Elbowing the Seducer

by T. Gertler

  “We can be partners,” she whispered to him at the model-boat pond in Central Park one afternoon, afraid to say it louder because he might get angry. A braid coiled on his shoulder. “Just part-time jobs for both of us and enough free time to do what we want.”

  Two women with baby carriages went by. One of the women was wearing low-heeled brown leather boots with red cuffs. On the other side of the pond children squealed and a man shouted, “No, Edward, no!” A German shepherd had jumped in the water. Its head glided among miniature aircraft carriers.

  Larry said, “I told you I’m not—not ever—going to work all day at some shit job so I can have a bigger apartment to fall asleep in like a fucking zombie. Where are your—”

  “Just part-time, not all day—”

  “Where are your fucking parents, don’t they want to see you happy?”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m not here on earth to make you happy.” His mouth puckered in satisfaction. “You want to be happy, go find a lawyer to marry.”

  A squirrel came to their bench, begging for food. Once, she’d liked watching squirrels, but now they reminded her of rats darting across open spaces. That morning the exterminator had left trays of poison in the cellar. She peered into a shiny black eye, round, provident, brave.

  —

  The train, arriving, roared. There remained the question of whether or not she’d be saved. The girl with mascara brushed against her as they entered the car. “Sorry,” the girl said. Dina nodded and smiled and nodded. She couldn’t speak because she was holding her breath.

  Rosemary was descended from the Review, which had established a respectable circulation among college libraries and large bookstores in college towns. The intricate woodblock R on its masthead had been carved by a student, Dickie N. Thornton, forty years before; thirty-five years later his widow, Lydia with plumed moles, provided a fund to perpetuate the magazine, with the provision that Dickie’s R should also endure. Otherwise the Review’s budget was sheer charity from the university, a purchase of prestige, vulnerable when money was tight. If something had to be cut, it wouldn’t be pipettes or textbooks on the Arapaho or “self-resilient” basketball hoops, it would be poetry. No one pretended distress or a polite hesitation, a conscience-tweaking. Howard’s predecessor, Dr. Zablau, didn’t protest when the alumni newsletter’s funding was increased and the Review’s reduced. Alumni endowed libraries and locker rooms and—who knows?—Dr. Zablau’s own salary; poetry’s rewards, like God’s, were less easily grasped. Dr. Zablau believed in God and literature, but, having fled Würzburg in 1937, had no wish to inflict his beliefs on anyone. Then too he may have worried that he’d used up his life’s allotment of luck in escaping from Germany; it remained for him to nurture anonymity so one of God’s bookkeepers wouldn’t notice him one day and say, “Look, there’s old Sam yelling about trochees, and after all we did for him.” Next would come a heart attack outside a cafeteria, where he would lie twitching on the sidewalk while people passed him for a drunk and someone pretending to loosen his tie would steal his wallet. He dreaded that the last thing he’d see would be such a face, the jackal’s, bending over him. As it turned out, he died inside a cafeteria, having choked on a raisin in a piece of raisin toast, though what he’d asked for was rye; noticing the mistake, he’d said nothing, thinking there are worse tragedies in the world than getting the wrong kind of bread. The last thing he saw was the face of the cashier, rouged, with very blue eyelids, and old.

  Zablau’s death opened a position that no one rushed to fill. Being editor of the Review guaranteed big headaches for practically no money. An ambitious instructor or professor of literature would do better to spend extracurricular time writing a critical study of Madame Bovary. The sixteen critical studies of Madame Bovary then circulating (among them Emma Bovary and Louise Colet: The Distance of Art from Life and Flaubert and the Cost of Perfection and Bovary: Search for Perfection) weren’t deterrents but proof that the subject was, as the professors liked to say, viable. The existing studies made further work easier; instead of originating a theory about Flaubert, the upward-striving professor simply wrote a book attacking an already published theory. The professor now had a book of his own to wave around at evaluation time, to help him achieve tenure, and to require his students to buy during the semester they covered Flaubert. They covered too the professor’s book on Flaubert and any of the sixteen other studies he may have assigned or they may have found while casing the library stacks for a private place to light up a quick joint. Some sweetly stoned students with dried chocolate milk at the corners of their mouths tried to look up Emma Bovary in the authors’ catalogue. The professors moved on to critical studies of Bleak House or Mansfield Park or, for the venturesome, the works of the yet-un-Nobeled Beckett. There was no profit for anyone as editor of the Review.

  Into this vacuum walked Howard, sober and purposeful in a borrowed suit. His eyes shone with comprehension, the whites clearer than they would ever be again. His hair wasn’t yet paling with wisdom. Having tearfully and sloppily left Margery and the children, he arrived in the city and through the intercession of Felix, who owed him something, achieved an interview with the chairman of the English department of the university, Felix’s mother’s friend’s onetime Platonic lover and a specialist in Flaubert.

  “Who is your favorite writer, hmm?” the chairman asked.

  “Flaubert,” Howard announced, “and after him Marvell, who was before him.”

