Elbowing the Seducer

by T. Gertler

  He straddled her rowing machine. “If I like something, I like it, Julie. I can’t say I don’t.”

  “You don’t have to. Just keep doing what you’ve always been doing. Be cantankerous. Don’t be soft, Newman.”

  “I never am,” he answered. Row one, breathe; two, breathe; three. “How about a drink later?”

  “No, thanks, but now that the obligatory nod to my gender is out of the way, we’ll be fine.”

  Besides reviews, he conducted an inquisition of a writer, a tape recorder the instrument of torture. It lay near the steak sauce on the writer’s dinner table. While Newman speared a roast potato, the writer changed cassettes because the first ninety-minute tape had run out. “Don’t want you to miss a single word,” he said. Reading the published article changed his mind. “Not so much an interview as a vivisection,” he complained in a letter to the editor among several such outraged responses Julie printed. The writer canceled his niceness campaign for a Pulitzer and his tutorial at a midwestern writing conference. Abandoning wife, children, mistress, and therapeutic dominatrix, he checked into a fat farm for megadoses of B-6. Newman had asked him if clit lit was his chosen specialty or simply his horizon.

  Julie declared the article to be the start of a series, “Newman Sykes Talks to…” She told him, “Keep filling in the blank.”

  He filled it in with a zest for lethal impudence that made each interview a suspense story and an exposé. When, during the subject’s rumblings about himself and Faulkner and the American tradition, would Newman remind him of charges he’d plagiarized parts of his last book from Artaud’s essays and ask about his first wife’s claim that she’d written the parts Artaud hadn’t? See the famous writer recalling how his first wife, the poor frigid bitch, was a pathological liar who went down on busboys and whose silicone-enhanced breasts had hardened to concrete jugs you could break your teeth on. Some interviewees thanked Newman; the dialogues were benign, dulled with Newman’s sincere respect. Most of the writers, with livelier exchanges, threatened to sue him or beat him up; they called him a John Bircher, a Communist, a fascist, a wimp, a queen, a homophobe, an illiterate, an old lady, a male chauvinist, a piranha. “It’s like being on 60 Minutes,” a poet said, digging at her cuticle. “You start out nice and polite, and by the end you’re cornered and you’re itching to punch out Mike or Morley.” But the need for publicity to sell books, coupled with essential authorial narcissism, created willing subjects.

  “How about me?” a short-story writer of undeniable shining talent asked him at a party after a bilingual poetry reading to benefit Appalachian hunger. “You can trot out your clit lit line again with a different slant. Slit lit. We can chat about my lesbian tendencies. I’ll tell you my latest poem: ‘Girls who are Sapphic / Seldom stop traffic.’ I’m also an anarchist and I sew all my own clothes. You make me sick to my stomach.” She moved aside to join a pleasanter conversation. Across the room a woman seemed to be kneading Howard Ritchie’s shirt label.

  Someone pumped his hand. “Mr. Sykes. Pleased to meet you, Newman. I’m a fan.” A gray blow-dried edifice and snub-nosed pasty face bobbed at Newman’s chin. A business card slapped his palm. “Have to run. Call me,” the man said. The card was from a local TV station. A low herringbone tweed jacket hurried away.

  The short-story writer read the card over Newman’s shoulder. “Goody,” she said, “maybe soon I can turn you off on a regular basis.”

  She was right: for three to five minutes once a week on the evening news Newman gave the tristate area what the female anchor introduced as “the book roundup. It’s culture time and we don’t mean yogurt.” He reviewed books and commented on trends in publishing. He interviewed authors plugging books. “The women in your book all find your hero irresistible, Jack. Would you say your fiction is revenge against life?” He learned to smile at the camera with the red light. He learned which colors not to wear on camera. His dentist’s receptionist asked him if he knew Judith Krantz personally. He asked the makeup man to tone down the base. He got letters requesting autographed pictures and/or advice about breaking into the book biz. He got death threats, marriage proposals, unsolicited manuscripts, and six handknit scarves. TV critics reviewed his reviews: “the poor man’s Dick Cavett,” “a welcome relief from Dick Cavett,” “the electronic Edmund Wilson.” His dentist’s receptionist asked him if Ann Beattie was Warren Beatty’s other sister.

