The Sleep-Over Artist

by Thomas Beller

  “Who’s that, Aunti B?” he asked.

  “Who? Who knows!” she said, and her laughter cackled.

  He went into the kitchen, where Esmeralda was washing dishes.

  “How’s it going?” he said.

  “Oh, all right,” she sighed. “She’s been very difficult. A lot of crying. She wouldn’t eat her lunch today.”

  Alex had become adept at dropping in between meals; there was something mildly revolting about watching his aunt eat.

  “Who’s the man in the picture, Aunti B?” he asked when he came back to the living room. She hadn’t moved once while he was in the kitchen. She had stood there like a statue.

  “My boyfriend!” she said, suddenly animated, and gave him a wide-eyed look of defiance, daring him to look shocked. Then she laughed. She was so inscrutable at times like this—was this perfect-pitch irony? Or had she concealed from him all these years her own erotic history, knowing a young boy doesn’t want to know such things about his aunt? Had she waited until now, in her waning moments, to show him the truth, like a flasher—with intent to shock? Or was she simply loosening into Alzheimer-induced incoherence? Maybe she was just kidding.

  In the darkest parts of his soul he wondered if he wished she were already dead. The doctor had been vague about life expectancy. It could be a year, or ten years. “It depends on the will to live,” he had said.

  So privately Alex monitored her will to live.

  GETTING UP AND down from chairs had become difficult for Aunti B, so she preferred to simply stay standing. She just kept walking that strange hobbling walk, ba-bump, in circles around the apartment, using her cane as though she were outside. When Alex visited her he got in the habit of walking with her. It was like going for a walk but in a tight two-room circle.

  He tried to get her to talk about her past, but it was like a ruined city to her. If she tried hard she could distinguish, among the rubble, parts of old monuments she had enjoyed, places she was happy, familiar locations in the metropolis of her personal history—the town square, City Hall, the Museum of Natural History. But there was too much dust in the air to breathe. She saw it all from above, at a middle distance. Amidst the wreckage was her childhood, her youth. Who bombed her? And what could Alex have saved before this happened, what could he have gotten out? All these questions about his father she could have answered if only he had asked in time!

  ALEX WAS SPENDING less and less time with Debbie and more and more time with his aunt. During the day Esmeralda was there, but at night it was just the two of them, and Alex felt giddy with the responsibility. Anything could happen in that apartment.

  Once, when he walked in the door she erupted in a delighted laugh, and proceeded to call him Karly.

  “I’m Alex,” he said.

  She absorbed this information for a moment and then broke into tears. But it was like a summer shower, and the skies quickly brightened. She asked if he wanted something to eat.

  “No,” he said.

  “You must be hungry!” she said, and walked to the kitchen to do an inventory. She scrutinized the salt, the oatmeal, the packet of spaghetti, the noodles, as though she were a pharmacist looking to fill a prescription.

  “I’m not hungry. I’ll just eat these grapes,” said Alex.

  Karl always stocked the place lavishly. Fresh fruit, various delicacies from Zabar’s, an abundance of cooked shrimp, her favorite. She was living more extravagantly than she ever had in her life and couldn’t remember any of it from one moment to the next. But she did seem to get pleasure in each moment as she passed through it. And, he thought, isn’t that almost as much as one can hope for?

  Her head seemed to be getting bigger as the rest of her wasted away. He could see how a gust of wind might knock her down. It was a miracle it hadn’t lifted her off the ground entirely and blown her away.

  “Do you want to go out?” he asked. “For a walk? We could go down to the lobby at least.”

  “Out, out…vas is dat?” She started laughing her new laugh, the one she had only recently developed. It brimmed with warmth and love and tears. He had never heard it before.

  “I thought maybe you want to go somewhere,” he said. “Is there anywhere you want to go?”

  She stood hunched on her cane, muttering in contemplation as though someone had offered her a million dollars if she could remember her high school locker combination.

  “The top!” she exclaimed suddenly. A tremendous smile.

