The Constant Heart

by Craig Nova

  “A Gucci frying pan?” I said.

  “Sometimes, Jake, you have a habit of rubbing me the wrong way. This is one. Just listen. We aren’t even near the trouble part.”

  So I asked about men she had “been involved with” as the time went by, and she looked down at the table and said, “Well, Jake, there’s a problem there,” which was that since she had dismissed romance as just some trap that got in the way of making money (at least she thought this in the beginning) and that men were just useful if you wanted to move from one apartment to another, but mostly they were assholes and since she believed this, the men she took up with proved it, which, as she said, “was sort of a closed loop.” She told me that one guy she took up with wanted a dog and so she bought him a dog, but he took off for three weeks when she was in New York trying to hustle the screenplay she had written and the dog starved to death, and when she came into the house it smelled like, “Well,” she said, “I’ll let you imagine.” It lingered, too, and no matter how she scrubbed the walls, the smell was still there and then she tried to paint the place, and that didn’t do any good either, since the dog had sort of leaked when it died, down into the floor and into the joists beneath it, but not into the ceiling of the apartment downstairs, although the people there were plenty angry. And they complained to the landlord and he came over, but Sara was too smart for him: She was boiling apple cider and oranges with cloves stuck in them when he showed up, and it smelled like innocence itself, she said.

  “You,” she said to me, “were sort of a fetish. A little bit of innocence I was trying to hang on to. Is that so bad? Oh, Jesus, Jake, when we used to look at those pictures and I tried to pretend there was nothing between us, but you knew there was and I knew it, too, but everything, music, movies, school, everything told me that was just a bunch of shit. What was I supposed to do? You want to call it confused? Well, yeah, I wrote the book on it. But when I came to my senses, I knew what I was going to do. I was going to knock on your door.

  “‘Hi,’ I’d say. ‘You remember me? I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d look you up.’ I was going to hit you with the A-bomb of consumerism. Don’t underestimate it. How about if I was driving a Boxster, huh?”

  The trail turned and ran along the river, which flowed in green sheets and made the boulders that stuck up seem white, like bones. A caddis fly fluttered, although the sun was still on the water and my father was pushing pretty hard, not stopping when he put his hand on his back, just doing so and leaning forward, and I went along, looking at his hand, like a root against his blue shirt.

  “What about Jack Payne,” I said. “Is he still in practice?”

  “He’s retired,” he said.

  “Well, who are you seeing?” I said.

  “No one,” he said.

  “Look, I’ll find someone at the medical school at the university. Will you go?”

  “Jake,” he said. “You’ve got to trust me.”

  “I trust you,” I said.

  “Then give it a rest,” he said.

  The river made that noise, that rustle, hustle, if-you-just-listen-close-enough-I-will-tell-you-something noise, that hiss and splash and something you knew was there but just couldn’t hear, and so when I strained, Sara’s screenplay seemed to emerge from it.

  “It was dynamite. Dyn-o-mite,” she said. “But I needed representation. Even I knew that.”

  The screenplay was about the pope, who is really a vampire, and then there is a young priest, maybe Brad Pitt, who knows about it, and then Natalie Portman, who is going to be the first woman pope . . . (“But wait,” I said. “Women can’t be pope.” And Sara looked at me and said, “Jesus, didn’t they teach you anything in that star school, that math factory . . . ? It isn’t about reality, you poor fuck, it’s about the demographics. That’s everything. Just think about iPhones and Facebook, see? Why, I could start a Facebook campaign tomorrow to get a woman made pope and it wouldn’t take long. You’re thinking old style. I’m thinking new style. See? I was in a hurry.”) And so Sara was in New York, going from agent to agent with her screenplay. (“They threw my ass right out of TUM. You know, the big talent place on 57th,” she said. “Right on the street and people had to step over me. They tore my stockings. My only pair and I had to go to the pharmacy and pay sixteen dollars for a pair that I put on right there, just kicking off my shoes, stripping off the old panty hose and wiggling into the new ones. The guy behind the counter didn’t flinch.”)