  Besides the magazine and TV work, he gave a series of lectures—funded by a federal program a United States senator denounced as “a viper in our fiscal bosom”—on Eastern thought in Western literature. The jobs required his presence in the city for two days each week; he arranged to spend three days and two nights a week in the city, in an apartment he’d rented when he started at the magazine. He sent Leslie and Will to good private schools. He bought Clare a new enlarger and the solicitous hairy ear of Dr. Max Linker, psychiatrist. He had his own psychiatrist, Steve, and from time to time a lover. Ex-lovers and potential lovers crowded his lectures, watched his lithe body on the podium, their bracelets clinking; he was grateful Steve was male. Steve collected rare books, which gave them something to talk about. Newman’s first editions were less valuable but better loved. All this took money. He wrote articles for magazines, persuaded publishers to hire him to anthologize Underground Writing Today or to introduce The Complete Skelton, Unexpurgated. He rented a summer house for two weeks on Block Island and wondered why. In her sleep Clare turned away from him.

  He got out of bed, shivered because the windows were open and he was naked. Alert with anger, he padded down the brightening hallway to the bathroom.

  —

  The landscape chugging past greasy windows belonged above a calendar, with the blue legend “Savings Banks Are PEOPLE Banks.” He unwillingly beheld perfection: sunlight flooding, through one convenient cloud, over a lunate brook and stands of unblighted green trees. If he looked away from the window, he would encounter Sheila Dunne, gilded and dressed for the city.

  “Well, hello,” she said.

  The car was almost empty, since the 1:09 was too late for the matinee and shopping ladies, and too early for the evening crowd. He smiled at her, a handsome made-up woman with real pearls, and shifted his heavy bookbag from the seat to the floor. She sat down and gave his arm a brief squeeze. “How are you doing?”

  She exuded a new fashionable scent he’d been hating for weeks. It lingered in elevators at the magazine, assaulted him from the ranks of his high-minded lecture audiences. One of the reporters had sprayed the studio with it. “I’m fine,” he said. “You?”

  “The usual. A hundred things to do and no time.” With a manicured hand she signed no time as an ideogram. She seemed dangerously close to a giggle.

  “How’s Harry?”

  The question produced the desired result. “Fine, thank you.” Now she was getting the hang of it: formality. “How’s Clare?”

  “Not too good.” He’d topped her. After formality came such indifference that a straitened intimacy was possible.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. If there’s anything I can do…”

  “There’s nothing to do.”

  “Newman.”

  “Yes?” he asked deliberately. An overweight conductor with unshining buttons caromed along the aisle.

  “I think about you. I worry about you.”

  “I’m all right.” He felt glad he wasn’t a conductor or even an engineer.

  “If you have problems, you can call me.”

  “Why?” That should have stopped her.

  “Because we’re neighbors. And because we’re…friends. At least I like to think we’re friends. I never know what you’re thinking. I never did know what you were thinking.”

  Her courage touched him. “Of course we’re friends.” Then, seeing an hour of reading time vanish, he yielded to the sound of her voice.

  —

  Women’s voices, a keening, breath, an echo of sorrow falling away—he heard these repeated in th
e train’s progress toward the city, where turrets and cupolas, beautiful with verdigris, risked eyes, the terrible power of the beholder. I am a witness, he thought as the woman talked and he answered her. He saw the spread of his fingertips, dark on a woman’s pale behind; he grasped, he took. The women. Time stirred, measured by women. Calendar girls weren’t decorations; they were time itself, everything revealed and, by that openness, everything shrouded. Here it is. What is it? Come, bite my ass, three-quarters of an apple. The other quarter, the one not there—where is it? “And have you been reassessed?” she asked, adding, “It’s outrageous, money and more money and the sewage system is still prehistoric.” The other quarter skimmed over green trees, that slice, the triangle rounded and with dimension, shape given flesh. Weary of women, he still yearned for something beyond himself. The train carried him, with Sheila Dunne and the enormity of his longing, to New York.

