Elbowing the Seducer

by T. Gertler

  “They’re my own thoughts, thank you.”

  “Touchy.”

  “So are you.”

  “I just split up with somebody.”

  “Did you want it to happen?”

  That wasn’t sympathy. “No. Yes.”

  “Well then?” She shrugged as if she’d proved something.

  He bent down to smell her hair. “Want to go to the movies tomorrow?”

  “I’m seeing someone.”

  “Every minute?”

  “I’m not looking for anybody else.”

  “I didn’t say let’s get married, I said let’s go to a movie. It’ll give you something new to criticize.”

  —

  Walking beside Bask, she felt peaceful. He had a quiet, unimposing voice, his words a blend of regional sounds, unstressed, unhurried. Compared to Howard or Newman, he was a boy—or a Great Dane puppy, with large feet and at times ungainly movements. He was a sweet boy who happened to be a good writer despite a marked absence of suffering and brooding.

  She didn’t worry about whether or not he liked her. She had blundered into a radiant calm. Soon Howard would love her again. Soon she would have a book contract to prove she was a writer. Cal Thomas in his high beige office that afternoon had been an annunciating angel kneeling to greet her. Howard would complete her transformation. The warm evening molded itself around her body. She could imagine the next day. She felt almost real.

  At the corner of Eleventh Street and Fifth Avenue he tried to set a time for them to meet. “Friends, nothing else,” he said, holding up his hands as if surrendering, and she would have smiled, but Larry was walking toward her, carrying a large potted palm tree tied with red ribbon.

  She stayed rooted to the sidewalk as the palm tree passed. From behind fronds Larry sneered at her, at Bask, at her again. He didn’t say anything.

  “You know him?” Bask asked, watching the departing tree.

  “My husband,” she answered.

  He punched his fist into his open hand. “Why do I keep ending up with married women?”

  “First of all, I’m not going to be married much longer, and second, you’re not going to end up with me.”

  “I know that. I’m going back to Massachusetts. Day after tomorrow.” He hadn’t known he was going until he said it. “A friend of mine’s in Washington to play with the FTC for a while and I’m going to stay in her house. I half built it. You’d probably say it’s too loosely constructed.”

  “Probably,” she snapped at him, and he wondered what he’d said to offend her. She walked to the middle of the block, climbed the pink stairs of a brownstone, and went inside.

  —

  The long-haired man held the tree between them while he spoke. “Were you bothering her?” A muscle at the side of his face might have been working in and out, or it might have been the shadow of a palm frond.

  Bask squinted down at him. “Who wants to know?”

  They stood on the sidewalk three houses away from the house Dina was in.

  “I have a right to know.”

  A blue eye and a green eye regarded Bask spitefully. Even a son of a bitch could feel hurt. He knew that from personal experience. He’d betrayed his friend Howard to sleep with Suzanne. Whatever this man might have done to Dina—or she to him—he could still want to protect her too.

  “I wasn’t bothering her,” Bask said.

  The man must have thought he intimidated Bask. “All right,” he said with unearned triumph. Then, pushing his luck, he demanded, “You live around here?”

  “No. Do you have a lot more questions?”

  “You leave her alone.” Fear made the command unconvincing. “Are you a friend of that shit Ritchie?” He didn’t let fear stop him.

  Bask admired the man’s audacity. “Let’s say goodbye now, before you get carried away.”

  “I’m going to make that shit Ritchie pay for what he did to her,” the man confided.

  Bask went closer to the palm. “What’d he do to her?”

  “You’ll see.” The man walked his palm away slowly, for the second time.

  Bask kicked a No Parking signpole to see it shudder. Being a writer, he should have been able to imagine the man as Dina’s husband, but he couldn’t. He continued west, to go home.

  —

  There were baby-blue canvas espadrilles, red patent leather flats with navy grosgrain bows, white and brown spectators, white sandals with bronze-studded heels, green mules with matching feather trim, purple tennis shoes with yellow laces. They were all on sale. Spotlighted recesses in a wall displayed fall merchandise: brown suede boots, black calf boots, fleece-lined waterproof khaki rubber boots. Suzanne paused at a pair of maroon half-boots with tassels.

