by T. Gertler
Apale, thin man came to the reception area for her. “Good God,” he said, “what are you, nineteen?” The two secretaries whispered to each other. He kept glancing back at her as he led the way to his office.
“I’m twenty-eight,” she said apologetically.
“Don’t ever tell anybody else. It’s much more…” The sentence finished in a mumble while he cleared a space on the sofa for her. She sat among piles of manuscripts, books, magazines. She put her purse on some magazines, picked it up again, tapped it unobtrusively on either side. His phone rang and he said, “One minute.” She put her purse on the floor and looked around the room.
There were pictures everywhere, framed photographs on the walls from floor to ceiling: famous writers and obscure ones, variously inscribed to Howard Ritchie with love, respect, admiration, suspicion, hesitation, or, in a calligraphic instance, “cheerful loathing” from an infamous writer fattened on TV talk shows but bony and evasive in this early picture. And among the writers on one wall there were two photographs of a beautiful woman. She smiled on a beach, her fine-boned face aloof, a long thigh interrupting the horizon. Holding a champagne glass, she followed Howard Ritchie, hatted and one stride ahead of her, in a restaurant. His wife. His handsomeness showed more clearly in the picture than in person, as if the drama he embodied required an isolated historical moment to contain it. He said, “Margery,” into the phone in a flat voice and caught Dina watching him. His eyes lowered, hers traveled upward.
On the wall behind him, between two windows, was a child’s drawing. Flowers or people floated in a void created by three bold lines. Next to it was a color photograph of him with his arms around a thin blond unsmiling girl. Sheltered by his striped blue and gray shirt, the child faced the camera with measured assurance; her father, guarding her, stared down the photographer. “Margery,” he said into the phone again, and Dina envied the safety and purpose of his life: his place to work, his family, the serious blond daughter and the woman on the walls who was no doubt the Margery he now politely argued with. She longed to be politely argued with. She longed to be photographed in a restaurant with a husband who was moving forward, even if he kept a pace ahead, because if it were her picture with him, he wouldn’t be a pace ahead; she’d be right there keeping up, careful not to get ahead herself. “Margery.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. Would he ever ask for her picture to put with the other writers’ pictures? How would she inscribe it? First she had to imagine a fired and deathless friendship with him, his benevolent mentorship, her flowering, his subsequent willing eclipse in homage to her talent. She inspected the writers’ gallery again, to pick her spot. All the writers were men.
“Now,” he said, putting down the phone. His hungry, mournful expression stirred in her an emotion she decided was nervousness.
“It’s brilliant. Flawless.” He pulled a manuscript from a pile of papers.
Yes, she thought, you already said that. Her typed pages blotched with Wite-Out rested under his hands. “It’s messy.”
“No, it’s very neat. Surprisingly neat. Tell me about yourself.”
She had been found in a rush basket floating in a river. On her right shoulder she bore the sign of royalty, a pink birthmark shaped like a nuclear power plant. “What do you want to know?”
“Where’d you grow up?”
“California.” Reluctantly: “La Jolla.”
“That so? Do you miss it?” His questions had only a slight interrogatory inflection. He was sly or bored or tired.
“No.”
“Your parents still there?”
“Yes.” She shriveled from writer to daughter.
“You have a character here named Ritchyoffsky. That used to be my father’s name. Want some coffee?”
“No, thanks. Yes, please.” She called after him to the hall, “No, none for me, thanks.” She needed her compact mirror. But the urge to find herself almost visible behind a film of powder didn’t outweigh the risk of embarrassment if he saw her doing it. She concentrated instead on deciphering his clutter: which pile of manuscripts was favored, which was spurned.
He returned humming, slouched, with a blue mug of coffee. She puzzled over his clothes, an odd combination of casual expensive things. He looked as though he’d reached into his closet in the morning and put on whatever he grabbed first. The resulting haphazard tastefulness was disarming: tweed jacket, well-worn loose corduroy trousers, muted plaid shirt, and a bow tie, olive and navy stripes. With his air of absentmindedness and his shrewd blue eyes, the effect was one of old money, of comfort and privilege genetically obtained.
“I like your jacket,” she said.
“Thanks. It’s a Ralph Lauren, had it for years. Too bad he’s so popular now.”
