“And you went to school after you got out?”
“Yah.” Jeff turns around to indicate a strong distaste for talking about himself. Having provided everyone a drink, he now sits down beside me on the couch.
“Listen,” he begins. “I’m not sure Sukie’s manuscript is the sort of thing her dad should read. I mean, rightfully I suppose it should go to him, but it’s sort of raw, if you know what I mean.”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” Max says.
This is precisely the least reassuring thing he could have said. Now Jeff is totally on guard. Seated beside him, I can feel a heavy resistance begin asserting itself within him.
“See, I promised Mr. Smilow I would get the manuscript back from you.” Joanne speaks calmly and matter-of-factly. “He’s just worried because he doesn’t want it to get … knocked around. It’s no big deal.”
Silence.
Everyone has staked out a different territory to defend.
“Hey. I told you yesterday what it was about,” Jeff says reproachfully to Joanne and me.
“I know,” Joanne nods. “But that’s really no big deal.”
I can feel the heat of Jeff’s eyes on her.
“Okay.” Max straightens up in his chair. “I figure this novel is about me, right? I’m sure Sukie did a real job on me, but that doesn’t matter. The book’s got to go to her dad. And since he doesn’t lose any love over me either, it’s not about to hurt his feelings.”
I know Max is telling the truth, but Jeff doesn’t. Jeff and Max can never trust each other because their serial relationships with Sukie make them natural antagonists. The men of our generation have trouble coping with contiguous sex and feel that subsequent lovers diminish them. While we believed it proper, or at least preferable, to space lovers, we were sophisticated enough to know that sometimes confusion peaked and produced an out-of-town beau—reducing us to such sanitary considerations as douching more than once in the course of a single day.
While Joanne and I see Max as the heavyweight man in Sukie’s life, Max views Jeff as having the edge over him because he was Sukie’s last lover. Men and women keep very different sexual score cards.
“Hey,” Jeff says. “Let’s cut the crap. You want to hear how this book begins?”
He stands up, walks to his desk, opens a folder and pulls out a handful of papers. Then he returns to sit down on the sofa again.
“Okay. Get ready. ‘Death Sentences. Chapter one,’” Jeff says.
“‘Samantha (Sam) Cronik lay on the frequently reupholstered sofa in her floral-papered living room and flipped TV channels with her remote control. The TV was a hot item she had recently purchased through her youngest son from a fence on 18th Street. On the coffee table beside Sam was a gallon jug of vodka, a half-full bottle of Diet Coke, a large ashtray containing two still-viable roaches, a box of Morton’s Kosher Salt, which she used when mixing vodka with grapefruit juice to make Salty Dogs—her favorite alcoholic beverage—a two-week-old issue of the Nation and a container of Flagyl capsules. The medication was for her defiant case of trichomonas (medically defined as a form of vaginitis, but considered by Sam’s best friend, Glenda, a venereal disease since it required immediate notification of all one’s partners to report their exposure to a doctor who would then initiate the standard twelve-day Flagyl treatment during which time no alcohol could be consumed). Sam once heard that out in California a person’s refusal of a drink at a cocktail party was tantamount to announcing that the abstainer was on Flagyl and thus a contagious trich carrier to be assiduously avoided.
“‘Next to the Flagyl was a large container of Yoplait low-fat cherry yogurt into which Sam periodically dipped a teaspoon upon the advice of her family practitioner/gynecologist, who prescribed yogurt to fight off the yeast infections frequently produced by Flagyl, which destabilized the chemical environment of the vagina. The yogurt could be taken orally or introduced directly into the guilty orifice. (When Sam asked Dr. Mulberry what flavor yogurt to use, the doctor had answered, “Whatever turns you on,” and Sam had felt forced to exchange sophisticated smiles with her family practitioner.)
