In the Flesh

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Later I saw a woman go into the dressing rooms. She wore a loose coat and she carried several dresses on hangers. In a while she came out and the coat wasn’t loose anymore. In fact she appeared to be pregnant, at least eight months gone, and her hands were under her belly, securing it. I walked behind her, trying to come up with the right opening. Are you hoping for a boy or girl? I might have said. Or maybe I could have offered myself as a midwife to deliver her of those dresses. This was my big chance, I knew that. I had let the man get away with the radio, but I could redeem myself this time. I followed her up to the main floor. She kept going, with a determined waddle, toward the doors. When she was twenty feet from freedom, I cleared my throat and extended my arm. Hold it! I thought, but I didn’t say anything. Maybe she needed those dresses. And who was I to question the convenience of a sudden pregnancy? Let them sic security guards on the real thieves, the ones who steal other women’s husbands.

  She went out through the doors and I watched her go, watched her disappear into the anonymous safety of the crowded street.

  “I’m turning in my badge,” I told Granick later, back in his office. “I just don’t have the heart for it.”

  “I hate to see you go,” he said sadly. “You looked like a natural.”

  We shook hands and I was unemployed again.

  30

  ADVICE CAME ON WINGS. It seemed that everyone wanted to get in on this act. In other circumstances I would have spurned them all and continued as I was, a confident self-starter. But things hadn’t gone well for me, to say the least, and I began looking to my advisers for guidance.

  Judy and Lenny had suggested a lawyer or a psychotherapist for marriage counseling. I knew I wasn’t ready for legal action yet; I was still too involved in affairs of the heart. And a marriage counselor didn’t seem like such a brilliant idea either. I was only half a marriage myself. The partner who had behaved so erratically, the one who needed treatment, would be absent. How would that look? And what good would it do me anyway?

  But Judy insisted that it would do me a great deal of good, that she and Lenny had been helped once through a crisis of their own. I was surprised to hear her admit to having problems requiring outside assistance. The Millers had always seemed so smug as they went smoothly along on their pilgrimage through life. This is how (they said) to do things: to have a baby, to raise it right, to read a lease, to get the most for your money.

  They had had hard times anyway, had sailed through rough waters, as Judy put it. I didn’t find the nautical reference unreasonable. And if they had foundered on that raging sea of matrimony, Howard and I had definitely capsized. Help! I wanted to shout. Woman overboard!

  But Lenny, in that way he has of switching metaphors, said that counseling had proved educational, that it had given them tenure in their marriage. And of course they knew a good man for me to see.

  I resisted at first, worried about money and about my own doubts picked up from those years spent with a nonbeliever. But finally I agreed to go.

  During the bus ride there, I rehearsed my defenses along with a list of grievances. I thought that Dr. C. would probably be a sinister non-directive Austrian or a mad Sid Caesar German. I invented snappy rejoinders for his leading remarks. A lip-reader sitting opposite me would have had a treat, but at least the doctor would find me prepared and maybe even challenging.

  When I got there, I saw that he looked ordinary and approachable, a man in his late fifties wearing eyeglasses and a wedding band. There was a faint familiar odor of cigarettes and after-shave in the room that stirred unsolicited feelings in my chest. I sat down on the other side of the desk ready to win him over. I smiled a brilliant smile, crossed my legs in a sweeping courtroom gesture, and then burst into a storm of bitter weeping.

  This obviously didn’t seem so remarkable to him. With a fluid gesture, he moved a box of Kleenex in front of me, the first of its lot popped into position. I pulled it out and continued to weep in big gulping noises and without a word of explanation. I laid my head on the desk and even dampened a corner of the blotter. It may have been put there for that very purpose, for all I knew. Dr. C. sat through it quietly, a patient and blurry reminder that I’d have to get down to business eventually.

