by T. Gertler
“I wanted the story to be published.”
“You don’t need to be published. We know you’re good.”
His consolation shut her into a dark box. It was hard to breathe. “He says he’s going to get better stories from me. He says he’s going to get me to tell him the most important thing I know.”
“Fuck him.”
“I don’t have any better stories to write.”
She sank with new density through thick, waste-clogged water, brown like the Hudson, toward litter at the bottom, eels and the rusting upraised sharpness of tin, clouded spines of glass. She settled through layers of ruin, bubbles at her mouth. Her eyes would rot; the sockets, water-rubbed, would be satin bone.
—
He shouted, “It’s one fucking room, damn it. You can’t sit here and sulk. I don’t want to live with that fucked-up face.”
Her fear goaded him. The way she shrank back in her chair enraged him.
“What is it?” he hissed in her ear. He dug his fingers into her arm.
“You’re hurting me.”
He shoved her back. She rubbed her arm, crying.
He was losing her. He saw it every day, she was slipping away; but he didn’t know where she was going. Her attention, the light of her concern, had deserted him. She looked at him without love. His testicles withdrew upward in the scrotum. His penis, unloved anyway, retreated.
He yanked her from the chair and in his fury didn’t notice the blue memo book on the table. He had come home and found her sitting there, her expression distant. He could claw under the mattress for a stranger’s socks.
“Stop it!” Her scream, caught on an indrawn breath, was a warning. He slapped it away with an open hand. Four red finger marks and a palm appeared on her cheek: Matisse cutouts. Lapis lazuli cost twenty-six dollars a tube. Vermilion cost eighteen. She screamed again and he slapped her again. He was creating an art form. In the last two months he’d earned one hundred and forty-three dollars. He could talk about brushstrokes, but he had no paint; he didn’t want paint because he didn’t know what he would do with it if he had it. His vision of himself as an artist had diminished to the urge for acclaim; or that was all it had ever been. The work itself was an obstacle to acclaim.
Her body swung forward and heat exploded at his knee. She tried to wrench free. Gasping, he held on to her. She swung forward for a second kick, and he grabbed her by the hair and pushed her off balance. “You kick my balls and I don’t know what I’ll do to you,” he whispered. She stumbled, shrieking, as he pulled her hair. “Coward, bastard, asshole,” she cried at him. She dragged on his hair as if it were a bus signal-cord and she wanted off at the next stop.
“Let go,” he said.
She held on.
He tightened his grip on her hair. “I said let go.”
She tugged harder on his. “You let go.”
He had the advantages of height and weight and strength; and he was pulling her hair from the top up, while all she could do was tug at his from below. He forced her head back.
Water ran from her eyes, down her cheeks, along her neck. Water ran from her nose. Her mouth was open because she couldn’t breathe through her nose. From underwater she stared at him without love.
Her stare unnerved him into laughing. “If I let you go now, promise not to kick or hit?”
Since he was holding her head immobile, she couldn’t nod. She wouldn’t speak. Her eyes lowered, and he took that for assent. He let her go.
He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to find her again. “Baby.”
She went back to the chair and sat. “Coward. Going to hit me some more?”
“Baby.”
“I wish I could leave you.”
“What stops you?”
“I don’t have any money. I don’t have any place to go.”
“Go to your fucking parents.”
“Go to hell.”
Angry at the devastation in her face, he slammed the door on his way out.
—
The bathroom mirror showed her ugly and red. She washed her face. Cleanliness might be an escape. She wanted to die. She opened the medicine cabinet and took out Larry’s bottle of Valium. She broke a pill in half and swallowed it with water.
She picked up the blue memo book and wrote.
Valium 10 grows octopuses in my brain. I’m past the stage for suicide. Since I’ve no self to kill, I’m ripe for murder.
And since I was a writer, I wrote the word gun on a piece of paper, I held up the paper, and I shot him.
