Elbowing the Seducer

by T. Gertler

  In his corner with no original Renoir, he glanced again at the last page of D. Reeve’s story. He hadn’t used his pen at all—interesting. Reeve required another reading in a day or two, to see if he would stay as good as he seemed. Howard put the story in his bookbag, a scarred leather pouch. How old was Reeve? He lived below Canal Street, around Chinatown, according to the envelope. Was he an account exec with a loft and higher yearnings or a waiter shriven by poverty? Howard tried to imagine another’s life but could imagine only his own.

  To support his two families, he would go on working at a killing pace. He would come home each night to the child he loved and to Suzanne and to the pile of half-truths multiplying on his desk. He would smoke and drink and fuck too much; he would die of a heart attack in a strange bed before Matty was out of college, Radcliffe—no, Harvard—class of ’94. There would be insurance for the tuition. No, he wouldn’t die. He would grow old. His shirt would hang on brittle shoulders. Pink scalp would show through his white curls. He would place waxy hands on withered breasts and have to be grateful. Lipstick would bleed in creases around the women’s mouths. The women’s hair would smell of medicine. He would have to lie like hell to believe he enjoyed them. Matty would grow up and become famous at something and leave him, leave him alone with Suzanne, who would be old, bitter, uneasy after years of neglect. And she would still be lovely. And she would still be stupid. He wanted to name his terror and introduce it to someone. He wanted to meet a woman, an almost faceless woman with voluminous hair and eyes like resin and a foul mind riding a quiet, maidenly body, and unzip and say to her, “Here it is. Now what?”

  On the worst of bad days, when the toothpaste and toilet paper both were exhausted by the time he got to them; when at breakfast there was no Times because of the doorman’s oversight or a neighborly theft (Mrs. 9-C in crepe-soled wedgies) or a strike; when Suzanne across the table showed the suggestion of a softening in her jawline or, more frightening, looked remote and beautiful; when he discovered in his office ashtray dark beadlike objects that Reinhardt the Joycean decided were rat pellets and Michaels of Russian Studies said were beads, and that Mr. Martinez of Maintenance identified as semisucked horehound ovals favored by the night cleaning woman, Berthe from Zagreb; when his lunchtime assignation was canceled because of rain or an inconvenient husband or a stepdaughter with bronchitis and a temperature of 102.6, the red line on the thermometer speeding past degree notches to deprive him as he sat at his desk and told his lover-turned-mother on the phone that yes, he understood, but he didn’t; when “Adagio Morse,” a love story in code and the lead fiction for Rosemary’s next issue, prompted the printer to call up screaming about dots and dashes in front of his eyes, and the author, a low hum on a bad connection from Ithaca, refused to delete the offending pages, maintaining their “something something quality”—then, on the worst of these days, Howard knew to expect a visitation from Margery, his ex-wife.

  It might come on the office phone, a ringing like others, but when he answered it and mumbled hello, there would be no sound, not even the static of her shallow breathing. He pictured her standing at the wall phone in her kitchen, a hymn to stainless steel, holding in one hand a gold-filled button earring with a blackened clip hinge, her other hand pressing the receiver against her chafed unadorned lobe. He couldn’t remember her hands. Were the knuckles too broad? She would turn the earring over, weigh it, flicking its discolored clip open and closed, all the while staring out the window at the backyard, where a green hose lay frozen in winter, untouched in summer, had probably split along its coils, and he would have to pay for a new one to replace it, and for the call too, dead air from Mount Kisco.

  “Margery,” he would begin to the silence, and she would hang up the phone, not always gently.

  But would call again in fifteen minutes, and an hour after that, and again, until her anger (over what?) had subsided or an errand took her away from the house. If his secretary answered the phone in his absence, Margery became an author, a lawyer, a nurse grim with lab results, an overage student in one of his classes. None of these people left a number for him to return the call, and he knew, after checking the messages on the pink While You Were Out slips, that Ms. Bliss from Con Ed was Margery playing games. “Ms. Bliss will catch you later,” the slip said.

