by T. Gertler
Her mouth tasted of toothpaste. Her neck gave off perfume. A horizon revealed itself to him; all things were possible. A breeze swept under the drawn window shade tapping the sill. Bonnie receded; he was waving goodbye when Suzanne said, “Oh no.”
“What?” He knew, but he asked anyway, suffering a sharp blend of embarrassment and pride.
“How can it fit?”
He thought of it as the curse of the superlative. His standard answer appealed to womanliness. “If a baby can fit coming out of you, I figure I can fit getting inside.” Even Bonnie, who was an antitrust lawyer, hadn’t debated the point.
He was right. They fit together neatly and she beamed at him as if they’d accomplished something extraordinary.
—
A folder of twenty sestinas on Platonism, written by an economist and submitted to Rosemary with prefatory remarks about publishing (“Experimentalism is an exercise in antiliterature and an endorsement of anarchy, in which no coherent communication can occur. By preferring experimentalism over classicism, the literary magazine thus effects its own demise. I wish to be in the forefront of the return to classicism. The new avant-garde must lead us backward.”), rested on Howard’s navy cotton pajama top with white piping, which rested on his chest and beating heart. The best and most expensive room air conditioner ever made in the history of the world vanquished a summer night. After a depressed peek at the first stanza of the eleventh sestina he dropped the folder on the floor beside the bed and opened a book, Anxiety in the Narrator. He propped it up on his chest and started at page 27. There were footnotes. He coughed, skipped to page 98. Inches away, Suzanne was reading too; instead of that week’s mythology-class assignment, Bandaged Moments weighed on the satin bodice of her nightgown.
“How do you like it?” he asked.
She viewed a scene beyond where he lay. He felt superfluous. “Yes,” she said and returned to the book.
A knot of excitement formed in his stomach. “He’s not bad, huh?”
“Mmm?”
“You’re enjoying it.”
“Mmm.”
She had retreated into the terminally bovine. She might be contented. He said, “It’s not fair. I’ve got this anxious narrator while you’re in bed with Vincent Bask.”
Now he had her attention. Io had no place to hide. He went on, “He’s pretty funny.”
She said solemnly, “Yes.”
He slid over and kissed her, sniffing for Eau de Bask. Even after her evening bath, even with his sense of smell dulled by cigarettes, he tried to detect traces of another man. “Allow life to impose on literature,” he said, and tugged at the book. She held on to it. He pulled harder and performed a bookectomy.
“Give it back.”
“Later.”
“I don’t want to make love.” She’d never come right out and said it before.
“But I do.”
“I think you must have had enough.”
Enough? They hadn’t made love in almost two weeks. “It’s been a while, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“Well, then, let’s try it, dearest.”
“No.” She grabbed her book and reopened it on her bodice.
With the craft of a man building a model schooner from unused toothpicks, he had guided Bask to her; stressing husbandly indifference, he had primed her for Bask. If they’d consummated their flirtation, it was because of his well-placed words, his un-spontaneous urging. And they had consummated it, he would bet his life (but not Matty’s) they had, and only that afternoon too. He knew it as he knew good writing; his gift was to recognize the inevitable. They had united under his direction. He couldn’t write a satisfactory story, yet he’d created a real-life one. He wanted to explore her character further.
“You’re not entirely pleasant. What happened today?”
“What is it?”
“Something must have happened to make you so snappish.”
“Something must have happened to you today to make you so curious.” Her voice had jutting corners he could bark his shins on.
“No.” He had gone to work; been kidnaped for a double matinee by a small, sexually excited woman; discussed modern literature with Newman Sykes in the sphinxlike presence of a bookstore owner with a spare bedroom; taught remedial Jorge Amado to sun-crisped college juniors spending the summer semester in cutoffs; returned to his office for phone calls and R and R; and, when there was nothing else he could do to divert himself, gone home. “Nothing happened.” His hand expressed enthrallment with her nightgowned thigh.
She said with ominous tranquillity, “If you touch me again, I’m going to call the police.”
—
No, she’d read this. Three sentences into a paragraph about Father Boisvert, she came upon an unknown arrangement of words and settled into them. After she read the sentence twice, she abandoned it to brood on Howard’s disgusting nature. He had run off with the girl in the halter that afternoon. They went to the girl’s apartment and made love on a peach satin chaise longue. His bare foot pushed against cool black and white marble floor. Or they went to a hotel, where he signed the register V. and V. Nabokov. He had signed like that once with her at a Holiday Inn outside Baltimore. He never took her to a hotel. The Holiday Inn didn’t count; it was a business trip. Now he wanted to make love. Her own unfaithfulness to him that afternoon didn’t temper her resentment. She had acted in self-defense; he had acted—and clearly had been acting for a long time—out of sheer selfishness. A movement of the bed. She persisted in staring at the page. His lighter clicked. He exhaled. What if by accident she called him Vincent? “The burning bush,” Vincent had dubbed his red-gold pubic hair. They’d found a jock strap and a crumpled piece of typing paper in the folds of the sheet. She wished she hadn’t gone to bed with him and she wished she was still there. She moved on to the next sentence.
