There is a moment when one watches beloved Atlantis sink beneath the waves, and resigns oneself. There is a moment when one decides to cut the Devil loose because you can"t pay the dues. That"s the moment when one toughs-up and decides to let the fire consume the tabernacle, the holy icons and the f.u.c.king temple itself!
"I"m the only one who can press charges against you at this point,Valerie. Try to wriggle and I"ll chew on your eyes, so help me G.o.d."
There was silence at the other end.
"Give me a minute to think; it"s all too fast," she said. I could just conjure up a picture of a rat in a maze, looking for a wall to chew through.
"Sure. Take a minute. I"ll wait."
And while I waited, I tried to piece together the off-camera action that I"d refused to believe had happened. I"d needed that final punch in the mouth, the sound of her voice across the line from Sacramento, actually to accept what a jerk I was. But now I"d gotten the shock, and I started piecing it all together.
All the facts were there ... only someone afraid to find out what a patsy he"d been could have missed it. She had either met up with her boy friend at the Burbank Airport-a guy described in the police report from his purchase of the flowers sent to Valerie as "Mrs. Ellison" in the hospital as a "dark, swarthy guy," a description that tallied with Valerie"s mother"s recollection of him as "a Latin of some kind, maybe Cuban"-or had had him fly to Sacramento from San Francisco. They had shacked up at the Holiday Inn and something had happened to Valerie. Something serious enough for her to have to be rushed by ambulance to the Medical Center, at which point the boy friend had checked out on her, with my credit cards.
Now I had her on (I thought) a police hold.
"I can"t do anything while I"m in here," she said, finally.
"You"re not getting out." I was firm about that.
"Then I can"t get the money."
"Then you"ll go to jail. I"ll press charges."
"Why are you doing this?"
"I"m just a rotten sonofab.i.t.c.h, that"s why."
A few more words were exchanged, then she rang off. I turned to Jim Sutherland and said, "I may have to fly up to Sacramento. It looks resolved, but I"ve got bad feelings about the sloppy way the BankAmericard people and the cops are going at this thing. Besides ... I want to look at her face."
What I was saying was that I wanted to see if I could detect the stain of duplicity in her expression. What I was saying was I"d become a man with an ingrown hair that needed digging and tweezing; like all self-abuse, I needed to put myself in the line of pain, to relive the impact, to see what it was that had made me go for the okeydoke, what had made me such a willing sucker, so late in my life of relationships, making a mistake of placing such heavy emotions in such an unworthy receptacle. I was consumed with the need to understand, not merely to stumble on through life thinking my perceptions about people were so line-resolution perfect that I could never be flummoxed. She had taken me, and with such perfection that even after I had spoken to her in the hospital, even after I knew I"d been had, some small part of my brain kept telling me her expressed affection and attention could not all have been feigned.
Thus do we perpetuate our folly.
Fifteen minutes later, she called back, collect.
"What did you tell them?" she demanded.
"Tell whom?"
"The cops. A cop just came up to talk to me."
"I told you what I told them. That you were a thief and you were registered under an alias and I wasn"t going to be responsible for any bills you ran up and they"d better hold onto your pretty little a.s.s till the Laws had decided what to do with you."
"Are you going to press charges?"
"Give me reasons not to."
"I"ll get the money back for Jim."
"That"s a start."
"I can"t do anything else."
"The cards."
"I don"t have them." And she named her boy friend, who she said had kited off with them. That didn"t bother me; I"d already had the cards stopped. Larry Lopes (p.r.o.nounced Lo-pez) was his name. It comes back to me now.
"Okay. You get the hundred back to Jim and as far as I"m concerned you can move on to greener pastures."
She rang off, and I sat in the dwindling light of the sunset coming over the Valley to my hilltop, thinking furiously. Getting no answers.
I heard nothing further for several days, and when I checked with Dennis Tedder at the BankAmericard Center in Pasadena, I was informed Valerie was no longer at the Sacramento Medical Center.
They"d let her skip on the 23rd of May.
She was gone, leaving behind a bill, in my name, for over a thousand dollars" worth of treatments.
My feelings toward Mr. Tedder, Officer Karalekis of the West L.A. fuzz, and the nameless Sacramento Sheriff who had not only spoken to me, but had confronted Valerie and gotten an admission of guilt ... were not particularly warm. Kindly note: I have just made an understatement.
Things progressed from miserable to ghastly. The Superior Ambulance Service in Sacramento, despite several long letters explaining what had happened, and backing it up with Xerox doc.u.mentation of the fraud, continued to dun me for the forty-three bucks Valerie"s pa.s.sage from the Holiday Inn to the hospital had incurred. They finally turned it over to the Capital Credit and Adjustment Bureau. My attorney, the Demon Barrister Barry Bernstein, sent them a harsh note, and they finally cleared the books of my name. But the time spent, the aggravation when the nasty little pink notes came in the mail...
