The Philatelist

by Tito Perdue

  It displeased me to have an oddball sleeping in my house, which is not even to mention the dog’s reaction. I would go to work, come home at noon to check on my collection, and then fly back to the office, all in less than two hours or less. Meantime with great effort, I had managed with the aid of my rehabilitated computer to retrieve a blueprint of the building where the stamp auction was still progressing. Such diagrams are required for purposes of fire insurance, don’t you see, and offer all sorts of wonderful information for people willing to seek it. But when I visited the nearest hardware and asked for the least expensive set of diamond-tipped glasscutters, the son-of-a-bitch wanted to see my driver’s license (long expired), my DNA hologram, my security clearance, and the half-dozen billfold-size photographs of my wives.

  “She’s the hottest,” he said, bringing the picture of my worst wife up to his eye. “What, did she abandon you or something?”

  “I abandoned her!”

  “Sure, you did. Anyway, you don’t need no stinking glass cutters. ’Less you got some sort of mischief in mind. Do you?”

  I looked to heaven in exasperation, but then finally strove to bribe the man with one of the new twenty-five-dollar bills bearing the image of The Reverend Martin Luther King on it. Junior, I ought have said. A bald man with tattoos forming two supernumerary eyes, the salesindividual gathered the thing, got into his glasses, jotted down the serial number, and then dropped it into a former milk bottle that held a fair number of other dubious bills. Which of those four eyes of his were actually viable? To this day I cannot with assurance say.

  “Oh, goodie!” he exclaimed. “Now I can get that operation!”

  I produced two more bills of the same quality and let them fall (like autumn leaves they seemed) to the counter, where they landed in different places. I reached out better to organize them, but before I could get there, both had disappeared!

  “You need to read the instructions,” the blighter said as he removed the instrument from its package and pointed to the wee little diamonds, none of them larger than a really very tiny thing. Was it indeed so delicate, that apparatus, that it needed so much protective material?

  “You have to lubricate it with this here ‘naphtha,’ we call it,” (he produced the naphtha), “or elsewise she’s liable to get too hot. Shit, some of those windows is three inches thick, for Pete’s sake!”

  I took the product, thanked the gentleman, and scurried back to the office in time to use the restroom. A long time I sat there, warding off the temptation to experiment aforetimes with the rather odd-looking product that had cost so much.

  Fourteen

  My retirement draws nearer, and already my employer and I have begun to celebrate. With just seven weeks to go, I was given a fancy all-weather barometer that upon first inspection appeared to be unused. Having put on my best face and utmost charm, I thanked the two wonderful women who had presented me it. One was fat and the other thin, and between the both of them they formed a more or less normal presentation. To reciprocate I picked up two pieces of simulated jewelry at a junk shop where by good hap I came across one of Perdue’s lesser-known works. Compared to the master of the craft, how dare I go on putting words on paper?

  This was the night I dreamt of the worst of my wives, she who had uttered the word “patriarchy,” sixteen times too often. She sleeps now, the bitch, in one of the city cemeteries with the sound of traffic all around.

  But readers are more interested in my glass cutter and quondam houseguest. Truth is, we plotted and planned over the course of three full days and nights, but by the time we had screwed up our courage, the divine collection had been taken down and sent back to its owner in Lucknow. Thus ended my last reasonable hope of completing the Chinese and Korean sectors of my collection. My guest departed shortly after, and apart from some four or five occasions, I was never to hear from him again. He had learned to do forgeries himself and had met a woman who, unlike any wives of mine, was highly willing to assist with counterfeiting high-value stamps of the German states. I have to assume that he has died by now, or will do so in the future, reckoning from the tenor of his letters. I remain grateful to him for having returned one of my most precious stamps, purloined by him on the second day of his visit. Three others of the same vintage continue to be missing.

  She sleeps now (picking up where I left off above regarding my second wife) in a progressive cemetery on the outskirts of the city alongside the polygendered pedophile who had been her next-to-last husband. Her last months, I learned, had been happy ones granting full satisfaction in all her orifices. I confess that I did actually contribute $1000 to her last marriage, wanting it to last.

  Fifteen

  Time goes by, sometimes quickly and sometimes quite the other way around. Me, I proceed at a more or less typical pace toward old age, senility, and the possibility of the world’s fifth-best accumulation of Austro-Hungarian tête-bêches. Day by day I am more and more alone, moving from strength to strength as I immerse myself deeper and deeper into books, stamps, and music, democracy’s most rueful enemies. When alone, I often reenact historical parts and sometimes venture out at night to watch pods of whale-like clouds migrating through the sky.

  And then on the ninth day after that, I was visited by two city officials responding to a report that my home had been abandoned and uncollected mail was accumulating on the porch. Well, we had a good laugh about that, which is to say till the tall one with the diamond in his nose perceived I was carrying half a package of exposed cigarettes in my pocket.

  “Are you a smoking man? Sir?”

  “Ha! Smoking. I did used to be, that’s for sure.”

  “How about now?”

  “Now? But I never smoke when I’m driving at the same time.”

