Elbowing the Seducer

by T. Gertler

  The mike uttered a loud whine. The singer tried to ignore it; her accompanist bent lower to the piano. The whine ascended to shrillness, an indignant screech overtaking the song, the piano, the room. The singer blushed. “Charming,” Newman pronounced through the din, “to see that deepening tone on tone.” When the restaurant manager rushed to the platform and silenced the mike by unplugging it, Newman alone didn’t applaud. “Why is it these days that common sense has been elevated to heroism?”

  Howard continued to applaud. “It is heroism these days.” But he felt foolish. Newman intimidated him. He was ten years older than Howard, and, like a schoolboy, Howard measured seniority as power: Newman had a ten-year advantage in reading, writing, women. Slender, of medium build, he was strong; Howard remembered through shadows how easily Newman had lifted him from the snowy sidewalk and carried him home to Suzanne.

  “How do I manage what?” Newman asked over the applause. Minutes had elapsed between his question and Howard’s earlier one.

  “Women,” Howard said. The singer passed their table on her way to the bar, and candlelight or the focus of expectation flickered in his eyes. “Ass.”

  “Too high,” Newman said.

  Howard gazed after her. “Something you can get hold of.”

  “Honestly, I don’t feel like discussing the merits of rumps. Can’t we have a conversation?”

  Howard ducked his head and looked sideways at Newman. “About what?”

  “I don’t know, something interesting. What two men who are friends can talk about. Books, art, a few minutes on tennis. Why did you ask me to have dinner with you? We don’t want to fuck each other and we don’t know each other well enough to have comfortable silences, so we have to talk.”

  Howard displayed his childlike appealing face. “Okay.” The idea of a discussion with the critic terrified him. He waited for Newman to begin. But Newman, his long muscular arms folded across his chest, leaned back and waited too. Howard made his face more helpless and adorable. Newman’s hazel eyes peered straight into the cavern, walls of mold and a floor of bat guano, that Howard knew was his heart. At last, out of a silence of calculation and timidity he said, “Newman, you want to meet my wife?”

  “I’ve met her, thanks.”

  “When you brought me home from the dinner party?”

  “Yes.”

  Howard’s brain was fermenting; he had trouble making connections. “She likes you on TV. Did you sleep with her?”

  Newman studied him with the fastidiousness of an emperor confronting a moth in the ermine. “No. She’s a lovely woman. Why don’t you sleep with her?”

  Howard had no answer to this logical question. He felt offended that Newman didn’t want Suzanne. “Would you let me sleep with your wife?” he asked. Since he’d never met Newman’s wife, the idea had a biblical patriarchal note that promised her unquestioning submission, dampness on the floor of the tent, the sting of sand in his eyes, the strong happy smell of goats at a waterhole.

  Newman gave the brief upturn of his public smile. “It’s a good rule of thumb that if you have to ask, you’ve already earned a negative answer.”

  “Then who the hell can I sleep with?” The loud belligerence didn’t disturb Newman, whose precisely planed face balanced light like a Buddha’s. Howard grew violent at the sight of such equanimity. “Who do you want to sleep with?” he demanded.

  Newman inspected the room. “That’s whom, and there’s no one I can point out here.”

  “Then make her up, describe her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…” Howard wanted a woman Newman wanted. Having her, he’d have something of Newman too. He believed the connection would bring him peace. He wanted the critic’s vision, a particular dance of the irises that seemed to see the gross spinning world with amazement but acceptance, perhaps love. “I love you, Newman. You’re a saint.”

  “I’m still not going to write a favorable review of that novel by your latest find, the backwater Balzac.” Newman meant Vincent Bask.

  “Excellent,” Howard said, cheering up. “Now we have something to talk about: Bask.” This time when he called, “Waiter,” the waiter hurried to obey.

  —

  Matty, drowsy and still warm from a bath, held up her arms, and Howard bent down to kiss her. She locked her arms around his neck. “Don’t go, Daddy.” She released him.

  He sat at the edge of the bed. In his weariness, he wanted to lie down. “Okay, I’m here.”

  “For how long?”

  “How long do you want?”

  “Till I fall asleep.”

  He almost whispered his laugh. “That’s quite a demand.”

  Shy, afraid of her father’s soft, sad laugh, she said, “Then stay a few minutes, please.” She settled under the covers, bringing them up to her neck, and inhaled his familiar harsh scent of Scotch and cigarettes. Fearing to have her happiness taken away, she chose instead to relinquish it: she pretended to fall asleep so that her father, with light movements, could stand up and leave her room.

