by T. Gertler
“Bless you,” Dan said. He had a ledger book open at the register. Two slender brown fingers trailed a column of figures. The set of his shoulders seemed easy yet prepared, as if he could with no effort begin a mime or a karate lunge.
“Thanks. Would it be okay if I stopped in a few minutes? I have to go see somebody.”
“Sure. Leave me here all alone with no help and no company.”
“Can I ask you something?” she asked shyly.
“You just did.” He smiled at the ledger.
“What did you do before you had the store?”
“I had another store.”
“What’d you sell?”
“Books. It was a Marxist and health bookstore.”
Staying with him might have put her on an FBI list. “Why’d you stop?”
“It went bankrupt.”
“I’m sorry. I mean, I’m sorry for your sake, not about the store.” There might be a microphone hidden in a hollowed-out Golden Bough. “That whole subject confuses me.”
“Health?”
“Marxism. I’m glad you have this store now.” She stood, lifting one of the dictionaries. “Which name do you like better—Reeve or Leitman?”
“Reeve. Why?”
“That’s my ex-husband-to-be’s name. Leitman was my name before I got married.”
“Which one do you prefer?”
“Bob Dylan. He named himself.”
“Lenin.”
“Picasso.”
“Stalin.”
“Colette.” She tottered toward the front of the store, resting the dictionary low against her pelvic bones. She had to hurry to get out of the way of a tall man who entered the store carrying two cartons of books. His face was red, his hair was red, and he was wearing an orange tee shirt. He blazed past her. The cartons slammed down on the counter. When she returned for another dictionary, at least thirty copies of Bandaged Moments had grown on the counter. The man—a thief? a wholesaler?—took more copies from a carton, and something white dropped silently to the floor. It was a sock.
“Shit.” He picked it up and stuffed it in his back pocket up to the grayish heel. “I’ve got another couple of cartons. You want them?”
Dan nodded, dispensing money.
“I’ll bring them by. Thanks.” The money, uncounted, joined the sock. The man frowned with embarrassment. His thin lips were familiar.
On his way out he stopped at a sale table: seventy-nine cents each or three for two dollars. He bought a copy of No, But I Read the Book, a collection of reviews by Newman Sykes. He glanced at her as he paid Dan. His face surprised her, as if she’d come upon a faded photograph of a childhood friend. Determined not to be surprised, she fled up the stairs.
She washed her face quickly and reapplied liner to her eyes. She put on a clean blouse, dabbed cologne at the back of her neck. She dropped a packaged contraceptive suppository and a subway token in her purse. A second token went in her jeans pocket. She couldn’t think of what she was going to say to Howard. She took a second suppository with her. She unzipped her jeans and patted cologne on her underpants. By the time she got downstairs again, the red-haired man was gone. On her way to the subway she tried to remember where she’d seen him before.
—
Newman had seen the girl somewhere before. Her arrival interrupted Howard’s monologue on the new fiction, whatever that was.
She seemed stuck in the doorway to Howard’s office, seemed to be tugged both away from the room and toward it. A heavy hand had drawn dark lines around her eyes; the rest of her had been better sketched. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—nobody’s outside.”
“They’re having coffee,” Howard said. “Come in.” He was improbably jovial. A browning apple core and an open bottle of red wine rested on manuscripts on his desk. Both men were drinking from mugs. “Dina Reeve, Newman Sykes.”
“Hello.” She blushed.
He liked to see a girl blushing. At his lectures he encountered few who blushed. “Please join us. Howard was pontificating about writing.”
“Dina here has a wonderful story that’s my lead for Rosemary.” From under a stack of manuscripts Howard unearthed three long printed sheets. “Your galleys.”
She received them cautiously, and a slow half-smile, a secretive glee, becalmed her face. “You’re really doing it.”
Newman smiled too, trying to remember how it had felt to see his writing in print for the first time. “You must be a very good writer if Howard publishes you.”
“She is,” Howard mumbled. “Sit down, sit down,” he told her.
“And you’ll have to be a very patient writer until Howard pays you.”
