She only allowed herself to smile and just for a second, though she was legitimately and mightily amused. Why was he telling her this? Because he was so stupid—or so indifferent to his job—that he didn’t care about the consequences? Could he tell she was crazy and homebound (she hadn’t combed her hair or put on any makeup) and that no one would ever believe what she said (as if he’d opened up for laughs to a lunatic screaming curse words in the street)? Or was he so sensitive, being an actor and all, that he could see that they were kindred spirits, both made to play parts they did not want, for which they had not auditioned, and from which they longed to be released? She wanted to believe the latter.
“I know what you mean,” she said. Then, to young it up: “I hear you.”
“Good. So, again, I’m sorry. I’ll try to, you know, do the delivery bit better next time.”
He said “bit” as if, yes, it was just part of a performance, one for which he had (somewhat unfairly, he thought) been criticized and which he would begrudgingly and half-heartedly work to improve.
He looked into her eyes, held the look longer this time—or maybe she just let him linger—and, unless she was crazy (which she knew she kind of was), she thought he meant to do more than just deliver her mail: he would, by knowing her, free them both.
The next day, Lee learned he was on mail duty again (she had called down to the desk on a pretext, heard his voice in the background as he coarsely kibitzed this time with a house painter). She listened for the sound of the mail landing before her neighbours’ doors, the placement of the letters today tender and not tough, as gentle as a touch to someone’s cheek or to a forehead to take a temperature. When she heard the feathery brush of a bill—probably—down near her welcome mat, Lee whipped her door open grandly, as if indeed making an entrance on that stage the doorman said he always stood upon, whether employed as an actor or not.
“Yes?” he said.
Oddly, he didn’t seem to recognize her or was only being courteous—and confused, for his eyes glanced at the number on her door to confirm that it was hers.
Should she be hurt, she wondered? She’d make sure this time that her hair was settled, her pale skin covered by foundation; did she look that different, had she looked that much worse the other day?
“Hi,” he said, pleasant and impersonal. “How’s it going?”
Then Lee’s eyes moved as well, to a mirror on the wall in her vestibule. She saw the cause of his perplexity and felt the start and swift growth of her own.
In the glass, there was another woman, one a few years older—pretty, freckled, heavy, not in an unattractive way, her hair bright red, dressed in a provocative manner, her shiny blouse cut low, her spangled jeans tight. She was very different from the woman Lee had seen reflected earlier, who had been slight, pretty if you paid attention (her mother’s words), her hair dirty blonde or mousy brown (if you were trying to be nice or not), her clothes a shapeless T-shirt she’d kept since college over sweatpants: herself, in other words.
Yet this was her, too, now: she certainly saw out from this new woman as she might from a Halloween mask, the way she sometimes viewed the world from her usual self when she was feeling most distant and detached, when she felt like a floating consciousness contained in somebody but connected to nothing. This feeling today was less hopeless, especially since she saw how the doorman reacted—purely physically checking her out, as the saying went, as he never had before.
“I’m—” She thought she ought to introduce herself, since that’s what he obviously wanted. Her voice was whispery in that Marilyn Monroe way. She remembered the actress’ name—her memory had improved, was more vibrant, like her hair, a contrast to Lee’s usual low, downbeat, almost miserable teenage boy-sounding tones. “I’m Lee’s sister . . . Angelique.”
The name just came to her: it sounded like a model or an actress, or a—it sounded like a perfume, that’s what, and no wonder: Lee could smell her own strong scent, different from the, okay, the nothing that she usually wore.
“Well,” he said, meaning, well, well, well, who do we have here? And “Hello,” this word a welcome for a new and wonderful opportunity.
She asked him in—this was what Angelique would do—and he accepted, after a surreptitious glance down the hall and then down at the letters still in his hand, which he a moment later had placed not very carefully on her front hall bookcase as she shut the door, some poor person’s postcard dropping and sliding forever beneath her standing lamp.
“Are you from out of town?” he asked.
She made up something: yes, from Chicago, a city that seemed as hearty and instinctive as Angelique. They engaged in other small talk, much smaller than anything she as Lee and he had made. The doorman seemed particularly suave and adept at this (“Chicago—now there’s a city”) and Lee realized that he, too, was playing a new part now: he was no longer a doorman or even an aspiring actor, but a dapper, lupine lover who thought nothing of interrupting his afternoon in such a way with such a woman. Angelique was his distaff edition, his partner in crime, or better yet, his co-star.
“Want some wine?” she improvised and he, of course, said, “Yes.”
The small talk and the drinking continued until at a certain point she stopped them both. Suddenly, his mouth looked to her like a beautiful red and white seashell: would she hear the ocean if she put her ear to it? She wished to find out.
Lee as Angelique knew exactly what to do, for she had done it many times before: the way to wetly probe his tongue with hers, then push it until it pushed back—or didn’t (his did); how to intertwine their tongues, as if her initial action had been intended to inspire camaraderie (the way one playfully smacks someone else’s shoulder until the smackee either gets enraged or becomes aware that it’s a joke, an aggressive greeting to mask genuine affection, and wraps his arm around the other); then to bite lightly at his tongue, as if to say, don’t trust me entirely, I’m no softie, no matter how soft I may have seemed a second earlier.
