Postcards from Pinsk

by Larry Duberstein

  At the Mass. General he had felt a compulsion to replace the busted TV at once, to conceal the damage as it were. Now he saw there was none extant. The damage was history, like every Red Sox fifth-place finish. But the hospital had served a purpose. The hospital had galvanized him, shocked him back to sense and purpose. It was a hinge to swing open new doors of perception.

  He would replace the idiot-box all right, but not with another of its own ilk. Instead, on the Bombay table where late the sweet box sang, he was envisioning one last house-plant, something vibrant, a lush red speckled begonia. The whole room would definitely be better for it.

  22

  When you split an apple with your thumbs, or struck a bolt of ashwood with a maul, there, was a grain that could only be guessed at from the surface. You might slice down four clean quarters, or alternatively tear off some crazy shapes: every log was a sculpture of unforeseeability.

  It was no different with people. When trauma came, they broke according to the grain. A man abandoned by his true love might hang himself from the nearest chandelier or he might prowl the backstreets with murder in his heart, and do murder. Sit helplessly whimpering in his chair, or rush to solace in another woman’s arms. For Orrin’s money it made a wash of all reductive thinking, and put the pressure on every therapist every day. No longer content to go through the motions, he applied himself with a fierce high seriousness at work.

  Seth Lowry was his favorite. He enjoyed the boy and reveled in Seth’s trust and affection. (Of course the boy had nothing to say at home; his parents suffered through meals like monks under a vow of silence.) Orrin liked being brought up to date on adolescence—having recently wrestled with the symbolism of shoe-lacing, he was charmed to learn that a whole generation of boys did not tie their laces at all. But he had yet to uncover the grain of this perfect boyhood in crisis and until he did, until they did, the crisis would not truly have passed.

  Sinclair-Fugard was easier to understand, yet even harder to help. She was what they call in the trade a help-rejecting complainer; complaint itself was perhaps her therapy. Orrin offered to meet with the husband gratis, but this, she told him, was impossible. With his fierce foolish black African pride, Winston put no stock in therapy, and with her weak foolish white African guilt, Elizabeth had not even admitted to him she was seeing a therapist.

  Orrin secured the pro bono case of a young black man who had raped and killed his first cousin. Twice weekly he listened to the schizoid monologues of Kenny Fellows in a chill, cramped parody of a dingy institutional room at Walpole. Half man and half infant, viciously aggressive and pathetically vulnerable, perpetrator and victim, Kenny registered 50/50 on every test Orrin ran at him. He loved and he hated everyone close to him.

  Orrin had been frightened by clients before, yet never while being so thoroughly charmed. Did Kenny know right from wrong? Orrin was supposed to determine if the young man felt remorse, but the young man refused to discuss it until he’d had a chance to research all the legal implications. And he could not be fooled. Though he would not soon be free to publish it, Orrin wrote the case up, and polished it down to a trim readable forty pages.

  Meanwhile Clyde kept after him, half nursemaid half parole officer, and Elspeth did call, a month after Bemis the Shamus had filed on her. She couldn’t eat a bite (not a good time for her) but she was sending a cassette on which her lyrics should be perfectly audible. El said she wanted a copy of his exegesis and would be happy to eat the bite at some future time that was better for her. Gail did not call and Orrin called her just once, to record the message: “No messages. Doing well, hope you are too.”

  As May was ending in a procession of resplendent blue skies, he hired a car and treated himself to a quiet weekend in Truro. The main house was still shuttered, but Theo gave him the key to the tiny cottage and the boathouse. Out on the Pamet River in the floodtide at twilight, Orrin considered the lives of the saints and watched gulls wheel like boomerangs in the paling sky. He read volumes of lyric poetry—Yeats, Hopkins, Larkin—and ate the fettucini at Napi’s, in Provincetown.

  He remembered thinking how difficult it would be to find a suitable woman for companionship, and how simple to find a man. Now how much simpler still to seek and find no one at all? To take the universe as he had entered it, one small creature adrift in a limitless splendor. At North Truro in late May, lyric poetry made great sense to him.

