Esther Stories

by Peter Orner

  On the mornings after, they’d wake up before seven, and Nadine would make a huge buttery breakfast of heaped eggs, toast, and four flavors of jam. Tito would take a run through Arnold Arb and pick up a Globe and a Herald on his way home. Then they’d sip coffee and read the news silently in Tito’s immaculate kitchen. He was a printer and spent his days covered in ink, but outside of work, because of his work, Tito was fastidious, constantly scrubbing.

  He taught her pool. Unlike the rest of us, no more than one-night wonders, Nadine actually had some talent. She wasn’t Tito, but after a couple of weeks of lessons she was quietly clearing tables and disposing of some of the better guys in the bar like Angel Cruz and Blake McClusky, Russell McClusky’s little nothing brother.

  “She empties her eyes,” Tito said. “Like Willie Mosconi said, ‘Friends, there is nothing in this world but the balls and the pockets.’ What the master meant was that you have to be like some fool drowning. It’s all blue from there. See? The table’s your ocean. Once the other stuff gets in there, once you start noticing your opponent’s fancy shoes…Once you start hearing the music—even Miles’s battaboop—it’s over. You’re through. And Naddy’s got it. Intuitively, she empties. You don’t teach that.”

  Nadine and Tito’s story would circulate among those in the know around the bar. How Tito taught Nadine how to kick some ass—and that some nights he’d take her home. Most guys gave him no grief—hell, a warm body’s a warm body. In Boston in February, there’s guys who sleep with frozen squirrel corpses. Once, when Marty Patowski said that Tito probably put a patch over his good eye when he was delivering the Bob Evans home to Nadine, Sal Burkus shot him a look so deadly that Marty coughed and took it back. “Jesus, I joke. Can’t anyone tell a joke in this friggin’ place?”

  Burkus pointed the rim of his beer in Marty’s direction and said, “Not you. You can’t tell any jokes.”

  On the summer night he showed her his left eye, Tito was standing in the doorway of the bathroom in his designer underwear. Nadine was sitting on the edge of his bed unbuttoning her blouse. He’d pulled a clean T-shirt out for her, and it lay neatly folded on the bed beside her thigh.

  “I want to see your eye,” Nadine said. She’d asked before, but she always backed off when he refused. “It’s a part of you and I want to see it.”

  Maybe Nadine caught Tito off guard barefoot in those silk briefs he got on sale at Filene’s. It also could have been that he just figured, finally, it’s only Nadine, what difference does it make if she sees? She of all people should be able to handle this. Right? Doesn’t she volunteer at that nursing home on Childs Street, the place tucked back in the trees where all the inmates are old and deformed, on the edge of death, hollering into the night, a bunch of elderly lunatics clinging to their lives by yelling themselves hoarse? Doesn’t she sit and read to those people and put her hand on their raving arms to calm them? Tito shrugged and lifted the patch. He smiled. “You asked.”

  She couldn’t conceal her revulsion. She looked down, at the clean shirt, then back at the eye. It was wreckage. A flap of skin and a gash, half an eyelid only partly covering a blurry mass of tissue, a gobble of iris and blue-white cornea.

  Her reaction didn’t surprise him. Tito slid the patch back down. Renee had done the same thing when he finally showed her. Had acted as if she were seeing it over and over again after he put the patch back down. Here was the same gagging look. And like Renee, Nadine was now saying something about blind people, about how much he had to be thankful for with his one good eye. It was as if someone had recorded the same bullshit Renee said and was now playing it from hidden speakers in this very room, as if Renee were under the bed. Baby, of course you aren’t any different to me now. How could I love you less? But Renee was three years ago. She didn’t leave right after. No. That would have been unseemly. But soon enough after. For a clown with two perfect shiny eyes, a greasebag assistant restaurant manager from Quincy. Tito took consolation in knowing that Renee carries the memory of his eye with her. That sometimes in bed with her tomato-sauced boyfriend, his eye floats across her night-mares like a wound.

  “I’m sorry,” Nadine said.

  “No need.”

  “I bugged you.” She stood up and moved closer to him, but Tito backed away. “I should have known.”

  “Known what?”

  “That it would hurt you to show it.”

  “I’m not one of your causes.”

