Pink Slip

  I knew I shouldn’t do it—but of course, I did. While Strauss had made the drive to my apartment, I had called that number in Brooklyn, hoping his parents would give me some clue about those messages. I prayed his father would answer; I had a feeling his mother wouldn’t like me. But his mother, of course, was the one who said hello, just as my mother always had answered the phone at our house because it was too much to ask my father (who had worked hard all day long! Ten hours and more!) to get up from his La-Z-Boy and utter a civil greeting to the caller.

  I swallowed hard. “Is Eben there?”

  “He was here over the weekend,” she said. “But who’s calling?”

  Ibby’s girl, I almost said before I chickened out and blurted in Brooklynese, “Mirandar!”

  “Mirandar?” she asked, as if I had uttered a name from outer space, or at least one that did not require a final R.

  I hung up the phone, my heart pounding. That’s when I knew that if Strauss ever got around to taking me back to Brooklyn, I’d immediately feel at home. Surely we were destined for one another, if already I was starting trouble with his mother.

  • • •

  When Strauss came into my apartment, his skin sallow and his eyes bruised beneath from lack of sleep, he hardly looked like the kind of man who had a girl, no matter what her name. I invited him into the kitchen, where I had taken out of the bags the broccoli and carrots and tomatoes and all the rest of the produce. “It’ll take awhile to get this stuff together,” I said.

  “Let me help.”

  I gave him a dubious look. Then I handed him a colander and told him to wash the mushrooms. “Wash them good,” I said. As I got out a cutting board and a serrated knife, I remembered I still was Boorman’s chief editor. “I mean well.”

  I heard him puncture and rip back the plastic wrap stretched tight over the tub of mushrooms. As I wedged the tomatoes, I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He stood at the sink, gazing down at the mushrooms. The task seemed to paralyze him.

  “Is there a preferred way to do this?” he asked. “I mean, do I use a brush?”

  “No, your hands. Rub the dirt off with your fingers. And do a good job,” I repeated. “They’re grown in cow shit—”

  “I know. I took botany in college.” The mushrooms thudded against the metal colander. Strauss looked around—just like a thunderously dumb guy, he’d forgotten where I kept the wastebasket—and when I pointed under the sink, he nodded and disposed of the plastic tub.

  He turned on the spigot and tentatively held a mushroom under the faucet. Water splashed in all directions.

  “Care for an apron?” I asked.

  “Actually, do you mind if I take off my jacket?”

  I didn’t watch as he pulled off his jacket—the moment called up too many intimate memories. “Thank you,” he said, when I took it from him. “You’re welcome,” I said, with all the disinterest and efficiency of an airline ticket-counter agent divesting him of his luggage. I headed for the hall closet before I changed my mind and went back into my bedroom. There—it must be confessed—I brought the rough wool of his jacket up to my face, then smoothed my cheek against the satin lining. I drew in my breath. He’d been sweating. Strauss hardly ever sweated.

  He was nervous.

  And his breast pocket crinkled. I peeked in. The paper was pink, but lighter than a while-you-were-out message slip. I hesitated only a moment before I pulled it out. It was a traffic citation. Dated twenty minutes before. Strauss had been pulled over on his way to see me. For speeding. And fined sixty dollars.

  I never felt so pleased in my life. If the past few months seemed to prove I needed someone, every now and then, to remind me to look both ways before I crossed a busy street, this pink slip also proved that if I was looking for a bad boy, I’d found my own version of him. For even Ibby drove fast. And sometimes got a ticket.

  I slipped the speeding citation back into his pocket. I put the coat on a hanger and placed it next to the infamous, overpriced Christmas dress I had not dared to return after the dry cleaners shrunk it. When I returned, I found Strauss in rolled-up sleeves, slopping water onto the drainboard and floor. I liked this—not the fact that I probably would have to mop after he got done, but the shirtsleeves. Something about a guy with his cuffs folded back always got to me. I always had liked Strauss’s forearms. And his hands—beaded with water when he delivered me a colander full of mushrooms so scrubbed they looked like they had been doused with Mr. Clean and rinsed in ammonia—also pleased me.

  “Good enough?” he asked.

  “That’ll do,” I said. “Can you handle the celery now?”

  He nodded. But again, he had trouble with the method. At the sink he put the entire head of celery under the faucet and began to rub, with his hands, on the outside.

  “Stalk by stalk,” I recommended, and provided him with a brush. He did such a wicked scrub number on the celery that strings of green fell off into the sink.

  We washed and chopped the vegetables. I put a tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan.

  “What are we making?” Strauss finally asked.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “You’re probably sick to death of stir-fry.”

  “I’ve learned to like my vegetables.”

  “Is it true they eat rats and dogs in China?”

  “Not in first-class hotels.”

  “Did you stay in a four-star?”