  As soon as I could stop crying. I told him everything, starting at the beginning with the dance at N.Y.U., with Howard’s music and that first sight of him knocking me senseless. I told about my pregnancy and our decision to get married, about how terrific things were between us despite that shaky start, about the deep commitment I believed we’d had; and all those intimate details recalled in my own voice, in my own rhetoric, finally brought on another onslaught of tears. Would we both be drowned?

  But no, I grew calm and again and finished that abridged, but accurate, account of Howard and me. I punctuated it with little anecdotes and funny asides, but Dr. C. hardly smiled. I guessed he didn’t have much of a sense of humor. I blew my nose for the finale and then I sat back exhausted but ready for the diagnosis and prescription.

  But it seemed I hadn’t gone back far enough to suit Dr. C. What about before that? he wanted to know.

  “Oh, that’s all irrelevant,” I said. It was now that was giving me trouble, it was Howard.

  “We’ll get to that,” Dr. C. said, “when we get to that.”

  “There isn’t time,” I insisted. “This is an emergency, a crisis.”

  But Dr. C. wanted to call all the shots himself, and he said that I was being manipulative. Me! He took out a notebook and wrote something in it. I tilted my head trying to follow his scrawl. Black marks against me, I thought, just like in school. Behind him the wall of diplomas looked down sternly, announcing his authority.

  Was I frequently depressed like this?

  Did I know that my tears were really a cover-up for suppressed rage?

  Did I often make inappropriate jokes?

  Had I always been a little overweight?

  “Tell me about your mother and father,” he said.

  If it was mothers and fathers he wanted, I would tell him about Howard’s instead. I could give him enough stuff to fill a thousand little spiral notebooks, enough to make him the star of the next Viennese conference.

  “But Howard isn’t my patient,” Dr. C. said in an unbearably gentle voice. “You are.”

  Patient! How had I become that? Just a few minutes off the street, and only looking for a little professional advice. Howard was the one, I explained, a husband and father running off in the middle of his life, risking everything for the sake of mere sexual impulse. Howard was the one, for God’s sake, with his Oedipal hangups, with his little depressions, with his hypochondria, his fear of death, his weird history.

  “But he’s the man you chose, isn’t he?” Dr. C. said, and we sat in the silence that followed like two figures in a wax tableau.

  I could see that if it was up to Dr. C, he and I would be in for a lifelong relationship. But that wasn’t what I needed now. I was bleeding, and I wanted tourniquets and splints for my wounded spirits, not that painful interminable probing for splinters.

  “We cannot treat the symptoms,” Dr. C. said, “without uncovering the causes.”

  “Thanks anyway,” I said, standing up, all the crumpled Kleenex falling like blossoms at my feet.

  31

  We are all living these lives,

  four-generation novels

  that are plotless

  except for birth and death.

  Halfway through we’re bored,

  we skip pages.

  Truth plus fiction

  make the best story,

  so we lie and invent passion.

  Dozing, we dream

  a new dream

  with tough symbols,

  without heroes.

  We wake, our breath

  drugged with ink,

  our heads mobbed

  with characters

  found in subways and offices.

  The dustcover promised more.

&n
bsp; December 30, 1961

  WE SAT AROUND LIKE children with nothing to do. It was raining and the shades were drawn against any available light. Sherry’s boyfriend Spence passed the joint to me after inhaling so deeply it was a wonder he didn’t hyperventilate. He smiled or did something resembling a smile, his eyes still bugged out from the effort of drawing in smoke.

  I smiled back and took the joint between my thumb and forefinger the way the others had done. I inhaled cautiously and was grateful that I didn’t choke or sputter on the smoke. I was definitely the new girl in town, but I still didn’t have to seem inexperienced or inept. The thing was to swallow it, Sherry had said, and keep it down as long as I could. I wished she wouldn’t make such a fuss and give me so many instructions. I wondered why some people automatically become leaders in this world and are constantly indoctrinating others into their way of life. Before this, Howard and I were always just a step behind Judy and Lenny Miller, following them into marriage, into parenthood, into a mass-housing existence, according to easy directions. Now we were a first among our friends, a separated couple, but no one seemed to find us inspirational. As far as I knew, their marriages were all still intact.

