“Will it grow back?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “No,” she answered mournfully. “Once it’s gone, it’s gone. And that really ... I mean, the human frame really is fearfully made, isn’t it?”
“Liza, it’s only a nail,” Eli interjected pragmatically.
Liza, having become lost in the minute examination of her toe, appeared not to have heard him. “The doctor says I should scrub it with Bon Ami once a week to keep it smooth. Isn’t that disgusting?”
“At least you’ve still got your toe. Remember Charlie Eccleston, who only had half the fingers on his left hand? That is, half of each finger,” he specified for my benefit. “Frostbite, dear.”
“It all makes me think of my grandmother,” said Liza. “I remember that whenever I came to visit her in the city, and we passed a beggar on the street, she’d say—I don’t know why, because it had nothing to do with Confucius—she’d put on this fake Chinese voice, and say, ‘Confucius say, I cried because I met a man who had no shoes, and then I met a man who had no feet.’ The point of which, I suppose, was that because for every person we encountered who was badly off, there was someone else who was worse off, we didn’t need to give anything to the beggar. But it never made sense. I mean, not to have shoes—that’s economics, isn’t it? That’s poverty. Whereas not to have feet—well, for all we knew the man who had no feet was rich, he could have been born without feet. Or lost them in a water-skiing accident. I ask you, why should I have felt more sorry for him than for the poor shoeless beggar?”
“Liza, you’re so funny!” Amy interjected, clapping her hands together (and this was the only comment she made on the subject worth repeating).
I tried to interpolate, here, an anecdote of my own, about a girl I’d known in high school who never wore shoes and had written a poem called “Summer Is a Stillborn Child,” but Liza ignored me.
“I mean, if no one took the trouble to give the poor beggar a pair of shoes, he’d probably step on a rusty nail, or get frostbite, like poor Charlie Eccleston, and then he wouldn’t have any feet or any shoes, would he?”
“More fundamentally than that, if you don’t have feet, you don’t need shoes,” added Eli, who was inclined to a metaphysical view of things.
Leaning against her brick wall, Liza took another drag from the joint. Clearly the toenail had been forgotten. And yet I could see her mind racing: already she was planning a story, already, in her mind, all the stick figures in this little fable—the grandmother, the shoeless beggar, the footless millionaire—were taking on heft and detail.
Often, on these afternoons—as in Proust, on Madame Verdurin’s Wednesdays, Morel might play his violin, or Russian dancers might perform an excerpt from Scheherazade—Liza would read aloud to us from the novel on which she was at work. This was the chief difference between her and her Parisian counterparts: she liked to perform as much as to host. Her novel, as she had explained it to me, was about a young woman trying to come to terms with her lesbian longings. Although I hadn’t read any of it, I’d already heard her recite several chapters, in the strangely incantatory, even bardic tone—utterly unlike her ordinary light contralto—that she adopted on such occasions, as if to lend to her prose an atmosphere of gravity and pathos.
This afternoon, she prefaced her reading by announcing that she had decided to go back on her earlier resolution (which she had told me about after Sam Stallings’s party) to change the novel’s point of view from first person to third person; for though this resolution, she said, had been arrived at as a consequence of a genuinely artistic impulse (the desire to “open up the narrative” so that it could include the perspective of Joseph, the boyfriend whom the heroine, Lydia, ultimately leaves for another girl), in the end it had only led her up a blind alley, which was why she was now resolved to tackle the story afresh from Lydia’s point of view. This announcement delighted Eli, who had from the beginning attributed the decision to Sada’s nefarious influence, which he saw it as his duty to oppose. “Oh Liza, that’s wonderful,” he cried, letting go of me, and kissing her. “Believe me, it’ll be a great novel now.”
Though Liza may have liked praise more than any human being I have ever met, she became curiously reticent, even shy when actually receiving it. “Really? Do you think so?” she asked, her cheeks, already crimson where Eli had kissed her, flushing a little.
“Oh, yes,” he answered emphatically.