  Back in town, he worked and walked, attended parties and shows. One afternoon he slipped into the King’s Chapel, wondering if he might add a strand or two of church feeling to the strength of the lyric poetry. A pleasant caretaker defined for him the architectural niceties of the building, all terminology and time-frames, but Orrin could barely see past the outsized white pillars and was nowhere close to focussing on such divine energy as may have been present. Too bad, for God would have been a nice help; luckily, Orrin did not need the help so much as he would have enjoyed having it.

  He was asked to dinner and he went, and ate, although privately he felt put off by the smugness and pallor of his generation. Knowing he had been no better (and probably a deal worse) one year ago, Orrin thanked his stars for the bliss of personal difficulty. MAN CRUSHED BY LIFE, YET SURVIVES! Wishing to settle all accounts amicably, he courted good will everywhere, though it was futile to explain the thing to Gail and he lacked the courage to try with Eli.

  He craved Eli’s reaction to Kenny Fellows, wanted updates on the Baker 27 and the real Man Crushed, but he did not quite trust himself with Paperman. A number of times he spotted Eli in the street, but it was never really him; always a perfect stranger in fact. Spotted him twice in one day in Cambridge—even went so far as to address one of him—and found it was only sleight-of-eye. Until the second week in June, he made no attempt at direct contact.

  Even this was accidental, almost—roundabout, certainly. It was a Sunday and Orrin had eaten his own concoction of stir-fry vegetables on rice, then taken the train to Cambridge to see a film. It was a warm, flawless night, dim dusk when he emerged at nine o’clock, and strolling under the stars soon realized he was just blocks away from Marcy Green’s apartment. As good a time as any. If Eli and Marcy were disinclined for company, they wouldn’t answer the door. If they did answer it, then perhaps the dynamics of the threesome could ease them past any lingering tensions …

  Two young women—one in windbreaker and shorts, the other in a thick bathrobe—sat drinking coffee on the railing of Marcy’s porch. Tenants in the building, presumably, they chatted with a conspiratorial delight that Orrin envied. And though they took no notice of him, their presence made him self-conscious as he rang the bell. Too late to chicken out, however. He took the dirty winding wooden stairs two at a time up to Marcy’s door, painted a pale blue, with the numeral four mounted in brass. The door swung open.

  “Orrin,” she said, peering past him and then back to meet his eyes. Marcy was informal, to say the least, in a cotton gown worn extremely thin. “Would you like to come in? I mean, of course you would—here you are, really.”

  “Yes, here I am. So a fairer question is would you like to have me come in. I should have phoned, of course, but it was a spur of the moment thing—just a hello to the two of you—not stay at all, you know.”

  He glanced at his watch-wrist, to mime a punctuation. (This was an odd habit, since he wore no wrist-watch on his watch-wrist, but it did help to orient him at times.) “Please say no if it is even the slightest imposition.”

  “No. That is, No I’m glad to see you. Come in. But Eli isn’t here, if that’s what ‘the two of you’ means. There’s only one of me.”

  “Oh well. Just estimating, you know.”

  “I haven’t seen him in a month. And wasn’t really expecting to, though I confess I thought you might be him. Since no one else arrives at my door out of the blue like that.”

  “Sorry. And sorry to disappoint.”

  “So am I, then. Shall we commiserate over a beer? Or I have some Daniels if you’d rathe
r?”

  “Maybe just one. Thank you, Marcy.”

  He spoke in a courtly, almost fatherly way as he took in the rooms, and accepted a glass. In the aftermath of the barroom brawl (as he had come to think of it), Orrin had been almost a teetotaler, but not out of principle.

  “You’re deciding whether to ask why I haven’t seen him—or how to ask it.”

  “Not at all. Quite blank, to be honest—a little surprised to find myself here. Did you know I hadn’t seen him either?”

  “I guess I figured it out. But you look very well, Orrin.”

  “The good weather helps. I dare not say, in mixed company, how well you look, dear girl.”

  “You dirty old man,” she said, smiling and covering up more conscientiously. Her cotton gown was worn through in one spot, where lamplight glanced off a shiny hip. But Marcy was much less surprised by Orrin’s remark than he was.

