Well, we had a good meeting on the face of it. They told me they were partnering with a big D.C. firm on the proposal, because it was only together that they’d have the manpower to fulfill such huge, lucrative interpreting contracts. The D.C. firm already had the huge, lucrative contract for this or that arm of the Defense Department or the DOJ or Homeland Security—whatever it was, it was worth billions. Dee-Dee licked his lips. That was when I felt my back stiffen. From here the conversation took a different turn, and I began to understand why the place felt so sinister to me.
“So the idea is to get in while the getting’s good,” Dee-Dee told me, “because you know once Obama comes in…” He made a slice at his neck. Have I mentioned all this was taking place late in 2008? Dee-Dee meant, of course, that he feared once Obama took office, he would cut off their livelihood.
Oh, I realized, these people support the war. The wars. They support the wars because it’s money in their pocket. They are Mutter Courage dragging their wares across the battlefield. I just didn’t know people like this. I did know people who supported the wars for other bullshit “moral” reasons, but I’d never met anyone who got behind war because it was good business.
“But the other side’s good for us too, you know,” Dee-Dee went on, beaming his cokehead smile at me. “With Obama there’ll be plenty of social services contracts: Medicaid, welfare—all that shinola. You see, Frances, it’s a win-win for us. Interpreting’s a recession-proof industry.”
They were thrilled to make money off other people’s misery.
I must get out here, I thought to myself.
“May I call you Franny?” Dee-Dee said suddenly.
“Absolutely not,” I said.
After I shook hands with the others, Dee-Dee and I reconvened to talk turkey. I’d quoted him my usual rate on the phone, but in the next few minutes he slashed me down to an hourly rate that was less than half of that. Then he told me that sum was a lot more than what he’d been expecting to pay me, and named a figure that suggested I’d be better off frying up chicken wings on Avenue D. “I’ll give you the good money,” he said to me, “but don’t expect a raise anytime soon—you’ve screwed yourself out of that.” I sat gazing at him as if he were Gogo, the talking dodo.
He also told me they’d be interviewing other people, so don’t get too cocky. It was hard not to make a flip comment at this, but I held my tongue, which is maybe what twelve years of Catholic school will do to you. He saw me to the door and shook my hand, which I immediately wiped off on my skirt.
I couldn’t wait to get home and tell Fitz how wacko the whole place was.
When I got in it wasn’t yet noon, and I found Fitz at the kitchen table, chin in hand, doing math calculations on the back of an envelope. He’d made us a big salad for lunch—he was a man who cautiously invited one to admire his handiwork—and even though it was early we were both ravenous, since anxiety had been causing us to pop out of bed fully awake and crazed with money worries at five every morning.
I told Fitz about freakazoid Dee-Dee, planet-struck Petey, witchy Cissy, and worried Will, dwelling for comic effect on the office decor, Dee-Dee’s bait-and-switch stinginess, and the all-around hideousness of capitalizing on the misery of others, something I could never possibly do. Fitz, with a look of concern—he was a tall, skinny man, with a bit of a stoop and the kind of intelligent, sympathetic face that made women of a certain age want to take his arm—told me I didn’t have to take the job. We’d find a way to get by. Well, I said, they probably wouldn’t hire me anyway.
Just then the telephone rang, and when I picked it up, it was Cissy asking me could I start tomorrow at eight o’clock?
*
Thus I found myself actually working in that loony bin. I was Alice, abruptly fallen down the rabbit hole, all my nice ideas about myself smarting with insult.
On my first day there, as I sat reading the three-hundred-page Request for Proposal, I looked around at the nearly blank workstation where I sat. That Mrs. Churtie-Matz had been a desolate woman was abundantly clear. Heaped on her desk were manila folders covered with big, looping, I-am-so-angry-I-can-barely-keep-it-together handwriting saying things like FORMS, FORMS, and OTHER FORMS. Looking inside, I found them all empty. On her overhead shelf, instead of books was a neat row of family-sized boxes of off-brand high-fiber cereal. But what got me was a little picture hanging at eye level directly in front of me. It was a gag picture of a cat sitting at a typewriter and wearing a pince-nez, with the words You Want It When? beneath it. What made this so bad—almost physically painful—was the fact that I’d seen this very same picture pinned up in the workstation at my first temp job, some twenty years before.