  And there was one guy in a little security uniform at TUM with tinted glasses and a dirty nose who left bruises and threw her against a taxicab after he pushed her down and tore her stockings and told her that trash like her was always making trouble. Talent, he said, you think you’ve got talent? You’re slime. The security guy had a black little badge that said his name was Peter Mann.

  “Peter Mann,” Sara said.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “Peter Mann,” Sara said. “Do you believe in karma?”

  “Not to speak of,” said Peter Mann.

  “They said I was lucky they didn’t call the cops. I couldn’t get anyone to read the screenplay aside from a cab driver who tried to take me to a cheap hotel room where, he said, he knew a film producer lived . . . You see what I’m saying about men?” said Sara.

  “But I didn’t do that,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “You’re splitting hairs,” she said.

  “No, I’m not.”

  She was right in the middle of the story about the screenplay and the dead dog and some other guy who stole all her underwear to give to some seventeen-year-old, and while she was telling me these things I didn’t think it was the right time to say I hadn’t done any of that stuff, hadn’t stolen anything from her, hadn’t tried to get her into some cheap hotel room, hadn’t let a dog die and leak down into the floorboards. Nothing like that, and yet, somehow, she included me with those who had, even though she should have known better. I was working hard, although I guess maybe the answer is that since I was gone and she was going to have to come after me, or so she thought, that this was another thing she could put down against me. I guess. And let me tell you that pride and vindictiveness are no strangers to these circumstances, or those times when everything is confused and not working out the way someone planned. And just what the hell works out that way?

  This is something that men are up against: already tried and convicted on the basis of what others had done. So it’s an uphill battle, even when you aren’t that way at all. That’s not to say I wouldn’t have liked to see her in her band getup, but I wouldn’t have done anything she didn’t want.

  But, of course, that wasn’t the trouble, not now.

  “So that’s what’s wrong?” I said.

  “Jake,” she said. “I am so far from that. So far from the trouble part that this is like a Sunday school picnic.”

  “Are you involved in drugs?” I said.

  “I wish. That’s easy. Not even dangerous, comparatively speaking,” she said. Her hands began to shake now. “You know, Jake, when you’re a kid, even ten, eleven years old, you can feel things, I mean romantic things that are bigger than you think. You never get over them.”

  “Like Romeo and Juliet,” I said.

  “I only saw the movie,” she said. “Lousy costumes.”

  “I mean you can fall in love when you are young,” I said.

  “Sure, that’s what I’m saying, but you get confused. Why, all that stuff was written by a bunch of dead white guys. What the fuck did they know? The teachers at our high school told me the answer is to fight your way to be an accountant in a ball bearing factory.”

  We got to the pool just as the water turned that deep green, like liquid jade, or molten jade, although the water was cool because we had gained some altitude and because mostly this section was spring fed, so that you could come up here in the middle of summer and still catch heavy rainbows, which liked to tail-dance a little, just shudder
with life, as you played them before letting them go. This long green glide had some silvery water run into the top of it. In the springtime, the trees around the pool bloomed, and often I stood there and saw the flowers reflected in a smear on the water, and in the white glare the mayflies floated, gray and transparent. I fished the head of the pool with a nymph, letting it sink. The trout there took it with a tug. It splashed around, shaking its head, and when I reached down for it and touched it, feeling its cool sides and looking into the depth of its eye, I thought, Why the hell can’t I forget about Sara? And her trouble?

  So my father and I stretched out on the bank, a place where it was a little sandy, and overhead the stars had the purple quality you can see if you get away from the light.

  The distances seemed almost palpable, Betelgeuse, 643 light-years away, Bellatrix, 243 light-years, Alnitak, 800, Saiph, 724. Saiph. Was that a name for a daughter? Saiph, can you see yourself out there and how you glow like a purple sequin on a black dress?

