Elbowing the Seducer

by T. Gertler

  He took a cigarette and purposely replaced the pack wrong, a lack of stealth to assure himself he wasn’t stealing. And not invading her privacy either, he thought, walking back to his office. The drawer had been unlocked. Besides, her secrets were so few and simple that— He stopped, knowing he had no justification, and admired himself for his honesty.

  He settled in his chair, clicked his lighter, and resolved to dislodge from his thoughts Margery and their children and the splitting garden hose and everything else that wasn’t manly and clean and suited to a high passion for literature.

  Hrubet the impresario, the director of this peripatetic nightmare, believes in justice….

  The cigarette was stale, the way he knew it would be. He inhaled deeply and bent over the manuscript, frowning. His fingers touched paper as shocking as skin. Alone in his office in April light, pale, angry-looking, smoking, he read. No one seeing him then would have realized how happy he was.

  —

  Howard’s voice on the telephone had a guarded sound, a slow baritone growl that only people who knew him could interpret as humor. Since she didn’t know Howard and since his call had awakened her, Dina Reeve heard his growl and nothing more. She squinted in the dim room. Larry had handed her the receiver; she wedged it between the pillow and her ear, and pulled the covers up over her shoulders against the room’s damp chill. “Hello?” she said, warming. Through years of sleeping late she’d perfected a wide-awake hello.

  A male voice demanded, “Is this D. Reeve?”

  “Yes,” she said hesitantly. She needed supporting materials, a driver’s license, an expired passport. She was listed as D. Reeve in the Manhattan directory and she’d sent a story to Rosemary under that name. The initial was supposed to defeminize her, to prevent obscene phone calls and a reader’s conscious or unconscious prejudice against writers who happened to be female through no fault of their own. After mailing the story, she’d daydreamed about the editor calling her and his surprise at her voice: female, young. Because it had been fantasy, she hadn’t gone on to imagine her response.

  “This is Howard Ritchie at Rosemary.”

  She put all her strength into listening. “Yes.”

  “Pardon?” came the growl.

  “Yes. I said yes.”

  “I’ve got your story. It’s flawless, brilliant. I’d like to meet you.”

  She rolled on her back, and the phone lurched over pages strewn across the plank between the loft bed and the wall. The Tensor lamp rocked. The clock skidded. In the bathroom Larry announced his presence by peeing a loud stream. Though he’d answered the phone, she pretended during the call that he didn’t exist.

  “Is that possible?” the voice asked her.

  “When?” she asked it.

  The flushing toilet thundered. The voice said, “How about this week?”

  “When?”

  “How about this afternoon? This afternoon good for you? Around three?”

  “Okay.” She breathed the word and sat up. Under scribbled and torn pages, crumpled tissues, a depleted tube of lip balm, there lurked a red pencil stub.

  “Make that three-thirty,” the voice said. “Twelfth floor.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “See you then.”

  Halfway up the ladder to the bed, Larry leaned toward her. “Well?” he asked, blond mustache spread above a smile.

  She wrote the time and floor in the margin of a two-paragraph essay, “How I Go Walked,” by Sho, a Japanese executive exactly her height but better dressed, with a gold Cartier watch weighty as a leg iron. He was her worst pupil, trembling with distinction. His wife, in Tokyo, was expecting their first child, “Alone from me. Very morbid.”

  Larry’s eagerness offended her. His mustache offended her. He pulled her to him. “It’s the editor of Rosemary. He said ‘flawless and brilliant,’ ” she told his neck. Two days of not shaving roughened it. She hid her face in his long hair. He smelled of soap and a musty tee shirt. She put her arms around him. “What time is it?” she asked, though she was closer to the clock. Movement was dangerous. Yawning, she moved. Ten after one, the face said behind a veil of dust. “Shit.”

  She stayed slumped in bed while he got up and turned on the fluorescent lamp suspended from chains around the heating pipe near her at the ceiling. A color like the harsh glow of gas stations on turnpikes at night glossed the room. It was their version of the day outside. Blue flowers in the sheet over her knees bruised in that light. “I’ll have to say something,” she said. “He might ask me questions. What it means—he might ask me that.”

  “Fuck him. You think Borges says what his stuff means?”

  “Somehow I don’t think I’m in the same position as Borges.”