And the hospital bill. It kept getting run through the computer and kept bouncing back to me. Finally, I called the head of the business office at the hospital and laid it all out (again) in detail. As of this writing, that goodie is struck. But the memory lingers on.
And Valerie was gone.
In speaking to Tedder at BankAmericard, I discovered, to the horror of my sense of universal balance, that Bank of America really didn"t care about bringing her and Mr. Lopes to book. They apparently don"t expend any effort on cases under five hundred dollars. BofA can sustain innumerable ripoffs at that level without feeling it. (This I offer as incidental intelligence on two counts: first, to permit those of you who are planning scams against BofA to understand better the limits of revenge of that peculiar inst.i.tution, a limit that scares me when I think of how much they must gross to permit such a cavalier att.i.tude; and second, to slap BofA"s pinkies for their corporate posture on such matters; at once similar to that of the great insurance conglomerates that permit ripoffs, thereby upping premiums; a posture that encourages dishonesty and chicanery. A posture that has aided in the decay of our national character. It occurs to me, when I say things like that-though I genuinely believe them-that they sound hideously messianic, and I blush. So ignore it, if you choose.) Valerie was gone, as I said. When I called her mother, to inform her of the current status, she sounded very upset and offered to give Jim back his hundred dollars. I thought that was a h.e.l.luva nice gesture. Yet when the check arrived, it was only for fifty. Poor Jim. I would have made good the other fifty, on the grounds that he"d laid the money on her because he thought we were a scene, but it never came to that.
Two or three months later, Valerie called again.
I had tracked her through my own nefarious contacts, to Pacifica, a community near San Francisco. She had been hanging out with a ratpack of losers and unsavory types, and I knew where she was virtually all the time. But I"d told her mother if the money came back to Jim and the cards weren"t used again, I would have no further interest in seeing her cornered, and I held to that.
Then she called. Out of the blue, to snag a fresh phrase.
"h.e.l.lo?"
"Who"s this?"
"Valerie."
Terrific. What"re you selling this week, cancer?
"Are you there?"
"I"m here. What do you want?"
"I want my stuff. My clothes and electric curlers and stuff."
They were all packed in the bottom of Jim"s closet ... waiting. For what, we"d never stopped to consider. Maybe the Apocalypse.
"Sure, you can have your stuff," I said.
"How do I get it? Will you drive it out to my Mom"s in Pasadena, she doesn"t have a car."
I have heard of chutzpah, I have witnessed incredible gall and temerity, but for sheer bravado, Valerie had a corner on the product.
"I"ll tell you how you get it," I said. "We"re like a good p.a.w.n shop here. You come up with the fifty bucks for Jim, the fifty you still owe him, and we release your goods. Just redeem your p.a.w.n ticket, baby."
"I don"t have fifty."
"Ask Larry Lopes for it."
"I don"t know where he is."
"Ah, but I know where you is. Have your friends boost somebody"s hubcaps and get the fifty."
"Go to h.e.l.l!" And she hung up.
I shrugged. Ain"t life teejus, mah baby.
Later that day, Valerie"s mother called and offered to unhock Valerie"s goods for the fifty remaining. She made it clear she had no idea where Valerie was on the lam, but I don"t think anyone will consider me cynical for believing that may not have been the strict truth.
So Jim took the clothes out to Pasadena, picked up the fifty, and the Sacramento Medical Center canceled the bill as unrecoverable, and that"s as much as I know, to this point.
Well ... not quite.
I know one more thing. And it"s this: In every human being there is only so large a supply of love. It"s like the limbs of a starfish, to some extent: if you chew off a chunk, it will grow back. But if you chew off too much, the starfish dies. Valerie B. chewed off a chunk of love from my dwindling reserve ... a reserve already nibbled by Charlotte and Lory and Sherri and Cindy and others down through the years. There"s still enough there to make the saleable appearance of a whole creature, but n.o.body gets gnawed on that way without becoming a little dead. So, if Cupid (that perverted little motherf.u.c.ker) decides his lightning ought to strike this gnarly tree trunk again, whoever or whatever gets me, is going to get a handy second, damaged goods, something a little dead and a little crippled.
Having learned that, all I can advise is an impossible stance for all of you: utter openness and reasonable caution. Don"t close yourself off, but jeezus, be careful of monsters with teeth. And just so you know what they look like when they come clanking after you, here is a photo of one. The package is so pretty, one can only urge you to remember Pandora. Be careful which boxes you open, troops.