“I have her check right here.” A storm of papers followed his efforts to locate the check.
“There’s one thing,” she said, sitting next to Newman on the sofa. “The name. Can it be changed?”
“It’s a good title,” Howard told his mug of wine.
“No, my name. It’s not Reeve, it’s Leitman.”
“It was Reeve on all your manuscripts.”
“I’m going to get a divorce.”
“You don’t look old enough to be married,” Newman said.
Howard said, “You should think it over.”
“I’m getting a divorce,” she insisted. “The name is Leitman.”
“You’re being hasty, you’re not thinking this through.” Howard’s face had whitened and thinned. Seams along his forehead deepened. His eyes moved from paper to paper on his desk.
“How can you say that?” she asked with such exasperation that Newman patted her shoulder.
“He’s an editor, not a marriage counselor.”
Howard muttered, “How do you spell Leitman?”
While she spelled it, Newman read a few lines of a galley over her shoulder. He could have read more, but he glanced down her blouse instead. “May I see this?” he asked.
“He can buy it at the newsstand,” Howard said.
“I have a subscription,” Newman answered.
“Then let him wait for the mail. He’ll have something to look forward to.”
“Why don’t you give this young lady her check? And some wine. I think we should toast her.” Newman leaned toward Dina and asked in a low voice, “This is your first publication?”
“Yes, sir.”
He wanted to brush her hair out of her eyes and request less politeness. She had a beautiful long neck, and a brown freckle perched on her right breast. “You have every right to get a divorce,” he said. “Aren’t you at the Karatasi bookstore?”
“Yes. We’ll toast her.” Howard refilled his mug and gave it to Dina. “It’s clean, it’s clean, the alcohol kills any germs.” He emptied a square plastic cup of paper clips and rubber bands, blew dust out, and poured wine for himself.
“It could be worse. He could have used the envelope-moistener dish,” Newman said.
Howard lifted his cup. “To your story.”
“And to many more,” Newman added.
She drank, and the three galleys slid from her lap. Newman had taken them.
—
Without its night-table carton, the phone sat on the floor, near the bed. Reaching from the bed, she pushed aside a pair of jeans to uncover it. One-handed, she laid the receiver on the floor and dialed. The fingertips of her other hand were being nibbled. The nibbling stopped.
“Don’t,” he said.
“I have to.”
“Just stay.” He rolled away from her, and the bed, on retired springs, shuddered. With the receiver ringing in her ear, she examined the expanse of his back, freckles at his shoulders, the spine like the shaft of an arrow leading to a red-blond arrowhead patch of hair above his buttocks. White against his tan, rounded against the rest of his angular body, they had an innocent look. She thought of patting baby powder on their unsmiling cleft.
“Hello?” came the voice on the phone.
“Hi, it’s me.” A monotone suppressed her anger. Hearing him speak—ev
en the one word—outraged her. “I can’t—I won’t be home until around twelve.”
“Oh?”
“I called the camp. The bus is dropping Matty off at your office.”
“Why twelve?” His calm inquiry invited anger.
“Because that’s when I’m coming home.”
“Suzanne, I think you should think this over.”
“I think it’s none of your business what I think.” She slammed the receiver down on the jeans, fumbled for it, and dropped it in place in the cradle. “There,” she said to the unmoving arrow, “now we can have dinner like a real couple.”
—
The critic definitely had looked down her blouse again. She laughed, then covered her mouth because Howard was on the phone. She tried to organize finishing the mug of wine while her hand stayed plastered over her mouth. He’d said the alcohol would kill any germs. He hadn’t worried about germs when they fucked. Beside her, the critic chuckled.
“I like this,” he said quietly, not to disturb Howard’s conversation. “Of course some of it, no: ‘My dance card’s full.’ I don’t like the flip attitude there.”
“It’s not flip—”
“You could find something better.”