  “Nice, aren’t they?” The salesman balanced four shoeboxes. His eyebrows sent out black and white antennae. “Italian.”

  “No, thank you,” she said, and moved on toward the cosmetics counters. One of her bare feet left small bloodstains on the gray carpet in the shoe salon. A model handing out free samples of cleansing grains didn’t give her any.

  She went through a bower of silk roses. The air smelled of roses. She searched past crystal bottles and silver compacts until she came to a counter with wallets heaped in a bushel basket on a platform draped in green wool. A rake lay beside the basket. The actress saleswoman was there in a black and red striped dress: the nurse on her day off.

  “Hello,” Suzanne said.

  “Hello.” The saleswoman was still beautiful. Her improbably blue eyes gazed past Suzanne again.

  “Do you remember me?”

  “Can I help you?”

  “I was here before. A few weeks ago. You showed me a photo album. It was blue? On sale?”

  “I’m sorry, but the sale’s—”

  “You also showed me a red wallet. Like that one, only red. There was a tray here of sale things.”

  “I’m sorry, but the sale’s—”

  “I took a billfold.”

  “Sale merchandise isn’t usually returnable.”

  “I didn’t buy it, I took it.”

  Fascinated by events at other counters, the saleswoman combed five long, frosted nails through her platinum bangs. “If you don’t have a receipt for it, you might get a credit.”

  “I stole it.”

  The blue contact lenses blinked at Suzanne at last.

  “A pink lizard thing. Or snakeskin,” Suzanne added.

  “Well, give it back.” The saleswoman would have used the same tone in directing a transvestite in a ballgown to the ladies’ lounge.

  “I can’t. It’s at home. And I cut off the price tag.”

  The saleswoman’s hands caressed her slender red and black striped hips. “What do you want me to do?”

  “What’s the store policy on shoplifting?”

  “I don’t think we’re for it.”

  “I stole a billfold.”

  “You have to have it with you or it doesn’t count. I can’t help you. If you like, go see a floor manager or somebody in Security.”

  In the glare of a lamp trained on her in an otherwise darkened room, Suzanne would weep while two retired policemen in short sleeves questioned her. “Why’d you do it?” Bad Cop would ask. Good Cop would ask, “Cigarette?” Though up till that moment she’d had two cigarettes in her whole life and hadn’t inhaled either time, she would blow smoke rings through the lamp beam.

  “Where’s Security?” she asked. “Can you call them?”

  —

  The store detective said her name was Jo. She offered Suzanne iced tea with lemon. Suzanne said she preferred it plain, thank you. Jo told her she could lie down on any sofa she wanted.

  “I’d rather sit, thank you.”

  “Where’s your shoes, hon?” Jo was stocky and had short brown hair brushed back from her face. She looked like a professional bowler. Suzanne remembered the women bowlers from the tournaments Markie Bailey had played.

  “I don’t know.” Suzanne sat at th
e edge of a brown corduroy sofa. One of the cushions had a big burn in it.

  There were about fifteen other sofas in the room. A camel-back convertible must have been knifed: slashes of pin-dot velvet hung down with clumps of erupted foam. Near her a yellow ottoman had suffered something orange. She was in a way station for derelict furniture. A smoke-veined oval mirror with a cracked wood frame rested against a gouged green lacquered Parsons table. A Queen Anne chair had a taped ankle.

  “This isn’t Security,” she said.

  “Sure it is,” Jo said.

  “It said Employees Only on the door.”

  Jo showed her a plastic ID card. It had a color picture of Jo looking unhappy. “See? No kidding.” She was about forty-five, not much older than Suzanne, but she acted in a motherly way. She was playing Good Cop.

  When the door opened, Suzanne thought it might be the detective to play Bad Cop, but it was a boy who delivered a glass of iced tea and left.

  “I shouldn’t have this,” she said, and drank greedily. The tea cleared the sad afternoon from her throat and washed it further down, somewhere else.

