Oh, happiest of days! Walter Miller was not only camped in his late fifties, but was also magnificently gaseous—a true burper, one of the belching best, and nothing was more ardor-dampening than a burst of the burps. In Walter Miller’s case, the burps seem to come at two-minute intervals, and if they didn’t, Walter Miller would thump his chest with his fist and a nice round burp would emerge like the mating call of the bulbous bullfrog. Tiger immediately loved him. He was a Rolaid’s bonanza, a belled cat who could no more sneak up on an unwary mouse than he could burp to the moon. Elysium!
If there was anything imperfect about Walter Miller as a boss, it was his attitude of all-business. For no sooner had she settled in than she found herself taking dictation. Tiger didn’t care to confess to the man not only that she had no grasp of shorthand, but that she could barely handle longhand. So she merely faked it as best she could. Because it was her first day at the post, Walter Miller manifested a wondrous patience. He was so patient that Tiger felt a medal should be struck especially for him, with Pitman clusters. They were only three sentences into the memo and already ten minutes had been consumed. At that rate the memo would be old hat well before its completion. It would arrive at its destination like last week’s TV Guide and would be read like a military bulletin from the Boer War.
But Walter Miller, grim bulldog, hung in there. “So, though I agree with Harrison’s position as to the legal precedents involved, I still feel that it would be in our company’s best interests if—” He stopped because Tiger had her hand raised like a traffic cop. “Yes?” he burped.
“Too fast.”
He was patient and gaseous. It was his daily double. “How far did you get get?”
“Harrison. Is that one r or two?”
“I believe it’s two.”
“Yes. Good. Just wanted to be sure.” She motioned to him that traffic could resume.
Walter Miller was curious, but in a gentle and fatherly way. “How long have you been working for the firm?”
“I don’t really know. Two weeks? I get shifted around a lot.”
“Why can’t you hold a position?”
“If I held the position people around here want me to hold, I could be a star.”
Walter Miller had no idea who and what she was referring to. Besides, a bubble had lodged in his chest and he thumped at it with his calloused fist.
“Mr. Miller,” Tiger said, “instead of this long-winded memo, why don’t you just make a phone call?”
“The memo is to ten people.”
“It’d still be faster than me taking dictation. Besides, it’d be so much more personal if you called.”
Outside, in the steno pool, there was some action taking place that Tiger had no idea of. Luther. He was there. Wearing something that vaguely approximated his idea of a suit. It wasn’t all that bad, except the blue jacket was plaid and the green pants were checked. And the necktie, canary yellow, looked randy-dandy on the red-and white-striped shirt.
In his hand, Luther had a small memo pad. It had some names scrawled upon it. In his other hand he held a fistful of dollars that he had successfully collected over the last twenty minutes. He leaned informally against the edge of one of the typists’ desks and gratefully acknowledged her contribution. “Thank you. And your name? It’s for the card. We’re enclosing a nice card.”
“Nancy Baldwin.” She was not thrilled, having parted with the dollar bill with the same enthusiasm she’d have accompanied the giving away of her last kidney.
Luther wrote her name on his pad. “Nan-cy Bald-win. Thank you, Nancy.” And he moved on to another of the typists, Gloria, who tried hard to not be seen, except she was an easy two hundred pounds and was camped in a burnt orange sweater that could be seen on a moonless night, in a cellar, at a distance of fifty lunar miles, by a blind man, looking the other way. “Hi,” said the charming Luther, leaning against her typewriter so that she had to stop. “I’m Jimmy Hopkins from Civil Disturbances and Misdemeanors. Myrna Wupperman is getting married, and we’re collecting for a nice gift.”
“So who’s Myrna Wupperman?” It was a fair question because Gloria had never heard of Myrna Wupperman.
Luther smiled at her obvious evasion. “Oh, you know Myrna. Myrna with the brown hair? Down to here? Myrna Wupperman.” He glared at Gloria and smiled again at her blatant cheapness. “Come on, how often does a girl get married?”
Gloria dug out a guilty dollar she’d been saving for a sundae afternoon. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve been here four years, and it’s cost me over a hundred dollars. Come around when I get married, will you?”
Luther knew the odds against that celebration’s ever taking place, and he cutely pinched one of her clunky arms. “I most certainly will. And your name?”
“Gloria Upham.”
