Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel
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I changed the subject by giving her a pat on the peach halfs and complimenting her on how she looked. She wore a watermelon red linen dress with a high neckline cut straight across the shoulders, a beltless thing under which her body, tanned the coppery red of tiger lilies, moved with animal ease. Lena is a proxide blonde.
She paused at the door, after taking my order for a beer, and said with one of them pregnant pauses that are the extent of her fertility, “I can’t ask you in, Stan. Art isn’t home yet.”
I hadn’t made a move to follow her in, but it was her way of indicating that there was Something Between Us. No minority report from me. She built it up by constantly denying it. The first inkling I had of it was the statement that it couldn’t be. We had been walking by the river one night, Art and Elsie up ahead and we behind, when she stumbled over a root or stone or so and I caught her hand. She withdrew it slowly with a significant look and said, “We better leave it the way it is, Stan.” There hadn’t been anything to leave the way it was, but now there was. I had no doubt she told Art out of a clear sky, “There’s nothing between Stan and me—absolutely nothing,” thereby putting the bee in his bonnet too. Lena don’t need no chastity belt but she needs a good belt across the chops three, four times a year. Oh, I suppose it’s all the human need to inject a little drama into our drab lives, or to use one of the phrases Lena is always stealing from writers she reads or plays she sees, “to recover a little of the lost poetry from the prose of existence.” Sometimes its fresh snow on the whatsis. Slush of disenchantment. Shenanigans with Lena would of involved all your waking hours, but there was another objection. The endless intellectualizing you’d have to pay for it with. You would have to get around to it by long discussions about the changing sexual morays of our time, the need to purge the Puritan ethic from the American conscience, et cetera. It just seemed too much red tape to go through to unknot a halter that when you got it unknotted you would have 2, 3 lbs. of potato salad. Still there were times when just to look at Lena made me feel like my blood was carbonated.
Now, standing out there in the back yard while she waited with the screen door in her hand for some sort of reply, I just said, “Stan Waltz has decided to take unto himself a wife but he hasn’t decided yet whose,” and thrun a peanut at her.
Waiting for my beer, I admired again what Lena had done with the yard. It was the dinky 25 by 50 ft. we all had on Sparrow Street, but she had laid it out beautifully in a single big cross of gravel walk with a bird bath in the center and four triangles of flower beds around it. The gravel was pink—a Japanese idea I think. “They do their decorations with such economy,” she said the evening we had initiated the new yard with an outdoor barbecue. “They have to, they don’t have no money,” said Art from the charcoal grill, and Lena said, “I’m talking about artistic economy. It’s space they don’t have.” Though I had thought what Art thought she meant too, I returned her look with an understanding smile, which was like copping a feel. I sometimes despair of ever meeting my standards. Still in all my faith in this human stuff was restored again as I thought how much we all meant to each other, taking in the garden there in the cool of the evening, how much we manage to do on our modest incomes while the wicked flourish like the green bay tree. Beyond the tracks was the vulgar element.
“Hey I want to talk to you before Els and Art get here,” I called into the kitchen. Just then she kicked the screen door open and came out with a tray with two drinks in tall glasses of plastic silver with foliage on top. Beer was never served with a sprig of mint to the best of my knowledge. “I thought you might like a Pimm’s Cup first,” she said. “You can have all the beer you want later.” It’s another one of her drinks with a cough remedy base, but I put it loyally down as I sit across from Lena getting her viewpoint on the crisis she knows all about and wants to hear the latest on.
“I’m living with a different person. I’m a different person,” I told her. “My life isn’t the same. It certainly isn’t my life. I no longer recognize my existence. Her faith is something she’s ‘got,’ like the personal hygiene. What am I going to do?”
Lena sits on the glider thinking. She crosses and uncrosses her legs, sprawls back, leans forward for potato chips and nuts, spanks the salt from her hands. She goes on thinking, the springs of the glider groaning under the strain, her face screwed up in a variety of expressions.