  In the kitchen Suzanne fed detergent to the dishwasher. “She’s asleep?”

  Her efficiency and her blue rubber gloves distressed him. “Coffee,” he muttered. In a corner of the living room his chair, his secondhand IBM Selectric, his stacks of papers and notes waited with alarming permanence. He sat down to reread a story he was considering for his magazine, Rosemary, which was really the university’s magazine. His uncapped fountain pen accidentally stroked a black line across the title page: “Jack,” by D. Reeve. He would use the pen to obliterate the author’s unworthy adverbs, to weed prose and rearrange it. He’d tried to write stories of his own, but his sense of form deserted him there. Since he was quick to sense talent, he knew he had none. Able as he was to discover a ten-page story in someone else’s rambling sixteen pages, he couldn’t discover a story in himself. He had stopped wondering why; a sense of dignity about his failings didn’t prevent him from pursuing them, though. He grunted when Suzanne brought his coffee. Safe because he was working, she kissed the back of his neck and went off to the bedroom to watch TV.

  When he allowed himself a break a half-hour later, he thought of her kiss and wandered into the bedroom. She was asleep—or pretending to be asleep?—oblivious to Joanne Woodward, who was soliciting funds for the Public Broadcasting System. The actress had aged, but she still looked good enough to provoke him to fantasies of hurried oral sex with her during commercials. Then he remembered that PBS didn’t have commercials. He turned off the TV and went back to his desk and counted the cigarette butts in the ashtray. He had to finish notes for a lecture on the short story, to be given at a Massachusetts women’s college with notoriously chill guest facilities at a moldering country inn. The thought of two hundred earnest Lit majors without makeup appalled him. He didn’t want to finish his notes. He had to decide something about Reeve’s story. The night stretched out, long and narrow.

  His lunchtime affairs made his life tolerable. Without them, he felt, he wouldn’t survive in the structure he had built for himself. Of course, not every afternoon brought him to bed with a woman; he couldn’t have survived that, either. He endured and at times enjoyed business lunches. Abandoning his midtown East Side office twenty minutes behind schedule, with papers fluttering in his wake, he took writers and agents and other editors to restaurants with good bars, uptown and downtown, upstairs and downstairs, and laid his American Express card down in wet rings on white tablecloths. But at least once and usually twice a week he lay naked, bone on bone, with one woman or another. Or with two women, because he liked playing ringmaster. Most of the women he knew laughed when he suggested a threesome, and some were shocked, and some consented. If they refused, he smiled good-naturedly and contented himself with sex for two.

  Having found the women, he had to find places to take them. Some invited him to their apartments, which ranged from roach heavens to duplexes on Park Avenue, and over the years he had learned his way around Manhattan
better than any cabbie. But some lived in faraway, impossible places like Sheepshead Bay and Valhalla and Rockville Centre. The married ones seldom wanted to bring him home, and the single ones often wanted the excitement of being in a stranger’s bed. This was where male friendship came in. There was always an apartment at his disposal during the week. It might have belonged to a bachelor who worked all day and didn’t mind strange women using his comb and leaving curled strands of hair in the bathroom sink. Or it might have belonged to a divorced writer spending a snowbound semester at Bennington as artist-in-residence and apprentice satyr. A sublet brown-walled one-bedroom on the Upper West Side; an illegal loft on Thirty-second Street, with a view of Gimbels; a Sutton Place cubby housing only a bed and an exercise bike—these were tokens of brotherhood. There had been a bleached aerie atop a Village bookstore, lent by the store owner, who withdrew permission after Howard used a signed first-edition Jack London to elevate the hips of a lover, tall Adrienne the Tarot reader. “Anyway, it hurt my tailbone,” she said. For the past few years, he had been one of three people with keys to Newman Sykes’s walk-up studio in a brownstone, also in the Village, on West Eleventh Street, between Fifth and Sixth. Newman used the place three days a week and spent the rest of the time at home, a converted firehouse upstate. During his absence he allowed the other two keyholders, Howard and a nymphomaniac named Maris, to devise their own schedules. Newman expected nothing for his generosity, but he did have one inflexible rule: you had to provide your sheets and towels, and you had to keep them out of his sight. That might have made two rules. “I don’t want to look at your mess,” he told Howard when he gave him the key. Though one of Howard’s subsequent sessions left a large, bloody, ineradicable stain on the mattress, Newman merely commented a month later, “You might have turned the mattress over.”