He wrote the name on his pad as if he were Santa Claus. “Good. Thank you, Gloria.” He started to move on.
But Gloria delayed his departure. “What are we getting her?”
“A combination charcoal broiler and Swedish pancake platter. You know how Myrna likes to cook.”
“Oh…that Myrna?”
“Yeah.” Luther strode away and approached a small dark girl. Anne, possibly Italian. “Hi, I’m Stanley Garibaldi, from Traffic Violations and Torts. Elsa Manicotti is getting married.”
“She is?”
“Yeah. Fat Elsa. Can you beat that? Anyway—”
Back in the office of Walter Miller—he was on the telephone. Tiger sat by, listening and smiling. “And after checking out the decision in McNeil versus Lockhardt, I feel certain you’ll agree that the matter bears further discussion before we commit ourselves to a position that may well be legally untenable.” He paused, thumped his chest, and burped Swanee River. “And listen, Tony? Tell Mell Westerfeld, will you?…Well, your office is right next to his, so what’s the big deal?…And then ask Mel to tell Jerry Flynn and Lee McCall. Very truly yours, Walter Miller.” And he hung up before the party at the other end could say another word.
Tiger applauded like a happy nine-year-old. “Good! Oh, good! That was very good!” And she sat back and smiled at him the way his mother used to do. “Now don’t you feel a lot better for it?”
Walter Miller thumped his chest. He went to his desk thermos, but it was empty. “I feel another acid attack coming on, that’s how I feel. Who do I have to call to get my thermos refilled?” He tried to smile, but it didn’t quite happen.
Tiger got to her feet and indicated that he had nothing to fear—she’d be back with a full thermos before the next burp. She left the office, the thermos in her grip as if it were the Holy Grail, and she stepped into the corridor—and into Luther.
“Hi, I’m Wally Abernathy, the school nurse. Phil Werber has just been arrested on a morals charge and we’re trying to raise money—either for bail or a nice filthy book.”
Tiger was too flabbergasted to present any emotion other than just flabbergastion. “Luther! Oh! Oh, what are you doing? Oh…Luther, I work here!”
He displayed his fistful of dollars. “I’ve got close to twenty dollars. I must tell Fat about this place. He’ll flip out.”
She blinked at all the money. “What did you do—I don’t want to hear!” And she walked away, the thermos tucked under her arm like a football. She tossed the words at him, not the thermos. “You return that money—all of it!”
Luther followed her down the corridor. “I need this money. I’m raising the ransom to get you back from King Farouk. It has to be in a plain paper bag and dropped from a moving Ferrari on Fifty-seventh Street—if I can only remember where.” He got in front of her, blocking her way, and he uncorked one of his more irresistible smiles. “How you doing, cutie?”
She faced him squarely. “I’m doing fine. God, you’re crazy.” She blinked at his costume. “What are you wearing?”
“This?” He modeled his outfit, with a hint of mint. “Oh—just something I stole from a Bowery mission on the recommendation of my seeing-eye dog. Do
you like it?”
She tried to get around him. “Please…Luther?”
He allowed her to pass, then quickly fell in step behind her, talking to her moving back. “Typing nice words? I hope your vocabulary’s improved. You don’t say ‘shit’ anymore, do you? I guess with me out of the way you don’t get any more anxiety attacks over boot jobs and things? Still taking the pill? Who you been fucking?”
She wheeled at him. “Don’t talk to me? Ever! Not here—not anywhere!”
She started down the corridor again, but he grabbed her wrists and held her there. The thermos dropped on her foot. It didn’t hurt, but she was so frustrated she started to cry. He felt that it was the proper time to sum up quickly. “Fat and Leon are gone. The pad is empty. Come back and make me Jello. We’ll be alone. I swear, I swear.” He picked up the thermos, first kissing her shoe top. “Tiger, I need you. You’re everywhere I look. Everywhere. You had no right to come back and then chicken out.” He placed the thermos back into her hands. “Handsome little tyke, what’s his name?”
Tiger looked into his eyes, trying to figure him, then deciding not to try. “Perhaps, sir, you have me mixed up with someone else.” And she walked around him.
