Vera picks up the papers, loving their weight, their smooth, unviolated quality, the sharp newsprint smell. Saving the Times for later, she steals a glance at the News’s front page. BOMBS BLAST BEIRUT. It’s too reminiscent of This Week, worse for being true. She can never read the comics or Parade; today’s entertainment page offers listings for Kung Fu movies in Brooklyn neighborhoods where not even Vera will go. Aware of the incongruity of munching croissants while trying to decide if a fifty-cent coupon is reason enough to buy a new brand of fish stick, she’s trying to remember if Rosie even eats fish these days when out of the coupon section falls a glossy invitation to her local Belmontbooks, where this very afternoon Karen Karl will be here direct from L.A. to autograph her new bestseller, I Predict: How Seeing the Future Can Help You Live in the Now.
Last week this might have seemed a coincidence worth paying attention to: just yesterday she’d read six months of Karen Karl’s columns and now here she is. But after all that’s happened, it just seems like daily life. A week ago she wouldn’t have crossed the street to see Karen Karl, and now she’s planning a route that will take her past Belmontbooks on her way to pick up Rosie.
God alone knows why. Curiosity, certainly, and beyond that—though Vera would never admit it—the possibility that Karen Karl will say something useful or even applicable. Applicable to what? What scares Vera is the suspicion that she’s becoming one of those poor souls who’ll go anywhere for help, even to Karen Karl. More likely her dropping by the book-signing is simply one way of getting through a day on which she’s got nothing much else to do but pick up Rosalie and cook dinner for Mavis Biretta. There, then, that’s it. The lift she’s getting is the one she remembers from Sundays when—faced with the prospect of a day alone with little Rosie—she’d see in the paper some mention of a clown or puppet show, a charity street fair, anything to take them out into the world of other lives. Oh, thank heaven. This day can be survived.
The book-signing is at the back of the store, but Vera sees it from the street, just as she’s heard you can see Chartres or Mont St. Michel—except that what she sees is not a cathedral spire directing her spirit toward heaven, but rather the black tip of Karen Karl’s witch’s hat. The aisles are lined with men with the shifty faces of perverts, the kind who waits till you pick up a book on Mexican cooking or Billie Holiday, say, then presses against the shelves and slides his penis into the empty space. They can’t all be perverts, there are too many; and soon Vera realizes they’re just husbands, checking to see if their wives are done chatting with Karen Karl. Karen Karl’s crowd is nearly all female, all in fact except three huge boys whose identical, lumpish noses, bad skin, and fishnet T-shirts proclaim them to be brothers, possibly even triplets.
Karen Karl looks as she did on TV: same round face, blond Dutch-boy hair, same long, pointy sleeves and tenty black chiffon. Where in the world does she shop? You can’t just pick two-hundred-pound-witches’ gowns off the rack. She’s standing on a platform behind stacks of books with shiny black jackets, white lettering, and a spray of multicolored stars like the ones on her hat.
Flanking her are two young men in horn-rimmed glasses, pressed jeans, rolled shirtsleeves. One of them takes the books that people hand up and gives them to Karen Karl to sign. The other passes them back. When they’re not doing that, they stand with their legs apart, arms folded, glaring into the middle distance like Secret-Service agents. In contrast, Karen Karl seems freakishly animated. The two-foot-long gold fountain pen she’s brandishing like Cinderella’s fairy godmother keeps almost cracking them in the face.
“When’s your birthday?” she’s asking a skinny old lady in tight stretch jeans and a beehive hairdo. “Not the year, now,” she warns coyly. “Just the day and month.”
The old lady mumbles something and Karen Karl calls out, “Sagittarius! It’s your year!” She waves her magic wand for order. “Okay. Let’s say you get up tomorrow and open your paper and your horoscope says, ‘Sagittarius: Don’t be surprised if loved ones seem short tempered. Drive carefully and watch for falling masonry.’ What are you gonna do?”
“Go back to bed,” says the old lady.
“Abso-goshdarn-lutely!” says Karen Karl. “Pull those blankets over your head. Now let’s say you open the paper and it says, ‘Sagittarius: An old problem will be settled. Romance in the air. Don’t overlook new chance for fame and fortune.’ What then? You’re gonna feel like a world-beater, right?”