Twenty years. It seemed impossible.
Looking at that picture of that cat with its stupid pince-nez, I felt like anything I had done or gained or won for myself in those twenty years had vanished. That cat, with its stupid pince-nez, told me that those twenty years of living, of learning, were really just for shit. I was spinning my wheels. I was, for all intents and purposes, just the same clueless, self-deceived, hustling-after-chump-change person I’d been twenty years before. I still reeked of the working class, I hadn’t magically become the wise, age-appropriate matron in a twinset making a gift of securities to my Seven Sisters alma mater. I was just twenty years older.
I quietly took the cat with its pince-nez down from the wall and, looking about me, crunched it in my fist and slammed it into the wastepaper basket.
As the days went on and I attempted to adjust to my life’s new rhythms, an enormous lassitude came over me. Fitz would pack my lunch each morning, and every day at one o’clock I’d stop work to eat, there at my desk. But this took no time at all, and the monotony of Acme would creep over me, and inevitably I would grab my coat and flee.
On the west facade of Macy’s was a big video screen, and sometimes—after hours of notating the RFP and its many hundred pages of addenda—I’d find myself stopping to stare at it and mumble aloud words like “The Macy’s Bra Event” with Kaspar Hauser–like fascination. But standing too long on the sidewalk only meant getting violently shoved aside. People were shopping! In the stores on Thirty-Fourth Street you could buy shoes, exfoliators, basketballs, but I’d never been much of a shopper unless you’re talking books, and I couldn’t afford to buy anything anyway. So instead I’d find myself walking.
It was cold outside. I’d be bundled up in my big black parka, scarf swaddled around my face like Mort from Bazooka Joe, but as I walked along Thirty-Fourth Street the December wind blew right through me. Signs of the newly lean times were everywhere, from the heavy traffic in and out of Central Medicaid on the south side of the street, to the number of people lined up for the discount BoltBus to Philly on the north side, to actual signs, such as the sandwich board in front of Soul Fixins’ advertising the Bail-Out Special (fried chicken and vegetable) for only $7.99—which seemed like a lot of cash to me.
It was on one of these early, gloomy days that I came upon a church just past Ninth Avenue. It was hemmed in by big buildings and faced in rusticated limestone, with a series of arched doorways leading inside. It was called St. Michael’s, after the archangel. This seemed like a good sign, because Saint Michael was a favorite of mine from way back, perhaps because I started life as a child both fanciful and furious and I dearly wanted a sword with which to smite my enemies.
The door was open.
Inside was a big statue of Saint Michael in the famous pose, from Guido Reni: the saint stands contrapposto with his weight on his right foot, left foot on the head of Satan. In his hand he holds his sword, and he rears back to bring it down on the devil’s writhing neck. I went over to Saint Michael and stood looking at him for a moment. Then I started to cry.
I was crying for my mother. I was crying for my friend Keith, who had died of an AIDS-related illness the year before. Linked in my mind to the death of Keith was the death of my friend Sal, who had died a similarly avoidable death by falling off
his fucking roof. None of this I ever got over. I was crying for myself, and for the many things that had been lost.
I was crying for the past, and being young then, and having had expectations.
I realized mass was about to start, and though I was utterly lapsed, disgusted by the politics of the Church, and no sort of “good Catholic” at all, I wiped my face, went to a pew, and sat myself down.
Looking about me, I felt the beauty of the church thrilling me as it would any medieval peasant. It was decorated for Christmas, with great sprays of red poinsettias banking its altar, and though it was cold inside, the silver lamps that hung from the ceiling gave off an aura of comforting warmth. Sitting there, I really did understand how a serf in wooden shoes, covered in mud and wearing burlap underpants, could believe this was the house of God.