“There is no one else!” He was following her again. “Only you. You know that.” She wasn’t answering, just walking. They passed through an area in which other people were standing and chatting. Luther kept talking to her. “I’ll call you, okay? We’ll work something out that’ll be fair to both sides. Or I’ll wait for you outside your Y. I’m sure you’ll recognize me. I’ll be the one with the broken heart.”
“You’ll be the one with the broken nose!” She had stopped and was holding the thermos in a threatening position. And in front of all the people in the corridor, she verbally laid into Luther. “If you make a scene here, if you do, it’s the end, okay! The end, final and forever! Do you understand that? Can you understand that? Does this message get through to your infant mortality? You are off limits here! You don’t belong! I don’t know if you belong anywhere, okay? So will you please leave me alone? Okay? Okay?” She let it end there and watched it all sink into him.
He backed away, smiling sardonically, striving to be arcane. “Okay. Okay. You win, Esposito. The West Side is yours. Me and the Irishman, we’ll stay on our side of town. There’s enough action for everyone. But one thing, dago—keep Shapiro off my tail, ya hear?” He walked backward, back up the corridor, like a man making a slow and careful getaway, turning his head sideways to address the people he was passing: “Nobody try to follow, ya hear? Nobody make a move. Nobody knows the trouble I seen.” He disappeared down the fire stairs, an apparition, a specter.
Among the people who had seen and heard it all was Martha. She came over to Tiger, who was standing motionless, blanched. Martha wanted to know what that had all been about. But it was apparent to her that Tiger either wouldn’t talk or couldn’t talk. Martha went about her business. Tiger eventually filled the thermos with water and returned it to Walter Miller. Whatever else was in her mind was too muddled for her to attempt to unravel.
It was her denial that hurt me more than anything. It was bad enough that she chewed me out in public like that, in front of all those apprentice moron types—but it was her denying that she had come back to the pad that was the most unstringing. It wasn’t like her. I sat in the dark in my apartment until I lit a candle, for, as the saying goes, it is better to light a candle in the dark than to play guitar without being able to see the chords. The longer I sat there singing, the more obvious the truth became. It was awful, unbearable, unacceptable—but it had to be faced. I had been rejected. Re-jec-ted. Whomp. Still, it wasn’t exactly a new experience for me. It was just that it hadn’t happened to me for quite some time. Rejection and I had long ago become bosom buddies. Rejection had been the crummy short story of my life, and small wonder. I was a most unattractive-type kid, skinny and gooney, with black curls and sad eyes that were forever collecting cinders. In my first twelve years I collected enough cinders to qualify for a fairy godmother (which, come to think of it, I had; my Uncle Gerald, who danced in Broadway shows). I was the runt of every litter, the one they tossed into the river. The one who, if allowed to live, weakened the species. But somewhere along the line I had determined to reject rejection. And the best way to reject rejection was to reject the rejecter before the rejecter rejected the rejectee. That, I think, pretty much sums up why, in recent years, I had become so mean to people. It was a case of fuck or be fucked, and I was getting pretty fucking tired of the latter, which is why I turned to the former. Better to be the fuckor than the fuckee, a reasonable enough philosophy, you will agree. Then—Tiger. With Tiger, well, when she stumbled into the blood clot of my life, it was all different. I mean, she took all the rejection I could dish out, and still she came back for more. Shit, I had rejected her enough times for three dozen frails to blow their brains out. But she kept coming back like a drunken homing pigeon, the game kid. But the wild thing was, each time I rejected her, I felt the pain at least as bad as she did. I felt it so bad that I could cry, and often I did. So, finally—and who could blame her, not me—she finally had enough of the bullshitty punishment I was doling out and, to save herself, she vamoosed, to see if maybe she couldn’t do better in life than hooking up with a rich, derelict kid who’s always putting her down. Shit, she was entitled. So it is over. The end. I don’t know if she knows it yet (probably), but I know it. I’m not sure if there’s anyone new in her life as yet (probably not), but there should be someday. Then again, who knows? But that isn’t the issue. The issue is that Tiger and I are not an item anymore. And the reason is that we probably never had anything going for us in the first place, nothing at all. When we met, she had been reaching out, trying to get out of her world—and I was reaching out, trying to get into it. Hell, I’d like to belong somewhere someday. I don’t much care going from day to day with nothing happening except my own slow dying. So there we were—moving in different directions, and happening to meet while we were