Seven Deadly Pleasures

by Michael Aronovitz

  By the time he opened the front gate and pulled it shut behind him it was almost dark. Mr. Jarvis had given him the alarm code for the sake of emergencies, but that was a year and a half ago. He hoped the boss hadn't changed the combination.

  He walked past the red bay doors and rounded the corner of the building. The steel door to the shop had a small glass window with diamond wire inside it. There was no light coming through it, and the overhead halogen in the back parking area was off. Good. Sometimes Joey Sanantonio liked to stay late and tinker with his vintage Camaro out under the corrugated overhang so he could save money on garage space. Tonight he had cut out at closing with the rest of them.

  Evan took a last look around. There were dark row houses behind the building and a high back wall made of cinderblock with razor twine curled in at the top. A dirt plot choked with weeds and occupied by a couple of arrow boards they tried to rent to PennDOT every now and again sat to the left, and the power station across from the front lot was dark and quiet for all but a nearly inaudible hum. He could smell someone burning trash. He opened the door, disarmed the alarm, and turned on the back office light by the head mechanic's work area. The dull glow made long shadows come off the plastic invoice trays, the red repair bins stacked in steel racks anchored to the wall, the calendar with the girl in blue jean shorts and work boots posing in front of a miter saw, the row of bench tools neatly arranged on the wooden slab. He reached over for the Metabo four-and-a-half-inch grinder and flipped it over. It had an eighth-inch cutting wheel on it. OK. So now he would have to go into the first aisle and get a grinding wheel as well as the other stuff. He grabbed a flashlight and went out into the warehouse.

  When he returned to the bench he set down a jigsaw with a metal cutting blade, a four-and-a-half-inch grinding wheel, some rivets, a handful of number twelve self-drilling screws, and a fourteen-inch diamond blade still in the cardboard. He unpacked it. He put it in the bench vice. He reached across for the mallet and a file with a thin end on it. He started knocking off the segments. They were only good for concrete. When he had a bare edge, he put on a pair of goggles and plugged in the grinder.

  After burning up three abrasive wheels and trashing seven jigsaw blades, he was ready for welding. He went out by the forklifts and approached the scrap pile to the side of a pallet of generators. He found a length of two-inch-wide pipe that was about five and a half feet long. He brought it to the shop and got back to work.

  By the time Evan pulled up in front of his apartment the moon was at its highest point, and some DJ was talking about how you could do late night radio in your underwear with a fifth of Jack Daniels by your elbow without management ever knowing it. Evan shut off the car, gathered his stuff, and went up the short stairway. He entered his small foyer and left the lights off. He didn't need them anymore.

  ***

  "Hey, ma."

  "Why ain't you at work? It's eight o'clock in the morning."

  "I called out. I had to take care of some things. Did I wake you?"

  "I was doing a crossword puzzle. What kind of things?"

  "Shopping."

  "What, do you need money?"

  "No, ma. I'm good."

  "What's that mean, you're good? You want to talk to your father?"

  "What's he doing home?"

  "His back went out again."

  "Naw, that's OK. Tell him not to believe everything he hears."

  "What's that mean?"

  "I love ya, ma."

  "What?"

  "Dad needs new glasses. Last time I was over I saw him squinting at everything."

  "Hey, are you sick or something?"

  "Bye, ma."

  Evan Leonard Shaw looked around his apartment. He hadn't slept. He didn't remember not sleeping, but had no recollection of lying down. He had no recollection of anything.

  His fingers were aching.

  His tubes, solvents, hog's hair brushes, and pallets were littered across the black dining room table that he bought two years ago at IKEA. The red canvas director's chairs that went with the long black table were shoved in his coat closet along with his down comforter, his four pillows, five trophies (one back from his nine-year-old little league team, The Angels), and thirty-seven novels that had recently shared space with the trophies on the set of inlaid shelves by the fake fireplace. There was paint on the bed sheets. Lengthwise, there was now a pair of eyes, a bulb nose, and a grin. The forehead was cut off by the rectangular limitation, but the tongue was continued down the side of the bed so it could spill out onto the carpet.

