Elbowing the Seducer

by T. Gertler

“—that pimp—”

  “Dad—”

  “Aaah, what the hell. Come home.”

  “There’s somebody waiting to use the phone.”

  “Let them wait.”

  “I’ll call again soon, I promise.”

  “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “No. I have to go now.”

  “Tell us where you are.”

  “Goodbye.”

  She hung up the phone. The barefoot, shirtless man advanced toward it. “You take your sweet time,” he said. He had a purple bruise under one eye. Without breathing, she walked away.

  —

  The nun in the elevator said “Excuse me” when he bumped into her. She was old enough to be his mother, if his mother had survived. On the third floor he bumped into a black woman with a clipboard. Stethoscope tubing trembled above her jacket pocket. If she had a beeper, she was a doctor. If she didn’t, she was a nurse. Without stopping to frisk her, he went to Ralph Cohen’s room.

  It smelled of cigar smoke. But the other bed was empty.

  He leaned on the guardrail at the old man’s bed. Gray skin draped over bones. The head had the soft look of an overripe pear, brown-splotched. Gnarled veins could have been bruises. Tufts of sparse white hair could have been mold. He recognized a clouded eye and a keen one. He and the old man were freaks, he thought, each with unmatching eyes.

  “What’s the matter, artist? You couldn’t find no flowers to bring me?”

  “You’re always screaming how the flowers are for paying customers only.”

  “You want dinner?”

  On a wheeled tray at the foot of the bed was St. Vincent’s version of dinner: string beans and mashed potatoes shored up a beefy fabric.

  “You’re supposed to eat it and get better.”

  “I don’t want. I had the roll with the butter. Since the plumber left, I got no appetite.” The plumber had been the patient in the other bed.

  The potatoes needed salt. So did the string beans. The meat evaporated in his mouth like cotton candy. He hadn’t eaten all day, not since he’d come home for lunch and found her note. She was gone. He touched the note in his pocket.

  “Sit down, you’ll get sick that you eat standing up.”

  “What’s this stuff?”

  “Apple betty, the nurse says. You’ll be crazy about it.”

  It tasted like the meat. “What happened to the plumber?”

  “He got better or he got worse.”

  He took the paper place mat from underneath the dishes and smoothed it out on the bureau. He scraped a blob of potato from it. His black felt-tip pen bled a little, but the place mat wasn’t Arches paper, after all. With the first line he remembered his father’s desk and the cloisonné jar with a hinged cover. Standing on tiptoe, he’d reached up for it and heard laughter. With the second line he saw his mother holding a bouquet impossibly high above her white-aproned stomach.

  “Here.” He held up the place mat. He had drawn on it a large open rose. “It’s a red one. You like the red ones, right?” He propped it up against the water pitcher on the night stand.

  The old man fixed his good eye on it. His hand, banded with a plastic ID bracelet, clawed a bar. Yellow-brown needle marks stained the inner wrist. “Sign it. It’s worth more if you sign it.”

  He signed it with his Hebrew name, Eliezer, and below that his un-Americanized name, Laurits Rabuchin.

  Dear Larry,

  I’m going, I’m gone. I’m taking what I can carry of what I’m sure is mine. I took out half of the bank account ($150) and left the book in your drawer. I’m going to lock the door and push my keys under it so you’ll have them all. I paid Con Ed and telephone. Your blue shirt’s fixed. Just wash it. I changed the sheets. The towels are clean too. One of us will have to start divorce stuff. I’ll do it as soon as I can if you don’t do it first. The towels are clean. Hope you’ll be okay. And me too.

  Dina

  Yes, the towels were clean. On the steps of St. Vincent’s he tore her note in half. A woman carrying a crying baby hurried past him toward the hospital. She murmured in Spanish, and a small fist struck air. The baby wore gold earrings with red stones. On the corner of Seventh and Greenwich a dirt-encrusted man browsing through the trash basket found a beer bottle and wiped the neck with a filthy hand before draining it. Larry put the pieces of paper back in his pocket and walked in the other direction, east along Eleventh Street. His lengthening shadow preceded him.