  He never hung up on her, but waited her out. This was penance, social work; this was how he held her hand when she needed him. At least he didn’t have to really touch her anymore. The calls, like fever blisters, erupted in clusters, then stopped for long, healing months. She would busy herself with knitting, dating, isometrics, peeling the bark from trees. Until she began to miss him again, and got angry, and called. She was angry because she missed him; he could understand that. Through the years since their parting, while he arranged for himself a new life, a gazebo built on a slag heap, but it was his gazebo, it was his slag heap, she considered him to be living in a home away from home, hers, and preserved patiently for him the dried blossomings of her hatred.

  Or it might come in the office mail, an envelope of intimate poison licked lovingly closed, a won ton from his wanton, he thought, a kreplach of loathing. The mailboy, a chemistry major too timorous to work his way through school by drug dealing, should have delivered it with lead gloves and a chest protector, but education had blinded him to real danger. Only nuclei and narcs could be lethal; there was no menace in correspondence unless it ticked or had a three-letter return address: FLN, PLO, IRS. Advanced Immunology II and the dreary business of infecting and then vaccinating mice prevented him from seeing the metaphorical possibilities of cancer. He was probably a mouth breather. With a glum “Here’s what it is,” he dumped several book mailers and large manila envelopes and two or three letter-size ones on a chair, his puffed right eye unfocused without the lens of a microscope.

  One of the letters beckoned to Howard. The afternoon—in late April, with clean light—made him unwary as he grasped the envelope. Yes, the familiar handwriting, loops and whorls, his name tatted by the spider woman. Yes, no return address. As if he couldn’t find the house blindfolded; as if, in the dreams he never had, he didn’t go there. Disgusted, excited, he tore the envelope open.

  “HOWIE DARLING” it began, printed in raucous orange capitals on the back of a torn square of wallpaper, interlocking green trefoils on a blue ground.

  ACCUSTOMED THOUGH I AM TO YOUR THOUGHTLESSNESS, I’VE GOT TO ADMIT THIS TIME YOU OUTDID YOURSELF. ILENE DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING TO ME, SHE’S NOT A COMPLAINER, BUT I KNOW FOR A FACT SHE WAS HURT AND CRIED IN HER ROOM ON SATURDAY WHEN IT BECAME CLEAR YOU WEREN’T GOING TO CALL AND THE MAIL WAS ALREADY HERE WITH NOTHING IN IT FROM YOU. ONCE YEARS AGO WHEN I FORGOT YOUR BIRTHDAY YOU CARRIED ON LIKE A WILD MAN AND STARTED THROWING THINGS AROUND, BROKE A GOOD VASE I REMEMBER, AND WANTED TO START IN ON ME, BUT YOUR GREAT AND GOOD BUDDY FELIX WAS THERE AND HELD YOU BACK UNTIL YOU FINALLY STORMED OUT OF THE HOUSE AND FELIX FOLLOWED TO MAKE SURE YOU’D BE OK WHILE I CLEANED UP THE MESS. SO MAYBE YOU CAN EMPATHIZE A LITTLE WITH ILENE, WHO WOULD HAVE LIKED YOU TO REMEMBER HER BIRTHDAY. IT’S SO PATHETICALLY SIMPLE, THEY HAVE CARDS FOR EVERYTHING. ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS GO TO THE SECTION MARKED SWEET SIXTEEN FOR DAUGHTER AND PICK ANY ONE AND SIGN IT AND SEND IT. EVEN YOU COULD HAVE DONE THAT. I OVERHEARD PAUL TELLING HER SHE WAS DUMB, THAT WAS THE WORD, DUMB, TO EXPECT ANYTHING FROM YOU AND IT MADE ME SAD TO HEAR HIM SAY IT, BUT YOU’VE BROUGHT IT ON YOURSELF AND HE’S RIGHT. HE’S A VERY HONEST BOY, NO ILLUSIONS, VERY MUCH LIKE YOUR FRIEND FELIX BECAUSE AS MUCH AS FELIX LIKED YOU HE ALSO SAW YOU FOR WHAT YOU WERE AND DIDN’T LET IT GET TO HIM. I SHOULD HAVE TAKEN LESSONS FROM HIM.

  Unsigned, as always.

  She had tried to kill him: a nudge with the rear bumper of their Chevy, pinning him against the garage wall. An afternoon and a night of drinking with Felix had made him bold and hopeless. He had finished telling her to go to hell. “I’m leaving,” he shouted at her, though she was the one in the car. He noticed through his tears how sooty the snow was before the car pushed
him. She claimed later that she’d gone into reverse by accident. At St. Somebody’s emergency room she hovered over him with a Blue Cross card while a low-browed Pakistani intern, addressing Howard as Mr. Rich, praised his x-rays and poked his injured leg before prescribing aspirin and compresses.

