A Stranger on the Planet

by Adam Schwartz

  “Don’t see nothing wrong with this sentence, Shapiro.”

  I asked him what the subject was in the sentence.

  “John and Mary.”

  “The verb?”

  “Asks.”

  “Is the subject singular or plural?”

  “Plural.”

  “So how do you get the verb to agree with the subject?”

  “Plural! John and Mary asks a lot of questions. Damn,” he said with a laugh, “you asks a lot of questions.”

  I explained the rule.

  “You saying, a singular subject got an ‘s’ on the verb, but a plural subject ain’t got no ‘s’?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Goddamn,” he sighed.

  Finally it was Angela Washburn’s turn to read. I looked in her direction and called her name. The baby cooed like a pigeon under the roof of an old house. She whispered in his ear for a few seconds before responding to me. I leaned forward, longing to hear her words.

  “Tom like to read, but I loves to dance.”

  I said something to her about the first-person singular. The baby laid his head against her breast and closed his eyes, as if the secret firequency between us had gone dead.

  THAT NIGHT IN BED I REPEATED TO MYSELF: “I loves to dance. . . . I love to dance.” Only one letter separated us. I love, you love, he loves, we love. I marveled at the way the verb opened up like a daylily. How easily I love blossomed into we love! Conjugating the verb over and over, I experienced a sensation of movement, like a widening echo, a journey outward. But after a time the motion of the verb transported me to my nightmare world: Sixty-third and King Drive, Sixty-fourth and King Drive, Sixty-ffth and King Drive. I thought of the bombed-out buildings, the elevated tracks blocking the sun like a twenty-four-hour eclipse, and I realized that I loves won’t flower overnight into I love. That “s” was as solidly planted as an old tree root.

  ONE NIGHT RAYMOND CAME to my apartment and questioned me about love.

  “A man and woman are secret lovers for forty years,” he said. “They see each other only two times a month, when they spend the afternoon in a hotel room in a strange city. But they write to each other every day. Some of the letters are extremely erotic, but mainly they chronicle births, deaths, marriages, business deals, the sweetness and bitterness of longing. The man’s view of life is especially black. He complains that everyone is after his money. He hates his wife and business partners, can’t communicate with his children, mistrusts everyone except his lover. He tells her that she is the only person he has ever loved, the only thing that is decent, beautiful, and true in his life. The woman is also very unhappy, tied to a marriage that is emotionally and spiritually dead. Now here is the question: Why don’t the two lovers ever get married?”

  I said, “Maybe he’s afraid she’ll ask for lots of money and be like all the rest.”

  “No. In fact, in his letters he pleads with her to accept money. He tells her she is the only person he’s ever wanted to share his money with.”

  “Well, perhaps she doesn’t want to leave her husband and cause her family pain.”

  “Possibly—but what is a couple of years of pain in return for many more years of happiness?”

  “I have no idea, Raymond.”

  “I think the two lovers liked things just the way they were. If they were married, they would have lost the element of imagination. They could have loved each other every night, but they’d have lost the chance to imagine loving each other every night.”

  “Where did you hear this story?”

  “From my grandmother. We discovered her love letters after she died. I always thought her story would be a great movie, but who would be interested in a movie like that in this day and age?”

  “You go to the movies?”

  Raymond smiled cagily, as if this was the question he had been maneuvering me to all along. “Every day.”

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON I shadowed Raymond around the neighborhood. I knew he had never been in love, I knew he believed in the soul, but I didn’t know how he got from the library to the liquor store to the supermarket. There had to be more to it than simply memorizing every street. He had to know their system— how the streets conjugated, the irregular forms of a route—as if the neighborhood were his secret language. Walking in his footsteps, I thought of the dull syntax of my own life, of the six years I walked the same route between my graduate-student apartment building and a library cell every day. I wouldn’t see other streets in the neighborhood for weeks. I wouldn’t go beyond the borders of the neighborhood itself for months. How could I have let that happen? At an intersection, waiting for the light to change, Raymond and I were brushed up against each other in the middle of a crowd of people. I knew he was going home, and I recited to myself, Fifty-sixth and Stony Island . . . Fifty-sixth and Cornell . . . Cornell and Fifty-ffth . . . Cornell and Fifty-fourth. . . . He turned and looked up at me. “Seth?” I held my breath and kept silent, as if I were hiding in a closet with someone else’s love letters or diary. The light changed and I went my own way.