At last all at once the fruit of this deliberation: “I can’t communicate with Art.”
This deal I am familiar with—whole marriages are based on it—but it hardly answers my question. I don’t begrudge Lena her style of living, the dramatic airs, but how about me for a change? Besides a wife, I have a child.
“How should I handle it?”
“What?”
“Elsie. What am I going to do about this situation? That obtains?”
“I know exactly how you feel. Oh don’t I just! He needs a little more lemon in him! That’s his main trouble. If he’d only get up on his hind legs once and tell somebody something back …”
She rises and begins to pace, breathing smoke and wagging a cigarette holder the size of a clarinet. I take in the nutbrown legs, the thighs that churn you to butter. How would it be if I had married her instead of Elsie? She was always the intellectual of the crowd, not being able to communicate and so on, even in the old days when we were young. A copy of Red-book or Cosmopolitan always under the arm, always leading the boys in the drugstore from the soda fountain to the paperbacks. Always the one to stop on the way out of the movie and complain to the manager, “Why don’t you show some foreign films once in a while?” (Answer: “They’re in another language.”) Lena was always a big zaftig girl, dominating the group even without speaking. What would she do if Art reared back on his hind legs and started telling people where to get off at? It might start at home, this identity stuff, like charity. I open my mouth, but it is little use for the moment exept to eat another potato chip washed down with Pimm’s Cup.
“A little more starch! In everything, all walks of life. That’s what he needs. Starch.” She stops as though making a mental note to have him pick some up from the store on his way home from work. “Why for instance does he let you tell him to stay overtime and finish a crating job after he’s been out on the truck all day? Why doesn’t he tell you to hire him for one thing or the other? If you want him to crate, let him crate full time and you hire another helper for the truck.”
“We have an average of two, two and half days furniture to crate a week, Lena. We’re a one-horse outfit. Only two trucks.”
“He’s meek with waiters. Such a mollycoddle! He never tells them to take it back to the kitchen when they bring him the wrong thing and get them what he ordered, or the right thing but it’s burned. To a crisp! Or even when they bring me the wrong thing, his wife. When somebody bumps into him, he says excuse me. He apologizes to tables and chairs. A regular Casper Milktoast.”
I remember Lena’s admiration when I took the plunge and went into business on my own, mortgaging my kidneys to buy a truck, then her bewilderment when I can’t stand being cooped up in the office I aspired to and have to go out on the truck again to get the feel of a loaded dresser on my back or my shoulder under a piano—that weight a man can feel in his marbles. If I was her husband, would I have to take lip for this public forfit of social standing I had worked so hard to get? Would we be always clanging the status cymbals?
Lena sits down again, and in the silence that I haven’t taken advantage of, being sunk in these thoughts of my own, she continues but in a quieter, more brooding vane.
“So he has this sense of weakness that he has to make up for in little ways. He’ll deliberately leave his beer bottle in the living room after dinner when is it any trouble to take it to the sink on retiring? A gesture of independence, that makes me subservient. He’ll leave his socks where he drops them, and his underwear, for me to pick up and throw in the laundry—to assert his masculinity a minute. Then there’ll be little digs,
things will start coming out, especially after a few drinks. You wouldn’t expect it from Art, would you? All this is a revelation. This is a total surprise to you, the quiet little lamb of a guy who wouldn’t hurt a fly. And he is, and he wouldn’t, exept with a little Dutch courage under his belt and the universal human habit of taking things out on those closest to us. They’re the only ones available at the time.”
A longer silence falls. I run the tip of my finger around the rim of my drink. An unexpected intimacy has sprung up between us. First Art’s socks, then his underwear, and now sly digs at her. A door closes somewhere, a car starts up in the alley and drives off, a tinkle of voices and laughter—the symphony of the summer night. Lena looks away, sitting against the side of the glider with her arm along its back. She drums the pad with her fingers.