She discovered wine in her mouth and heard Howard say “Suzanne” into the phone. A curious pain traveled between her breasts, a stabbing. From high above the room she watched the three of them in it: the critic, cold as a dead star, his unhappiness so powerful that it drew her toward him; Howard, lost and nobly foolish, a liar, a circuit rider, a lover of complications; herself, grotesque to have felt less pain in leaving a husband of six years than in losing a lover of a few weeks, with time out for cystitis. Help me, she thought when Howard hung up the phone. If he didn’t save her, she would have to go with the critic. The severe presence at her side, reading her story, threatened to excite her. Unless there was someone to see her, she didn’t exist. Assisted by wine, she sped toward whatever solution would present itself.
Howard refilled his square cup. “To Rosemary, the constant woman,” he muttered.
She lifted the empty mug. She wanted to kneel at his chair and unzip his pants and take him into her mouth. Let the critic review that. She wanted to be obliterated by servitude to love. Who would she be if Howard didn’t want her?
“We have to talk,” she told him. “I have to see you to talk.”
“Shall I leave you two?” Newman asked.
“No, no,” Howard said. “We can’t…talking now…not now.”
“What about my story?” she asked.
“I’m enjoying it,” Newman said.
Howard picked up a pencil and examined it as if he’d never seen one before. “Yes, a story, a fine story.” The phone rang again, and he grabbed the receiver ardently. “Yes?” he asked it.
The critic whispered to Dina, “More wine?”
“Yes, please. A lot.”
“Margery, you’ve caught me at a very bad time,” Howard explained to the phone. “…No, it’s worse than that…That’s nice, Margie…I could suggest something.” He winced and hung up. His hand opened, palm to the ceiling, as if he were appealing to God, and tipped over the square cup. Manuscripts absorbed wine. A handwritten note across the top of a cover page dissolved in blue. He blotted it with the dry side of another manuscript.
“I’d like to know what else can happen,” he said.
“Hi, Daddy.” A little girl holding a birdcage and a few wilting daisies walked slowly to his desk.
—
In the elevator the critic said, “If you’re going downtown, I can give you a ride.”
“Yes, thank you,” she said. “I’ve seen you on TV.”
On the street he said, “I have some ideas about your story. Why don’t we discuss it over dinner?”
“Yes, thank you,” she said.
In front of the restaurant, before he opened the door, he asked, “How well do you know Howard?”
“Not very well at all,” she said.
—
“I don’t care what its alias is, it’s a rodent.” The manuscripts had stiffened as they dried; he arranged mummies on his desk.
“It’s a gerbil,” she said. “It’s clean. His name is Mork.”
“It’s unappetizing and it can’t go out to dinner.”
“Mommy said it was okay. It’s my turn to keep him overnight. It’s not his fault we’re not going straight home.”
“Whose fault is it?”
“I don’t know.” Wisely she said nothing more, but retreated to the sofa and held the cage on her lap. Her feet in miniature running shoes jutted straight out in front of her. She made soft kissing sounds to the rat in the birdcage and stuck a small finger between the bars.
Her wilting daisies stayed on his desk, a bonus for Berthe the night cleaning woman. He didn’t need dead flowers to underscore the absurdity: bringing a rat to a New York City restaurant.
He muttered at the papers, careful to keep damp ones away from his Rosemary galleys. When Gail buzzed him, he heard “Larry Reeve to see you” and, preoccupied with rodents and wives, said, “Fine, fine,” before realizing who the visitor was. In the few seconds it took Larry Reeve to reach his office, Howard had time to repent of a thousand sins of commission and omission. Not to mention emission, he thought, saluting his gallows humor. At the sight of his visitor, all humor vanished.
The man could have been an eccentric billionaire disguised as a bum. He could have been an artist or a mass murderer. His green overalls were grimy and wrinkled. The collar of his Hawaiian shirt was torn. His hair hung in yellow-brown strings past his shoulders, which seemed drawn up to brace his neck. A mustache smothered his upper lip. His eyes searched the room, resting on nothing. They glittered, dulled, flashed light again, the inner lids red and swollen. One eye wept a colorless fluid.
“Matty,” Howard said, “go ask Gail for the key to the bathroom. You have to wash your hands before dinner.”
