The Misfortunes of Others

by Gloria Dank

  “Not like mine,” Weezy said dourly. She did not say another word until the train pulled into the Ridgewood station.

  When Snooky let himself in the house, he found Maya and Bernard sitting in the living room. Maya was propped up on cushions, her feet were on Bernard’s lap and they were both absorbed in a TV show.

  “Life in the fast lane,” he said. “Did you miss me? Did absence make the heart grow fonder?”

  “We did not miss you. Did we, Bernard?”

  “No.”

  “You’re looking a little better, Missy.”

  “So are you. Have a good time in the big city?”

  “A weird time. I’ll tell you all about it later. What’s on?”

  “Something called Attack of the Killer Cucumbers. It’s very funny.”

  The three of them watched in silence. The dog wandered into the room. Snooky picked her up and fondled her silky ears. She settled down in his lap, giving a low grumble, her equivalent of a purr.

  “There’s the head cucumber destroying Manhattan,” said Maya.

  “Just lucky I escaped in time,” said Snooky.

  “How was it today?”

  He briefly recounted the meeting with Harold.

  “Oh, how weird. I’ll have to call Weezy. How’s she handling it? Is she okay?”

  “Not bad. She was very courageous, going right over to them.”

  “Weezy never shirks from confrontation.”

  “No.”

  “Is Harold everything she said?”

  “Frankly, I don’t see the fascination she has with him. How did the two of you spend your day?”

  “It was wonderful, Snooks. The sun was shining at last. I did some gardening and we took a long walk.”

  “You, Maya? You did some gardening?” Maya’s garden was one of her great passions. “You must be feeling better.”

  “Somebody has to look after the garden. You and Bernard are hopeless at it. Remember the time I sent the two of you out to weed the patch near the sun room, and Bernard cut down the smoke tree?”

  Bernard shifted his weight on the couch. “Not all of it.”

  “Enough of it, Bernard. Enough of it. It was mutilated. It was never the same afterwards.”

  “You weren’t there,” said Snooky. “The trunk looked dead. Bernard and I agreed it was dead before he cut it down.”

  “You could have looked up and seen the new branches. It’s not hard, the whole tree isn’t much taller than you are. I don’t know what the two of you were doing near the smoke tree anyway. I sent you out to weed, not to rape and pillage.”

  “Pay attention,” said Bernard, patting her foot. “The cucumbers are winning.”

  Maya paid attention for a while. Then she curled up on a pillow and went to sleep.

  “What’s for dinner?” asked Snooky, yawning. “Or should I just ask which cans you intend to open?”

  Bernard, on Snooky’s day off, had volunteered to cook. His eyes were glued to the screen, where the cucumbers were storming their way down First Avenue toward the United Nations Building. “Coq au vin.”

  “Come on.”

  “You heard me.”

  “Oh, right. From a frozen TV dinner?”

  “No. Fresh. I made it myself.”

  “This I find hard to believe. Coq au vin takes time, and more importantly, talent.”

  “Nobody’s asking you to believe it, Snooky. Or to eat it, for that matter.”

  “No, no, no, I can’t wait. Coq au vin by Bernard. Have you ever heard of such a thing, Misty?” he asked the dog, slumbering in his lap. He lifted her so that her head and silky ears lolled downward into his face. “Have you ever heard of such a thing? I can’t wait. Listen, Bernard, make sure to wake me up in plenty of time for dinner.”

  Then he, too, curled up in his chair and went to sleep. Bernard watched with a frown. He himself often had trouble falling asleep. He would toss and turn in bed, cursing silently, his brain nattering away at him. When he took a nap during the day, it was usually from exhaustion, and he would wake up feeling worse than before. Both his wife and Snooky, however, had the ability to fall asleep anywhere, at any time, and to awake refreshed from their catnaps. Now the two of them slept peacefully in the waning light of the afternoon. Even the dog was asleep. On the TV screen, tiny figures of people ran screaming before enormous cucumbers.

  “What do you think of the coq au vin?” Maya asked later.