in motion. And in the process, we waved to each other because it was such great sport. And somehow our hands touched, and lo, if she wasn’t everything I wanted, and I everything she wanted. And so it is written that the touch became an embrace and that the two became one. Yet all we did, when you cut through all. that crap, was just stop each other cold and hurt each other hard. It’s like a fullback busting through and a linebacker coming up to whack him. Zap. No gain. No loss, but no gain. Anyhow, now that I’ve got it pegged, I can accept the fact that she belongs in her own comfy world, where she’ll take tea and marry some pipe-puffing charming commuter and have blond kids with straight hair, and get broad in the beam, and grow old as graceful as a fucking swan, and die quietly on some nice autumn day when she’s a hundred and five all propped up and smiling for her 643 descendants. Whereas I, in my exotic looniness, I will remain on my side of the cage, making funny faces at gum-chewing gawkers, until that one day, in the winter, when everybody stops laughing at my antics and my keeper comes and leads me out into a quarry somewhere and bashes my head in with a Friar Tuck stave and then makes glue out of me. And maybe, once I’m glue, she’ll buy me in a bottle and use me to paste her kids’ pictures on the walls because, in that way, I’ll be able to stick around. Anyway, anyhow, and no matter—the candle is going out, and it gives me the willies. I’ll sit here until it’s light. In the dark I kind of pretend and make believe that she’s still here. Here, kitty, kitty. Here puss, puss.
21
Tiger spent the remainder of that day typing up some reports for Walter Miller as well as refilling his thermos two more times. And it occurred to her that, just perhaps, it was all that water that was making him burp. Especially since he never went to the john to relieve himself. Perhaps it was his heart saying “Help.” Or perhaps his heart, to save itself, was floating around in his lungs somewhere, like a life buoy, burping on and off as a warning to floating cartileges…She tried hard to not think of Luther. But the laugh was
a different kind of laugh even to her own ear. It was a laugh, not from the core, but from the perimeter. It was a laugh, not of a participant, but of an observer. Somehow—click—she was on the outside looking in. There was Luther, on the stage, dead center as usual, but doing a single. She was somehow in the audience. But she kept changing her seat, moving farther and farther to the rear, until, she was at the box office, getting her money back. Then she left the theater. It had been a fine show, really, with some nice memorable performances. But very little of it stayed with you once you headed home. Oh, there was this one actor—very endearing, very good and with his own high style, but he had been dreadfully miscast as the love interest, and he was powerless in a plot that never quite took form. It had been, at best, a pleasant diversion, but it just couldn’t sustain. Besides, who could believe it?
She walked back to the Y after work, and it took a few hours because of the concentrated window-shopping she did along the way. The city was quietly pretty that time of day, turning that soft gray-purple that comes just in advance of evening. She felt wistful and decidedly mature. And for the first time in too long to even guess at, she felt peaceful. It would have been a fine time for Christmas. She felt very much like Christmas. She wanted to buy something for someone, but she had no one to do it for. She barely knew Martha. Luther—oh, swell. Still, it wasn’t such a bad idea. With her new outlook, Luther no longer seemed an obstacle. Rather, he was slowly transforming into a very fine memory, one she’d warm herself by as the years ticked off. Such being the case, what could she get for him? The first thing that occurred to her was a shrunken head; it seemed somehow appropriate. Then she became maternally practical. Gloves, for the oncoming winter. A muffler, a huge one, one that reached all the way to his ankles. One he could wrap ten times around his neck and let the tails fall where they may. And he’d look like a Christmas caroler out of Dickens, and, oh, what songs he’d sing. “God fuck ye, merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.” She laughed to herself, and it was fine. She could think of Luther with affection. That was fine, too. She had lived, for a while, in that small space between the absence of summer and the oncoming of winter. An eternal fall. She had made her home there, in a tiny time between harvest and Christmas. And she had compressed three decades of love and kisses into one magnificent pendulum ride from amusement to loss. And now it had a period to it. A gentle, soft period, set down in a graceful script by the all-seeing Almighty. No more hurt. No more uncertainty because…no more story. She had made of Luther an old photograph, already turned at the corners, already yellowing and wallowing in the past. She would be twenty soon. A landmark. Thirty was dirty because twenty was plenty. Forty was naughty, but twenty was plenty. The last few blocks to the Y she took with long strides.
A Glimpse of Tiger Page 16