  —

  The first thing he saw when he opened the door was a man’s ass, the last thing he wanted to see, but there it was, hovering over hair streaming from a woman’s head. Another woman’s head shot up from somewhere else in the orange sheet. A magician’s illusion? He smelled burning leaves. Howard Ritchie could pull women’s heads out of a top hat. The lamp on the night table had been moved aside. In its place were a hand mirror, a razor blade, a rolled-up dollar bill, and a saucer with a lumpy joint that had gone out. “Hi, Howard.”

  Three faces whipped toward him.

  “Hi, Maris. And hello to you too,” he told the stranger.

  He hung his jacket in the closet. The hanger scraped against the rod. He put his bookbag near the desk. “Anyone for a beer?”

  Howard stumbled over clothes on the floor and, hopping on one leg, thrust a foot into khaki pants. His penis lolled against his thigh, the tongue of a panting dog. The strange woman said, “Hey, those are mine.” He recovered other khakis.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled to Newman at the refrigerator.

  “You don’t wear shorts.” Newman sipped beer and watched the women dress.

  “Nah, more trouble than they’re worth. That’s Katharine.”

  More nipple than breast, Katharine hurried a tank top down over ribs, hips. Maris halfheartedly held a blouse against herself. “Sorry,” she said.

  “This isn’t part of the contract,” Newman answered.

  “But you’re early,” Howard said.

  “It’s my day, not yours. But it’s nice to see two of my friends have met each other.”

  Maris buttoned her blouse up to her throat, where the skin sagged. “Shit,” she whispered, “I didn’t even get off.”

  “Do you?” Howard asked in a low voice. He slumped into his jacket. A pair of green bikini underpants clung under the back of the collar.

  “There they are.” Katharine peeled her underpants from twill.

  “I mean, you do, huh?” Howard pursued Maris to the bathroom.

  “How about privacy?” was all she said before the door closed on the two of them.

  Katharine buttoned her khaki pants. Something familiar there. She sat at the edge of the bed, a stewed sheet, to put on her sandals. She had gold toenails. She reminded Newman of a woman he’d known, and of another. And another. And the way she bent her head—another. There are only so many ways of bending the head. He thought, How sad she is, she’s like so many people that she’s no one at all. Tin cans strung to the tail of the thought clamored at him: The sadness is yours, the fault—defective observation, obsession—is yours.

  Before she spoke he wondered if possibly he could desire her. She asked in a pleasant voice, “Weren’t you on Johnny Carson last week?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re…you’re…” She screwed up her face. “You’re, you know, him, the guy with—” She laughed. “Help me.”

  He shook his head.

  She came toward him, laid hands lightly against his shoulders. “I know who you are, it’s on the tip of my tongue.”

  “Show me.”

  The tip of her tongue parted chafed lips. He closed his mouth around it. Her mouth opened. Not an offering, he thought, but a reflex. He tested it anyway, probed it with his tongue, searching tongue, teeth, gum, ridged upper palate, tongue again, the slick insides of lips, the bubbles below the tongue, searching for something familiar, for home. It was familiar. It wasn’t home. Her tongue flicked his. She tasted like whisky—what else would Howard’s women taste like? He pushed his tongue toward the back of her mouth, then reeled it in. Out. She whispered “Cold.” He drew in breath. “The beer,” she said. “Cold mouth.”

  The sound of running water came from the bathroom. She said, “You’re a painter, right?”

  “Right.”

