Irresistible Impulse

by Robert Tanenbaum

  She wondered if Lucy felt toward her as she had felt toward her own mother in those distant pre-adolescent days, when she had first understood that her own life was to be on a different course from the one her mother had followed. She was not going to marry a local and make a home in the womb of Italianate Queens; nor was she going to get a “good job” as a schoolteacher while awaiting same. She remembered the sense of disappointed expectation in her mother’s eyes as the woman waited in vain for Marlene to “settle down.” She was still waiting, despite the marriage and the three grandchildren. A pang went through her, the mother’s bane. Did Lucy feel the same way about her?

  Something must have been communicated through the ether between them, for Lucy twisted and looked back at Marlene, startled.

  “Spying on me again?”

  “It’s not spying. I’m your mother. I’m required to stare at you—it’s a New York statute.”

  Lucy rolled her eyes and said something low and not in English.

  “What was that?” asked Marlene.

  Lucy giggled. “It means, ‘they will believe it in Hunan.’”

  “Yes, dear. Correct me if I’m wrong, but little Chinese girls don’t talk that way to their devoted parents,” said Marlene. She sat down next to Lucy, who closed her notebook, in a gesture of privacy.

  “What’re you working on?”

  “Math. Factoring.” Casually said.

  Marlene put an impressed expression on her face. “My, my! Do you need any help with it?”

  “No, it’s easy. Tranh showed me how to do it.”

  Ah, Tranh, you indispensable monster!

  “You’re still getting on okay with him?”

  “Uh-huh. He’s neat. It’s like having our own private restaurant here. He’s learning more English too. He says, ‘I watch much of TV.’” A pause. Lucy looked into her mother’s face; Marlene looked into her husband’s eyes. “Is Tranh, like, in trouble?” the girl asked.

  “Not that I know of,” said Marlene carefully. “Why?”

  “Oh, nothing. Uncle Harry hates him. He was saying bad words to himself in his office. About Tranh. He was supposed to watch Miranda’s mom, wasn’t he? I mean, Tranh was.”

  A chill went through Marlene. “What gives you that idea, darling?”

  “Because I was in Tranh’s room and I saw the whatchamacallit, the folder with the pictures and stuff … ?”

  “The case file?”

  “Uh-huh. The case file about Ms. Lanin and that guy who was chasing her. He got killed, didn’t he?”

  “That’s right, he did.”

  Lucy thought for a few seconds and then said, “Probably Tranh did it.”

  Marlene swallowed hard “What makes you say that?” she asked, managing with some effort to keep her face placid and her voice steady.

  “He had a big spot of blood on his sneaker yesterday, the other pair. I saw it in his closet. But now it’s not there. Also, he has a gun in his bag. A weird semi-auto. With Russian writing on it. It’s not a nine or a forty-five, or—”

  Marlene interrupted the gun talk, to which her daughter had become regrettably prone of late. “Yeah, but that’s not what the police think, Luce. They think that Ms. Lanin got the gun away from the man who kidnapped her and shot him with it. He was shot with that gun, the bad guy’s gun. That’s the first thing. Second, it’s not allowed to go poking around in other people’s stuff. So don’t do it anymore, okay? I mean it! And also, what you just said about Tranh? I don’t want you to talk about it to anyone else, ever. Understand?”

  Lucy nodded. “Sure, Mom. I would never say it to anyone but you anyway. I’m not a dope!”

  “No, you’re certainly not,” said Marlene. “But, Lucy? Don’t even say it to me.”

  “Okay.” She held a forefinger to her temple. “Bzzzt! It’s erased. Can we go shooting?”

  Was this a quid pro quo? Amnesia in exchange for a treat? Marlene hoped not, although being taken to the range to bang away with a .22 was very nearly Lucy’s favorite activity. She decided that math prowess, in any case, deserved a reward. Marlene looked at her watch. “Sure. After your homework’s done,” she said.

