No Lease on Life

by Lynne Tillman

  Ernest asked Elizabeth to attend one of the legal sessions with him. The office wasn’t far, and the meeting wouldn’t take much of her time, he said. Elizabeth agreed, shamed by his commitment. The meeting was in a shabby brown room, with fake wood furniture. The lawyer wasn’t a lawyer but a paralegal; she used the acronyms Ernest used and knew. MCI. PAR. Elizabeth tried to appear involved. She knew if this was a documentary she’d be caught looking uninterested. There were stacks of paper on the harassed woman’s desk, thousands of claims against landlords, standing for thousands of tenants in trouble. It was a sorry place for sorry situations. Elizabeth was desperate in desperate places. Hector the super’s daughter-in-law walked in to the squalid office. Elizabeth said hello, and everyone nodded. Hector’s daughter-in-law was having trouble with her landlord and her husband. Elizabeth knew that. She’d already had two kids and the two kids were miserable. Even before their parents separated, the kids were falling on their faces, having too many awful accidents, and were being rushed, bloody, to too many emergency rooms. The daughter-in-law was tragic at eighteen.

  Elizabeth worried that the girl would mention seeing them to Hector the super, seeing them in the free tenant lawyer’s office. Hector would tell the Big G. Ernest told Elizabeth they were within their rights, doing what they were doing, they were absolutely within their rights. Nothing would happen to them. He smiled benignly at her.

  Elizabeth wasn’t sure if being within her rights covered being seen as a conspirator, an agitator, and whether her rights would keep her from being tormented before being thrown out of the building illegally in the middle of the night. It wouldn’t happen, Ernest went on reassuringly. They were sitting tenants with leases. She was, she repeated to herself, a sitting tenant with a lease.

  One night, when no one was around, except the morons on the street, Ernest and Elizabeth collected evidence for their dossier against the landlord. Pictures had to be included with the letter to the city. They needed photographs of the filthy halls, walls, and broken stairs. It was so late, the building was quiet, like the Tombs, Ernest said grimly. They arranged to meet in front of her door. They moved stealthily through the halls. They skulked. The naked lightbulbs were stark illumination. The light accented the streaks on the walls. Shadows made it harder to know where the dirt was and also made the dark spots darker. It was just the way shadows in gangster and romantic movies obscure and enhance the seamy sides of life.

  The joke was that they needed photographs of holes in the floor. Any one of the tenants could have tripped or caught their heel in the ugly recesses, they could have fallen down and broken their nose. They could have fallen down and in a freak accident died because of the way their head hit the floor. If they were drunk, they could have tripped, hit their head, and bled to death on the floor. The tenants could’ve sued the landlord. Elizabeth thought the landlord would’ve wanted to repair things, to avoid being sued. But if everyone’s too poor to get lawyers, or too intimidated, why should the landlord repair anything, or if people like her—whatever that meant—couldn’t even respond when their rent was being raised unfairly, then landlords didn’t have to fix anything. She’d heard about someone who broke his arm falling out of bed to answer the phone, though his bed was on the floor. Accidents happen all the time.

  The ugliest hole was in the deepest shadow. It was too dark in the vestibule to take pictures. The light overhead was the dangling naked bulb that the landlord had recently put in, the one they wanted the tenants to pay extra rent for every month. It was weak. If anyone wanted to mug you in the small vestibule, you’d never see him well enough to identify him. The weak light wasn’t a deterrent in any way. Just the opposite. Ernest and Elizabeth were standing very close to each other in the small entryway. She could feel his anxiety. She liked it and hated it.

  —I need more light, Elizabeth said.

  —You don’t have a good enough view? Ernest asked.

  —I can see the hole with my eyes, but it won’t come out on the photograph.

  —Let me open the door, he said.

  He opened the front door as wide as it would go. Then he studied her with a worried expression.

  —Is that better?

  Is that better? she thought. The way he said, Let me open the door, his perplexity about photographing the hole, the way he said, Is that better? was priceless and ridiculous at the same time. She fell in love with him. For a minute. He changed in her eyes in the dark, ugly vestibule.

