Elbowing the Seducer

by T. Gertler

  “You can pee in the woods, for Christ’s sake,” Howard told her.

  “Daddy drove us all the way out here to pee,” Matty told Suzanne.

  “Wise guy,” Howard said. “The woods are a museum and a movie too. Don’t you want to draw some of this stuff?” He gestured at trees, rotting wood picnic tables and benches littered with paper bags from burger factories.

  “I want to draw the guys in Murder in Space.” This was Matty’s current favorite movie. “And I want to draw the Flatiron Building.” She had a postcard of the Steichen photograph “Flatiron Evening, 1905,” a grimed pearl, and had gone with her parents to see the building one Saturday afternoon. As they approached it down Broadway, she held up the card and stared at it, the building, the card again.

  “What you doing there?” Howard asked.

  “I’m remembering it,” she answered.

  —

  Dinner didn’t go well. Matty asked why Suzanne hadn’t peeled the cucumbers all the way. Howard sat in his terrycloth bathrobe and moved stew around on his plate and yawned irresistible gapes through what was supposed to be adult conversation.

  “I guess so,” Suzanne said when Bask asserted that the president lied to the country often and with relish.

  “It goes with the job,” he said. “They all lie. They like it. It’s a skill, like hunting.”

  Spooning potatoes on Matty’s plate, Suzanne heard silence. “Howard, you wrote—remember that essay on morality? In the Times?” When he said nothing, she went on, “Howard wrote an essay on morality for the Times.”

  He said, “It was on hunting. For Boy’s Life.” He assessed the table, suddenly alert. “Where’s the wine? You forgot the wine.”

  “Not for me, thanks,” Bask said.

  “The hell with you,” Howard muttered. “I want wine.” He grinned as Suzanne went to the kitchen. “And women and song,” he called, reaching into his robe pocket.

  “No smoking at the table,” Matty said.

  He brought his hand up empty. “You’re too young to be self-righteous.”

  “You promised.”

  “I’m human. To be human is to be weak at times.”

  “A promise is a promise.”

  “Okay, enough. I’m not smoking, am I?”

  “But you wish you could.”

  “Wishing doesn’t count. Wishing doesn’t have nicotine in it.” He nodded at Bask. “How you doing?”

  “Maybe I should go,” Bask said. Suzanne set down a tray with three wineglasses and a carafe of red wine. “No, thank you,” he told her.

  “I insist,” Howard said, his brown eyes expressionless.

  Bask smiled. “So do I.”

  It was for this smile of his that Suzanne fell in love with Bask. She saw it rise like a sun over Swedish crystal and French stoneware. She was accustomed to Howard’s smile, daylight breaking through clouds in a challenge, with a sense of triumph indifferently concealed. She was accustomed to her answering acquiescence, shoulders lowered, weakness at her wrists, and, beneath her compliance, pebbles of anger rattling in a rusty tin can—small stones, like calcifications in the gallbladder or the kidneys: unnoticed, potentially obstructive. In the back bedroom of her Aunt Nessa’s house there had been a mason jar filled with sixty-seven brown gallstones, most the size of nailheads, and one large one, “Big as a hen’s egg,” Nessa said with pride, wattles trembling. In that back bedroom where nobody slept the air smelled of camphor. Aunt Nessa hefted the jar from the doily on the bureau to admire her body’s handiwork and failed assassins.

  “Enough,” Howard said when Suzanne had filled a third of a glass. “Just a taste.” He reached across the table and placed it before Bask, who shook his head.

  “Never let an alcoholic drink alone,” Howard said.

  “I’ll drink with you, dear,” Suzanne said.

  “Me or him?”

  “You. I said dear.”

  “What is it, you a Moslem?” Howard asked Bask.

  “I don’t drink.”

  Howard took an exaggeratedly small sip. “Excellent. I bet you don’t smoke, either. My daughter here likes nonsmokers. I would die for this child, who happens to be an artist, I would do anything for her, but I can’t stop smoking. Isn’t that right, sweetheart?”

  Matty hesitated, checking her parents’ faces before answering with a low yes.

  “Yes, sir,” Howard said.