  The inlaid shelves, those that had been one of the primary reasons he took the place for such a high monthly, were now bare. They helped form a picture of a clown-giant as if seen from under water, huge balloon-like feet across the bottom, then legs with ruffles at the knees, all pyramiding up the slats like waves until the head was but a dot on the front edge of the top mantle.

  The exposed bottoms of the pots hanging off the rack in the kitchen were covered with dots and smears. At first it looked like random, yet somehow organized, paint splatter. From the stove five feet away, however, it was a close-up smiling Bozo, red hair burst to the sides, wide eyes, and a grin that stretched along the bottom frying pans. From the dishwasher at the far edge of the space, then, the nose became a medal hanging around the neck of a hairless clown wearing a chef's hat and flipping red pizzas. In the bathroom, there were clowns riding bicycles on the three sections of mirror, but when the two outer pieces folded out, the reflections joined to make a smiling elephant clown that turned into a frowning hippo clown if the angle was altered a fraction of an inch.

  The television was on, its screen painted over in thick strokes that formed a smiling clown with silver dollar blush dots on his cheeks. The inside of the mouth and the eyeballs were not painted in, so the moving images beneath made it seem as if he was communicating with the wall clowns across from him. They wore striped shirts, suspenders, and white flood pants and they were painted on either side of the stereo unit, each with a sledgehammer raised in the ready position. The rest of the collage filled the balance of the wall space, one portrait bleeding into the next. There were clowns with big bow ties and clowns with red smiles. There were clowns with checkered bibs, and clowns that were pouting. There were Fedora hats and police hats, and little British hats, and pirate hats perched on bald heads, and heads with wooly hair sticking out over the ears. There were fat clowns and thin clowns, and clowns with teeth and clowns with mini-trumpets that had little rubber squeeze bulbs on the ends.

  He did not recall painting them.

  They stared at him and he knew what to do.

  He went to the bathroom and got out his beard trimmer. He removed the comb-head attachment. He shaved off his eyebrows and then used his razor to erase the stubble. Then he began to remove the hair above his ears. First, he had white-walls, then a Mohawk, then a burr. He picked up the razor for the second time. When he was finished, he started painting again. They wouldn't even see him coming.

  ***

  The clown strutted down Lancaster Avenue, and when he passed the college kids who spilled out of the Subway sandwich shop, all four of them cheered.

  "You da man!" Andy Pressman called. He was a sophomore, philosophy major, buzz cut, wire frames, head shaped like an egg. He was known to cross his legs, click his pen up by his ear, and in the silkiest of tones deconstruct whatever paradigm the professor had just spent a half hour building in seminar. Even his friends admitted that they thought he liked to hear the sound of his own voice too much. Tonight, he was dressed up for the Halloween party as a cowboy. He'd borrowed the Stetson and the brown chaps from a techie in the theater department. He had just eaten two large Italian hoagies. There was going to be grain punch with dry ice in it, and he didn't want to party on an empty stomach.

  Mandy Rivers was wearing a black leotard. She had straight strawberry blonde hair, funny teeth, and an ass that had gotten a bit bigger this semester. Too many late nights reading for
her Modern American Lit. survey course, and too many jumbo bags of peanut M & M's to get her through. She was wearing cat ears and had drawn whisker lines on her cheeks. She had painted the end of her tiny, upturned nose silver with product from a cheap makeup kit that she picked up at the Acme, and she tried not to think about how badly it itched.

  Terry Murphy, the Murph monster, had gone the economical route. He had on a corduroys blazer, jeans, and a cap. He had drawn in a square, black moustache above his lip, and around his waist was a wire stuck through a potato hanging in front of his crotch. On his back there was a sign that read "The Dictator."

  Rachel Silverstein surprised them all. Throughout the semester she had always worn baggy army pants, oversized sweatshirts, and dark black eye makeup. Real Emo, for all but a mane of curly brown hair that would have made any female country singer jealous. A lot of kids thought she had an eating disorder. Tonight, she was wearing a nun's habit, a tight halter top, and black hot pants. Skinny yes, but all legs, hips, and muscle. Andy Pressman couldn't take his eyes off her.