  “I washed the spot. I thought it should dry first,” Howard said, looking woeful and dear.

  “I had a guest, and the mattress was unaesthetic, almost discouraging.”

  Howard brightened with curiosity. “What was she like?”

  “Like a woman who wanted to make love in a clean bed. And after seeing the mattress, she suspected my sheets.” Newman closed the discussion, and Howard retained his key.

  It was important to him, not only for the door it opened but for its proof of Newman’s friendship. That Newman also expressed friendship for a nymphomaniac didn’t lessen the key’s value to Howard. He enjoyed saying to a woman, “I’ve got a place we can go to—the apartment of a friend of mine, Newman Sykes, the critic. You’ve heard of him?” The woman usually had; Howard preferred literate sex. Of course, if that wasn’t available, he’d take anything.

  He did have two rules of his own: never sleep with a woman from the office and never sleep with a woman who knew Suzanne. He broke both rules soon after he made them, and reflected ruefully but admiringly on his own impetuousness. “There goes a man,” he almost said to himself, avoiding the forming thought because of a distaste for parody, especially self-parody—though he wasn’t above thinking of himself as a plain but honest fornicator, let me show you my testimonials, honey. What am I supposed to do, he thought, just give up and die? To celebrate Leap Year, he lay with Anne Small on the blue checkered designer mat in her guest bathroom while two rooms away Bob Small instructed his other guests, among them Suzanne, in the wonders of lepidopterology. Anne Small whispered, “I’ve always wanted you, always.” Howard considered this reasonable, but the fine coat of talcum powder on the tile floor and the thought of Suzanne being forced to admire dead insects grieved him. He wanted to be breast-fed, held like a child. He grabbed the first part of Anne he could find and ended up licking her ankle, which tasted like hand lotion. Afterward, his arm bruised by her tennis-hardened grip, he joined the lecture group in the living room and ground to bright dust a valuable specimen from Siberia or Saint-Lô. “An accident,” he muttered to Bob, who had turned ashen as the big-bodied moths thudding against screen doors in summer. Suzanne knelt and swept butterfly dust into a pile. Her round behind pushed out brown wool pants, and she kept saying, “Poor Bob, Howard didn’t mean it. Poor Bob, Howard didn’t mean it.” He could have kicked her for her kindness and stupidity.

  He took to Newman’s bed one rainy March afternoon a thin young Frenchwoman, Liliane, secretary to colleagues down the hall. Once he got over the shock of seeing her in a full slip—“I didn’t know anybody still wore those things,” he said, to which she answered unsmiling, “Oui, la combinaison, le bra, les panties, le panty’ose. Tous sont nécessaires”—he found her compliant but unfragrant. A nimbus of sad odors surrounded her, the acrid smell of the duplicating machine, the dark cloying of the typewriter ribbon, the burned rubber of eraser fragments, and the taste of her mouth, coffee in a cardboard cup. These odors reminded him of all he wanted to forget. In her arms he felt embraced by a symptom of his own disease, the dread of the drab.

  “Are you from Paris?” he asked, hoping to heighten the interlude with the shopworn glamour of that city.

  “Non. Guadeloupe.”

  She wasn’t even properly French. He placed his tongue against her half-closed eyelid; obedient, she closed her eyes. He licked off iridescent mauve eye shadow and uncovered her pulsing pink lid.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Twenty-six,” she said, still keeping her eyes closed.

  “You look younger.”

  Beneath him, she shrugged. Her small breasts briefly rubbed against him. He felt like shrugging too. Memory, not instinct, guided him on his excursion through her; a tour guide dressed like a stewardess and holding a microphone recited, “Now we will see the frescoes. Notice how the color persists, even after centuries of weathering and the shocks of wars. Notice the delicacy of line, the unusual use of perspective.” High heels clicked along a marble floor while he desperately listened for the guide’s voice. “In this next gallery is a minor masterpiece, often overlooked by art lovers in a hurry…”

  Liliane cried, “Ho! Oui! Ça!” and soon “Reste, reste.” An art lover in a hurry, he raced on.

  As he helped her into her raincoat, a thrifty dirt-concealing black with a label clinging by one thread to its neck, a battle of old perfumes rose from its dampness, and he thought of his daughter, Matty, and the long uneven days of love she would encounter. He settled the coat brusquely on the woman.

