A Work in Progress

by Barry Rachin

  “Got a cigarette?” Like an apparition from the nether world, a disheveled, middle-aged man with a lumpy, disfigured nose lurched out from an open doorway. He smelled of rancid body odor and his shirt pocket was torn away in a useless flap.

  What was I thinking, coming here alone without mentioning it to anyone? “Don’t smoke.” Tawana edged away and, while still eyeing the man, groped for the doorknob leading back out into the street.

  “Who’re you looking for?” The fellow’s eyes, bulgy and jaundiced, never strayed from her face.

  Tawana took a tentative step backwards but the queer fellow immediately closed the gap and was hovering so close she could feel his sour breath on her cheek. “Eudora Grossberg,” she mumbled still fumbling for the illusive doorknob. “I brought her some soup.”

  The man swayed back and forth as though in a drug-induced stupor. “Dora? She’s up in 3B.” Turning away, he hurried to the far end of the foyer and jabbed the elevator button several times. “Dora’s sick bad. Threw up twice last night. Can’t keep nothin’ down.”

  When the elevator door opened, the strange fellow stumbled in and held the door open for her. “Say, you wouldn’t have a cigarette to spare? I’m just about crapping my pants for a butt.”

  Tawana was feeling light headed. “You already asked me a moment ago, and I told you I don’t smoke.”

  Looking muddled, the man scratched an earlobe. “Funny, I don’t remember.”

  The carpet on the third floor landing was torn and one of the fluorescent lights recessed into the ceiling flickered erratically. He shambled down the unheated hallway a short distance and knocked at a door.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Just me,” the fellow replied, “and some fancy-shmancy lady. She didn’t offer no name and I didn’t ask.”

  The door opened. Dressed in flannel pajamas and bedroom slippers, Eudora Grossberg squinted myopically out at them. “I heard you were sick so brought fresh soup from the market.”

  If Eudora was shocked to see the store manager standing in the dank hallway, she didn’t show it. “How sweet! Sure, come in.” She held the door wide, and the odd fellow trailed Tawana into the efficiency apartment, flopping down on a chair near the window. “I see you’ve met Dennis.”

  The man with the shapeless nose grinned sheepishly, pushing his bottom lip out in a perverse caricature of a smile. "So how you doing?”

  “Hungry as hell.” Eudora removed a couple of spoons and bowls from a cupboard, poured a generous portion of chicken escarole into each, handing one to Dennis. They ate in total silence. When the soup was gone, Eudora had a mild coughing fit then turned to the man with the unflattering nose. “You didn’t jump out in the hallway and scare Mrs. Saunders, did you, Dennis?”

  “Oh no,” he blustered. “Didn’t do no such thing!”

  “Actually, he was quite polite,” Tawana protested. “Even told me what apartment you lived in and escorted me up here like a perfect gentleman.” Dennis sat up straighter in his chair and puffed out his lower lip, which was still moist from the soup. Then he rose and, without saying goodbye, wandered out of the apartment leaving the door wide open.

  Eudora shut the door. “Dennis, he’s a little …”

  “Yes, I can see that,” Tawana said.

  “I had a chance to read through your material.” She lifted the manila folder off a shelf and handed it back to the black woman. “From a technical standpoint, the writing is solid, but the author is among the missing.”

  “You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”

  “About the Robert Hayden poem,” Tawana continued. “It took my breath away.”

  Eudora put the soup in the refrigerator and rinsed out the bowls. “That visceral quality ... it’s what’s missing in your writing.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  Eudora sat down on the edge of the bed. “Don’t play it safe. Write from your private anguish… confusion and darkest fears.”

  “Like Hayden does.”

  “It’s a good place to start,” Eudora confirmed.”

  The apartment was tiny. The bedroom and kitchen merged into one living space with a closet and claustrophobic bathroom near the rear wall. By the window a computer rested on a table. It was a Windows 98 model, a prehistoric relic that backed up off old-fashioned plastic diskettes and couldn’t support any of the sophisticated thirty-two bit software programs that had emerged in recent years. The supermarket had shifted over to the Microsoft XP software in two thousand six and junked all the outmoded machines. Next month they would switch again to the Vista operating system - more elaborate gadgetry, bells and whistles.

  “We’re all works in progress.” Eudora Grossberg was sitting up on the center of the bed now in a modified lotus position. There was something transcendently beautiful about the awkward, introverted woman.

  Works in progress. Sadly, not all mortal creatures turn out all that well. A fleeting image of a defiant Reginald Owens flitted across her mind. A minute passed. Dennis returned with a fresh cigarette. He sat down at the kitchen table and smoked voraciously, discarding the burnt ash into an empty coffee cup. “This cigarette’s got menthol,” Dennis noted. “I don’t like menthol. It tickles my tongue.”

  “I want to apologize again for my faux pas—the My Fair Lady gaff. Who the hell am I, an upwardly mobile black woman, telling you or anyone else for that matter what the hell to do with their life?”

  Eudora exploded in a spastic coughing fit. When it was done and her breathing back under control, she blew her nose and lay prone, staring up at the ceiling. “Myra Dobbins is in her eighth month and fat as a whale,” Eudora spoke in a hoarse, nasally tone. “I’d like a crack at her job unless it’s already promised to someone else.”

  Dennis took a final drag on the stumpy, mentholated cigarette. He tossed what little was left of the butt into the cup, rose and went off to panhandle another smoke.

  “The job is yours.” Tawana also got up to leave. “I’ll post the position as tentatively filled first thing in the morning.” She placed a hand on the sick woman’s shoulder. “You don’t look so hot, Dora. Take the rest of the week off.”

  Later at home, Tawana sat in front of her fancy new computer staring at an empty white canvas. What was it Eudora Grossberg suggested? Don’t play it safe. Write from your private anguish… confusion and darkest fears.

  An hour later Tawana's daughter wandered into the room. “What are you doing?”

  “Writing the great American novel.”

  The girl pointed dismissively at the screen. “All you got is three lousy paragraphs.”

  Tawana leaned over and brushed the girl’s ebony cheek with her lips. “Consider it a work in progress.”