  “Two, Mr. Rich.”

  “How do you mean two?”

  “I mean two.”

  “One hot and one cold?”

  “Two aspirin, Mr. Rich. Any temperature you like.”

  In the car on the way home, no longer home to him, she said, “You’ve got it wrong. He said cold compresses for the first twenty-four hours.”

  He felt such pain in his chest that he couldn’t believe his leg wasn’t broken. They had conspired against him. She must have slept with the Pakistani too. “You’re a killer, Margie.”

  “You’re a liar, Howie.” Serenely delivered, with her chin uplifted as she barreled through a yellow light.

  “You’re a cunt.”

  “I should hope so.”

  “I can move out limping.”

  She glanced away from the road. Sincere brown eyes dilating. Since they both had brown eyes, how come Paul had blue eyes? “It was an accident.”

  “I don’t know, you looked kind of purposeful to me.”

  The car halted at a red light. Her fingers stroked the steering wheel.

  “I guess the accident was that I came home for lunch,” he said.

  “You were sent home. That’s two jobs in six months. Who asked you to editorialize against codeine?”

  At the pharmaceutical ad agency where he’d been assistant traffic manager, he’d also written the company newsletter, four stapled sheets passed out monthly and crammed with, he believed, ass-kissing and head-patting, and nothing in between. Instead of an interview with a VP–Production (“Let me say I get a big kick out of production”) and the usual birthday and anniversary congrats, he’d typed six stencils detailing codeine abuse around the country, the countless lives ruined: “Shall we be racked by coughs or wrecked by cough medicine? We are truly between a rock and a hard place.” In faint purple ink fresh from the Mimeograph, his call to action arrived in cubicles and offices. Within an hour he was summoned to another floor to meet a VP–Accounts and a VP–Personnel, both with crewcuts and both wearing black loafers. “Don’t bother cleaning out your desk,” Personnel said, dropping a filled brown paper bag in Howard’s lap. “That’s your stuff.” The VPs escorted him into the elevator and down to the street.

  “You don’t want me to be happy,” Margery said.

  Sitting in his office, he thought he would be able to remember her hands on the wheel. He could remember her lipstick, dark red, and her coat, a gray, black, and white tweed, the collar up. The way her lips tensed, as if she were about to speak French, when she stepped on the accelerator. He could remember the weight above his diaphragm, an unexpelled scream, and the throbbing in his leg. The warmth of the car, heater on, windows rolled up, the whole goddamn car rolled up, crushed and hurtling like a spitball aimed at the back of a sixth-grader dreaming of a cigarette. He’d dreamed of a lot more than cigarettes when he was eleven.

  “Kids know more than we like to think,” he’d told his new boss, a VP–Juvenile, at a different ad agency. A breakfast-cereal account had commissioned an activities book of stories, poems, sports facts, projects, and puzzles. It would be free for six boxtops. Howard, a copywriter trainee, had been assigned to find suitable poems. He’d been given a box of the cereal “for inspiration.” In a morning meeting he came up with a poem, Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” How could he have known that his married boss was seeing a researcher in the legal department? A secretary in a pink shirtwaist spilled coffee on her pad.

  “Okay, so Felix likes me. But I don’t like him back,” Margery said.

  “Shut up, Margie.”

  “He’s too analytical. And he’s not smart enough to be analytical. You’re much smarter.”

  “Shut up, Margie.”

  Her hands on the steering wheel. Hidden: she’d been wearing gloves, gray kid gloves he’d bought her for Christmas. With black wool lining. Cashmere? The car two-wheeled a corner.

  “Felix likes Elvis Presley. Felix is ordinary.”

  “He’s my friend.”

  “Some friend. He tried to go to bed with me.”

  Absurdly proud: “He didn’t try, he succeeded.”

  He reread the letter vivid with lies and saluted her capacity to hurt him, even from such distance. All right, he’d forgotten Ilene’s birthday, and his son probably did despise him. It made sense, and Paul might be sensible, the way Margie said. But the part about his own birthday and Felix was fiction. Did she want to remember it that way or did she want to remind him of it as revenge for Ilene’s unhappiness and for her own larger, less defined sorrows? What vase had he broken?

