Elbowing the Seducer

by T. Gertler

  “I don’t see how—”

  “You borrowed it so we could fuck there. Why can’t you borrow it so I can sleep there?”

  Leaning back in his chair, his fingers interlaced in a meditative pose, he stuffed her into a giant black plastic trash bag, slung her over his shoulder, and carried her to the river. He added his office typewriter and the supply closet’s gross of medium ballpoint pens to the bag for weight. A jukebox played “Heartbreak Hotel.” The pens had blue caps. “Let me think,” he said.

  Newman Sykes was chopping wood. He liked how the muscles of his arms worked, liked to feel the axe swinging up and down, liked the way his arms and the axe became one force stroking in one rhythm. It merged with the rhythm of the afternoon: July sun heating through the back of his shirt, a warm breeze shaking the heads of daisies and black-eyed Susans at the edge of the field, where tall grass parted and closed, wounded and healed by the path of the breeze. Crazed yellow butterflies rose in the air like confetti and fell again, fluttering. On a brown bank of earth along a neighboring meadow, dark spots marked the burrows of wood-chucks, who kept poking their heads out in of movements as rigid and regular as the peg pistons of a toddler’s pull-toy, the wood kind drawn by a dirty string attached to a yellow wood ball graspable by small splayed fingers. Across the meadow a red tractor droned through nettles and grass.

  Stripped of its thin uprising shoots, the branch at his feet lay solid and mysterious. No longer part of a tree, not yet a fireplace log, it seemed in its present purposelessness as remote and unyielding as a god or an autistic child. He noticed he was thinking about children. The axe bit into rough gray-brown bark, bounced back, bit again. Splinters exploded at each attack; the sound of the blade deepened. His arms rose and fell, rose and fell, in welcome monotony. He stopped thinking, except for the thought I’ve stopped thinking, a last, fleet glimpse of himself before he submerged in an ocean of contentment; and with the exhilaration of emptiness, a keen sense of absence, he watched his hands and the axe and the branch, and saw them and not himself seeing them. His face, harsh, set, grooved as a walnut, took on tenderness. He was chopping wood for this moment when thought abandoned him. Sometimes he said he did it for the exercise, sometimes to save money. In cords near the garage and in others under tarp near the back door to his house, he had stacked more than enough wood for his two fireplaces for the coming winter. He had more than enough for a cold summer too. Passing the cords, he would wonder at their wry significance.

  He halved the branch. With creamy yellow centers wrapped in bark, the halves were enormous pieces of candy. He upended one on a tree stump and split it. Sweat dampened his hair, which was straight and glossy black relieved by coarse strands of white. A bee whined near his ear, and the breeze, sweeping in a new direction, brought him the clean smell of cut grass. He lifted his head to inhale it and saw the blue station wagon turn off the highway, bump along the dirt road to his house, and disappear behind trees. He heard it stop, heard the engine cut off. This took a while: she was always fumbling with her purse and packages, with doors and windows, because she dreaded moving from one place to another. (“Look,” she’d once called to him as she walked away on Madison Avenue, “no net!” And she’d held up her arms and laughed.) The car door slammed. He’d been standing, sweating, waiting for that sound. He turned back to his wood and brought the axe down.

  —

  Biscuit, an old springer spaniel lying in the sun, thumped his tail against the ground in greeting. Slowly, with the laziness and arthritis of his twelve years, he got up, stretched, shook himself and his incorrigible fleas and vet-certified kidney stones. “Hello, boy,” Newman said, putting down the logs and axe, and going over to him to save him the walk. Biscuit licked the back of Newman’s hand, stared through cataracts at him as he patted the contours, bone and silk, of the dog’s forehead. Satisfied, Biscuit lay down again, tongue out, and Newman said, “Don’t you look handsome.”

  —

  He stacked the logs with others at the back of the house, wiped his feet on the mildewed hemp mat before entering the back door. He placed the axe in the orderly arrangement of the tool closet near the pantry. No sounds reached him from the kitchen, though he expected a cabinet creaking open or the complaint of a faucet. The new water heater stayed mute. In the downstairs bathroom, the one for guests, he washed his hands and face with yellow soap shaped like a lemon and dried himself with a green velour hand towel. He spread the towel neatly on an empty rack to dry.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table, which held an assortment of groceries: canned goods, boxes of pasta and beans and cold cereal, a gallon of milk in a white plastic jug, perspiring cans of frozen orange juice, a squashed bar of sweet butter, a cup of sour cream, bottles of Heineken’s, a cellophane package of chocolate-chip cookies. A cash-register tape wetly embraced a box of frozen Chinese vegetables. On the floor empty brown paper bags were open-mouthed, like beached fish.

