by T. Gertler
Sincerely,
Laurits Rabuchin
P.S. I am a citizen.
Howard put it in a drawer. “All better?” he asked Matty, who had returned with Liliane.
“We wash the face and it is much better,” Liliane answered.
“I hope Mork didn’t get too upset,” Matty said.
—
In her favorite daydream they were together, with Matty, in a farmhouse in Massachusetts, near where he was born. He was writing at the kitchen table, golden oak with four lions’ heads at the pedestal base. There were apples and pears—little Seckel pears—heaped in a blue and white bowl. She was baking butterscotch-chip cookies—no, she was making veal ragout—no, a vegetable stew. Matty was doing something in another room. The problem of Howard had disappeared. She didn’t know if he was dead or if they’d divorced. He had simply ceased to exist for her, except as an immensely satisfying absence.
The daydream tranquilized her when Howard was home. Thin as he was, he filled the apartment and she needed something to defend herself against him. “Any mail, dear heart?” he’d ask and, blurring him across the room, she’d launch into her farmhouse.
He had on a plaid flannel shirt, and his red curls covered the back of his collar. “For Suzanne, for all that is and all that will be,” he wrote at the front of his manuscript. She went on stirring her vegetable stew.
“Dear heart, the mail—is there any?”
At a Chaplin double bill in an old movie house downtown, she and Matty had watched Charlie walking away from the camera. The screen had gone black except for a narrowing circle around him. He got smaller and smaller, his twirling cane an asterisk, and the circle around him got smaller and smaller until it finally closed and the screen went completely black. “That’s called irising out,” Matty said later. For two years at school—a private school selected by Howard despite or because of its cost—she’d been taught Film Appreciation. Once at dinner he’d asked her if she knew who Lewis Carroll was, and she’d answered he was a character actor in MGM movies and later played in the TV series Topper and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. “Lots of the old movies had that between scenes. You go: ‘Iris out on Charlie.’ I’m going to use it in all my movies.” They were passing the Karatasi bookstore on their way to University Place to catch an uptown bus. Sometimes Howard bought books there. “It’s a wonderful old place, there’s always something there I want to have,” she’d heard him say to somebody at a party in a Tribeca loft with a picket-fence quilt on a wall and a boa constrictor in a tank with an understandably agitated white mouse. Poor mouse. She could have stopped at the bookstore to buy him a present, but she didn’t know what it was he wanted to have. She decided to give up mythology and take a film course for the fall semester.
“Suzanne, give me the courtesy of a response.”
On the way to the farmhouse, iris out on Howard. Trapped, without knowing it, in the tightening circle of her anger, he made his first aesthetic error that she had ever witnessed: he walked toward her when he should have been walking away.
—
She began to need the daydream not only with Howard but with Vincent. Lying in his bed with him, she imagined herself lying in bed with him at the farmhouse. When they made love, she imagined he was making love to her in the farmhouse. Sometimes they were in the master bedroom, sometimes the guest room. She preferred the color scheme in the master bedroom, blue, white, and soft peach. The guest room, on the other hand, had a canopy bed draped with yards of crewelwork. Once they made love on the kitchen table, but she worried that Matty would come home and see them, and besides, it was uncomfortable lying over his papers, a pencil at her back. She returned their lovemaking to the master bedroom. After a while, whatever happened with him happened better in the imagined farmhouse.
“You okay?” he asked. “You’re quiet.”
She buttoned her blouse clumsily with her mother’s arthritic hands. “Like a mouse.”
“Faraway.” He finished buttoning the blouse for her.
“If anyone’s faraway, you are.”
“I’m right here.”
“Only in the strictest sense.” Behind the window shade New York honked. The room had grown larger since he’d removed two of the cartons of books. It seemed too large, impossible to cross.
“Sorry. I keep thinking about what to write and there’s nothing to write about. If I don’t write, what do I do?”
