“You take it easy. I’ll go in and talk to her,” Ron mumbled. “See what I can do.”
He entered the study and approached Penelope with his guarded savoir-faire. She shone her cheerful countenance upon him and began to speak. Giving an explanation, I presumed—I couldn’t hear above the bustle of painters and women. I stopped a young painter just climbing in the window. He had a pleasant face, obscured by an extraordinarily thick black mustache.
“Look here,” I said quietly. “I understand that you have to be here because you’re working. I wish someone had told me, but okay. But would you help me get rid of these other people? They have no business here. I don’t even know who they are.” He looked blank. “It’s a crime. Don’t you see? Trespassing.”
He smiled a chilly, close-mouthed smile that altered the shape of his mustache, and replied curtly in a thick and unfamiliar language.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Don’t you speak any English?”
“It’s Greek,” one of the young women told me. She was arranging a bouquet of huge paper flowers in a wine flask.
“Greek? Do you know Greek? What did he say?”
“He said he only works here. He can’t get involved.”
I tried several other painters but they all spoke Greek. If indeed it was Greek—how could I be sure? They gave the same answer; after a couple of times I recognized the syllables.
The black woman with the Afro, evidently a potter, unwrapped smoky-blue mugs and bowls and set them on a table with little cards stating their prices. A pair of women who looked like sisters, with berry-red cheeks and masses of savage black curls, hung silver chains with finely worked medallions from pushpins on a board. Another unwrapped small stained-glass plaques. So it went: from the cartons and shopping bags, as from a cornucopia, flowed batik scarves and silk-screened T-shirts, wall hangings, macramé plant holders, crocheted shawls and purses, embroidered carpet bags, leather belts and pouches, hand-painted ties—a tribute to the fertility of hand and eye. My bedroom abounded in life and color. I had to admit the fair possessed a certain chaotic beauty.
“Where’s the grill?” the black woman called loudly, as she pulled a loop of raw pork sausages from a paper bag and held them high in the air. It was a loop so long I could have jumped rope with it. I was a champion rope jumper in my youth, and for an instant I wished I had kept it up, so I could be one of them and jump rope at their fair with the loop of sausages.
“It’s outside in the hall. I’ll get it,” the blond woman said.
“Oh, no! That’s the limit!” I tried unsuccessfully to block her path. “You’re not doing any cooking in here! This is my bedroom!”
“Take it easy, lady.” And she looked at me briefly with menace in her eye, but perhaps it was only indifference. It was clear they had no idea who I was. They didn’t read, they did handicrafts. Or maybe they knew and didn’t care. It was hard to imagine that they were Penelope’s friends. Penelope had always been courteous and observed the proprieties. Surely she would have introduced them, asked permission ... ?
I tried to see what sort of progress Ron was making. Penelope had spread out a few of her rugs, one over my typewriter. She was standing quite still, close to Ron, her arms hanging innocently at her sides, and was listening to him in a heartfelt and earnest manner. She was practically palpitating with earnestness. Ron was posed stylishly but a bit self-consciously with one foot up on my chair, a hand resting on his knee, and the other hand propped against the wall. Every so often he gave a shy shrug and a little laugh. Penelope smiled in her fresh, vibrant way, and made small humming nods of agreement, meaning, Oh yes, I understand perfectly. Oh yes, it’s amazing, I’ve had exactly the same kind of experience:
The nerve of him! In my house and amid my calamity! On my time, conquistador! He worked fast; from this encounter could come another of those whining five-year-old children for me to feed cookies to. Who knows, maybe he was in collusion also. Maybe his coming over this morning had something to do with the crafts fair: he and his children, ah, those sly children, keeping me occupied while the women were slipping in. Of course! He hadn’t been bothered by the noise when we were trying to work, he hadn’t rushed to help when I called him, he hadn’t seemed shocked by the crowd in my bedroom.
I wondered what Penelope, with her counterculture convictions, would think were I to tell her that Ron smoked, drank, ate all sorts of high-cholesterol foods, watched television avidly, called grown women “girls” and used phrases like “fresh flesh,” loved money, had no scruples about devising artful tax shelters for big corporations, drove a gas-guzzling Lincoln Mark IV, had been a lieutenant in the army and was proud of it, etc. Most likely she would find sociological excuses and vow to take him in hand. Principles bend easily when mating is involved, I have noticed.