The old woman draws herself up and pats her hair and says, “Right.” Then one of those boys in the fishnet shirts raises his fist and says, “Way to go, Mom!”
“Is that your son?” asks Karen Karl.
“They’re all three my boys,” says the woman. Everyone applauds motherhood, and even Vera feels warmed, as if the tightness of the woman’s jeans is a statement of faith in the future.
“Say it again, son,” orders Karen Karl.
“Way to go, Mom,” he says, no longer sounding convinced.
“That’s what I’m talking about in my book,” says Karen Karl. “Positive Energy Potential. P-E-P. Pep!” As she punches the air for emphasis, her sleeve falls back, revealing an armful of digital watches set, Vera imagines, to tell the time on other planets or, at the very least, in L.A.
Karen Karl goes back to asking names and signing as fan after fan approaches with such awe and reverence they could be touching a god or the fingerbone of a saint. When they reach out, they actually pale a little, as if bracing themselves to hear their fortunes told on the spot. Vera’s so moved by these women and their questions, she suddenly wants to ask Karen Karl something, too. Perhaps she should introduce herself, one professional to another, saying, “My paper carries your column.” But she can’t stop thinking of that scene in Wise Blood when Enoch Emory goes up to Gonga, the man in the gorilla suit who’s shaking children’s hands in front of a theater, and Enoch is so overcome with feeling he confesses his life story and all his deepest hopes, and Gonga says, “You go to hell.”
Just for something to focus on, Vera lifts a book from the stack and gets as far as the title page when one of the owlish boys snatches it from her hands. “What’s your name, Sweetie?” Karen Karl asks, and Vera’s horrified to hear herself whispering. Karen Karl scribbles a few words and motions for Vera to follow her book down the line but Vera just stands there. She’s searching for the tiny eyes in that wide face, and as soon as she finds them, she says, “Do you believe in coincidence?”
“Now what do you mean by that?” The wariness in Karen Karl’s voice moves Vera all over again; it’s the voice of a not-very-bright child going stiff when the smarter kids tell riddles. A dozen answers swim through Vera’s head, but all seem way too complicated, and finally the best she can do is, “Yesterday I read your column—really read it—for the first time. Then I read every one—back through the last six months. Then today I pick up the paper. And now you’re here!”
Karen Karl stiffens again, but the fervor of Vera’s conversion—six months of columns at once!—seems to mollify her. She rubs her eyes with the heels of her palms. How tired she looks. Then she waves her wand and says, “Let’s put it like this. It’s all in the stars, and we earthlings don’t know the teensiest bit about it. What we call coincidence may be two distant planets crossing the plane of our orbit. I don’t care what you believe—the big bang or the little bang or God created it all in seven days. Whether you think the universe stops at a certain point and there’s something else beyond it, or that it never stops but just goes on and on…Believe any of that and you can believe anything. Compared to that, your reading my column and my showing up here today is chickenfeed!”
For one brief moment, Vera feels that all her questions have been answered, wants to change places with the owlish boys and follow Karen Karl to L.A. and beyond. Barely audible music seems to be piping under her skull. She wants everything to stop so she can sort it all out, but the owlish boy’s being paid to make sure it doesn’t. She takes the book he offers her
.
What registers first is that she’s got the wrong book. The inscription reads, “To Virginia, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, Don’t stop wishing on your lucky star! Love, Karen Karl.” The old woman and her three sons are beside her. Vera knows it’s theirs.
Without understanding precisely why, she feels that the naming of these boys is the very epitome of everything that most depresses her about human life, everything she most hates and secretly fears about the kind of people who read This Week. Of course their mother couldn’t have known how they’d turn out. Clearly she’d had something cuter, less swollen, more baby-duckling-like in mind. And if they’re saying, “Way to go, Mom!”, they must not hold her accountable. Still, how could she do it?
What Vera’s feeling is the opposite of that honeyish, sentimental glow that had her seeing these people inching toward Karen Karl as pilgrims. Perhaps if she tried hard enough she might recapture it, might see it as funny and tender and really rather sweet to name your kids after Donald Duck’s nephews. But she can’t. Instead she’s losing patience, much as she used to at the end of a long day with Rosalie, when she’d turn on her, shrieking and chattering like a monkey. That’s what she’d like to do to the old lady as they trade books and apologetic smiles. Vera hates her smeary mouth, her tiny, sharp teeth, her pleasure in having her own book at last. Vera’s copy says, “To Vera, Don’t stop wishing on your lucky star! Love, Karen Karl.”