It might have been the fact that he pronounced every syllable distinctly, with no muttering, that made Matty look up in alarm.
Reeve took a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “You’re Ritchie?”
“Yes.”
“Where is she?”
“Who?”
Reeve glanced at Matty and the birdcage in her lap. He asked Howard, “You think because she’s here you have an easy out?” The delivery belonged to a spy or a scientist: unaccented but alien.
“What exactly do you want, Mr. Reeve?”
“The name is Rabuchin.”
“You told my secretary it was Reeve.”
“That’s so you’d know who you’re talking to.”
Everybody was changing names in his office. He could change his name too—he liked the sound of Rex Adamson—and live alone in tequilaed anonymity in Mexico, in a hammock in one of those dusty outlaw towns no bigger than Orson Welles in a white tropical suit. There would be no women, no wives, no children. He would bring with him a lifetime supply of deodorant and a subscription to the Times Book Review. “What are we talking about?”
“You know.” Reeve—Rabuchin—waved the piece of paper. “You gave her ideas. You poisoned her against me. Some professor. How about if I show you some of my writing? Want to see a letter to the college president about what you did to my wife?”
“You write fiction, Mr. Rabuchin?”
“I write the truth. Tell me where she is or I mail this.”
Howard measured the awfulness of the threat. He had spent almost fifteen years at the school without meeting any of a succession of presidents, and he wanted to keep it that way. If he told Rabuchin where Dina was, he’d be admitting to an involvement. And Rabuchin might still send the letter, whatever it contained. And he might hurt Dina. That, Howard reflected, wasn’t his problem, it was Rabuchin’s—and hers. He thought of her litany of oh-oh-oh-no-no-yes-oh croaked into his ear at Newman’s place. She had bitten him gently on the shoulder. Or was that someone else? He hadn’t seduced her,
no; and she hadn’t trapped him. The clear voice of her writing accused him. He turned his copy of her story galleys face down on his desk.
“I don’t like being threatened, Mr. Rabuchin. I can see you’re upset and I’m sorry you’re having domestic problems, but that has nothing to do with me.”
“I’m in pain, you shit. Someone I love has disappeared from my life. How would you like it if someone you love disappeared?”
Howard said to Matty, “Leave the room now,” but the girl stayed.
“Daddy?” she asked, crying.
“Leave,” he said coldly. She scrambled off the sofa, struggling with the birdcage. “Leave that,” he said. “Go.”
She left the cage on the sofa and ran to him, past Rabuchin. She climbed into Howard’s lap and sobbed against his shirt. He put his arms around her.
“Now that you’ve terrified my child,” he said to Rabuchin, “maybe you’d like to pull the wings off a couple of flies.”
The man put his hands on the desk, bending papers. His weeping eye swam in glare. “You think you have everything on your side. You play at art and make money from lies and now you think having your kid cry makes you honest. You’re a parasite. You live on the blood of artists. If you really love your daughter, you should stay far away from her so you don’t poison her too.”
A stranger asked, “Everything all right here?”
In the doorway Liliane and Gail stood behind a campus cop, a stocky black man outmuscling his gray uniform.
“He was saying goodbye,” Howard said.
The cop beckoned to Rabuchin. “Okay, bro, let me help you.”
Rabuchin laid his paper on Howard’s desk, on top of Dina’s overturned galleys. “I have more,” he said.
—
It was a Xerox copy of neat and dark hand-printing that slanted downward.
Dear Sir,
The ones who believe they possess the truth, are dangerous. They corrupt the ones who are young and impressive. Kierkegaard writes about the seducer, that he perverted the others not outwardly but in their inward natures. It is a double crime when the victim is an artist because, then the world loses, not just the individual person.
There is a man who seduces under the name of literature. He is one of your teachers Howard Ritchie. He has taken a sweet and loving woman and turned her frightened and angry. He stole her happiness because he cannot steal her talent. But he has hidden her from her family. She is my wife. I need to find her and deprogram her. She cannot survive in a world made up by Ritchie to suit Ritchie. He should not be a teacher or allowed to infect others. I know you must do something about this.