Elbowing the Seducer

by T. Gertler

  “Do you want it?” the saleswoman asked. She had on a white blouse. Her eyes were the pure blue of tinted contact lenses. She could have been a nurse except for her long nails. She was too young and beautiful to be anything but an actress.

  “No. May I see that wallet? The red one.”

  Before the saleswoman returned with the wallet, Suzanne picked up a pink snakeskin billfold from the REDUCED MERCHANDISE tray and dropped it in her purse.

  She examined the red wallet quickly. “No. Thanks for all your help.” She almost added, Break a leg; but she didn’t know if the actress had a part in a new play.

  On the escalator going up to Lingerie, she saw herself in a blue satin nightgown, brushing her hair with a silver-backed brush.

  —

  Aug. 17, 1980

  Dear Howard,

  Thank you for the copies. Thank you for publishing my story. Thank you for telling me not to write beautifully. I’m writing now and it’s not beautiful at all.

  Dina

  —

  The second time she read the story, she noticed the typo: “…so I won’t have to hurt him with my depature.”

  “Depature,” she said. “Newm.”

  He folded the tip of his index finger into a thick hardcover novel about six generations of an American midwestern family. He’d been skimming it, making notes and sighing or laughing now and then. His reading glasses had slipped down his nose; above tortoiseshell his hazel eyes were serene.

  “Perhaps the typesetter is from Boston.” He adjusted the pillow at his back and the mattress dipped briefly. “Think of it as a found object: ‘depature,’ the act of depatching—to depie the Harlequin, to retear, or to make whole. You can use it somewhere else.”

  “Are you this calm about typos in your own stuff?”

  “My writing has been cut, garnished, rearranged—without my permission. Patched and depatched. It happens to everybody. Except, unfortunately, him.” He opened the midwestern saga. “It’s not even a good beach book, except to hold down the corner of a towel.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “No.”

  “What if you did? Would it matter?”

  “If he were my friend?”

  “Yes—in a review.”

  “I suppose I’d try to be kind.”

  “What if you liked the book but hated the author?”

  He pushed his glasses up along his nose. “I don’t particularly hate anybody.”

  “What about Vincent Bask?”

  “If he has another book, I’ll read it and review it, not him.” He resumed paging through the Midwest.

  “What if I write a book?”

  “You should.”

  “Maybe you’d be nice to me because we’re lovers, but what if we weren’t anymore?”

  “That’ll have nothing to do with your book.” Again he looked at her over his glasses. “An affair runs its course, like a fever or a mass delusion. We’re having a mutual delusion.”

  She slid down in the bed and lay her head against his thigh. Rosemary fell between the bed and the wall. She was always lying on the inside half of a bed, unless she slept alone. “I’m writing something. I don’t know if it’s a book.”

  “You can show it to me if you like.”

  She didn’t know if she’d like that. Since she’d met him, a second man had entered her writing, a character who was critical, analytical, and remote, a severe man who drank beer. “Maybe,” she said.

  He patted her breast briefly before turning a page. When his hand moved away, she thought, That’s depature. But she didn’t say it out loud.

  8-25-80

  Dear Dina,

  Of course you’re welcome, sweetie. I’m glad you’re writing, but all advice I give should be cherished only after strenuous examination. And if I’m one hell of a teacher, you’re one hell of a writer. Let me see it when you’re done.

  Friendship,

  Howard

  —

  She hadn’t expected to feel horny. If she were a serious writer, she wouldn’t be feeling horny. But Ned, staggering under the burden of his adventure, had impaled a woman in the shower, and Steven was watching them.

  She clamped her legs together and kept writing. Ned, the character who wasn’t Howard, and Steven, the character who wasn’t Newman, were both married men who fooled around. Ned’s bed-hopping had a feverish glee; Steven’s adulteries were narrower, more sober. Using his apartment for their respective affairs gave the two men an uneasy friendship. The woman in the shower with Ned moaned.