  He crossed Sixth Avenue and considered stopping at Balducci’s for an apple or a bag of raisins and nuts. They cost the same there as at a supermarket. A block down, people with full shopping bags hurried out of the store, going home. He didn’t envy them; he was an artist. He was alone, he had been abandoned by all the world, but he was an artist. Someone laughed. A couple laden with Balducci’s shopping bags came toward him. They were young, both about Dina’s age. “You put the cassis in first,” the woman was saying.

  He continued east on Eleventh Street. Two lhasa apsos barked at him from the corner. A radio on roller skates sang. He thought he saw her. She was standing in the middle of the block, staring up at a brownstone. It might have been shadows making a stranger look like her, but he knew the tilt of her head, black silky baby hair parting over her ear, the short arms like sticks growing from pockets hiding her small hands, the particular jutting angle of her hips in loose jeans. In one day he had lost her and found her again. “Dina,” he called. “Dina.”

  From the distance her face might have seemed welcoming. He ran toward her.

  “No!” she shouted, and she ran away.

  He heard the “No!” when the buildings were already rushing past him. He couldn’t stop. The sight of her receding, instead of growing larger, drove him on. She had never been an athlete, not with her small flat feet and her fears of falling. He could overtake her. He saw her turn right on Fifth Avenue, but when he got to the corner, she was gone.

  Panting, he stared down Fifth, to Eighth Street, thick with summer strollers and dope peddlers and ice cream vendors. She couldn’t have reached Eighth Street that quickly. He saw the cab at the corner of Tenth Street.

  “Dina!” he shouted.

  She was looking at him, yes, she was. He chased across Fifth after the cab. By the time he reached the corner of Tenth, the cab had sped the long block to University Place and was waiting at a red light. He leaned against a lamp pole to catch his breath. Joggers in tee shirts and shorts bounded past him on their way to the park. He’d have to start jogging every day. That way, the next time he’d catch her. The cab drove off. Working to push air through the pain in his chest, he began to cry.

  —

  She peered through the rear window to make sure he wasn’t following her. “I’ll get off at the next corner.”

  “You okay, hon?” The driver, a gray-haired man with a neck mole exactly like a pencil eraser, lurched the cab to the curb. She gave him two dollars. “If some guy’s bothering you, you should go to the cops,” he said.

  She wondered if his wife ever bit his mole in a moment of passion. She felt ashamed for wondering that. If Howard had a neck mole, what would she do? When he bent down naked to pick up his clothes from the floor around the bed, any bed, his vertebrae stood out because he was thin. The bumps formed a keyboard, each bony projection a note in a tapering human xylophone. With two small wooden hammers and six years of lessons, she could play “Danny Boy” along his spine. The next time they made love, she’d ask him what he thought about the raised dark brown freckle on her right arm. There would be a next time. At his office that morning he’d been angry with her—but he’d found a place for her to stay. He would love her again, pinning her arms down on orange sheets and telling her a joke about God trying to buy a cameo on Forty-seventh Street. Something about a discount for cash. Minutes before, outside the house where he’d first made love to her, she’d wanted one of those afternoons back, fucking in the critic’s apartment. Seeing Newman Sykes selling his books, she’d
hated him because he was cold-eyed and clear-eyed and he wasn’t Howard. She wanted to lie in Newman Sykes’s bed again and have Howard hold her. On the sidewalk where she’d waited for him to pay the ponytailed cab driver weeks ago, she saw herself as she’d been then and as she was now, shoulder to shoulder with herself: time squared. She’d traveled a hard distance to get from one place to an adjacent one. And Larry had found her and frightened her into doubting she’d traveled anywhere at all.

