Howard picked up the extension in the bedroom; I don’t know how I knew that—I just did. Sherry went into her bathroom and closed the door. “Hello,” Howard said. He sounded expectant, and as if he’d been running.
It was easier than I’d thought. It was like leaving a message on someone’s answering machine, because I didn’t really wait for his response. “This is me, Paulie,” I said. “I’m at Sherry’s and I’m not coming home. Janine paid me a visit today.” Then I hung up, quickly, and just as quickly took the receiver off the hook again.
Sherry came out of the bathroom, I indicated the phone. “I’d like to leave it that way for a little while if it’s all right with you.”
She nodded and said, “Ah, Paulie, didn’t I tell you Aquarius and Scorpio wouldn’t work?”
14
THE MAGAZINE I’D GRABBED at the checkout in Foodtown had a piece on “the new breed of bachelors.” After I’d emptied the bags on the kitchen table and punched them flat, I sat down and opened the magazine to the cover story. It was a big, full-color layout about six men ranging in age from twenty-five to sixty. One of them was black, one was Asian, and they all looked as if they’d been fitted with expensive rugs. The gist of the article was that bachelorhood was a dynamite way of life, not just a state of limbo before marriage. Some of the photos showed the men at home in their bachelor condos. None of them seemed to live in a suburban development, like me, and none of them was shown eating supper on one corner of a crazily cluttered table. I’d gotten into the habit of doing the dishes after meals, for fear I’d run out of them, but other things piled up: the mail, cans of dog food it didn’t pay to put away, clothes to go to the cleaners, the newspapers I hadn’t gotten around to reading, the books I meant to return to the library for Paulie.
Every day it got light out before I was ready to wake up and turned dark again way before I was able to sleep. The bachelors had been photographed on the job (a doctor, a clothes designer, a construction foreman, etc.). They were pictured holding important-looking papers or chatting democratically with their underlings. I thought about shlepping to the studio every day, and having to listen to the music of hopeful amateurs and Mike bragging about his latest conquests. I also kept waiting nervously for Janine to show up. Whenever the light flashed in the control room to indicate someone had come in the front door, I’d start palpitating and get a little short of breath. I wasn’t sure what I’d say to her, except that she’d ruined my life and I wanted to murder her. It was strange that she hadn’t come by yet, almost two weeks after her visit to Paulie, and that she hadn’t returned my telephone calls.
After Paulie called that day, to say she was gone for good, I listened to the dial tone in a sick daze for a few seconds before I hung up. The phone rang again almost immediately, and I grabbed it, saying, “God, Paulie, please listen, you have to listen to me!” My mother’s voice whined through the wires: “What? Hello, hello? Howard, is that you?”
Her perfect timing. Sometimes she caught me in the bathtub, or on the can, or like Annie used to—the moment Paulie and I began to make love. The pitter-patter of little feet, the jarring ring of the telephone. “Did I wake you?” she invariably asked. “You sound funny.” When we remembered, we’d knock the receiver off first, lock the bedroom door, keep the noise level down. It was a wonder we ever got together, a wonder we ever enjoyed ourselves.
“Did I wake you?” my mother asked that fatal day. “You sound funny.”
“No, Ma,” I said. “I just have a little headache.”
“What did you say before, when you answered?”
“Nothing. I was talking to Paulie.”
“She’s there?”
Jesus, did she have radar? “Of course,” I said. “Of course she’s here. So, how are you?” I asked, switching tracks, hoping to derail her.
“How can I be?” she answered. Our usual opening volley. There were at least a hundred more lines we’d have to exchange before we got around to the purpose of her call, if we ever did. And Paulie was at Sherry’s, probably expecting me to call her right back.
“Ma,” I said, “I can’t stay on now. I’ll call you soon, okay?” and I hung up the way Paulie had hung up on me, before she could rally to protest.