  Except when the clown strutted by. That got everyone's attention. The four partiers spilled out onto the street to cheer. Mandy held up her bottle of Deerpark spiked with vodka and spilled a bit on her pink ballet slippers. Across Lancaster Avenue a group of suits elbowed each other and laughed out loud, while a woman wearing ear buds, a fanny pack, and a sun visor turned her baby carriage around, squatted, and pointed.

  Later, Andy Pressman would tell the police that the dude was born to be a clown. He was made for it. He was lanky and humorous. He was strutting and swaggering. He would take two steps forward, and one step back. He would prance in circles and wave to onlookers. He did the "Farmer-John-Doe-See-Doe" thing with his elbows, yuck, yuck, and made all the exaggerated facial expressions. He had his entire head painted bright white. He had a Charlie Chaplin hat about half the size of his bald crown cocked to one side. There were blue brow-arches painted all the way up to the top of his forehead. He had black liner around his eyes and they made big teardrop shapes at the outer edges. He had a red nose ball that honked when he squeezed it and fake ears that were about nine inches long. He had on a green and red jumpsuit, Christmas colors, with buttons shaped like horseshoes.

  And of course, he had that sick executioner's axe. It was humongous, with a five-foot handle and a fourteen-inch blade cut in a half moon. It was covered with crinkled tin foil, as if there was cardboard or something like that underneath, and it had a red ribbon tied around the shank in a big bow.

  He was the scary clown, perfect for the Halloween party in the McDonald's next door.

  When asked why he followed the clown, Pressman said that he saw something strange. When the dude passed by, Andy noticed that there was a small rip in the tin foil on the blade of the play-axe. But the material underneath the rip was smooth silver, not cardboard brown.

  When asked what he saw when the clown entered the McDonald's, Andy Pressman took off his wire-framed glasses and rubbed his eyes too hard. A bit of saliva bubbled at the corners of his mouth. He said that before the doors shut behind the dude, he could hear the screams of children. The scary clown-thing, you know? Then, through the dark windows sectioned off by those three-by-three white borders, he saw the guy raise up the axe and bring it down in a rush. It flashed. It seemed as if he split a white-haired lady straight in two, forehead to crotch. Pressman thought he may have even caught a glimpse of the inside of her head for a second, marbled T-bone steak in a half-shell kind of thing, as she was turned sideways on one leg and the other half fell away into the shadows like a domino. Or maybe it was a trick of the light. It was really hard to see anything with the angle and the glare of the low sun. Then Andy had hustled back to the sandwich shop to dial 911.

  His cowboy hat was now behind his head, the rubber band stuck under his Adam's apple. He rubbed his nose on his index finger and then asked the cop if anyone made it.

  Officer Scott McMullins went under his cap with his pen and scratched his forehead.

  "After we put him down we found four," he said. "Three employees who hid behind a deep fryer, and a six-year-old girl dressed like a fairy godmother. Like you said, son, he was born for this."

  He looked down at his notebook in a quick review.

  "Is there anything else you saw, son?"

  Pressman shrugged.

  "Not really. Just a flash of something, like afterimage. I'm waiting for it to fade, but I don't think it ever will."

  "What exactly?"

  Andy Pressman looked off toward a picture of Ryan Howard in front of a Philly cheese steak on the wall by the restrooms. His usual honey voice was shocked and dull.

  "After he did the old lady, I watched through those windows for an extra second before I ran. I saw them all trying to get away. And for a second they didn't look like people anymore. They were bristling all over each other, like bugs when you upend a rock in the woods." He looked Officer McMullins in the eye. "He made me forget all the stuff that we pack on to make ourselves into complicated geniuses. He forced me to revisit the fact that we all urinate like dogs no matter what kind of fancy porcelain we make the bowls out of. He reminded me that we hate for no reason, and shit on each other more often than we pause to offer one of those 'how ya doin's' that we don't really mean."

  Pressman got up.

  "He tricked my eyes, don't you see? Just for a moment, he made me look at kids and grandparents as if they were a swarming disease."