“Did you know that he could belch whole sentences?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a trick. He started in to do it with a buddy in the war. They were drinking beer in a bar in Germany, fooling around, getting kind of high and crazy, and they began to talk in belch after a drink. That was what they called it. Then some other American soldiers at another table joined them, and they had a contest to see who could belch the longest sentence. One of the officers was educated and got this experiment really going. Have you ever heard of a writer named Oscar Wilde?”
“No.”
“Well, he defined all German poetry as attenuated beer belching, according to the officer, a Rhodes scholar. They began to belch the German classics. ‘Ich Weiss Nicht Was Soll Es Bedeuten Dass Ich so Traurig Bin.’ That’s that song we use to sing in school, remember, the ‘Lorelei,’ but it was originally a poem by Hiney. I don’t think this promotes international understanding, but they were going along with the gag like a bunch of kids. Kids do this you know. Anyhow Art got pretty proficient at it, and came home with that ability. Now when he’s horsing around the house he’ll start it, partly because he knows it annoys me—just exactly somewhat like kids doing something they know annoys their elders. He has to have a few drinks in him. Once he belched the entire Pledge of Allegiance. If he hadn’t done his share in the war I’d have reported him to the FBI. When he got to the ‘under God’ that Eisenhower stuck in, that he feels the same way about as you, it came out with such a roar that it was simply appalling. At such times he can be an absolute chlop.”
“The entire Pledge of Allegiance in one belch?” I said. Not that I asked out of anything but normal curiosity. I didn’t want any more information about this house. This would be quite enough, thank you. “In one running broad-jump?”
“No, no. You stop after a string of words to fuel up for air. What prompts a person to behave in such a manner? A person who’s had every opportunity, a fine marriage. What sense of satisfaction can there possibly be in it for them, what feeling of achievement? I honestly ask you that. You’ve been through eighth grade.”
I honestly couldn’t answer. It wasn’t for me to say. We’re complex creatures, infinitely mysterious is the human spirit. Why is everything so mixed in with its opposite? Nobility with moral squaller, love with hate, the sublime with the ridiculous. Once in a diner booth I seen a deaf and dumb couple, and they were quarreling. There they were blurting out things with their fingers they’d later regret. Should you laugh or cry? I remember it as a fantasy. The scene here was fantastic enough, because watch. See what happens next. Here I had come to wonder out loud, air, why I was married to Elsie, and staying to wonder what Lena was doing united to Art. Still you have to be careful about judging marriages from the outside. Anything ridiculous on the surface may have all the more value to it underneath. I have a rule. When I see something that makes absolutely no sense whatever, I figure there must be a damn good reason for it.
“Oh, God!” Lena suddenly exclaimed, swatting the table. “The things that go on! With what life does to all of us, how can people do the things they do to each other! Oh, God!”
“Oh, shut up!” came a voice from the next yard. “Can’t we ever have any peace and quiet around here?” It was Mrs. Gromulka probably listening at the stockade fence, thinking she was getting an earful of a marital squabble. Her way of lashing back no doubt. So again—where does reality leave off and fantasy begin?
“Oh, shut up yourself!” Lena called back without turning her head. “Go on back to your love life. There’s only two billion of us on the planet, half of them starving, so go on replenish it some more. Go on with the copulation explosion. We can hear you half the time. We lie there listening to you, like beasts. Of the field! What do I care? Where were we?”
“How Art has no gumption and is always tyrannizing over you with—”
At this point the screen door squeaked open and the object of this discussion himself came out—Art Salerno.
He couldn’t of been a nicer dark-complected guy with horn-rim glasses and a ready smile. Exept that the smile was kind of sly, coming at you around the corner, as though he knew something to your disadvantage. It was only out of the goodness of his heart that he wasn’t blabbing it around. Well neither did I blab it around that he left a lot to be desired on the keyboard, which is the least important position on a piano crew.
“Hello, paisan.”
“Hello, chlop,” I says, returning it in Polish. “Els is still waiting for the sitter, so I thought I’d mosey over and have a quick one with you all. Did you get the job finished?”