  She could fall in love with anyone.

  He was still holding the front door open so she could get a better shot of the hole. She knew the picture wouldn’t come out. It was close to hopeless, futile. The City might still be impressed by the documentation. They also had to get photographs of loose tiles and grease in the corners. There was a stair that slid out by itself, and anyone could slip off and kill themselves, it just came out, but it was hard to take a picture of that. They moved the stair to show that it was loose, to show it in its improper, dangerous position. Photographing dust on the walls was implausible. She did it anyway and looked at Ernest. He was smiling, reassuringly. He knew it was absurd. He wasn’t deluded, he was optimistic. Ernest was a mystery.

  She looked at his mouth. She had never noticed the thin scar on his chin. Maybe he’d been in a duel. He was a swashbuckler for tenants’ rights. She could fall in love with anyone if the timing was right and the place was right, or wrong. If she was in a room long enough with someone, with no other people around, or if she was trapped in a place, she could fall in love with anyone. Like an animal. She liked animals. They were adaptable.

  Anyone could fall in love with anyone, under the right circumstances. Maybe it was the survival instinct. Elizabeth wasn’t sure she had one. People wanted to continue themselves, protect themselves, get pleasure. People wanted pleasure all the time, anytime, anyplace, they’d do anything to get it. Everyone was capable of the most hideous behavior and crimes to get it. The pursuit of pleasure wasn’t pretty. It made people cruel during tender moments. If they weren’t really getting what they wanted, they could kill as easily as kiss.

  Ernest was driven. Driven was sex to her, sexy. Someone active and alive with desire for anything was sexy. Maybe not driven for a car, or ice cream, or heroin, because it excluded you, the possibility of you. She could kind of tell what somebody was like sexually, what their body might act like if stimulated, from the way they wanted supposedly nonsexual things. Nothing wasn’t sexual.

  Ernest and Elizabeth finished for the night. They had done the job. The Polaroids were flat and weird, but they were evidence. They showed something. Maybe the City would appreciate that.

  Hillary and Bill Clinton are driving around. They stop at a gas station. Hillary gets out and talks a long time to the gas station attendant. Finally she gets back into the car. Bill says, Who was that? Hillary says, He’s an old boyfriend of mine. Bill says, A gas station attendant? Hillary says, If I’d married him, he would’ve been president.

  Now Elizabeth wasn’t exactly seeing as she stared out the window. Things were moving, even imperceptibly. She couldn’t live without windows. She got bored easily. She needed outside stimulation. She even wanted the outside inside her.

  The street looked like desolation alley.

  A man walks into a bar. He sits down and places a gunnysack on the barstool next to him. It starts to move. The bartender says, What’s that? What’s in there? I don’t want any animals in here. Get it out of here. The guy says, It’s not an animal. Listen, I’ll show it to you if you give me a drink. It’s really amazing. OK, says the bartender, but it better not be an animal. The guy opens the gunnysack and a little man about twelve inches high jumps out. He looks around and sees the piano. He runs to it and begins to play. He plays beautifully. The bartender is astounded. He’s great, says the bartender, I’ve never seen anything like that. The guy says, Well, one day I met a gypsy woman, and she gave me a ring. She said, Rub the ring and make a wish, and I’ll give you whatever you
ask for. But you have to be very careful about your pronunciation, because I didn’t ask for a twelve-inch pianist.

  The moon was fading. The sun was starting to rise. It showed the top of its fierce face. It rose resolutely. Daily Elizabeth negotiated with nature. Anything natural was a problem.

  Elizabeth did contact other tenants, she did what Ernest asked her to do. One of the tenants was hard of hearing. Before she knew he was deaf, she tried phoning him. She raised her voice higher and higher and then she shouted into the phone and then hung up. She met him briefly on the street. She realized he couldn’t hear a word she was saying unless she stood in front of him so he could see her mouth move, and in addition she shouted. He was stone deaf. She didn’t know why he had a phone. Then she sent him a letter.