“‘Sam put down the pocket calculator on which she had been adjusting her budget in accordance with some recently released data showing that a husband’s expendable income increased seventy-two percent in the year following a divorce while the wife and children’s income decreased forty-three percent. Stretching toward the coffee table, she turned on her also newly acquired (through the same source as the TV) ghetto blaster, which was tuned to OK100 where Sam’s favorite deejay was playing some golden oldies that fit in perfectly with the dismaying heavy fog being dispensed on this ashen, isolated January afternoon. Alternating with the golden oldies were some newsy bluesies to which Sam attended carefully so as to memorize enough lyrics to enable her to mumble along with the music in case it began playing when she found herself in some uncomfortable sexual situation during which she was unable to think of anything to say.
“‘Only four days ago, beneath her glass cocktail table, Sam had discovered the corpse of her white French poodle, Haggie, who had died of old age—or, more specifically, cancer, according to the vet to whom she had carried the corpse in a large green garbage bag, uncertain about the legal requirements for its disposal. The death of the family dog had affected Sam adversely since it occurred after the death of her family, which meant she was the only one still home and available to deal with the final details.
“‘This last betrayal paralleled the original one, when her three sons had promised to take complete care of a puppy if they could have one. Of course what had happened was that Sam ended up working as a support staff—for over fifteen years—purchasing and delivering crates of canned dog food, shampooing, grooming and styling Haggle’s hair—more frequently than her own—and clipping its nails when she herself needed a manicure.
“‘Now shoved into the newly available space beneath the coffee table were all the books Sam had been reading: Shana Alexander’s Very Much a Lady, The Jean Harris Story, Diana Trilling’s version of the same trial; the paperback Scarsdale Diet (to give Sam a clearer picture of Dr. Herman Tarnower), Widow by Lynn Caine, a Penguin edition of Medea, a copy of Moving Violations, which Sam had published six years ago in 1979, I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can, by Barbara Gordon, Crazy Time, by Abigail Trafford, and a five-section college theme notebook in which Sam was keeping her divorce diary.
“‘In the first section of the notebook, Sam was recording all the symptoms of her deterioration which she planned to use in her next, nonfiction, work—Sex and the Single Grandmother. The second section contained many of the herpes and cunt jokes that Sam collected because she felt they carried a lot of social significance in terms of contemporary attitudes toward women.
“‘What’s the difference between love and herpes?
“‘Herpes lasts forever.
“‘What is a woman?
“A life-support system for a cunt.
“‘Why is it good that women have cunts?
“‘Because otherwise no one would ever talk to them.
“‘Why do women have two holes?
“‘So you can pick them up and carry them like a six-pack.
“‘What do you get when you mix a computer with a JAP?
“‘A system that won’t go down.
“‘What does a good JAP make for dinner?
“‘Reservations.
“‘Have you heard about the new Jewish porn movie Debbie Does Nothing?
“‘Why does a JAP make love with her eyes closed?
“‘Because she can’t stand to see anyone else having a good time.
“‘How do you know when a JAP has an orgasm?
“‘She says, “Sorry Mom. I’m going to have to call you back later.”
“‘The third section contained an outline of a new novel that Sam intended to write while she proceeded with her plot to kill her estranged husband, Seymour Cronik. The book, which she planned to have
published in conjunction with her trial, was entitled Death Sentences: The Assassination of an American Jewish Prince.
“‘Following the outline was a page of other titles that she planned someday to use: Tight Ends, Split Ends, Enemy Lines, Raw Material, Dirty Linen, Intimate Relations, Root Canal, Double Extraction, Third Parties, Cross Purposes and Second Opinion. Often after writing down a good title, Sam no longer felt any compulsion to write the book to go along with it, but this time her rage at Seymour and her monetary needs made the writing of Death Sentences nonnegotiable. Luckily her financial neediness coincided perfectly with the unclogging of her creative passages. For the past two years, Sam had suffered from a writer’s block that she believed was really a strike by her talent for better working conditions. But now that her marriage was over and her life had become preposterously simplified, Death Sentences was actually being written in daylight—so her block and/or strike had ended.
“‘With a sigh, Sam closed her notebook.
