by Méira Cook
It was odd, yet all that month Shapiro couldn’t shake the memory of the man on the pay phone. The image disturbed him in ways he didn’t understand, got under his skin and made him itchy. Who was he? What was he saying? And why did it matter? Every day Shapiro walked to the bus stop, and every day he passed the public pay phone on the corner of Broadway. The kiosk with its hooded Perspex windbreak and its torn directories chained to the post was innocent of human use, no kidnapper. Where had he gone with his glossy pelt, and his global conscience, and his urgency? Perhaps he was holed up somewhere with his hostages, playing Russian Roulette and Stockholm Syndrome. Sluicing down lemon tea from a samovar or slipping a single bullet into a six-chambered revolver. Come here, lyubov moya. Come here, my love.
As Shapiro walked, he brimmed with melancholy — he’d lost something, but what? February was the coldest month, the city a cheap snow globe shaken by a lunatic child. Inside the sealed globe, snow shrieked like Styrofoam, the air smelled of freezer burn. Kids pulled terrible faces and stayed that way when the wind changed. It was the shortest month of the year but it felt like the longest, was what people said. And every year they said it again because February was a jig played on a cracked fiddle. The timing was off, and the fiddler’s hands were much bigger than his instrument, and each note that sawed from his crooked bow curled away like wood shavings. He played his heart out, his eyes watering and his fingers bleeding. But nobody could hear him above the wind.
Shapiro hunched into winter, pulling up the collar of his astrakhan coat. An early birthday present from his elegant wife. Again and again, he tried to find purchase in the season’s frictionless slip and fall, the solipsistic intimacy of cold, the little cough of hope sucked thin as a throat lozenge as he wandered through the cumulonimbus of his own breathing. What had he lost? His keys, a stray thought, the thread of a conversation he’d had years ago? He checked his pocket, his phone, his wallet, his watch. Everything was in order. He snatched a glance at his driver’s license and, for a moment, thought he was gazing at his father’s face, but no. Instead, Shapiro stared out at Shapiro from the laminated blank flash of his driver’s permit: brown hair, brown eyes, brown pullover. He studied himself, his monochromatic middle age. He was the proud possessor of a street address and a phone number. He wore prescription spectacles and was licensed to drive a standard vehicle.
Gingerly, he felt himself all over. Heart, check. Lungs, yup. Kidneys, liver, courage — check. He ran a hand over his scalp sensing the grey busyness of his brain inside the skull’s honeycomb. But something was missing — some organizing principle, some unified field theory, some queen bee fattening in her cell. His brain was present but his mind was absent.
This, then, was the shape of his days, but Shapiro couldn’t help thinking they were the wrong shape. An impossible shape. A four-cornered triangle or a circular square.
The last time Shapiro saw Maggie before the accident was in late February, a blustery day. She was waiting for him when he got to the office, blowing Nicorette bubbles and flipping through her anxiety channels.
“He’s struck again,” she announced. “The Fucker.”
She mouthed this last word, chary of Miss Leonard’s sensibility, not to mention her everlasting swear jar.
Maggie called the fellow “the Fucker” to distinguish him from all the other fellows she had to deal with daily (fuckers all). He (or she, Brodsky interrupted smugly) was a prankster whose letters, while sporadic, were addressed to “Miss Belief,” Maggie’s advice column nom du guerre. They turned up in her inbox every couple of months, although only once — alas, on Shapiro’s watch — had one actually been printed. Maggie could quote that letter verbatim, as if every word had been tattooed upon the hidden flesh of her credulity. The peek-a-boo part of her that once gave a damn.
Dear Miss Belief,
I love my husband but am frustrated by his typically masculine attitude. He is rational to a fault, a real problem solver, but he lacks spontaneity. He has common sense but no sense of joy. How can I convince him that love is magical?
Yours sincerely,
Mrs. Samantha Stephens
P.S. He also dislikes my mother.
As always, Maggie had counselled “honest dialogue,” an air-clearing “heart-to-heart,” a renewal of “physical and emotional intimacy.” Make a date night, take up a hobby together! Why not sign up for a ballroom dancing class? Have you thought of couple’s yoga? Cunningly, she’d taken issue with the man’s churlish attitude to his mother-in-law which, she advised, had to be addressed as a prelude to “the new era of marital magic.”