As the mass went on I spaced out, as I always had as a child, idly looking at the others in attendance: an older man in a pile-collar coat, a big lady in a yellow hat, a skinny auntie with a floral scarf. I started to fix on the back of a woman who sat a few rows ahead of me. The blue blazer she wore was strange—severely cut, with shoulders padded in an exaggerated style that wasn’t really worn anymore. Plus, it was cold outside: where was her coat? I tuned in enough to hear the reading, which, I remember, was full of hectoring, repetitive verses: I am writing to you, little children…I am writing to you, fathers…I am writing to you, young people…In typically Catholic fashion I didn’t know my Bible, and I found myself wondering if the reading was from Paul, because the guy was always such a dick. Suffer not a woman to teach! Better to marry than to burn! I was about to roll my eyes when I looked up at the very old man reading and saw that he was looking right at me.
He read:
…because all that is in the world (the desire of the flesh and the desire of the eyes and the arrogance produced by material possessions) is not from the Father, but is from the world. And the world is passing away with all its desires, but the person who does the will of God remains forever.
I felt a prick of strange sensation, of odd familiarity. It was the strong, beautiful language, but it was also the feeling given me by the words the desire of the eyes. How can I explain this? I blinked through my own wanting present and those words took me back to Kendra and her family. The desire of the eyes. Because my eyes in those days had been filled with desire.
Kendra Löwenstein. Kendrick Marr-Löwenstein, properly speaking.
The Marr-Löwenstein family, out of the past.
My mind must have flown away thinking about them, because next thing I knew it was the kiss of peace. I remembered that the handshake had largely gone out of style since my childhood and more often than not people would just sort of turn and wave. Each of us was alone on our island. But the young woman in the blue blazer turned to me and actually reached her hand across the pew. We shook hands warmly, and that was when I saw the insignia on her arm and understood: she was a cop.
Afterward, as I walked down Thirty-Fourth Street, another pair of cops caught my eye. These were women too, walking arm in arm like Europeans, both also wearing dress blues; one of them, sharp and cute, had white gloves tucked under her right epaulette. And when I got to Seventh Avenue it was as if a dam had burst. Hundreds of cops spilled out all over the sidewalks outside Madison Square Garden in their fancy blues, hundreds of them. The academy had graduated new cadets, of course! And in my mind’s eye I saw a thousand white gloves being thrown into the air all at once, like a huge flock of birds taking wing.
The crush on the sidewalk was abruptly too much for me, and I got bumped out onto Thirty-Fourth Street. I leapt back up on the curb just as a bus sailed by, blaring its horn. I had instant crowd panic and I was almost panting waiting for the light to change. It changed and I ran across Thirty-Fourth Street, through the moving streams of people, and bounded up on the curb. There was a newsstand at the corner, and as I turned I caught a glimpse of the front page of the New York Times. I stopped in my tracks. What? What was this elaborate trick? What was this freaky, synchronic moment? Because I looked to see, on the front page of the newspaper, the obituary of Clarice Marr. Kendra’s mother.
Oh my God, I thought. The old bitch finally died.
2
…which is not a word I kick around casually, needless to say.
Would it be strange if I told you I was surprised to read that all the kids were still alive? Besides Kendra, there were Bertrand and Cornelia and Gerhardt: four of them. Though none of them could rightly be called a kid anymore. I realized that Cornelia, the youngest, would be thirty-four now, and the eldest, Bert, over fifty. It seemed impossible to think of them as that old.
A song flooded my mind: Love is pure gold and time a thief…
But it was the other two who had mattered to me.
Kendra and Jerry.
Jerry and Kendra.
I’d been so fascinated by their names: Kendrick and Gerhardt, spiky little bundles to keep the world at bay. Back then those names had seemed to me so exotic, so cool, so different from the regulation Maureens, Eddies, and Jennifers of my childhood…
*
“That Kendrick Löwenstein,” Trina said to me not a week after I’d first met Kendra, “is completely out of her tree.”
