Elbowing the Seducer

by T. Gertler

  “She could get hurt,” Howard said mournfully, lifting his face from the glass. A woman had once taken a Polaroid of him in her bed. He’d lunged for the camera and ended up cutting his chin on the lens rim. He shredded the picture—a headless, very thin nude man holding a cigarette on a tartan blanket—and carried the pieces back to his office, where he threw them away after turning his pocket inside out to make sure they were all gone. “I’m not losing Matty. And not Rosemary. Never.” He underlined never by banging his glass on the table. Chivas Regal sloshed over his hand.

  “Waiter,” Melanie called.

  “We can see that it dies. People owe us. I can see that it doesn’t get reviewed anywhere important. You can see that it doesn’t get talked about. What are you going to do?” Newman asked Howard.

  “I’m going to have another drink. And then I’m going to kill her.” He licked his hand.

  “Should I get us menus or what?” Melanie asked.

  —

  He left the blond ponytail with Newman and walked to his office, smoldering. He would call Dina. He would call a lawyer. He would call a hit man.

  It was snowing around the building. Pink and green and yellow and blue sheets of paper drifted down. From across the street he saw a man standing on the roof and scattering papers as if he were sowing seed.

  Papers floated over the campus. Reinhardt the Joycean leaned out his office window and grabbed a green page. Other hands from other windows did the same. Students and teachers were picking up pages from the ground and reading them. Cars ran over pages in the street. Two grim campus cops with fistfuls of pages entered the building.

  He picked up a few pages that had fallen near him. They all were the same—copies of a letter addressed to the president of the university.

  Dear Sir,

  The ones who believe they possess the truth, are dangerous. They corrupt the ones who…

  It was Rabuchin’s letter, the same one he’d personally delivered to the office. Matty had cried. The only change was an addition at the bottom. Under “P.S. I am a citizen” he’d typed:

  LAURITS’S FLORALITY on Horatio Street.

  Formerly Ralph’s Florist.

  On the roof the two campus cops grabbed Rabuchin. He kicked a shopping bag over the edge. Hundreds more pages spilled out, a poisonous rainbow riding a breeze. Pigeons flapped to get out of the way.

  Howard stuffed pages in the ample pockets of his cotton cardigan. He didn’t have enough room, though, to hide all the copies. Accusations spread around him, bared him to ungenerous judgment. He couldn’t face Reinhardt or Gail or Liliane at the office. He couldn’t face Suzanne at home. He waved frantically at a cab, leaped inside it, shouting the address of the Karatasi bookstore, and expected to hear a satisfying screech as the cab took off. It lumbered up to a red light instead, and he sat digging his fist into a split in the vinyl upholstery.

  —

  Near revolving doors a few buildings away, she watched him gather up pages. This time she had the pink snakeskin billfold with her. She could prove everything. There were bandages and flat shoes on her feet. Her dress was the same one from the day before, and she had no makeup on. She’d gotten up too late for niceties and missed following him at lunch. She wouldn’t let that happen again. If she was good, very good, he would lead her, she knew, to the end of all her unhappiness. On separate beaten sofas they would have iced tea with Jo at the store. “My wife doesn’t lie,” he’d say. “Not this sweetie.”

  She picked up several pages from the ground and folded them into her purse. Green and blue corners of pages poked through the shut frame like tongues.

  She got into a cab behind him. “Go wherever that cab’s going,” she said. The seat was warm.

  “It all depends,” the driver said, hitting the accelerator.

  A halfhearted breeze came through the window. She took a blue page from her purse and began reading….They corrupt the ones who are young and impressive. Howard’s cab was two cars away in the next lane. It is a double crime when the victim is an artist….The lights were green for blocks. There is a man who seduces under the name of literature. He is one of your teachers Howard Ritchie. A mockingbird flew out of her dress. The white markings on its wings were a code. He has taken a sweet and loving woman….Howard’s cab ran a yellow light and sped away. She slid forward and back as her cab halted at the light.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, and she gave the driver the address of the Karatasi bookstore.

