Elbowing the Seducer

by T. Gertler

  “Amen,” Howard said.

  Bask stood up.

  —

  With the water running and the dinner dishes clinking in the sink, she couldn’t hear the men’s conversation in the living room. Grasping a plate between blue rubber fingers, she listened for the voice of the man she loved, but she couldn’t tell who that was. The plate almost slipped from her hand.

  —

  “It just seems meaner than necessary.”

  “He’s a strange guy, Vince.”

  “He’s a putz.”

  “Where’d you learn to say that?”

  “He is a putz. I tried to break into TV. Wrote a sitcom pilot. It’s the second sentence you learn at Berlitz in L.A.: ‘This is a producer. He, she, or it is a putz.’ ”

  “He liked the writing, he commented on the writing, did you notice?”

  “Come on, Howard, he hated it.”

  “Once we were talking about you, and he compared you to Balzac.”

  “This is depressing.”

  “Want a drink? It’ll take your mind off Newman Sykes.”

  “No, thanks, I don’t drink. Besides, what happens when my mind gets back on Newman Sykes—I take another drink?”

  “No, you do what you can. You write.”

  “I don’t feel like writing. Look, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be here whining at you. You’ve been great to me. If you hadn’t published my story, I never would’ve gotten a publisher for the book. I guess I’m lucky he reviewed it at all. How many first novels get reviewed? Or published?”

  “Vince, you have to get your mind off this. It’s one review.”

  “Maybe I should consider myself lucky and be grateful for any attention. Maybe I should hope he’ll crucify me on TV between deodorant ads. But the guy panned Dickinson too.”

  “Visit with a friend.”

  “I am—you.”

  “I mean a woman friend.”

  “I was living with someone in Massachusetts, but we split up.”

  “There’s no one?”

  “Not now.”

  “You need a woman, Vince.”

  “What am I supposed to do—head over to Forty-second Street for a pavement princess?”

  “Find a woman. After splitting up and being anxious about the book, you should have a little something in between real events. You’re upset. What you need is a strong feeling of temporary security. A woman who won’t cling when it’s over. And it will be over.”

  “Jesus, Howard, you’re fine.”

  “You need a woman who’s mature, a couple of years older. And married. With a woman like that, when it’s over, it’s over.”

  “Can she be gorgeous too?”

  “There’s no point if she isn’t.”

  “Okay, where do I find her?”

  “Now, Vince, that is up to you. Look around. But I would say…”

  “Yes?”

  “If you see what you like—no matter where you see it—go for it.”

  “People can get hurt that way, Howard.”

  “People can get hurt no matter what.”

  “What about ‘Do unto others’?”

  “That’s what I’m saying, Vince. Do unto others.”

  —

  He sat on the sofa, reading a manuscript with a red cover. He had an empty glass in his hand.

  “Where’s Vincent?” she asked.

  Without expression, his face was pure. He gave her an abstraction of himself; what she could have, always and forever, would be his denial. “In Matty’s room, with a puzzle.” He set the glass down and took an English sesame cracker from the plate she’d brought out for Bask that afternoon. “Matty likes him.” He bit into the cracker, and alarm spread across his face as he swallowed.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “This is awful.” He put back the remaining piece of cracker.

  She sat down beside him. After a desperate silence in which she searched for something to say and could think only of her blue blouse at the cleaner’s, she sighed. He closed the manuscript and left it on his lap. “I hope it’s not boring for Vincent, doing a puzzle with Matty,” she said in a low voice.

  “Vince can take care of himself.” Equally low.

  “Maybe he’s too polite.”

  “Nothing much I can do about that.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “What do you think of him?”

  “Vincent?” She stared at his profile, unyielding as a statue’s. “I think he’s very nice. Very quiet.” She could hear Mrs. Baugh, the Sunday-school teacher, saying, “Suzanne’s a good girl. Nice and quiet.”

  He said, “I think he has a crush on you.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” His eyes were still closed.

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Why? Why shouldn’t he have a crush on you?”

  “Because it doesn’t make any sense. Because I’m married.”

