Elbowing the Seducer

by T. Gertler

  “I’m not good at it, you see, not the way I need to be good. The best thing I do is teach, I’m a very good teacher. What do you want for yourself?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Are you happy with your husband?”

  “I don’t know. No.”

  “You should be writing. Nobody’s happy. You have no right to expect to be happy. It’s a mistake that happens sometimes and gets corrected.”

  She kissed above his navel and below it, along a line of hair. She kissed from the root of his cock to the head, her tongue busy as an anteater’s. With little complaining noises of pleasure, she licked at his scrotum gently, roughly, gently, her forehead against him. She pushed at his thighs, mouth closing on him. Desire traveled in him to her mouth; he was erect. Applause. He crushed a cigarette in soil and observed his engagement.

  —

  She asked for her husband, knowing he wasn’t there. Liliane, with a shrug, dismissed him. “ ’E is gone to lunch, Mrs. Ritchie.”

  “I was supposed to meet him here.” It was easy to lie; she’d given Howard more credit for it than he deserved. “I was supposed to have lunch with him and a friend of mine—a young woman.”

  Liliane tapped a pencil at the opening to the electric sharpener. “I did not see ’im leave.” Gail, Howard’s secretary, typed diligently.

  “But did the young woman—my friend—meet him here?” A high note vibrated through Suzanne’s question.

  “There was…no one that I saw.”

  “I see. May I use the phone in his office?”

  “Of course. I am so sorry not to be more—”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  The pencil jabbed into the sharpener. Whining followed her to his office.

  She sat in his chair at his desk. On the wall younger Suzanne at a beach posed foolishly and gladly. The window behind her projected her shadow on the desk. This was how the world appeared to him. A chair facing her might have held the haltered woman she’d seen rushing away with him. She flipped through the Bs in his address wheel. A typed address in Massachusetts had been crossed out on Bask’s card and a Manhattan one, midtown on the West Side, with a phone number, penciled in. Using Howard’s pen and a sheet from one of his memo pads, she wrote down the information.

  —

  Sooner or later the pants have to get pulled on again. He balanced on one leg, then the other: the dance of the pants. A button entered a buttonhole. He grasped his zipper and abruptly stopped it from grinning. His life consisted of dressing and undressing and dressing and undressing between jousts with literature. Or it was jousts with literature between cycles of dressing and undressing. He sat on the bed, defeated by the prospect of having to put on his socks. Part of an old song hummed in his head:

  Oh who will tie your shoes

  And who will glove your hand

  And who will kiss your ruby lips when I am gone….

  She was kissing the back of his neck. Her teeth grazed it. “Stop it,” he said. Kneeling behind him on the bed, she rested her hands lightly on his shoulders. Her hair tickled his skin. Her breasts brushed his back. He tried to understand what it must be like to be a woman. Waiting for the courage to put on his socks, he couldn’t understand how a woman, yielding to entry, reclaimed herself. Women must be half-persons, part of them never reclaimed. Which explained Suzanne’s reluctance for sex: a sensible precaution against loss. He knew he wasn’t the reason. The limp argyles on the floor reproached him. He had his own fears of loss; but except for Matty, he had nothing to be afraid of. He reached around to squeeze the girl’s thigh—what was her name? Contrite, he kissed her tenderly.

  When he was dressed, he muttered, “Bathroom’s next door.” It was possibly the only bathroom in New York with both a rare private edition of a Pinter play and a baited mousetrap. He relieved himself in an exalted and defended place. On the balcony, hearing a familiar voice, he looked down and saw Newman Sykes selling a shopping bag of books. He descended the stairs whistling.

  “Hello.” Newman’s black brows lifted. “Dan here, as usual, is offering a magnificent sum for all these.”

  Dan, the brown man behind the register, punched a key and handed Newman thirty dollars.

  “I could probably get forty at the Strand, but I come here for Dan’s conversation.” Newman folded the money into his wallet. Dan stacked books on a cart.

  “Wait a minute.” Howard picked up a copy of Bandaged Moments.

  “Your protégé’s effort,” Newman said.

  “Why are you selling it?”

  “It’s hardly for my permanent collection.”