“What’s happening?” I called to him sharply. “When are they getting out?”
He turned in surprise, as if he had forgotten all about me. “We’re coming along,” he said. “We’re negotiating.” Penelope giggled in a skittish way I wouldn’t have thought her capable of.
I wheeled round to face the women. “Everybody out! Out out out!” I shouted as loud as I could. “This minute or I’m calling the cops.” Not one of them paid any attention. I shoved into their midst and was about to fling their wares to the floor, but as one woman leaned over a carton I thought I saw something metallic glinting in the back pocket of her jeans. I was alone. They could finish me off in no time.
I would call the police, which I should have done at the start. But not here. On the kitchen phone. Suddenly I remembered the children, left alone for so long, and was sick with dread. Something terrible might have happened to the children. In a story it would have. It would fit right in with the aura of the bizarre and the sinister. What would I do? Ron might not even care—he had defected utterly. I had no hope of extricating him from Penelope’s web. Maybe they were not even his children. Maybe they were just props.
In the kitchen all was serene. The three ruddy, robust little boys, sons of one mother, still played cards. Rummy. They had found pencil and paper and were keeping score. When they heard me come in they looked up and smiled in unison. Some children do have a knack of surviving, one way or another. My own did fine without me. The tall slender boy who resembled his father was drawing an abstract, geometric design with crayons on white paper. On the table were three sheets with the same design, colored in the same way. Odd. But children are odd. They do odd, repetitive things. Maybe he was practicing. It wouldn’t be so odd if he played the same piece on the piano four times, would it, or repeated, four times, a poem he had to learn? Maybe there were subtle but crucial differences in the drawings, invisible to my casual glance. He seemed content, at any rate. The girl, Erica or Angela, was curled up on the hard floor near the garbage can, her thumb and a strand of damp hair in her mouth. She looked touching and vulnerable asleep, as children unfailingly do. I thought of moving her to a more comfortable place, but she was sleeping so peacefully I didn’t want to risk waking her.
I explained to the voice that answered 911, the police emergency number, that my bedroom had been taken over by a band of craftswomen bent on holding a fair.
“Is there an immediate threat of violence?”
“Yes, of course, what do you mean, immediate threat? They’re occupying my apartment and I can’t get them out. Isn’t that violent enough?”
“Is there a physical emergency? Are you being threatened with physical harm?”
“They might very well have weapons—daggers—how should I know? The point is ... And in a voice made thin and high by terror, I gave a cogent little speech on the term “violence,” that violence need not always be physical, and so forth. It didn’t seem to make any impression on the other voice, which told me to call my local precinct. I did, but the line was busy. I tried four times, at about two-minute intervals, and in between I watched the little boys’ card game. They were cunning players. They would pick up cards t
hey didn’t need, to mislead the others. I envisioned them doing the same thing years from now, with gray in their hair and lines on their foreheads and big cigars in their mouths, but still smiling in unison.
My local precinct’s phone was probably out of order. I walked back to the other end of the apartment. In the study, Ron and Penelope were sitting close together on my studio couch—they had pushed aside three piles of manuscript I had been collating. Their hands were entwined and resting on his thigh, and they played with each other’s fingers while murmuring what appeared to be poignant confidences. In the bedroom, the crafts fair was ready. The handicrafts were attractively arrayed, and the green velvet cushions and tall brass urns lent elegance as well as an air of ritual. Happy salsa music came from a transistor radio someone had placed on the windowsill. Rows of sausages were spread on the grill, glistening brown and sizzling; the pungent smell rose, smoky, into the air. The women stood behind their tables proudly and expectantly. The painters had gone, leaving the front door wide open, and through it the public was beginning to arrive, sporting the countless permutations of age, race, size, sex, and garb. The members of the public were boisterous characters, brimming with life. They pushed past me into the bedroom and fanned out to greet what the fair had to offer.