  The chairman rode in an oak swivel chair on casters to the bright window and apologized for misplacing Howard’s résumé. Howard faced a corona of glare describing a thick, shadowed presence. He hadn’t sent a résumé. He knew the chairman could see him with no difficulty, but what was it the chairman saw—another body to stand yammering at kids, another mind offering itself on the grubby altar of literature, beneath a cloud of buzzing flies? Canon fodder, an unemployed homeless copywriter, a cuckold, a creep?

  The shadow at the window rumbled. Had Howard ever taught?

  Yes, yes, he lied. Yes.

  There was one class in creative writing. Freshman, of course.

  “Of course,” Howard said. Did the chairman have a ring he should kiss? He had hemmed his borrowed pants with long stitches the night before. Bowing might loosen his needlework.

  It would be in the nature of a probationary endeavor.

  “Naturally,” Howard said.

  And there was the matter of the Review, a literary quarterly. He would be entrusted with its editorship—for a probationary period. He would of course receive additional compensation for those duties.

  “What exactly do I do?” Howard asked.

  “You read manuscripts of poetry and stories, and essays too, and you select some and get them printed.”

  “Writing from students?”

  “Writing from people. Writers. Students are seldom either.”

  Howard’s beautiful smile dawned. “I get paid to do this?” There had to be a catch. Why should he be handed this prize?

  The chairman misunderstood and rolled closer. “Yes, paid. Look here, you don’t have to do it, but someone has to do it, and it doesn’t seem unfair to ask you, you have only one class, and that by a bit of luck, timing; the class is really not the essential matter. If you feel you don’t want to—”

  “Excuse me, sir. When do I start?”

  He had entered the dean’s office a disgraced onetime would-be copywriter and failed anthologist, and left it an editor and college teacher, still in a borrowed suit. This lesson, the limits of metamorphosis, impressed him as something worth challenging.

  —

  The energy he would have put into plotting the vivisection of Margery or at least into making her understand how much she had lost when she lost him, he now put into his work. He pitied and loathed the forty-three students in Creative Writing I for their efforts and muttered to them once in exasperation that he was renaming the course Creative Typing I. Their applause surprised h
im. He pitied them for trying and failing; he loathed them for trying in the first place. They interfered with his real work, a quest for love. His mistress would be literature, and he would establish her in the…The next word should have been Review, but he declined it as unacceptable, a moldy tidbit from somebody else’s bygone party. He would rename the magazine, to signal its new spirit. (He’d never read the Review, but he knew that under him it would be different from anything it had been before.)

  It seemed he had the world to choose from, short of short anatomical terms and ethnic slander. He could name the magazine Henry or Tree or Cut Along Dotted Line. The exhilaration was greater than when he’d tried to name his children, his lost babies, because this progeny would be solely his. But, after checking with the chairman, he saw his choice shrink to anything beginning with R, Dickie Thornton’s hand-carved R that formed the logo for the Review; he couldn’t obliterate the past, even a past he didn’t know. He resigned himself, then brightened: heading a new name, the R would uphold continuity and acknowledge underlying values in the midst of change. He celebrated his rationale at dinner with Felix in a French restaurant serving Italian wine. After two glasses of Chianti, while Felix fired at him, “Red, robin, riff, rest, roost, rapid transit, rape, rooster, Rasputin, Raskolnikov, Rosebud, rookery, rye, Rosenberg, Rex, rattler, resource, Rhonda,” he let his blurring menu scream from the translated Poulet section: “…with the Garlic and Rosemary.”

  “Rosemary,” he said.

  “Why not Rhonda?”

  “Rosemary because it’s a flavor and a woman—two women, Rose and Mary. Stein’s ‘I Am Rose,’ Jesus’s Mary, either Mary or both. The two sides of women.”

  Felix laughing, thrumming fingers on the table as if searching for the strings of his bass: “Okay, buddy pal, what’re the two sides of women?”

  Howard looked at him full-face, then inspected his glass of wine. “The front and the back. Cheers.”

  Months later, before sending his first issue to the printer, he added a line from Shakespeare to the masthead: “There’s Rosemary, that’s for remembrance.” He cut it there, thinking it was enough of a nod to the magazine’s academic source; drawn, overtired, living in a sublet without a roach of his own, he didn’t include the next line, “Pray you, love, remember.”

  —

  He sat in Sam Zablau’s chair at Sam Zablau’s desk, which the maintenance man, Beau, had cleaned out, packing the personal contents and three framed pictures in a carton stamped Lettuce. It remained in the office, its label a red flash at the corner of Howard’s eye, until its removal to a university basement, where it waited for a year before being claimed by Rivke Bester from Fort Tryon, a third cousin of the late Sam. Beau himself would die before the year was over, stabbed at a cockfight in a two-car garage in Jamaica, Queens, far from the Jamaica of his birth. Mr. Martinez would clean out Beau’s locker and store the contents in a carton stamped Eggs for two weeks until Léonie Beauvrais, widow, came to pick it up.