  “Did I say that? That you were a cause?”

  “Save your bleedy heart for your social work.”

  Nadine stepped back to the bed, fisted the shirt, and threw it across the room. She’d promised herself when they first started leaving the bar together that this was only about being with someone, someone to help chew up the meaningless hours when she couldn’t work. That was all this was ever going to be. She turned and faced him. Stood there in her unbuttoned blouse and plum-colored bra. “And I’m some princess, Tito? You taking Princess Fergie home with you?”

  “You’re being stupid here now.”

  “You can’t look at me. Easier with the light off?”

  “Why don’t you put the T-shirt on?”

  “What if I love you?”

  “Nadine. Don’t—”

  “For the sake of argument. Me with my big ass and this face. What if I do?”

  “I told you.”

  “Right. That you’re waiting for some Brahmin with a ponytail to stray into the bar, a lost lamb in search of directions. Excuse me, I’m looking for the Green Street metro. Oh my!” She put her hand over her heart and swooned. “A hunky to beat all hunkies!”

  “Naddy—”

  “And he’s Mexican! Or something like Mexican. Oh, they will be absolutely floored on Beacon Hill, floored!”

  Tito retrieved the shirt from the floor and tried to hand it to her, but she refused, kept right on talking at him in that screeching voice, what the little lost girl would look like, her curls, her sneery lip, her little yellow shorts, her peek-a-boo thighs…

  Tito watched her and listened. Her half-naked rave in the middle of his room. The rain pelted the window like a phantom tap dancer. When he tried to take her in his arms, she whapped him. “Like you’re the bastard that invented loneliness.”

  For the first time he didn’t ask her for help scratching his back, and she didn’t offer. That night they slept on opposite edges of the bed. Even the bottoms of their feet didn’t touch. When Tito woke up to news radio at 6:17, Nadine was long gone.

  Some say they fled away together. To a cabin in backwoods Maine where they still speak French. Or maybe it was Newfoundland. San Bernardino. Others say they went separate, and not far, that she stuck to her guns and never spoke to him again, that she went to Waltham and he went to Medford. There’s even one guy who swears he saw Tito doing some strange ritual dance outside her apartment, three days after she’d packed up a U-Haul and left J.P. to stew in its own juice. This guy said Tito’s dance was something like half hopping and half praying, and that he kept going around and around in a circle. It all depends on how big a liar the guy who’s telling it is. Because the fact is, there isn’t anybody around here who knows anything more than I do. And what’s it matter, really? Neither of them ever set foot back in Cousin Tuck’s. What else is there?

  Before they vanished, Nadine rode her bike into the bar. Pedaled right through the door. It was a hot night, and Moca Joe had propped the door open with a brick. That tote bag dangled from her handlebars. Not stopping the bike, in mid-speech about the uselessness of pool, she pedaled by our row of stools to the table, still going on about pool, how it was a disgusting waste of time and resources. Billiards! The world rides on a highway of shit while we hit glass balls into pockets like oblivious ducklings. And she called Tito all sorts of names. I won’t go into all the particulars, but she let him have it as bad as she could give it, in front of all of us, in the place where he was king. She went right for his throat and said Tito’s rule over Cousin Tuck’s w
as like Reagan’s, slack-jawed and drooling at the wheel while the crew cuts run the country from the basement. The pool shark racks ’em up again. Another round of opium for the masses. Then she got off the bike, let it drop, and turned to us at the bar. She said something that sounded rehearsed: “Listen up, louts, I LOVE his eye. Not his pool eye, ignorants. Do you hear me? The eye he hides.” She turned around and approached Tito. She placed both hands on the green felt and pulled till it ripped. Then, with one angry finger pointed at him, she said, low and vicious, as if this worst truth had only just occurred to her, “Forty-two years on earth and still dumb enough to be vain. And by the way, we didn’t fuck. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

  She got back on her bike and rode slowly toward the door. A couple of guys at the front tables moved their chairs out of the way to give her clear passage. And through the whole thing Tito just stood there holding his cue and looking at the chalk blue tip as if it were the thing exposing him, calling him out.