I had to get Sherry’s number from Information. She was listed as S. Fabrikant, that pathetic ruse of women living alone, to fool the crazies. Nothing that simple would ever stop those guys. One of them used to call my father regularly at the funeral home and describe what he’d like to do to the stiffs. I dialed Sherry’s number, my head jammed with opening lines, but her phone was busy. I dialed again and again, the number now memorized for life, repeating “Come on, come on, hang up.” Then I called the operator and said this was an emergency, could she please break into the conversation. She got back on after a few seconds to say there was no conversation to break into, and I understood at last that Paulie didn’t want to hear from me. I sat there for a while digesting that news, and then I called Janine’s number. Her kid answered and said she wasn’t there, he didn’t know when she was coming back. I left my name and number and said it was important.
I tried to imagine Janine coming here, what she might have said to Paulie and how Paulie must have felt. It occurred to me that I always picked women who loved in an ambitious, do-or-die way. Marie drove me crazy until I went away with her, and now Janine was trying to do the same thing. Even Paulie was once that demanding and intense. And I’d had a moronic, macho pride in being wanted like that. Maybe I still did.
It was hard falling asleep that night, and most of the nights that followed. I kept the lights on in the bedroom while I watched old Westerns and reruns of Ben Casey and Sergeant Bilko. One night, some guy on Ben Casey had a massive heart attack, and I looked on in fascinated horror while they pounded him on the chest and then shocked him back to life with electrodes. I had to get up and walk around a little, and I ended up in the kitchen eating a bowl of cold leftover pasta, washing it down with wine, until I was groggy and glutted. Sometimes I’d fall asleep sitting up, and then wake in the middle of the night with a Japanese monster on the screen and Paulie still missing from our bed. I kept trying to call her those first days, and I kept getting Sherry’s tape: “Hello. Don’t hang up. This is a recording, but the real me is only a message away …” A couple of times Sherry herself answered, and she only confirmed what I already knew—that Paulie still didn’t want to speak to me. I called Janine again, too, and again I got her kid. He said that he’d already given her my message.
The bachelors in the magazine piece had a heavy social life—they were all shown dining or dancing somewhere with great-looking women. I probed myself for feelings of envy, but I didn’t have any. I could have been reading National Geographic and looking at the quaint customs of some foreign culture. All I wanted was what I’d recently had and lost.
My own social life was almost nonexistent. Paulie’s friends seemed to go out of their way to ostracize me. La Rae would drive by without even slowing down, and Katherine turned her back on me at the 7-Eleven one night, where I’d gone to buy cigarettes. Frank Peters came to the house a couple of times, and I made room on the table for another plate so we could have supper together. He advised me to wait it out, as if it was a summer storm, something that would quickly pass. Mike asked me to hit some bars with him, to listen to a little piano and drown my sorrows, but he seemed relieved when I turned him down.
I’d broken the bad news to Annie and Spence the morning after Paulie left. Now, when they visited, it was like one of their hospital visits, or a condolence call. They talked in hushed voices and she kept patting my arm. “What can we do for you, Daddy?” she asked. “Just tell us what we can do.” When I moved back home after Marie, Annie, who was still a baby, greeted me at the door like a Trojan maiden welcoming a hero back from the wars. Now I didn’t give her and Spence any of the details, only that Paulie and I had had some major differences and decided to separate for a while. I had no idea what Paulie had t
old them. Jason called once or twice, but I think Annie made him do it, because he didn’t say very much about anything. It was as if I’d called him and woken him up. When I tried pumping him about Sara and himself, he said he had to go now, and he got off fast.
I wasn’t really smoking again, only a few cigarettes a day. I rationed them out to myself in the morning, and I wouldn’t touch one before noon unless things were especially bad. Paulie had hidden all the ashtrays, so I was using a mayonnaise-jar cover. I always emptied it before the butts could pile up and depress me more. I kept waiting to feel better, for that tight feeling in my gut and chest to ease up, but it didn’t. The worst thing was knowing there was nothing I could do. Even if Paulie did agree to speak to me, what could I say to undo what was done, to make her forgive me and come back? I could only die, maybe, and I spent a night or two imagining the big heart attack, my body found when the neighbors began smelling something funny.