—
A copy of Bandaged Moments lay between them on the bed. The Tensor lighted an airless night. “I don’t like this guy,” he said. His hair hung in damp strands to his shoulders. His tee shirt stuck to his chest. “What are you doing in his office?”
“We talk about writing.” She wiped a collection of moisture from her forehead.
“What’s there to talk about?”
“Same way as you go on about Matisse or Gorky, only we talk about writing.”
“This book looks like shit.”
“You haven’t read it. He says it’s good.”
“How come you’re running uptown to talk about writing? Why don’t you stay home and write?”
“It’s not so easy. I don’t see you painting.”
“I’m working.”
“What about six years you didn’t work? What was the reason then?” She thought she saw his fist, and she raised her pillow against it.
“You have an ugliness in you, you know that? You don’t know how to build a man up.” He kicked the sheet off and lay still.
She cried, “Why is it my fault if you don’t do what you want—what you say you want? Should I blame you if I don’t write?”
He immobilized her with the blue and green hatred in his eyes. “This must be a philosophy you learned from your good friend Ritchie.” He hurled Bandaged Moments down into the fireplace. The book landed hard against brick, falling into the winter’s unswept ashes, which exploded from the impact. A section of pages popped out like a slice of toast from a toaster.
He occupied the outer side of the bed. She crawled over his feet to the ladder, tripping over her nightgown.
The spine was cracked, along with the ineffectual glue binding. The jacket had slid forward in flight and was crushed against brick. Beneath ashes and dust the author smiled with a closed mouth. She exhumed the book and refitted the ejected pages to the spine.
Gray water flowed from her hands. Her fingers tapped the faucet once, twice, three times on each side. In the mirror she saw a woman’s face streaked with gray and tears. The marks might have si
gnified caste or crime. She washed them away.
She climbed back up to bed with the book, careful to keep its loose pages from slipping out. She cleared one of his legs, knocked the other, said, “Sorry.”
“Your fucking light is in my eyes,” he said.
She adjusted the reading lamp, twice tapped the table.
“Turn it off,” he said.
“I want to read.”
“I want to sleep. Turn it off.”
She turned it off, turned it on.
He sat up. “You playing games?”
“Let me fix it so—”
He reached past her and turned it off. “You want to read, go somewhere else.” And lay down, his back to her.
There was nowhere else to go. She climbed over his legs again and down the ladder, clutching the book. She closed the bathroom door behind her before fumbling for the light string. She put down the toilet-seat lid to sit on. This was happening to someone else, not her. Only the burning was real, a burning almost painful and almost pleasureful. She connected it to Howard. She burned for him. She slumped forward, leaning her elbows on his stand-in, the book in her lap.
The Carb-Othello Sanguine pencil was gone. A wet charcoal stick lay on the sink rim. She took a gray eyeliner pencil from the medicine cabinet and opened the book to the dedication “For my parents…,” an almost blank page. She began to write.
I am working on the theory (unproved) that I love you. You make me laugh because you keep dropping your keys. Your hair grows commas along the back of your neck. And there’s a question mark too. Soon my diligence will lead to a new problem, the corollary theory that you love me….
Sealing in light, the closed bathroom door also sealed in heat. Sweat spread at the nape of her neck and under her breasts. She wiped her face with toilet paper. After writing on both sides of the dedication page, she went back to the title page for more space and finished that on both sides too. She wrote in the top margin of the first page, stopping at the bold CHAPTER ONE, wondering if the book would interest her. She skipped down to the bottom margin, then proceeded to the second page. Sweating, burning, stopping only to drink water or sharpen the eyeliner, which gave way to a blue one toward the end, she wrote.
—
No breeze moved the window shade. Surrounded by cartons of Bandaged Moments, he lay alone in bed, naked, in the dark. A vision of Suzanne moving beneath him caused Code Red, erectility. A hand, not his, entered the vision and caressed her. It was Howard’s hand. She was in bed with Howard now. Cancel Code Red.
From the living room came the staccato of Jonathan switching channels. The TV insisted, “Heeee-ere’s Johnny!” He thought, There’s Bonnie. Johnny started in on a presidential candidate, Ronnie. He would never sleep again. When the first Alpo commercial boasted about real beef, his eyes were shut and rolling with dreams.
A life-size four-color plastic replica of the female urinogenital organs sat on the desk, next to a bronze plaque engraved HAVE A NICE DAY. Dina read the exhortation and despaired of fulfilling it. Dr. Scarcella, white-smocked, degloved, his chubby cheeks glowing from hypertension, wrote in her chart. “You have had intercourse in a position you’re not accustomed to,” he said. “Penetration from behind, I would think.”
“How’d you know that?” Pigeons would soon be flying from his white sleeves. His accent added to the mystery: How did Chico Marx get through med school?
