by T. Gertler
He closed Dina’s manuscript. “It’s very good. You’ve certainly caught those men. Especially Ned. It’s marvelous how you’ve captured Howard.”
“That’s not Howard.” She sat up abruptly. Her breasts flashed into view.
Barebreasted women huddled in a tent during the first sandstorm the movie had provided a few hours earlier. He’d gotten his money’s worth of sandstorms. “I think you’ve been a bit overkind to Steven, perhaps because you knew you were going to show it to me. I don’t mind being portrayed, you know, as long as it’s done with underlying compassion. I think you’ve done that.”
“I wasn’t writing about you.”
“I said I didn’t mind.”
“I made it all up.”
“Your characters have a lot in common with Howard and me. Ned, for instance. His past, his preoccupations, they’re all Howard’s. In fact, it seems to me now that you lied to me.” He said this quizzically, as if, having pulled a car up to a curb, he’d fished a map from beneath a roll of quarters and a waterproof flashlight in the glove compartment and learned he was in Pittsburgh when all along he’d thought it was Philadelphia. “I asked you how well you knew Howard, and you said you didn’t know him well.”
“I don’t.”
“He does imitations of you threatening to bite his shoulder.” He took a breath to enjoy her hurt expression. “And it’s clear from what you’ve written here that you’ve been lovers.”
“What I did with Howard is nobody’s business, just as what I do with you is nobody’s business.” A flush had spread across her breasts and up to her neck. She crossed her arms over her breasts. “You had no right to ask me about him. I wouldn’t tell you about him, and I won’t tell anybody about you.”
“You wouldn’t have to,” he said mildly. “All someone has to do is read this. Howard and I are both quite recognizable among book people. But that’s minor. The point is, it’s good. You might think of making it into a novel.”
“I’m going to. I saw an editor at B&G today. He’s giving me a contract. And money.”
She was smiling at him, expecting congratulations or, worse, a display of enthusiasm. Under the stamped-tin ceiling of his first Village apartment, designs deepened by lamplight, he had written brief literary stories that he believed then were pure and alive. “You’ll have to change this. You can’t publish it this way. Howard has a family and a job to keep. And so do I.”
“He says he’s happy for me.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“Yes.”
“Has he read it?”
“No.”
Newman savored an unexpected pride and said with what he thought was patience, “You’ll have to change it so people aren’t recognizable. Otherwise they’ll get hurt. Clare has worked very hard to deal with her problems. You could make Steven’s wife something besides a photographer.”
“But it’s not you—”
“All I’m saying is, don’t hurt people. Steven doesn’t have to live upstate. He could live somewhere else.”
“Yes, I can do that.”
“It’s not for myself I mind so much as it is for Clare. I don’t mind being portrayed.”
“I’ll do it. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I made it all up. I want to write, that’s all.”
“You should.” He kissed her lightly, with regret. “It’ll be an odd first novel—there’s not too much sentimentality about it so far.” Because she blinked at him unhappily, he added, “And that’s good.” The young man under the stamped-tin ceiling had written from ten at night until dawn. The words had marched out like soldiers. Eight cups of coffee through the night had jolted him to what he believed then was artistic frenzy and now knew was a caffeine kick. He’d greeted the morning expecting glory. The words hadn’t brought him that.
She was kissing his hand. He tossed her manuscript down to his slippers on the frayed Oriental rug. She was kissing his stomach. His thigh. He fell into desire. He crept inside her, hoping there would be an exit sign or he’d never find his way out again. He fiddled her with an artless impatient finger and after a while knew from her continuing high-pitched whispered ohs that she hadn’t come. It was his cock failing him again. He stopped and allowed her to please him instead. She did this gratefully, ardently. Across the room the table lamp blinked. He swelled with power and finally said in a conversational tone, “Oh. Yes.”