I returned to the kitchen and to the children. I lay down on the floor near the garbage can alongside the little girl, Erica or Angela, and curled my knees to my chest. I dragged a strand of hair into my mouth. I was tired. I fell asleep.
I had a dream, and in it I was the woman I had been more than twenty years ago. I was lying in bed, cold. There were no mystery stories and no mononucleosis. There was no accountant, with no hungry whining children. Naturally—I had done nothing that was accountable. No young women and no crafts fair: I was the young woman, even younger than they, but I had no crafts I could display, yet. It was dark; no, palely dawning now, the darkness sifting into a grainy light. There was the husband I lay with in our bedroom, not twenty-four by thirty, not a place that could hold imagined scenes or a crafts fair, but a small room stuffy with sleep, and there were our ruddy twin infant boys in their cribs a couple of yards off, who would soon be waking, howling to be fed. Already the stench of urine from their drenched sheets rose, pungent and smoky, into the air. That would have to be attended to. My husband would need to be fed and attended to as well, for it was long before the era when he evolved sufficiently to attend to himself. I was still a nice young woman, and yet I wished they would all go away. I wanted the apartment empty.
The pungent smell woke me, not urine but sizzling pork sausages. I found myself on the floor next to Erica or Angela, and I wondered if the young, ruthless women who did not read but did handicrafts were still there, taking over my place, and if the public was still pushing into the space where I had dreamed my mystery stories (for them!) and which I had expected to keep as my private province. I had perfected the work at the expense of the life, and now I couldn’t distinguish my fantasies from what was happening to me, or tell which was food for the other.
LIFE IS AN ADVENTURE, WITH RISKS
THAT PROVOCATIVE TITLE IS a line I often heard tossed out by a memorable, soft-voiced professor who gave a seminar called Problems in Poetic Theory, He said he was quoting Santayana. He would use it, raising his eyebrows and tilting his balding head to one side, with students who were nervous and hesitant about delivering oral papers, or who were afraid to follow the implications of literary or philosophical theories to their logical, bitter ends. He was an astute, generous teacher, beloved by the class; I profited from his abundant wisdom. Except that leaving his seminar the last day of the term, I tripped on the stairs and lost the heel of my shoe. Limping down the street, I collided with a fire hydrant, fell off the curb, and broke my ankle, which needed to be set and bound: I had to stay off my feet for a month.
Recently, alone in a restaurant downtown, rummaging in my purse for change to pay the check, I noticed that I had lost my eyebrow pencil because of a small hole in my make-up kit.
The loss of a lipstick or a Max Factor $2.99 compact would have meant nothing. These could be easily replaced in the Woolworth’s across the street. But the eyebrow pencil had a curious history.
Years ago, I used the familiar shiny red Maybelline eyebrow pencil, until one evening a friend who worked in an advertising agency told me my eyebrows were too dark. She said a soft gray drawing pencil would do better; moreover, she had an ample supply at work. Why not? I said, and so she brought me one, about six inches long. She was right. The drawing pencil did give a much gentler, toned-down line, especially when I learned to use it correctly, in short light strokes. I sharpened the pencil occasionally, but never to a very sharp point, for that would destroy the soft line it made. Because I used it so sparingly, the pencil lasted a long time. It lasted fifteen years, and the day I lost it, it was an inch-and-a-half stub, still serving me well.
It sounds odd to say I missed an eyebrow pencil, yet I did, for it brought back those lost days when I was a young girl and my friend was sketching underwear ads and I was working as a laboratory assistant examining the legs of fruit flies under a microscope. Much later, of course, we both rose in the world. She became a sculptor and I became a copyright lawyer.
Anyway, while I sat in the restaurant brooding over all this in front of my empty coffee cup, I began idly to listen to the conversation at the table next to mine. A young girl of seventeen or eighteen with billowy strawberry-blond hair and a gentle rosy face was talking animatedly to a young man with a dark beard. She told him the following story of lost and found, which touched me and made me smile. I stayed to hear the end, even though the waitress glared at me with her impatient eye.
