“Sure,” I said. “I guess.”
Harry returned to the tent at noon one day. He had Hoving Harrington Hartman in his hands. “He wanted to see you,” Harry said.
“This revolting Cyclops brought me here against my will,” Hoving said.
Harry placed the little man in the center of the tent and left. Hoving had shrunken since I saw him, and his stained and wrinkled black wool coat brushed against the floor of the tent. The sky outside the building outside the tent was clear. The sun, because this was winter in lower Manhattan, occupied the area of the sky south of Houston Street and shone directly through the window outside our tent, making the tent walls especially orange and bright. “I’m in Hell,” Hoving said in a voice that was a high-pitched, cracked variation of the voice of the woman I loved most in the world. “I had often wondered if this would happen. I tried to be decent in all my individual dealings with people. I did not ever behave in a lascivious manner in my private gynecological practice, though on several occasions I was quite tempted to do so. While it is true that the proto-intrauterine device that I invented caused severe health complications in some of the women who used it, it is also true that I neither intended nor foresaw those complications and, furthermore, that each woman who sued received a substantial out-of-court settlement. Should I have sold all my stock shares in my own invention and given away not only all of my proceeds but all of the proceeds of my proceeds? Apparently so. Ah, my legs ache, just as in life. I suppose I should not be surprised that Hell is a continuation of old age in perpetuity.”
“You’re not in Hell, you’re in the East Village,” we said.
I said, “Look, Grandpa, it’s me.”
Hoving squinted at us. “Is that my darling grandchild? But my dear, I am confused. You were kind to me on earth. Why are you in Hell? You treated me gently and reminded me of my mama. Has someone killed you?”
“Shut up, Grandpa, you’re scaring me.”
“Oh, yes, now I remember. You’re an insolent creep. I’m glad you’re dead.”
Mittler said, “Please have a seat, sir. I’ll fix you some tea.”
Hoving stared at Mittler and said to me, “My precious, who is this falsely polite little gargoyle you’ve extruded from your face?”
“That’s Mittler. You’ve met him, remember?”
“I remember nothing. My grandchild, if you are the Devil and you have made yourself a two-headed monster to scare me, cut it out.”
Mittler said, “Do you think Harry gave him a hit of acid?”
“No, he’s just paranoid and senile, which is kind of the same as being on LSD except when you come down, you’re dead.”
Hoving became frantic and leapt at us and tried to pull our heads apart, but we were stronger and had often practiced how to keep them together in such an event. We each used a hand to restrain Hoving, while using the other to stabilize our heads. “I’m hungry,” Hoving said.
“We’ll have to give him beef jerky,” I said.
Hoving said, “I adore beef jerky.”
Hoving sat on the floor of the tent with his legs splayed out in front of him, nibbling on the tip of the beef stick. He gazed at nothing. An invisible hood seemed to have descended over his eyes. He had that pouty, almost catatonically blank look of contentment that five-year-olds get after they’ve cried a long time and then been appeased with food. Though his body had shrunken, his face had remained the same size, which made it look huge. It was tinted orange in the tent-filtered sunlight. His eyebrows were thick and pale. His forehead was so tall and featured with wrinkles that the total front of his head looked like two faces, one on top of the other.
Mittler said, “How old is he anyway?”
“Ninety,” Hoving said dreamily.
“Don’t believe him,” I said. “He has no idea how old he is.”
Hoving looked at me. “I know exactly how old I am. You think because I am frightened of damnation that I am not in my right mind. Well, let me tell you something, girlie. This boy is wasting his love on you, and he knows it, and he should snap out of it, and so should you. You belong with my daughter. Instead, you left her, fool.”
“She kicked me out! On Christmas Eve!”
“That is crap. You kicked yourself out. Thank you for the beef jerky.” Hoving stood up and left the tent.
To be seventeen and eating LSD every day for three months in a filthy squat in New York City while stapled to your boyfriend’s face is to be seventeen. Eventually, one must either die or turn eighteen. The latter befell me.