  I know you must do something about this.

  She arrived in time to see her husband throw a cigarette on the sidewalk and go into the store.

  —

  The door simply opened. Nobody knocked. She thought it was Vincent, though she didn’t know why he’d show up again. Howard said, “I want to talk to you.”

  She sat cross-legged in the white bed, holding her notebook and pen. In his thin colorless face and narrowed eyes she verified her portrait of Ned. Tenderness for him—Howard or Ned, she couldn’t tell which—swelled in her. “Hi. I thought you were going to call,” she said.

  “I’ll sue you. I’ll get you,” he said more clearly than he’d ever said anything to her before. “You can’t write a book about me.”

  Tenderness vanished. “It’s fiction.” She put the notebook under her. The spiral metal spine pressed against her jeans. “And you can’t tell me what to write.”

  “If you’re going to steal my entire life and screw it up, yes, I can.”

  “It’s not your life.” Was it his life? If someone used something of hers, a pen or a sweater, or had a piece of paper she’d written on, she worried that she’d lost a part of herself. Someone wearing her sweater might absorb part of her soul. There was spirit, too, in her handwriting; and when she’d lived with Larry and paid bills, she hated signing the blue checks because one of them might get lost and never come back canceled from the bank. It would pass undefended through abuse at the hands of strangers before fluttering into a mass grave for checks in a triple-locked basement on Wall Street, where her signature would lie against a chartreuse check that had a picture of a daisy on it and was signed by a schizophrenic with leprosy who picked his/her nose. “You haven’t read it. What makes you think it’s about you?”

  “Newman told me. He’s my friend.”

  “Great. He thinks it’s about him too.”

  “No, he says it’s mostly about me. All about me. I’ll lose my family. I’ll lose my job. As a teacher I’m supposed to give the illusion of conforming to the community’s illusions of its morals.”

  When his hand moved toward her, she flinched. He held out a crumpled green page. “After this,” he said, “I may not have a job to lose anyway.”

  Reading the page, she heard the creak of floorboards under his feet. She is my wife. I need to find her and deprogram her. “Larry sent this to you?” she asked.

  “No, he was on a roof, dropping hundreds of them over the campus just now. It was like a ticker-tape parade, with no parade. The cops stopped him.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Did they arrest him?”

  “They probably threw him off campus. They should’ve flayed him. Or flogged him. Or whatever.” He sat on the edge of the bed and slumped over. “And here you are, the literary gossip columnist.”

  She tucked her feet closer to her body so they wouldn’t touch him. “Are you drunk?”

  His head down, he nodded. “I know what I’m saying.”

  She could have put her hand on his shoulder, he was that near. He wasn’t going to hold her ever again. The idea of never fattened between them. She remembered who she’d been when they were fucking. He wasn’t her character Ned because she loved Ned and she didn’t love him. She touched his shoulder.

  “Howard, I’m not doing anything to hurt you.”

  He presented his woeful pinched face. “I can understand that you’re writing about me.” His beautiful smile began. “We had some
interesting afternoons here. And here we are.”

  “No.” She shook her head and laughed. He watched her for a moment before he joined in her laughter. She took his hand and kissed it quickly. “You’re too dangerous for me.”

  His brown eyes widened. “I’m afraid it’s the other way around.”

  —

  Her reddish hair grew above a poster for The Great Dictator. She’d hidden behind the Coming Attractions easel of the theater as Howard came out of the bookstore. When he turned the corner, she went to the bookstore.

  The halter woman wasn’t there, but a bald brown man was. She could tell he was gay. She knew the secrets in all the books on the shelves without reading them. She opened one to a poem in Italian and stared at it. It was shaped like a house with a mansard roof.

  “I want to buy something. For my husband.” She went close to the brown man because he was kind.

  “Poetry?”

  “Yes.” She waited for him to give her a book for Howard.

  “Any particular poet?”

  “I’ll take this.” She hugged the book with the Italian poem in it. “And do you have Bandaged Moments?”