  What did husbands and wives do together—real husbands and wives? Larry hated her family and had driven away her few friends. Janice Wrightson, a neighbor upstairs, used to visit despite his comments about her father, whom he’d never met. She was finishing her dissertation on the probability of altruism in times of disaster and worked as a bartender. “The industrialist fattening on my blood,” Larry called Mr. Wrightson, a grocer in South Dakota. “Come over to my place for a while,” she told Dina. Larry said, “We’ll see.” Dina went once by herself. There were squares of sunlight on a green tablecloth and a feeling of space. Air. There was a green china sugar bowl with red flowers painted on it. Janice asked, “How are you doing?” She might or might not have been condescending. She had on purple cutoffs and a pink tee shirt. A pink plastic band gripped her blond hair, exposing a smooth, high forehead. Dina drank a cup of coffee fast and left. Larry didn’t speak to her when she came home. “Poor Janice,” she said, “she’s all alone.” “Boring,” he said. Janice stopped visiting them.

  So did Nicola, a teacher, with Dina, at the Babel Language Institute. The one time Nicola came to dinner—a chicken stew Dina had labored over all day, cutting onions and potatoes with dreamy diligence—Larry accused their guest of being overweight and a nihilist. She’d brought a copy of Ms. magazine in her briefcase. Her ruffled yellow blouse might have been snug, but the full black skirt fit her fine. She left a coral lip mark on her water glass. After that night, whenever Dina saw her at work, Nicola asked, “How are you?” Dina would say, “Okay, thanks. How are you?”

  “They don’t care about you, little one. I’m the only one who cares,” Larry said. “And that includes your parents, the happy misers.” Afraid to contradict him, afraid that what he said was true, she’d allowed him to reduce their world to a thirteen-by-sixteen room. By the light of the TV, she’d crocheted intricate pillow shams for their prison, pineapple motifs hooked during late-night reruns of The Twilight Zone. He wanted her to have nothing and to be nothing without him. She’d wanted that too. Now, since she intended to be without him, he would have to inflict nothingness on her.

  “He wants to kill me,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “You better go to the cops,” the cab driver said.

  “No, it’s something between him and me.” When she realized he wasn’t going to give her change, she got out of the cab.

  —

  Any one of the books at any time might hold a meaning, a sign especially for her. In the hundreds of thousands of books around her, she would have to find that one at the right moment and open it to the right page. She ruled out the foreign-language and chemistry sections; whatever meaning was there she couldn’t decipher, and if the special meaning intended for her was there, then it would be her fate never to find it and never to know she couldn’t find it.

  Surrounded by possibilities, she stood in her nightgown in the dark store, enjoying her fear of the dark. No matter what else might be in the cavernous room with her, Larry wasn’t.

  She ran her fingers across book spines on a shelf above her head and stopped at a book she believed would be bound in blue and would tell her something essential. She pulled it out and inclined it toward the window to catch light from the street. Though the book was green, she opened it in the middle and struck a finger on a page. By low light she read,

  …a diamond is explained as a person, a turtle, the navel, a mountain, a lake, a star, an eye. The setting of the design does not by any means explain sufficiently why these varying interpretations should be used.

  She flipped to the title page: Primitive Art, by Franz Boas.

  On her first try, she might have found the special meaning intended for her—or she might not. It hadn’t occurred to her before that she might not recognize it when she found it. She put the book back and went to a table of paperbacks for something to take upstairs with her to the white room.

  Ten minutes later, having picked up and discarded Mailer’s The Deer Park, which was missing the first three pages, a Middle-march that smelled funny, Knowing Your Sun Sign Can Save Your Life, The Canterbury Tales Coloring Book, and a book of poems called Why I Don’t Like Japanese Prints, which began

  Utamaro Utamaro Utamaro

  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

  To the last syllable of recorded time…

  and was written and illustrated in two colors by M. “Hokusai” Donnelly and dedicated to Shiva the Destroyer, she climbed upstairs, holding a copy of the 1979 Maupassant Prize Stories collection. Her story was going to be published in Rosemary, and she wanted to look over the competition.

  When she was a little girl in California, a story appeared in the L. A. Times about a little boy, a tourist, who’d been standing in shallow water in the ocean, up to his waist, and a shark came along and bit off his leg. She wondered if the shark ate it on the spot or swam away with it. The story confirmed her suspicions about the dangers of submersion. From the age of eleven on, she swam only in pools. Some years later she saw a James Bond movie in which the villain released sharks into a pool through a secret underwater passageway. By then she was living with Larry in New York. She stopped taking baths and began showering.