  Howard meditated on the red word Lettuce. All his possessions—the clothes at the sublet apartment and the six books he had flung into an A&P bag as he left Margery—would have fit in the Lettuce carton, with room left over. He let this image bear down on him. His face was tranquil and grave. He took in the three beige rectangles, Cyclops-nailed, on the darker beige wall where the framed pictures had been; the filthy windows, Sam’s grime, clouding light, dulling a snow-spotted park twelve floors below; and the piles of envelopes menacing him with poems and stories and essays and correspondence intended for Sam Zablau and waiting, waiting, some of them for over six months. The oak chair, movable in crab fashion on creaking casters like the chairman’s chair, held his body resentfully; after twenty years or more of Sam Zablau, it didn’t want him, an intruder.

  “I’d like a new chair,” he said.

  “That is new,” Beau answered. “Puffessor Zablau only had it but since last October.” He set down a bucket reeking of ammonia.

  “Then I’d like a different new chair.”

  “I’m to do the windows.”

  “Can I get this place painted?”

  “I know you can get these windows washed.” Beau opened a window to cold and the illusion of fresh air.

  Howard picked up the phone and wiped the mouthpiece once with his sleeve, then wiped the earpiece. There was no dial tone.

  “How do I call out?”

  But Beau was already outside, strapped to the building, squeegeeing a pane of glass.

  It didn’t matter. Howard had nobody to call.

  —

  That Saturday morning he arrived at the office with Felix and a stepladder and two paintbrushes and two gallons of white paint and a can of turpentine and a takeout order of two cups of coffee and six doughnuts, half of them chocolate at Felix’s cranky insistence.

  “God damn,” Felix said as he backed out of the room, carrying half of Sam Zablau’s desk while Howard followed him, grunting, with the other half. “I got a matinee.”

  “Get the chair, Felix, come on.”

  “I need to sleep, man. I didn’t sleep all night.”

  Howard handed him a can of Arctic White. “Open it.”

  Felix obeyed, cursing. “I helped you with the job, good buddy. It’s your problem how to make it pretty.” His long black hair covered his eyes as he bent over the can.

  Howard asked, “How much gratitude would you like?”

  Felix grinned, gave an unrepentant “Sorry, man,” before launching into a story about how stoned they all were in the pit the night before when the leading lady raced them through her second biggest number. “We’re limping in after her, man, and Dave’s looking up at the stage and telling her over the music, ‘Hey, mama, this piano don’t have wheels,’ but the bitch goes right on.”

  They sat on the floor and drank coffee. Felix ate five doughnuts while Howard described the furniture he’d bought for the office, indicating with sweeps of his small hands what would go where.

  “Why can’t you use the stuff that’s here?”

  “Do you like playing on somebody else’s bass?” The minute he asked the question he regretted it because a roaring rose in his ears and blotted out whatever Felix was saying.

  They agreed that the paint smelled terrible. Felix decided it affected his breathing. “You’re lucky I don’t play a horn,” he said. With the first white strokes covering beige, Howard heard himself humming. Two coats, and it would be perfect.

  —

  Preparing the first issue of Rosemary, he expected the chairman or another tenured professor to sneak up and stand reading over his shoulder. No one did. He thought this denoted trust and later understood it had been indifference. To others the magazine was a symbol, tired and harmless, a dribble of words. To him it was a live and burning possibility, an opportunity hammering, a door opening into a malleable future, words stretching like newsprint on Silly Putty (oh his lost kids) to a point beyond distortion. And somewhere beyond distortion but before the snapping point, before the putty fractured under stress, somewhere between the two was transfiguration, when the words meant more than themselves, when they erupted from neat and clever patterns, when they bopped and kicked to forever surprise, when they grinned and wailed and showed their sharp shocking teeth. The chairman and others assumed aesthetic struggles were bloodless. They believed they were getting a museum. He was going to give them a zoo.

  He sped through the manuscripts that had accumulated since Sam Zablau’s death, scanning each submission. The word submission summed up the problem he faced. He didn’t want writing to crawl to him, hat in hand. He wanted to be assaulted by live grenades juggled before his eyes. He wanted the stories of tightrope walkers, words from the high wire, precise and deadly, with no net. He wanted the exultation of risk; and if it meant a soundless slow-motion fall to the sawdust and a thud punctured by bone cracking and the fascinating taste of blood, his own, then he wanted that too, and the bleached immobility to follow, a steel pin through the tibia, the wei
ght of a plaster cast and the growing filth of it, and earthbound crutches rammed against armpits.

  And so, when a story began,

  Often it has been observed that the railway journey is the best method of traveling, even in this age of the airplane. It has to be remembered that speed is not necessarily progress; and that sometimes the old-fashioned ways are still the best. In the coach that had just departed Norwich and was bound for Lancaster sat a traveler who best exemplified this attitude. She was a widow named Mrs. Prescott. Nora Prescott was forty-eight years old and wore her auburn hair, which was not dyed, up in a bun. Her knowing azure eyes looked out the window. She was wearing a smart navy voile dress that her late husband, Dr. George Prescott, always liked. She liked to wear it now because it reminded her of him. She was going to visit her daughter, Jessica, in Lancaster, to try and persuade her not to become one of the Amish if she possibly could help it. Little did Mrs. Prescott know how far this journey would take her…,