Again her head lay on his chest and she snuggled against him. They drifted to drowsiness. “I’d like to be with you on a ship,” he said, “a cruise on the Nile. On a houseboat. Imagine stepping out on land in the morning to go see the pyramids.”
She burrowed deeper into his protecting arm. “Newm, if the Nazis come back, will you hide me?”
The young man under the stamped-tin ceiling tore up four stories and cried in a secondhand butterfly canvas chair. A booted foot, impeccably polished, banged at the door to his house upstate and menaced his wife and sons. Upstairs, the study, lined with books, had room for only one writer.
“The Nazis can’t come back, because they’ve never been here.” In the same extravagantly deliberate voice, he’d once explained away a son’s fear of lightning. “But if they did come, then, no, I couldn’t hide you because I might get into trouble myself.”
She didn’t move. Her breathing seemed to have stopped, the way a sleeping baby’s breath sometimes suspended, the shadow of a crib bar across the baby’s head. He returned to the pyramids. She sat up, and the space she had occupied against him became available and hollow, filled with possibilities.
The bed bounced as she left it. Watching bulrushes go by along the riverbank, he listened for the sound of peeing in the bathroom. He heard the closet door open. The bulrushes shriveled. He sat up and saw her getting dressed. Her breasts disappeared behind cloth. He’d seen that happen somewhere before.
“What is it?” he asked.
Her hair needed combing. Her small pale face seemed to concentrate its whiteness. Smudges of makeup ringed her gray eyes. In the beam of his waterproof flashlight he’d caught the startled face of a raccoon beneath an apple tree at night.
“You’re being foolish,” he said.
She took underpants from her purse and put them on under her skirt. She fastened her brown unswift sandals.
He got out of bed and went to the desk for his wallet. “Take a cab,” he said, handing her a five-dollar bill.
She shook her head no. She picked up her manuscript from the rug.
“This isn’t reasonable behavior,” he said.
She left without combing her hair.
—
It was cool. At the top of the stairs she checked the dark street in both directions. A mugger with a dull carving knife might be waiting. A palm wrapped with red ribbon might follow her. The ginkgo trees she saw remained earthbound. If there were Nazis behind the ginkgos, she was on her own.
She darted down the stairs and ran the half-block to Fifth Avenue. There she stopped and looked behind her and to the sides. Four blocks down, floodlit Washington Square Arch curved over tourists and homeless natives and people scoring insecticide-sprayed oregano laced with grass. Uptown, Fifth Avenue unreeled light after light.
She held on to her manuscript as if it were a safety jacket on the Titanic. Nobody would be able to take it from her, not Larry or Newman or Howard. The Nazis could. She breathed in cool air, her heart a kettle drum struck during the Labor Day parade. She began to run. She was going home, wherever that was.
—
He heard the trap spring shut. Three daisies leaned in a water glass. Before them on the table a sketch pad lay opened to a blank page. He’d been sitting and holding a pen in readiness for almost half an hour. Now the closet held two problems: her clothes and a dead or dying rat. He wrote on the page,
Throw out her stuff.
He drew a line that coiled at the end. A rat’s tail. He yawned. His mouth felt dry. He went to the fireplace, where he’d left the manuscript boxes from the copy store
.
The two thousand pages were different pastel colors: yellow, pink, blue, green. He would have preferred deeper tones, but the printing wouldn’t have shown up as well. He stacked the pages neatly in two rainbow piles and put each in a supermarket shopping bag. He carried the shopping bags to the door and left them there so he wouldn’t forget them in the morning.
—
The window-shade pull tapped the sill. A cool gust surprised the room. He stopped typing because he couldn’t decide what to call her. Should she be Mary or Linda? Sally, he thought. He would have to go back through the previous pages and change her name from Paula. Sally was close to Suzanne, but not dead center. He would have to do better about the husband: Harold was too close to Howard, and Glen was too far away.
The TV in the living room subsided. Barbra Streisand sang, toying with syllables. If Jonathan had given up TV for a record, the regular programs must have been preempted by political ones. Or by another hostage special, Islamic radicals strolling through the American embassy in Iran.