The Other Eye of Polyphemus This is about Brubaker, who is a man, but who might as easily have been a woman; and it would have been the same, no difference: painful and endless.
She was in her early forties and crippled. Something with the left leg and the spine. She went sidewise, slowly, like a sailor leaving a ship after a long time at sea. Her face was unindexed as to the rejections she had known; one could search randomly and find a shadow here beneath the eyes that came from the supermarket manager named Charlie; a crease in the s.p.a.ce beside her mouth, just at the left side, that had been carved from a two nights" a.s.sociation with Clara from the florist shop; a moistness here at the right temple each time she recalled the words spoken the morning after the night with the fellow who drove the dry cleaner"s van, Barry or Benny. But there was no sure record. It was all there, everywhere in her face.
Brubaker had not wanted to sleep with her. He had not wanted to take her home or go to her home, but he had. Her apartment was small and faced out onto a narrow court that permitted sunlight only during the hour before and the hour following high noon. She had pictures from magazines taped to the walls. The bed was narrow.
When she touched him, he felt himself going away. Thinking of warm places where he had rested on afternoons many years before; afternoons when he had been alone and had thought that was not as successful a thing to be as he now understood it to be. He did not want to think of it in this way, but he thought of himself as a bricklayer doing a methodical job. Laying the bricks straight and true.
He made love to her in the narrow bed, and was not there. He was doing a job, and thought how unkind and how unworthy such thoughts seemed to be... even though she would not know he was away somewhere else. He had done this before, and kindness was something he did very well. She would feel treasured, and attended, and certainly that was the least he could do. Her limp, her sad and lined face. She would think he was in attendance, treasuring her. He had no needs of his own, so it was possible to give her all that without trembling.
They both came awake when an ambulance screamed crosstown just beneath her window, and she looked at him warmly and said, "I have to get up early in the morning, we"re doing inventory at the office, the files are really in terrible shape." But her face held a footnote expression that might have been interpreted as You can stay if you want, but I"ve been left in beds where the other side grows cool quickly, and I don"t want to see your face in the morning with that look that tells me you"re trying to work up an excuse to leave so you can rush home to take the kind of shower that washes the memory of me off you. So I"m giving you the chance to go now, because if you stay it means you"ll call tomorrow sometime before noon and ask if I"d like to have dinner and see an early movie.
So he kissed her several times, on the cheeks and once-gently-on the mouth, with lips closed; a treasuring kiss. And he left her apartment.
The breeze blew gently and coolly off the East River, and he decided to walk down past Henderson Place to sit in the park. To give himself time to come back from those far places. He felt partially dissolved, as if in sending himself out of that apartment he had indulged in some kind of minimal astral projection. And now that he was ready to receive himself again, there was a bit of his soul missing, left behind in her bed.
He had a tiny headache, the finest point of pain, just between and above his eyes, somewhere pierced behind the hard bone over the bridge of his nose. As he walked toward the park, he rubbed the angles of his nose between thumb and forefinger.
Carl Schurz Park was calm. Unlike vast sections of the city, it could be visited after dark without fear. The stillness, the calmness: marauders seldom lurked there.
He took a bench and sat staring off across the cave of water. The pain was persistent and he ma.s.saged the inner comers of his eyes with a gentle fingertip.
There had been a woman he had met at a c.o.c.ktail party. From Maine. He hesitated to think of her in such simplified ways, but there was no denying her sweetness and virginity. Congregationalist, raised too well for life in this city, she had come here from Maine to work in publishing, and the men had not been good to her. Attracted by her well-scrubbed face and her light, gentle manner, they had stepped out with her two, three, once even four times. But she had been raised too well for life taken in late-night sessions, and they had drifted back to their meat racks and their loneliness mutually shared. One had even suggested she seduce a platonic friend of hers, a gentle young man coming to grips with his s.e.xuality, and then she would be fit for a proper affair. She had asked him to leave. The following week he was seeing the wife of a production a.s.sistant at the publishing house in which they all labored, and the girl from Maine had signed up for tap dancing lessons.
She had met Brubaker at the c.o.c.ktail party and they had talked, leaning out the thirty-first floor window to escape the smoke and the chatter.
It became clear to him that she had decided he was the one. Reality and upbringing waged their war in her, and she had decided to capitulate. He walked her home and she said, "Come in for a graham cracker. I have lots of them." He said, "What time is it?" His watch said 12:07. ""I"ll come up till twelve-fifteen." She smiled shyly and said, "I"m being aggressive. It"s not easy for me." He said, "I don"t want to come up for very long. We might get into trouble." He meant it. He liked her. But she was hurting. "It"s not a kind of trouble you haven"t been in before," she said. He smiled gently and said, "No, but it"s a kind of trouble you"ve never been in."