The following morning I woke up at three o’clock, which is generally the time of day when a person sneaks away from the one who loves her beyond reason. I unclasped the lip ring, slid it up out of my lip, and clasped it again, leaving it inside Mittler. I stood up slowly. This was like being released from the gravitational field of the planet you’ve been living on for three months. I thought I would rise up into the air and dissipate like a cloud. I hugged myself for a few minutes while staring at Mittler, who did not wake up. To weigh myself down, I put on all the clothes I had arrived in, though the weather was much warmer now than it had been then. Already wearing my own black wool overcoat, I put on Mittler’s puffy, hooded down jacket that resembled a dark blue space suit, which I thought would help protect me from the thin air beyond the immediate atmosphere of him. I started out of the tent and then, reader, I did something I would not have done when I was seventeen: I thought of how much he would miss his jacket, and took it off. I have long understood that it is not nice to be cruel, but I am still learning how to tell the difference between nice behavior and cruel behavior.
I started out of the tent again and remembered the $10,000 in hundreds I had stashed in one of the blanket rolls shortly after my arrival. I checked the blanket roll and found nothing. I went down the hall to the room where Mildred and Chetty were sleeping, woke Chetty, and asked him for the money.
Chetty said, “Oh, sorry, we bought a motorcycle with most of it and spent the rest on nice clothes and fancy dinners. I’ve got twenty bucks I could give you.”
“Okay.”
He gave me two dirty little tens. I floated down the stairs and out into the world.
Listen: after detaching myself from that boy, I wandered Manhattan and the Bronx for hours and hours. I wanted to go home, and when I spoke the word home to myself, I pictured my bedroom with the white comforter and the large French windows; I pictured Skip Hartman standing with her back to me, looking out the French windows. I wanted to go home to Skip Hartman. She was the one I loved most. Mittler may have been the gentler soul, but Ms. Hartman, who owned me, knew how to tolerate my fierce separateness. She knew how to tolerate my hatred of her. My hatred helped her; we understood that about each other. The one thing that she did not know how to tolerate in me was my wish to be with Mittler. I had now succeeded in exhausting that wish.
I wondered if I could return to her. I pictured her standing with her back to me, looking out the French windows. The question was, Does she turn around or does she not turn around? Does she turn around? Once you have left, she had said on Christmas Eve, do not come back. She does not turn around. I could not return to her.
Nor could I now, with twenty dollars in my pocket, check into a hotel.
Several hours after nightfall, I boarded a train and rode it to Verdant, New York. The Verdant train station, which also serves Marmot, is a place you can look at late at night and think of all the nice things that happen there, if you are inclined to think that way. I mean that you could get off the train and watch the three other passengers climb into their cars and drive away, and then you could stand by yourself in the dark, desolate little parking lot and—if you are of a certain cast of mind—you could mentally populate that parking lot with families of children greeting their dads as the dads arrive from the city after a day of work in a clean office, and you could imagine a lot of good cheer imbuing such a reunion, which happens every fucking evening.
As I was retying my
hiking boots before undertaking the walk to Marmot, that gray, beat-up American car swung into the deserted parking lot. The big former Marine Corps fellow, whose name I decidedly cannot remember now, stopped his car beside me. As far as noticeability of pectorals, this man was on a par with the best and brightest Playboy centerfold. In his navy pea coat and white dress shirt, whose top three buttons were unfastened, he displayed a taut, striated cleavage. I saw in his future the kind of physiological corruption and decay that only such exaggerated good health can hint at. Places on his body were muscular that shouldn’t have been, his skull and fingers, for example. In chichi multicultural combat training programs sponsored by the U.S. government, this man had learned eight different systems of sticking hard parts of his body into soft parts of other people’s bodies in order to incapacitate or damage them, and he was offering me a ride into the dark woods. I declined.