  “You haven’t read it.”

  “Didn’t you see my review?”

  “Yes. That’s why I know you haven’t read it.”

  Newman threw back his head and laughed, a brief exuberant ha cut off in his open mouth. “It’s not a very good book.”

  “It’s better than you said.”

  “Allow me to present it to you with my compliments.”

  “Thanks, but I have it.”

  “I’d like you to have my copy. Maybe you’ll read it my way. Dan, how much do I owe you for this?”

  Dan shook his head.

  Howard opened the book and checked the price on the front flap. “It’s eleven ninety-five new, so you owe Dan six plus tax.”

  “I don’t think I should pay the store price. I want to repay Dan what he paid me for the book.”

  “The transaction’s been accomplished. It’s Dan’s book now. And he sells review copies for half-price.”

  “That isn’t what he paid me for it.”

  “It’s the American way.”

  Dan placed the book in a bag and gave it to Howard. Then he wheeled the book-laden cart into the stacks.

  “Dan’s un-American,” Howard said.

  “Maybe he’ll charge you double for whatever you buy.”

  “I’m waiting for a lady.”

  Newman inspected an emaciated blond wearing a large NUKE THE PREZ button at a nearby table. She was reading a paperback by Jung. “Anyone in particular?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “The famous upstairs. I thought Dan had put a stop to that.”

  “The lady insisted.” Howard lowered his eyes modestly.

  On the balcony a door opened, flooding light across dimness. Light shaped a small silhouette before the door closed. Watching with Newman, Howard made out a figure disappearing inside the bathroom.

  “Another protégée?” Newman asked. “Enjoy the book.”

  Howard produced one of his iridescent smiles. “I’ll treasure it.”

  —

  There were too many things to hide. She walked home carrying a book, Bandaged Moments, which he’d picked up for her while waiting downstairs.

  “It’s a good book, very talented writer, very.”

  “Thank you.”

  Larry would want to know where she got it. On the back cover flap the author’s face in black and white contemplated a private distance. Crossing Broadway, she felt sperm and spermicide seeping from inside her. A taste of Howard lingered in her mouth. Everywhere he’d touched her had been impressed. She inhabited her body.

  In the bookstore bathroom she’d taken her underpants from her purse and put them on. Larry might already be home. Though he worked at the shop all day because Ralph was in the hospital, he made surprise visits for lunch or “just to say hello,” a casual explanation for a trip of three subway stops and several blocks. He was trying to catch her at something. Infidelity, for him, meant her brief conversation with the boy who weighed produce at the market. If she imagined Larry’s reaction to her real unfaithfulness, she became afraid. But she also was afraid to stop seeing Howard. He’d given her life a purpose: him. On Tenth and Broadway she started from the curb against the light to catch a bus, and her inhabited body had to run to keep whole.

  —

  A fly crawled over a tree in the mural of a Mexican village at the Athena Coffee Shop.

&nb
sp; “Coffee, please,” Suzanne said.

  “The souvlaki is real good today,” the waiter said. His accent wasn’t Mexican.

  “You got fresh orange juice?” Bask asked.

  “Fresh only in the morning.”

  “You mean it’s been sitting for a few hours or it’s canned?”

  “Not fresh now.”

  He ordered club soda. The waiter, printing, strolled toward the kitchen.

  He grinned. “Breakfast and coffee together in one day. Want to try for dinner?” When she didn’t answer, he fiddled with the sugar dispenser. “You sounded upset.”

  “I was. But after I hung up, I felt better. I guess because I knew I was going to see you.” She waved a fly away. “If I ask you something, will you tell me the truth, even if you think I won’t like it?”

  He nodded red-gold, his brown eyes promising.

  She asked, “Do you ever think of going to bed with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to now?”

  “Yes.”

  “I would like you to.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  He wondered if the friend of his friend would be in the apartment when he brought Suzanne back with him. He began to slide out of the booth.

  “Bon appétit,” the waiter said, serving their drinks. He dropped a straw and two paper napkins on a wet spot on the table.

  She asked him, “Do you have pie?”

  “Apple, cherry, blueberry, chocolate cream.”