Tumbling down the loft ladder—nearly tripping on the bottom rung—Liza picked up a sheaf of manuscript pages and started to read. In the chapter she chose, Lydia describes her initiation into the pleasures of Sapphic love at the hands of Gin, who has “a tongue like a darting flame.” Lydia’s voice is comic. Liza’s, on the contrary, resembled that of a cantor; its rhythms, though melodic, bore no relation to those of the story, which she seemed not so much to be reciting as channeling. Like a catatonic, she rocked. Eli squeezed my hand tighter at the best lines. As for Amy, on her small canine face she wore an expression of raptness, almost of ecstasy, as if she wanted to convey to Liza the degree to which—despite her much avowed heterosexuality—this seduction scene was really turning her on. Indeed, when Liza finished the chapter, it was Amy who jumped to her feet first. “It’s great!” she chimed. “It’s engaging! And more than that, it’s hot!”
Liza blushed. “You really liked it? You’re not making it up?”
“Of course not,” Amy said.
“It was terrific,” Ethan echoed. “Some of the best writing you’ve done.”
“I loved it,” Eli affirmed.
“I’m really grateful to you all for listening,” Liza concluded modestly. “But now the thing that’s worrying me—because of my decision to go back to first person—is whether The Island of Misfit Toys is really the right tide, whether it strikes the proper chord.”
“I don’t see why it shouldn’t,” I said.
“Were you thinking of another tide?”
“Not really. I mean, I do have another tide in mind—but then again it’s a tide I’ve been wanting to use for years, and never found the right story for, and it really doesn’t have any bearing on this one: Under the Weather."
“That’s nice,” said Eli.
“Maybe there’s someplace where you could incorporate the idea behind the tide into the text,” suggested Amy, “such as—well, for example, does Lydia at any point get the flu?”
“I like tides that have two meanings,” I said, “one literal and the other suggestive.”
“Maybe I could insert something,” Liza mused, “you know, some passage in which Lydia thinks about the implications of the phrase ‘under the weather.’”
“What about The Quick-Change Artist}" suggested Eli, referring to a tide that he himself had proposed—and that Liza had rejected—months earlier.
She ignored him.
“What about A History of Hands?” I proffered, a tide I had derived from a line she had just read.
A History of Hands, however, Liza didn’t like either. “It’s too poeticky,” she complained, suppressing a yawn, for she was growing bored with the topic of titles. “No, in the end I suppose I’ll probably stick to The Island of Misfit Toys,” she said conclusively, then, turning to the little television (which, though muted for the reading, had been left on), shouted, “Oh, who is Grandma Moses?” For in the interval Wheel of Fortune had segued into Jeopardy!, which meant that it was past seven. “The time!” Liza suddenly cried, like the White Rabbit. “I’ll be late to meet Jessica!” And, leaping to her feet, she started the water running in her tiny bathtub. Ethan and Amy got up and put on their coats, as did Eli, for though normally Liza liked us to stay a little longer than the others, tonight was one of his teaching nights, and he was in a rush.
“Good-bye, dear one,” he said, kissing her on the cheek.
“Good-bye,” she answered vaguely, too caught up in her ablutions (not to mention her abstracted eagerness to see Jessica) even to be aware, in any real way, that he was
leaving. “Typical Liza,” he complained when we were out on the street. “The minute there’s the possibility of pussy, she’s off and running.”
We returned to his apartment, where he put on what he called his “teaching suit,” then took the subway together to his Brooklyn campus. As usual Eli had entreated me not to bother accompanying him, which was very nice but finally pointless. In my eagerness to share every aspect of his life I no longer enjoyed being alone; indeed, whenever I returned to that high-rise apartment in which I now lived only nominally, I became instantly disoriented. Just as in childhood, when I had sometimes suspected that nothing except my perception was real, that when my back was turned all the facets of the world except those I was momentarily experiencing folded into one another, like the panels of a fan, so an opposite anxiety would seize me, and I would worry lest in the absence of Eli’s responses and reactions—which seemed alone to vouchsafe my existence—I should discover that I had no identity at all.