Since the disastrous publication of that letter and its ribald aftermath, Maggie had come to suspect every letter signed “Sleepless in Seattle” or “Play Misty for Me” or “Likes Piña Coladas,” as being yet another taunt from the dastardly Fucker. The Fucker, true to his name, had responded by becoming even less subtle, as if to goad her with the implied assault upon her pop cultural naïveté.
Dear Miss Belief,
I am an astronaut who enjoys all the perks of the swinging singles lifestyle. The other day I stumbled upon a bottle containing a female genie…
Dear Miss Belief,
I am in the process of grieving the loss of my dear mother. Do you think it would be inappropriate, or otherwise foolish, to purchase a 1928 Porter automobile?
The current letter concerned the misadventures of a close-knit family of friendly monsters.
“Why do folks react so strangely to us?” the letter writer inquired plaintively.
“If he would just try to fool me,” Maggie fumed. “Would it kill the bastard to give me the benefit of the doubt?”
Dutifully, she mouthed the word bastard. She’d been boning up on the unlikely plot lines of quirky seventies sitcoms, unfortunately by watching them. She knew that one day the Fucker would stop patronizing her — she was banking on it. Instead he might throw her a curveball, an easy lob with a subtle top spin, and she wanted to be ready for it. She was halfway through the slapstick misadventures of a blended family living in a split-level bungalow and was dreaming of the day when she would receive a letter from a spunky housekeeper about the infuriating mysteries of meatloaf.
But how could Shapiro appease her? “That’s a lot of Nicorette gum,” he said instead.
It turned out that Maggie wasn’t trying to quit smoking so much as attempting to achieve a sustainable blood nicotine level between smoke breaks. She couldn’t go cold turkey, she told him, on account of her rotten kids and her aggravating husband. She’d been experimenting with patches too, she confided, tugging her shirt out of her trousers and flashing him a view of her nicotine-patched stomach. Shapiro nodded sagely. Yup, uh-huh. But Maggie was in one of her hot-tin-roof moods, as she called them and, raking a hand through her hair, she grabbed her bag and told him she’d be outside.
Smoking, if he really wanted to know.
“Effing March wind be ding danged!” she yelled over her shoulder.
But a moment later she poked her head around the door to clarify that she would be sure to stand at least fifteen metres from the entrance to any public building. Miss Leonard, a stickler for scofflaws, waved her on. Get out of here, you!
Maggie having taken her cranky leave, Shapiro was free to return to his computer terminal where hundreds of emails were already queued up, awaiting the benediction of his higher education, his perfect understanding.
Dear Editor,
As a high school social studies teacher who believes that accuracy counts, I feel compelled to draw your attention to certain errors in last month’s edition of the Riverview News. With all due respect, the recent town hall meeting that you reported as having taken place on February 17th actually took place on the 19th, the speaker’s name was misspelled, and the excerpted words of Councillor Buhler (not “Buler”) were misquoted.
I have included a full transcript of the meeti
ng so that you might include it in a subsequent edition.
Yours truly,
Catherine Boychuk
There were fewer letters in his father’s day, but enough even then for the old man to feel compelled to dismiss them with one of his characteristic zingers.
“This fella’s sharp as a matzo ball,” he’d murmur, running his eye over letters signed “Concerned” and “Long-Time Reader.”
Naturally, all Shapiro’s readers were long time, eagle eyed, alert to typos, grudgy. They had an exaggerated sense of grammar and held no truck with contractions. He suspected that the lure of misinformation was what kept them reading.
Some were plaintive: “For pity’s sake, I have baked Aunt Betsy’s butter raisin tarts four different times —”
Some were belligerent: “What gives you the right to editorialize on the Israeli question? You self-hating Jew, you hemorrhoid swelling in the anus of your people’s history!”
And some veered giddily between passive-aggression and its more active form: “You might be interested to know that your photograph of the Saint Dominic Craft Fair incorrectly identifies me as Rachel Schellen. And it incorrectly identifies my prizewinning toffee pudding as a ‘delicious second-place apple pie.’”
