“Alma? You understand?”
No. How could Alma understand.
“Y-yes, Mr. Seigl.”
“But you can call me Joshua. As I’ve said, you’re my assistant, not my servant.”
SEIGL HAD INTENDED to begin with his manuscripts. Clearly, this was urgent. Yet, faced with the prospect of seeing what he’d accumulated over the past fifteen years, and of needing to reread so much, he felt weak, defeated beforehand. To be a writer was a moral commitment, maybe he hadn’t the strength. The tragic grandeur of his subjects mocked his feeble talent. Even as Alma waited for him to instruct her, he lapsed into a sudden, stricken silence, reminded of that terrible hour a decade ago when, in New York City, at a black tie fund-raising gala at Lincoln Center, rising amid applause to accept yet another award for The Shadows, he’d stumbled on his way to the stage, lost his balance, regained his balance, and dared to say, at the microphone, that the award should have gone to another writer, Joshua Seigl had had his share, and more than he deserved. A visceral revulsion for the public nature of the private, spiritual enterprise of writing had swept over him. The beginning of my illness, that night. My punishment.
“We’ll begin with the letters, Alma. These cartons. The Augean stables. And more coming in every day.”
In Seigl’s cluttered study Alma was warily brightening, wanting to begin work. She wasn’t one who was comfortable with being talked-to by an employer, she wanted to be told what to do. Seigl saw that. He would have to rein in his penchant for fanciful speech. Later, he would ask her to prepare lunch for them both. And a light dinner for him, he’d heat in the microwave in the evening. Maybe a little vacuuming, housecleaning.
They dragged cartons further into Seigl’s study and opened them. Seigl was impressed with the strength of Alma’s arms and shoulders. She worked with a clumsy sort of agility, doggedness. She should have worn more casual clothes, not her cheaply dressy pleated wool skirt and red nylon sweater with three-quarter sleeves, that looked like items purchased in a bargain bin at Kmart.
But Seigl wouldn’t comment on her attire. He didn’t want his assistant to feel self-conscious in his presence.
As a man, he had no authority to suggest to a young woman what to wear. Maybe later, when they knew each other better. But he was determined not to pry into Alma’s personal life. He vowed.
Seigl said, “Letters in these cartons to which I’ve replied, I’ve marked with R in the upper right-hand corner. If the letters are professional, on letterheads, for instance publishers, magazines, universities, and they’re marked R, they should be filed in this cabinet. Professional letters not marked R please place on this end of the table. Personal letters are another matter. Some of them are handwritten, you can see. Not many are marked R but if there are some, file them in this filing cabinet. Don’t mix them with the other. Personal letters not marked R can be placed in a stack on this end of the table. Some of these I will want to reply to, but most of them probably not; probably they’ll just be discarded. Still, I should look them over. My feeling is, if someone has taken the time to write to me, if my work has struck a chord with someone, I owe it to this individual to at least read his or her letter. In time, Alma, I will trust you to read these letters as they come in. Some you will pass on to me, some you won’t. You’ll learn to discriminate. In the basement are yet more cartons filled with more letters and manuscripts, galleys, books people have sent me. We won’t even speak of these today. There were days, weeks, months when I couldn’t deal with my mail, especially when I returned from trips and it was waiting for me. I don’t have an answering service. I don’t do e-mail. I haven’t had a secretary. Until now I haven’t wanted an assistant. I can’t discard anything, I haven’t the heart. Yet I can’t seem to deal with these letters, either. It’s like a nightmare, voices calling to me, strangers’ voices, appealing to me and wanting something from me and a kind of paralysis comes over me . . .” Seigl heard the words he was uttering with horror.
Paralysis! He was revealing too much.
But Alma, with instinctive tact, chose to give the impression of hearing only what was instructive, practical. To spare Seigl embarrassment, she’d begun her task of sorting the letters.
She wants me to leave Seigl thought with relief.
Seigl went away to work on his Virgil translation in another part of the house. Already he was feeling calmer, optimistic.
He’d broken through the paralysis of months. Years!