The song was about falling in love. Walking with him, Dina had explained what was wrong with his writing. Lowering sun colored her face, blued the black hair. A single straight hair jutted from one of her eyebrows. If he saw her that clearly, could he also see her seeing him clearly?
He pulled two large suitcases from under the bed and dusted them off.
—
“Hello.”
“Clare?”
“Hi. You’re early.”
“Everything okay?”
“Better than okay. I’m going to have a show.”
“Of what?”
“Pictures.”
“Your benches?”
“No, the photographs of the patients. Mine and Bea’s. Before and after. Unretouched.”
“A medical show?”
“No. In a gallery in SoHo. A dealer came in with her daughter for a nose job and got this great idea.”
“Whose nose job—the dealer’s or the daughter’s?”
“She wants us to blow them up to life-size. The doctors say it’s okay if the patients say it’s okay. She wants to do it all before Thanksgiving.”
“Don’t we all.”
“Newman, are you glad for me?”
“I’m glad for you, Clare.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m very happy for you, Clare.”
He hung up the phone and lay back in bed—the luxury of a call that didn’t take place in the bathroom. That afternoon in therapy Steve had mentioned confronting solitude. It meant: no Dina, no distractions from unhappiness. “The idea doesn’t excite me,” he’d answered. He smelled her on his finger.
He took a pencil and pad from the night table and began to list, in no particular order, women he’d fucked. He tried to remember something special about each one, a grace note to place beside the name, if he remembered the name.
1. Alice—brsts
2. Georgianna—blnd pbc hr
3. ?—brsts
4. Dina—eyes
5. Alice (diff.)—Wolfgang
6. Maris—lion
7. Sheila—prls
8. Barbara—Freud
9. Jane—baths?
Women he hadn’t thought of in years came back to him, their hair rising and falling like wings, their breasts giving refuge.
10. Marilee—bckwrds
11. Rhea—Szechuan
12. Gillian—frère Jacques
13. Noriko—gum
14. Amy—wrkrs of the wrld
15. Sylvia—loosestrife
16. Clare—
He thought a moment before writing beside her name:
exposures
Because he couldn’t allow himself to end it there, he went on listing.
The doctor’s office put him on hold before he could say anything. “Hello?” he shouted into a void. The woman from C.E.W.—the Committee for Endangered Writers—leafed through a back issue of Rosemary on the sofa. The receptionist’s voice, West Indian, returned to demand “Yes?” as if he’d kept her waiting.
“My daughter needs shots for school,” he said.
“Doctor has an opening in…two weeks.”
“No, she needs it for next week.”
“I’m sorry, if it’s not an emergen—”
“They won’t let her in school without the shots.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor doesn’t have—”
“It’s an emergency. My wife’s sick and I’m here at the office and my daughter needs shots and Dr. Grossman has to give them to her, he doesn’t have to see her.”
“What’s your daughter’s name?”
“Martha Ritchie.”
“Uh-huh. Next Tuesday at nine.”
“I can’t—”
“I’m sorry, that’s the only—”
“Okay. Next Tuesday at nine.”
He replaced the receiver gently to prove he was still in control. Suzanne at a beach ten years ago smiled from a picture on the wall. To wipe that smile from her face, he dialed the Karatasi bookstore, imagining Dina beneath him in the white bed. He got a busy signal. Tried again. Busy.
The woman from C.E.W. said, “I’m sorry to hear your wife’s sick.” She was in her late twenties and wore silver arrow earrings.
“It’s nothing. She cut her foot. It might be a virus.” He worked on a charming smile.
“There’s a lot of that going around.” Without a preamble, she named areas in the world where writers suffered censorship or imprisonment or worse. South Africa. Argentina. Russia. Her long blond ponytail shivered with emphasis. If her eyes hadn’t been close together, two planets about to collide, she would have been pretty. Instead she was momentarily interesting.