  The Music Lover carefully pasted the review from the Times into his scrapbook and took the opportunity to peruse the volume once again. He was in the room of his little apartment dedicated to Edith Wooten and her music. The walls and the ceiling were papered over with concert posters and programs, from the very first one to the one just passed. A white wooden shelf held more intimate souvenirs: a pair of white panties, a white brassiere, a toothbrush, a set of keys, pink lipstick, a pair of tan leather gloves. Above these, pinned to the wall, was his private photo gallery, both standard publicity shots and his own compositions—Edie on the street, Edie shopping, Edie practicing, and several shot with a telephoto lens, of Edie in her bathrobe, Edie in a half slip, one small breast showing. His favorite.

  He placed the scrapbook back in its special trunk with the three others and lay down on the camp bed that was the room’s only other furniture. The bed was made up with a white duvet covered with a white cotton duvet cover printed with tiny pink roses, the same as the one on Edie Wooten’s bed up on Park Avenue. The pillow was a square one in oyster-colored silk that came from Edie’s bedroom. That had been his biggest coup once; it still smelted of her Jean Naté. Now of course he could get anything he wanted. It was easy since he had learned how to make himself invisible.

  Perhaps too easy? No, the thrill was still there. The Music Lover became excited, thinking about the treasures he would soon possess, thinking about control, about the power he had over her, over the music. He went to the closet and brought out a huge boom box. He really needed a good stereo system, but he moved so much, and so quickly too, that it was impossible. Into the slots fed a tape of Edie playing Schubert’s Quartet in A Major, the Rosamunde. As the music swelled through the room, he lay back on the bed and fixed his eyes on the ceiling, where he had taped a poster-sized blowup of Edie playing her cello. It was an informal shot, taken during practice at a summer music festival. Edie was wearing a tank top and shorts, her head was back, and her face was full of joy. She was laughing, in fact. Exposing her throat. The Music Lover opened his bathrobe. He pressed the pillow against his cheek. Her naked thighs were pressing against the bare wood. The music swelled. He breathed in her fumes, her music, he stroked himself slowly, trying to make it last until the end of the first movement.

  ELEVEN

  Sunday dawned, a dull day with yellowy-gray city clouds and a cold December wind. Karp the Infidel snored in bed, and Marlene got her daughter ready for church. Marlene and her husband had been walking on eggs since the shooting of Pruitt. Given the peculiarities of their respective personalities and professions, however, this did not bother them as much as it would have another couple. Shortly, Marlene knew, there would be the crisis—both of them would bellow, trample around like hippos, yolk-stained to the knees, and, still snarling, fall into bed.

  Lucy was ready when Marlene came out of the bedroom, dressed in white tights and a deep purple velvet dress with a lace collar and little black buttons up the front. She had a round-brimmed hat in the same color held in her hands, and she had clearly tried hard with her hair. It shone, and the tangles were mainly at the back. Lucy liked church, as she liked all serious things, non-kid things—guns, for example. It was another aspect of her eight-going-on-thirty personality. Marlene sometimes feared that she was even a trifle too dour.

  “Ow!” as Marlene plied her hairbrush.

  “Be quiet, and think of the holy martyrs, as my mother used to say,” said Marlene. Finishing, she stood back.

  “There! Gorgeous! Ready for church. In fact, in that outfit, you look like a tiny monsignor.”

  Lucy was not amused by this remark. She put on her hat and her camel-hair coat, now somewhat too small, showing skinny wrist bones, and made for the door. They walked the dog, boarded the yellow car, which was nursed with many a prayer into fretful life, and dro
ve to Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street off Prince. In the car, Lucy asked, “Do you think they’ll let girls be, like, priests while I’m alive?”

  “I don’t know, Luce. John Paul and I are trying to work it out, but we’re still pretty far apart. Why? Feeling a vocation coming on?”

  Shrug. “It would be neat to be, you know, holy.”

  “You could be a nun,” suggested Marlene, shriveling.

  “Yes,” said Lucy. “I could be the kind that parachutes over the jungle and saves people from bad soldiers. But … I don’t like the part where you can’t”—a faint blush and a wriggle—“have babies.”

  Straight-faced, Marlene responded, “You want to have a family?”