“You could always be a carpenter again.” He could strengthen the canopy bed in the guest room and repair a splitting lion’s head under the table.
“Thanks.”
“You can make money that way.” She would wash his carpenter’s shirts and mend pockets pierced by nails. “It’s honest. How would I make money if I had to?”
“You could be a carpenter’s assistant.”
“I don’t want to be anybody’s assistant.” In the farmhouse, she dumped the pot of vegetable stew on the floor. Hot gravy spattered her ankles and burned. He didn’t turn around from the kitchen table to see what she had done.
“Okay, you be the carpenter, I’ll be the assistant.”
Because he took her hand, she walked easily to the door.
—
The singer wasn’t good, the piano player wasn’t good, the food wasn’t good. All the tables had candles stuck in ink bottles. It wasn’t a place he would have picked, but he didn’t mind the expense; he still had two more cartons of Bandaged Moments to sell. And he could get an advance from his publisher if only he could manage to write a few pages describing what his next novel would be about. He didn’t know what his next novel would be about. He didn’t want to write another novel, he wanted to lie naked in bed all day and feel sorry for himself.
She insisted it was her treat, and he said, “Nope.”
“Why not?”
“It’s like the line in the Ring Lardner story: ‘Shut up he explained.’ I’m paying.”
“You don’t want me to pay because you think it’s Howard paying.”
“An interesting theory.”
“What if he does pay? He should pay, and pay and pay.”
When she lifted the napkin to her lips, he hoped it would wipe away the bitter lines there. He reviewed the eggplant on his plate for overlooked chunks of cheese. “We shouldn’t be here,” he said. “Howard eats here, doesn’t he?”
“He has Matty to take care of. Besides, what if he does show up?”
“You don’t want us to have dinner together. You want to stick it to Howard.” He stated this while buttering a broken-off curlicue from a seeded crescent roll. The red-gold hair at his wrists glittered in candlelight.
“That’s not true.”
The black woman at the microphone said, “And now we’re going to give you our rendition of a little Willie Nelson.”
“And now,” Bask said, “having decimated Billie Holiday and Rodgers and Hart, she’s going to screw up ‘Night Life.’ ”
“Let’s go.”
“And it’s not ‘a little Willie Nelson.’ Willie Nelson’s a giant.”
“Vincent, let’s go.”
“We haven’t had dessert—you know, like a regular couple.”
“It’s clear you don’t like the place. And someone just came in that I’m sure you don’t want to see.”
“Howard’s here?” He wondered if he’d have to hit Howard or if he should let Howard hit him.
“No, Newman Sykes.”
He followed her gaze and saw a slender black-haired man escorting a woman to a table. She had black hair too. “I thought he was older.” He recognized the woman: all eyes and shyness behind the Karatasi cash register. She probably needed transfusions after a brisk three-block walk. He wondered how it would feel to hit Sykes. “What if he sees you?” he asked. “You want that?”
Suzanne stared at the woman. “She’s given up wearing halters.” Her voice was thin and tremulous, a cassette played on a recorder with failing batteries.
“You know her?” He watched t
he woman smile at Sykes.
Suzanne put a cold hand on his wrist. “Do you?”
“She works at the Karatasi bookstore.” Sykes seemed to be reading the menu to her. “You’d think somebody who works in a bookstore could read for herself.”
“Let’s go.” Suzanne stood up. “Please.”
He held on to the crescent roll and didn’t get up. “Maybe Sykes’ll tell Howard he saw us. Isn’t that what you want?”
“I’ll be outside.” Panic, like a glaze on porcelain, crazed her face.
He should have smoothed her skin with long thumb strokes. He meant to ask, What’s the matter, babe? Across the room the woman from the bookstore would be listening to Newman Sykes condemn the menu for lack of character development.
Bask turned back to Suzanne, to tell her not to be upset, but she was already beyond the bar, on her way out. He signaled the waiter for the check—at least that was his—and fed bread crumbs to the candle flame.