  MEANWHILE, KARL WAS on a spending spree. It started innocently enough. “She should have the best bed possible,” Karl had said. “She sure is going to be spending a lot of time there.”

  But after the new bed it was a stereo, and the week after a coffeemaker, then a television, a vacuum cleaner, new silverware, a special water filtration system. When a state-of-the-art electric toothbrush appeared, Alex couldn’t take it anymore.

  “You’re spending her money like it’s going to spontaneously combust!” he shouted to Karl over the phone.

  “It is, man. It’s going to go down the Medicare drain. Either she gets it or Uncle Sam gets it.”

  “But an electric toothbrush? She’s going to maim herself with that thing!”

  “It’s not for her, cuz. It’s for me. You got a problem with that?” It was part threat, but partly a sincere question. The sincere answer would have been yes. But Alex was not up for that confrontation.

  ESMERALDA WAS BEING paid an absolute fortune for her total full-time commitment to Aunti B, but it seemed to be taking a toll on her. A certain vibrancy Alex had detected in her when he first lay eyes on her seemed to be in peril. She padded around the house in pink cotton sweatpants, a baggy T-shirt, and socks and slippers. There were moments when she looked like a patient herself, and arriving at the apartment felt like coming upon two shut-ins who were slowly driving each other crazy.

  But Alex had once seen Esmeralda leave for the weekend wearing a skirt and knee-high leather boots, her hair full, her cheeks alive, her figure startlingly feminine. It was a reminder that she had a life outside the dim apartment and the care of his aunt. Judging from the vigor with which she made her exit that evening, it was a life she was very anxious to resume living.

  “You should see what she does with men!” his aunt bellowed at him one day. For a moment Alex took her seriously, and wondered what the hell Esmeralda was doing bringing men to the apartment. Then he remembered his aunt was insane.

  “What’s going on with you and men?” Alex said to Esmeralda, who was standing in the room laughing, her gold tooth flashing.

  “Do you know what she does with men?” Aunti B said again, this time in a mischievous whisper.

  Alex shook his head.

  “Nothing!” she yelled. “She’s a virgin!”

  Esmeralda laughed some more but with a hint of embarrassment, which Alex shared.

  “I’ve got a son,” she said. “How am I going to be a virgin?”

  EMPTY CARDBOARD BOXES were placed here and there around the apartment.

  When Alex asked Esmeralda about the boxes she shrugged and said, “Your cousin.” She said it in a way that implied she had sufficient contact with Karl to grasp that he was a little out of his mind.

  He called Karl. “What’s up with all the boxes? It’s like an obstacle course in here.”

  “I’m trying to get her acclimated to the concept of packing,” said Karl. “The more boxes lying around, the more she’ll be comfortable with the idea of moving.”

  This was exactly the kind of thinking that made Alex nervous about Karl. But he didn’t contest him. He didn’t have the vigor and energy that Karl seemed to have on the subject of their aunt. She was going to leave the dim cavernous one-bedroom apartment she had lived in for thirty years, a bodega on the corner and a housing project across the street, and go live amidst the woods and meadows and deer and bunnies in rural Pennsylvania not far from where Karl lived, because Karl wanted her to. She loved Alex, but she was obsessed with Karl. It w
as Karl’s call.

  So Alex put the phone down and decided to concentrate on the task at hand, which was to visit with his aunt. She seemed incredibly pleased to see him. She seemed to take this sudden invasion of cardboard boxes as some kind of game, and puttered around weaving in and out of them, looking up at him and laughing her sputtering laugh as though to say, “Can you believe it!” It was really nice to see her look so pleased.

  Then she called him Karl, as she often did.

  “I’m not Karl,” he said. “I’m Alex.”

  She looked surprised. “Where’s Karly?” she asked.

  “Not here,” he said.

  “Not here? Why not? Vas is dat?”

  This three-word phrase could be a statement of pleasure or of anger, or a question, as well as a multitude of variations and combinations of the above, depending on tonality and whether the accent was on the “is” or the “dat.”