  Dear Herbert,

  I would like to talk to you about our protest against the rent hike the landlord is proposing.

  We are filing our objections to the Major Capital Improvements and would like to know your objections. We know that a former tenant in your apartment did file a PAR, Petition for Administrative Review, a while ago, but we do not know what the specific protest was—windows? a hallway problem? Do you know? Did you file anything? Do you have any evidence or documents about the building’s condition?

  Others in your building have also filed. If you could be of any help contacting them and finding out their objections, please let us know as soon as you can.

  You and I say hello on the street. Because you are hard of hearing, the phone is not the best way to communicate. Let’s meet in front of the building when it’s convenient. Please contact me or Ernest—he’s in in the mornings. We both have answering machines or actually you could drop a line, just send me a letter. Please contact us any way you wish. If you can’t reach people in your building, Ernest and I will write letters. But are the people who filed still living there? I couldn’t find any of them listed in the phone book.

  Many thanks.

  Sincerely,

  Elizabeth Hall

  Elizabeth worried that mentioning his deafness would offend him. She wasn’t going to pretend that screaming into the phone was easy or adequate. They had to communicate. Herbert responded. Maybe he wasn’t sensitive or maybe she hadn’t offended him. He was accustomed to being deaf. He was used to the stupidities of the nondeaf. He was happy to help, he said, when they met, face to face, in front of the building. She thought he said that, or that’s what she heard, because he didn’t pronounce words clearly. She had to interpret. She may have confused his complaints for others he didn’t have. She shouted her thanks, and they shook hands. He helped Ernest and her contact some other tenants in his building.

  Ernest and Elizabeth went to see one of them. He lived in the alleged same building as theirs. Architecturally it had been the same—Roy said she was going to see how the other half lived. The other half had been a mirror image, but the landlord recently halved all the apartments. Then reconditioned them. The ceilings were lower and made of a porous material. The apartments smelled bad. They lacked proportion. They were hopeless, shapeless.

  His apartment had no outside or available light. It was probably illegal to have just one window looking out on a wall. Elizabeth could hardly breathe. The place was a hole, in a desperate condition. The guy was cute, even handsome. Elizabeth knew that no one would expect the condition he lived in from the way he looked. It was like the super Hector’s apartment, though she’d never had the chance to enter Hector’s. It was smaller than Hector’s and the cute guy was the only person in it. All the shit was his.

  To him, it meant nothing. She could see that. His surroundings meant nothing to him. There could have been decades of vomit caked on the walls and floors, he wouldn’t have noticed. He didn’t see it or smell it. He must have also been like Hector in that way, except he was a rock musician, not a super. The decals on his guitar case announced his seat in the theater of life. Lobster of Hate was the decal she liked best. She’d heard them play.

  People live in very strange conditions. People live in situations no one talks about. People live in ways no one sees. People live in ways that aren’t described and have to be forgotten if they are. People live in ways that no one wants to hear about or can accept, so no one hears about them, no one’s told, no one listens. No one would believe the descriptions. TV sitcoms were descriptions of a very few situations. All situations might ultimately be comedies, but all comedies and situations weren’t on television. So few of them surfaced, so few situations ever lit up the screen, everything was predictable.

  The cute guy’s place wasn’t predictable, not from the way he looked. It wasn’t that unusual either, except no one talked about it. People live like this voluntarily. People are free to live like this.

  Ernest took notes on the yellow pad while the cute guy talked. Ernest was stable and winning. Elizabeth wandered mentally while Ernest talked to the guy. He was collecting information for their dossier to the City. That was their agenda.