—
He gave the waiter her order: a glass of white wine, a baked potato with butter and sour cream, and a small green salad. She wondered why she wasn’t supposed to talk to the waiter. She wanted to say to him, This wasn’t my idea. The wine she’d had at Howard’s made her almost brave enough to do it.
A black woman sang, “And listen to what the blues are saying.” Dina would have listened, but, looking up from a relish tray eyed with olives, she saw the red-haired man, without cartons, walking toward her.
He stopped at their table. His hair in loose curls seemed about to explode. “Mr. Sykes?”
“Yes?” Newman said with aggrieved reasonableness.
Before the red-haired man spoke again, she recognized him: saw his face under ashes in the fireplace, where Larry had thrown Bandaged Moments. In the store that morning the man, embarrassed, had been selling copies of his own book; now she flushed with embarrassment. The book, which she still hadn’t read, had given her story its first home, print crowding script in smudged eyeliner. She’d read his story “Eating Peaches” in the Maupassant Prize volume and admired it. Awe and gratitude welled up inside her; the olive in her mouth kept her silent. If she concentrated on his nose, he didn’t have three eyes. Freckles shimmied on his nose. Remembering the fifty-dollar check from Rosemary in her purse—Howard had found the check in an envelope marked IMP. and given it to her—she told herself that she was like Bask: a writer. The tablecloth hid her hands as they moved up under the table to tap once, twice, a third time. She studied the red-haired man’s nose for clues about how writers behave.
He bent toward Newman and said, “My name is Vincent Bask and I think you’re a putz.”
A smile cut into Newman’s face. His black brows stretched above his light eyes. He delivered his answer with puzzling enjoyment. “You’ll pardon me then if I don’t get up.”
—
It was eight, not twelve, when she got home. Slumped at his desk in his work corner of the living room, he didn’t turn to greet her. The manuscript before him said, “…but though the Jungian view of the dragon presupposes this conflict, we cannot resist questioning why it…” He heard her open the door to Matty’s room, close it, and return to the living room.
“The prom let out early?” he asked.
“I will never forgive you.” Her statement, hissed across the room, made him turn around.
She was sitting in an armchair. She looked clean and thoughtful and only a bit edgy, as if she were a housewife trying to decide on camera which pile of diapers was cleaner, the Tide pile or the other. She crossed her legs with finality. She had made her decision. The off-camera voice, inevitably male, prompted, Now let’s see what’s under that pile you’ve chosen, Suzanne. Howard knew what was under any pile of diapers. What does the card say, Suzanne?
No ice cubes rattled comfortingly in his glass. It was empty except for a puddle of water. He took it to the kitchen. She followed him there.
One loose ice cube remained in the freezer. Gouging ice from the trays was her job. He dropped the lone cube in his glass and floated it in Scotch. He had left the freezer door open, expecting her to close it. Though she stood beside it, she didn’t move. He went back and slammed it shut. He was close enough to strangle her if he put down his glass. He shambled back to the living room. She was right behind him.
“I’m not used to all this sudden togetherness,” he said.
“If you don’t like it, you can move out,” she said.
“Where were you?”
“I had dinner with a friend.”
“You’re supposed to have dinner with your family.”
“I didn’t realize you were such a family man.”
“I had dinner at McDonald’s with Matty and a rat in a shopping bag. If one of the girls at the office hadn’t given me the shopping bag, I couldn’t have had dinner even at McDonald’s. Did you ever eat there? Everything’s in paper. And Matty likes it.”
“I saw a friend of yours in the restaurant.”
“What restaurant?”
“A woman. Small, with black hair. Young.”
“I don’t have any friends.”
“She was with Newman Sykes. He’s married, isn’t he?”
“Everybody’s married. You’re married.”
“Who is she?”
“Who’d you have dinner with?”
“Who do you think?”
“You’re supposed to be home for dinner. I always am.”
“That’s because you’re not home for lunch. I saw you on one of your business lunches. You were running for a cab with that woman. You were holding her hand.”