It was something of a novelty to him, to be in the presence of a woman who seemed to want from him nothing more than he wanted to give. Long he’d been accustomed to women who wanted something from him even when they could not have defined what is was.
A piece of my heart. My soul.
Well, Alma Busch was not one of these. Clearly she’d never heard of Joshua Seigl, as she’d never heard of Virgil. What a relief!
How Seigle’s friends and acquaintances would disapprove, he’d hired an assistant who barely knew English, let alone Latin. She couldn’t operate a computer and was surely a mediocre typist. Her voice was rough, untrained: yet he would trust her to answer his phone.
This wasn’t the first odd thing Seigl had done, he supposed. In the eyes of others.
Well, it was none of their damned business.
What Alma Busch lacked in intelligence and education, she compensated for in warmth, generosity. Seigl sensed this.
He took up his work sheets where he’d left off. It was his custom to write in longhand, crossing out most of his lines. After years of fevered work alternating with periods of inactivity, and numerous drafts, he was only in Book II of the Aeneid. The visit to Hades still lay ahead. Yet he felt optimistic now. Elated! As his assistant toiled in his study sorting through the detritus of his misspent life, he was beginning anew in a room with tall narrow windows opening upon a white sky blank as an unsullied canvas. He would immerse himself in the sacerdotal labor of translation. He would subordinate his doubtful genius to a poet of genius. For what sanity in Virgil’s Latin. What precision. Even in the nightmare tale of the deaths of Laocoön and his hapless sons, what beauty of speech.
From Tenedos, on the placid sea, twin snakes endlessly coiling, uncoiling, swam abreast to shore.
AT 6 P.M. a taxi arrived to take Alma Busch away.
“Tomorrow at ten, Alma. I’ll be expecting you. Goodnight!”
He’d switched on lights at the front of the house. From the front stoop he watched as his assistant, straw-hair blowing in the wind, descended the nineteen stone steps to the street. At the wrought iron gate, Alma fumbled the latch as she had that morning, but managed to open it, and to close it behind her. As she climbed into the rear of the idling taxi she glanced back up furtively at her tall bewhiskered employer who waved good-bye with such gusto, Alma was inspired to wave back.
Seigl went inside. He was one who never said good-bye to any guest without feeling a measure of relief. Alone! How good to be alone.
And yet. Already the house seemed empty, very quiet.
He’d hardly seen his assistant through the day. They had avoided each other. Only a few times Seigl heard Alma’s footsteps, in the kitchen and on the stairs going down to the guest room, where she used the bathroom but otherwise didn’t linger. Seigl ate the lunch Alma had prepared him in the dining room where he’d spread his translation work sheets, and Alma ate her lunch hurriedly in the kitchen, taking no more than ten minutes. There’d been no likelihood of Seigl asking her to join him in the dining room.
Never Seigl’s mother would have cautioned. If you do, you’ll regret it.
Well, he wouldn’t. He knew better.
Alma had worked diligently for hours sorting, stacking, filing letters. Seigl was satisfied that his assistant had worked hard, if slowly. Around 4 P.M., restless, he went to stand outside his study door, which was partly ajar as he’d left it, where he observed Alma inside, so absorbed in her work she took no notice of him. It was wholly innocent, Seigl wasn’t spying on her
! If Alma had happened to glance up, Seigl would have continued into the room matter-of-factly as if this were his intention, but she didn’t glance up. She’d removed her shoes and stood in her stocking feet, which were broad, squat, rather graceless feet, though her ankles were slender. Her hair was forever falling into her face and she brushed it repeatedly back. Seigl was touched by his assistant’s devotion: you would think, from Alma’s rapt, slightly pained expression, that she was doing calculus, not minimal office-work.
Or was she a temple virgin, in the service of a god.
Seigl decided to pay Alma in cash for this first full day. Eight hours of which she’d worked virtually every minute. Oh, he was tempted to overpay her! Out of guilt and anxiety, Karl Seigl had often overpaid certain of his employees. He’d lavishly overtipped. (Compulsively, Seigl’s mother charged.) But it isn’t a good idea, Seigl knew. Overpayment, like overtipping, sends a confused signal. Workers are most comfortable when they’re well paid and receive the payment they expect; tips and bonuses make them anxious. For always then they will be expecting more.