But all, in the end, were vaguely litigious: “Shapiro, did you even taste my sticky toffee pudding?”
When Shapiro finally saw the kidnapper again, two weeks to the day since their first encounter, he realized how much he’d been missing him. The world shifted subtly on its axis, as if aligning itself with all’s well, and Shapiro drank him in. His shoulders were braced, as if he was preparing to heft the sky on his back, and his ancient bicycle was still leaning against its lamppost. Once again he was hullaballooing into the pay phone. He cocked his head for a moment, angling the receiver to his ear. Shapiro imagined his lips touching the mouthpiece that was smudged with other people’s lips and words, their confusion, their pain, their stale morning breath. In a mere fourteen days the man’s beard seemed to have greyed.
It was almost March, the sky flashing sunlight and shadow in a series of grand mal seizures. A full rigging of clouds scudded overhead, their sails stiffening in the breeze. When the sun wheeled through again, Shapiro saw that the silver threads glistening in the kidnapper’s dark scarf of a beard had inexplicably multiplied. Once he could have poked his doubting finger right through those slipped stitches, once he could have counted them, but now they were as infinite as the snowflakes that fell all night over a prairie city. Stars! Cells!
A feeling of joy and homecoming overwhelmed Shapiro. How happy he was to see that man! The happiness was a little corkscrew twist into the heart’s sweet wine. It reminded him of how long it had been since he felt the spiky joy of nothing he could name. A stiff breeze engaged the edges of the man’s overcoat and he rustled in his sleeves seeming, for a moment, to caper, to dance. The man no longer resembled a kidnapper. Instead he looked like someone Shapiro knew or had known. Perhaps even someone he had yet to meet. But what is resemblance? Only wind moving over the surface of water. Only nothing.
As he stood there, watching, he had the strangest feeling that the past was a locomotive barrelling into the present, derailing the future and scattering boxcars across the rails. The past, the present, the future. But not necessarily in that order, so that Shapiro, poor goon, remained confused.
“Tak kak zhe vy zhili, kol’ net istorii?” the man yelled into the mouthpiece.
Those were his exact words — Shapiro read them as they emerged from his mouth and hung in the cold air. For a moment he even believed he understood what they meant, that he’d overheard them somewhere. But how could you live and have no story to tell? The man turned to face him, his eyes blank with the effort of listening, and Shapiro finally recognized him.
Rabbi Zalman, none other. As always the old man’s trousers were knee-sprung, his overcoat battered about the elbows, but the rabbi was not entirely grey, not yet. Indeed, viewed from a distance, a backward glance, the rabbi’s beard still appeared mostly black, a dark thumbprint against the sun.
From apparently nowhere snow began to fall. Thick snowflakes, fluffy as lamb’s wool, gamboled about the rabbi’s shoulders. The wind started up again and the direction of the snow changed abruptly. Now it spun around the figure in long, whirling strands. Suddenly, Rabbi Zalman was caught in the double helix of his people’s self-replicating history, yet he remained oddly serene. The motionless centre of a clock face, the still point of a child’s spinning top. For the third time the wind changed, turning the snow to static, flipping the weather channels of the world to interference and white noise.
Shapiro gave up on his bus and stared at the rapidly transforming snow, at the figure stranded in his once-black overcoat and fedora, his once-black beard fading to white, like the end of an old movie, before the titles roll and the theatre lights are turned up.
* * *
“Ransom hasn’t been paid yet?” Allie asked politely.
She was referring to their folie à deux, their shared fantasy of the pay phone kidnapper. Shapiro wanted to tell her about Rabbi Zalman, but what could he say? His parents had once been congregants at the rabbi’s North End synagogue, frequent attendees and generous donors to the Sisterhood fund. When Shapiro’s mother died, Rabbi Zalman had delivered her eulogy, selecting for the occasion the proverb about a virtuous woman’s price being far above rubies. Less than a year later, he officiated at her husband’s funeral, blessing the memory of the man who was so fortunate as to have married a woman whose price was far above rubies. So many rubies, Allie had murmured at the time.