  He said, “Don’t you look pretty.”

  And she did look pretty, blond hair pushed back with combs and falling, limp and shining, to her shoulders. Her ears were charming—he’d always thought so—lying snug against her head, flaring out only at the small lobes pierced by minute gold stud earrings. What he had particularly liked when he met her was the fact that such a big-boned woman, a strong, athletic woman, chose to call attention to her delicate ears with equally fine earrings out of all proportion to the rest of her. Remembering their meeting, he approached her in the kitchen, past screens of longing. But, closer to her, he saw blue shadows beneath her dark eyes and spun spider lines there and between her eyebrows, nights of the floor creaking under her feet, back and forth, back and forth, to impress those lines, and the downward pull at the corners of her mouth. He felt the same pull at his own mouth. Her hairdo seemed girlish, wrong; he wished she’d worn it up as she usually did.

  “We’ll have to make these,” he said, leaving aside two cans of juice. He handed her the box of Chinese vegetables. “What do you think—freeze or not?”

  “I got you your beer.”

  “Yes, I see. Thank you.”

  The box dented under her thumb. “It’s nice of you not to point out that I let all this food spoil.” Coiled around a slippery center, her courtesy wasn’t as sure as his; despair at controlling it threaded through her voice.

  “Nothing spoiled.” He put the thawed vegetables in the freezer.

  “I sat here and watched them.” Head against her arms on the table, she cried.

  “Clare,” he said quietly. He didn’t go to her.

  “What?”

  “Go upstairs and lie down. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  With her long blond hair on defeated shoulders, with her wrinkled denim skirt and grass-stained sandals, she was a tall chastised child being sent off to bed without any supper. The stairs announced each footfall; in the kitchen, holding the cans of juice, he heard the echo of her passage.

  —

  Will said, “Disgusting!”

  Newman said, “Why don’t you try it?”

  “Is there something else?”

  “Salmon mousse, steak poivre, and four thousand apple popovers.”

  Will checked his plate again. “What is it?”

  “According to the package, ‘an Oriental vegetable fantasy.’ With eggs.”

  Leslie said, “It’s not bad.”

  “A testimonial. Thank you.” At the head of the dining-room table, Newman swallowed a hard mouthful. The two black-haired boys watched him.

  Will’s tee shirt rode up over his belt. His chair teetered on its back legs. “Dad, can I make myself a sandwich?”

  “Be my guest.”

  “That’s the trouble,” Leslie said. “He thinks he’s a guest.”

  “Shut up,” Will told him without enthusiasm from the kitchen.

  “It was your turn to cook tonight, not Dad’s. If you don’t like dinner, it’s your own fault.”

  Will came stomping back with a jar of mayonn
aise. “It was your turn. I cooked last time.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “Yes I did. Chili—remember? Two Saturdays ago when Mom started crying at Stop-’n’-Shop.”

  “Uh-uh. I cooked. Tuna casserole—remember?”

  “Who could forget it? But that was when Dr. Linker came over.”

  “He didn’t come over. Dad drove Mom to his office. And I made the casserole.”

  “You made the casserole when Mom was upset after the museum. I made the chili when she cried at Stop-’n’-Shop. And that was the last time. So it was Dad’s turn, so bug off.”

  Leslie struggled with indignation. “He always walks away before I can answer him,” he told Newman. “He’s immature.”

  “And you’re an idiot,” Will shouted from the kitchen.

  “Lower or you’ll wake your mother.” Newman peppered his Oriental fantasy.

  “He’s immature and inconsiderate,” Leslie said.

  Will arrived in the doorway to deliver his answer quietly. “And you’re an asshole.”

  Leslie gasped, “Daddy!” Will waited for his father’s reaction. Newman kept on eating.

  “Dad, did you hear him?”

  “It’s better not to comment on boorish behavior, especially when it comes from someone in your family.”

  “He called me a name.”

  “Name-calling is a sign of an impoverished vocabulary. Perhaps Will should consult a thesaurus.”

  “He’s always butting in. He pisses me off,” Will said.

  Standing, Newman offered the laser of his serene gaze. “There will always be people who’ll make you angry. And if you call them names, then you’ll lose friends and jobs and other assorted necessities.” He went into the kitchen.

  “Hey, Dad?” Will had followed him.