  —

  The water had a habit of disappearing. An apartment would spring a leak, and the super, summoned from lunch in his apartment three blocks away, on Baxter Street, would turn off the water for the whole building. That stopped the leak and kept his fried rice warm. Among other anxieties—getting cancer of the nose, losing her teeth, getting mugged, getting raped, getting pregnant—Dina worried that the water would stop in the middle of her shower. She had been worrying over this for six years. It hadn’t happened yet, so the odds against her were growing. One day she would be showering, shampoo in her hair, soap at her armpits, soap inside her, and the water would stop. Or only the coid water would stop. Or the hot water. One day, she thought, and hurried through her shower.

  While she was drying herself, Larry brought her a mug of coffee. She covered herself with the towel. “I heated the milk for you,” he said. The mug, sending up wisps of steam, rested next to a Carb-Othello Sanguine pencil on the flat rim of the sink. He stayed to trim his mustache, thick and curved down, a music brace drawn in the wrong direction. He denied modeling it after Arshile Gorky’s. (“The guy killed himself. If I wanted to be like a guy who killed himself, I’d pick Van Gogh. Gorky was brilliant, but Van Gogh knew God personally.”) Rusting embroidery scissors munched through it, scattering yellow hairs over the wet pencil with a bleeding point and over the toothbrushes and the toilet seat and the floor. She couldn’t step out of the tub because there was no room for them both in the narrow bathroom.

  “I’d like to get out,” she said.

  “Wait…one second.”

  “I’m going to be late.”

  “Drink your coffee for a few seconds.”

  “I want to get out. You can do that later.”

  “Uh-huh, but I see these mothers now.” He snipped at an outstanding hair before lowering the scissors to inspect his mustache.

  She stepped quickly from the tub. She had aimed to press herself against the wall, but she bumped into him. She kept her hold on the towel. “Sorry.”

  “You couldn’t wait.” The scissors clattered in the medicine cabinet. She heard him opening a drawer in the room.

  She tucked the towel around herself and took makeup from the cabinet. Closing it, she glimpsed her unprepared face in the mirror. She tapped the faucet once with each index finger, and again. The coffee didn’t have any hair in it. She skimmed off the skin of milk at the surface before she drank it.

  From up in bed, he watched her at the crammed closet, a doorless improvisation by a previous tenant generous with nails. It stood beside a venerable refrigerator on which was painted an almost life-sized Carmen Miranda, topped by four giant papier-mâché bananas, dusty yellow. Grease spots pocked Carmen’s face and dulled her red lips. “Maybe I’ll go uptown too,” he said.

  She yanked a pair of jeans from a hanger. The legs were wrinkled. “Damn.”

  “Want me to iron them?” He overemphasized the end of the question. He pronounced the words right, but the pattern was off.

  “No. Thanks.” She pushed aside hangers to find her silk blouse, a peach-colored one her mother had worn twenty years before. Gently wrinkled. You could always pretend to yourself that you’d started out ironed and got wrinkled along the way.

  “Did you
hear me?” he asked. “I’ll go uptown with you.”

  At the bottom of the closet, under fallen boots and the buckled hose of the vacuum cleaner, she found her new shoes. They were in the back, near the baited rat trap. Her mother had bought them for her. They had unstylish square toes; she’d saved them too long. And they hurt. She hobbled to the bathroom for toilet paper to dust them. Why had she picked shoes that hurt? “I’d rather go alone.”

  “I’ll go up to the museum. It’s a free day.”

  “A donation day.”

  “You could meet me there afterward.”

  “But I’d like to go alone. To give me time. To think.”

  “Alone on the subway?”

  She dumped the new shoes back in the closet, taking care not to spring the trap. She’d been traveling alone on the subway for years: uptown to a waning counterculture bulletin, rumored to be CIA-funded, where she, another woman, and a bearded psych dropout, all using the name Pilar O’Keefe, had compiled an advice column answering anguished inquiries about VD and toilet seats, the right way to steam brown rice, the advisability of using blond dye on pubic hair or, if not on pubic hair, what about on a poodle; then downtown to a registrar’s office at a two-year college, where she’d shepherded financial-assistance requests from steel out-box to out-box and officially encouraged illiterate nineteen-year-olds to take Remedial Basic English I before Remedial Basic English II; and currently midtown to a private school for foreign executives, where each Saturday she taught five classes of English as a second language to Japanese men in perfect tiny suits and Russian Jewish émigrés in short sleeves with ballpoint pens clipped to their shirt pockets.