  Her face in muted daylight—for the curtains had been drawn, one of Howard’s few discretions—showed solemn and greedy as a child’s. She wasn’t much older than a child, early twenties, large face, with shiny skin, no makeup, not even powder, which she could have used, light blue eyes, and long hair, her pride, untidy. An oiled Madonna, a piglet, a bit of both. “You did that stuff, those sports pictures. Hockey and stuff. Right?”

  “Right.”

  Her two front teeth, separated by a wedge of gum, had no sign on them saying, “Here passed the tongue of Newman Sykes.” He wondered if she ever closed her mouth. She did, only to open it again.

  “You don’t look like a painter.”

  “What does a painter look like?” Out of politeness he didn’t yawn.

  “During the commercials does Carson talk to you?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “God, I’d remember.” She tapped his belt buckle, stroked the fabric of his fly. He stood still, listening. She said, “You don’t want me.” She was puzzled.

  He took her hand, a warm live thing he’d have preferred not to touch, like a squirrel or a woodchuck, a wild animal that might bite or transmit disease or parasites. “I’m knocked out. Painting, California, jet lag.” He performed Sheila Dunne’s no-time gesture.

  Twining a strand of hair between two fingers, she stared at the rug, a small worn Oriental, its random fraying almost a pattern on the pattern. She smiled—out of embarrassment, he thought. He reached for his beer. Empty.

  “You shaved off your mustache,” she said.

  “Never had one.” He hesitated between another beer and righteous indignation, chose the second as safer. He banged on the bathroom door. “Hey!” No answer. Again “Hey!” with anger at the water running, anger at the sounds it must be covering, anger at his exclusion. No whispering secrets in company—didn’t anybody know that rule? “Hey!”

  He opened the door—it was his bathroom—and steam rushed toward him. The shower pounded. It wasn’t his bathroom anymore. Transformed by fog, it breathed, a place inspirited. Should he remove his shoes? He had wandered onto holy ground. Mist rolled past him toward the open door. He pushed it shut. Through the green-tinted translucent shower curtain from Woolworth’s he saw spectral dancers, Howard and Maris, slow and eternal. A plant, a flower bending, she stood on one leg, stemmed, swaying. Her other leg lifted to crook around Howard’s thigh, which dipped to receive it. Now her fixed leg moved, she uprooted herself, twined around him. A new form showed through green plastic, a humped unwieldy form on two legs dancing. Water beat down on it, tattooed the cries that came from it. He waited for something to call his name. Vapor condensed on his face in saltless sweat and tears. He saw his past filtered in green. The deft monster in his shower arched, limbs extended. A starfish. It contracted. Began pulsing. There was nowhere to go. Here was verdurous obscenity; outside, Katharine waited. From clothes on the floor he picked up Maris’s blouse to wipe his face. He could have used the towel on the rack, but he didn’t know who had used it before him and for what. Too late he realized the same uncertainties applied to the blouse at his forehead.

  He took off his shoes, socks, pants, underpants. The monster moaned. He unbuttoned his shirt, dropped it on the floor with the other clothes. Glanced at h
is unimpressed penis, slack in dark hair. He pulled aside the curtain. Water spattered his face and chest. He saw a breast, a spare muscled arm, a prominent tendon; tried to identify the tangle. Howard looked tired but determined: Maris had weight to her, a surprising generosity. With her hair flat on her scalp, though, she didn’t show to advantage. Water ran from the corners of her open mouth. Gray streaks of mascara had settled in the lines under her eyes, which were startled and excited and sad. Water hit the floor. It trickled down his legs, steel beams.

  “Come in or stay out, but close the…curtain.” Suspicious, flattered, Howard must have wanted to say “goddamn curtain,” but respect and his nakedness had made him amend it. Maris ushered flurries of kisses across his neck, yellow butterflies hovering over tall grass.

  Newman hesitated, heavy with indifference. “This isn’t going to work,” Howard said. Newman stepped into the bathtub and drew the curtain closed.