But he could not refuse her. And he was good with her, as good as he could be, accepting the responsibility, hoping when she found the man she had been saving herself for, he would be very very loving. At least, he knew, he had put her out of reach of the kind of men who sought virgins. Neither the sort who would marry only a virgin, nor the predators who went on safari for such endangered species were human enough for her.
And when he left, the next morning, he had a headache. The same pinpoint of anguish that now pulsed between and above his eyes as he sat in the park. He had felt changed after leaving her, just as he did tonight. Was there a diminishing taking place?
Why did imperfect people seek him out and need him?
He knew himself to be no wiser, no n.o.bler, no kinder than most people were capable of being, if given the chance. But he seemed to be a focal point for those who were in need of kindness; gentle words, soft touches. It had always been so for him. Yet he had no needs of his own.
Was it possible never to be touched, to give endlessly, no matter how much was asked, and never to name one"s own desire? It was like living behind a pane of one-way gla.s.s; seeing out, while no one could see in. Polyphemus, the one-eyed, trapped in his cave, ready victim for all the storm-tossed Odysseus creatures who came to him unbidden. And like Polyphemus, denied half his sight; was he always to be a victim of the storm-tossed? Was there a limit to how much he could give? All he knew of need was what was demanded of him, blind in one eye to personal necessities.
The wind rose and shivered the tops of the trees.
It smelled very clean and fresh. As she had.
Out on the East River a dark shape slid smoothly across his line of sight and he thought of some lonely scow carrying the castoff remnants of life downtide to a nameless grave where blind fish and things with many legs sculled through the darkness, picking over the remains.
He rose from the bench and walked down through the park.
To his right, in the empty playground, the wind pushed the children"s swings. They squealed and creaked. The dark shape out there, skimming along obscuring Roosevelt Island, was heading south downriver. He decided to pace it. He might have gone straight ahead till Schurz Park ended, then crossed the John Finley Walkway over the East River Drive traffic, but the dark shape out there fascinated him. As far as he could tell, he had no connection with it, in any way, of any kind. Utterly uninvolved with the shape. It meant nothing to him; and for that reason, chiefly, it was something to follow.
At 79th Street, the park"s southern boundary behind him, East End Avenue came to a dead end facing the side of the East End Hotel. To his left, where 79th Street"s eastern extremity terminated against the edge of Manhattan Island, worlds-end, a low metal barrier blocked off the street from the Drive. He walked to the barrier. Out there the black shape had come to rest on the river.
Cars flashed past like accelerated particles, their lights blending one into another till chromatic bands of blue and red and silver and white formed a larger barrier beyond the low metal fence blocking his pa.s.sage. Pa.s.sage where? Across six lanes of thundering traffic and a median that provided no protection? Protection from what? He stepped off the curb and did not realize he had climbed over the metal fencing to do so. He stepped off into the seamless, light-banded traffic.
Like walking across water. He crossed the uptown-bound lanes, between the cars, walking between the raindrops, untouched. He reached the median and kept going. Through the downtown-bound bands of light to the far side.
He looked back at the traffic. It had never touched him; but that didn"t seem strange, somehow. He knew it should, but between the now-blistering headache and his feeling of being partially disembodied, it was inconsequential.
He climbed the low metal barrier and stood on the narrow ledge of concrete. The East River lay below him. He sat down on the concrete ledge and let his legs dangle. The black shape was directly across from him, in the middle of the river. He lowered himself down the face of the concrete wall till his feet touched the black skin of the East River.
He had met a woman at a library sale two years before. The New York Public Library on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue had been clearing out excess and damaged stock. They had set up the tables in tiny Bryant Park ab.u.t.ting the library on the 42nd Street side. He had reached for a copy of Jose Ortega y Ga.s.set"s The Revolt of the Ma.s.ses in the 15th anniversary Norton edition, just as she had reached for it. They came up with the book together, and looked across the table at each other. He took her for coffee at the Swiss Chalet on East 48th.
They went to bed only once, though he continued to see her for several months while she tried to make up her mind whether she would return to her husband; he was in the restaurant linen supply business. For the most part, Brubaker sat and listened to her.
"The thing I most hate about Ed is that he"s so d.a.m.ned self sufficient," she said. "I always feel if I were to vanish, he"d forget me in a week and get himself another woman and keep right on the way he is."
Brubaker said, "People have confided in me, and they"ve been almost ashamed of saying it, though I don"t know why they should be, that the pain of losing someone only lasts about a week. At least with any intensity. And then it"s simply a dull ache for a while until someone else comes along."