  He went to get it behind high shelves. The only other customer, a white-haired man at the Judaica section, had his back to her. She leaned across the counter and took a pen and a set of keys from a shelf below the cash register. They were souvenirs, like ashtrays from hotels. She dropped them in her purse. She’d hoped to find a clue to the halter woman’s name. The white-haired man sneezed mightily. She didn’t have the right to say bless you. The brown man returned with Vincent’s book. She’d read it in bed with Howard, the pages heavy on her midriff. The brown man put it and the Italian poetry book in a blue and white plastic shopping bag that said KARATASI. She had counted out eleven dollars when she saw Vincent.

  —

  He told her she looked fine, and she answered that not much could have happened to change her since yesterday. Her dress was dirty across the front. Lace at the low neckline wilted. He offered to take her home. She said no, dignified as a nun. She might have whipped out a ruler and smacked his hands. He told her he was sorry, she asked what he was sorry for. When she saw Dina coming down the stairs, she whispered to him, “Please. Introduce us.”

  “I’m in a hurry,” Dina told him. She didn’t say hello. Seeing her, small and intent, made him forget what he was supposed to say. She nodded at Suzanne.

  “Don’t you work here?” Suzanne asked.

  Dina smiled politely. “Dan’ll help you.” She seemed to be trying to place the other woman. “Were you here yesterday?”

  Bask said, “This is a friend. You two should know each other. Dina Leitman, Suzanne Ritchie.”

  Dina’s polite smile petrified. It had been painted on by somebody with a palsy.

  He got the idea that he’d made the introduction wrong. “See, Suzanne’s married to Howard, who knows all about books, and Dina’s a writer who lives in a bookstore. And Howard published one of Dina’s stories.”

  “It must be a very good story.” Suzanne’s mouth tightened around the words. “What issue is it in?”

  “Howard’s a very good editor,” Dina said.

  A gross unease had settled, like ashes from a volcano, over the women. They would be preserved in this moment for thousands of years, the way the bodies had been at Pompeii. Bask was glad he wasn’t the future archeologist who would discover them.

  Dina blushed. “I should’ve recognized you. Howard has beautiful pictures of you in his office.”

  “I’ll have to give him a more current one,” Suzanne said.

  Dina glanced at the white-haired man at the Judaica section. “Is Howard still here?”

  “No, he’s gone. Gone,” Dan said from behind the counter. “We didn’t have the book he wanted. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Ritchie.”

  “And what book was that?” Suzanne asked.

  “I’m sorry I missed him,” Bask said.

  “Me too,” Suzanne said.

  “Why no Chagall?” the white-haired man asked.

  “Under Art,” Dan answered.

  “I must apologize, but I’m in a hurry.” Dina edged toward the door.

  “You can’t help that,” Suzanne said.

  Bask squeezed her hand. It was cold. “I’m rushing too.”

  “One minute, Mrs. Ritchie,” Dan said. “Let’s see if we can’t order that book for Howard. Let’s see.”

  —

  The book she agreed to order was about the Dead Sea scrolls or the life of Elinor Wylie. “What about Pissarro?” the white-haired man asked. “Under France,” Dan answered.

  She left the bookstore and walked until she came to a drugstore on University Place. She held the door open for a woman with a baby in a stroller. There was a special on ear syringes. She bought a bottle of aspirin, a toothbrush with a black and white striped handle, a pack of cigarettes—Howard’s brand—with matches, two cans of lighter fluid, and a can of powdered infant formula. On the street she threw the aspirin and cigarettes and formula in a garbage can. She put the toothbrush in her purse. It was getting full. She put the cans of lighter fluid and the matches in the Karatasi shopping bag. If you added water to powdered infant formula, did you get an infant? She went across the street to a Greek coffee shop, decided on a tuna salad sandwich on white, no extra mayo, with a glass of milk, and took out Vincent’s book to read again.

  —

  He loped beside her for a block. She worked hard to keep running and he worked hard not to pass her.

  At the corner, waiting for the light, he asked, “Where are we going?”