  “A clean old man, I’m afraid. Sorry if I couldn’t help but notice. Tell me how your work is going, with the young.”

  “Oh I love it, Orrin. I’m almost sorry summer is coming. Right now, I’ve got to decide about the summer program—it would be four weeks, so I’d still get a nice solid vacation …”

  “Sounds ideal. I’m glad the whole thing has worked out so well.”

  Marcy might not have been ‘good enough’ as a dancer, by someone’s standards, but her legs were surely good enough. As lean and shapely as legs can be, thought Orrin, and there was a distinctive beauty to her foot as well, in the strong delicate arch. Fragments of this girl’s anatomy seemed to turn inevitably to fetishes—the neck and now the feet—but Orrin could reckon for himself the truth, that he was isolating the parts to block a reception of the whole. Originally in keeping with the policy of denial, this was now perhaps a little trick for simple self-preservation.

  “I just got back an hour ago,” she was saying, apropros of nothing. And then in a curiously absent voice, “I was about to wash my hair.”

  “I’ll go. No reason not to wash it on schedule.”

  “No, no,” Marcy said, brightening. “It’s nice to have some company for a change. It’s not like I needed to wash my hair.”

  “I find it hard to imagine you anything but besieged by company. Have you been off on one of your skiing weekends?”

  “Orrin, it’s June? You might notice such details?”

  “Oh well, I’ve been off Weather for a while. Waterskiing, I must have meant.”

  “I was down in New York for the weekend, actually. Helping my mother move into a new apartment.”

  “That’s nice—your mother. You get along together?”

  “We have fun. But this apartment is an amazing dump. Roaches the size of my hand. Mice the size of rats—I’d hate to see the rats! We hauled away a junky old mattress and a billion fleas jumped us—and moved right into my socks.”

  “But you called this fun.”

  “You had to be there. We took some sandwiches to the Park and sat near a couple of Noo York ladies—fur coats in June and little white poodles on leashes? And those poochlets were so irresistible—”

  “You didn’t?”

  “We did. Our fleas had found a new home.”

  “Your mother participated?”

  “My sainted mother? Mothers are just old girls, Orrin. You should meet my mother. But yes, for sure she did.”

  “Ah the spirit of evil is in it, Marcy Green.”

  “That’s what we thought, too. But it seemed to us that the alternative was a rather dispirited moralism in which one refuses to contaminate the sweet doggie doggie.”

  “And continues to itch oneself.”

  “There’s the rub! And one never wants to be too dogmatic either, if you see what I mean.”

  They were doing fine now, feeling chumly. The trouble was that whenever Marcy rose, or shifted her weight, what he saw was too much thigh, and one time a soft shadow where the thighs intersected. For Orrin, not currently in training for the incursions of casual lust, it was quite literally dizzymaking.

  “But enough about these fleas. What have you been up to lately, Orrin? How have you been feeling?”

  “Feeling human. Doing I can hardly remember. But it’s been very pleasant lately, very positive.”

  “Another drink?”

  It occurred to him he might be missing a cue. On the lookout for his hint to go, he never considered a signal to stay. But Marcy was two drinks ahead of him, making herself high—goading herself to it—and it began to seem a seduction was possible. Overwhelmed by the mere possibility, blasted from monasticism in the presence of the shining flesh, Orrin fell back into polite weak-kneed confusion. So young and so lovely!

  “I’d better not. I have to negotiate my way back to Boston soon.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said, leaving the bottle for him. It was incredible, nothing less, yet he was now certain Marcy was moving her body (not by parts but as a concerted choreographic entity) in ways meant to shock him into action. Pulling her legs underneath her on the chair, she left him to stare at (or broadly stare away from) a parabolic slice of thigh rounding into buttock.

  Hardly in condition for this sort of thing, Orrin didn’t want to blow it either; did not wish to play the fool, or even simply miss a cue. He stood, without a plan in mind. Options included the bottle, the bathroom, the gate, and Ms. Green.