  “Only when I’m real old, like thirty-five or something. But maybe they’ll let nuns have babies.”

  “Maybe,” said Marlene. “In which case you could found your own order. The Little Sisters of the Fruitful Womb (Airborne).”

  Lucy looked at her mother sideways, decided that she had been made fun of, sniffed, and fell silent for the rest of the drive. Marlene sighed. Their relationship seemed to be transforming itself into a wisecracking rivalry rather than the warmly supportive figment of Marlene’s hopeful imagination.

  That Marlene chose to go to Old St. Pat’s instead of to St. Anthony of Padua, where every other Italian in lower Manhattan went, or Transfiguration, which was closer, was part of the same contrarian spirit that (aside from her vow to raise her daughter in the faith) kept her going to church in the first place. It was not expected that someone of her education, politics, and behavior—Jew-wed and all—would continue to be a regular communicant of the nasty old patriarchal racket, and so therefore she was. St. Pat’s was also a venerable Gothic Revival pile, parts of it dating back to the War of 1812 (which antiquity she thought gave worship there an almost European style) and full of the ghosts of departed poor Irishmen and the present bodies of poor Latinos. For Marlene their déclassé presence took some of the sting out of doing something her mom approved.

  They passed under the peculiar Gothic facade and into the echoing space, redolent of incense and damp stone. It was early, not much after seven, and they both joined the short waiting lines by the confessionals set out along a side aisle.

  Lucy went in first. Marlene could not imagine what the child had to confess, not unless she really thought about it, and then she primly put the thought out of mind. In any case, Lucy had always been eager for that particular sacrament since she had taken first communion the previous year.

  There were two boxes in operation. An old woman in shiny black emerged from the far one, and Marlene went in, wondering briefly whether it was manned by the pastor, Father Raymond, or one of his curates. In general, Marlene was not interested in the character of her priest, unlike many of her coreligionists, who were nearly Congregational in their concern with the style, character, and attitude of their pastors, and shopped around town for the one they considered most amenable to their own concept of Rome’s doctrine. She did not particularly care for Raymond, a sheep-faced man of dull and conventional views, but, she believed, either it was magic or it was bullshit, and since she was here, she had opted for the magic, which would work via an asshole as well as via a Thomas Merton.

  In the dim familiar box, after the ritual acknowledgments, Marlene began her tour through such of the Seven Deadlies as had afflicted her in the past week. Wrath, as usual, was top of the charts.

  “In my work—I run a security firm that offers protection to women against stalkers and abusive men—I get so angry at them,” she said, “the men, I mean. It frightens me. I want to hurt them and kill them. I sometimes do hurt them, in the line of duty, so to speak and … I get pleasure out of it.”

  The voice said, “Do you hurt them for the pleasure, or as a means to an end?”

  Startled, Marlene stared at the grille. It had not been Father Raymond’s voice, or that of any priest with whom she was familiar. The voice was low and husky, the diction precise with the flat accent of the outlands. New England? Not a New Yorker, at any rate. Marlene brought herself back to the question.

  “I think it’s as a means to an end,” she replied hesitantly. “I want to frighten them away from the pattern of increasing violence. The law doesn’t seem able to do that. I want them to know that if they continue there will be consequences, horrible consequences, for them personally.”

  “And does this work?”

  “Sometimes. The shock works, I think. Like having blackouts works for a drunk sometimes. They have to choose between stopping drinking and losing their lives. But some drunks keep drinking and die, and some of these men keep after their women and kill them, and then they often kill themselves. Or I could kill them first.”

  “But in providing this shock, you feel pleasure. What sort of pleasure?”

  “Not physical. More like … I don’t know … moral satisfaction, the sense of meting out justice—now, you rat, you know what it feels like. Afterward, after one of these sessions, I feel depleted; sometimes, if it’s bad enough, I feel nauseous.”

  A long pause. She could hear him breathing. She became aware of a growing interest in the priest, and a not entirely comfortable increase in that almost erotic feeling she always got in the confessional: sitting alone in the dark, telling your secrets to a man you knew, but who was professionally anonymous, a stranger, a stranger clothed in mystic powers, the best entertainment on earth, now closing in on its third millennium of continuous performance. Why all the churches were full of women.