  An accent on the “is” usually meant indignation; if it was on the “dat?” it usually implied an amorphously good-humored question within which was the suggestion that life was an unknowable mystery and one might as well make the best of it.

  She wore two small watches on her left wrist.

  “Why are you wearing two watches, Aunti B?” he said.

  “So I can tell the time!” she snapped.

  Esmeralda shuffled into the living room in her slippers, en route to another chore. She shot him a look that seemed to say, “See what I have to deal with?”

  AUNTI B HAD spent two years, starting at the age of five, at a sanitarium outside Vienna because of polio. What happened in sanitariums in Austria in the years just after World War I Alex did not know. Judging from his aunt, it was nothing good. He wanted to ask her about it, but was constantly reminded that his aunt was beyond the realm of normal comprehension.

  “What do you think of all this?” he asked her, waving towards the boxes that dotted the living room.

  “Well,” she said, without bitterness, “what can you do?”

  “You could stay.”

  “Yes!” It seemed like a new idea. A tremendous discovery along the lines of Galileo, Newton, Darwin. Everything must be fairly novel when you can’t remember anything.

  She held a pair of scissors like a dagger. Karl wanted to move her out in a matter of weeks. But he had wanted to move her out in a matter of weeks for six months. It was now summer. She was staring down at the scissors as though she couldn’t understand how she came to be holding them. She’ll kill herself if she stays here, Alex thought, but he didn’t really believe it.

  HE HAD BEEN arguing terribly with Debbie. His scale of priorities was being recalibrated in ways he didn’t understand, but he no longer felt interested by anything she had to say. Instead he became a regular at his aunt’s place, seeking solace there the way one might frequent a bar.

  Almost every day now he turned the key in the lock, pushed the door open, and entered the claustrophobic world of his declining aunt and her housekeeper/nurse. It was as though a theatrical event was going on eight hours a day, and you could drop in at any time and simply pick up the plot from that moment.

  Aunti B was always clutching the photograph of her young intellectual, her small bent body often contorted with tears, while Esmeralda stood before her, burgeoning out of her improvised uniform, ass in one direction, breasts in the other, robust, healthy, and helpless before this tiny woman’s inexplicable rage. On one such occasion Esmeralda’s eyes turned to Alex’s with a mixture of relief that assistance had arrived, and embarrassment that he had walked in on such a scene.

  “She’s trying to kill me!” shrieked Aunti B between sobs. “You don’t know…you know what she does to me!”

  Alex strode forward and put his arm around his aunt’s tiny bony shoulder. He cast a quick glance at Esmeralda that tried to convey sympathy, and was surprised to find on her face an odd look of contrition, as though she had accidentally broken something valuable while dusting.

  “I didn’t do nothing,” she said.

  “Come here, Aunti B, come into the kitchen, let’s—”

  “No!” A murderous cry, a primal scream of rage and frustration of the sort a baby might make.

  After a few failed attempts to navigate her to the kitchen, he turned her in the opposite direction and got her into her bedroom. Whenever possible he tried to avoid this room. It smelled faintly of urine. Its one window hadn’t been cleaned in years. She had gotten in the habit of raiding her drawers and throwing everything on the floor. Sometimes Esmeralda just left everything out until the end of the day, and then put it away before going home. The place was strewn with underwear.

  “Please,” she whispered, suddenly with real focus, real urgency, as though her crazy personality were just an act, and this was a brief moment when she could be herself. “Get rid of that woman! Get rid of her! Get rid of her!” She yelled these last words, fierce, hysterical, dictatorial, the ferocity of a monarch who had returned to retake her conquered kingdom, in this case the tiny kingdom that was her life. The queen is back, and she will wreak havoc on the nincompoops who have been doing such a bad job in her absence!

  “Sit!” he said, and nearly pushed her onto the bed. She sat with a thud, and immediately became quiet.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  He rushed out to touch base with Esmeralda. It was only a few steps, but he started to formulate an apology. He was full of sympathy for the woman. She was being paid a thousand a week, but no amount of money was worth being cooped up with his crazy aunt.