Vera reels out of the bookstore and into the street, where now everyone has cartoon-character names. Mr. Naturals, Olive Oyls, Daddy Warbuckses, Little Nemos, Betty Boops—Eighth Street on a Sunday afternoon is crawling with them. Seeing people as cartoons is one of Vera’s personal horrors and one that, she fears, is yet another occupational hazard of working at This Week. Sometimes it even happens in Vera’s dreams: people turn into Looney Tunes. It’s why she’s never enjoyed movies that switch between live action and animation, finds them nightmarish. Why? Because when it happens in her nightmares, she knows something terrible is hiding and waiting to pounce as she rounds the next corner of her dream.
IT’S A SHORT SUBWAY RIDE to Kirsty’s, but long enough for Vera to envision a dozen horrendous scenarios of carnage and gore she’ll find upon arriving. It’s nothing she hasn’t imagined before, only this time the maniac killers have the cartoon faces and sadistic m.o.’s of Dick Tracy’s archenemies: Fly Face, Flat Top, Prune Face, 88 Keys.
But when Kirsty’s mother, Lynda, answers the door, it’s clear nothing terrible’s happened. Not yet. At worst, Vera feels as she always does with Lynda—interested and uncomfortable.
Lynda works at a trendy Soho beauty salon called Skank. She’s wearing black vinyl toreadors, leopard scuffs, neon pink plastic earrings, a sweatshirt big enough for three: yet another style begun as a way of offending the middle classes, who’ve taken to it so fanatically that women like Lynda have to wear it to keep their jobs. Lynda’s bangs are peacock blue. The rest of her hair is a reddish fox color, cut against the grain so it stands straight up and looks so like an animal pelt that Vera wants to pet it. Why doesn’t she? Lynda often makes free with her hair, hefting it in a pony tail, appraising it with that cool hairdresser’s eye that always makes Vera expect the worst: ENDS SPLIT TO ROOTS—CANCER OF THE HAIR.
“Come on in,” says Lynda, whose breathless, slightly charged-up voice evokes the ghost of Marilyn Monroe. She turns till she’s shoulder to shoulder with Vera; it’s as if they’re arriving together. And in a way it’s true; it’s not exactly Lynda’s apartment. Thanks to an imaginative custody arrangement, Kirsty stays here, and her parents move in with her for alternate weeks. Kirsty’s Dad is named Richard, but Vera has never heard Lynda call him anything but El Creepo. The way Lynda talks, Vera imagines El Creepo as a masked bandit who leaves picked-over chicken bones in the refrigerator, full garbage bags in the pantry, whiskers in the sink. No one, probably not even the judge, expected this setup to last; but though the apartment has the dulled, dusty look of a child being used as a go-between by two warring parents, Kirsty seems to be thriving.
“Guess what happened to me Friday,” says Lynda. “I ran into four flashers. Four exhibitionists in one day. They couldn’t whip it out fast enough. One right up against the shop window, one down the counter from me at lunch, one on the subway each way.”
“Ugh,” says Vera. “Give me a screamer any day. The thing I hate about flashers is the surprise. I mean, you’re not looking crotch level, so you’ve been staring at their silly faces for hours before you look down and notice. By then it’s like they’re your friends, like obscene phone callers always sounding at first like some guy you know. Then they’ve really got you—”
“Christ,” says Lynda. “You know what the guy in the window said? The shop was pretty crowded, I figured I couldn’t get into too much trouble, so I told him to get lost. And he said, ‘Don’t be offended, Missus. Me and Henry, we’re just takin’ the breeze.’”
“Me and Henry?” Vera shudders. “Once my friend Louise was walking through Central Park and a guy came up to her jerking off. ‘Please hep me,’ he kept saying. And she looked him right in the eye and said, ‘God heps them what hep themselves.’”
“Sure,” says Lynda. “You always hear stories like that. But no one ever does it.”
