A Strange Commonplace Page 7

  In Dreams

  I WALK INTO THE DINER AND SIT AT THE COUNTER, THEN order a piece of cheesecake and a cup of coffee, which, I’m pleased to see, are both in front of me just as I finish ordering. “Some service.” The waitress stands directly behind me and says that it’s because she’s got Monday off this week. “You can’t hypnotize people who don’t want to be hypnotized.” Three young men in a booth are shouting and screaming with laughter, then they smash crockery on the floor and throw the cream pitcher and sugar dispenser at an old man who is eating a bowl of soup. “Yankee bean.” The waitress walks over to the young men and stands there looking at them, her order pad and pencil poised for their orders. One of them slides out of the booth and slaps her in the face. “Monday off, you cunt?” The other two young men rock back and forth in hysterical laughter, punching each other’s shoulders wildly. I finish my cheesecake and one of the young men, who is sitting next to me at the counter, orders a piece of cheesecake, and when it arrives, pushes it into my face. He grabs the waitress by the wrist and roughly shoves his hand under her skirt. “I told him I have Monday off so maybe that’s why.” I look for my paper napkin to wipe the cheesecake off my face but it’s missing, as are all the napkin dispensers. “Some service.” I hear applause and look around to see the waitresses, countermen, cooks, busboys, and dishwashers crowded under the television set. On its screen, a heavily sweating man in a pale-blue silk suit, whose pompadoured gray hair has a jaundice-yellow cast to it, walks wildly back and forth on a stage. “Jesus is HERE, friends, Jesus is HERE, friends, and he is fixin’ to fuck you ALL UP!” The little crowd of employees applauds louder. I reach up to my face and find that it is completely clean. “Thanks for the napkins.” I look behind the counter to see the waitress being raped by the young man who pushed the cheesecake into my face. She is naked save for her white cotton anklets and white canvas shoes. Tears flow from her staring eyes as the young man drives himself into her. “What you look? I fuck you next!” I get up from the counter and walk over to the employees, who are clustered about a booth. The waitress is sprawled on her belly across a table while a young man brutally sodomizes her. Another young man waits his turn, panting like a dog. His fly is open and a bottle of ketchup protrudes from it. “Some dick!” I go back to the counter and finish my coffee and the waitress sits next to me in nothing but her slip. “They really hurt me, they raped me to death, do you want to do it too?” Her face is bruised and bloody. “It was probably hypnotism.” She lets her head fall forward onto the counter and closes her eyes, even though I am trying to put the white nylon uniform on her. The three young men leave the diner, laughing and shouting. “Good night nurse!” I have the waitress’s uniform on her, it was easy to do after all. “Too bad, youthful pals, that it is not Monday yet!” I open my eyes rather theatrically, raise my right hand, in which I have a ballpoint pen, and gesture with it. “I have expelled all illusion from this place.” There is the sound of gunfire from the street, a quick, scattered volley of shots. The waitress peers out a window at the street, then turns to face the suddenly crowded room. “Just outside Roxy Deluxe Nails somebody shot the youths despite their prayers. The motherfuckers are dead.” Everyone in the diner applauds, no one as politely as the waitress, who is in a clean pink polyester uniform. She seems to be at least twenty-five years older now. “I am not a nurse but I am pregnant. I’ll get rid of it Monday, if I get the day off.” Two policemen enter and sit at the counter. “I’ll go with the cheesecake.” “I’ll have a, let’s see, a piece of cheesecake.” One asks me if I know anything about three deadbeats who got killed outside.