  There followed a brief silence, briefer even than the time needed to mention it. Suddenly the other man, the one with a plug in his ear and a brief antenna sticking out behind, lurched forward and began to climb the stairs. Nor was I allowed to follow.

  “There’s nothing up there, actually,” I called after him. “Just a bunch of old books and whatnot.”

  “‘Old books?’ And these books, as you call them, do they tell you what happens to a person’s lungs? When you smoke cigarettes in enclosed places? Where innocent people are present? I thought not.”

  “And unenclosed, too,” the other man said. Just then, seeing that I was staring at his revolver, he dropped back two spaces.

  “I wouldn’t know how to fire it anyway,” I said, smiling betimes. “What is that, a .38?”

  “Just keep your hands where I can see them, okay?”

  I agreed to it. “Anyway,” said I, “I’ve been thinking that really I ought to give up on cigarettes. The costs, don’t you know. And odor! Yuk.”

  The first man now returned to us, holding between his thumb and finger a superannuated paperback of Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus.

  “Well, lookie here,” he said. “There’s just no telling what you might find. If you know where to look.”

  It was on the night after that I drifted up Third Avenue to my personal theatre, New York’s most dilapidated building. Here, roaches gamboled in freedom, fattening themselves on residues of chewing gum. But here, too, was where old-fashioned black-and-white films from the ’40s and ’50s could still be viewed, a boon for those of us sick to death of watching sub-humans congressing at high magnification in front of our eyes.

  My special place was in the nineteenth row, far from the alcoholics sleeping in the front and retrophile film students congregated in the back. One single individual had chosen to sit in front of me, though I was soon able to send him on his way by means of simulated smoke from my analog cigarette. With some minutes before the show was to start, I began to dream that it was also 1940 or ’50 in the outer world. My excitement increased. Very soon I would be entering a dimension in which romance had priority over coitus, where people spoke English, men wore suits, and the themes were serious. Had ever such a world re
ally existed?

  Sixteen

  Continually more awful are my dreams. Last night again, to take only the most recent example, I imagined I was fighting with my middle wife. A red-headed bitch with roots in Ireland, she had been trying for years to promote me in the eyes of society. I suppose I must have attended a dozen parties in pursuance of her ambition, until driven to despair she made herself into an “entrepreneur” and squandered half my savings on a boutique in Brooklyn specializing in nasty underwear.

  I dreamt that I had thrown her down the stairwell, a solution old Schopenhauer had pioneered with a similar female. Of stamps themselves, she had cared only for the cheerful ones, modern garbage picturing butterflies and spaceships, and in one notorious case, Mickey Mouse himself.

  “What’s the good of these things,” she asked about my stamps, her upper lip curled in her accustomed way. That would be the moment I ought have tossed her down the stairwell.

  “‘What good? What good?” I cleverly replied. And then, after allowing my riposte to sink in: “And what good are you, so far as that goes?”

  She wept, the first time in over a week. “I’m a human being!”

  “By God, I believe you’ve put your finger on it!”

  “I don’t even know why you married me!”

  “Sex. But I could have done better with a jar of cold mayonnaise.”

  Sometimes her tears would turn to laughter. But not that day. Not with the four children—just one of them, the worst of the lot, was mine—watching worriedly from the balcony. And yet, the bitch had borne other fruits almost as rotten. The eldest girl, initiated to lesbianism by television, shaved her head and carried a ten-inch switchblade. I kept well away from her. And then there was Leroy, a tall individual fathered by a black person never to be seen again. The third child, worse even than mine, had left school at fifteen after having already established an unlicensed enterprise involving pharmaceuticals transported from Honduras.

  I now choose to end this effort to account for my latter years. Farewell.

  Seventeen

  But instead of sons and daughters, it was the little neighboring boy I found waiting on my front porch. (I have decided to continue this narration of mine, never ask me why.) He had somehow climbed the fence and had worked his way through the downed trees that were to keep people from my door and had planted himself on the top step with his wretched little stamp album grasped in his unclean hands.

  “Hi,” he succinctly said.

  “You!”

  “Want to trade stamps?”

  We went in. The boy could drink more chocolate milk than the combined 1943 Russo-American armies swilling in tandem. Seated just across from him in dim light, the dog and I waited in silence till the milk was gone. Of all the little boys in all the deteriorating houses in all New York, why couldn’t he have been my son as opposed to the one that was? Trade stamps? Far rather had I traded boys.

  “How’s your schoolwork going, Feenie?”

  “I got some new stamps from Argentina. Want to trade? One of ’em’s red.”

  “Well, let’s see what you’ve got there. Sounds real good.”

  What he had there was a little 3 x 5 glassine envelope holding perhaps a dozen Argentine commemoratives of minimum value.

  “Interesting. By the way, I’ve got some doughnuts in the kitchen.”

  “No, thanks. The red one’s got a woman on it.”

  “A naked woman?”

  He looked at me severely, then stood suddenly and started to leave.

  “Okay, I’ll trade you five green stamps for just one red one.”

  He sat back down. His album was thin and miserable and had no more than a couple hundred poorly mounted commonplace items in it.