  The pressure of her legs started a slight, rhythmic rocking. She scribbled Steven into the shower with Ned and the woman. The rocking quickened. She hurried the wet threesome toward a triple climax, but before she could arrange it, her breathing became irregular, her body stiffened and arched, her voice whispered, “Oh oh oh.” She lay unmoving on the white bed, a notebook over her breasts, an uncapped felt-tip pen drying out in her open hand.

  MORRISSE AND PINCHANSKY LITERARY AGENCY

  Sept. 3

  Dear D. Leitman,

  Howard Ritchie showed me your story “An Affair, I Guess” in galleys and gave me a copy of an unpublished one. They’re both quite fine. If you’d like to come in and talk, please call me for an appointment. We represent, among others…

  Most of the names were familiar to her—older writers with good reputations and famous prizes; younger writers, including Vincent Bask, with one or two books to their credit—and among those that weren’t familiar, she assumed, was a genius like the plaid hulk requesting Einstein. Eisenstein.

  She called the agent and agreed to mail a copy of her latest writing before she came in to talk. She gathered up her seventy-eight and a half typed pages about Ned and Steven. The weight and thickness of the accumulated pages satisfied her. Reluctantly she choked them with a rubber band. She took enough money with her to make two copies. The second one, she decided, might as well go to Newman.

  —

  Humming, the machines ate pages and spat them out. Behind her the line had grown. “Forty-nine,” a boy yoked in gold jewelry called. She put her ticket on the counter. Beside her a woman with a cartoon panel demanded of the boy, “But will it reduce well?”

  A copier the size of a restaurant stove swallowed her pages. If she watched carefully, the operator, a tiny girl with fuchsia-streaked hair, wouldn’t be able to run off an extra copy to keep.

  “Long time no see.” The accented voice promised old terrors, the fear of disappearing, the lure of disappearing.

  He’d trapped her again. If she ran now, she would have to leave her manuscript behind.

  He was old. His skin, his tangled hair, his eyes, even the green one, had grayed. His untrimmed mustache aged him further.

  “Aren’t you going to run away screaming?” he asked. His smile frightened her.

  “No. How are you?”

  “Fine, fine. And how are you? It’s so nice to see you again. We really have to stop meeting like this. We should get together sometime, don’t you think? Coffee or a light intimate dinner for two. We do have so much to talk about.”

  The boy behind the counter called, “Fifty.”

  “Excuse me,” a woman said, poking Larry with an attaché case. “I’m next.”

  “So you are, madam,” he answered with exaggerated deference. “Everybody is next but me.” He didn’t move, and the woman had to go around him.

  “Tell me,” he whispered to Dina, “how long until you’re like her, one pushy bitch looking to trample the world?”

  Pages shot out of the copier eating her manuscript. “What are you doing here?”

  He checked his ticket. “I’m sixty-one. Cheap copies do attract a select clientele.” He took a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “You may be the writer in the family, but I’m going to publish something. How about two thousand copies of this? Want to see it?”

  “No.” She concentrated on her reproducing pages.

  “It concerns you and y
our good friend Ritchie. I visited him a while back, did he tell you that?”

  She shook her head.

  “And yesterday I saw your story in his garbage magazine. I was in the library, just so you know I wouldn’t pay to read that Rosencrantz.”

  “Rosemary.”

  “Now I think I should get published too. This is a democracy, right? Equal time for opposing views.”

  The fuchsia-haired girl brought Dina her manuscript and copies. She turned the top page over and asked the girl for a bag.

  “You’re certainly busy,” he said. “But instead of making copies of writing, why don’t you write?”

  “An agent asked to see a copy.” She wondered how she’d pay for that burst of pride.

  He followed her out of the store. “Agents, you realize, are parasites on society. They produce nothing.”

  “You’ll miss your turn,” she said.