Of course, by giving in to this fear I also made it real: by grabbing and holding on to Eli, as once kings had kidnapped and held on to those Venetian glassmakers who possessed the secret recipe for mirrors, I ceded to him the power to corroborate my very reality. In this way the thing I feared losing through sex—that kernel of selfhood, which I imagined might slip away as inexorably as my mother’s diamond down the bathtub drain—I ended up losing through love.
So we went to school, where I waited for him in the cafeteria, drinking Diet Coke and watching as behind the steam table a cook in a dirty apron halfheartedly rotated the hamburgers and hot dogs in their moat of grease. Eli's class lasted an hour; then the door clicked open, and a low burble of voices sounded, within which I could easily distinguish his curious, cracking baritone. The sound of the door was my signal to leap up and run to where he stood amid the throng of his admiring pupils, at which point we would ride down in the elevator, cozily ensconced amid the chatter of women, the smells of perfume and wool coats. “Good-bye, Mr. Aronson!” the students would cry happily on the street. “See you next week!” And, parting from us, they would disappear in a dozen different directions, after which we would head into the subway, Eli telling me everything that had gone on that night, how Maria Hernández had explained worriedly that she had “comma splice” (as if “comma splice” were some medical condition, to be corrected by surgery) and Evensha Hopkins—a Brooklyn girl and his favorite—had offered a brilliant response to last week’s exercise.
“Listen to this. I gave them the old ‘point of view’ assignment—you know, ‘tell the same story from two points of view’—and this is what she turned in.”
Two Points of View
by Evensha Hopkins
Point of View One:
The other day my friend Josie’s boyfriend beat her up so bad she ended up in the hospital. When we went to see her, her eyes were swollen. She could hardly open them. It was very sad.
Point of View Two:
Speaking of this same Josie, I happen to know that the week before her boyfriend beat her up she beat him up twice as bad. He wasn’t a creep. He was just evening the score.
“Isn’t that amazing?” asked Eli. “I mean, with this exercise, usually it’s just, ‘My daughter, she’s such a brat,’ ‘My mother, she’s such a cow.’” He smiled. “It’s the miracle of teaching women like this—if you can only tap into it, they’ve got so much to tell!”
“You’re a good teacher,” I said, which he was—better than Liza, who had a bad habit of lecturing too much; better than I; better, perhaps, even than Stanley Flint. “So what would you call the two points of view?”
“I don’t know. The naive and the informed?” But by now the train had arrived at his station. We got out. In his apartment the little red light on the answering machine was blinking. “Five messages!” Eli said. “But how could I have gotten five messages? I’ve only been away a couple of hours.”
Sitting at his desk, he began to play the messages back. The first was from Liza. “Eli, where are you?” she implored, “I’ve got to talk to you. Please, please call me as soon as you get back. I’m at home. Bye.”
Eli stopped the machine for an instant. “What’s she doing at home?” he asked. “She’s supposed to be with Jessica.”
He played the second message. “Eli, where are you? It’s me. Please, if you’re screening calls, pick up. It’s urgent ... Oh well, I guess you’re still teaching ... Well, call me as soon as you get back.”
Third message: “Why aren’t you back? I need to talk to you!” (This last sentence was delivered almost as a rebuke.)
Fourth message: “I need to talk to you. Call me.”
Fifth message: a dial tone.
Without a word Eli picked up the phone and punched out Liza’s number. It was busy. I ordered Chinese food to be delivered. “Why don’t you eat dinner and call her afterwards?” I suggested when it arrived.
“I guess you’re right,” Eli agreed, and sat down with me at his little table. Even as he ate, however, he kept looking over his shoulder at the telephone, getting up, and trying her number again.
Finally I threw my fork down dramatically. “I don’t see why you’re even bothering to pretend to have dinner with me,” I said, “when obviously you’d rather be at the telephone dialing Liza’s number obsessively, over and over.”
“I’m sorry,” Eli said, “I know it’s not very polite ... it’s just, that tone in her voice ...”
“But if she’s so desperate to talk to you, why is the line always busy?”
“Probably she’s talking to someone else. That’s how Liza is, when she’s suffering, she has to talk. She’d even talk to the lady at the Korean grocers if there was no one else around. My suspicion,” he added, “is that she had a fight with Jessica.”