  Movies

  HAL IS DESTINED TO BECOME A RICH AND FAMOUS writer; this is known by the fact that he carries a Great Book through the Mean Streets of his grim neighborhood, even into the corner candy store and the poolroom, and despite the mockery and bullying of the ne’er-do-wells among whom circumstances have placed him. Here among the decaying tenements of the Slums, his worn and thinly smiling Mother, constantly drying her hands on her coarse apron, save when she is patting her severe bun into place, knows that her Yossel will be a Great Success some day. She looks very much like Ann Revere or Dorothy Adams, although her name is Sarah. Yes, he will make her proud one day, with his good grades and deep love of Education, even though she worries, at times, about his fascination with baseball. “Eat, eat, my darling,” she says, setting a steaming plate of Hearty Ethnic Food before him as he sits at the oilcloth-covered table, immersed in a thick book of philosophical Ideas or great Poetry. He wouldn’t be here all his life, no, he’ll be rich and set Ma up in a swell apartment off the Park. It’s too late for Papa, of course, dead of galloping consumption after long years in the Factory downtown. There is, however, a Siren in his future, soon to arrive, Monica, a sensuous, depraved, shallow, diabolical woman who wears nothing but evening gowns out of which her snowy bosom yearns to emerge. She will, at the moment of his Explosive Appearance on the Literary Stage with his first novel, Let No Man Judge My Anger, drive him mad with an Unlawful Passion and lure him away from sweet Peggy, his blond American Wife, who resembles June Allyson, dear, faithful, patient Peggy in her ruffled apron, bent, more often than not, modestly, of course, over an oven out of which come those pies that even Ma has to praise, and does, for she has come to love Peggy as the woman her beloved Yossel has chosen. His rich and spoiled enamorata, a dead ringer for Gail Patrick, has, although only twenty-five, seduced, toyed with, weakened, betrayed, and finally destroyed, a jazz trumpeter, a playwright, two scientists, a bullfighter, a second baseman, and a professor. Her father, Charles “Big Cholly” Cunningham, who is always flattered to hear himself described as an Edward Arnold look-alike, is highly amused by his daughter’s vile depravity, as befits the heartless Tycoon, the Boss of Cunningham Mining, and the owner of West Virginia and most of Kentucky. “Another fly in your web, Monica?” he’d roar. “Ha ha ha! See that it doesn’t cost me too much this time, my dear!” Hal has almost stopped writing, for his days are a Mad Whirl of polo, croquet, riding to hounds, fast cars, and brandy, his nights a Dizzy Kaleidoscope of fine restaurants, night clubs, hot jazz, and champagne, and he has almost forgotten that he is really Yossel from the Slums. His Ma, settled in the beautiful apartment off the Park that he promised her so many years ago, richly dressed, resplendent in pearls and diamonds, and splendidly coiffed, is not, certainly, Happy, and longs for her cramped little kitchen in the Tenement, longs for her coal stove, her coarse apron, her groats and flanken. She has no idea what has come over Yossel, and his angry outbursts when he visits to find her on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor in her evening gown, shock her into tears. He cannot understand her when she quaveringly suggests that the apartment is too big for her, or when she complains that the maid, Annette, is snooty and intrusive. He also spurns the good advice of his publisher, the suave and sophisticated Carruthers Astor, a brilliant yet down-to-earth gentleman with a rich voice and lustrous silver hair, a man much like Otto Kruger, who warns him that it is time to stop carousing with that playgirl and get back to work on his second novel, to be entitled A Wilderness of Tears, “before the critics and the public forget you, my boy.” Yet Monica’s corrupt beauty leads him to ignore Everything, her smoldering fascination tempts him over and over again to shameful, unutterable weakness, her eyes and hair, limbs and lips and sophisticated accent bewitch him. And so now he finds himself, always, among her frivolous, rich friends, young men and women who know nothing of Lou Gehrig and Schopenhauer and roasting mickeys in the corner lot. And in the smoke and brittle laughter of nightclub and cabaret and jazz joint, his pen is stilled. Peggy weeps silently night after night, gazing at the untouched table setting and his unmussed bed in the beautiful suburban mansion that seemed, once, to portend Happiness for them. One night, when a weak-chinned and pencil-mustached drunk at the bar of El Congo, remarks that it looks as if the boy genius’s first book will be his last, Hal slugs him and is thrown into the street by the nightclub’s bouncer. Lying in th
e gutter in the rain, he sees Ma’s face, her eyes filled with tears. Monica, soon after, during a bitter quarrel about his refusal to wear jodhpurs to her father’s annual Spring Hunt, spits out, “You’re nothing but a one-trick pony. Ricky was right.” She throws her sable over her shoulders and laughs. “A cheap vulgar drunk from the streets! Good-bye!” Hal is left alone in the penthouse apartment in which their Unlawful Passion began. Hours later, the telephone rings, waking him from his brandy stupor. It’s Peggy, and she tells him, sobbing, that their beautiful Scotty is dying of a Dread Disease that has no name, not, at least, one that the doctors wish to utter. She is in the Finest Hospital in The City, and the Greatest Specialist in The Country is at their darling’s bedside, and yet… . Dr. Charles Trowbridge and his colleague, Dr. Samuel S. Hines, stand in the shadows of the gleaming hospital room, stroking their chins, while a sturdy nurse, holding a white-enamel basin half-filled with a nameless liquid, stands somberly behind them. “It’s out of our hands now,” Dr. Hines says. “We can,” says Dr. Trowbridge, looking at his watch, “only pray.” Hal stands at the bedside, looking down at his angel’s sweaty face, and touches one of her curls, while cold rain lashes at the dark windows. Peggy is beside him, groping for his nerveless hand, while tears gleam in her eyes, and Ma is speaking softly to Heaven in the guttural syllables of her native tongue. The hands of the wall clock turn with astonishing rapidity and suddenly stop. It is 8:00 A.M., and in the silence of the room, Hal and Peggy hear, “Mommy, Mommy, I’m sursty.” The adorable Scotty, as pretty as Connie Marshall, and just as cute, is smiling weakly. Dr. Trowbridge hastens to the bedside and places his stethoscope on her chest. “The fever has Broken,” he says. “She’s going to be Fine, just Fine.” Sunlight floods the room and the nurse bustles about, doing things, while birds sing on the windowsill. “Thank you, God,” Ma says, while she and Peggy and Hal hug each other. Soon the leaves are falling and Hal is at his desk in the little study in the cabin that they’ve bought in the Pine Woods. He sits at his typewriter, and, smiling, types PERMIT HER MERCY, Chapter One. Peggy enters with a tray on which there is a sandwich on home-baked bread, an apple, and a glass of milk. “No apple pie today, honey?” he says, and they kiss. Outside, Scotty runs and tumbles with Lobo, her collie puppy, while Ma sits under an old elm tree, her knitting forgotten in her lap. “Is it really true, darling,” Peggy says, “about the Pulitzer Prize? Really, really true?” Her eyes are shining with pride as she dries her hands on her ruffled apron and tosses her blond hair. Hal wipes a smudge of flour off her pert nose. The postman arrives at the gate and calls out, “Letter from New York, Hal. Looks important!” Hal squeezes Peggy’s hand and rises. In the soft light of the study he looks almost like John Garfield.