His father’s name had been Ritchyoffsky. Yet Howard Ritchie couldn’t have grown up hearing dark melodies of guilt through the speech of parents who were immigrants or the children of immigrants. He hadn’t been born with an understanding of exile. He wasn’t displaced, he was at home; he couldn’t be Jewish.
“You remind me of someone,” he said after two silent sips. “The first girlfriend I ever had. Same eyes. Her name was Sherry Bauer. Any relation?”
She shook her head. A teacher, Rabbi Bauer, had smelled of cherry cough drops. “Learn!” he commanded the children, striking Hebrew letters on the blackboard with a rubber-tipped pointer.
“My parents were unhappy about it. I was sixteen. I’m forty-four. I remember it.” His smile did nothing to cheer his eyes. “They never said it, but I’m sure they were upset because they thought I was shtupping her. You never heard that? It’s slang, Yiddish for screwing.”
The quasi-Englishman in tweed holding her story knew Yiddish. His leanness cut into space. He was eight years older than Larry. She closed one hand to dig nails into her palm for the distraction of pain.
“Tell me about yourself, that you never heard of shtupping.”
She had come to his office as an invited writer; since it was the only identity she had, she wanted to keep it. But, having given it to her with his phone call, he now seemed inclined to take it away. “What do you want to know?” she asked for the second time.
“School,” he decided.
“Berkeley—some English, some Ed., some Psych.—and before that public school, and Hebrew school once a week till I was eleven. I know what to do if a camel falls in the marketplace on the Sabbath.”
“We’re both Jewish.” He leaned back in his chair with enjoyment. “And what do you do now, do you work?”
“I teach English part-time to foreign executives. A semester with me, and they can say, ‘I would like to see your supervisor’ and ‘Do you deliver?’ ” She wasn’t a writer. She’d never believed it anyway. The story he’d called about wasn’t her design, it was a freak coherent union of her terrors.
“And you do this so you’re free to write?” he asked.
“I do it to eat.”
“You write every day?”
“No.”
“You should.”
“It’s hard, the apartment’s small, there’s no privacy, and the library’s full of winos and it’s closed two extra days a week to save money and I can’t afford to go to a coffee shop every afternoon, even if I could get a back table in a quiet place for a couple of hours.” Besides, the branch library didn’t have a public bathroom, not after a librarian, the nice one with the toupee, waded through two inches of water, vomit, urine, and excrement on the bathroom floor to find the plumbing problem: someone had tried to flush down Volume 2 of the Britannica. The book, bloated as a corpse fished from the Hudson, was stuck in the filthy bowl while the toilet kept running. What would happen to schoolchildren with assignments on Luther Burbank? Democracy required that since the winos had to be kept out of the bathroom, everybody else had to be kept out too.
“You should write every day. Can’t your parents help you? I’m assuming they’re not poor.”
“They’re not.” It was interesting how
nail-digging in both fists didn’t double the pain of nail-digging in one.
“And I’m assuming they’re like most parents, Jewish parents, I know I’m one, I know how it is. Why do they let you live without money?”
Parents were an idea far away. They sent the idea of concern in references to dressing warm, the idea of love in a hundred-dollar birthday check. “I moved to New York to do exactly that. I’m an adult, Mr. Ritchie.”
“No, please: Howard. I’ve offended you.”
“No, it’s okay, you haven’t. But we haven’t talked about my story.”
Half-closed eyes flickered from her to the manuscript and back to her. “I want to know about your writing. Why don’t you have privacy in your apartment?”
“Because it’s one small room and my husband’s there.” It came out with the galled relief of a confession.
“Ah, the man on the phone when I called you. I thought he was D. Reeve. In fact from your story I thought you were a middle-aged man.”
“I’m not.”
“I pictured you as a disheveled man in a big raincoat, probably secondhand, with tobacco stains on your fingers. That’s who I expected when I called.” He chuckled into his collar before asking with sudden sobriety, “Can’t you work when your husband’s not there?”
“He’s always there.”
“He works at home?”
Her head moved down for the first part of a nod but didn’t come up again. His questions narrowed the present to a doorless corridor leading from shame to shame.
“He writes?” Howard prompted.
“He’s a painter. Right now he’s concentrating on collages.”
“Any showings?”
“No.”
He sat straight up. “Why can’t he do something to earn money too?”