  My father went right to sleep, although he kept waking up and reaching around for that spot. As I sat there, Sara’s voice mixed with the burble, hiss, unsaid sound of the stream, as she said, “Yeah, so, that’s part of the problem. I believed in no possibility with those jackasses I took up with and you know, that’s just what I got. But where were you, Jake, when I was getting my heart broken?”

  “But wait,” I said. “If you didn’t think anything was possible, how did you get your heart broken?”

  “You’d be surprised. When you start sleeping with someone things change and you get pulled in, sort of like water going down the drain. But it happens, and when it’s all over and you’re scrubbing that dog stink out of the floor, you know what men are. You think you’re any better?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Now there’s a pretty thin reed.”

  But that isn’t even close to the real problem. Those stars, with that purple tint, suggested the depth of the universe, and somehow, as I considered the rest of it, their indifference made Sara seem all the more lonely.

  The real trouble started a few years before, when Sara got a job selling cars. She had a knack for it, and while she realized she could have gone to medical school, or business school, or something else that wouldn’t leave her in the trouble she was in, she thought it was too late for that. She liked the smell of the showroom, and that aroma of new leather, and she sometimes came across the floor in just her stocking feet, smelling of baby powder when she came up to a man who was trying to hide his paunch and said, with a smile that would break your heart, “Can I help you?”

  She was best at selling cars to middle-aged men. They came in and she’d smile and talk about what cars she liked, as though it were something more than just a car, and before long they were into options and the guy would be signing the loan application and getting ready to drive a Lexus out of the lot. Sometimes the guy’s wife came in and looked at Sara suspiciously, but this never lasted long, because soon Sara starting talking about mileage and practical aspects of the new car, and before long the suspicion gave way to a general enthusiasm, no matter what the payments were going to be. “It’s like fishing,” she said. “A lot like fishing. What are they taking?”

  So she was good at it, but that wasn’t enough, because she wanted to prove that somehow this could make up for all her impatience, her mistakes, her delusion, all her ridiculous attempts to fit into those bits of gossip and a vision of life that was so unreal as to make her ashamed that she had ever been in such a blind rush to get there. This time, though, she wasn’t going to prove to me what she thought by sneaking me into a prison, to be passed from cell to cell, but by selling cars the way cars had never been sold: It would put everything to rights. She’d be there at my apartment, one day, just like that. She’d make up for all the innocent magic we’d lost.

  So she got up in the morning in her apartment with the island between the kitchen and the living room, with little stars on the ceiling, little flecks of glitter that had been blown into the rough stucco that had been sprayed on, and she knocked the microwave chow mein and noodles package out of the way, made instant coffee with hot water from the tap, then she’d eat a piece of stale bread and a piece of dry cheese from the icebox, and go into the bathroom where she took her shower and sprinkled on her baby powder before she dressed in her polite clothes, a khaki skirt, although short, and a blue blouse, although tight, and shoes with a heel that just showed off her legs, all vaguely subtle so that the poor bastards who came into the showroom wouldn’t really know what was happening, that is until they found themselves signing on the dotted line and going to the bank. With that scent of baby powder in their noses and the memory of how she moved in that aroma of a new car and the perfume of an all-leather interior.

  So she dressed with a vengeance, already thinking what moves she could use, whether to flirt or to be cool as a glacier, depending on the buyer, her entire morning, her preparation, powder, makeup, hair, all done with the whiff of a primitive tribal member who is going to face an old enemy and who isn’t going to take any prisoners, either. Outside her apartment, she started her car (“a piece-of-junk Toyota, a sucker that overheated and leaked oil from the place where the low-oil sensor went into the engine”), shoved it into reverse, and made a chirp as she backed out of the driveway and turned out of the apartment complex, the windows of which were now filled with a number of men and women, in their bathrobes and holding their coffee cups to see whether or not she was going to leave this way one morning and plow into a garbage truck or a school bus. So, even from a distance, people felt her intensity, although they didn’t have a clue about what was driving it: all those mistakes, that dead dog, the stupid screenplay, impatience, and, of course, a heart broken by a bunch of men she shouldn’t have given the time of day to, but had anyway because she had believed nothing more was possible.