  The waiter slouched toward Bethlehem. Bask hadn’t heard her choice.

  She said apologetically, “I’m hungry.”

  Blueberry pie, girded with cornstarch or blue putty, arrived. A fork slid across the table. She offered him a taste, which he declined. By a well-timed question between forkfuls she started him on the limitless topic of his writings.

  “Mostly it’s hard work, paying attention to what you’re doing, noticing what you’re not doing, always asking yourself how one part relates to another and to the whole. You can be obsessed by form if you’re not careful. If you are careful. I mean, somewhere between confessional stream of consciousness and the over-restricted well-made tale, there’s a blessed ground. That’s where the story counts and the form it takes builds from it. The form is the support that has to be there without showing. It’s invisible, like gravity, and inescapable.”

  “The astronauts escaped gravity. Remember those wonderful pictures of them floating around on the ceiling of the spaceship?” Behind a loaded fork her teeth were blue.

  “Yes, like a re-creation of uterine existence, floating in amniotic fluid.”

  “I never thought of it like that.” She drank coffee. His heart expanded. Again he prepared to pay and leave. The waiter reached for the empty plate.

  “Tell me,” she said, “what other pies did you say you have?”

  “Apple, cherry, blueberry, chocolate cream.”

  The crust on the apple pie had ruptured. Steam rose from the filling, an ooze surrounding the crust like a moat around a besieged castle. This she ate desperately, he thought; and she talked about growing up on a farm in either Iowa or Idaho, he couldn’t be sure and he knew it made a difference, Iowa or Idaho; and though he wanted to ask, he didn’t. She swallowed decorous mouthfuls. He could remember the pattern of acne on the back of his first girlfriend, Danielle Boisvert, whose last name he’d given to the priest in Bandaged Moments, but he couldn’t remember what Suzanne had just said. Later he remembered the dress she wore that afternoon, pink flowers; whether he remembered it correctly or as he preferred to remember it, he didn’t know. A young and fairly simple girl would wear it in one of his stories, which would be rejected by eight magazines, including Rosemary, before being accepted by a ninth, a southern quarterly. The story would win a Maupassant Prize, his second.

  She was saying, “…And Markie agreed. No alimony, no fuss. We divided up our things. There was a cheval glass I wish I still had.”

  “He got it?”

  “It was his mother’s. She took it back.”

  The split-up with Bonnie had been simple. The house, the car, the setter bitch and one remaining puppy, the turntable and metal-capable tape system were hers. He took some of his clothes and books to New York, leaving the rest with her in Massachusetts until he could find a place of his own. She had storage space; he’d built it, and bookshelves and kitchen cabinets and one-third of a redwood deck. The deck halted in midair, without a guardrail, giving the house a bombed-out look he considered European. Responding to his ad on the bulletin board at Grove’s Market—“Literate Carpenter, Construction and Term Papers, Roofs, Odd Jobs, None Too Small, Irate Letters, Love Letters, Letters of Introduction, Latticework”—she’d hired him to build two closets. Three days after he started work, a morning blizzard closed the road; two days of being snowed in together altered their relationship. She stopped paying him. By the time the snowplow got through, they were planning a summer house. After two and a half years, he was somewhere else, but he also was where he’d started, looking to move in.

  “Would you like something else?” he asked her as the waiter approached.

  “No, thank you. I’ve had more than I should have.”

  She seemed to have acquired an attitude of resolution. He had hoped for anticipation or at least curiosity. But not resolution—not that set of the jaw, that forced line of the mouth—as if he were medicine she didn’t want but had to take.

  “Are you in a hurry?” He allowed a dangerous pause. “Because I’m getting hungry.” He enjoyed her surprise. “Okay,” he said to the waiter, “what’s the grilled cheese?”

  —

  Outside the restaurant she tried to repay him. He closed her hand around her five-dollar bill. They came to his building debating the uses of money; and, passing the storefront apartment of Mrs. Lotta, Adviser and Reader, whose forested underarm sprouted from a taxed French-cut tee shirt as she waved prospective clients closer, they entered the small, chairless lobby. The digit roll showed the elevator at six, the top floor. He pressed the Up button. She said, “Oh, the poor thing,” and stepped back. A cat wearing a dirty blue felt collar with rusting bells cried, scratched gray tiger fur, jingling.