  “I’m tactfully not saying anything, Missy.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with it? I think it’s delicious.”

  “I’m happy for you.”

  “You’re going to hurt Bernard’s feelings. He slaved over this all day long.”

  “With time out to watch one of the worst TV movies I’ve ever seen.” Snooky leaned back and hooked his arms around the chair. “Besides, Bernard has no feelings to injure. His heart is made of steel.”

  Maya glanced at her husband, who was happily shoveling in his third helping of coq au vin. He did in fact seem oblivious to the conversation.

  “So what’s wrong with the chicken?”

  “Well, first of all, Missy, coq au vin is (as you can tell from the name) supposed to be made with wine, not beer, which is apparently what Bernard used. Also, the chicken should be browned with minced salt pork, not what seems to be Bac-O-Bits. There are supposed to be spices other than salt in it. And I believe you should add about two tablespoons of flour to the sauce, not (as Bernard has so generously used) two cups. Other than that, it’s just the way I would make it. If I were on drugs.”

  Maya glanced guiltily at her husband. “Bernard didn’t put in a lot of spices because I’ve been so queasy up till now.”

  “How thoughtful of him.”

  “Would you like a bowl of cereal or something?”

  “Yes, thank you, Missy. But I think I’ll make it myself.”

  A few days later, the phone rang at the Woodruff household, and Snooky answered it.

  “I want to talk to your sister,” Weezy said. “Where is she?”

  “She’s out walking with Bernard.”

  “Out walking? She must be feeling better.”

  “She is. It’s the second trimester, at long last. She says she’s coming back to herself. She remembers what it’s like to feel like a human being again.”

  “Oh, good, good, good. That’s good.”

  “Can I give her a message?”

  “The slimiest thing just happened, Snooky. You remember Edward Genuardi, the owner of the gallery that’s putting on my show?”

  “Dead fish eyes?”

  “That’s it. Well, he called up a few minutes ago and asked me out to dinner.”

  Snooky felt an unaccustomed surge of jealousy. “You’re kidding.”

  “No. Pretty slimy, huh?”

  “Yeah, pretty slimy, all right. What are you going to do?”

  “Well, I don’t want to endanger my show, so I’m going to sleep with him. Just kidding,” she said when she heard the silence on the other end. “What’s the matter with you? I told him I couldn’t possibly mix my professional and personal life. Not to mention that his eyes turn me off completely. He doesn’t even seem human, with eyes like that. I didn’t tell him that, of course.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re no fun to tell this stuff to at all. What’s the matter with you?”

  “Well, I’m experiencing an increase in blood pressure and a small amount of tachycardia. Nothing to worry yourself about.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re jealous that some gallery owner from Manhattan asked me out on a date?”

  “Yes. I guess I am.”

  Weezy gave her snorting, horsey laugh. “You are charming. You are charming, and good for my ego. Always stay the way you are. Never change.”

  “Do you think this is going to endanger your show?”

  “What? He wouldn’t dare. I could give him so much bad publicity, he’d never get out from under it.
No, no, the show will be fine. And he and I will be lovely to each other and perfectly polite to all the guests at the opening reception. It’ll be fine.”

  “That’s good.”

  “You still sound a little worried. Are you that concerned about my career?”

  “No, I’m that concerned about my heart. It seems to be jumping all around my chest right now. I’m getting irregular heartbeats, and then I feel like coughing. I feel a little short of breath. Will you call nine-one-one for me if I suddenly pass out?”

  “I think you’re spending too much time in that house discussing Maya’s symptoms. You’re all turning into terrible hypochondriacs. None of you is sick, and only one of you is pregnant, which is not an illness.”

  “Bernard’s not turning into a hypochondriac.”

  “No, no, Bernard is a real man. Bernard never complains. Bernard is my dream man.”

  “That hurts me, you know. That really hurts.”

  “Give him and Maya my love, and come to see me sometime when your heart isn’t acting up,” said Weezy, and rang off.

  When Maya and Bernard returned from their walk, Bernard escaped upstairs to his study and Maya came into the kitchen looking smug. Snooky was chopping vegetables for a wok dish.