She described the scars on the back of a South African poet imprisoned for four years with no charge ever brought and no trial. He finally got out of his country through the international efforts of various groups, a burst of acronyms that reminded Howard of comic-book sound effects: ZIP, ZAM, BIFF, ARGH, UMPHGH. “He’s teaching literature in Utah now,” she said.
That sounded worse than imprisonment.
A Russian writer had been committed to a psychiatric prison for six years because of his unpublished novel satirizing the Revolution.
“You all got him out?” Howard asked. The Russian would be teaching Pushkin in Fairbanks.
“No, he died there from an overdose of a tranquilizer. There’s no way of knowing if it was an accident or murder or suicide. His wife, who’s a biogeneticist, hasn’t been able to get a job since he was imprisoned. Now that he’s dead, they may let her leave. She has a fourteen-year-old son, a math genius of some kind. They may not let him leave. But you’ve heard about cases like these, Mr. Ritchie.”
“Howard. Howard.”
“Melanie.” She wanted to give him an assortment of manuscripts from endangered writers. “If there are any you see fit to publish in Rosemary, great. It would be a great help in publicizing our work.”
“I’m all for endangered writers,” he said. “But I publish only what I think belongs in the magazine.”
“Sure. If you don’t find anything you can use to help us, I hope we can still send you more.” She patted a foot-high stack of manuscripts, tied with twine, on the floor. “There are always more. I’m sure in all of these you can find one—”
“I didn’t find one in all of those,” he said, indicating three stacks of submissions against the wall. They were from unendangered writers. “But you can give me whatever you like.”
“If you could find room for a poem, with an accompanying note.”
“There’s always room for a poem if it’s good.”
The blond ponytail bounced fervently. “Sometimes, Mr. Ritchie, there’s a need to look beyond literary merits.”
“Not in a literary magazine. I could publish a note, unaccompanied by a poem—unless it’s a good one. Otherwise, you should try a newspaper.”
“You can’t ignore politics, Mr. Ritchie, and pursue some pure liter
ary goal as if there were no real world with repressive governments bearing down on dissent.”
“Why not? That’s what the endangered writers do.” He gave himself a point, reconsidered, and added another. “How about lunch? I’m supposed to meet the critic Newman Sykes a couple of blocks away. Maybe he can help you.”
He called Dina one more time. Still busy. He slammed down the phone.
—
She was taller than he was, and her stride was longer. Hands in his pockets, he struggled to keep up with her. She ignored traffic lights. All the way to the restaurant she rattled off the names of the missing and the wounded and the dead. Before he saw Newman’s serene face in the crowded back room, he grabbed a waiter’s sleeve and demanded Chivas on the spot. “My stars,” the would-be actor said, smoothing his sleeve.
“This is Ellen,” Howard told Newman. “She’s a liaison.”
“Melanie,” she said.
“She wants to make the world safe for writers.”
“How about making it safe from writers?” Newman lifted his empty glass. He wasn’t serene. He was unobtrusively, critically drunk.
“Have another,” Howard said. “What is it?”
“Vodka.”
“I’ll have Perrier,” Melanie said.
“She’s writing a book about you,” Newman told Howard.
“No I’m not,” Melanie said.
“She’s got me in it too, but you’re the center of it, and anybody who knows you or knows about you, everybody who counts, is going to know it’s you.”
“I’m not,” Melanie said again.
“It’s not about me,” Howard said. “It’s a novel.”
“It is,” Newman answered. “All about you.”
The waiter proffered Chivas and a leading man’s smile beneath his leading man’s mustache. Howard snatched up the drink.
“Perrier with lime,” Melanie told the waiter. “And vodka for him.” She pointed at Newman. “And hurry.” The waiter hurried.
“I told her to change things, I told her to disguise things,” Newman said. “She thinks I’m a Nazi. Maybe that’s why I’m not more prominent in the book. I said people could get hurt.”