  She was collecting other information. She was taking her own notes. She was looking around. She was taking in the guy and his place. It was hard. But she found a way not to be there. She wasn’t fucking the cute musician in her head, she couldn’t bring herself to do it, with him and Ernest in the room. Instead she saw the girl he’d brought back from a club, it was very late, and they were both high, drunk, stoned, and he opens his door, and the girl gasps, she has an asthma attack because of the years of dust, so they never fuck. Or, maybe they do fuck, she’s really turned on by the shit they’re fucking in, she’s from a strict family in the Midwest, or from an upstate New York farm, and she’s never seen anything like this, and she thinks it’s romantic. Elizabeth couldn’t remember if she found this scene romantic when she was twenty. Fucking on dirty clothes. She was too old to be young, couldn’t revive her adolescence like a comeback career. She didn’t think she’d be rejuvenated by fucking him. She could imagine it. The smells would be the same, the actions would be the same, nothing would be changed. But she was older. She was going to grow even older, old, and she was going to become less flexible and drier and more indifferent and she’d eventually become decrepit no matter who or what she fucked, and then she would breathe her last breath and expire. It was inevitable.

  The cute guy had filed a complaint with the City once, he told them. Ernest and Elizabeth had him sign his name to their petition. It felt like success. Then they started to leave. The cute guy said to Elizabeth, How’s about getting together again and talking about the situation? Ernest shot Elizabeth a look. Elizabeth said, Whatever, I mean, whatever Ernest wants…. She pretended she didn’t realize what kind of situation he had in mind. She wondered if Ernest was jealous. Ernest never referred to it. Ernest had deep reserves.

  The other tenants never materialized, they never answered Elizabeth’s carefully crafted letters. They could have been eliminated, through intimidation for one thing. It was not out of the question—Elizabeth could imagine it—that the renovations started and the tenants, the complaining ones, were not told when the walls were going to be torn down, because the Big G hated them, the way she hated Elizabeth, a little less, and some were lying in bed and the walls fell on them, so their legs were broken, or they were buried under the debris or in a wall. A cryptic end in a tenement crypt. Improbable.

  They were eliminated because the noise of construction, the daily crash and boom, drove them out, drove them screaming into the night, or, when the walls came down, and the vermin came out and bit them, the tenants’ legs became swollen and inflamed and covered in red itchy wounds, and, marked by disease, they fled, yelling about bugs and rats, about hardy roaches. They were driven out, and the landlord could raise the rent. Or the drilling and banging every day ended their relationships, decimated their tenuous loves, and they broke up, broke their leases, or they developed respiratory illnesses, living in dust for months, and they fled their homes, and the landlord had its way, forced them out. The landlord could raise the rent the way it
planned, and the landlord did raise the rent on the smaller, blighted apartments, on the newly fixed-up, reconditioned hovels.

  That was a while ago.

  Two women are at a hotel in the Catskills. One says, The food is terrible here. Yes, the other says, and there’s so little of it.

  Now a few people were leaving their floor-throughs or one-bedrooms, or studio apartments, to go to work. The blue collars. The housekeepers. The train conductors. The nurses. Some people were coming home. The prostitutes, the bartenders, the club managers, the clubgoers, the musicians, the alcoholics, the night people. There weren’t as many of them as those going to day jobs. There were several taxi drivers.

  One night a taxi—a checker—was parked across the street. Elizabeth noticed some movement in the front seat. She couldn’t tell what it was. She watched. The driver was getting a blow job. The prostitute’s head went up and down, up and down, up and down. Then it stopped, the movement stopped, and, like an animal stuck in the mud, the taxi driver, who was large, rolled over and lay on top of the poor prostitute.

  The taxi driver had a huge ass. The moon was out, a full moon, and the moon lit his ass, spotlighted it. If it was done in the movies, no one would believe it.

  He starts to fuck her and his big white ass, all lit up, goes up and down, up and down, up and down.

  Three people come out of the front door of a building. Two men, one woman, maybe coming from a party, maybe they’d had a menage a trois. They looked preppy. Maybe they’d had coffee. one of the men immediately spots the taxi driver’s big ass humping up and down, up and down, the moon shining on it, but he doesn’t want the woman to see. He positions himself between her and the taxi. But finally they all see it. The three stand there, spellbound on the sidewalk, watching until the taxi driver comes. Then the driver sits up, the prostitute sits up, and he starts the car and drives away.