  In daylight he seemed more faded. “Listen,” he said in a suddenly gentle voice, “maybe you haven’t really thought about it. After a while, you won’t be able to come back, even if we both want it. We’ll have hardened into our positions. Don’t you want to come back?”

  She hugged the manuscript and tried to speak gently too. “No.”

  “Don’t you miss me, don’t you crave my body?” An edge of mockery sharpened the questions.

  She said quietly, “I don’t miss you.”

  “Little one,” he said so tenderly that she couldn’t object. His blue eye pleaded with her. “I’ll have to do terrible things to forget you. I’ll have to go with other women.” Their faces were close together. They exchanged breath. If he cried, she’d cry too. He whispered, “Your friend Ritchie’s a fag. And you’re a whore.”

  She started walking away.

  “Wait,” he said. “Aren’t you going to ask me how Ralph is?”

  “How is he?”

  “He’s dead. The doctors and a nun named Sister Anne killed him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He left me the store. I’ve got property. I’m a businessman. Come back and I’ll knock you up and we’ll move to a nice apartment. Maybe if you work very hard with me at the store, we’ll get to move to the suburbs and have wall-to-wall carpets before the Nazis come back and take it all away again. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “For the Nazis to come back?”

  “No, a baby and carpets.”

  She put up a hand in a parting gesture. “Bye.” She got a few steps away before he grabbed her and wedged her against the window of a shoe store. In her terror, she noticed a pair of red high heels she wouldn’t be able to walk in. “Let go.”

  He tightened his grip on her shoulders. An old man passing glanced at her without interest. The store window was warm against her back.

  “I’ll scream,” she said.

  “I’ll break your face,” he said. He yanked the bag with her manuscript from her.

  “Give it back.”

  He took out a page.

  “I don’t want you to touch it,” she said.

  He crumpled the page and threw it in the street, between two parked cars. A puddle of water or urine received it. “It’s garbage, see?”

  She lunged at him, trying to pull the bag away. He laughed. “Easy, easy. I’ll give it back. First listen to one thing.”

  “Give it back.”

  “Listen. You see your paper? That’s what happens when you put anything out in the world. People use it for garbage. What do you think people do with magazines and books? They drop them in garbage cans, they use them to pick up dog shit on the street, they roll them up and kill cockroaches and spiders with them. Keep it safe, away from everybody, because otherwise it’s going to be garbage. All these years I protected you from that and you think I’m the monster. You don’t know who the monster really is.”

  He gave her the bag and sauntered toward the copy store. She could tell by the stiffness of his shoulders that he was determined to look strong.

  She picked up her crumpled, soggy page by a dry corner. She could type another one. She carried it back to the bookstore, to throw it in the garbage there. On the way, she turned around a few times to make sure he wasn’t following her.

  The brown tee shirt was torn in front. He threw it across the room. It landed over his typewriter and the mail. A letter from his agent confirmed, with a bold black signature, that soon the publisher would be sending a contract and a check as “advance against royalties for a novel in the English language of approximately 60–100,000 words in length, to be delivered by Sept. 30, 1981. Working title: Paula.” Part of a letter from Bonnie in Massachusetts, blue-inked “…yours if you want it till then,” escaped from under the agent’s letter. He put on a faded green Celtics tee shirt and, for the first time in three weeks, dialed Suzanne’s number.

  She sounded angry, but she agreed to meet him. He waited for her downstairs, near Mrs. Lotta’s storefront. The bells on Mickey’s collar made a tinny jingle as the cat vigorously licked itself. He envied that ability; it kept things simple. In sun on the sidewalk the cat’s fur was glossy. From inside the store Mrs. Lotta paused in her crocheting to wave at him, and he nodded.

  He was looking in the wrong direction when Suzanne said a cool hello. She pulled away when he tried to kiss her.

  “Want to go somewhere for pie?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Want to go upstairs?”

  “No.”

  “Well. How’ve you been?” he asked.