  He opened his eyes. “What does that have to do with anything?” He seemed mildly curious to know her answer, as if it wouldn’t affect him, as if he’d peered over a splotched menu in a coffee shop at lunch and asked her what she was going to have even though he thought he knew what she would have. Maybe he expected her to say, “Tuna salad on white bread, please, and no mayonnaise.” Maybe his question was a formality, to give her the illusion of decision. What would he say if she ordered a bacon burger with a side of fries?

  —

  Bask bent down and kissed Matty high on the forehead, at the hairline. “Good night,” he told her as she arranged her pillow.

  “Night, Vince.”

  Howard said “Mr. Bask” to her and sat on the bed.

  The girl’s eyes, his own but alive, widened. “Mr. Bask said I could call him Vince.” A sharp white baby tooth pulled her lower lip.

  “Yes, I did,” Bask said politely, acknowledging that Howard, as father, would have to decide the case.

  “Well,” Howard said. “If Vince says it’s all right with him, then it’s all right with me. I think ‘Uncle Vince’ might be better.”

  “Howard, I’m not anybody’s uncle.”

  “Fine.” He deferred to Bask’s deference.

  The writer’s jaw jutted fiery stubble in the lamp light. “I’d better go. Thanks for listening to me complain.”

  “Don’t worry, Vince.”

  “And thanks for the advice.”

  “I meant it.”

  With a wave to Matty: “Good night.”

  And again her voice, less sure this time: “Night, Vince.”

  As he left the room, she giggled. He turned around and saw Howard whispering to her.

  —

  Alone with him at the door, she confronted the texture of his green tee shirt. “Yes,” she answered to a question about whether she was usually home in the morning. He took her hand, he took her hand, he took her hand. He kissed the side of her mouth because she didn’t keep still. Her face burned from red bristle; her hand in his died from fear and was reborn a pulsing starfish, holding on. Behind her an imaginary Howard emerged from Matty’s room and watched her treachery.

  Closing the door, hearing Bask’s footsteps retreating, she wondered if Howard would be so kind as to perform a husbandly ritual and behead her. The neat prospect of annihilation as safety had its appeal. They could buy a secondhand sword with faded crimson tassels. He called to her from Matty’s room and she went.

  “B ut why can’t we see each other on Mondays or Tuesdays or Wednesdays?” Her teeth pressed his shoulder, her hand closed on his thumb.

  “I can’t get the apartment then. That hurts.”

  “What about another place?”

  “Yours?”

  “No.” She bit him again.

  “This is what we’ve got. Stop it.”

  The next Tuesday, at eleven, when the temperature had already reached eighty-nine and was still climbing, she arrived at his office wearing a halter top and a full skirt and sat with her back to the open door.

  “And how are you
?” he asked, bent over a note he was scribbling. A blue oxford-cloth shirt made him studious.

  “I want you,” she whispered.

  He glanced at the hall and said in a voice that carried, “You’re certainly looking well.”

  “I want you.” Hissed.

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible today.” His voice fairly boomed.

  “I need you.”

  His eyes narrowed and his features assembled into a mask. A wooden sound emerged. “Sometimes, you see, there’s an unfortunate confluence of events. Right now I have a lot of work and there’s no place for us to go anyway. So though I appreciate your coming up here—I think it’s very dear of you, very touching—I can’t.”

  She loved him because, with his back to the wall, he still used a word like confluence in his lies. She needed to identify her rivals: gap-toothed Katharine or his wife or someone unknown to her. If his work was the competition, she could try to engage him in a discussion of Heart of Darkness.

  She put the heels of her sandals on the seat and lifted her skirt to her parted knees. She was naked underneath the skirt.

  “Yes, you’re looking well,” he said.

  —

  Crumbs and a slick of marmalade littered the carmine red stoneware plate. The two cups had coffee stains inside. Bask placed a plaid elbow where Howard’s blue oxford-cloth one had rested a half-hour earlier.

  “Please, let me clear—I didn’t expect—it’s not clean.” Suzanne hovered over the table, a butterfly in an eyelet robe.