  And while she rode the subway, he waited for her at home in the dampness, lulled by the boom of Honeymooners and Superman reruns on TV, with glue on his fingers and scraps of origami paper and foil on the floor and mostly sad blank sheets of watercolor paper spread on the table, over the phone (moved down from the bed for daytime use), over the lessons she was correcting (also moved down), over her typewriter and the Sunday Times she fought him to buy. “That’s not reality. That’s the Times’s version of reality,” he would yell. “I like it better than mine,” she would yell back, dancing out of his hitting range. He hadn’t ever hit her, but he’d offered to.

  She went to the hearth for her everyday shoes. “I’ll be all right,” she said.

  He climbed down from the bed. “Where’s your brush?” Standing behind her at the bathroom mirror, he brushed back her hair, which she had combed forward. He turned her around, wiped rouge from her cheeks with the heel of his palm, kissed her forehead. “You’ll be fine. He won’t believe you when he sees you.” He rummaged through a pile of his clothes on a chair. “I’ll walk you to the subway, little one.”

  “I can’t wait, I’ll be late.” She combed her hair forward again. Black waves parted stubbornly over one ear.

  “You have time.” He was headless, then the neck of the faded turquoise polo shirt dilated and his head appeared, its contours readable because his long hair was pulled taut inside the shirt. He drew the hair out; honey-brown and light-streaked, it fell past his shoulders. From above a cradle of wrinkles his eyes, one blue, one green, fastened her.

  “I can’t wait for you,” she said.

  He walked her, slowly, to the subway. “You should take a cab,” he said. He buttoned her jacket, black velvet balding at the cuffs. When he hugged her goodbye, she held on to the waistband of his red overalls. “ ‘Flawless and brilliant.’ Remember,” he said. She climbed down to dull mustard-tiled walls, down to eyes preying sidelong, empty hands that knew the weight of her purse hanging from her shoulder, knew how delicately her arm fit in its socket. Could she tell them when they came for her, their steps silent in stolen imitation Adidas, “Not today, please. I have to get uptown.” At the bottom of the stairs she smiled up at him because she knew he expected her to.

  Down another flight of stairs, she unbuttoned her jacket. On the platform a man read the Post, a woman hummed “O Holy Night,” a girl with no mirror put on mascara. Dina saw the vast territory of the future spread out in the wash colors of maps. She would discover something she needed to know. She would be saved. The train, arriving, would roar.

  —

  She was small and occasionally pretty. She looked trusting and soft and shy, and since she examined her face frequently—in mirrors and the chrome sides of toasters and the shining blades of knives, in whatever reflecting surface was handy when the urge for confirmation struck—she wondered at her outward misrepresentation. She thought of herself as fierce and devouring, one unending demand for an unknowable benediction. She couldn’t define it, she couldn’t discover who would bestow it on her. She believed herself capable of any cruelty in pursuit of it. This terrifying aspect she hid so well that she felt in danger of disappearing completely. She needed to see herself in mirrors to make sure she was still there. And what she saw confused her.

  Fragile-looking yet surprisingly voluptuous, she resembled a scaled-down ancient love goddess, the gilded plastic replica sold at museum shops: full breasts, a narrow waist, full hips. She looked desirable and, because of her size, manageable. Her large gray eyes, dark-lashed, and plump lower lip, somewhat chapped, were inviting. She radiated the intensity and sweetness of a young girl. Her image confused her because she felt no connection to it.

  She wouldn’t let Larry kiss or touch her full breasts. “They hurt.” She didn’t want him inside her, his hands on her full hips. “It hurts.” At night after he fell asleep, she warmed her hand against her thigh, moving stealthily not to wake him.

  She believed that angry thoughts, hers or anyone else’s, caused harm. If during a fight she wished Larry were dead, then soon he’d end up face down, doing a cramped dead-man’s float, in the ringed bathtub; or he’d slip in the unscooped sidewalk droppings of an unleashed Saint Bernard and tumble into Seventh Avenue as a beer truck doing sixty tried to make the light. To counteract her anger she tapped certain objects a certain number of times or blinked her eyes or held her breath. Some nights before she could sleep she had to climb down from the loft bed and touch the bathroom faucet twice with her index fingers, twice with her middle fingers, twice with her thumbs. Other nights required two or three pilgrimages. For her twenty-fifth birthday Larry made a purple papier-mâché faucet and cemented it to the wall near the bed. “That’ll save you mileage, little one,” he said. She never used it.