“She’s Newman’s friend.”
“I thought you didn’t know her.”
“I don’t. You just told me she was with Newman.”
She picked up a small lopsided bronze rectangle he’d bought at a gallery in SoHo. She seemed to be considering throwing it at him. And now let’s see what’s under this bloody pile, Suzanne. When she put it down, he thought she’d remembered that it cost over three hundred dollars.
“Sweet Susannah,” he murmured from a safe distance.
She sank into a chair and began to cry. He edged toward her. She hunched over, her head to her knees. He stroked her hair. A few white ones trailed through the auburn.
“It’ll be all right, sweet Susannah.”
“No it won’t,” she cried.
—
At the top of the stairs she glanced over her shoulder at the sidewalk. The front door sailed open. He didn’t have any trouble with locks. The familiar smell of unventilated carpet greeted her. She followed him up more stairs.
Everything in the apartment was the same except for him. She worried that she’d call him by the wrong name. Howard’s mug of wine at the office had made her giddy; the first glass at dinner, instead of making her sleepy, had heightened the giddiness. She might have been drunk because Newman fed her roast beef from his fork. She noticed it was his fork. “Taste,” he said. Speaking about Bellow, he touched her arm. “The causality of geography. Does it inflame talent? Who celebrates pithily Bucyrus, Ohio?” Speaking about Roth—“Fearless. A toreador waving a tallis.”—he touched her hand and interrupted himself. “Very small,” he said. She said, “I have to buy knitted winter gloves in the children’s department at Lamston’s.” He held her hand and explained that her story was very good despite several lapses in language. “Examine Didion.” Stung, she was about to wish for Vincent Bask to return when he said, “We haven’t properly toasted your publication yet.” She requested—and he ordered—a second glass of wine, but it wasn’t for a toast and she wasn’t much of a drinker.
The air conditioner complained starting up. “Wine? Beer? I think there’s ice cream.” He opened the refrigerator. “There seems to be a dying sandwich.” He poured a glass of beer. “I never know what I’m going to find. Once there was a urine specimen in a baby-food jar.”
“Isn’t this your place?” she asked with well-inflected surprise. He might be testing
her.
“Yes, but I let certain people use it during the week when I’m not here. Sometimes Howard uses it. Once he left a bloodstain on the mattress.” Lamp light deepened harsh grooves in his face.
“Doesn’t he have his own apartment?” It was a test.
“He can’t bring women home to his wife.”
“Is that why you keep this place?”
“My work’s in the city and my family’s in the country and I don’t like daily commuting and, yes, that used to be why I kept it, for women. But now it’s more for me.”
He scanned her as he sipped beer. “I once carried a fairly large woman up and down and back up the stairs here simply because she asked me to. That’s about six steep flights. Once I ran out of here at two in the morning to get a strawberry milk shake because the woman in my bed—I think she was a tree surgeon—wanted it. She had calluses on her elbows.”
“Did you get the milk shake?”
“No. I brought back an Oh Henry! bar that I bought from a cop who wanted to know what I was doing running on Sixth Avenue at two in the morning. It was winter. There were Christmas decorations in all the closed stores. She was asleep when I got back. In the morning she told me she was allergic to chocolate. I don’t like it, myself.”
She had known the apartment in afternoon, north light filtered through curtains. In the low, yellower light of two lamps, with the curtains backed by darkness, with colors warmed and softened, it detached from the surrounding rooms and buildings and, traveling alone through night, took on the spun mystery and menace of a spun cocoon.
His kiss tasted of beer. Where was Howard’s white wine? He took off his plaid shirt. His arms, she thought, were beautiful: lean, muscled, smooth as polished wood. She kissed the round hardness at his upper arm. She wished she were alone in her white bed, sleeping. He smelled faintly of soap and wood shavings. She kissed cool skin and with her tongue traced a roped vein down along his inner forearm.