  The VP–Juvenile had moved his lips reading the poem to himself. Two bites left of a cinnamon bun fused to his palm.

  “And what are the children supposed to make of the word mistress, Ritchie?”

  “It’s a great poem. And it’s not copyrighted.”

  “It has breast in it. It has Jews and virginity in it. It advocates sexual license.”

  The VP’s navy tie had a crusty spot on it. Howard imagined feeding him a mouthful of tie.

  “No it doesn’t, Mr. Gabriel. It’s three hundred years before the Beatles and ‘Love Me Do,’ that’s all.”

  “You’re pushing your luck, Ritchie.”

  “Kids know about these things, sir. What they don’t know is that people have always known about these things.” Howard sang a few bars of “Love Me Do.” The secretary in the stained shirtwaist stopped taking notes. A full-fledged copywriter slapped a cigarette case on his knee in time to the song. “I can do more,” Howard said.

  “No you can’t,” the VP said. “You are dehired. I kid you not.”

  Howard got to clean out his desk himself. He came home to the domestic sight of naked Margery astride naked Felix on the sofa. He was reading to her from a paperback. Paul was at nursery school, but the baby, Ilene, was sleeping in her playpen near them, a thumb stoppering her mouth, damp curls at her neck. The house had always been overheated. He couldn’t have broken a vase because Ilene remained asleep while he was there. The scene proceeded in curt whispers. On his way out he closed the door quietly. Felix ran after him, calling, “Wait, good buddy,” and he waited while Felix, in sneakers in the snow, pissed into the leafless hedge at the side of the house. Felix’s shirttail hung down beneath his bomber jacket. They went off to get drunk together. What did she mean, Felix saw him for what he was? Why was she so angry? He was the one who’d been wronged. Felix played “Heartbreak Hotel” on the jukebox six times in a row for two quarters. “Please believe me,” he said. “I just read Ferlinghetti and it blew my mind, and I came to the house to give it to you.” Perfectly fine, nothing hard to believe, except that Felix knew he’d be at work, not at home, in the middle of the day. “I guess I thought it was still Christmas,” Felix said, and he asked Howard for a quarter.

  —

  He filed the letter under P, for Proof of Insanity (Margie), a folder of evidence he was accumulating against the day she attacked him again or went to court accusing him of something less than rectitude. He wrote a hasty birthday note to Ilene—“Sweetie, I’m sorry,” etc.—and stuffed it with a check, the zeros open and suppurating. “You know you’re my sweet peach,” he added to the note before reaching into his bookbag on the chair and pulling out a better story, D. Reeve’s “Jack.”

  Hrubet the impresario, the director of this peripatetic nightmare, believes in justice. For the fourth time, in striped trousers and a cutaway, he is going to be married. The trousers once belonged to Marco the Monkey Boy, who retired in Orlando at the age of seventy-six and abandoned formal attire for Bermuda shorts. Now that Hrubet has had the tail hole sewn up, the trousers fit him perfectly. He sets a shining black top hat on his head.

&n
bsp; “What makes it shine so?” I ask, pointing as best I can at his hat.

  “It’s silk,” he says.

  I am ashamed to ask him what silk is. I know he will answer that silk is what the hat is made of, and I know that is not the answer I want….

  The pack on the desk was empty. There were no cigarettes in his jacket hanging on a hook on the door, and none in his bookbag, though a frantic search of it did locate a birthday card and check for Ilene that he’d forgot to mail. Michaels smoked a pipe, and Reinhardt had no known vices, and the secretaries were at lunch. Gail, the secretary he shared with Michaels and Reinhardt, had locked her desk, but he found Liliane’s available and as touchingly quaint in its tidiness as she had been in her layers of underwear two years ago. The center drawer, in addition to a built-in compartmentalized tray for paper clips and rubber bands—no chance to be creative there—showed her organizational genius: a compact, lipstick, a miniature bottle of perfume, and the key to the bathroom on a grimy ribbon were fitted into a box from a typewriter cartridge; a book called English NOW had a comb, teeth clenched on long hairs, for a bookmark; and tucked into a cardboard roll of masking tape dotted with lint were a pocket spray of mouthwash and an open sample pack of cigarettes, an airplane giveaway.