—
In the morning when she woke up, he was sleeping beside her in their bed. His honey-brown hair fanned out over the pillow. Terrible things had happened while she slept, perfectly ordinary things had happened terribly. A man had come home and undressed and gone to bed. The network of veins at his nostrils stopped her breath. She wanted to find a bed he wouldn’t be in.
They were polite with each other. She worked on students’ essays. He pretended to read Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art. (“The impossibility of a red horse demands an unreal world.”) At the market he let her wheel the cart alone to Canned Vegetables, but soon she heard him calling her. He was searching for her in the wrong aisle, Cereals and Rice. He’d abandoned their cart near Frozen Foods. On the way home he urged her to buy an ice cream cone and promised he wouldn’t taste it. They shared it, vanilla fudge, one of her favorites, instead of cherry vanilla, one of his. After dinner he dried the dishes for her.
That night as he slept in shadow beyond her reading light, she wondered if she were viewing history. It made his nose eloquent. Hoots came from the leather bar a block away. In the hall two voices climbed the stairs.
He had told her once about Jeannie, his great love at eighteen, years before he’d met Dina. He lay down on a sofa with Jeannie one afternoon, his head resting on her arm, and fell asleep. When he woke, it was night. The room was dark. And she was there beside him. She hadn’t slept but had stayed with him, unmoving.
“Her arm must’ve hurt,” Dina said.
“She didn’t want to wake me.”
“She could’ve slipped it out from under.”
“She didn’t want to risk waking me.”
“She just lay there with a crushed arm for hours to avoid interrupting your nap?”
“Yes. That’s love, that’s tenderness.”
“That’s crippling.”
“That’s the mother in a woman’s love. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Was she on the inside of the sofa, between you and the back?”
“Yes.”
“So she couldn’t get out. She was stuck there.”
“It’s beyond you, isn’t it? The idea that she could want to stay like that?”
“It’s not real. What’d she do for hours? She didn’t even have a book to read while her arm was risking gangrene.”
“Love and comfort are not the same thing.”
“Not with you they’re not.”
“Not with anybody, little asshole.”
June 6, 1980
Dear Howard,
Out of a balancing act under a full moon last night, a contemplation of the long fall below. Rope burns on the insoles of my archless feet. Buses and the luck of poets wheezed outside the room where I wasn’t sleeping. Off-duty cops were shooting real bullets.
I turn the points of scissors and knives away from me. Rats gnaw at the wall behind the radiator. Traffic hurts my ears when I step outside the freshly painted bile-green door. The Puerto Rican exterminator says someone could throw a bomb—or maybe that was palm—into the unlocked basement. The past, which is always changing, waits to be invented.
Here are the two most important things I know:
1. Things are themselves, not symbols of themselves.
2. It is natural to eat; it is not natural to be eaten.
(The concept of nature presiding over the predator-victim cycle is a lie, worse even than religion.)
Dina
<
br /> 6-9-80
Dear Dina,
You write a hell of a letter. When do I get another story? Or are you angry? You shouldn’t be, you know. Call me—we can always talk.
Friendship,
Howard
—
His office window had a green view of a park where muggers and rapists and rats big as alley cats watched benched gothic readers and nannies with prams. She hadn’t noticed it the other times she’d been there. Katharine sat with them. She was young and pretty and had tanned oily skin. She wore a thin white dress with a full skirt and gold sandals. Her toenails were painted gold.
“I studied writing with Howard,” she said, flashing a gap between her front teeth.
“I’m a wonderful teacher,” he muttered. “It’s the thing I do best. Katharine here is very talented. Wants to rethink the paragraph.”
When Dina had called him, he’d asked her to come for lunch, to discuss writing, but he seemed to have forgotten it. He did say that Updike was one hell of a writer, she should read Updike. Katharine said she didn’t read contemporary writers. “They haven’t been purified by time.” She left reluctantly after an hour.
He said, “I didn’t expect her to stay. I don’t know what she wanted.”