  “It was a residence inn. For bewildered foreign businessmen.” Strauss said the thing he liked best about the inn—and one of the few things he liked in all of Taiwan—were the sunsets from his balcony. “Other than that, I was miserable.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “But I felt so alone. It was like the first week of college—I wrote a lot of letters to my parents—only it went on for months, with no one to talk to. I even thought about keeping some kind of diary—or journal—whatever you call it, just to talk to the page—”

  “Did you?” I asked, knowing I wouldn’t be able to resist snooping through that choice document.

  “No.”

  As I tilted the pan to let the oil cover the bottom, I asked, “Afraid of your feelings?”

  “Maybe.” He cleared his throat. “It’s awful to be tongue-tied.”

  “I’ve never had that problem,” I said.

  No argument on his end with that. “What I meant was, it’s distressing not to be able to ask for the simplest of things.”

  “Didn’t you learn any Chinese at all?” I asked, sure I myself never would get beyond tank you velly much.

  “Hello,” Strauss said. “Good-bye. Take me to the Regent. Crazy Western man. Crazy Western girl.” He smiled. “I really was miserable, believe me.”

  “I bet the women were pretty,” I said.

  “Too pretty.”

  I dropped the onions into the bottom of the pan, where they spurted and sizzled, practically drowning out Strauss when he said, “But too thin. And altogether too quiet.”

  I took a spatula and pushed the hissing onions around in the pan. “Mind if I do these vegetables Italian-style?”

  “You’re the chef.”

  I pointed toward the spice cabinet. “Get me the basil.”

  He opened the cabinet. I saw him blink at the kosher salt, then move it aside without comment. He jumbled through the jars. The bottles clacked against the side of the cabinet and against one another.

  Finally I said, “I’ll give you a hint, Harvard. It’s green.”

  “I’m aware of its color.”

  “Then what’s the holdup?”

  “There’s a lot of green stuff in here,” Strauss said, as he finally located the basil. When he handed it to me, our fingers grazed for a moment.

  If this had been a Hollywood picture—or the thirteenth draft of Stop It Some More—the romantic hero would have repeated in a manly, but broken voice, There’s a lot of green stuff in here … Then, taking matters into his also-manly hands, he would reach over
and shut off the burner, divest the heroine of her apron, grab her by the forearm, kiss her until her lips were bruised, and make wild love to her against the refrigerator until the automatic icer spilled out bucket after bucket of cubes onto the floor.

  Strauss and I looked away and kept on cooking. Then we sat down and ate dinner, in strained silence, like some old married couple too exhausted to sustain an extended conversation after a hard day at the office and too badly in need of adding extra fiber to their diet. I left my apron on and forgot to put my napkin in my lap. He apologized when he scraped his knife against the plate. The ice cubes in my water clinked as I tilted back my glass. He asked about a humming noise, and I said it was my heater, which twice that winter had been on the fritz.

  Finally, because I saw he was having trouble getting to the point, I said, “I noticed you called me once from your parents’ house.”

  “That’s right. I went there. When I got back. Last weekend.”

  “I’ll bet they were glad to see you.”

  “That got repeated a few times. Yes.”

  I smiled.

  He didn’t. “My father—my father has a brain tumor.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Can they operate?”

  He shook his head.

  “Did you find out when you were in Taiwan?”

  “No. He told me when I came back.” Strauss pushed a strip of red pepper across his plate with his fork. “By then he already had known a whole month.”

  “Why didn’t he tell you?”

  “He has a habit of withholding things.” Strauss shrugged. “It’s strange. The minute I saw him I just had a feeling; do you know how you sometimes know something without it being spoken?”

  “Yes. I know that.”

  “And then—you know—it gets said and too much comes out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everything came out. While I was gone … someone showed him that book—”

  “It wasn’t me—”

  Strauss blinked. “Of course it wasn’t you.”

  “Your sister?”

  “No. It was my brother-in-law.”

  “Ah, the infamous, dislikable brother-in-law. What were his motives?”

  “Not pure, I’m sure.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “Something to do with my father’s will.”

  “Oh. That’s ugly stuff Did your father get angry? At you, I mean. For talking.”

  “No. I was surprised. He almost seemed to relish having my side of the story. Although he took issue with more than a few details.”

  “Such as?”

  Strauss hesitated. “He said we were shelling walnuts that afternoon, not peanuts. He said, ‘We never had an Oriental carpet in our dining room, the landlords gave you a chocolate Easter egg and not a rabbit, you were not so well-behaved as a child as you would like to think—twice we had to leave restaurants because of your misbehavior, and there was plenty of backtalk when you turned thirteen. From the way you remember, people would think it was you and not me who had the brain tumor, Ib.’ ”

  I smiled. “Is that all?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “I’m sure there’s more. You have a look on your face like there’s more.”

  “Well. All right. Since you insist. He said—excuse me for just a moment, Lisar—‘You were fooled by that last name, she was Jewish, you were the romantic one who made her Catholic, why would I marry a Catholic? I had enough problems in my life at the time.’ And he didn’t like what I said about my mother.”

  “Did she see it?”

  “I apologized. More than a few times.”

  “That must have been an icky scene.”

  “Not as icky as the one with my father after that.”

  “So he was angry.”

  “Like I said, too much came out.”