  She wiped her forearm across her face and managed to say, “I didn’t invite you.”

  “I came to say goodbye,” he said. She was too short, too thin. You could snap her in two at the waist. She wouldn’t be able to carry a backpack in mountain country. They walked west along Tenth Street, a block down from the house she’d visited the night before. “I think we should sit at a table together and do our writing. It’s nice to write with somebody there.”

  “I don’t know about that.” She walked as fast as she could, and he sauntered along beside her. On Sixth Avenue he stopped at a deli and bought a bag of salt-free pretzels. He had no trouble catching up with her on Greenwich Avenue. “You just broke up with somebody,” she said. “So did I—with three people.”

  “You think I’m lonely and that’s all?”

  “I think I’m going to write and that’s all. I’m going to try and write.”

  “Backtracking so soon? Have some,” he said.

  She still had a few pretzels in her hand when they got to a flower shop on Horatio Street. The wooden sign was cut in the shape of a tulip and painted orange with green lettering: LAURITS’S FLORALITY. There were no lights on. The door was locked. He wondered why she didn’t buy flowers at a place nearer the bookstore. The man walking toward them wasn’t carrying a potted palm tree tied with red ribbon, but Bask recognized the spitefulness. “Here comes Dale Carnegie,” he said.

  “The princess and her bodyguard,” the man called in greeting. Strands of his long honey hair stuck to his neck. As he unlocked the shop door, his hands shook. He closed the door behind him and turned on the lights.

  “No,” she said when Bask started to follow her inside the shop.

  —

  She held out a green copy of his letter. A philodendron vine from a hanging basket groped her forehead.

  “You like it?” he asked. “I wasn’t too sure about some of the grammar, but that’s nitpicking. Basically, I think it’s brilliant.”

  The shop was cool. In a plastic bucket on the counter, a sheaf of gladioli, peach buds furled, aimed at the ceiling.

  “I’m not coming back,” she said.

  “Do you like the sign? I did it myself.” He’d trimmed his mustache.

  “What’s ‘florality’?”

  “I think of it as the morality of flowers.” He poured water into a bucket of day lilies.

&nbs
p; “We’re split up. No more together. Ever.”

  “You’re sweating, you know that?”

  “I hope your store’s a big success, I hope you get a great apartment, but you can stop writing letters because I’m not coming back and Howard Ritchie has nothing to do with it.”

  “Little one, don’t do this so grownup and tough. You’re full of shit, but I love you. Smile a little.” His blue eye winked at her.

  “That’s good. The maudlin act.”

  He grinned. “Listen, baby—”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Listen. Cézanne used to take so long to paint that the apples he set up for a still life rotted. So he switched to paper flowers because they wouldn’t rot. But he took so long to paint them that he said, ‘They fade, the bitches.’ Isn’t that perfect?”

  “Bye, Larry.”

  “Don’t you want to kiss me goodbye?”

  “No. Want a pretzel?”

  “No. Want a rose?”

  “No.”

  —

  He was leaning against a brick wall, his chin up, when she came out. Sun kindled his red-gold hair. The empty pretzel bag stuck out of his shirt pocket.

  “Let’s get some juice or milk or something,” he said.

  “I have to work. And I have to go to the laundromat.”

  “Infinitely preferable to seeing me. How about after you do all that?”

  She rolled her eyes and shook her head no, and he knew he was getting somewhere.

  “It’ll just be for a couple of hours. I’m leaving tomorrow.” He wrote his address at Jonathan’s and his phone number on the torn corner of a piece of green paper she gave him. “You like Chinese food? It’s great late at night. We can go to an arcade in Chinatown and play Asteroids.”

  She put the scrap of paper in her jeans pocket and didn’t answer.

  Maybe he would put off leaving for a few days. “Call me,” he said.

  She nodded, and he decided it might be better to leave that night instead of in the morning.

  —

  She spent the afternoon in the coffee shop, rereading pages of Bandaged Moments. She liked an argument between Father Boisvert and Lulu.