  But when she stood too, facing him, the matter was clinched. Not at all certain which he feared more, acceptance or rejection, Orrin took her shoulders and leaned forward to attempt a kiss.

  Marcy attempted it too, briefly. Like Orrin, she was wrestling mostly with herself. And just as he was impelled forward out of the awkward bind, she was in the end impelled backward.

  “Wrong,” he said. “Right?”

  “Right, yes, but not your fault, Orrin. Mine.”

  It was true, Marcy had been engaged in a seduction; seducing not Orrin but, again, herself. Only at the last had it gone bust.

  “It’s just a situation,” she shrugged. (To this meaningless attempt at good will, he could only muse, and shrug back, And what isn’t?) “Don’t feel badly,” she tried again.

  “Don’t you. I’m a big boy. But maybe I would, accept that drink now …”

  Orrin swallowed, breathed; swallowed again, breathed again. A sort of boy-scout-pace for social survival.

  “Well it is just a situation, isn’t it?” he could now concede, though he saw that she had turned more somber.

  “Both of us lonely—and fond of each other, too. It’s so trite, Orrin. But I think that loneliness is like a job description, either it fits you or it doesn’t.”

  “Certainly a mystery to me.”

  “I mean some people can’t be lonely. They aren’t lonely even when they’re alone. Consequently they aren’t alone very much.”

  “Consequently, eh? I wonder who you can be thinking of.”

  “It’s true, though—the things that make Eli happy on his own are the things that make him so appealing to other people.”

  “Oh I know. I really did come here looking for Eli, by the way. I insist on your believing that.”

  “Of course. And really, Orrin, it would have been perfectly all right if you had come just to see me. I won’t even die of your kiss. I didn’t hate the idea, it was just—”

  “Wrong.”

  “Right. You know why.”

  Orrin did know why, of course; the girl was in love with Paperman, and reasonably enough. There was nothing reasonable about any visions of himself in the rare embrace of this sleek, witty, green-eyed creature. Unfortunately it was not his reason but his unreason upon which she had almost inadvertently laid a claim.

  Mere chance that he found her, and mere mischance to find her in a state so vulnerable, so readily intimate. Moons in Jupiter, or something. But after an excessively civil leavetaking, and an extremely long walk home, his senses still brimmed with her: the soft lips, hard muscles of her arms, sweet bourbon-flavored breath.

  He was o
vercome with a panic made visceral—unless he could touch her again soon, he might cease to exist. This was wild, sudden, excessive, but it was there,’sapping him like fever. He could think of nothing else.

  Something kin to this panic had come over him once before in his life, long ago, in May of 1949, when Gail accepted a weekend invitation to Cornell in order to “broaden her experience.” Orrin took it to mean that after three wonderful years she was done with him and he waited out the weekend like a shock victim, a vacant husk.

  But Gail, the love of his life, and Marcy Green, a lovely girl he barely knew? It was blasphemy to consider the two together. He was reliving an emotion, that was all, a terrible emotional drowning. And however unexpected or unwarranted it might be, it was the same tonight as it had been then. Emotion, Orrin knew, was not always imprecise.

  In May of 1949, Gail had come back embarrassed, and vastly relieved. Grateful for his familiarity, their familiarity, so that very soon they were talking familiar family talk again, naming their prospective babies. The Cornell man had never even kissed her.

  Why this searing sense of loss now?—and loss of something he had never considered having? It could not be love. There was Gail, for one thing, and there was also the fact that it had not been love just prior to his arrival at Dana Street. It had not been anything at all.

  But it was something now. Intoning her name like a lyric, invoking the merry green eyes and the sweet jug-handle hip, Orrin was in straight adolescent meltdown. Shaky in the legs, hollow in the gut—all the clichés applied, and there was nothing he could do except try to intellectualize.

  Thus he ransacked the file cabinet for an ancient paper on the chemical basis of love. In it he had discussed the extent to which love was something “real” versus something “constructed”, and at what point the imaginative construct might become objective reality. There had been a lengthy section, closely argued, on the chemical aspect of “love at first sight”, Orrin recalled, but he could recall none of his conclusions. He had proved something in that paper, but what? More mystery.