It was so constant a question in her life that a stranger could ask it. “He does sometimes. At a florist’s.”
“He thinks it’s all right for you to support him?”
“I don’t, not always and not well, either.” Her father called Larry “that pimp” and didn’t grasp the implication: if Larry was a pimp, what was she?
“Do you think it’s all right?”
“He says owning stuff is a joke. He says an artist has better things to do.” She was pleading with him to understand. Her nose swelled with grief.
He ignored her tears. “No wonder your parents don’t help. If a healthy adult male won’t work…”
She sniffled. She sighed. This was how she had to pay for her story. “His parents were Danish Jews. Sometime in ′43 the Danes ferried Jews over to Sweden, to save them from the Nazis. He was born in Sweden. Conceived there. But his parents gave him a Danish name. They could have gone back after the war—the Danish government protected the Jews’ stuff—but his father wanted to go to Palestine. He wanted to be safe. The Danes shipped their possessions to them in Sweden, someplace near Malmö. They got to Palestine in ′46 and changed Larry’s Danish name to a Hebrew one. All their stuff was lost in transit. His mother died a couple of years after Palestine became Israel. She was working in a kibbutz. There was a sniper. Or some tomatoes exploded. I’m not sure. His father brought Larry to Cincinnati and changed his name from the Hebrew one to an American one. The father taught music at Hebrew Union College. Larry got to be an Eagle Scout. How’s that for fitting in? He was a history major at NYU. He wanted to study art and his father wanted him to be a doctor. I guess they compromised. He got his master’s in history too. European history. He wrote an essay on Josephus that won a prize. He started to go for his Ph.D., but his father was killed outside a movie theater. It was a revival of Sullivan’s Travels. Nobody’s sure if he saw it. Larry says his father liked Veronica Lake a lot. Somebody mugged him and then stabbed him. Larry says his father got killed because he did other people’s work. Larry says all an artist should do is his own work.”
Howard Ritchie picked up his coffee mug. “But if you agree with him that artists shouldn’t have to work, why are you working?” He drank coffee and watched her cry.
She had told secrets, betrayed her parents and her husband and her shame to a mumbling stranger in a bow tie; and he had given her the odd exhilaration of having no secrets. Before they’d spoken, he’d known her secrets by reading her story. If she couldn’t learn to trust him, she could learn how to betray him. She watched herself cry too.
—
He left the building with her. He had put on a gray fedora, like the one he was wearing in the restaurant picture with his wife. Over his shoulder he carried a beat-up leather pouch stuffed with books and papers. She missed the safety of his desk between them.
After a few steps she found his rhythm and followed it. People chased after the exhaust fumes of buses, flapped hands at cabs rolling on treadless tires. People frightened her with their shopping bags and attaché cases: men in ties and trench coats, women in French blazers and dignified skirts. She envied their steadiness and pitied them for it too. Their insignificance and hers made a sorrowing kinship. What will become of me? she wondered, longing to put her hands over her eyes, as if she were sitting through an axe-wielding scene in a horror movie.
“You’ll get back to me with this,” he said, meaning her story, which he’d returned to her in a manila envelope with someone else’s address on it.
“Yes.”
“Shorter, right? More ending. You understand?”
“No, but I guess I will when I try to do it.”
“And you’ll bring me more stories.”
He was walking close to her. His scent would be clean, with faded cologne, she thought. He smelled of liquor, his jacket was steeped in it. She moved away. “I like your hat.”
He grinned sadly and placed it on her head. “There you go.”
His action and her response, a shy giggle, reminded her of high school flirting. She gave the hat back and fluffed her hair out at the sides.
“I’m that way.” He pointed uptown, in the direction of a pretzel wagon and a black man hawking belts: “Real leather, genyooine, check it out.”
“When do you want it?”
“Whenever you’re ready.” He was gone.
It wouldn’t be dark for another hour at least. She was alone, on her own, free to do what she wanted. She could explore a department store, spray blasts of sample perfume on her neck and wrists. She could play in a bookstore. She could walk toward home and take a bus when she got tired. The manila envelope dropped, and she picked it up without touching the pavement. Near the subway entrance she halted to dig a token from her jeans pocket. A tall man wearing a gray suit almost bumped into her, and she followed him down the subway stairs. From her height four steps above him, holding her breath, she saw how precisely he had arranged his blond hair to cover a bald spot.