  “Hi, big sister.” He pulled out a chair for her and returned to his work, his long-bladed knife flashing silver in the air.

  “Hi.”

  “You seem content.”

  “I outwalked Bernard.”

  “Bernard doesn’t walk. He only lumbers along, like a bear.”

  “I wanted to walk the last bit, the curve before you get to that big modern house, you know the one I mean, but he pooped out. He said he had to get back to his lobsters.”

  “How’s the migration going?”

  “I don’t know. Okay, I guess.”

  Maya took some vegetables from the cutting board and began to nibble at them. She was smiling to herself.

  “You seem happier than you’ve been.”

  “Thank you. I am.”

  “Feeling better?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “The queasiness and that low-blood-sugar thing are gone?”

  “Yes, Snooks, you know, it’s like a miracle. It didn’t happen all at once, but over the last week or so, I’ve started to feel so much better. I’m coming back to myself, I think. I really am. I have some energy again.”

  “You have some joie de vivre.”

  “I do indeed.”

  “Have some cucumbers, in memory of the ones that overwhelmed Manhattan. Well, you look marvelous, Maya. I haven’t said anything for fear that you’ll bite my head off, but you look wonderful. You have that certain glow.”

  Maya blushed. “I do not. I certainly do not. That glow is a myth, my friends tell me. But at least I don’t feel awful all the time.”

  “You have your strength back.”

  “I do.”

  “You could work in the fields.”

  “Yes, I could.”

  “Well, thank God you don’t have to,” Snooky said, handing her a plate of cucumbers and tomatoes.

  The next day Snooky got a frantic call from Weezy.

  “Come over here immediately. I need you right now.”

  “At last you’ve come to your senses. You’ve realized how much you care for me? How I’ve always been waiting in the wings, but now that I’ve grown up I’m absolutely the right man for you?”

  “Don’t be so stupid. Your face. I need your face, Snooky. Come over here at once.”

  “What about my face?” he asked, but she had already hung up.

  When he showed up at her door ten minutes later, Weezy grabbed his face and pushed it about in the sunlight.

  “Not too bad,” she murmured. “I thought so. Aah! Yes. Those cheekbones. All right. Come with me.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I have a class starting in exactly three minutes, and I need a model. Somebody with good bone structure. I thought of you at the last minute, and you’ll have to do. Those great cheekbones that you and Maya have. I would ask her—her face is much finer than yours, of course—but I can’t, not in her condition. You’ll have to sit still for an hour. Can you do that?”

  “No,” said Snooky. She propelled him with a push down the hallway and into her studio. “I’m not taking my clothes off, either,” he added.

  “Oh, don’t make me laugh. Sit there”—she indicated a chair at the front of the room—“and try not to fidget. Okay? Thanks very much.”

  “I thought you and your students only did abstracts. You know, things that don’t look like anything. Blobs that look like people having sex with other species. That kind of stuff.”

  “Well, today we’re doing faces. Yours, in particular. We’ll see how it goes. Now, sit still and don’t talk.”

  “I don’t suppose I get paid for this or anything?”

  Weezy snorted and walked away.

  The first student to come into the room was old Mrs. Castor, who greeted Weezy and Snooky with a sweet “hello” and then opened her paintbox and went right to work. Weezy explained about Snooky’s face, and Mrs. Castor nodded vigorously, staring at Snooky with a bright birdlike eye. “Yes, yes, I see. Yes. Oh, excellent bones. Very interesting. An excellent model.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t talk,” snapped Weezy. “You’re a model. A mannequin. Like one of those rubber ones in the store windows. Sit still, and don’t breathe.”

  Snooky sat still.

  Elmo and Jennifer came in next, hand in hand. They said hello to Weezy, set up their easels, opened their paints and pencils and began to work, laughing and talking together in whispered asides. Jennifer’s long hair was pulled severely back into a thick braid, a style which accented her strong features. Snooky thought they could have used her cheekbones instead of his. He sneezed, and she glared at him. Elmo, on the other hand, did not acknowledge his presence at all. After working for a few minutes, he seemed to have forgotten where he was and who was with him. He ignored a suggestion from Weezy, and he merely frowned at a giggled whisper from Jennifer.

