Charlie Foster sat. He appeared to merge with the club chair. Shedding years of worry, from his expression.
That’s a sale. Carney returned to his office. He’d bought the new executive chair in April and repainted last Christmas but his office had changed little over the years. His business-school diploma dangled from the same nail, his signed picture of Lena Horne remained in its holy perch. Business was good. The fencing sideline had allowed him and Elizabeth to buy the place on Strivers’ Row and sprung them from their cramped first apartment before that. Made possible the expansion of the store into the bakery next door and helped them to ride out numerous rough patches. But buying 381 and 383 West 125th Street? That was all Carney’s Furniture. He bought the two buildings from Giulio Bongiovanni the first week of January 1970. A new decade, full of promise.
If you’d said when he signed the lease that one day he’d own the joint, he would’ve told you to get lost. Carmen Jones was holding its movie premiere down the street at the Hotel Theresa and as he held the keys in his hand for the first time it was like all that light and noise were for him. The property wasn’t much to look at, but it might make a man his fortune. For the first two years he dropped off the rent by hand at the Fifth Avenue offices of Salerno Properties, Inc., not trusting the U.S. Postal Service, as if at 12:01 A.M. on the second of the month the marshals were going to bust down the door and throw his shit out in the street. He felt the 12:01 A.M. thing had happened to someone he knew, or his father had known, but now that he was settled and middle-aged recognized it as a tall tale. Most likely.
Carney met the landlord for the first time when he called Salerno about expanding into the bakery. One of the baker’s regulars had been alarmed to find the store still closed at five past seven, then noticed the legs sticking out from behind the counter. Out of respect for the dead, Carney waited forty-five minutes before inquiring about the lease.
Giulio Bongiovanni let his staff handle the tenants, but he’d been curious about Carney for a long time. 383 West 125th had been a cursed retail spot since before Bongiovanni took over the real estate side from his father. Two furniture stores, a men’s haberdashery, two shoe stores, and more had come to swift ruin after signing the lease, and the bad luck had followed the owners even after vacating the space. Cancers you’d never heard of that afflicted body parts you’d never heard of, divorces to be studied in family law courses for generations, a variety of prison time. Crushed by a large object in front of a nunnery. “It got so I was afraid to rent it,” Bongiovanni told Carney.
“I’m doing okay,” Carney said. The man subjected him to a never-seen-a-Negro-like-you-before look, not a novel experience for Carney. He reckoned it occurred more frequently these days, all over. Lunch counters, the voting booth, next thing you know they’re running successful furniture businesses in Harlem.
“More than okay,” Bongiovanni said, and he gave Carney permission to break through the wall into the bakery.
Giulio Bongiovanni’s roots on 110th Street went way back, to when East Harlem was the biggest Little Italy this side of the Atlantic. He talked like a guy from around, but distinguished himself with his tight polyester polos and Muscle Beach physique. When asked about his regimen he attributed it to positive thinking and Jack LaLanne, whose show he watched daily and vitamin shipments he awaited monthly. “Don’t knock the Glamour Stretcher,” he said, posing in a forty-five-degree twist. “It’s not just for the ladies, as you can see for yourself.”
His grandfather had operated two grocery stores on Madison, and his father had bought 381 and 383 West 125th Street as investments when the Jews split the changing neighborhood. The family groceries still thrived, although the Bongiovannis no longer lived upstairs. They had decamped themselves for Astoria after World War II and now Bongiovanni was leaving the area for good. “The city is going to hell,” he told Carney when he proposed the business deal. “The drugs, the filth. I’ll take Florida.”
Carney was flattered that the Italian thought he had the scratch to buy the two buildings, that the white side of town recognized his successes, then quickly assumed something was wrong and Bongiovanni was dumping bum properties on him. The city itching to condemn, some expensive disaster in the sewer below, or the final version of the Curse of 125th and Morningside finally come due. None of that turned out to be true, although Mrs. Hernandez in apartment 3R of 381 had a mysterious stain in her bathroom wall that returned each time it was patched and repainted and which bore an eerie resemblance to Dwight Eisenhower, a curse if ever he heard one. “He stares at me,” she said.
Bongiovanni asked Carney if he was ready to be a landlord. “People calling you all hours, the water’s too cold, the heat’s too cold, my wife hates me?”
Carney meant to feast upon their complaints and grievances like they were a big bloody steak and potatoes. “Yes.”
“Good man.” They did a deal for the two buildings and three months later in Miami Bongiovanni keeled over while doing his sunrise calisthenics—aneurysm. The family brought him home and buried him with his ancestors in Calvary Cemetery in Woodside, plum view of the expressway.
Churn. Carney’s word for the circulation of goods in his illicit sphere, the dance of TVs and diadems and toasters from one owner to the next, floating in and out of people’s lives on breezes and gusts of cash and criminal industry. But of course churn determined the straight world too, memorialized the lives of neighborhoods, businesses. The movement of shop owners in and out of 383 West 125th Street, the changing entities on the deeds downtown in the hall of records, the minuet of brands on the showroom floor.
Carney’s legit trade had transformed during the four years of his criminal retirement. Argent, his biggest client, the name he built the store on, was bought by Sterling in ’68, who phased out their lines two years later. Sears swallowed up Bella Fontaine and assumed exclusive dealership. Collins-Hathaway overextended themselves in their Canadian expansion and got wiped out in last year’s recession. Carney kept their Authorized Dealer plaque up above his desk as a souvenir.
To replace the hole in his inventory, Carney signed up with DeMarco, the American arm of the big Norwegian concern Knut-Bjellen, currently specializing in low-slung, boxy “lifestyle components.” Palette: earth tones. Market research warned that the U.S. consumer was suspicious of “foreign”-sounding household products, so DeMarco renamed their lines for the American market, rechristening their modular couch system the Homesteader, their recliner the Mitt. The product moved so Carney didn’t care what they called it.
His only complaint concerned the photo shoots in the DeMarco brochures and literature, which unfolded in far-off ski lodges and mountaintop aeries. Prodigious fire in the hearth, rust-and mustard-colored lifestyle components arranged around it, and white ladies with furry hand muffs and white guys in wool turtleneck sweaters adrift in dopey bliss on the shag. Carney didn’t want to put people in a box, but he wondered how many of his customers saw themselves reflected there. The shag.
“Welcome to my chalet,” Carney said whenever their latest catalog arrived.