“So?”
“Well, in that case I’m the only person who can help her.” He smiled. “I’m her best friend ... You don’t understand, you never have, you haven’t known us long enough.”
Again he walked to the phone and dialed. This time she answered. “Liza,” he said.
Getting up from the table, I started packing the leftover food and putting it into the refrigerator. From Eli’s expression, from the way he repeated the words “It’s okay, it’s okay” into the receiver, in the tranquilizing tone of the policeman trying to talk the suicide off the ledge, I was able to deduce without difficulty what Liza must have been saying. Nor did the possibility that she and Jessica might have broken up in any way make me feel sorry for her; instead it made me worried for myself.
Finally Eli hung up. “What’s wrong?” I asked from the refrigerator.
He was already reaching for his coat. “Jessica’s gone back to Peggy,” he said hurriedly. From atop the desk he picked up his watch and wallet, then searched for his keys, which were next to the answering machine. “I’ve got to go. I’m sorry.”
“But why?”
“Because she asked me to.”
“But can’t you go in the morning?” I pleaded, suddenly grasping the reality—more terrible, now that it was imminent, than it had ever been in theory—that Eli was actually intending to leave me. “I mean, you haven’t even finished dinner.”
“I know.” He took my face in his hands. “And you’re sweet to worry. But this is an emergency. Liza’s hysterical.”
“But she’s got other friends, you said so yourself. God knows she was on the phone with them long enough.”
“They don’t count. It’s me she wants.”
“But you count for me too.”
“I’ve got to run. I’m sorry, Martin, I’ll call you as soon as I can, within the hour. Stay here if you want.”
“Eli—”
Kissing me hurriedly, he left. Through the open door I gaped after him. “Do you want me to come with you?” I shouted down the stairwell, in the depths of which I could hear footsteps echoing.
“Better if you stay here,” a distant voice called, a voice that hardly sounded like Eli’s at al
l.
Then a door slammed. He was gone.
I stepped back inside. It was the first time I’d ever been alone in Eli’s apartment. Now, in his absence, all that furniture that spoke so elo-quently of him—of his fondnesses, his predilections, even his occasional descents into bad taste—seemed to be laughing at me; it was poignant and hostile at the same time, like a cat that, missing its owner, urinates in the shoes of the friend who has volunteered to take care of it in his absence. Noticing a pair of dirty socks that Eli had dropped idly by the dresser, I picked them up. When we were together I never dared clean up after him, in case he should interpret my efforts as an interfering, if motherly, reprimand. Tonight, however, in my need for some activity with which to fill the void his sudden departure had created, I decided that if I cleaned the entire apartment, which was in a sorry state, perhaps when he got back, Eli would be grateful. So I washed all the dishes that over the last few days had collected in the sink. I made the bed. I put away L'Amour Bleu and plumped the futon, which was starting to droop off its wooden frame. Finally I swept the floor, and would even have vacuumed Eli’s threadbare carpet had I not feared that the noise of the vacuum cleaner might drown out the ringing of the phone.
Then—cleaned out, as it were—I sat down and looked at the clock. Only twenty minutes had passed since Eli’s departure—twenty minutes! But it had seemed an eternity. The more sensible part of me knew that the best course of action would be simply to sit tight, watch television or read until he called, which he’d promised to do within the hour. And yet in such situations it is rare that only one voice speaks up within the mind. Indeed, at that moment, even as the first voice (the voice of reason) was urging patience, a second voice, both louder and more militant, had entered the fray, insisting that patience was pointless and that the time had come to act, if not for Eli’s sake, then for my own. For no matter how bitterly he might inveigh, in her absence, against Liza’s arrogance and selfishness, nonetheless it was obvious that she still exercised a formidable hold over him. And from this hold it was my duty to wrest him free, in order to prove to him that unlike Liza—who looked upon him merely as a convenience, a crutch to throw aside until the moment when, finding herself suddenly bereft of Jessica’s “tongue like a darting flame,” she telephoned in outrage to demand the return of her property—I really loved him.
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