I left the parking lot and walked along a tree-bordered road dimly illumined by streetlamps. The man stayed still in his car in the parking lot. I was relieved to think he was waiting for the next train. Then his car crept out of the parking lot and followed me slowly along the road. Then it pulled up alongside me. He rolled down the window. I continued to walk and he drove his car next to me and looked at me. He made ambiguous comments, sort of innocent-slash-deeply-noninnocent comments such as “Those are nice pants. Are you of Scottish ancestry? Hop in, I won’t hurt you.”
I just want to say quickly here before I get to the ghastly part that these two phenomena are connected, that one could not exist without the other: the violent, frustrated ex-Marine sadist in his car following the solitary girl late at night, and the cheerful family greeting Dad as he steps off the 5:23 out of Manhattan. They go together like a horse and carriage.
I refused his initial offers of a ride, but not because I thought accepting would make it any more likely that he’d do something bad to me; I knew he’d do something bad independent of what I accepted or did not accept. No, I refused as a kind of hopeful planning gesture: I thought I might need, in my future life, if indeed there would be such, the memory of having resisted. And when I accepted his seventh offer of a ride, I did so on the principle that whatever bad thing he was going to do to me would be over with sooner than if I did not accept. Actually, I have no idea why I accepted. He shoved open the passenger side door of his car and I climbed in next to him.
He said, “Where are you going?”
I said, “Where do you think I’m going, dipshit?” There was no principle behind this remark. In fact, this remark can now be declared purely counterproductive.
He said, “I’ve got a cassette player back at the guardhouse. Do you like music?”
“No.”
“What kind of music do you like?”
“Songs that specifically express hatred toward people who work in guardhouses.”
“Sing me one.”
“Whistle while you work.
Hitler is a jerk.
Eenie-meenie,
Bit his peenie.
Now it doesn’t work.”
He hit the brakes hard, threw the stick shift into neutral, and applauded so vigorously that he could have crushed the skull of a newborn baby each time he slammed one of his palms with the other.
He started to drive again. “Come on,” he said. “Tell me something about yourself.”
“I like flowers and trees.”
“What else?”
“I just got out of a very intense relationship so I’m feeling kind of fragile.”
“Who were you in the relationship with?”
“Someone kind of like you only much smarter and nicer.”
“Why’d you break up with him?”
“As I said, he was kind of like you.”
“Who has the nicer body, him or me?”
“Him.”
“Who’s stronger, brute strengthwise?”
“Would you shut the fuck up? I hate you.”
He reached inside his coat pocket and pulled out a long knife whose molded handle doubled as brass knuckles. He held the knife between his left hand and the steering wheel as he drove. The little jaw muscle that looked like a small erect penis sheathed under the thin skin of his face began to twitch rapidly. I went to punch him hard in the right ear to break some of the small, delicate bones of his hearing mechanism, but he blocked my punch with his right forearm. He slammed on the brakes again, grabbed me by the wrist with his right hand, and sliced open my palm. “Stay put and don’t insult me. It really hurts when you insult me.”
When we arrived at the guardhouse by the Marmot entrance gate he said, “Reach inside the glove compartment and pass me that roll of duct tape.”
“What do you need duct tape for?”
He punched my arm and I gave him the duct tape. He held me by the wrist and dragged me across the stick shift and out the driver’s door of his car. He shoved me ahead of him into the deserted guardhouse. The guardhouse was about seven feet by seven feet. He pressed me face first against one of the walls and began trying to yank down my pants.
“Can I just say one thing?” I asked.
“What?”
“You won’t be able to do it. Your dick will be limp.”
He uttered a long sort of sigh of frustration and said, “Then I’ll just have to kill you.” He made it sound as if it would be a very unsatisfying consolation for him. “Come on,” he said, “just cooperate.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. I turned around slowly and caressed his face and kneed him in the testicles as hard as I could.
He punched me in the chest and I sat down on the floor and couldn’t breathe. At around the time he punched me I thought I heard the quiet engine of a European car, but I knew I was hearing what I wished to hear.