That led again without any awkwardness—expertly—to the rest of it: her undoing his uniform and everything else, even her—for she was more experienced than he, imagine that—touching and kissing, picking up and placing his parts (his hand and his penis) onto and inside her. It came as easily as other things, doing the dishes, driving—not to make it sound casual or inconsiderate, but they were all things she had learned to do when younger and now needed no more help to do, had been okay doing by herself for years.
When he had opened her clothes—or she had opened them for him, or had helped him open them—there was so much more of her to see now. He had the reaction she hoped he would—“So much, so gorgeous”; he didn’t stay silent in a way that meant he wasn’t pleased by her appearance and was too polite and too prideful to lie. In fact, he seemed pleasantly—excitedly—surprised, and she understood, for she was surprised to see herself, too.
In bed, she controlled him, sent signals from beneath him, supervised him in a sense with her hips, hands, and sex—once more with confidence. (Lee remembered an article she’d read once that said women always really make the first move—not men—by the way they sit or look or speak to someone. It gave her a new way to understand aggression, and now she knew that this power went beyond just inviting someone’s attentions all the way to controlling the actual event once things moved along—though she soon learned the limits of her new power as, shaking and shouting out, he finished immediately, no matter how much she tried to impose order. She accepted this with her new worldliness: it was their first time together and he was young, after all.)
He fell beside her (“Thank God,” he whispered; she didn’t want to know why), and she watched him now as she had the whole time: partly from outside her new self, her older sister (why had she said that, for God’s sake; she was an only child), and partly from within the experience.
“You’re a woman,” he said appreciatively, meaning, she guessed, a re
al one, and what a one.
“I am,” she said, imitating his grateful tone.
“That’s a gift. That’s rare.”
“Thanks. I’m—I had nothing to do with it.” And this was true—it wasn’t a joke, though that’s how he took it.
“Right,” he said and laughed. “Right.”
(She wondered: should she be upset at how quickly he had commingled with her sister after showing a slightly more nuanced interest in her? Then she remembered: she was, if anything, cheating on herself with him.)
“I better go,” he said, kissing her—seriously freckled, look at all of them—shoulder.
Lee didn’t join him at the door, just lay undressed above the covers in bed. She heard him fumbling with the mail again and opening the door.
“Bye,” she called quietly, affectionately, and thought she heard him answer. Then she fell into a sleep from which she eventually awoke as Lee, her body lighter, an hour and a half late for her afternoon pill. She luxuriated in the bed, secretly celebrating the freeing of herself from her stale and painful character, the expanding of her repertoire.
The next time she saw the doorman was two days later, after being awakened by the sound of a package being propped up and then crashing onto the floor in the hall, followed by a whispered but still audible curse. Lee cracked open her door and peeked out: she saw another door had opened across the way and a female neighbour was catching the doorman red-handed, carefully placing the (perhaps destroyed) package against the wall.
“Sorry,” Lee heard him say.
She was afraid he would go into his explanation—his only acting the part of doorman, a confidence she hoped had been reserved for her—and was relieved that he did not.
Still, he stayed at the door, 22F, for longer than an apology, speaking in low enough tones to be inaudible by Lee. (Was he playing the lover part again, an even worse infraction?) When Lee saw him leave, he did so with a smile and a discernible—what was the expression?—spring in his step.
Lee stood at her own open door long after her neighbour’s had been closed. She knew who this tenant was: an attractive young woman in her twenties who had recently moved in, seemingly anti-social or simply spoiled, who (obsessed with her iPod or speaking into a cell phone) never said hello or even smiled when Lee passed her while taking out the trash; who upon moving in had left her empty boxes in the hall for someone else to toss instead of walking the few steps to reach the garbage; whose parties had been loud, crowded, and filled with blaring music made by famous bands the names of which, to her frustration, her synapses blurred, Lee couldn’t recall.
Lee had resented the girl but now she hated her—not just for her youth, which of course accented her own retreat to an earlier generation (she was super-aware of her real age now, had pulled definitively away from identifying with those older), and not just because the doorman had flirted with the girl after probably breaking what she’d had delivered, but for a reason that had only just occurred to Lee right now, a crime of which she realized 22F was guilty.
In a second Lee found that she was walking on clomping feet across the hall. She didn’t stop banging on the other door until it opened.
“Yes?” Her neighbour already seemed impatient, though no words had been addressed to her (and were her tank top and short shorts the outfit she’d worn to greet the doorman? No wonder he’d gone away skipping).
“What’s the meaning of this?” Lee had no compunction about using the older person’s expression now; as she revealed her damaged pay envelope, the sound of her own voice, the deep and crackly aspect of it, stunned her.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The girl shifted uneasily onto one hip.
“Oh, I think you do, honey.”
Now 22F seemed a little rattled. “Look, sir—what’s the—please, who are you, anyway?”
Lee was made silent by the strange form of address. She glanced down at her own frame, caught sight of a paunchy male gut that jutted out in wide-fit jeans over feet wearing flip-flops. Trying to seem casual, she ran fingers through her hair—and found what little was left pushed forward, Caesar-style, to hide her baldness.