I wrote letters to Paulie that I tore up and threw away. The language itself seemed inadequate for what I wanted to tell her. One night, while I was eating supper at the crowded table, I opened one of Paulie’s library books at random and came across a slew of love poems. I read them one after the other—it was amazing the way they were about us: “Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!” … “Have I spoken too much or not enough of love?” … “I can no more hear Love’s / Voice” … “There is a momentary pause in love / When all the birth-pangs of desire are lulled.” I thought of scribbling one of them out and mailing it to her, but I knew she’d see it for the cheap, easy ploy it was. For years she’d tried reading poems to me at night in bed. “Howie, just listen to this,” she’d say, and then begin reciting before I could stop her. I’d only really hear a few lines before my concentration shorted out. Sometimes phrases of music came into my head and washed away the sound of her voice. Sometimes I went off into my own reverie or I just fell asleep. There’d be no way to convey to her how moved I was, reading poetry in our kitchen, with the book propped against a pyramid of dog-food cans. And maybe it was only self-pity, anyway, something Paulie would recognize in a minute.
When I thought I could stand it, I called my mother back and lied to her about everything. “Fine,” I kept saying, “fine.” I hadn’t told her about my heart attack until I was almost recovered from it, and then I’d played it down. Now I said that I was completely well, that everybody was just fine and dandy. I said that Paulie and I were thinking of going to Paris next spring, as an anniversary present to ourselves. My mother never asked to speak to her, so that was no problem. At first, it felt sort of good pretending that nothing terrible had happened—I almost believed it myself—but once I hung up and began making supper, I felt worse than ever. I wasn’t sleepy, but I went to bed early that night, like an invalid, the way I did those first weeks home from the hospital. The bed was getting as messy as the kitchen table. It was easier to just leave things scattered there—magazines, snacks, my Walkman and tapes. I looked at the telephone, willing it to ring, and when it didn’t, I put my earphones on, blasting Miles and Coltrane inside my head until I fell asleep.
The next day, when I came home from work, I noticed right away that something about the house was different. I realized it was the smell, or smells—of cooking, of furniture polish. I rushed into the kitchen, with Shadow wagging around my legs, almost tripping me. “Paulie?” I yelled, and the name rose and died in the room. There was a cake in the very center of the table—everything else had been cleared away. The cake was angel food, the only kind I was allowed on my diet. The appliances all had a hard gleam; I could clearly see my own reflection in the glass oven door. After a while, I saw the note stuck to the refrigerator with one of the magnets. “Dearest Daddy,” it said. “No little elves, just Lily and me. Speak to you soon. Love you, A.” Annie and her housekeeper, putting things in order, making me feel even lousier than I had. I imagined La Rae remarking on what a sexist pig I was, expecting Paulie to not only crawl back to me but to clean up my mess besides. But that wasn’t what I wanted.
The whole house had been cleaned, and there was something final about its tidiness, as if all evidence of our previous life here had been wiped and waxed away. I was reminded of the day Paulie left, when the kitchen had looked like the kitchens in model homes. Today, the bedroom seemed … virginal, with its fresh linens, everything tucked tightly in place. I lay across the bed, thinking that I would never fit in with the new breed of bachelors, that no matter what happened I would always be married in some deep, binding sense of the word. Then, when I wasn’t even looking at it, the phone rang, and it was Paulie. I was so surprised my throat closed up. “Paulie,” I croaked.
She was all business. “I just want you to know,” she said, “that I’m coming by for some of my things tomorrow, around noon. And I don’t want you to be there, Howard.”
“I wouldn’t get in your way,” I said. “And I could help you pack.”
“No, thank you. La Rae and Katherine are coming over to help me. We’ll manage.”
I knew they’d be there as much to keep me away as to help her. “Paulie,” I said, “I’m trying to understand what happened, what Janine could have said to you.”
“It doesn’t really matter, Howard, and I don’t want to discuss it. In fact—”
“How have you been?” I asked quickly.
“I’m okay,” she said. Then, after a pause, “And you?”
“Could be worse,” I said, “could be better. Oh, shit, Paulie, won’t you even talk to me?”