“The worst are the ones in bookstores,” says Vera, recalling how when she’d first walked into Belmontbooks she’d thought everyone was a flasher. Now that she thinks about it, it’s a wonder she didn’t encounter one. She’s noticed that thinking of flashers seems to attract them. Which isn’t to say she believes that stuff about rape victims secretly wanting it. That’s simply untrue, and anyway, desire—even secret desire—isn’t the issue. It’s something subtler, more mysterious. In which case, what does Lynda’s four-in-one-day imply about her mental processes? Well, plenty. Lynda and her friends inhabit a world where men named El Creepo want nothing more than to leave whiskers in the sink or leap out from behind the nearest subway pillar waving their penises in women’s faces.
Which is to say: the real world. Or their corner of it. All Lynda’s friends seem to be divorced from men who might as well be named El Creepo, and what they do when they get together is complain about their ex-husbands. In other words, romantics. None of them has stopped believing in true love; they all want to remarry. Often in their company Vera imagines she’s among women on torturous diets: the one food they crave is the only one they can’t have.
Beyond that, they make her miss Louise the way boring men at parties make her miss Lowell. Their talk makes her long for the common language she shares with Louise and just can’t seem to speak with Lynda and her friends. One problem is: when they’re telling their horror stories, Vera can never manage to come across with a suitable contribution. And it’s not that she doesn’t have stories to tell. Let them beat the one about Lowell spending their last peso on cashews! Still, she’s never told it, partly out of some vestigial loyalty to Lowell, but more out of loyalty to herself. If she presents Lowell as an idiot, what does that make her for marrying him?
One night, bravely keeping up her end of the conversation, she told them about the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, in which Valerie Solanis, the one who shot Andy Warhol, claims the only way men can rehabilitate themselves is to sit around repeating, “I am a lowly, abject turd.” Just saying it cracked Vera up, but no one else thought it was funny. Did they think she was making fun of them? She wasn’t. Perhaps she was just taking it too far.
Now she asks Lynda, “Are you coming or going?”, meaning the apartment. Traditionally, the changing of the guard takes place on Sunday nights.
“Leaving,” Lynda says. “Can’t you tell? When El Creepo’s been here, the place is a total disaster.”
If this isn’t a disaster, Vera would like to see one. But who is she to pass judgment on anyone’s housekeeping? Changing the subject, she asks Lynda if El Creepo’s coming to the recital.
“Let’s hope not,” says Lynda. “I don’t know if he knows about it, and I’m
not going to tell him. When he does go, all he does is stare at Madame Svenskaya’s ass.”
“Madame?” says Vera. “She’s eighty!”
“Don’t kid yourself,” says Lynda. “She’s got terrific muscle tone. Madame’s got a cuter ass than we do.”
Strangely, Vera’s a little hurt by this; pride alone prevents her from reaching back and patting her behind reassuringly. Lynda seems to know what she’s thinking; it’s the kind of thing she’s instinctively sensitive to.
“You?” she says. “You’re doing great. Me, I’m getting to the point where the highway patrol wants me to put a sign on my skirt, ‘Caution. Wide Load.’”
Vera laughs and asks where the girls are. “Listen,” says Lynda. Vera hears a scratchy version of “The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” coming from down the hall and follows Lynda toward it. The girls don’t hear them come in. They’re twirling round the cramped bedroom, each holding one hand in the air like show-off waiters balancing trays. At the recital there will be trays, and on them lit candles. Vera’s never approved; the girls’ long hair whips back and forth at tray level. One night she asked Rosie if they were planning to dance in asbestos tutus: another mistake. Rosie can’t stand any questioning of Madame’s authority and taste. “Mom,” she said. “It’s the St. Lucia dance.”
Vera knows for a fact that St. Lucia has something to do with Christmas in Sweden, with fresh-braided cardamom loaves glazed with sugar and raisins. But then, ten-year-olds waltzing with open flames in mid-August fits right in with Madame’s vague Mittel Europa origins, her trailing Isadora Duncan scarves and Isak Dinesen makeup job. What sympathy Vera has comes from knowing that all this, accent included, is Madame’s uniform, as much a part of her job as Lynda’s blue hair. In five years, Rosie’s had three ballet teachers, all of them called Madame.
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