  “That’s a very good sign,” he said. “The sickness. I would be more concerned if you went out for a hearty meal afterward. It sounds as if you acted with good intention and when you caused pain it was to promote a greater mood. This is slippery moral ground, as I’m sure you know, but it seems as if so far you are keeping your feet. The rage is another matter. Please go on.”

  She went on. Lust—stupid fantasies about men she’d met casually or seen on the street; sloth—a slight tendency toward acedia, the abandonment of hope; pride—yes, perhaps a serious problem there, more serious than Marlene was willing to recognize. Without quite knowing how she had started, Marlene found herself talking about her husband. This was another first, as the irregularity of the mixed marriage had always made her shy of bringing Karp and the church together in the same breath, and it came pouring. It was not complaint, precisely, but more like a spiritual confusion. Why did her life torment him? Why did his suspicions torment her? Where was the trust? Why did she feel stifled? Why did she feel compelled to lie to him—no, not exactly lie, as such; more a selective withholding of the truth?

  “It sounds,” said the priest, “as if your marriage is far from perfect, and that you yourself have fallen far short of the perfection you have every right to expect from yourself.”

  Marlene found herself nodding in agreement for a moment before it struck her that the priest’s tone had been ironic. Irony is not much met with in the confessional.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, although she did.

  “I think you do,” said the voice. It seemed to wait.

  “You’re talking about pride, spiritual pride,” said Marlene.

  “I’m not talking about anything. You’re confessing your sins.”

  Who was this guy? Marlene took a deep breath. “Yes, right. I have been guilty of the sin of pride. I want to be perfect, and have a perfect marriage and perfect children and never make a mistake and save all the poor, poor women, every one of them. Yes, it’s true. What can I do!”

  Marlene had to struggle to keep from raising her voice. She could feel sweat rolling down her sides and clammy on her forehead.

  “You can sincerely repent and make a good act of contrition. For your penance, read the first four chapters of St. Theresa’s The Way of Perfection. Do you have it?”

  In fact, she did and said so.

  “I thought you might,” said the priest. “Now, is there anything more?”
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br />   There was not. Marlene said the ritual words with more fervor than was her wont—she was heartily sorry—received the absolution, and left the box.

  “You were in there a long time, Mommy,” said Lucy, who was waiting for her on a stone bench.

  “Yes, well, I’ve been a very wicked woman lately.”

  “It doesn’t matter how wicked you are. If you’re really sorry, God will forgive you,” intoned Lucy in her most sacerdotal voice.

  “Yes,” said Marlene, “that’s the catch.”

  After church it was the tradition of the Catholic Karps to switch cultures and stop off at Samuel’s on East Houston to buy fresh bagels, lox, cream cheese, whitefish, and carp, this last from an early age Lucy’s special delight (That’s us, right, Mommy?). When they arrived home with their aromatic burdens, Karp (the man) was, as usual, sitting at the kitchen table with the fat Times, in his frowzy blue plaid robe, unwashed and unshaven. She plunked her shopping bag down on the table and kissed his ear.

  “Euueh! Take a shower,” she said, and kissed him again, on the neck.

  “How was church?” he asked surprised at the attention. He pulled at the bagel bag.

  “The usual. God loves us all, and the pope knows what’s what. There’s a new priest I’d like to get to know.” Marlene continued her nuzzling and ran her hand inside his robe. Karp groped bagels.

  “Would you rather have a bagel, or me?” she breathed into his ear.

  “That depends on whether you’re covered with crunchy little bits of onion,” said Karp and held up an onion bagel to demonstrate. He got up and pulled a knife from the rack.

  “It could be arranged,” said Marlene, as Lauren Bacall.

  “That must have been quite a sermon,” said Karp dryly. “What was it on? Marital duty? The proper subjection of wife to husband?”

  “The Immaculate Conception, if you must know. Jesus, Butch, how can you cut bagels like that!” It was an old argument.