“Why should I?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it would lead to something. Look at Reagan and Gorbachev.”
“Ha!” she said. “You look at them.”
It began to seem a little more like a conversation, so I said, “I saw Jason, you know, and I spoke to him about Sara.”
“What did he say?”
“I think I straightened him out.”
“That’s not what I heard,” she said. “Maybe there’s a genetic flaw.”
I was going to ignore that and build my case about Jason, but instead I blurted, “Paulie, I never meant to screw us up like this!” She didn’t answer, and the silence was so heavy I thought she’d hung up. “Hello?” I shouted. “Paulie?”
“I’m here,” she said, with that creepy new composure.
“Yeah, and I’m here,” I said.
I would have been home the next day, despite Paulie’s orders, if her friends weren’t going to be there, too. I stayed away as long as I could, and when I finally did go home I was sick with suspense, as if I was just about to discover that Paulie was gone. And it actually was like that. I sensed the further emptiness even before I could bring myself to look in her closet. Her clothes were gone, but her smell—something like raisins—still lingered among the bare hangers, and I stood there breathing it in as if I needed it to live.
15
IT WAS DIFFICULT LIVING with Sherry. She thrashed around in her sleep and the sofa bed’s foam mattress bounced like a trampoline. I ended up folded in half on her love seat most nights. I’d be stiff and cranky in the morning, and Sherry quickly matched her mood to mine. One small room was terribly confining for our disparate tastes and habits. She kept the blinds drawn, making the room seem even smaller and more confining, and if I opened them she squinted and threw her arm across her face, like Dracula surprised by sunrise. We got on each other’s nerves, and were viciously polite in our efforts to deny it. “Excuse me … No, excuse me,” we’d say as we bumped hips going in and out of the narrow bathroom.
Sherry watched an inordinate amount of television, and like Howard’s last hospital roommate, she kept it on even when she wasn’t actually watching it. Sometimes she read while the television was playing. “Could I please shut that off?” I’d ask, because I was trying to read, too, and couldn’t concentrate, especially during the supercharged commercials. Sherry would say, “Why, of course, be my guest,” and throw me a murderous glance. I had to remind myself that I was he
r guest, that it was truly generous of her to have taken me in in the first place. It was up to me to make concessions to her peculiar habits, to be grateful for every favor.
But we didn’t even like the same foods. Howard and I had always eaten sensibly, or at least I had. When she was younger, Sherry had gone dangerously gaunt on a macrobiotic diet, and now she seemed to eat only overly rich ethnic dishes. One morning, I went to the market while she was at school, and brought home salad greens and fresh fruit. “Don’t give me any of that,” she said, with a little shudder of revulsion, as I tossed the salad that evening.
She left her answering machine on until she came home, and when I was in the apartment I heard the messages as they were being recorded. Almost all of her callers were men. “Sherry? Ralph here. I’m really glad you liked my picture. Why don’t we get together this weekend?” … “Hi there, babycakes, this is the Lone Ranger—501-3420. The vibes are good for a meaningful relationship, so give me a call.” One of them just sang a few bars of “I’m on Fire” at the sound of the tone and then hung up. Howard called several times, too, and when I heard his voice I stopped whatever I was doing and listened in miserable silence.
Sherry played back her tape every afternoon, scribbling numbers and names on a note pad. Finally she told me that most of her calls were the result of an ad she’d placed a few weeks before in the personals section of The New York Review, and she showed me a copy. “SWJF looking for a soul mate. Are you ready for a literate, luscious, liberal, lovable, lunatic Libra? I’m 38 years young in heart and body—who are you? Photo, please. NYR Box 365812.” She’d received over two hundred responses so far. Some of them were clearly unacceptable—raving anti-Semites and plain old garden-variety psychopaths. Three men sent nude photos of themselves; five requested the same from her. Another, whose letter was full of misspellings and food stains, claimed to be a noted surgeon who would give medical discounts to her family and friends. Sherry had answered several of the more reasonable letters and these telephone messages were in response to her replies.
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