  “Better?” Jo asked.

  “Yes.” Suzanne used her good-girl voice.

  “Wouldn’t you like to go home now?”

  “No.” The hell with the good-girl voice. “I stole something.”

  “The merchandise isn’t in your purse. It’s not in your pockets.”

  “Maybe I put it up inside me.”

  “Then I guess it wasn’t a microwave oven. Ahhnngg.” Jo gave a satisfied snort, as if she’d made a spare.

  “It was a billfold.”

  “Tell you what,” Jo said, wiping her eyes—she was still enjoying her joke. “How about you take the money this billfold was supposed to cost—”

  “Did cost.”

  “Fine. And how about you give this money to charity?”

  “Why can’t I give it to the store?”

  “Because the store can’t take money unless it’s for merchandise.”

  “But it is for merchandise.”

  Jo sat in the Queen Anne chair and rocked it dangerously. She shook her head. Her brown hair didn’t move. “Hon, I can help you call home if you like, I can help you pick out a pair of shoes to wear, but after that I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  Suzanne held the empty iced-tea glass as if it were a scepter. Jo couldn’t help her pick out shoes because Jo had no taste: she was wearing navy Oxfords with repulsive rusted grommets. Suzanne smiled at Jo with generous pity. “You can’t make me leave. I have a gold-card charge account here.”

  —

  shots & certificates

  blue looseleaf binder (not green)

  2 felt-tip pens (blue)

  2 no. 2 pencils with erasers

  blue schoolbag—canvas

  blue corduroy jeans

  cotton socks

  shoelaces (not with hearts)

  index cards

  “What about a fountain pen? There’s no fountain pen,” he said.

  “It says pens,” she said.

  “Have you ever used a fountain pen?”

  “No.”

  “It has a good feeling to it. Something solid. Try it.”

  She wrote her name on the list, underneath “index cards,” with his pen. Her name looked sober in black ink.

  “Do you like it?” he asked.

  “It’s nice,” she said politely.

  He took it back. “If you’d like one, I’ll get it for you.”

  “Thanks, Daddy, but I like the regular kind better. Can I have the fried rice, please?”

  “ ‘May I have the fried rice, please?’ ” He opened the cardboard container. It was the same kind Woolworth’s used to give, when he was a boy, to carry home a pet turtle or a goldfish swimming in three inches of greenish water. His turtle had died because he’d forgotten to feed it. His hunger surfaced through a sea of guilt. “How about the lemon chicken?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  He spooned more Buddha’s delight on his plate.

  “Did Mommy call the doctor for me to get vaccinated?”

  “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “What if I’m not up when she gets home?”

  “Then I’ll ask her. Wipe your mouth.”

  The blue cloth napkin removed a grain of rice from the corner of her mouth. She spread the napkin over her lap again and cleared her throat.

  —

  The actress who had once been a model was talking to the actress who had always been an actress. “But I love him,” she said. Her eyelashes must have been twenty feet long. In the vast, almost empty theater her declaration squeaked.

  Newman had insisted on going to Radio City Music Hall because he wanted to see a movie there even though he hated movies. “It’s supposed to take place in North Africa at the turn of the century. At least you get to see another country and some costumes. In color. And big.”

  The screen filled with the face of the actress who had once been a model. “And I know that’s not enough for him,” she squeaked on.

  “I hope there’s a sandstorm,” Newman whispered. He put his hand in Dina’s blouse. The seats around them were empty.

  Howard had liked it when she didn’t wear underwear. Thinking Newman might like it too, she’d taken off her bra and underpants in the enormous ladies’ lounge at the theater. A mirror in a gilded frame caught her as she left the bathroom, closing her purse. She was pale against red flocked wallpaper. Tonight she would do this for Newman. Tomorrow for Howard? Practice.

  Newman moved his hand up under her skirt. “Nice and accessible,” he said. She wondered if that would apply to her writing. She slid down in the seat and opened her legs for him.