  “We go back to the office separately, yes?” Her nude eyelid reproached him.

  “Yes.” Then, because he felt sorry for himself, he kissed her hand.

  The next morning she passed his office several times without stopping, her eyes fixed on an open file or a ballpoint pen as compelling as a reliquary. He managed a long business lunch and returned to his desk drunk enough to ignore her. She knocked on his open door.

  He glanced up too quickly; his head hurt. “Well, hello there.”

  “ ’Ello.”

  “Come in.” His hearty invitation sounded hollow to him.

  Approaching his chair, she seemed ready to cry. She smiled. “You understand, sometimes we try and—” She shrugged. “Pouf! We learn something we did not enfin expect to learn.”

  Warily he nodded. “Sometimes.”

  “You understand. We must see each other here.” She offered her hand; confused, he took it.

  “So,” she said, “we will think of yesterday with fondness, but we will not repeat it.”

  He thought, I was supposed to say that. He noticed, with amusement, that she was beginning to look better and better to him. He could almost desire her. He watched her walk away, checked the swing of her hips in an unfashionable pleated skirt, and relished his perversity and relief.

  He forgave himself these lapses. Anne Small had become pregnant—not by Howard—and produced, as the birth announcement declared, a little Small. He wondered how he could have been attracted, even for a moment in the bathroom, to a woman who would send out gingham-bordered cards with a message like that. As for Liliane, the awkwardness of seeing her in t
he office proved less of a problem than he’d expected. If her presence reminded him of a damp, foolish, unhappy afternoon, it also reminded him that he was a rogue, a sexual gallant, a villain—in short, that he was alive.

  And there were other women. There would always be other women. He had that afternoon attended a salon for two given by the ex-wife of an art dealer who specialized in Impressionists; through her Howard momentarily connected to Monet and a lost world of gardens and women in long dresses white as clouds. Seeing his hostess undressed, he understood why the art dealer had divorced her: tanned, thick-thighed, unashamed, with a massive, almost papal, gold neck chain jamming a Coptic cross between her breasts, she was more suitable for an Expressionist. The cross scraped his chest. Her thighs squeezed him powerfully, a boa constrictor greeting a squirrel. He maneuvered her with caution until caution gave way. She served Greek olives and Turkish figs and instant Maxwell House coffee. She showed him an original Renoir drawing in a gold-leaf frame, part of her divorce settlement. Before he left, she patted his behind and sang “What I Did for Love.”

  There had been no divorce settlement with his first ex-wife, Fiona, whose daddy’d had Howard annulled after a four-day marriage based on room service at the Roney Plaza in Miami Beach. “I’ll always love you, Howie,” she shouted as her daddy removed her to a limousine and her senior year at an all-girls’ high school run by the Sisters of Perpetual Yearning for Jesus in Tallahassee or Titusville. “Me too,” he shouted back from the lobby. The limousine carried her away. A twenty-four-hour jellyfish alert had ended, and he went swimming. For two years, until he was graduated insigne cum laude from the University of Miami with a degree in seventeenth-century English literature and assorted useless credits in prelaw, she sent him greetings at Christmas and at the Jewish New Year: “Happy Rush Hosanna. I miss your sweet thing.” His mother mailed them to him at his off-campus apartment, envelopes violated, the notes ripped in pieces. He had to reconstruct Fiona’s messages and, after a while, his image of her face. She might have stopped writing to him, or his mother might have stopped forwarding the letters, or he might have stopped taping them together. He moved to New York for adventures as a social worker, the Robin Hood of Avenue B. The adventures ended on a front stoop on Sixth Street when he threatened a client’s common-law husband with jail: “You lay a hand on her again and you’re in trouble.” The man punched Howard down six steps. From a ground-floor window his client shrieked, “Ai ai ai.” At the rear tire of a parked car a tiger cat gazed into Howard’s open eye as he lay on the sidewalk. Fiona became a troublesome detail on job applications. Did the marriage count or didn’t it? In three years the question altered. Did Fiona’s unsolved murder—a bullet entering under the ear during a voter registration drive in Lamar County, Mississippi—leave him a widower? His mother wrote the news to him and enclosed a clipping from the Miami Herald on the dangers of New York street gangs. By then he was married again or for the first time. He had begun to examine the literal meaning of making a living.