  “You need to use hinges, Feenie, when you mount those things. Glue is bad and damages the album.”

  “Naw, it don’t matter. I’ll be finished with this particular phase pretty soon, anyway.”

  I looked at him. His head was a tetrahedral with a bump on top. His arms were spindly and had barely the strength to support the combined weight of his fingers and hands. His legs did reach the ground, concluding in two feet housed in shoes that were identical in all ways save in color and size. His eyes meanwhile (and here was the problem) were all times focused on the ground.

  “What do you see down there, partner?”

  “Nothing. Things.”

  Of doughnuts, I collect those only as have frosting on them. Having nudged the platter closer to the boy, he refused to look at it.

  “What would you do, Feenie, if someone left you a lot of money?”

  “I don’t know. Buy a dog.”

  “Like my dog?”

  “Naw. How much you want for him?”

  “Hundred dollars.”

  “Naw. Can’t afford it.”

  “Well, how much can you afford?”

  “I don’t know. I got five shares my grandmother gave me.”

  “Shares of stock?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well! You can pay me out of dividends.”

  “Okay. Say, where’d you get all these stamps, that’s what I want to know. I don’t have any like this one.”

  His taste, like mine, was for gaudy things. Working with exaggerated carefulness, I lifted the stamp with my bespoken tongs and passed it over to him in such a way that he must extend his ridiculous arm quite a long distance way in order to retrieve it.

  “You’ll have to feed him every day. And water.”

  “Yeah. I don’t even have any like this one, either,” he said, touching with his blunt finger a mint stamp with the picture of a vampire on it.

  Eighteen

  I woke at ten, nonplussed to find that I was in the early evening of my late middle age. Contrary to all my hopes, it was not the week-end, and now, bringing my Will into play, I threw my persona out of bed and, after micturating in the appointed place, got into the same set of clothes I had worn on that day two months ago when I had arrived at work earlier than normal. I was congratulated for coming at all. My behavior and laziness had so developed in recent weeks that obviously I must enjoy the support of some very important person—this is what they believed.

  I had stayed up late drinking wine and working on my collection, the proximate cause, I believe, why every day my colleagues were more and more coming to resemble my fourth-grade teacher, an earnest and hard-working woman who had done great intellectual damage to the children she so clearly loved. But now back to present time—the woman just to my right was less like my old-time teacher than my uncle on my mother’s side, a slit-eyed personality who once had used a stamp of mine for postage.

  I must drink no more wine at night, or not until my retirement. I must also apply myself to my work, must gather more and more non-public information from foreign sources, must stop smoking, must leave off comparing my fellow workers to protozoa. Accordingly, I turned on my computer and, after allowing time for it to accept my codeword and DNA, began right away downloading protected information on dental hygiene in the Central African Republic. An uncouth language, the translation required more than the usual time. I would have liked a cigarette; instead, rising and stretching and going to the window and examining the tableau seven hundred feet below me, I saw me a sight that put me into the worst depression in seven hundred days.

  There, so far away, I saw a couple rush into each other’s arms and stand there embracing for a full half-minute or more, a longer time than most people realize. And how long, pray, before any similar woman would wish to come into my arms, what?, and remain there for a parallel length of time? Never happen, not at my age, never again, though the world go on forever without end. Or until my first wife recognize her errors and come running home again. Not that I wasn’t also at some fault, especially that day I struck her a time or two, too hard perhaps, for mixing up the imperforates in my Near Eastern collection. However, I suppose she’s as old as me by now, that she has had children, and that her beauty has eroded into somethin
g as disappointing as that of ordinary bell-curve women who have no real interest in philatelic matters.

  That wouldn’t be her down there, the woman I was watching? Clinging to that most fortunate of all husbands? Husband and wife embracing each other in shared happiness after a successful morning at the stamp and coin shops? Not likely. The city has nine million monads in it, and it was beyond impossible that I could have found the one good person in all that mess. Ridiculous. Even so, I got up quickly and was about to run to the elevator when the woman in the next-door cubicle spoke up loud and clear: “Leaving us again?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I confessed, putting on a serious and even a spiritual expression. “I need to visit the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Array, the one on 88th Street.”

  “Oh.”

  There were very few people using the elevator at this time, and I was able to choose my own side of that conveyance, exposing only a very partial silhouette. The other passenger was as grumpy as me, and we seemed to be in the first stages of an unvoiced compact based on shared attributes. Were only the whole world like that, with mutual understanding everywhere! We fell past the fourth floor, given a hasty view of a laughing woman with a mouth full of luminescent silver fillings fore and aft.

  “Dumb bitch,” said my traveling companion.

  “Right. Redhead, too.”

  We came to ground at precisely 10:08 and, like civilized people everywhere, went our separate ways. There was a good bright Sun outside, the sort that urges a person to go out into the countryside and take a long stroll with himself or his divorced woman. It urged me in particular to lie face-up in a little rowboat drifting at hazard on an idle lake. It wanted me to be a boy again, a pre-philatelic type mad for dogs and fishing. The woman herself had disappeared.