“‘It was Playoff Sunday. The Redskins, whom Sam had come to know and love during the NFL strike that had coincided with the long winter of her own discontent, were in Dallas to face the Cowboys, a team that had not given unanimous support to the Player’s Union. Jess Ransom, the Skins’ tight end, had become Sam’s favorite football player both because of his body and his up-front role as union rep during the strike. Indeed, Sam had become a fanny fan of his, so that she was very eager to see Ransom play and display his designer buttocks tucked into tight pants that grabbed his buns and gloved his genitals.
“‘Still, she resented having to watch the game alone.
“‘Even though she genuinely enjoyed pro football and was committed to the Redskins because of Jess Ransom, Sam resented the fact that she had raised three perfectly fine sons, none of whom was any longer in residence or available to watch the game with her when she craved company and companionship.
“‘The problem was that Sam was in such an intensely insecure period of her life that she felt her present solitude reflected her character, her social status, her sexual circumstances, her professional plateau, her advancing age, her fading appearance and her financial straits. Insecurity had become Sam’s major personality trait.
“‘Just last Wednesday, when she walked past the fresh fish counter at the Safeway, she had shriveled with shame, momentarily certain that the fishy odor in the area stemmed from her own carefully deodorized crotch. Later, only after hand-testing herself while driving home, she realized that her spasm of self-consciousness was simply a sign of her heightened insecurity.
“‘Indeed, at the insistence of her family practitioner/psychiatrist, Dr. Mulberry, Sam had registered for her first adult education extension course: Self-Assertiveness I, at Georgetown University. The first assignment required each class member to assert herself in some way and then write four paragraphs describing her feelings before, during, and after the chosen assertion. These paragraphs were to be read aloud to the entire group—consisting of five other women besides Sam—at the next class meeting.
“‘Sam had used the assignment as an opportunity to teach Haggie, who was still with her then although already desperately thin, how to slip between the bars of the new gate Sam had installed on her back door after her seventh robbery. By teaching Haggie how to squeeze between the bars, Sam could avoid unlocking and relocking the gate every time Haggie had to do her business. It had taken close to two hours, and a half-box of Treats, to teach her old dog this new trick. Although Sam had felt guilty about taking advantage of Haggie’s boniness to fulfill her assignment, she was shocked when the teacher refused to accept her recitation on the grounds that asserting oneself with a pet didn’t meet the intent of the lesson. So Sam had been doing a makeup assignment when Haggie slipped away through pearlier gates.
“‘However, compounding Sam’s confusion was the fact that only three students had registered for the second semester, Self-Assertiveness II, and the university had canceled the course. Now, several times a day by telephone, Sam was trying to assert herself sufficiently to get her prepaid tuition refunded by the bursar’s office. Needless to say, her ineffectiveness in this endeavor only underlined her suspicions that she should receive refunds for both her first and second semesters’ tuition, since her first genuine effort to assert herself sufficiently to get her tuition back wasn’t working.
“‘Sam reached over for her pack of cigarettes which was buried amid the debris on the coffee table. The tabletop was strewn with random objects which she liked to keep within reach now that she was spending an inordinate amount of time on the living room sofa. Lately, the majority of both her sleeping and nonsleeping hours were passed on the sofa since she could no longer find any reason to go to any other areas of her awesomely empty house to eat or sleep, when all essential functions could be accomplished right in one place.
“‘The major problem with Sam’s new life-style was that the coffee table was quite crowded. Ashtrays overflowed, tepees of open paperback books formed Indian villages, empty coffee cups and vodka glasses squeezed for surface space while fruit peelings, sandwich crusts and empty cigarette wrappers wilted along the periphery. Two toothbrushes (one firm for teeth, one soft for gum massaging), a scratchy nylon hairbrush, a strong skin astringent and some Sassoon spray deodorant for men (because Sam believed her perspiration to be of male, rather than female, ferocity) cluttered the tabletop.
“‘Reaching beneath the sofa to extract the soft mohair blanket her mother had knitted for them years ago, Sam wrapped the cover around herself.
“‘She had been cold all winter.