  “But,” she said, “you can’t rush it. You’ve got to know what someone wants. Really wants.” For instance, she said, a lot of people just come into talk (“cheaper than a shrink, and better, too, since with a shrink it’s just some imagined idea of comfort in the future, where in a showroom they can see, right beyond my cubicle, a new car, nice wax, smell of leather, all the extras, and it’s not some dream, or doesn’t appear to be, but it’s right there”). So, she said, a lot of people, men mostly, came in to talk. They’d be on their lunch hour and often, she said, it was obvious they didn’t even have the money for a hot dog, and so they came in to talk options, as though that would fill them up. And the odd thing, she said, is that sometimes it looked like they felt less hungry when they talked about a turbocharged engine with positraction. All-wheel drive. It perked them up.

  A man, about forty, a little overweight, balding, usually wearing a suit that was one day overdue at the dry cleaner, came in and said, “Hi, Sara.” And she’d say hi and get up and they’d go from car to car in the showroom, and she’d go through her list of things about each car, and the guy, whose name was Jack Michaels, “sort of like two first names,” he said, leaned close to her, nodded his head, got behind the wheel, worked the gears with the stick shift. Then he got out and closed the door (“nothing like the sound of a new door on a new car, better than a freezer, way better than a freezer”) and followed her into the cubicle, where Sara took out the loan forms and the purchase and sale agreement, but he waved them away, just as he had been doing for a couple of months.

  Instead, he took out his wallet and showed her a picture of his daughter, about twelve, she guessed (“a couple years younger, Jake, than when you and I were flirting with each other”), and at first he would only say that sometimes she was losing weight and that he went without lunch to buy her a cream puff or something else, like a brisket sandwich, or a quart of ice cream, but she’d only have a bite, and then begin to cry and say that she wanted to eat more but she couldn’t.

  You could see, said Sara, from the pictures that he showed her, one after another, a sor
t of serial of pictures, that the girl, whose name was Nadia, was losing weight. Jack sold novelties (like “belly button lint”) and had a little case on wheels that he rolled from store to store, although, he said, the Internet was killing him. He even gave Sara a guaranteed cockroach killer. It was two blocks. “Place cockroach on block A. Strike sharply with block B.” That kind of thing.

  After they had looked over the cars and Sara had shared half a tuna sandwich with Jack, which he ate in small bites to make it last longer, he said, “Do you know what nephritis is?” And when Sara said she didn’t, he explained that it was a kidney disease and that Nadia needed a transplant, but a lot of people also did, and she was on a waiting list, which, he guessed, was as long as the Manhattan telephone directory. And, Jack said, she’s got this little suitcase all packed and ready to go in case we get the call, but I think, Mike said, we’d have better luck if we could just buy a kidney. Sara said she thought that was illegal. He asked her if she would do anything illegal to save someone she loved. She said she hoped it would work out. He sat there, with a quarter of the tuna sandwich, and said, “Yeah. Let’s hope.”

  So he came in once a week, sometimes more, and on some occasions he just sat in her office and she shoved over half her lunch and he left her a bag of belly button lint and a plastic ice cube with a fly in it. Just what I needed, she said.

  Still, she was selling cars even when times were hard, when people were out of work: She had a way of suggesting that the car would bring good luck. She had a gimmick, too, which was that she had a case of champagne and when she sold a car she gave a bottle of champagne to the buyer and said the thing to do was to put it in the refrigerator, since she said that a bottle of champagne in the icebox attracted things to celebrate. And she had some spray cans of good luck she got from the Latino grocery down the street, and sometimes she sprayed the car with the can, which she said was a closer.

  She came home late, glad she had sold a car, but the next day she sold two or three cars, each day getting tougher than before, as though while she wanted to forget this growing obsession (“That’s what it was, Jake”), underneath it all she was trying to make sense of things: Each new car sold suggested order, didn’t it?