“Just—with the last nail in the keg. Remember to order some of the six-penny. And we’re nearly out of one-by-fours.”
I don’t know whether he kissed his wife when he came home or not as a general rule, but probably not judging from the clumsy production made of it now for my benefit. First he went around the table, kicking its leg and mumbling some apology to it as he went by, then he leaned down over the glider with one hand on the back rail of it, so that the glider swung back and made him lose his balance and miss Lena as he bent over her. She steadied it and helped him complete the ritual, rolling an eye at me as she raised her well-lipsticked mouth. “You smell like Naphthalene,” she said, the moth flakes we strew furniture that’s going into storage with. “Not that I don’t rather like it. I think some of the most wonderful smells are those you’d least expect. Coffee is another.”
“And gasoline,” I said. “I like gasoline fumes.”
We all looked at Art to see if he had some favorite fume to contribute to the discussion, and after a minute he says, “Tar.”
“Tar has a certain nostalgic quality to it,” Lena said.
“Not only that, it takes you back. To when you were kids. My whole past won’t go by me no faster when I drown than when I get a whiff of tar,” Art said. “Remember the smell of streets being paved, Stan? I can still remember that summer when they paved the street in front of the fireworks factory. The whole summer is in one whiff of tar. Vacations, going barefoot. We use to chew the stuff. It’s suppose to be good for your teeth.”
When Art went in to wash I sat on the glider beside Lena to show we had nothing to hide. “Where the hell is Elsie?” I said, glaring at my wristwatch. A few minutes later the gate opened and she came into the yard, her hair combed in a bun, in the shiny blue dress that sent up detrimental highlights.
Lena was always trying to give her pointers on how to dress and make up. She begged her to stay away from shiny “ribbon counter fabrics” she called them, which tended to drain out the little color she has in her face. Elsie has a clear but very pale skin, lily-like, and the exeptionally high cheekbones of the Wishnotski tribe sometimes make her cheeks look hollow, even sunken, when she isn’t careful about dresses and cosmetics. “Strive for soft fabrics and gentle colors that won’t wash out your skin and your pale blue eyes,” Lena said. Elsie never paid much attention, and now that she had her mind on eternal things and not the material aspects of this life that don’t matter, she didn’t pay any at all. I was surprised to see Tom traipsing after her through the gate, reading a comic as he walked.
“Of course!” said Lena, zeroing in on the kid with a hearty smack. “Cokes I’m out of, but I just got a lot of Seven-Up to put in the Pimm’s Cups. Pimm’s Cup O.K. for you, Els?”
“Anything will do, Lena,” said Elsie with her freedom from all mundane matters. “It makes no difference.”
Tom wiped the lipstick from his cheek and sat on the glider with the comic. He hadn’t raised his eyes from it since coming in the yard, reading it with a steady grin on his fox face. He has a pointed nose that seems to grow sharper as his smile broadens.
“Why don’t you read a book once in a while, Tom?” I said, watching him. “Do you want to be a Polak all your life?”
“Paderewski was one, as I recall,” said Elsie.
I closed my eyes, thinking hard. “Paderooski,” I said, imitating her pronunciation. “I don’t believe I ever heard the name. Though there was a Paderevski some years ago who was a great concert pianist.”
Elsie’s Christian humility has an arrogant streak in it (like Christ’s). I’m not condeming or defending, only pointing out another example of opposites going together. Abraham Lincoln was suppose to’ve had this arrogant streak. Elsie’s came out in this pretending to be Americanized and so superior to the first and second generation Poles. But (here we go again with paradox) it took the form of not pronouncing Polish names the way the hunkies beneath her and the Americans above her would—that is correctly. So it was out of giving herself airs that she made mistakes, and out of the vow to make Tom educated that I tried to make him sound like the great-grandparents and other neighborhood oldtimers I wanted him to be as unlike as possible. Let him even learn some Polish, a second language. Human relations can become so screwy you can’t make head or tail of them. There was another skirmish in the war over religion.