“‘Although a longtime participant in the Year-Round Budget Plan of the Griffith Oil Consumer Company of Cheverly, Maryland, for $141 a month, Sam couldn’t warm up. She was still cold although she was wearing a pair of Mike’s woolen soccer socks on top of a pair of run-ruined nylon pantyhose beneath a pair of 28W by 30L Levi’s (unsnapped and unzipped for comfort), a black turtleneck T-shirt and a large Bulgarian machine-made sweater, purchased for a five-dollar bill from the Pakistani street vendor outside the Riggs National Bank Universal Branch on Connecticut Avenue (out of which Sam intended to take her $194.53 checking account balance because of the bank’s rumored investments in South Africa).
“‘Actually, she believed she was cold—both inside and out—because she had just made a truly chilling decision.
“‘Within a week, Sam Cronik was going to murder her estranged husband, Seymour Cronik, who, after twenty hectic years of marriage, had decided to run off with his red-haired, pug-nosed, slightly pigeon-toed secretary.
“‘Sam was angry. Very angry. Having previously relied exclusively (and heavily) upon drugs and alcohol to deal with her rage, Sam had now decided that homicide was the only suitable solution—the only act serious enough to express the magnitude of her magnificent rage. Murder was definitely dramatic and dramatically definitive. It appealed to her on a number of levels and was the only sort of action appropriate to her current condition.
“‘Also, it was clear that Sam needed an organizing principle—some means of tying up the various loose ends of her life. Without some grounding action, her mind would continue to leapfrog from one fright to the next. Recently, all she could do was obsess about getting old, fat or sick. She spent hours wondering what she would lose first—her mind, her money, her parents or her hair.
“‘Sam needed an organizing principle just as she needed certain office organizers, separators for the cards in her recipe box, individual makeup containers for her purse, small plastic boxes for her tool chest. She yearned for heart-shaped containers in which to keep paper clips or aspirins—anything that would put a little order back into her life. She even wanted to do something permanent with the cigar box full of her children’s baby teeth, sweet white pearls that she meant to preserve for posterity.
“‘This was why her impulse to kill Seymour seemed perfect. It would catapult her simultaneously released novel onto the best-seller lists while riddi
ng the world of a man who had never once refilled an ice-cube tray, a salt shaker, a guest’s drink or his own prescriptions. She would rid the world of a man who couldn’t pump gas in a self-service station or control his own at home. She would do away with a man who had difficulty locating a clitoris in the dark, lighting a match so the sulfur would absorb the stench he left in the bathroom, or speaking in a normal tone of voice to a good-looking blonde. She would do away with a man who couldn’t drive in a single lane on a high-speed highway, adjust to daylight saving time or keep his pajama fly closed when he was vertical and ambulatory …’”
Suddenly Jeff’s voice breaks.
At first I think he is laughing, but then he lowers the hunk of manuscript down to his denim thighs, raises his empty hands to cover his face, and starts to cry with coarse groans.
Joanne flinches, rises as if to go forward to comfort him, but then sinks back down again.
Max, clearly unnerved by Sukie’s book, sits motionless near Joanne, sullen and injured by the comic treatment of himself that he’s just heard read by his former wife’s young and handsome lover.
And though my heart is aching for Jeff, whose grief is a palpable presence in the room, I feel myself lighten—as if before a birth. Because now some of the heaviness surrounding Sukie’s death is diminished by the fact that she had begun to alchemize her tragedy into comedy before she died, had attempted to transform rage into art. Like Lois and Allison and Nora and numerous other women writers we know, Sukie had begun to spin her grief into gold.
Jeff’s sobs continue for a long while; no one speaks.
Sukie has done it again. She has left her survivors wallowing in chaos, unable to deal with her death because she continues to reinsert herself into our lives. We are now interacting with her work as if it were a living entity.
I sigh heavily. Joanne looks at me and shifts her shoulders in a slight shrug to indicate there’s nothing to be done about the current situation. Finally, Jeff stabilizes himself, stands up, inspects a messy heap of tapes near his tape deck and inserts one. Immediately Tina Turner’s raucous voice begins shouting “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” and the music provides a cover under which each of us retreats.
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