“I’m—” Lee became more aware of her voice, which cigarettes had turned raspy, though she’d only ever tried half of a friend’s Pall Mall in high school and only ever smoked dope twice. Swiftly, she spoke lines. “I’m . . . Roddy, the brother-in-law of Lee, down the hall.” She tapped contemptuously on the envelope’s address, half-hidden by the words “by accident.” “Though I bet you don’t even know her name, your own neighbour, do you, sweetheart?”
“Well—” The girl now seemed even younger, unprotected. “So what if I don’t? And so what if I opened that?” With a shaking hand, she gestured at the letter. “I gave it to the doorman and wrote that I was sorry, didn’t I?”
Lee had to admit it was true and so had no retort. She saw the girl back slightly away, to escape breath Lee smelled on herself was dipped in beer. She plunged ahead with the bellicosity that was apparently the stock in trade of Angelique’s blustery (and, she now knew, constantly cuckolded) husband, whom Lee had impulsively named after a wrestler she heard of once on TV.
“Well—just be more careful next time, okay?”
Deeply frightened, the girl closed the door. Lee stomped back down the hall to her home.
When she was safely locked inside, she glanced in the mirror—and saw her old female self, which looked if possible even less prepossessing than usual, in a purple sweatshirt painted with a puffin that she’d bought a decade earlier for ten dollars in Maine.
Eased by meds, Lee slept for much of the afternoon, exhausted by the thrill of changing shape, feeling the fatigue some patients experience after surgery to impose or remove things from inside them. Hours (or minutes, or days) later, she was revived by a buzzer or a bell, which in her groggy state she imagined was from an oven to declare her dinner done. Soon she realized it was her door.
After stumbling toward it, Lee paused to understand who might be calling. If it was the doorman, she was now only herself and not her sister—she smelled and didn’t even need to see it—and would that be a problem?
“Did I scare you?”
“You woke me up.”
Would they say those words again and—like “sim salla bim”—what would it start now?
It wasn’t him. It was her super, Martin Raveech. He was lean, middle-aged, and strangely hysterical, unlike others in his field Lee had known who were tough and even physically threatening.
“Look,” he said, as always glass-half-empty, “we’ve got a problem.”
Lee didn’t let him in, just let him continue, realizing that her pills had made her mouth too dry for her to do much more than lick her lips.
“You know the rules,” he said.
He referred to Lee’s long history in the building, in which she’d been raised—indeed she’d seen many supers come and go before Raveech. Her mouth still parched, she only shrugged, remaining noncommittal before knowing what he meant.
“I mean,” he said, “your sister and brother-in-law. You know they can’t be living here without being on the lease.”
Lee now nodded—not just because she was aware of the rules of apartment habitation, but because she knew that Raveech had been tipped off and intimidated by her girl neighbour, and then had quizzed the young doorman who had admitted what he knew, endearingly innocent of (or indifferent to) the results.
“Hold on,” Lee rasped and let the door half-close.
When, after a long moment, it opened completely again, Raveech had to look down at the person who was—with an effort—still holding onto the knob.
“Hey,” he said and couldn’t help but smile. “Who do we have here?”
“I’m Aunt Lee’s niece.” And now Raveech saw the six-year-old pause as if—adorably—trying to remember her own name. “Glinda.”
(Indeed wit
h her head full of red curly hair, she very much resembled her mother, Angelique.)
“Well, Glinda,” he said, imitating her childish voice, “where’s your Aunt?”
“She’s not feeling well.” Glinda put on a frowny face, which made the super squint and chuckle cloyingly.
“I’m sorry to hear that. Tell me—” and here Raveech revealed he was not above trying to pressure and mislead a less capable companion, even seemed glad to have the opportunity, “are you and your Mommy and Daddy living here? We’d love to welcome you to our great big building.”
“No. We’re just visiting.”
“Really? Was that something a grown-up told you to say?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, that’s a relief. Tell me—do you know what a super does?”
“I’m not allowed to talk to strangers. Goodbye.”
“But—”
With her tiny hands, the newest member of Lee’s family pushed the door definitively shut. The little girl waited until she had stopped shaking, unnerved by having faced down and defied an adult. Then slowly she realized that the doorknob was no longer at eye level, was in fact at her waist, and the spyhole—which had been completely out of reach—could be accessed with just a brief lean forward. (Raveech was gone.)
“Wow,” Lee said, and heard her own deep timbre return. She didn’t even bother with the nearby mirror, knew that she was once again herself now that another self had done what needed doing, and that, like TV shows about law firms or crime units or hospitals, she employed a whole ensemble.
The next day, Lee didn’t need to keep an ear out for the mail. Dozing without pills, and so only really resting like a dead fish on the watery surface of sleep, she was caught and jerked into consciousness by the sound of paper sliding. She rose stiffly and saw that a note had been pushed beneath the door. It had no stamp or envelope, had just been torn out of a memo pad and folded. She stooped to pick it up.
The Family Unit and Other Fantasies Page 11