  “Yes, sir,” Matty said, smiling, ducking her head.

  Suzanne asked, “Dessert?”

  Howard rolled on. “Now, my wife here, my wife, whose profile compensates for many things, my wife would also like to see me stop smoking, but unlike my daughter, she doesn’t expect it. She’s very tolerant of me, looks the other way, you might say, and I’m of a mind to return the favor. More wine?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Bask said. He hadn’t touched his glass.

  Howard didn’t give him more wine. “To your novel.”

  Bask nodded. “Thanks.” Suzanne and Howard drank.

  “And to your next novel,” Howard said. Again Bask nodded and Suzanne and Howard drank.

  “Have any ideas in that direction?” Howard asked without waiting for an answer. “Of course, there are only two subjects for fiction—love and power. The great themes of sex and money. Affairs, adultery, standing on line at the bank. Why aren’t you in bed?” This last was addressed to Matty.

  “I’m waiting for dessert in the first place, and in the second place it’s not eight-thirty.”

  “There’s a tone to your voice I don’t especially admire.”

  “But it’s not eight-thirty.”

  “Something about respect.”

  Suzanne cleared dishes from the table. “Help me,” she said to Matty.

  The girl took her father’s plate of untouched food. “Okay?” she asked before carrying it out of the room.

  “Coordination there,” he muttered to Bask. “She’ll be an athlete, maybe a dancer.”

  But Bask didn’t seem to hear. His face was almost comic in its earnestness. He was watching Suzanne.

  —

  Months later, when he held her—when he’d loved her so well that for days afterward her thigh muscles knotted at curbs and his lower back emitted flashes of rue—she whispered to him, “I like how you talk. That’s not Massachusetts, is it?”

  And Bask, who’d lived in Tampa, Austin, Chicago, Denver, Missoula, L.A., Bakersfield, Stockbridge, Hendersonville, and Valdosta, answered, “No, not exactly.”

  —

  The goblet set before Howard held a puddle of beige ice cream in which slivers of chocolate and almonds floated. His dessert spoon, someone else’s heirloom acquired at a country auction, rested in this mire, beaming someone else’s initial like a distress signal. The others had finished their ice cream, and Suzanne had already served decaf espresso in white cups. Matty had a white cup of milk with a teaspoon of coffee. Bask had plain milk. It was possible that Howard might one day disappear in the ultimate attainment of perfect thinness. He didn’t eat; how much protein was there in Chivas and black coffee? He drank his espresso avidly, and the sluggishness he had worn through the evening gave way to a deliberateness bordering on animation. “Let’s talk about cowboys,” he said. Suzanne, with a blurred sense of alarm, refilled his cup.

  “I’ve seen cowboys, but I don’t know any,” Bask said.

  “I do. Did. Almost was one myself.”

  “What’s your definition of a cowboy?”

  “I don’t mean a guy on Third Avenue in boots and a Stetson. I’m talking about Wyoming, South Dakota. Horses, cattle, dust so thick you think you’re breathing cotton. Rolling your own cigarettes, not joints.” He glanced at Matty, who was fighting sleepiness to listen, her eyes closing, cheeks flushed.

  “I rolled my own cigarettes when I smoked,” Bask said. “It was cheaper, that’s all.”

  “Maybe you’re a cowboy and you don’t know it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You think I’m
kidding with you, Vince. I say you’re a cowboy.”

  Suzanne wondered whether being a cowboy was good or bad. Her husband in his robe glowered at their guest, who glowered back.

  “If I was a cowboy, I’d be the first to know,” Bask said.

  “Wrong!” Howard announced, slamming the table.

  The white cups rattled. Matty woke up enough to ask, “How about an astronaut?”

  “How about it?” Howard muttered.

  “If Mr. Bask doesn’t want to be a cowboy, he can be an astronaut. You could take turns. First he’ll be the astronaut and you’ll be the cowboy, then you’ll switch. That’s fair, isn’t it, Daddy?”

  “Sounds fair.”

  Suzanne wished she had made cappuccino. She craved cinnamon. “Which is it better to be, a cowboy or an astronaut?” she whispered to Matty while the men talked.