  IN LATE SEPTEMBER, Rachel’s mother was diagnosed with liver cancer and given approximately two months to live. Rachel moved back across the bay to her mother’s house in Berkeley to care for her and help both of them come to some type of peace about their relationship. It was even more difficult for her and Lucinda to regularly call each other, so Rachel called me every night. Rachel had never come out to her mother, and she was in a quandary about whether to introduce her mother to Lucinda, as her lover, before her mother died.

  “Why is it so difficult?” I asked her. “Your mother wouldn’t be judgmental.”

  “I know she wouldn’t, but she’d have all these theories about why I’m gay, and I know we’d just end up arguing.”

  “So maybe you’re doing the right thing.”

  Her mother still thought we were a couple—she kept a photograph of Rachel and me at our college commencement on her bedroom bureau. For Rachel, it had been a convenient ruse, a way to keep her mother from trespassing too far into her emotional life.

  “She keeps asking me to go to her lunatic therapist with her.”

  “The one who does regression therapy?”

  “Yes. She thinks that if the therapist can regress us back to the time when I was an infant and she was a young mother, we’ll be able to emotionally reconnect.”

  “Are you going to do it?”

  “No. I told her it wouldn’t help because I didn’t believe in it.” Rachel started crying. “Why am I such a bitch? She’s dying. Why can’t I do that for her? I mean, wouldn’t you do something like that with your mother if she were dying?”

  “Rachel, you’re not a bitch. If my mother dies a prolonged death, I only hope I can be half as gracious and generous as you are to your mother.”

  She began crying again. “Oh, Seth, I miss you.”

  “I was thinking of coming out to visit for Thanksgiving. That might be a nice last Thanksgiving for your mother. Just the three of us. You, me, and her.”

  “Yes, I’d like that. I’d like that very much.”

  “‘IF YOU PRACTICE THE PIANO REGULAR, you will soon be able to play real music.’”

  Angela Washburn stared at her book. The baby stared at me. His blunt, fleshy arm moved back and forth like a wand. I imagined he was inviting me to enter their aura of intimacy. I beamed back a reply in stealth: I love, you love, he loves, we love. . . .

  “If one practice the piano regular, one will soon be able to play real music.”

  She didn’t even look up to see how I would respond to her answer. I explained that the sentence was wrong because of the adverb and not the pronoun. “Do you understand, Angela? ‘Regular’ is an adverb because it modifies ‘practice.’ So there should be an ‘l-y’ at the end of the word.” I repeated this rule as ardently as if I were reciting Keats. The baby reached for me, but she pulled down his arm as if drawing a shade.

  MOST DAYS RAYMOND AND I had lunch at Sol
’s, a neighborhood deli run assembly line fashion by ten or twelve Vietnamese. They labored at a furious pace, swabbing rolls with mustard and mayonnaise, slicing pickles and tomatoes, slapping meats and cheeses onto bread, shouting in loud bursts of Vietnamese.

  Only Raymond slowed them down. When he came tapping through the door, they eyed one another as if he were the strangest sight they had seen in this strange land. Otherwise, their only connection to the world beyond the counter was through the items on Sol’s menu. “You chop livah! You hot dog!” the workers shouted out as customers proceeded through the line. I always ordered juice, because the word allowed me a sense of connection with Sol’s Vietnamese.

  “You jew-is!” the juice worker would shout at me.

  “Damn right!” I always shouted back. “And what about it?”

  “Ya, ya,” he’d reply, with a huge smile, “you jew-is!”