“Talking about contact lenses,” the strawberry-blond girl said, “the craziest thing happened with my lenses last year. I’m not really careful with them, y’know, so one morning I was washing them to put them on over the sink in the bathroom. I was up so late studying the night before, for this history test, y’know, I could hardly keep my eyes open. Anyhow, what should happen but one drops right down the drain. God! I was even afraid to tell my mother, but, y’know, like, I had to.
“So I called her and said, ‘Ma, my lens fell down the drain.’ I never used to wear my glasses before I had the lenses. I had this thing, y’know, about how I look in glasses? But I got so used to seeing, with the lenses, I mean, that I didn’t like not to see. So my mother comes in and tries to reach down the drain, my sister comes in and tries, but no luck. So I wore my glasses to school. I couldn’t stand not seeing, once I was used to it, y’know?
“Anyhow, after I left, my mother, she’s very mechanical, like, she takes the whole sink apart. And you know, she found it. I swear to God. So she wrapped it up and gave it to my sister and told her to take it to me in school. My sister didn’t have a first-period class that day, so she left later, y’know?
“So my sister gets on the bus with the lens in her bag, and when she gets off at school there’s this tremendous downpour. Cats and dogs. You could practically drown. So she bends down for something and one of her lenses falls out. I’m not kidding, can you believe it? They say it can’t happen, but I’m telling you, it did. So of course in that rain, like, there’s no use looking, so she comes into my room and asks the teacher, y’know, if she can speak to me for a minute. And she comes over and whispers, ‘I have your lens but I lost mine.’ So I said, ‘What?’ And she says, louder, ‘I have your lens but I lost mine.’ Well, of course I can’t believe it, I mean, and soon all the people around me hear us, and then the whole class is breaking up, because she keeps saying, ‘I have your lens but I lost mine.’
“Well, after school we both go home and tell my mother, and she says, ‘You girls, stop it, you’re driving me crazy with your lenses.’ So anyway, the next day we go to school together, she’s wearing her glasses this time, and when we get off the bus she says, ‘This is where I lost my lens.’ So I bend over the curb and I reach down and I pick up the lens, rig
ht there. I know, but it’s true, I swear. I bent over and picked up the lens. I swear to God.”
Some years ago I lost my underpants in the dressing room of a ballet studio.
I was taking a weekly ballet class. I wasn’t very good at it, nor was it likely that I ever would be. But my aim was not to do it well, only to do it. I was approaching thirty and afraid the parts of me were beginning to slip and fall. I wanted something to hold my body together in reasonably good shape.
The ironic thing is that I hadn’t always taken off my underpants for the class. At the beginning I used to pull my tights and leotard on right over them. Soon I came to see this was very unchic. Most of the others in the class—all younger than I, some teen-agers—took everything off. I wasn’t inhibited by the modesty of an older generation. It was vanity that kept my underpants on. I felt I was too fat. Not a great deal fatter than the others, perhaps eight or ten pounds, but those pounds seemed to make an alarming difference in the dressing room. Ballet students are generally flat all over, and an unfair criterion for the average person. Still, I thought my naked self was too much, too much specific woman for our ascetic pursuit. Soft white bulging flanks belonged in a bedroom, not in this bevy of skinny chattering girls who, in their stages of undress, always reminded me of French academic paintings of mythological scenes. Except that these girls were bonier than nymphs.
Then I lost a lot of weight. Not through dieting but through secret heartache, much the easier way, since no conscious effort is required. I became thin enough, in my own judgment, to prance naked around the dressing room. No longer a Rubens, a Titian, a Veronese, I was more of a Modigliani. No one noticed me any more than before; I felt freed.
The sign on the dressing room wall said, “Carry your valuables with you,” but I never imagined that “valuables” referred to underwear. Two or three weeks after I began stripping for class, I found the pants missing from the bench where we piled our clothes. I strode brazenly about asking if anyone had seen them. No one had. Fortunately I could wear my white ballet tights under my skirt—that was easy enough. But I would miss the pants: low-cut hip-huggers, white cotton with a scattering of small aqua flowers all about, a half inch of lace around each leg and at the waist. I had bought them as one of several rewards for my new-found slimness. My tribute to a loss was lost.
Acquainted with the Night Page 14