  “Yes?” Newman poured beer into a glass and gave Will a ritual sip.

  “There’s a kid at school,” Will said, “who says he can drink a whole six-pack and not get drunk. He’s a senior.”

  From the dining room Leslie called, “I’m all deserted.”

  Newman told Will, “Make that sandwich and come back,” and he went out to face Leslie’s dark, reproving eyes.

  —

  He woke and found her turned toward him, her eyes closed, lips parted. Shadows and the blue light before sunrise lapped the bedroom; he swam in thought through unbuoyant air as beautiful as water. Her breathing was slower, shallower than his. Her sealed dreamless sleep, chemically induced, affronted him: she preferred it to any comfort he could present. It was an extended time-out for her. Playing stickball in a weedy lot in Camden years ago, he’d scraped his knee and seen his blood outside his body, where it didn’t belong. He’d started to walk away, and one of the older boys, a McBride or a Sullivan, had grabbed him and said, “You can’t leave without we call time-out.”

  “So call it,” he’d said.

  “Can’t. There’s only three time-outs allowed and we ain’t wasting one of them on you. Get back.” The press of fingers on the nape of his neck.

  He got back.

  The sense of fairness—no, not fairness: rules—the sense of rules the bigger boy had laid on Newman’s neck stayed with him. He grew up to love books and women, in no special order, though he believed women were the more predictable. He stopped going to church. He attended World War II as a propagandist’s aide in Washington, D.C. Three blocks east of the White House he yanked an undersecretary from the path of an oncoming car. He fell in love with a pregnant technical translator who lived with her mother in Bethesda and was engaged to a staff sergeant she hadn’t seen in fifteen months. Newman drove her to a closed restaurant in Silver Springs for an abortion and straightened fork tines on the bar while inside the kitchen she cried, “Oh God, oh God, oh God!” He had an affair with a typist, Gillian, from the FCC. At a party he saw Mrs. Roosevelt carrying a teacup. After two promotions and a peacetime offer of the good life in intelligence, he came to New York convinced of the need for balance. Suffering the polar pulls of reason and passion, fearful of losing himself to either, he indulged in both. He would master each from the center, a kind of access by excess. He rutted through college and years of glad bohemianism beneath overpainted tin ceilings in Greenwich Village studios. He peeled off dancers’ black tights, exposing white, sometimes defiantly unshaved legs. The women gave their bodies freely, but saved their souls for Rilke or Marx. He prepared underdiluted Campbell’s tomato soup on his hot plate. The women brought packages of bread and sliced cheese with tough rinds. Alone, he opened with knightly reverence the bound wisdom of books and surrendered himself to naked and voluptuous language. If his choice of women remained random, his affairs with writers didn’t. Study sharpened his taste; kings were deposed, some beheaded, as new masters loomed. E. E. Cummings, who lived several blocks away, may one night have heard the thud of his reputation on an enamel-blackened wood floor; Newman had discovered Yeats.

  Soon literary magazines discovered Newman. He erected fiction. For stipends barely covering his coffeehouse bills, he grasped the privilege of seeing his words, and the typos they engendered, endure in print. With the double edge of fixity, his well-chosen paragraphs would live, but so would the bad ones, monstrous as taxidermy, dead-eyed in glass. He wrote skillfully, searching for greatness, uncertain of the results. Awe for great writers burdened his stories, and his contempt for the second rate turned inward. He confronted his relative value: a minor-league hopeful. He took pride in renunciation: he would serve art in a humbler way. The real issue, his fear of the uncontrollable and shapeless substance of creation, he didn’t admit. He withdrew from competition with himself. Having reasoned with his passion, he bent his tender nature toward criticism, which brought him the rapped-knuckle attention of writers he admired. An idealist, he was perpetually disappointed by the actuality of most prose. If he had renounced art because of his high standards, then writers who pursued it would have to vindicate his standards. If he wasn’t worthy, then they had better be. In essays and reviews he lashed out at the writers; and they, in print or face to face in bars, cried to him, “No! But tell us more.” Much as his comments stung, he was, after all, a fascinating voice, the conscience. “Art is a toenail clipping in your salad,” a former surrealist said, yellow-spattered fingers around his glass. “Pompous fart,” a poet answered. “Art is a pompous fart after the salad,” the former surrealist went on. “I wish I had the money for a salad,” the poet said. Further down the bar an Abstract Expressionist teethed on his mistress. Newman passed them and chose a stool next to a plum-nosed bisexual poet from out of town. “You know what your problem is?” Plum Nose asked.