  The girl opened an eye, brown like her father’s, bloodshot like her father’s, though from sleepiness, not liquor. Suzanne felt herself in the presence of an oracle; atavistic awe placed her, chilled, on a mountain slope where marble columns fronted un-composed truths gnarled as olive trees (the mythology class had met only three times). She waited expectantly, but Matty closed her eye.

  “It’s a compliment,” Howard was saying to Bask.

  “When were you in Wyoming?”

  “Montana too. I worked there. Played Autoharp in a marching band. And Colorado.”

  He was lying. She recognized the wild, dangerous note he tried to swallow every time he hit it, as though ingesting revelation. His mumbled lies dropped into the neckline of his robe.

  “A cowboy’s just a guy with a sore butt,” Bask said. “A guy whose hat gives new meaning to the word sweatband. A guy who spends most of his time risking sunstroke or frostbite in order to be with other cowboys and crushes of cattle you can hardly see for the flies.”

  “You’re knocking our American hero.”

  “Jesus, Howard, I’m a Catholic from New England and you’re a Jew from Miami Beach—”

  “Coral Gables.”

  “Coral Gables, and we’re neither of us cowboys and that’s not our hero.”

  “Course it is. We’re the ones who need him most.”

  Bask smiled at Howard admiringly. “You ever been on a horse?”

  “Yes.” The word trumpeted truthfully. “Didn’t you ever hear of Durango Chaim?”

  “Sure, he went partners with Longhorn Nate Loyola.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Over in Sioux City.”

  “Fargo.”

  “Okay. Two mean guys.”

  “But not to each other.”

  “No, partners.”

  “Everything the same.”

  Bask laughed. “Not exactly. Longhorn Nate wouldn’t get himself circumcised.”

  “Durango Chaim wouldn’t rustle on Saturday. But otherwise they shared everything. Loot and women.”

  “What’d the women think of that arrangement?”

  “They were grateful, Vince, really grateful.” Howard allowed himself a small sorrowing smile. “I wish you hadn’t mentioned the part about my being a Jew in front of my wife. I haven’t told her yet.”

  Bask raised the glass of wine that had been waiting for him. “Howard, you know you’re devious.”

  “I’m a peach,” Howard said, raising his own glass.

  Suzanne left her glass on the table. She watched Bask with dismay and a guilty fascination. Wine shone on his thin lips before he licked it away.

  “Can’t stand the stuff,” he said. His prominent ears, poking through curls, seemed primed for flight.

  Howard kept a grave bloodless face. “To you, Nate, and to your long horn.” Then he smiled triumphantly and Suzanne knew why: for his own reasons, which were never easy, he had just seduced Vincent Bask.

  There was blood on the space bar. The outer corner of her right thumb had a cut. She was bleeding at the typewriter because of procrastination, not industry. She’d fled the unaccustomed quiet of the apartment soon after a phone call from the florist, Ralph Cohen, stopped Larry in the middle of a tirade on Van Gogh’s sanity.

  “The old fart thinks he can call me anytime and I go.”

  “He said it’s an emergency.”

  “It’s always an emergency. Now it’s his heart. He’s all alone and bored.”

  “I guess the money—”

  “Fuck the money, fuck all the money there ever was.” He gathered his hair in a green rubber band at the nape of his neck. He put on yellow socks and Mexican huaraches with soles made of tire treads. He’d bought the shoes on Canal Street, after switching them from the five-dollar bin to the three-dollar one. “Goodbye, little one. I go forth to the cold world to earn.”

  He rolled paper into her portable typewriter, next to a Russian student’s essay, “From Smolensk to NYC, Life in the Quick Lane.”

  “There. You have a good time and write.”

  She heard the door to the building close downstairs. She stood alone in the room, waiting. The fluorescent fixture droned. She picked up the pages of the story Howard Ritchie wanted improved. Staring at it didn’t improve it.