  TWO OR THREE AFTERNOONS A WEEK I went to a movie with Raymond. I felt sinful, but weekday afternoons were the best time to go to the movies with a blind person. The theaters were nearly empty, so Raymond and I could talk without annoying people, although the first few times I succeeded in annoying Raymond. I described everything—reaction shots, scenery, camera angles. He sighed, fidgeted, then shouted, “I know Meryl Streep looks sad. I’m not deaf too, you know!” The three other people in the theater all turned to look at us as I slid down in my seat.

  Eventually my technique improved. At a revival house, we went to see a Hitchcock double feature: Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train. With my lips an inch from his ear, I drew Raymond into the world of visual echoes, light and shadows, murderous hands. In Shadow of a Doubt, when young Charlie moved her hand down the banister to show Uncle Charlie she is wearing the ring that link him to his crimes, Raymond gripped my forearm as I described the exchange of looks between them. I had never known anyone to get so worked up at the movies.

  At the end of Strangers on a Train, Raymond said, “I just love Bruno Anthony’s voice. I could come here every day and listen to him seduce Guy Haines.”

  “Seduce him?”

  “Of course. Couldn’t you tell that Bruno is in love with him?”

  “Raymond, Bruno is a psychopath! He murders an innocent woman for thrills.”

  “No,” he declared happily, “he murders for love.”

  RACHEL’S MOTHER WANTED TO BE CREMATED, her ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean. But Rachel couldn’t bear the thought of her body going up in flames, and she had secretly bought a burial plot for her mother.

  “I know it’s a really bad thing to do,” she said to me during one of our nightly calls. “I mean, it is her body, and I’m not honoring her beliefs, but I want to be able to visit her in a cemetery, to know she’s in a physical place.”

  “It’s a Jewish thing, and you’re more Jewish than your mother.”

  “I kept thinking of your story ‘Two by Two.’ The impulse to be buried among family is so powerful, so true.”

  I had actually been thinking the same thing. A couple of months before, I had driven by a cemetery and was overcome with dread: What if I lived out my days in Chicago and was buried here, alone, far from my family? I tried to laugh it off, but after nearly ten years in Chicago I still didn’t feel at home. I missed my family. I missed the East. My life had stalled out. Twisting the phone cord around my finger, I looked around my apartment. I had bought everything secondhand: my toast-colored sofa, the faux-wood desk, the industrial-looking metal bookshelves. I had described the decor of my apartment to Sarah as “graduate-student emeritus.” Would I ever get out of here?

  “Seth, I’m sorry I overreacted to that story you wrote back in college. That was a very confusing time for me, and the story made me feel so exposed.”

  “Who knew all that tension was really about sex?”

  “I did,” she replied. “But I just didn’t know how to name it.”

  THE NEWSPAPER SAYS THAT on the average person a college diploma is worth two hundred thousand dollars more than a person who has no college diploma. On the other hand, by the list of jobs, you are basing whether or not to go to college, is a incomplete list.

  I spent hours studying Angela Washburn’s language, as if her blurred grammatical patterns and derailed subordinate and independent clauses were a map to her soul. On her paper I wrote lengthy comments about her faulty comparisons, with the weary heart of someone floating a message in a bottle. One day, though, she showed up at my office, her paper in her hand, her other arm holding the baby.

  “This ain’t so good, is it?”

  Good or bad. Right or wrong. Black or white. Don’t think this way, Angela, I wanted to say. I wanted to tell her I regarded these grammatical rules as a prism refracting her iridescent intelligence.

  I asked her where her subjects were.

  “My what?”

  “Your subjects. Where are your subjects in this sentence?”

  She stared at her paper, searching for her subjects; her baby stared at me, his head tilting and swaying, his eyes bright with wonder. Finally she answered, “They everywhere.”

  I laughed. “They sure are.”

  The baby bleated with delight and clapped his hands on my desk.

  Angela, as if embarrassed by the excitement, looked down at her paper and smiled shyly. She read another sentence: “The most problem and hurt is knowing and hoping the future one want do not exist after college.”

  I asked her what the main emotions were in this sentence.

  She gave me a searching look, like someone hearing news she can’t quite believe. “Hurt and hope.”