“You okay?” the man asked, squatting in front of me. “Come on, be a sport here, won’t you?” He rammed his shoulder into my torso, as if he were a football player and I a tackling dummy. He unzipped my pants, pulled down my thermal underwear, and stared in wonder and dread at my naked crotch. That was when Skip Hartman entered the small guardhouse. “Mr. Hand,” she said. “Please stand up and turn around.” He stood me up and held my throat firmly in his fingers. I could not breathe. He turned his head to look at Skip, pointed the knife at her, and said, “Stay right there.”
“Come to me,” she said.
“What?”
“Come and make love to me. Mary is a child. I am a woman. I know how to love you. I know what you want. I know how to make you feel good.”
“If you try to trick me I’ll slit your fucking throat,” he said.
“Fair enough. Now make love to me.”
He gave my throat one last good-luck squeeze and released me. I fell on the floor. I still could not breathe. He went to Skip Hartman, and she embraced him in the same way that she had often embraced me to realign my back when it was sore. I watched the veins stand out on the skin of her bare forearms that pressed into his back. She was embracing him with all her might. He could not move. “Hey,” he croaked, “you’re suffocating me. Hey.” I looked at her blank, open-eyed face over his shoulder as she continued to make her arms into a single boa-constrictor sort of appendage and squeezed the hell out of his torso. After a minute, his body went limp. She laid him gently facedown on the floor, pressed one knee into his spine, took the roll of duct tape from the little shelf where he had placed it, and wrapped the tape around his hands behind his back. She taped his feet together and turned his head to the side and placed a piece of tape over his mouth. He stirred then. She lifted him up and sat him in the swivel chair of the guardhouse. He was awake now, and I sensed that he could still have head-butted Skip Hartman and picked up his knife and cut out her entrails, but he didn’t seem to want to. She bound his torso and his thighs to the chair. His face looked peaceful and sad like the face of a child who has just been thrown a loving birthday party but who has failed to receive that one red fire truck that would have made this the perfect day.
“Pu
t a piece of tape over his nose,” I said, sitting on the floor, dressed, bruised.
“Why?”
“To kill him.”
The man did not look at me. He slouched in the chair. Skip stared out the window of the guardhouse with an expression of mild satisfaction, as if she were admiring what an excellent job she had done of parking her car.
“I’ll drive you to the house and give you a glass of wine,” she said to me. She pressed the button that opened the iron gate. She made a small circle of her thumb and forefinger as if making the “okay” sign and flicked the top of the man’s ear with her forefinger. We left the guardhouse and got in the car and drove into Marmot.
No lights were on in Tommy’s house. She drove the car up the driveway and stopped. “Did he hurt you?” she said.
“I don’t know.” My body had gone numb and I could hardly think or speak. She stood up out of the car and left the door open. She walked rigidly across the wet grass toward the front door, and lost her footing and fell down, and stood up again. She stood still for a moment and looked around in a daze, as if she didn’t know where she was.
She let us into the house. It was empty: no people, no furniture. “Tommy and Myra sold the house,” she said. “For now, they are living in my house in the city. I drove up tonight to be here for the closing tomorrow morning. I have handled the sale of the house because of course I am the only one who knows how to handle these sorts of things without screwing them up. I’m not sure why I decided to drive up tonight instead of tomorrow morning. I had a presentiment. I had a—um. Wine?”
We walked into the kitchen and Skip turned on the light. We stood in the bright, bare kitchen. Her arms and legs were vibrating. She went to a cabinet and removed one of two bottles of Bordeaux. She opened her purse and pulled out a wineglass. “I expected to be alone and did not bring a second glass. I hope you do not mind sharing?”
Her words themselves were a kind of crystal wineglass on a high shelf: sharp and elegant and clear but far away; I could not reach them. She turned off the kitchen light.
Nothing Is Terrible Page 21