  And here was Sherry, saying this is the life, four individuals, no one subservient to anyone else, each doing his or her own thing on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Only this wasn’t actually my thing. It was hers.

  Howard had smoked marijuana, had once promised to bring some home for us to try together, and never did. Did he use it now with Mrs. X for heightened pleasure?

  I was hoping it would have the promised effect as quickly as possible, so that I could enjoy the camaraderie and the glorious freewheeling mood that Sherry was always raving about. Instead I was so burdened by sadness that I could hardly sit up straight. Of course the furniture had something to do with that too. But where were those terrific flashes of insight, that new intensity of vision? Bring on the fireworks, the dancing girls.

  It reminded me of those gloomy Monopoly games we had played as children on inconclusive Sundays, when there was nothing else to do. The thin lopsided cigarette we passed among us might as well have been a pair of dice or that pink and yellow money we once exchanged for hours without ever tipping the balance of power. I knew I wasn’t being fair. A few lousy puffs and I was making judgments.

  Spence, Sherry’s current live-in companion, was a writer. His typewriter stood uncovered on the corner table with a page of typescript still wound in the roller, in mute testimony to what he did. But we didn’t need mute or subtle clues. Spence liked to talk about it. Sherry had told him that I was a writer too, and I had made all those silly and nervous disclaimers: “No. Not really. Only a few poems,” putting him into a position of benevolent superiority. I could send him some of my poems for a critique, if I liked, he said. He had a wonderful facility for editing other people’s work. He would be an editor, in fact, if it weren’t so draining of his own creative powers.

  At least I didn’t fall all the way into the trap. I didn’t ask where I could read his work, or what he was working on now, or any of those leading questions to which I didn’t want the answers.

  Spence took a letter from his pocket and passed it to me. The others had obviously seen it before. It was from a well-known novelist and critic and it said, yes, Spence was indeed a promising and original writer, and that it certainly wouldn’t be easy for someone whose work was so oblique and personal to find a reading audience, but the critic had admired him and remained sorry that he couldn’t be of any practical help at this time. The letter was soft with age and handling and was reinforced at the creases with mending tape.

  I tried to assess Spence’s age, but it was hard to do in the shadowed room. He was older, I suspected, than that boyish haircut and those youthful clothes implied.

  The other man was a friend of Spence’s from childhood. I think they were cousins or pretended to be. There appeared to be old rivalry between them that had never been resolved. The cousin or friend, Richard, sat cross-legged on the daybed, most of the pillows propped behind him. There wasn’t a comfortable seat in the room. The daybed was open and was so deep and wide that we sank in at awkward angles. If I wanted my feet to touch the floor I would have to sit at the very edge, but then my back would have been unsupported. We all sat or slouched or lay there anyway. Even Sherry’s cats, two fat, altered males, moved restlessly among us, trying to find comfortable places for themselves. The only chair that looked decent was piled with books and papers that might have been manuscripts. I was afraid to ask that they be moved, certain that merely mentioning them would invite a reading.

  It was so dreary and dim. I leaned across Richard to light the lamp, but it was like a flashlight with a weak battery, and its pale halo hardly penetrated the gloom. Sherry probably had nothing larger than a forty-watt bulb in the whole place.

  There was a kind of expectant silence in the room and I wondered if everyone else was as conscious of it as I was, and if they were desperately trying to think of things to say too. They didn’t seem to be. Richard passed the joint to Sherry and then studied his fingernails. Sherry inhaled and shut her eyes as if to enclose herself in some private ecstasy. Were they feeling it already? Even the cats seemed to be in a dreaming languor that looked enviable.