  But when he reached her he was surprised to find on her face a look of fear and remorse and anxiety that collated into an expression he hadn’t expected. It was, more than anything else, womanly, even a little childish, and in a flash he apprehended her not as a maid or nurse, but as a woman, a vulnerable and quite sexy woman.

  Her breasts strained against her shirt. She looked at him with wide anxious eyes.

  “Esmeralda,” he said. “This is a difficult situation. I want to be fair.”

  Her face remained unchanged, anxious and worried.

  He let his eyes stare into hers for a moment, and then he slowly and very deliberately moved them down her body, over her face, her neck, and let them linger on her two large melon-shaped breasts protruding against her pink T-shirt. Then he looked farther down, over her wide heavy hips, all the way down to her feet, which were in socks and slippers. He looked back at her eyes.

  “It’s not fair,” she said. “She is crazy. I am doing nothing wrong.”

  “Esmeralda, go have a seat on the couch.”

  He stared at her some more. His face was incredibly dispassionate. There was a huge welling-up in his chest of varying emotions, and he imagined that beneath his expressionless gaze, Esmeralda could sense some kind of turbulence.

  “Sit down,” he said, more harshly than he expected.

  He went into the bedroom and quieted his aunt; she was agitated and mournful. He sat at the edge of her bed and held her gnarled hand. It was a weird kind of seduction. He rarely touched her like this. The room smelled of her sour smell. He willed her to sleep, and miraculously, after a few minutes, her eyes shut. He got up and closed the door behind him. She didn’t like the door closed, and it was when he heard it click shut that his blood started to race again.

  Esmeralda was not on the couch. He looked around. She was nowhere. He went to the kitchen, and just then heard a sound in the bathroom. He went there and saw Esmeralda about to emerge. She had obviously decided that there was no point in sitting on the couch, and had begun to clean the bathroom. Was she cleaning to make a good impression, to mitigate his aunt’s shrieking protest against her competence?

  Or was there something on his face that, even in its blankness, registered with her and made her not want to wait for him on the couch?

  They collided in the doorway to the bathroom. She held her blue rubber gloves in one hand, and he could smell the faint, bitter smell of Ajax. She had just washed
the sink and the tub. He was aware of her breasts, how much closer to him they were than the rest of her. The fullness that had eluded him for the months that he had been lurking around in her presence was now overwhelming, monstrous, luscious; she was a gorgeous thing with blue rubber gloves. It was not a transformation he had expected, but now that it had occurred it seemed obvious and natural. Other than the blue gloves he was aware of her eyes, brown and flecked with orange. She looked up at him as he blocked her way in the bathroom doorway. At that moment he didn’t look at her face but instead looked up at the bathroom mirror. In it he saw himself, and Esmeralda looking up at him. Her expression was bemused and also worried. For a moment he felt their age difference. She had mentioned she had a son, seventeen, not that much younger than he. She was firm, though, full and firm, and in profile her breasts and her hips and ass looked all the more formidable. There was something offensive and angering about them. He saw how close they were to his torso. They held their respective gazes for a long time—she on his face, his face towards the mirror, looking at her looking at him—as though they were sitting for a portrait.

  “Come with me,” he said, and turned to face her. He took a step forward. She took a step forward, and they bumped. It was comic. Now he didn’t know where to look. But he didn’t move. An image of an outrageous coupling in the bathroom was vaguely taking form in his mind.

  “Excuse me,” she said in a bored and almost annoyed way, as though impatient to get on with her cleaning. She said it with so much authority—the authority of someone who doesn’t have time for nonsense—that he completely lost his nerve. Only the memory of her open, worried face staring up at him moments before kept him planted to the spot, resolute to go through with it. For some reason his eyes cast down to the floor where her white socks creased at the point where the slipper’s thong pressed into them, next to her big toe. Again she froze, still staring at him, and he stared at her slippers—pure work clothes, totally unglamorous, tawdry really, yet charged with sex all of a sudden.