  She resembled Paula in his book. Maybe Paula should be shorter, he thought. Maybe Paula should have black hair. She had on a dress he’d once told her he liked because it was thin and scoop-necked with a few bits of crucial lace.

  “You want to fight in the street?” he asked.

  “Let’s go in there,” she said, pointing at Mrs. Lotta’s.

  “Let’s talk,” he said, but she was already in the doorway. Against his quickly reviving beliefs in Unitarianism, Catholicism, and isolationism, he followed her.

  In the crosswinds of two electric fans blowing from opposite sides of the room, her hair lifted from her shoulders. She was admiring Mrs. Lotta’s crocheting.

  “Five bucks any color, six for two color,” Mrs. Lotta said.

  “What is it?”

  The reader-adviser spread the needlework on the table and folded her hands across her stomach. “This is the body for the poodle. After the body, you make the head. Then you cover the extra toilet paper with it.”

  “I know what I’m going to give you and Howard for Christmas,” Bask told Suzanne.

  Ignoring him, she placed a finger lightly on the green yarn. “How much is it for a reading?”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Bask said.

  “The short one or the long one?” Mrs. Lotta asked.

  —

  She didn’t use a crystal ball. She didn’t ask about birth time. She took Suzanne’s hands and turned them palm up on the crocheting and glanced at them. Then she closed her eyes.

  The fan behind Suzanne parted her hair and blew it forward while the fan facing her blew it back. Her hair billowed at the sides. A red bandanna hid Mrs. Lotta’s hair. Standing over the women, Bask felt directed air rush over his neck. His forehead stayed warm. With her hands outstretched on the table, Suzanne seemed to be appealing to Mrs. Lotta for something, but Mrs. Lotta was blind, Justice with a crochet hook instead of scales. The smell of cumin wafted in from a back room.

  She opened her eyes. “You are feeling lost and confused. You seek guidance,” she told Suzanne.

  “Bravo,” Bask said.

  The women ignored him.

  “You need to know that your man love you,” Mrs. Lotta said. “He must sacrifice for you. For love he must go even into hell to rescue you.”

  “Give the world a break,” Bask said.

  “You must pray he is strong enough for this.”

  “I can’t pray, not really,” Suzanne said.

  “In your way,” Mrs. Lotta s
aid.

  “God’s green earth,” Bask said.

  The edge of the reader-adviser’s bandanna darkened along her forehead. “It is necessary to pray. It is not necessary to believe.”

  “You ever teach at St. Agnes?” Bask asked.

  “Hush,” Suzanne told him. To Mrs. Lotta she said, “Tell me how to make it right.” She opened her purse and took out more money.

  —

  Dan said, “Wear jeans. You look anxious in a skirt.”

  “I am anxious. And my jeans are dirty.”

  “Wear dirty jeans.”

  “This isn’t a Marxist agent.”

  “You’re a writer, you’re not going on a job interview. You should look reliable, but not predictable.”

  Dina leaned against the counter, her head in her child-size hands. “Do you have any Dramamine?”

  —

  The coupled windows overlooking Fifth Avenue needed cleaning. Four buses nudged each other from stop to stop. If she waited long enough, she’d be able to watch them travel from midtown to Twenty-third Street. Cautiously, the receptionist, a boy in a polka dot shirt, typed a label.

  “Dina?”

  The woman who’d entered the room was tall and once must have been athletic. Passing time had settled her hips, had blurred the sharpness of her face. It was a face Dina liked: mobile, quick, strong. The eyes were bright between puffed lids, the nose thin and elegant, the mouth wide and wry. The woman extended her hand, square-cut unpolished nails, a thick gold band on the middle finger. “Hi, I’m Maris.”

  —

  Her office had a blue fishnet draped from the ceiling, a small wood African fertility goddess with memorable buttocks, and books and manuscripts and boxes of manuscripts and towers of manuscripts. A path between books and manuscripts led to her desk and two chairs for visitors. Dina sat in the strongest-looking visitor’s chair and held on to the sides of the seat.