I remember we were at the student center, McIntosh, waiting on the greaseburger line. They were really fantastically terrible, the burgers they had there, and it couldn’t have been any kind of picnic for the women who worked the short-order grills, what with all these impatient entitled girls, some in tip-to-toe Moschino, glaring at the backs of their heads as they waited for their grub. I remember particularly one lady there, whose heavy makeup would melt down her face as she worked the grill—she reminded me of Cruella de Vil—and how she would turn and slap your greaseburger down in front of you when it was ready, implying that it was actually her spleen and daring you to eat it. This might have been part of why Trina and I eventually became vegetarians.
“I swear,” Trina was telling me, “the girl was doing the heroin nod in ‘Joyce, Eliot, Pound.’ ”
It would take me a little time to really understand what an excellent judge of character Trina was. I simply hadn’t known her long enough at that point. If I had, perhaps I would have listened to her better.
“Maybe she was just tired,” I suggested.
“There’s tired and then there’s your sodden ragdoll head hitting your desk to the rhythms of ‘The Hollow Men.’ ”
It also needs to be said that Trina was always socially smarter and more circumspect than I. The well-adjusted child of a military judge and beautiful Scandinavian mom, she never seemed to have anything to prove. Whereas I, in those days, had a chip on my shoulder the size of Alaska. I was embarrassed by my class background and very often I was fronting, but I had internalized this so much that I often lost track of where reality ended and fiction began. I wanted to be worldly and sophisticated, but really I dragged my peasant prejudices after me as if they were a big bag of deposit bottles.
I was impressed by money.
I was impressed by money, it should be said, for the things it protected you from.
But of course all of us were punk rock back then, and things like money were incompatible with our core beliefs of DIY-ism, smashing the state, going off the grid. Not being like our parents—our complacent parents—who were the root of the problem. Maybe the difference was that my parents were anything but moneyed. They were their own weird subset, the educated but luckless poor, so to be not like them would be to have a savvy career as a Wall Street broker.
Anyway, I remember this particular day was a Friday, because there was a show I wanted to see at the Ritz that night, and it seemed like all my friends were going home for the weekend even though winter break was only a few weeks off. Audrey was going to Pennsy to see her family, Fang was going down to Virginia for some kind of obligation involving her annoying sister, and Trina had decided to hitch a ride with Fang and get dropped off in D.C. to surprise her da
d on his birthday. I did have other friends, but they were mostly more interested in reading Husserl in the original German than going to see the Cro-Mags—not that the two were necessarily incompatible—and I found myself staring at the prospect of a Friday night alone. Make no mistake, I was a pretty diligent student, but the idea of staying in and reading my Nochlin—have I mentioned that I was an art history major?—on a Friday night made me completely stir-crazy. It was a bad habit that our father had instilled in his children, I think. Friday was payday in our house, and on payday our dad would come home from work, from his week of teaching remedial reading to adjudicated youth at the county juvie known as Hell’s Acres, with candy bars and money for us all. Then we’d pile in the car and tear off to Hoy’s 5 & 10 so that we could run down its aisles to find shiny junk to blow the money he had just given us on. He wanted to give us a treat, see us pleased for once, and it’s true that this was the most exciting thing in the world to me as a little kid—I still can remember the beautiful crap that I got at Hoy’s—but it didn’t exactly set up a responsible fiscal model for us.
My dad’s favorite candy bar, needless to say, was the PayDay.
I had no love for where I’d come from, a place of haves and have-nots, but, I realize only now that I’ve lived in New York City for so long, I was still not quite down with how to live in Manhattan back then. Sometimes the wide, blank sidewalks of Broadway in the middle of the night—and somehow I found myself out in the middle of the night all the time—would send a tremor of the deepest aloneness through my body. Trash would blow right down the avenue, and every block or so you’d find a stoic homeless man, covered in a wretched blanket and often sitting up, miserably alert at the devil’s hour of three a.m., as if there were no hope for even the escape of sleep.
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