—
The sound of the key in the lock brought no response. She turned on the table lamp; dust particles floated through the beam. There was a note from Larry taped to the bathroom mirror, where he knew she’d find it.
Beloved, have gone to pier. Come to me with all your good news to tell. Your adoring husband who is missing you, L. Walk on left side of Canal till Varick in case I’m coming back.
—
An Afghan and an Irish wolfhound sniffed each other at the gate to the pier. Their owners could have been any of a dozen people sitting along the broad wood railing, reading a newspaper or a book, doing needlepoint, staring at rust patterns on a ship moored there. A man crocheting something red hooted and leaned against his companion, a man wearing ponyskin chaps over jeans. Wind carried the hoot out to the river. The wolfhound appraised Dina with yellow eyes before placing its nose in the crook of her arm, to stain silk. “Thanks,” she said, “but I’m married.”
Beyond the ship, at the far end of the pier, she saw Larry or a man dressed like him. He waved at her. Cold wind raised goosebumps on her skin when she left the shelter of the ship.
“Come here, hurry!” he shouted. It was a long walk toward him. His hair, u
nfastened, blew across his mouth. His cold hands spun her around by the shoulders so she faced the harbor. “Look.”
The small and for once unmisted Statue of Liberty stood like a stripper in pink light. Blue-gray water bore facets of light streaming toward the lady, and on the other shore New Jersey in low relief had stopped smirking. A clear and beautiful evening was falling on the river, falling chilly and gentle, bringing with it a hint of contentment.
“Oh,” she whispered at the sight.
“I got it for you,” he said.
—
She told him some of what she’d told Howard Ritchie, how she’d cried. “We’re out of wheat germ.”
He put a jar in the cart. “What’d he say about the story?”
“He wants it shorter, with more ending.”
“I thought it was flawless and brilliant the way it was.”
“I guess it’ll get more flawless and brilliant.” She stopped at Granny Smith apples shining green, noted the price, and pushed the cart past them.
“What is he, some kind of an asshole?”
“No.”
“He sounds like one. He sounds like he doesn’t know what he wants.” He tore the end off a loaf of French bread and tossed the loaf in the cart.
“Maybe,” she said and headed for the shortest checkout line.
By the time they’d walked home, he’d eaten all the bread and described sunset on the Hudson as an extension of the reality Matisse had despaired of finding in canvases that represented it instead of evoking it. At the door to their building she reached up and kissed his forehead. He was so excited by his speech that his skin was warm in the cool evening.
—
That night in bed his hand traveled under her nightgown, tugging at her underpants, which she said she wore for warmth during the winter and managed not to explain during the summer. Her legs remained together—there were no banners and confetti for him, no welcoming committee—and he had to maneuver his hand through an obstacle course before he could push a finger inside her. She wriggled in discomfort. Soon his finger moved more easily and her legs relaxed somewhat, but they didn’t offer him a haven. When her breathing grew shallow and quick, when she was moving with his finger, he whispered to her, “Oh little one, open your legs,” which she tried to do, but her legs tightened instead. In consolation, she patted his erection, a stray dog that roused in her pity and concern about fleas. She patted him until he said, “I want to go inside you,” whereupon she unhooked herself from his finger and slid down the bed and dutifully lapped at the erection. “No, inside you,” he whispered, but made no effort to stop her. She toiled over him, with hopes perhaps of forestalling his plans; but soon with a groan of reluctance he pulled away and, hanging down from the bed, opened a bureau drawer and took out a box of lambskin condoms. She heard a foil packet tear open and raised herself to help him, a gesture made a beat too late, encountering flesh suited in other flesh, prelubricated. He rolled her over on her back and pressed himself against her, optimism born of a bad memory. She, though, could remember everything; and, stuffed with anger and long-held weariness, had no room for him. After vain and delicate approaches, he tried to be more forceful and won from her a yowled “You’re hurting me!” at which he stopped and leaned on her flexed guarding knee and sighed. Trying again, he succeeded partially and might have gone further, but she cried “Wait!” so desperately that he waited while she adjusted herself to him and by the adjustment ejected him. His next try worked; he installed himself without her noticing it too much. Pleased, he smiled down at her and yanked the pillow from under her head. She smiled back at him until he pulled her nightgown up above her breasts. “Don’t,” she said.