  He walked to the exit and stopped. Talked to the wall.

  "Then he erased them, and I'll never forgive myself."

  He pushed through the door and the little bell at the top tinkled in a small fanfare that followed his exit into the night.

  Passive Passenger

  She was starting in again, and he was well used to it after all these years. Same old tapes played over and again. It was all because he never got that doctorate. He couldn't finish the thesis, and his mere master's in mechanical engineering translated to thirty years of community college work. The pay had been OK, but they'd raised the boys amongst neighbors who were better off. It was not the way of life Dorothy had pictured when she married the number two ranked student overall, first in the sciences, from Brooklyn's Washington Academy and Technical Institute for Boys. Grainy memories from the black-and-white days before the Beatles. She must have thought he would clean up in government work. He preferred the classroom. When they moved to Broomall Pennsylvania for his assistant professorship at Delaware County Community College, she stopped caring about the ins and outs of Melvin's contributions to society. When he failed to complete the Nova doctoral thesis in 1983, she assigned him the back den by the bathroom as sleeping quarters. Melvin had no real argument for this. She'd backed the wrong pony, and now they were limping toward the finish line in their golden years.

  Melvin pulled the damp towel a bit tighter under his bloated paunch. The towel was cranberry red, with flower designs on it. He disliked the towel. It was a cheap, short towel that did not absorb the water well. Seemed to run moisture across the skin, leaving a sheen. Dorothy had picked out the towels. She picked out everything. She demanded to do so, and hated Melvin for the drudgery of the responsibility. She cloaked her hate in a mask of annoyance that boasted only slightly blunter fangs. The mask had dug itself in permanently. Her eyes were shock blue, and red at the edges. Her hair looked like a perm, but had taken on the hard consistency of old steel wool. She was very skinny, and the veins on the back of her hands were raised like gorged bloodworms. She had not aged well. Neither had Melvin. He had a nesting of bags under his eyes, thinning hair falling in limp strands over his ears, and pipe-stem arms.

  He had goose bumps. It was cold in the hallway. The wallpaper just above Dorothy's head, in the catty-corner between Brian's old room and the bathroom, was starting to curl down at the top edge. It was an ancient, peach-colored wallpaper with a repeated copy of some Impressionist painting of men with bowler hats, tuxedos, and canes. The decorative scheme
put the figures in alternating poses both upside down and right side up. Dorothy's taste for a dizzying show-tune world of ladies and gentlemen. Melvin vaguely remembered helping Dorothy pick out the pattern, some time in the early nineties when Douglas was still in middle school learning to play the clarinet that he would give up soon after (he much preferred smoking pot, listening to The Stone Temple Pilots on volume ten, and masturbating for what seemed like hours on end). Melvin dimly recalled shopping with Dorothy when he had lab books to grade, shopping with a smile at the Wallpaper Plus that sat next to the Dress Barn, next to the Kids Cuts, next to the Blockbuster Video. Back then, Melvin had been good at acting interested in wallpaper, and knowing which designs to keep hesitant about. He knew just how long to play hard to get, and then zone in on Dorothy's real first choice. He knew that she knew he was faking interest, and he had long lost the talent to play that particular clarinet, so to speak. It had been a slow process of intricate, quiet protest to convince Dorothy that their little illusions had truly worn down, but that moral victory led to constant, explosive confrontations. The price for the breath of freedom. And he well knew he would somehow be blamed for this current curling in the corner of the ceiling. This unexpectedly raised up an old, helpless anger in him, and he swallowed it. Dorothy always won those things. She was just too darned fast.

  "Move over, Mel. I've got to get in there."

  "OK."

  "You slept in again."

  "I know, but it's the weekend."

  "It's almost nine o'clock!" Melvin looked down.

  "I know."

  "Comb your hair."

  Melvin brushed the lock that had fallen across his cheek back over his bald spot. She pushed past, and her voice snapped from behind the door.

  "Wipe off the sink after you shave, Melvin. We discussed this."

  "OK."

  "And call the plumber today. That rattling heater kept me up all night."