  “That’s Mickey. Mrs. Lotta feeds him goulash and Häagen-Dazs.”

  “It needs a new collar,” she said, but the elevator had opened and Bask was already inside.

  —

  In the friend of a friend’s apartment the air maintained an odor of insecticide. A gray-green sofa, collected on the street, buckled in resignation, a tail of yellowed batting between carved legs.

  Bask said, “Jonathan?” No one answered.

  In the kitchen he offered her orange juice. A dying cockroach weaved across the counter. She shuddered and he killed it with a rolled-up copy of Gourmet magazine.

  Four cartons of Bandaged Moments defended his room. He kicked one listlessly. “I got carried away. Want a book?”

  “Thank you, but you already gave one to Howard.”

  “I guess two of them is excessive. One of them is excessive. I’ve got about eighty.”

  “Do your parents have one?” she asked helpfully.

  Beneath plaid shirts he found a chair for her. “Yes. But I don’t think they’ve read it.” He grabbed two white athletic socks from the chair before she sat down. He piled the shirts and socks on yellow typing paper next to his typewriter, a green portable manual that he said had previously been owned by Gutenberg. He kissed her, stepped over a carton, and sat on the Science section of the Times on the bed. “Come here,” he said politely, sweeping the newspaper away. Sections fell on a carton and the floor. She stepped over another carton and sat beside him. They sipped each other.

  The fabric of her dress seemed weightless in his hands. An imago, she emerged from it or it fell away, and after it the bra with ribbon straps slipping from her shoulders. He pared away the inessentials, close work like diamond-cutting. He had aimed at exposing another facet when she fl
ed. Her back bare, fabric gathered at her waist, she clambered over a carton. An arrangement of ribbon and net, her bra, stayed in his hands.

  At the closed bathroom door he heard feeble retching. He slung the bra over his shoulder and knocked before opening the door. “Go away,” she said hoarsely, huddled at the toilet.

  “Stick your finger down your throat. And leave it there till the action starts.”

  Soon she was vomiting splendidly. He admired the dance of her shoulder blades and the tension of her slender spine down to its prominent bumped coccyx. Her back straightened. A sweep of hair resettled on her shoulders. She flushed the toilet and went to the sink. She washed her face and drank water from her cupped hand. He touched her damp back.

  “Feeling better?”

  She nodded. Her eyes and cheeks burned in the mirror.

  “You look like Ray Milland in The Man with the X-ray Eyes.”

  She dabbed toothpaste onto her forefinger and licked it. She gargled delicately, the song of a baby swamp bird. “I’m sorry. This isn’t the way it should be.”

  “How should it be?”

  She said over her shoulder, “Easy.”

  She might not ever turn around because she was naked. “I’ll bet you’d like some privacy,” he said, “so you can finish undressing.”

  That made her laugh. He glimpsed breasts and an outstretched arm. He gave her the bra and left.

  —

  Two glasses of seltzer gone flat topped a carton he used as a night table. He was undoing her bra. Scene one, Take two. In the movies, when the jet pilot keels over at the controls, his heart having attacked him, the young stewardess—okay, it’s sexist, but go on—the stew who doesn’t know how to administer CPR, much less how to fly, panics. The copilot and navigator have checked out too, a first instance of a contagious high-cholesterol count. After screaming and crying and flaring her nostrils, the stew hears this voice on the radio. It’s the chief control-tower guy or maybe the head of the FAA or FTC or FBI. He says with calm authority, “Forget you’re scared. Forget there are three hundred and forty-six hysterical passengers in Tourist and sixteen bombed out of their skulls in First Class. Forget everything. There’s just you and me, there’s just the sound of my voice. I’m going to tell you how to land this plane, step by step. And I’ll be with you every step of the way. You’re going to land this baby, baby.” He talks her down. Bask had been talking Suzanne down. Epaulets grew on his bare shoulders. Her bra dropped to the sheet. He refrained from calling her “baby.”