  He liked her confusion. It colored her delicate face and eased his own confusion. She was about ten years older than he was, she was married, her husband was his unofficial mentor. Despite or because of these facts, he wanted her.

  He thought about her when he was supposed to be doing other things. In the cluttered room he was temporarily subletting in the apartment of a friend of a friend, he put down the Times apartment listings and remembered how her eyes had lifted to his. On a blank piece of paper he drew lines and crosshatchings. He had to write a proposal for his next novel in order to get money from his publisher, but each time he settled down to work, her image teased him into daydreams, doodles, despair. He couldn’t concentrate without her. He assumed this because he was without her and he couldn’t concentrate. As an observation, it lacked scientific control. He forged questionable connections between unrelated phenomena. Being with her, he believed, would solve all his problems: love, reciprocated, would not only be his muse and show him what to write, it would also find him an affordable apartment in a seller’s market in New York City and help him to forget Bonnie, the woman he’d left in Massachusetts. He needed to believe in something ennobling, even if he had to invent it. Suzanne’s hair, fired with morning sun, echoed flashes of his own red hair. Her breasts rode in wrappings of eyelet. Her bottom rounded out eyelet. Giving him a plate of toast, she managed a cunning smile. His adoration cracked, regathered. Hopeless, he watched her drink coffee. He loved her the way any creator loves the thing created: with intensity and suspicion.

  The toast wasn’t whole wheat. The marmalade had refined sugar in it. Daylight burned through his plans for her. He ate breakfast, listened to mythology-class tales of Hecate, bemoaned his apartment troubles, and said thank you. He didn’t kiss her goodbye; but, waiting for the elevator, he waved to her before she closed her door, and she waved back.

  —

  Dina heard someone passing in the hall behind her. “I thought we could go to lunch.” She parted her knees further.

  “Today, I’m sorry, it’s impossible, deadline,” he muttered, eyes going from her to the hall to her.

  “A short lunch.” She touched her exposed flesh in a gesture of presentation, as actors did with products in commercials. Try this.

  Anger or fear pulled along his face. “Let’s go.” He hustled her ungently from the office, his hand firm around her upper arm. In the elevator he stared straight ahead and whispered, though they were alone. “Don’t you dare do this again. I have a family and I have a job, and I intend to keep both.”

  The floor numbers lighted up in descent. She felt carsick. Her teeth chattered. She’d already failed at being a writer; now she was failing at being a lover.

  Outside he dragged her toward the street and pushed her into a cab. Her arm was free. He climbed in after her and slammed the door. He spoke an address. His hand slid up under her skirt. Her legs parted in triumphant submission.

  They got out on a street in the East Village, far from the apartment on Eleventh Street. A movie house down the block had CHAPLIN FEST on the marquee. They were going to see Gold Rush. He hurried her into a bookstore. They were going to read.

  It was cool and dim, a cavernous room rising two stories. The walls were books. Wood stairs led up to a balcony that ran along three walls. The balcony rested on books. Beneath it wood ladders leaned against high shelves where gold leaf on old book spines glinted. Metal stacks in the shadows created more shadows overlapping on the floor, uncoated wood dull as clay. Through a doorway she saw concrete stairs painted battleship gray and leading down. Wood tables before her overspilled with paperbacks; piles of paperbacks on the floor narrowed the aisles. In shadows under ladders and at tables solitary people gathered books or read them or ran fingers over torn covers. She inhaled dust or a fine powder of disintegrated old paper: she was breathing sonnets and treatises. Visiting the scene of a disaster that hadn’t happened yet, she saw firemen’s hatchets eating the tables, stacks crashing, books tumbling down, pages turning or returning to pulp in a flood of water. She sniffed for the acridity of wet smoked wood. In an emergency, she would be sorry she wasn’t wearing underpants.