  Nikki Cooper came in next, out of breath, her frowsy hair blown all around her face. “I’m so sorry, Weezy … hate being late … had to walk from the station … so sorry …” She looked at Weezy pleadingly.

  “Goodness, Nikki, that’s all right. Settle down. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Oh, no, I feel terrible … hate being late …” Nikki rushed over to her place and set up her easel with a shaking hand. Her face was red and her breath came fast. She was obviously not used to any kind of exertion. Snooky eyed her with concern. She gave him a shaky smile. “Oh! Is that … is he the model for today?”

  “Yes, yes,” said Weezy in a disparaging tone. “We’ll all have to limp along and try our best. I thought his face might be interesting.”

  “Oh, yes … oh my, yes …”

  The last student to come in was another young woman. “Hello, Alice,” said Weezy.

  “Hi, Weezy. Sorry I’m late.”

  “Okay.” Weezy tapped her foot impatiently. She explained the assignment, indicating Snooky with a wave of her hand. The girl stared at Snooky, fixing him with a pair of curiously expressionless green eyes, like pebbles at the bottom of a sea. She had long pale hair and an ugly, intelligent face with a great curved nose like a witch’s. Snooky felt sorry for her. He turned his face toward her and held it immobile.

  “Why is he looking at me?” she asked Weezy.

  “I don’t know. Because he’s stupid. This is his first time modeling, and also, I would imagine, his last. Oh, I forgot to introduce you. Snooky Randolph, Alice Faber. Snooky, don’t look at anyone in particular, it’s unnerving. Look at the wall over there.”

  Snooky looked at the wall.

  “Thank you. And try not to sneeze, it’s upsetting for everybody. Pretend you’re made out of rubber and you don’t have a brain, that last bit shouldn’t be so hard. Mrs. Castor, this is excellent. But don’t
you think that over here you could use a little bit of detailing, perhaps …”

  After a quarter of an hour, Snooky’s muscles were aching from the unaccustomed immobility. After twenty minutes, he was extremely uncomfortable. He began to move around on his chair, flexing his muscles surreptitiously, shaking his arms and legs.

  “What’s he doing?” Alice asked out loud. She had been drawing with fierce concentration, fixing him with a withering gaze. “Why’s he doing that? I can’t draw if he moves around.”

  “Snooky, what in the world do you think you’re doing?”

  Snooky stood up and stretched. “I’m stretching.”

  “Sit down and stay still.”

  “I can’t. My muscles are aching. My blood circulation has stopped.”

  “Well, it is your first time, I suppose. Stand up and stretch again, then sit down for a while. I don’t want your feet to fall off.”

  Ten minutes later Snooky stood up and walked in a rapid circle around his chair. There was a barely audible hiss from Elmo.

  “I’m in the middle of something here,” he said to Snooky. “Do you mind?”

  “Try to remember what I look like. It shouldn’t be that hard, you’ve been staring at me for half an hour. This is agony, by the way. Nobody in their right mind could do this for more than five minutes.”

  Weezy was wringing her hands. “Here Maya was always telling me you could sit in front of the television for hours. I thought you’d be a perfect subject.”

  “There’s no TV here.”

  “Pretend we’re the TV. We’re an art show on TV. Now sit down again and let everyone finish, all right, sweetie?”

  Snooky reluctantly acquiesced.

  “I feel like Socrates after he took the hemlock,” he announced twenty minutes later. “I have no feeling in my legs at all. Will somebody help me off the chair so I don’t fall down?”

  “That’s all right, we’re done with you.” Weezy was standing behind Alice and conferring with her in a low voice. “That’s all. Go into the kitchen and fix yourself something to eat.”

  Snooky stood up, stretched luxuriously, and left the room. He was rooting in the refrigerator a few minutes later when he heard several voices raised in argument. He straightened up and hobbled as quickly as he could toward the studio.