After Alma departed, Seigl tried to return to translating Virgil but found himself too restless. He wandered into his study where there was a faint scent of Alma: yeasty, fleshy. And that acrid smell of (he surmised) her hair . . . He was stirred with belated curiosity about the marks on her face, hands, forearms.
Birthmarks? Burn scars?
Tattoos?
(But what crude, clumsy tattoos!)
Someday, maybe Seigl would inquire.
Out of curiosity, too, not suspicion, for Seigl wasn’t a man to be suspicious, he went downstairs to the guest room. Alma’s scent was here, too. Seigl had been struck with a kind of familial pride when he’d showed this room to Alma and she’d been impressed with it. In her awkward faltering way she’d mumbled what sounded like Oh Mr. Seigl this room is so . . . nice.
The guest suite, like the house Seigl had inherited from his Steadman relatives, with its expensive if faded furnishings, had long been of little interest to Seigl. Where he can work, there is a writer’s home. Where not, not. Seigl had been far more productive as a writer in small, uncomfortable flats in Rome, Paris, London, as a younger man. Material things made little impression upon him except as responsibilities. He quite understood Ludwig Wittgenstein signing away his fortune, the equivalent of millions of dollars, to his siblings.
Seigl noted indentations on the satin bed coverlet. Alma must have sat down here, heavily. Perhaps she’d been tired after all. There was the distinct impress of her buttocks, and the palms of her outspread hands.
Almost, Seigl could hear her breathing.
Later that evening, in the upstairs hall, Seigl would discover Alma’s scarf on the floor. It must have slipped from around her neck when she’d hurriedly left the house. The taxi had arrived early, at about 5:55 P.M., the driver had lightly tapped his horn. Alma had been anxious that the taxi might leave without her though Seigl assured her this was hardly likely. “The driver has come to pick you up, Alma. Why would he go away without you?” Seigl was bemused, but Alma continued to hurry, hastily buttoning her coat, descending the stone steps as if eager to escape.
Seigl lifted the long narrow gauzy scarf, made of layers of a cheap cobwebby rose fabric, to his nose, to smell. Whatever this scent was, it was Alma’s.
3
SHE WAS IN LOVE, had to be. Christ she knew the symptoms.
Wanting to die. Like kicking a junkie habit clawing screaming puking your guts out. And they come in and hose you down, hose the puke and shit down a drain in the concrete floor, you’re laying there sprawled naked like part-butchered meat.
He had that effect on her, he’d gotten under her skin. She knew the symptoms.
Wanting to say Look I have a new life now, I have a job. I have a place to go. Where I am treated with respect. I am paid very well.
Wanting to say I don’t need you. See?
But she was in love, and wanting to die. Wanting to scream, claw, tear out his throat with her teeth. He hadn’t touched her in how many days, she tried to count on her fingers and gave up. Seeing how she might set herself and him on fire dousing with gasoline and dropping a lighted match as she’d seen boys once setting fire to a limping muddied stray dog when she was a little girl and like the boys she would shriek with laughter at his antics in death. How do you like it now! How do you like it! She would wish to die herself, to see Dmitri Meatte burning alive.
For he’d sold her more than once and betrayed her.
For he’d kicked her out as of no use to him.
For he wasn’t one to forgive.
She would have to beg. She would have to kiss his feet. Yet he would not allow it, he’d kick her away. (As he had done.)
Not allow her to suck his precious cock nor even to touch him as before. As before he’d liked, oh yes hadn’t he! And saying she was his beautiful big Alma-doll.
Though she was no doll. She smiled to think!
She wished to tell him she had no further need of him, either. Yet the pleading came into her throat Dmitri can we talk, don’t send me away please, let me in, Dmitri please let me in, I love you, I love love love you Dmitri and he’d slapped her forbidding her to say his name as if her very mouth defiled his name.