  She had to learn perfect obedience: to be available when her man wanted her. It would balance out her anger at Larry, all the years she’d withheld herself from him. It would balance out her fear and her ambition. She’d be able to see herself at last as a woman. She’d have to work very hard at it because she was also trying to see herself as a writer. She’d have to discover her will in order to write, and she’d have to relinquish it in order to be properly female.

  The actress who had once been a model enlarged that ideal. “Wherever you go, My Lord,” she squeaked to the sandals of her lord, “let me go with you. And if this cannot be, permit me to be here to await your return.”

  More than Newman’s fondling, this speech stirred Dina. She wondered if a man or a woman had written it. The screen dimly lighted her nakedness. Practice. She sighed, her skirt up across her belly, her blouse open at her breasts, and willed herself to know only Newman’s will.

  —

  She came home barefoot. There were cuts on her feet. She rested a foot on the bathroom sink and poured peroxide over it. The cuts bubbled with white foam. Peroxide dribbled paths through the dirt on her foot.

  “Where are your shoes?” Matty asked her.

  “I lost one, and the other one needed stamps.”

  “What kind of stamps?” Matty asked.

  He waited to hear the answer, but she said nothing. A gray puddle collected on the tile floor at her peroxided foot as she washed the other one.

  “Your mother has a knack for loss,” he said. “She once lost her dinner on the Connecticut Turnpike.”

  “I never did,” she said.

  “It must have been someone else,” he said.

  “We had snow peas for dinner,” Matty said. “There’s some fried dumplings left.”

  She kissed Matty’s forehead. “I’m too tired to eat.”

  “How about explaining? You too tired for that?” he asked.

  “I’m too tired to shower.” Leaving gray footprints on the bathroom tiles, she passed him in the doorway and went to the bedroom. He and Matty followed her there.

  She pulled off her dress and let it drop to the floor. She undid her bra, dropping it too. Wearing only underpants, she lay down on his side of the bed she hadn’t made that morning and pu
lled the covers up to her shoulders. “G’night,” she said.

  After he kissed Matty good night and dumped the dinner dishes on top of the breakfast dishes in the sink and had a juice glass of J&B and a cigarette and a long, hot shower, and checked the front-door locks and the gas range, and rechecked them, and turned off the lights, he climbed into bed on the available, wrong side. Suzanne’s lips were slightly parted; her deep, even breathing lulled him. He felt peaceful enough to cry. He brought his mouth close to her ear. His nose plunged into her reddish hair. He whispered, “Tell me, bitch, tell me everything.” Her eyebrows moved toward each other above closed eyes. Her mouth closed. He considered torturing her with a thumb rack. He would fuck a stranger in their bed, in front of her. He fell asleep, plotting, on her pillow on her side of the bed.

  —

  He looked down at her over his glasses. She had burrowed between his left arm and shoulder. Her head lay on his shoulder. The sheet covered her to the waist. Above it was pearled pale nakedness, small and thin. He tried to see through the top of her head, black hair like his, into her skull, into her brain, the left or right side—he couldn’t remember which side supposedly controlled thought processes. There he would find her thoughts, some neatly folded and wrapped with tissue paper, some tangled as fine gold chains which, left alone in jewel cases handpainted with willows in Taiwan, spontaneously knotted. At times, usually when they were late for a party, he’d seen Clare, still undressed, sit among rejected outfits on the bed, in the angora and silk litter of her indecision, and drive a straight pin into a gold knot and unpick it, loop by loop. He would have liked to see the bright strands of Dina’s thoughts, even the knotted ones. He wanted to know what produced her writing, how she, with her pliancy and hesitation, with her inexperience, her deference to him, her floating, large-eyed helplessness—how did she manage to arrange mostly uncluttered language into sentences that lured him along from one to the next. If the pull faltered at awkward phrasing, lumpy with undigested thought, like a snake that has swallowed a rabbit whole, then the next sentence, clean and recklessly accomplished, retook him.

  Split the Lark—and you’ll find the Music—

  Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled…

  He dismissed the lines. Emily Dickinson was a problem, not a poet. Over the years her words came to him unbidden, despite his best efforts to ignore them. He was like his son, singing ad jingles.