  He deposited her in the PSYCHOLOGY, NEW AND USED aisle with the admonition “Stay here.” She peered around a shelf ending with the title The Survival of Thanatos and watched him talking to a man behind a register. The man—slight, brown, bald, bearded—shook his head. Howard said something more. The man nodded, straightened a yellow sign: SELL YOUR USED BOOKS HERE. He glanced at her appraisingly as Howard returned for her.

  She was always following him up stairs. At least they weren’t going down the concrete stairs to the basement, where the dead bodies were. On the balcony she looked down at the man behind the register. He was still looking at her.

  “This way,” Howard whispered.

  The floor sounded beneath them. Light from below defined the spaces between the floorboards. He pushed a door open—it must have been swollen from humidity—and they entered a room that was another place.

  It hurt her eyes. Day poured down through a skylight gridded with wire. Light reflected from the ceiling, walls, and floor, all painted with white enamel. The only pieces of furniture were a floor lamp and a wood platform bed, both white. The bed had white sheets and a turned-down white woven bedspread. A small white ceramic bowl on the floor contained the greenest jade plant she’d ever seen. It should have been white too. A white woman should have been lying naked on the bed and eating white chocolate.

  “Whose place is this?” she asked.

  It needed red. The room’s denial of red threatened her with red. It needed a red pillow or a picture of a ripe tomato. It needed blood spattered on the walls.

  “C’mere,” he said. He sat her down on the bed and walked away from her. Leaning against a white wall across the room, he shimmered. “Okay, let’s see what was so urgent.”

  Flushed—some red for the room—she pulled up her skirt. His grave, observant face confirmed her modesty; a spotlight of sky released her. In his face she saw, unconcealed, her progress.

  —

  From the middle of the block Suzanne saw Howard hurrying along the cross street. He was coming from his office. She had given him that blue bow tie. The young woman he was guiding by the arm flew with him, her halter miraculously in place, her skirt flaring. They got into a cab. It had to wait through a red light before it could take off. Suzanne waited too. Pedestrian traffic streamed around her. Frozen like a tra
pped chameleon, she wished her pink flowered dress would change to pavement dun. The light turned green.

  The woman with Howard might have been a new secretary or a new professor. They were going off together to attend a conference on halters. She was a student with an emergency writing problem. He was going to parse a troubled sentence for her.

  Suzanne had decided to surprise Howard because that morning Bask had surprised her. He showed up at the apartment and didn’t touch her. Every weekday morning for two weeks she’d been hoping he would show up. With Matty on the day-camp bus and Howard waiting for the elevator in the hall, his bookbag slung over his shoulder, her blue bow tie at his throat, she studied herself in the bathroom mirror while brushing her teeth. She powdered her nose and forehead and chin, patted faint rouge on her cheeks. When the house phone buzzed later, she knew it was Bask. She undid the top button of her robe, then closed it.

  Serving him in Howard’s place at the head of the table, she wanted to kiss his red-gold curls. She hoped he would take her and leave her no decision. But he’d gone away, eyes yearning, ears pink. She was left with the need to decide. She put his plate on top of hers in the sink.

  She dressed slowly and spent a long time on her makeup. Seeing Howard would affirm her fidelity. She would go to his office right away. She changed belts before leaving. She could have called to tell him she was coming over, but she didn’t. She wanted to experience contingency. On the sidewalk outside the administration building, she saw exactly what she had come to see.

  —

  Crouching naked over his jacket on the white floor, he took a pack of cigarettes and a matchbook from a pocket. He stepped over a skirt and set the white ceramic bowl with the jade plant near the bed, to use as an ashtray. A pale body on white sheets curled toward him. He admired what his lovemaking had done to her. A trail of wetness along her belly shone under the skylight. Her nipples had reddened from his mouth and the play of his teeth. Her mouth had reddened too, been rubbed and stretched to accommodate him. The thought lifted him for a second. He still felt the draw of her mouth, the slide of the inner sides of her teeth. “Ah yes,” he said, stretching out next to her. A match scraped, burned. She settled her head against his chest, but the room was warm and soon she moved away, to rest on the sheet. Idly running a hand along her breast, he told her stories about himself, two cigarettes’ worth of sad true stories about wives and women and children and writing.