  She thought of writing as a kind of submersion: dangerous and contrary to natural buoyancy. Still, something about that risk tempted her and, struggling between fears of being devoured by work and fears of being lost in silence, she had managed over the years of her marriage to produce several stories and fragments of stories—messages smuggled out, notes in amber seltzer bottles bobbing in blue-green waves patrolled by fins, or shreds of paper bearing the hastily scrawled “Help, I am being held prisoner in a fortune-cookie factory.”

  In her white solitude in the white bed, she became accustomed to writing in a notebook. It kept loneliness away. She wrote about what she didn’t have, in order to possess it: love. She wrote about an idea of love embodied in a man she imagined was very much like Howard. She made him look different from Howard, she gave him a different family and a different job. He was part her, part her mother, part her father, part the boys she’d known in school, part the clamorous voices of the rabbis, part Larry, part Howard. He had her mother’s desire to shine in the eyes of the world. He wore her father’s anger more stylishly and felt it more acutely. He suffered frantically and with appetite. He was, this imagined man, most nearly the person she feared she was, a spectator, though with a good seat, at the literary circus. Her fictional maleness had a sideshow logic: determined to seem as lost as a hoop-skirted southern belle in a mud-wrestling contest, she believed unhappily that talent and ambition made her masculine, and being masculine made her a freak. For her imagined man she created a world, occasionally hospitable, in which to live.

  Though Dan had warned her that she could stay only until someone else needed the room, no one showed up to claim it. Every day she expected to lose it, every night brought a reprieve—and disappointment: she was waiting for Howard to show up and claim her. At night she worked very hard not to think about what she was writing, cryptography against abandonment, and in the morning she typed a clean copy of her writing while more or less ignoring it. She aggressively ignored how the number of typed pages grew from three to several to twenty to forty and more. Forty-six. As Dan said, who counts? Fifty-one. She was swimming into the mouth of the shark, and she didn’t want to see where she was going.

  On clear nights, after she put her notebook and pen on the floor and turned out the light, the skylight above her framed stars. She wondered if Howard was sleeping.
His beautiful wife yawned in his arms. Dina tried to find Orion’s Belt, the only cluster of stars she knew. Once she thought she’d found it when a cloud rolled out of the way, but the three stars were irregularly placed and she remembered dimly from a sixth-grade science class that Orion belonged in the winter sky. She could feel Howard’s terror at being trapped in sleep, without lies to protect himself. If he loved her, she would protect him. If he didn’t love her, then all she had was a notebook of embroidered fears. She fell asleep searching for something—a dipper or a bear—she could recognize. The next morning she woke up afraid that Larry was going to find her.

  He didn’t find her that day; and Howard didn’t call, either. She sat down on a pile of three unabridged dictionaries and wiped dust from her face. She hadn’t seen or heard from him in the two weeks since he’d sent her to stay with Dan. If he didn’t want her anymore, she would die. She would fall away from life with less than a sigh, a browned leaf riddled to lace by insects (cutters, borers, or juicy green caterpillars, the better to symbolize with) and dropping unnoticed, three months ahead of autumn, to a sidewalk littered with Good Humor popsicle sticks. If he didn’t want her anymore, she would kill herself. A few days earlier she’d read about a spy in World War I or II—it didn’t matter which—who’d committed suicide by eating the contents of a tube of toothpaste. The tubes might have been lead-lined in those days. It might have been during the Korean War. She’d read only up to page 26, and somebody bought the book the next day. “It’s a rat race in here,” Dan said. She would eat two tubes of toothpaste, one mint and one regular flavor, both with fluoride. For lead, she would add ground pencil from a pencil sharpener. There was symbolism. No, she would nick her wrists. No, she would gnaw rat poison. Then he’d be sorry and have to publish her story posthumously, with a black-bordered note about the author. He would confess his love for her publicly and too late. She inhaled dust from her hand. If he didn’t want her anymore, he might not publish her story. She sneezed.