  If a stranger passing on the street, a Portuguese woman in black contending with a toddler and a bag of dried cod, wished Dina harm, it would come true unless she protected herself. She held her breath or forcibly exhaled as the other passed. These precautions gave her a breathless quality and the tentativeness of a person on the brink of oxygen deprivation. She accomplished her rituals more or less by rote, as the fulfillment of compulsions: she had to touch the faucet, never mind why.

  She cried easily and had weak ankles, no arches, and a medley of allergies. Larry complained that they spent more money on antihistamines and tissues than on food. “It’s clear you weren’t breast-fed,” he’d tell her when her nose itched and her throat ached and her eyes burned. It gave him another reason to hate her parents. “Any normal mother breast-feeds her child.”

  She had learned not to answer these provocations if she wanted to avoid a harangue about her parents, moral unfitness of. Then she would be obliged to defend them, if only for logic’s sake, at key points in his oration. But sometimes she couldn’t resist answering.

  “Asshole, jerk, I hate you, you fucking shit,” she shrieked at him. “I could almost kill for a little peace and quiet.”

  “Almost doesn’t count,” he reminded her, and twisted her arm up behind her back.

  She didn’t like the wild screaming person she became in her fights with him. She wondered who she would be in a room with daylight through the windows. He might be someone else there too. She could remember bright rooms she’d grown up in, a maid ironing her clothes, the endless
power of her mother’s checkbook at department stores. “You can’t beat real estate,” her mother said, and got a license to frame for the den. Dina could remember her father at the dinner table, saying that AT&T and Honeywell had gone up. She’d pictured bees ascending in a blue sky. A call from the hospital interrupted him. Until she was five or six, she didn’t know the difference between patients and patience. According to her mother, somebody’s daughter’s ring was four carats, somebody else’s daughter had been—never mind. A horn-handled carving knife slid through roast beef in a pool of red on a white oval platter edged with gold.

  An upper-middle-class upbringing had convinced her that she didn’t want to be an upper-middle-class wife, but it hadn’t equipped her to solve poverty. Her idea of survival involved paying bills and the virtue of responsibility, which she mistook for respectability. The bills got paid sooner or later, for her pride, not honor. But poverty required more guile than she could admit to having, and less despair.

  In escaping a four-carat ring and “never mind,” she had hoped to unrein her imagination, to ascend with the Honeywell bees in the bluest of skies. She cashed the college graduation check from her parents and fled to New York and freedom. Her mother’s weekly phone calls proposed graduate school, a white Mustang with red interior, and/or a psychiatrist. “Come home,” her father said. For a hundred dollars a roommate service placed her in the East Twenty-sixth Street apartment of “a suitable young professional woman matched to your personality by computer.” Carole was thirty-four and in Better Dresses at Lord & Taylor. “You want something, I’ll let you in on half my employee discount.” She didn’t wash fruit before she ate it. Dina worked mornings as a receptionist at a furniture showroom—a forest of veneer—and spent the afternoons writing stories about working in a furniture showroom. The doctor son of a doctor friend of her father’s took her out for a drink at Maxwell’s Plum. He was tall and quiet and kind. She focused on despising him for his suit. When he asked to see her again, she was flattered and desolate. “I’m getting married,” she told him. A mug of beer raced across the bar. Waiting for a free stool at a Chock Full O’ Nuts, she met Larry, his hair in three loops tied with rawhide thongs. She knew he was a rock star with a weakness for date-nut bread. “Princess,” he labeled her. “Pirate,” she responded. He gave her “Guernica” at the Museum of Modern Art and ducked behind Louise Bourgeois’s “Sleeping Figure.” He had her blouse off at his apartment and was explaining that he couldn’t sketch her if she kept her bra on when his roommate, a night clerk at the Animal Medical Center, came in early. “A marmoset bit me,” he said, unlacing his sneakers. Larry and Dina splurged on a room at the Hilton, blocks away. Johnny Carson’s hair was orange on the color TV. “You should take your parents up on that Mustang,” Larry said. “You can always sell it. Should we spring for the coffee shop in the morning?” The next day he gave her a picture of herself sleeping. He’d drawn it on a Hilton menu, under DESSERTS. They got married three weeks later and moved into a place of their own, situated in picturesque poverty that Dina believed she’d always remember fondly. They were still there. After six years Dina’s fondness for it had long ago vanished. She had hoped that by holding Larry, she would be holding art. Instead she had trapped herself as wholly as a suburban matron, but with no consolations: no house, car, charge accounts, neatly stitched episiotomy.