  After Nadine coasted out of the bar (Angel stood by the door, kicked his heels together, and saluted), Tito yanked the triangle off the hook by the Bud Light girl and started to rack. He moved in the slow methodical way a shamed man does when he knows everybody’s watching. His hands wandered around as though they were detached. Nobody—not even any of the newcomers, who could not have understood the significance of what had happened—stepped up to challenge. Tito broke, and the crack of the balls in the silence of the bar was enough to make even Sal Burkus wince. We listened to him knock around. He avoided the tear she’d made in the felt. Nobody made any comments. He waited a decent half hour before leaving, so we wouldn’t think he was chasing her heels, her rattling back fender.

  Two Poes

  THEY WERE BOTH in town impersonating Edgar Poe. You’d see one or the other charge down the street in a ragged morning coat, cape, and cravat, with a similar wavy crop of unruly hair and wide forehead, but one would be silent and smiling, the other growling like something rabid. Originally, they were part of a festival honoring Poe, but the festival, after a while, became irrelevant. In time, it felt as if they’d always been with us, those two who stomped our streets, hunched and shrouded in black. They gave respective one-man shows on alternate nights, except Sunday. Growling Poe performed on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; Smiling Poe on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Both performances were sparsely attended. In one famous instance, Growling Poe did a beseeching, raging version of his show for one deaf senior citizen who hadn’t even come there for Poe. The woman had stumbled down into the dark catacombs on a far different mission. She was looking, she told the angry, pacing, furious-haired man, for her beloved kitty. Growling Poe was already irate that nobody had shown up that night and imagined that she’d been sent by his enemies to make a clown of him. He repeated her question in a diabolical whisper: Have I seen your kitty? This confused the old woman, because she could read lips. “Yes, that’s what I asked. Have you seen my cat? She likes to roam down here. This isn’t the first time. Naughty pussy crawls in through a window.”

  And Growling Poe said it again, except this time it wasn’t a question. “Have I seen your kitty. My dear, Muddy, I’m afraid I have. Something’s happened.”

  “To Punim?”

  “Yes, to Punim.” He jabbed a finger toward a folding chair. “Sit.” And as the old bird watched in terror, begging him to return Punim alive, Growling Poe launched into his second act, an abbreviated telling of “The Black Cat,” cutting right to the moment when the pet assassin reaches down and gouges out the eye of the feline who torments him with love.

  Although on the surface at least, Smiling Poe was a kinder man than Growling Poe—all the merchants downtown would tell you this—Smiling Poe didn’t have much better luck luring people down to the catacombs for his shows. So why, you ask, an Edgar Allan Poe Festival in our town when our idea of theater is the high school’s annual abomination of Li’l Abner? It’s a good question, but if you have to ask, you don’t know Rita Larry-Pontewitz. Rita Larry-Pontewitz is famous for being a thrice-widowed eccentric with incurable boredom and more money than our town’s two savings-and-loans can handle. She likes to pretend that we care more about culture than we actually do. Thus, every few years or so she pours a little of her fortune into a project designed to bring us culture and tourist revenue. “Gonna put us on the map,” she shouts, as she cruises down our sidewalks in her golf cart, handing out flyers for the ballet, the opera, ancient Chinese table dancing. She’s never asked us if we wanted anybody to find us or not, but we tolerate her because she often donates money for things we do need, like a new monorail system connecting our downtown with our new mall and the reconstructed driving range and put-put center we named in her honor.

  In the beginning, we were even excited about the festival and hauled out our forgotten copies of Poe from cardboard boxes in the basement and stayed up nights rereading “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Oblong Box,” “Hop-Frog,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” after which we were again surprised and mildly annoyed that those killings were all an innocent monkey’s havoc. We dutifully attended the art exhibitions and the Vincent Price movies, and we happily bought tickets for the one-man shows given in the basement of our Historical Society, which the society president and chief tour guide, Hal Hodapp, renamed the catacombs. The catacombs were a dank, cramped basement filled with stacks of molding telephone books that made people sneeze so loudly and profusely during performances you sometimes couldn’t hear either Poe. But Hal Hodapp, who serves also as Rita Larry-Pontewitz’s unofficial propagandist, circulated the story that the basement of the Historical Society had been an execution chamber back when beheading was still legal in our county. (New Hampshire Puritans don’t mess around.) So the catacombs it was, no matter how much mold, and Hal, who shared Rita’s desire to put us on the map, placed signs along the I-73 corridor to attract tourists to the festival. SEE NOT ONE BUT TWO EDGAR A. POES IN CHAMBER OF LOST HEADS.

