The Second Story Man

By Mimi Albert

The Second Story Man is a half-real, half-imagined account by the narrator, a seventeen year old girl named Anna, of the love affair between her friend and roommate Mary and a man named Florian Rando, the "second story man."

Set in the bars and hang-outs of New York's East Village in the late 1950s, just before the rise of the pop-drug culture, it's the story of a man who feeds off the lives of others, and of the women who participate in their descruction in order to sustain him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mimi Albert
• Release date: Jan 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301770083

Mimi Albert

Mimi Albert is the award winning author of two published novels. Her first , The Second Story Man, received reviews in The New York Times, The Chicago Sun-Times, Library Journal, The Village Voice, and many other venues. It was excerpted in the anthology, A Different Beat: Writing by Women of the Beat Generation. Her second novel, Skirts, published by Baskerville, won a Northern California Book Reviewers’ award as the best work of fiction. Albert has also won a PEN/NEA syndicated fiction award and a PEN Los Angeles award for her short story “Some Human Beings”.

Book preview

The Second Story Man

by

Mimi Albert

Published by Mimi Albert at Smashwords

Copyright 1975 Mimi Albert

All the characters in this book are fictitious; any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This publication is in part made possible with support from the New York State Council on the Arts, and with the cooperation of Teachers and Writers Collaborative and Brooklyn College.

Special thanks to Mark Weiss.

To Anthony Gabriel and Martha Friedman

I saw him for the second time in Mary’s arms. He lay forward, pressed against her, so that his hands and face were hidden from me. Beneath him Mary too was hidden by the blur of hair which concealed her as she turned from side to side, slowly. And at first I thought she was refusing him, trying to cast him off even as he entered her, that he was an attacker, taking her by force before my eyes.

What are you doing? I cried. What is it?

Responding to the sound, the man lifted his head blindly, and the sight of his upraised face came to me with the impact of a blow. I knew him. I knew who he was. I had held his image within myself, significant, waiting for recognition. Only it had been above my own head that I had dreamed his features. Above the swell of my own chest that I had willed his out-thrust chin, his lips. I watched him as the breath came from his nose and mouth, and his thin hands moved against her breasts. I knew then that Mary was with him because she wanted him, and not only for herself as she believed, but for the two of us.

For me.

Later I would understand that moment as the end of my time with Mary. Alone with her, I was captured in an interlude of nights and afternoons so filled with her presence that I was granted a reprieve from the usual emotions and fatigues of my own life.

I met her at a party.

All kinds of people will be there, offered my friend, inviting me.

I was too shy to speak to any of the men. Instead I spoke to Mary.

Mary was drunk. She wore a long coat and a pair of dark rough trousers, like a man’s. She leaned against a wall, barely able to stand upright. Her smile was bitchy. Her eyes were the color of cinders. I knew right away that I wanted to be her friend.

I wanted her to teach me what she knew. How to be drunk, and beautiful, and at a party like this without caring, although she wasn’t much older than I was, and I was only seventeen.

The smell of pot returns her to me. I came to see her in her empty three room apartment on Avenue C and 12th Street. It was the middle of the summer and she stood naked on the splintered floors and taught me to turn on with a small stone pipe.

What else do you do? I wanted to know, when I was high for the first time, and thoroughly baffled. Everyone I knew was going to school.

I don’t do anything else, she said. This is it.

She didn’t like to talk about herself. Gradually, though, she allowed the pieces of her life to fall about me, fragments in a kaleidoscope. With a word she dismissed her family.

My father is a surgeon. Very handy with a scalpel. School had been an expensive university upstate. Escape was first a dozen men — most of the football team, the

chemistry professor, the gropers after dancers — then one abortion, performed in an empty apartment in New York.

After which, she asked me, her grey eyes gleaming with bitterness, why should I go back?

Her first year in the city was spent in a state of loneliness so intense that it had the quality of a novitiate. It had made her whole and totally hard, like metamorphosed stone.

She said she needed no one. Still, both of us must have known it was a lie.

Certainly she didn’t need me. I thought that she had more planned for me that day, but one of her lovers came and they took a bath together while I sat there, and she made me read to them from a book of Salinger’s short stories. To Esme, With Love and Squalor. Later she accepted me because I confirmed her existence. I ran alongside her in the streets, I sat with her in bars and coffee shops. I lent her clothing, gave her money, bought her food. In return she presided over my first sexual adventures with the amused aloofness of a priestess inaugurating secret rites.

You go with him, she’d say to me, selecting some man who she thought was suitable. Then she might stand and listen at the door. I did everything she told me to do. But she never offered me any tenderness. Her distance was the result of her own honesty. Why should she have mercy for others, or for herself? She believed compassion was only another form of weakness.

Now I remember our brief season together only as a series of escapades. I vacated my childhood without amnesty or treaty; I too was an escapee. One night I fled my father’s house. I came to Mary’s apartment because I had nowhere else to go.

Let me stay, I begged. She said nothing. Still, she didn’t throw me out.

I starved with her without complaint, fearful that anything might make her change her mind. Neither of us had jobs or money.

At last she said, I know what to do, and putting on heavy raincoats, we descended to the local supermarket.

Follow me, she said, and taught me how to skulk between the aisles ramming cans of food into my pockets without getting caught. I was proud of my own daring, but Mary insisted on stealing only elaborate unsatisfying foods. She stuffed small overpriced jars of caviar, smoked oysters and liver pate into her coat, unable to refrain from laughter, maybe hoping to be caught merely for the adventure. The clerks watched us with suspicion, waiting for evidence.

Why caviar? I would ask her. Why snails? I hate eccentric food. Why don’t we swipe a tenderloin once in a while?

The checkers, plain sour women wearing green smocks and hairnets, turned their heads and lifted their eyebrows like alerted animals as we cantered down the aisles, our pockets clanking with bottles and jars. Returning to her apartment the two of us would fall down on the kitchen floor and laugh, already nauseated by the opened cans of smoked oysters, the short round jars of lumpfish caviar, the olives in salty water.

Sometimes too, becoming slowly high and having no one else to talk to, she might tell me stories about herself and listen as well to mine. I would feel then that I did know her after all, better than anyone else. That she and I were friends.

But I always knew that time was going to carry us away from one another. Running up the stairs that last night, feeling chilled and tense because the first winter stillness had fallen upon the city, I thought suddenly and without cause, Maybe this will be the last time. The end of things. She’ll be standing at the top of the stairs and she ’11 tell me, ‘Go away. I don *t want you any more. Or else she won’t be there at all. The apartment will be empty, ransacked. Everything gone.

I climbed.

Or maybe, I thought, she could be there with someone new. A man she wants to live with. And she'd ask me to get out.

Gradually it occurred to me that my discomfort centered about the man whose name I knew but didn’t want to remember. To pronounce it would be to reveal a secret, although I didn’t know whose secret it was nor why it should be so carefully guarded. Until I tried the door and found it unlocked, and flung it open on the room.

Later I would remember that as a moment I had always expected. For nights, before her door, I must have anticipated it, so the shock should at least have been softened