  “I thought you said he didn’t like to talk about himself.”

  “He didn’t. He talked about me. He lectured me about me.”

  “And how did it feel to be lectured?”

  “I got a taste of my own medicine.”

  “Galling, I’m sure.”

  “You might have enjoyed seeing me get put in my place.” Strauss gave me a sad smile. “Should you still be working on that novel of yours—”

  “Of course I’m still working on it,” I said, although I had decided for the last time in the grocery store—or maybe even standing over Dodie’s open grave—that I was going to make good on my threats once and for all. I would trash the whole thing, start again, and prove that if I wanted to tell a true story, I really did have to get my heart broken—if not once, then many times over, and write about that. I would write about that.

  Strauss shifted in his chair. I could tell he was still uncomfortable with the prospect of Stop It Some More seeing the light of day. “Can I give you some advice about your novel?”

  “Maybe.”

  He hesitated, but only for a moment. “Based on what I learned this weekend, my advice is to use a pseudonym.”

  “I was contemplating that.”

  “And think—strongly—about being a little more subtle when you choose names for your characters.”

  I took up my knife and fork like they were weapons and lit into an onion. He kept on going. “Although you’d have plenty of material if you portrayed everyone the hopeless way they really are.”

  “Yes. I would. Wouldn’t I.”

  “But I forgot,” he said. “You don’t need a co-author.”

  “It’s good of you to remember,” I said, and popped the onion into my mouth.

  He looked like he was going to say something else. But he didn’t. We both looked away. This probably was the closest to pardon my stupidity, stubbornness, lies, hotheadedness, high-mindedness, self—righteousness, and promiscuity that either one of us ever would get. Unless we said it later.

  But what was going to happen later? I couldn’t even begin to think of it. For the past week I had been living backward. Just like a woman checking her calendar, again and again, to count back toward her last period, I had been counting backward to the day of Dodie’s death and thinking, Dodie’s been dead X number of days now. I knew I would be living in reverse for a while, whispering to myself, Dodie has been dead two weeks, three weeks, one month, and that was how it would keep on going, the time growing longer and longer, and the pain becoming more and more like a stone in your shoe that you got used to, because you were in public and had to keep up your demeanor and it would be impolite to bend down, take off your stinky loafer, and pull the stone out. So you suffered in silence.

  As I ate my vegetables and rice, I wished Strauss would lean over and take my hand. I wished he would get to the point—I wished we would get to the point—of why we were sitting there together eating every conceivable squash and root vegetable ever invented. I wished I could think of something—anything—to say, besides asking him if he wanted more to eat.

  “No, thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

  Then I said, “You look tired.” And I blushed.

  “I’m dead on my feet.” He also flushed, but at the word dead.

  “Coffee?” I asked. Suddenly I remembered the clobbered mugs Dodie gave me when I first moved to Ossining, hidden in the back of my cabinet, the gold inlay shining against the cobalt-blue background. I longed to take down those mugs and carefully wipe the dust off the rims with a clean dish towel. Only then would I be able to dust off my own voice, which felt thick in my throat whenever I thought of Dodie, and tell Strauss, “My cousin gave me these”—which would be the beginning of a long story he probably did not want to hear, but would gently invite me to tell anyway.

  After I thought of the cups, I remembered, to my discomfort, the first time Strauss came over to my apartment, when I tried to seduce him by luring him upstairs with the promise of a metaphorical cup of joe, and then I remembered that steaming hot cup of coffee I made for him the morning after we first made love and I fo
und out his father had survived the war by yanking gold out of corpses’ teeth. It was strange: I was sure he remembered something along the same lines. He pushed up his glasses. “Maybe a walk would do me more good,” he said. “Feel like a short walk, before it gets dark?”

  It already was dark. But maybe he, too, was thinking back toward last summer, when the sun seemed to stay high in the sky almost until the time we went to bed.

  “I’ll get your coat,” I said.

  I went back into the bedroom and took his jacket off the hanger. But something grabbed me inside—an onion-induced cramp in my stomach? Or a stitch in my soul?—and I had to sit down on the bed. I brought his jacket up to my face again, and the tweed felt like sandpaper scratching inside of me, wearing me down to pure dust, and I kept sitting there so long that when I finally looked up, I was startled and embarrassed to see him standing in the entrance of my bedroom, leaning against the doorjamb, watching me nuzzle his coat like someone with a fetish for Donegal wool.

  I stood up. “Oh, why did you come here?”

  He gave me a tired smile. “I wanted my tie back,” he said. “But now I see you’re set on keeping my jacket.”

  I clutched his coat against me and felt the speeding ticket crinkle in his pocket. “I’d rather keep you,” I said, in a hoarse voice that seemed to come from someone else.

  He blinked. To watch Strauss was like watching a child carefully consider his next move during a game of Simon Says or Red Rover. After a short silence, he dared to step forward and hold out his hand. We clasped our palms together, as if we had just been introduced.

  “Lisar,” he said.

  “Strauss,” I said. Then I grew sober. “God. Let me call you something else—”