  Most people in town saw both Growling Poe’s and Smiling Poe’s show at least once. All well and good. We clapped and clapped and we clapped. That was that. Our literary interlude was over. We tromped our books back down to the basement, because they crowded our shelves. Then an odd thing. They didn’t leave. Even after the rest of the festival packed it up and moved on to Ossipee. Even after Rita herself lost all interest in Edgar Allan Poe and disparaged him and his impersonators in the streets, a mother casting stones at her babies. “All right, enough already!” she yowled from her golf cart. “Besides, the real one was a drunk and married his eight-year-old sister! Is this the kind of role model we want to encourage for today’s lusty youth?” She’d already begun to plan her next project, a tribute to our town’s glassblowing heritage. To his credit—though he began to do Rita’s bidding by inventing a glassblowing heritage, complete with an archaeological dig behind Shaw’s—Hal Hodapp stuck with the Poes and didn’t, despite Rita’s thunder, evict them from the catacombs. Hal maintained that their voices kept the rats from coming upstairs and gnawing the carpet.

  Neither Poe ever spoke to the other. We assumed, without giving it much thought, that the nature of being Poe is such that there can’t be more than one of you. Why they both decided to stay is anyone’s guess, but I’d say the two Poes agreed on one thing: that art need not be seen by human eyes to be art, even when it’s drama. Still, it was funny to see two identically dressed men in period clothes pass each other on the street without a word, Growling Poe glaring, Smiling Poe raising the corners of his mouth—slightly—but enough for us to notice and remark that the more he smiled, the worse he looked.

  They kept at it, week after week, month after month, depending on handfuls of tourists. Hal told us that in February there was no audience for either show for two weeks running. But every weeknight and Saturday they went on anyway, performing entire shows for rows of empty folding chairs. Hal knew because he lived upstairs at the Historical Society and admitted, when Rita Larry-Pontewitz w
asn’t around, that he liked to listen to the Poes from the open door of an old laundry chute.

  At this point, I should confess, though I am no one important, that I felt there was something not quite right about Smiling Poe. He had, if this is possible, too much talent for his work. For me, Growling Poe was easier. He was a simple, vengeful man and therefore consistent. His openly hostile demeanor when he walked our streets matched his stage presence. His show was mostly shouted fury. Growling Poe’s Poe anticipated that the world would turn against him—and the world delivered as promised. When I saw Growling Poe’s show, I was depressed, anxious, pessimistic, but never afraid. I didn’t fear death to the degree of a constant squeezing pressure against the temples. Growling Poe didn’t overcome me with dread. But isn’t dread what we ask of a Poe? I, who have never had anybody to lose and am still waiting, know that even Growling Poe’s delivery of “The Raven” was complacent. It was as if he’d always expected to lose Lenore. Growling Poe reveled in the easy and dismal; what could this misery known as life bring you other than the loss of the only one you ever loved? And so, he enjoyed his own anger too much to feel a single word of the poem he had memorized, acted so beautifully. He missed the point. Wasn’t it Emerson who said that every single word is a poem? If anyone ever has, the real Poe understood this too well, as his hand stiffened and he could no longer hold his pen to write even one more of Emerson’s sacred words in that cold house of his. And you know damn well that he couldn’t reach for his wife’s precious little hand, because she, young thing, was as cold as he was, and after that she was dying, and the dying have no warmth to give the living. Forgive me for getting carried away. Because we know all this, don’t we? We’ve heard it all before. We die alone, and the real Poe wrote this out in his own blood, and though Growling Poe had done all his homework (in his program notes he wrote that he’d read all the books in Roderick Usher’s library, including, of course, the Directorium Inquisitorium by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne), he never understood how quickly our anger at being left dissolves into a loneliness no words can describe, not even words on the page. You can’t take hold of the powdered hands of the dead, and this is what Smiling Poe understood too well. Embedded in his quiet smile was always the aloneness of grasping for a hand that’s gone.