He lined up the July issue of Vaginal Digest with the corner of his desk. His doctor had put him on a low-sodium diet, refusing to debate the quality of life without parmesan cheese. “The burning you complain of is traumatic cystitis, a mild bladder infection caused by the penis pounding against the bladder before slipping fully into the vaginal sheath. Pounding.” With an enthusiastic smile he disassembled the red, blue, pink, and cream plastic reproductive system, pointing out a passageway here, a blind alley there. He brushed dust from the isthmus of a Fallopian tube. An ovary snapped. “You may have had such intercourse without problems, but most recently the angle of entry was wrong for you. When your husband enters you from behind—”
She amended husband to Howard and had to gallop to catch up with the doctor, who had arrived at “…slowly until he is in place. Then he may move as aggressively as he wishes.” He sounded wistful. The lecture ended with a prescription and “No intercourse for the next week.”
She doubted Howard would like that. He’d never mentioned if he played chess. “No intercourse?”
While a woman with a tipped uterus sat in a closureless pink examination gown near stirrups in the next room, he folded his hands beside a silver letter opener inscribed with a pharmaceutical company’s name. “Your husband will have to understand.”
—
The doctor’s pills turned her pee a luminous orange. The one advantage of cystitis was that it gave medical backing to her refusals of Larry. She worried how she would refuse Howard during her week of abstinence, but he didn’t call. She could have called him, but her justification, sex, was gone.
In an iced room nicknamed Siberia at the Babel Language Institute, fifteen Russian students of English persecuted the comma. “Necessary, yes,” Vova said, “but no so important.” He stuffed toilet tissue into the central air conditioning vents. He was nineteen and a future computer programmer.
With stiff fingers Dina wrote on the green blackboard.
Yes, he is Mr. Gogol.
Yes, he is, Mr. Gogol.
“The same words, but a comma makes the second sentence mean something different from the first sentence,” she said. Her nose was running. She sneezed. “Can anyone explain the sentences?”
Vova wrote on the board. His shirt pocket gaped with a plastic penholder.
Is googol Mr. Gogol.
Is googol, Mr. Gogol.
“I think your first sentence needs a question mark,” she said, wiping her nose.
“Possible,” he said.
After class he asked her to go out for coffee, “to talk over these commas.” The collar of his short-sleeved shirt was opened to a white undershirt trimmed in brown chest hairs. He had on black trousers and a wide belt with a buckle of metal flowers spelling out PEACE.
“Thank you, but I think we’ve done enough commas for one day,” she said. “See you next week.”
“My heart crashes for you.” The row of pens in his penholder hid the crash. “Dina, you are Jewish also, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Gogol wrote the Dead Souls, yes, but he also wrote the Taras Bulba. You understand me?”
“Yes.”
“We must take our opportunities.”
“See you next week, Vova.”
“School is named for Babel, Isaac, yes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Possible,” he said.
At home she corrected lessons and in daydreams shuttled between the shower and the Eleventh Street apartment or the shower and the East Village bookstore. It was a damp time. She begrudged Larry the space he took up with his body and thoughts and endearments like “little one.” Knowing she couldn’t will him to disappear—she’d tried to, on and off, for years—she intensified her own efforts to disappear, grew fiercely quiet. He brought her a bird-of-paradise flower. He brought her a thin gold neck chain. He brought her a bottle of Chanel No. 5 cologne. The flower, resembling an alert bird, browned. She would wear the gold chain and the cologne to her next meeting with Howard, if only he would call. Sho, the Japanese student, called to tell her that his wife had given birth to a boy. “Already in Tokyo, but tomorrow here. Or yesterday. I am most excited to know which.”
She swam through hopelessness, surrendered to panic. Panic hardened to anger. She collected her paycheck early at the Babel Language Institute and quit. “I didn’t think you were unhappy here,” the president, Demetrios Papadopoulos, said.
“Not here,” she answered. “Thanks, Jimmy.”
Because Larry was working, they had a novelty of riches. After paying rent and phone and Con Ed bill
s, they could pay this debt, that doctor, including Scarcella; they could buy new jeans for Larry, pain-free new shoes for her. They could buy Granny Smith apples and a jar of marinated artichoke hearts. She took Bandaged Moments from her underwear drawer and typed a copy of her writing from the bathroom palimpsest. She brought the manuscript to a bargain copy shop. The Xeroxed pages, still warm from the machine, she put in an envelope and mailed to Howard.
On the seventh night she threw out the empty pill bottle and applied demanding kisses to Larry’s mouth. He received her far-open legs with the fortitude of a lottery winner and asked no questions lest fate withdraw what it had so freakishly bestowed. “Little one,” he whispered in happy perplexity, his hair falling in her eyes.
His weight wasn’t Howard’s. His body bound her differently from Howard’s. His hands on her breasts clung more heavily, with less authority. His mouth lacked the heat of cigarettes and white wine.
She made love to him for an idea of a hint of a fossil; memory shaped tenderness. Without anger, she had room for him, and sorrow for his past privations (Nazis and painters) and future ones (too terrible to surmise). Tangled in his hair, she stretched. His back rounded under her embrace. Six years of intimacy with the ceiling above the bed had left no souvenir. She followed him to pleasure, she led him to another loss.
An Affair, I Guess
by D. Reeve
I am working on the theory (unproved) that I love you. You make me laugh because you keep dropping your keys. Your hair grows commas along the back of your neck. And there’s a question mark too. Soon my diligence will lead to a new problem, the corollary theory that you love me. When I don’t see you, I forget many things.