  Howard had once said that there weren’t any real hallucinations with marijuana, but there were new revelations in ordinary experience. Colors were purer, for instance. And he was able to hear unexpected things in music, to separate sounds in a wonderful sharpening of the senses.

  The colors in Sherry’s room were drab and refused to reveal anything. Green. Brown. It could be some deficiency in myself, I knew, some genetic failure that wouldn’t allow me to go beyond concrete experience into another dimension of perception. Maybe it was this very lack in me that Howard recognized, that he could no longer endure. Willingness was simply not enough. Yet he had never brought the stuff home to share with me, had never given me a chance to sharpen my senses.

  I wished there were two or three joints going around at once. It took so long between turns, another inevitable comparison with Monopoly. Any effect it might have would probably wear off between drags. So far I didn’t feel anything. Was it the real, undiluted McCoy? Spence had assured us it was, using all that new street language that made me feel like a foreign tourist: nickel bag and Panama Red and hash. The wisest thing, I decided, was to keep quiet and smile a lot, even though we were equal partners in this, had all chipped in for it.

  “How are you doing, Paulie?” Sherry asked, and I just smiled again. Anything I might say would probably be all wrong, would be anachronistic. My head was stuffed with words left over from the forties. Did anyone still say, “I feel groovy,” or “I feel copacetic”? I wasn’t going to take any chances. And I still didn’t feel anything anyway. I looked at the others, trying to detect visible changes.

  “Do you remember,” Richard said, “when my father took us on that overnight to Lake George?”

  “Oh, man,” Spence said. “Don’t bring that up now. I’m just starting to feel mellow.”

  Mellow? Wasn’t that an oldie too?

  “How’re you making out?” he said to me.

  “Fine,” I said. “Just fine.” I felt thirsty though. Was that the beginning, the first sign? No one else said anything about being thirsty. I wondered if it was only the egg and anchovy sandwich I had had for lunch.

  “Yeah, well,” Richard said, and then lapsed into silence. I hated the silence with its obvious need to be filled with conversation. And my stomach was starting to make those bubbling and growling noises. Could everyone tell they were coming from me? I wished they’d play the radio or sing to drown out my stomach, and so I could test my sense of hearing for increased sharpness.

  “I once went to Lake George,” I said.

  Richard giggled. “Was that your stomach?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Was it yours?” I asked Sherry.

  “I am so stoned,” she said
. Why hadn’t I thought of saying that? “What I like best …” she began.

  What? What did she like best? She never finished and no one else seemed to care. Somehow I knew that it would be irregular for me to ask. There are so many unwritten rules that keep changing with every phase of our lives. Once my parents had whispered in their bedroom. Other girls had whispered near the lockers in school. Downtown now, Howard whispered across pillows to Mrs. X. Who made up all the rules anyway?

  I guessed that I was supposed to be thinking about what I liked best myself. They were all clearly thinking about something. Their postures were so relaxed, as if the daybed had grown even softer to accommodate their new suppleness. Richard, a small man, seemed to disappear into the pillows.

  Maybe it was my weight. Maybe marijuana was like medicine, and you needed more if you weighed more. Hell, even Monopoly would be better than this, I thought, this lying around with others and still being so miserably alone.

  Sherry switched off the lamp. The joint was so tiny I had to hold it between my fingernails. I wondered how you put it out, and I imagined one of us having to swallow it, like evidence. And what if the place really was raided? Queens mother of two caught in dope raid. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go.

  Richard stuck a toothpick into the underside of the joint. He sucked out the last of the smoke and then he opened it into an ashtray. So that’s how it was done. Spencer had lit another one and it was coming to me. Maybe this one would be a little stronger. Or maybe my virginal bloodstream just had to be broken in. I lay full-length on my edge of the daybed, and folded my arms across my chest.

  “You look dead, Paulie,” Sherry said, and she laughed. I did too.

  “Don’t bring Lake George up again,” Spence said. “I’m finished with all that.”