  Five minutes later she was outside, hurrying to the market for apple juice because there was very little at home and she didn’t want to run out of it in the middle of writing, which she wasn’t doing because she was hurrying to the market. She walked around the block, squinting into the sun, hands in her jeans pockets. The day clarified each brick of each wall she passed. She came home. Green bumps on the tree outside the building had turned into leaves. She cut her thumb tapping the bark. Brave as a lion tamer, she went inside to the dark room.

  There was blood on the page too. A thin streak of red in the upper right margin lent significance to the paragraph she’d managed to complete. She covered the blood with Wite-Out and, while that dried, anointed her thumb with antibiotic cream. Her thumb seemed the only real part of her. It throbbed against the space bar. It left bloody proof of its presence. Despite monthly cramps and bleeding, she remained insubstantial. If Rosemary published her story, then she’d be better than real, she’d be justified.

  —

  She was dreaming of bridges, he was dreaming of tunnels. He woke to find her back nestled against his chest, her hair tickling his nose. He had his arms around her. He wanted comfort, the spare oblivion of fucking. He was dying in a flower store, surrounded by carnations. His parents had died for history. Van Gogh, with a pistol, outstripped time. Picasso lived too long and time outran his talent. For saints and artists, it was a race. Van Gogh won by losing. Picasso won by winning. Morally superior to murderers, his parents lost by winning. What this foursquare theorem demanded was for him to lose by losing. He could do that. He didn’t have Van Gogh’s or Picasso’s talent. He didn’t have his parents’ opportunities for martyrdom. As usual, he was overqualified for a job.

  —

  Her small hands, twisting fingers on the knees of her jeans, distracted Howard.

  “It’s good,” he said, “you did good work here.”

  “But?”

  Her eyes heated him. Wonderful obscene visions lurched toward him: behind his desk, those small hands on him, those gray eyes lifted to his. He would pull up her tee shirt advertising THE GRATEFUL DEAD. He would make her cry yes. His mouth, which he imagined clamped around her breast, proceeded to speak. “You write almost too well. It’s too beautiful, the surface is shining, like a mirror. It can repel the reader, this perfection. It doesn’t give him any place to get in, it’s too smooth, too unyielding. You should open it up in places, make it jagged, leave room for the reader to enter the story.”

  “You’re not going to publish it, are you?”

  “I’m going to get better ones from you.”

  “What’s wrong with this one? You called me about it.”

  “It’s good, but it’s not what I want from you.”

  “And what’s that?”

  Amazed at his own sincerity, he didn’t hesitate. “I want to
hear your voice completely. I want you to tell me in a story the most important thing you know.”

  Her downcast, chastised face stirred him. “There was a writer,” he said, “a young woman like you. She wrote a wonderful story and I published it. Now all she can write are imitations of the story she already wrote. She sends them to me, and I send them back. She hasn’t found her voice except for that one story. She keeps trying to recapture what she never had. I’m not going to make that mistake with you.”

  He couldn’t remember if the young woman actually existed. The episode rang true, he heard such conviction in his voice. He might have made it all up. “As for my calling you, yes, the story excited me, and I wanted to know something about the writer. But you should know I’m a terrible liar. I lie all the time. I hinted to you about publishing the story because I wanted to see if you could change it so maybe I would publish it. But it hasn’t worked out this time. I’m telling you, you’re going to write better and I’m going to publish you. Now, you’re not unhappy, are you?”

  Her head bent to her tee shirt. He would have liked to slip his hand along each groove in her rib cage. His other hand would be kneading a nipple between the E and the A in DEAD.

  “Let me keep the story,” he said. “I’d like an agent I know to see it.”

  “Okay.”

  “You are unhappy. Someday you’re going to thank me. Meanwhile I want you happy as a clam.” He gave her three addressed, stamped manila envelopes sent by other writers for the return of their manuscripts, a black felt-tip pen, and a quadrille-ruled memo book with a blue cover. “You soak the stamps off and glue them on other envelopes,” he said. “Now tell me you’re as happy as a clam.”

  “I’m as happy as a clam,” she said.

  —

  Larry consoled her. “He’s crazy.” The regret on his face was real and so was the relief. “Little one, you’re good.” His arms around her prevented escape. “Those assholes don’t know what they’re doing. You’re good, you don’t need them.”