“She looked as if she wanted you.”
“She’s lonely. Bad marriage.” He stared at Dina’s breasts as if he could see them through her camisole. She moved in the chair so that her breasts moved. He said, “Loneliness. You don’t know about it. You’ve got your husband—Larry, right? Most people are lonely.”
She had bathed carefully that morning, soaping herself as if she were polishing intricate repoussé silver. She had put on the blue camisole she’d been too shy to wear before. She had applied perfume to the back of her neck and her inner thighs. She had been able to do these things because Larry, cursing, had gone off to the flower shop to work.
Howard consulted his watch. “It’s too late. There’s an apartment, a place we could have gone. But it’s too late. I shouldn’t have let her stay, I should’ve taken you there.” Low, his head to one side, eyes averted: “Would you have gone?”
The salt and pepper shakers, the white china bowl containing packets of sugar and Sweet’n Low, her glass of white wine, the waiter’s black-sleeved arm reaching across the table to serve her something she could eat daintily while discussing with Howard how to rethink the sentence, never mind the paragraph—all disappeared. The restaurant crumbled and from its ruins—here a melted fork, there butter soup—an apartment grew, with sunlight and beige sofas and a view of the East River from twenty stories up. He would hike across the living room to the sofa where she reposed against a scarlet cushion and waited for her life to begin. His kiss would break the spell she’d been under; without morning mouth or sand in her eyes, she would at last awaken.
Yes, she nodded, and astonished herself.
—
He took her to a bar down the block for a quick drink. He had to get home, he said. They sat side by side in a red vinyl booth. He ordered Chivas Regal. Because she was hungry, she ordered a glass of milk.
“What if we’re no good together?” she asked.
His sad smile, fumed with liquor, touched her. “It’s just something else to find out. Finish your milk.”
—
Larry brought her a rose. “The bastard charged me for it.”
Sitting on wood railing on the pier, she let him hold her hand. A ship pulled on rope thicker than her leg. A dog flew past with a frisbee. She said the word divorce.
“I’ll make a deal with you. We try to fix things up.” Soon his stricken look would turn to fury. He kissed her hand. “I’m going to be making money. I’m running the store. Ralph’s going into St. Vincent’s for tests.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Heart. He doesn’t have one.”
“Is he in pain?”
“He’ll live forever. Baby, it’s a real job, every day. And you’ll write.”
That night he whispered oversweet love, struggled to get inside her. “Open a little more.”
“I can’t.”
“Try.”
“I can’t.”
—
The cab crept uptown through midday traffic, but she felt the thrill of speeding. She had her ten-dollar bill ready. Tucked behind her social security card in her wallet, it was her life savings. Larry didn’t know about it. In six years of living with him, she had managed to provide for a puny emergency. She preserved her fund against puny pseudo-emergencies. Once, for four days before Larry got a temporary job helping movers pack sculptures on White Street, they had only a head of iceberg lettuce, a quarter of a loaf of French bread, and a half-quart of low-fat milk for food. She didn’t use her money to rescue them; hunger wasn’t an emergency.
The meter clicked. She was purchasing with her safety net the chance to leap from nowhere to another place.
Howard sat hunched over at his desk and searched among papers for something he said he had to take care of. The secretary with the French accent stopped at the open door: “ ’Oward,” then left. He typed a note to someone. He mumbled on the phone to someone else. She had spent six-forty to experience this. Her perfume was fading, her cotton gauze blouse wilting. Water beaded on her nose and upper lip. She pressed a tissue to her face.
At last he presented his mournful hungry expression. “Should we go for a drink?”
In the elevator he hummed what he said was the theme song of the Cossacks. At the door to the street, he placed a hand against her back, to urge her through first. His hand stayed there, and her own moved around his back, to rest at his waist. He felt less solid than Larry. She lengthened her stride to match his as they walked to the corner.
“That apartment,” he began.
“Yes,” she said.