And now she was back, and he was disgusted saying who the fuck wants you, didn’t I tell you cunt to get out of here but she had reason to believe he was liking it too that she’d come crawling back, the evidence of the Tattooed Girl’s devotion to her lover in the eyes of his friends excited by her, and impressed. That’s Dmitri’s girl Alma. The one with the tattoos.
How many nights ago he’d kicked her out. She’d begun working at the Book Seller, he was furious, hateful. Shutting the door in her face. Opening it, and tossing her things down the stairs. She’d slept in his car in the backseat wrapped in a filthy blanket crying herself to sleep not minding the cold. Proving to him her devotion. Her brain jangled from the crystal meth. Might’ve been roach poison he gave her. I love you Dmitri don’t send me away, see?—I trust you.
Men were impressed by devotion, loyalty. A man might be cruel but if you show your trust he will relent.
How many times she’d seen it. In her own family she had seen it.
Crystal meth. Ice. Her brain never so alive and alert!
But at a distance she was watching herself curled up inside the blanket hunching her shoulders hugging herself and her face white as bread dough and her mouth slack and ugly, stupid cunt he’d called her, who wants you, who needs you, didn’t I tell you stupid cunt this is a warning but he’d only raised his fist to strike, he hadn’t hit her it was only words.
So she had reason to think there was hope. In Dmitri’s eyes, in his fury that meant he cared for her, there was the connection between them.
What she’d done to provoke him: slipped from him to work at the bookstore for that man Scanlon and now she was working for the Jew Seigl with the whiskers and cane. And she would not make the money he wished her to make.
In Akron Valley there’d been no Jews, not a one.
No Jew would live in such a place only left-behind white trash was that it?
If you traced it back far enough, not whose names were on the mines but who actually owned the mines, these were banks, the international conspiracy of Jew-banks, you’d discover it’s Jews. She had not needed Dmitri Meatte to tell her about Jews.
How do you know, well you know. She was twenty-seven years old and no child. Things you know like you know the earth is round, the sun is in the sky and going round and round in the darkness of space in a weird distended circle causing the seasons to occur, winter to last a long time at the poles of the earth, summer to last longer at the equator.
None of this you can observe with your eyes but you know. Even if they didn’t tell you in school (and she couldn’t remember if they’d told her in school, she’d missed so many days) you know. It’s part of what you know. The air you breathe in like the poisoned air rising in whit
e smoke-plumes out of the cracked earth and deep inside the earth the mines burning. There were jokes on the radio, wisecracks about Akron Valley: Hellfire PA. But people lived there because it was their home. Akron is where I live she’d say (though it wasn’t true really, she hadn’t been back in years and was not welcome there) causing people to smile. For men like to smile, and men like to laugh.
A Jew is a despised thing her grandfather had said screwing up his burnt-looking face to spit, and Alma said, Why? and he said, Because they are accursed of God and man, and Alma said, Why? for sincerely she wished to know, and her grandfather said, vague but angry, Jews killed Christ. Judas killed Christ, he was a Jew. And so she would set her heart against the Jew though he had been kind to her and had not touched her not even her hair that it was rare for men not to straggle their dirty fingers into, Mr. Seigl hadn’t touched her though she had seen his strange black shiny eyes like marbles moving onto her. And the faint tremors he’d tried to hide in his hands.
And him standing outside the door watching her. For a long time it seemed but maybe no more than two or three minutes. Seeing if she was working hard? Or just seeing her?
Her grandfather said, It’s in the Bible, all you need to know. About Jews and anything else.
Alma thought, A Jew is no different from anybody else except by accident maybe. Like being born in Akron Valley not twenty miles away in Erie, or Pittsburgh. Or Poland, or Saudi Arabia. It was a clear piercing thought but she had nowhere to take it, not to her scowling grandpa who was anyway near-blind, both his eyes milky.
Saying now, to make Dmitri who was sullen and sulky and disgusted with her love her again, as in high school she’d tried to make boys love her who’d gone out with her once, twice, three times then dropped her by saying weird wild things that flew into her head, anything to snag their straying attention, “Guess what? He said he had some sickness. ‘Medical condition’ he said. This cane he has . . .”
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