His wife would certainly remember Rabbi Zalman, but Shapiro was reluctant to mention his parents even though he and Allie were eating scrambled eggs for dinner, which Allie prepared by adding a dollop of mayonnaise to the eggs after she took the pan off the burner, just the way Mrs. Shapiro had taught her. The taste of the eggs, at once fluffy and creamy, reminded him of his childhood, of shovelling food into his mouth on winter evenings while beleaguering his parents with the miniature blackboardland of his school days. Bookends, those parents of his: once they’d held his world in place but now that they were gone, Shapiro tended to slip sideways.
Perhaps marriage was just another folie à deux, he thought. He imagined telling Allie about his day. The ruby merchant called, he would say. He wanted to know if I’m finally ready to sell. Out of nowhere, it occurred to Shapiro that the rabbi was angry with him.
Allie picked at her eggs and rambled on about the bicycling kidnapper and his pay phone ransom. Could one have a folie à deux alone?
“Things are heating up,” he conceded, playing along.
“He’s quite a wimpy fiend, isn’t he? Always pleading and getting tangled in telephone cables.”
Allie possessed the kind of beauty that was difficult to ignore, but Shapiro had been married to his hothouse orchid for long enough that her pale, watercolour allure had become routine, nothing more than the cultivated scent of a tea rose and sometimes, when he was distracted, she was merely a border flower. A marigold!
In short, Shapiro frequently ignored.
But Allie was no silently falling tree. Allie was no cat in a box. Allie was objectively beautiful, whether or not she was centred in the opprobrium of her husband’s eye. Starting from the bottom and proceeding upward, she had long, shapely feet, legs, fingers. A Modigliani balance of extremities, an Audrey Hepburn tilt to the neck, an oversensitive Woolfian nose. In contrast, her hair was cut short and on the bias. Complicated modern tufts stuck out all over as if to mime the passage of thought intercepted by impatient fingers.
She pulled absently at a lock of her hair: “Ears should be turning up in the mail soon.”
The ruby merchant called today, Shapiro imagined telling his wife. I told him I was finally ready to sell.
To distract himself he asked Allie if she’d heard of a cance
r divorce. Of course she had; she was a crack attorney, the best there was. Grounds for divorce included adultery, cruelty, abandonment, mental illness, and criminal conviction, she told him, rattling them off as if she’d recently been turning them over in her mind. Cancer was a no-fault circumstance that did not, ipso facto, constitute grounds but rather established a precedent by which similar cases might be resolved.
Cases of what? he wondered. Terminal illness? Existential despair? Failure of the imagination?
A cancer divorce was the worst, Allie explained, because it combined elements of all other divorces. To wit: betrayal, alienation, malignancy, and lies. It was about failing to balance the odds, she reckoned. It was a teeter-totter swinging crazily between love and love’s beautiful corpse. Someone fell ill and someone else fell out of love. The way she looked at him she might as well be coughing up the old one-syllable spitball, the single word-phlegm of disgust. Men!
The unspoken curse still ringing in his ears — Men! — he wanted to tell Allie that the cancer divorce in question had been initiated by the wife.
“What’s cancer good for if you can’t lose the extra weight?” Brodsky’s mother would like to know.
Shapiro longed to ask his wife if she would rise to the occasion if he got ill. Or would she fall instead: out of step, out of sympathy, out of love. Out of the clear blue sky with its patina of melting wax wings?
And if she still wanted him, would he want her back? The older he got the more he realized that what he had was never as beguiling as what he thought he’d always wanted. Was all of adulthood merely a couple of turns on a kid’s merry-go-round, each horse focused on the one in front, all the riders changing places when the canned music stopped? Ah love, that creaky old carousel horse! How like this penny-ante world to set such store by it.
* * *
The day before the tragedy, Maggie finally turned in her slice-of-life column about Brodsky’s mother’s cancer divorce (names and circumstances changed, naturally), to which she had perversely appended a trigger warning alerting readers to graphic content. She’d also included a spoiler alert on the grounds, she claimed, that no one enjoyed a surprise ending anymore.