He seemed to have made a random gesture with his free hand, but a cab stopped. He mentioned an address in the Village to the male driver’s ponytail, long hair that could have been Larry’s. They were going to be blocks away from Ralph’s flower store, on a street Larry might pass. She had rushed uptown in order to be rushed downtown.
He put two fingers on her inner wrist. He was taking her pulse. Next he would produce a blood-pressure cuff. She struggled against her response: a feeling of dissolving, a feeling that her wrist had become part of his touch, dependent on it. He circled her wrist lightly with his fingers. She wanted to learn to be defenseless.
The cab stopped at a row of brownstones. He gave the ponytail money. Waiting on the sidewalk, she became the sidewalk, planted in it. Someone she knew might see her. To the west were the top stories of St. Vincent’s main building. Later Larry would tell her how he’d taken Ralph to the hospital in the afternoon, and she would discover the charm of parallel lines. The sun defaced a No Parking sign. Flies with bottle-green wings convened on a turd at the metal base of a tree with a trunk guard. Nothing in the day indicated that she was about to do something momentous on Eleventh Street.
She followed him up pink stairs to a glass door reinforced with wire mesh. It opened on a wood door with a lock protected by an angle iron. He pressed the bell marked Sykes; when there was no response, he fitted a key in the lock. It fought briefly with his key. Inside the hall, an airless smell of old wool rose from the carpet. Darkness closed out the street. She followed him up more stairs, past a landing with a Steinberg poster, to another with no poster. At a door, one of two on the landing, he fiddled with locks. He wasn’t good with keys. The door relented.
Three sunny windows, books and books, two frayed Oriental rugs, a bed, a small kitchen. He turned on an ancient disgruntled air conditioner. He took an almost empty bottle of white wine from the refrigerator. “Want some?”
She stood on a blue rug and clutched her purse. He uncorked the bottle and drank from it. When he kissed her, he tasted like white wine. He put her purse on a table. Her hands, helpless, hung at her sides. His tongue in her mouth swayed her on the rug.
H
e was unbuttoning her blouse. It dropped to the floor. Cool air at her back, the pressure of his mouth on her breast. He was taking off his clothes, tossing them anywhere: his jacket on the floor, his tie on a stack of books. His shirt caught on a lamp. One of his socks hit the telephone. She took off her shoes. She undid her skirt. It fell around her ankles, and he pulled her blue underpants, the best pair she owned, down to her ankles before lifting her out of a pool of cloth. His pants landed on her skirt. He didn’t have on underpants.
He was tearing off the bedcover. From a drawer that stuck halfway open he extricated an orange sheet, whipped it over the mattress: light housekeeping performed with an erection. She kept her eye on it, awed, and considered worshiping it as a delaying tactic. It yearned for her, stretching away from his leanness. In her purse she found a foil packet which she held up like an amulet.
He lowered her to orange. She wondered if the sheet was clean. A vegetable-stand scale, she registered the difference between his weight and the one she was reluctantly accustomed to. She couldn’t cry no to him as she did with Larry; it wasn’t in these rules. A hard thigh knocked against her thigh. Her legs parted, her hips lifted. He moved inside her. She fitted around him. This was what people did all the time.
“Howard.” Their noses brushed. She blinked, showed him the foil packet.
“And what’s this?”
“Birth control.”
“Timely.” He peeled away foil and examined the small white rocketlike object. “A silver bullet.”
“It goes inside me, then we wait for fifteen minutes while it melts.”
He slid out of her, provoking her to sigh, and inserted the suppository for her. She enjoyed her bold open legs. Yes, anything, do anything, she thought. He told her a joke about a Jewish policeman and God. His face, as he told it, grew sorrowful. While she was laughing, he kissed her stomach, lower and lower.
“Maybe I’ll taste like spermicide. Oh!” The exclamation of pleasure ended that worry. Instead she worried she would take too long. She drifted into a precise understanding of something or other. She was sprouting branches. Wordless, her body traveled.