  “Yes! Excellent! Do you see what the problem is then?”

  “My sister, she went to college, but she can’t get no job.”

  Ask her what her sister does now, I told myself. Ask her about her hurts and hopes. Tell her you hurt yourself by walking the same insular route every day for six years, building your routine into a wall, and now you hope to learn a way out.

  Instead, I asked her about her gerunds.

  “My what?”

  “‘Knowing’ and ‘hoping’ are your gerunds. The problem is that you attach them to the same complement and thereby cancel out your meaning.”

  She gave me a bruised look, then turned her eyes away.

  ANGELA WAS NOT IN CLASS THE NEXT DAY.

  Daryl Dalrymple, as always, was sitting in the middle of the front row. “What’s your rap today, Shapiro?”

  “Irregular verbs.” He extended his hand so I could lay a little skin on him. “All right,” he said.

  I asked Daryl to read the first sentence of his composition. He faced the class and recited, “I was born and breaded in the South.”

  A number of students laughed.

  “Damn right I was,” he said. “In Meridian, Mississippi.”

  “After your mama breaded you, how she fit your big butt in the frying pan?”

  Now everybody laughed.

  “Y’all saying something ’bout my mama?” Daryl challenged the class.

  “What’s the infinitive form of the verb?” I interjected.

  “Breed,” someone answered.

  “Right,” I said, relieved. “To breed.”

  “Breed!” a woman repeated incredulously. Her name was Yvette Woolfolk. More moralist than grammarian, she said, “You know, I read in this Alex Haley book how they used to breed black folks like they was horses. That’s how their birth records were kept. Like they was horses!”

  “That’s right, that’s right,” someone responded. Then there was a chorus of “yeahs” and “amens.”

  I wasn’t aware of how red my face had become until one of the students said, “Hey, man, why you look so guilty?”

  “You don’t look beyond pale now, Shapiro,” Daryl said.

  RACHEL’S MOTHER DIED TWO days before Thanksgiving. I arrived the next day and we went to the funeral together. Rachel kept close to me, holding my hand during the service at the synagogue, leaning against me for support as the rabbi
chanted Kaddish at the grave. Most of Rachel’s relatives presumed I was her boyfriend. How long had I known Rachel? Where was I staying? At Joan’s house? How nice that Rachel doesn’t have to be alone. How long was I planning on staying?

  Some of Rachel’s childhood and graduate-school friends had come to the funeral. I knew that Lucinda was among the mourners and kept trying to figure out who she was. I was fabbergasted when Rachel finally did introduce me to her. She was slight and plain, scholarly looking, her eyes large behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. This was the woman Rachel wanted to spend her life with? The woman she pined for night after night?

  After the services, everyone gathered at Joan’s house. Rachel’s relatives had brought enough food to feed an army of Cossacks— bagels, rye breads, and seeded rolls, mounds of lox and sturgeon, platters layered with cold cuts, bowls of fruit salad, and plenty of vodka and scotch. Throughout the afternoon and evening, I was keenly aware of Rachel and Lucinda. Rachel didn’t act any differently with her than with her other friends—no extralong glances, no surreptitious hand squeezes—and I marveled at how well they pulled off this difficult act. At one point I noticed Rachel go into her bedroom; Lucinda followed a couple of minutes later. I kept looking at my watch: five, ten, then twenty minutes. I occupied myself by drinking scotch. I had seen Rachel kiss and hold hands with some of her girlfriends, she had told me the most graphic details of her sex life, and it never bothered me, but imagining Rachel and Lucinda lying next to each other on the bed, holding and comforting each other, was deeply unsettling. It shattered the illusion I had maintained that I had become the most important person in her life again.

  After all the guests had left, Rachel and I collapsed into her childhood bed together, our arms around each other. I asked her if she had told her mom about Lucinda before she died. Rachel’s eyes welled up with tears.

  “No, and now I regret that I didn’t.”

  “You don’t have anything to regret, sweetie,” I said.

  “I actually did go with her to see her dumb therapist.”