  Years of attacking the literary establishment made him part of it. He had regular columns in two journals. At the Ninety-second Street Y he enlivened symposiums on the death of the novel, the future of the novel, the religion of T. S. Eliot, the need for exegesis of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” “No need,” he said, confounding his fellow panelists, whose dissertations and sabbaticals and hard-won grants assumed that need. Honorariums and tomatoes stuffed with chicken salad and celery inspired him to lecture on Oscar Wilde at banquet halls, Pearl Buck at women’s clubs, Ralph Waldo Emerson at prep school graduation ceremonies. He moved to a sunny brownstone apartment with an even white ceiling and an unpainted oak floor; the cheerful ascetic, he furnished it with a bed, a table, a chair, and books, wall-to-wall books. He loved, in his bed and a few times on the table and once on the floor, a variety of women, among them a painter, three writers, innumerable students and disaffected wives, a saleswoman from Abercrombie & Fitch, a gymnast, a Communist (she was the one who’d insisted on the floor), a photographer, and several dancers with fertile opinions on Martha Graham. Clare was the photographer. She carried forty pounds of camera equipment and talked about epiphanies of light. He thought, It’s about time. He was thirty-five, she was twenty-four. He rolled down her nylons and married her. While he discussed Hans Castorp at a radiologists’ convention and tried once more to
write fiction, she took pictures of benches in Central Park. “It’ll be a photo essay called ‘Four Winters,’ ” she said. His stories appeared in literary magazines, including Rosemary; five winters’ boxes of her pictures commandeered the sweater shelves in the closet. She complained of headaches. He framed one snowy bench and hung it in their living room. Before moving upstate, they had Leslie and began Will. Newman packed his books. Clare bought dimity curtains for the new bedroom windows, “for diffusion.”

  They settled into their house in a rainy spring. He built bookshelves, nail-less marvels to fortify the walls of the upstairs room he’d picked for his study. Lavishly pregnant, she followed him slowly, as if underwater, holding Leslie and trailing a tangled measuring tape.

  “How about this for a darkroom?” he asked her. He indicated half the large pantry. “I’ll put walls here.” His gesture excluded their small store, cans of cling peaches and tuna, a sack of flour.

  He thought he remembered her whispered “Okay.” He had built walls and a lightproof darkroom. Crying, she had given birth to Will; and hadn’t stopped crying. Yellow light overwhelming the blue. Morning again, through windows without dimity; something in a flowered print there now. He had fed the babies, bathed them, changed them. Had held them on nights when Clare, sobbing her outrage, demanded to know where he’d hidden her talent. Leslie had come home from second grade with a note from his teacher about his gold-starred story beginning “Momy wants lite but Dady says no.”

  Inches away, her dazed warmth drew him. Her white breasts wore the ghost of a bathing suit. He pulled the blanket higher around her because it was cold. He thought, I have responsibilities. He had made his life tidy. He had compressed his feelings into a space narrow enough to fit between two lines on a printed page.

  For years he reviewed books and scrutinized the state of literature in a respected monthly meekly celebrating the arts. A conglomerate on a pretax spending spree bought the magazine, along with an aglet factory and a third-world film distribution company. The new editor, fresh from streamlining a newspaper chain, said, “Let’s break up all that print.” A design consultant created a look and brought in his stable of artists to maintain it. Truncated columns of text supported dazzles of illustrations. The editor directed any remaining text toward upward mobility. She had “There’s Room at the Top for Our Readers” professionally needlepointed and mounted on a knife-edge pillow for a high-tech chair in her office. She hired editors for fashion, sports, pop music, science, and psychology. She fired the language columnist and the gently humorous essayist. “We need Richard Pryor, not Will Rogers,” she said. She didn’t interfere with Newman’s freedom to write as he pleased—“Polysyllables Spoken Here” backed with burgundy velvet was on order at a needlepoint atelier selling do-it-yourself petit-point canvas for Unicorn in Captivity pillows and “Home of the Whopper” jockstrap covers—but she did encourage his pessimism. “Take ’em on, take on all the sacred bulls. If it’s shit, say so, no matter who made it.” She pyramided her third prelunch can of Tab, with its lipsticked straw, on the other two empties, and swung back in her chair. Red running shoes thudded down on computer printouts on her desk. Linen pants cuffs rolled back over a fading tan. “I’m not afraid of controversy, Newman. I’m afraid of low circulation.”