  Born Again

  RALPH SAID THAT HE’D EXPERIENCED A MORAL REBIRTH when he married Inez, a marriage that seemed incomprehensible to me and to many others who knew these somewhat fragmentary people—perhaps sketchy is a better descriptive. And while Ralph may have been reborn, morally or ethically or otherwise, this pious state did not prevent him from beginning an affair with Claire, a beautiful and somewhat unsettlingly placid woman who was, quite perfectly, one of Inez’s oldest friends. This surrender to the flesh, as the increasingly insufferable Ralph, in all his evangelical glory, might have put it, occurred just eight months into his conjugal annus mirabilis. To rehearse the ups and downs of this shabby amour, Inez’s suspicions—mundane, at best—the usual tears and quarrels, etcetera, would be tedious for me, and for you as well. It’s enough, perhaps, to say that the affair never quite attained even the lowest level of banality, the “star-crossed,” but wallowed just outside it, much as the lukewarm souls who are not permitted to enter hell congregate in its anteroom, bitching and moaning. In any event, Ralph and Claire blundered into her pregnancy, at which news Ralph, predictably and immediately, recoiled from any and all responsibility for his part in this misfortune. That Claire was surprised and hurt by this is, quite probably, a testament to her lack of acumen; that is, it seems clear that she never had an understanding of Ralph’s character, or, more accurately, his lack of character. After a few afternoons of sobbing and shouting and laying blame, mixed with loathsome prayers in which he begged Jesus to make Claire see her sins, he cut Claire out of his life. And then for some inexplicable reason, he put out the base story that Claire had been sleeping with her younger brother, Ray—a dim bulb, indeed—for a year or more, and was pregnant with his child. Perhaps Ralph thought of this as a narrative to set nicely in place as a counter to what may have been Claire’s desperate threat to tell Inez about the affair, such as it was. Nobody believed Ralph about Ray, most notably because he and Claire as an “item” had been an open secret for some time—to all, apparently, but Inez. If Claire were pregnant, the idea of Ray as the incestuous culprit was beyond absurdity. So Ralph, by this odious act, not only elaborated his petty, mean self, he also established that self as monumentally dumb. As someone said, not even Jesus on a good day could forgive such a prick. Claire, however, did go to see Inez, and, amazingly, told her that, yes, she were pregnant, it was true, and by Ralph! He had raped her in the bathroom at a party that they’d all been at a few months earlier, well, he didn’t rape her, but he took advantage of her drunkenness. This was, of course, a lie in every respect. Inez, who had never been reborn in the sublime mystery of marriage as had her spouse, believed it in all details, down to Claire’s description of looking at the black-and-white tiles on the bathroom floor as the deed was done. She took it in hook, line, sinker, float, rod, and reel. She wanted to. She began sleeping, quite openly, with Bill, a very bad guitar player but profoundly dedicated smoker of marijuana, hashish, kif, rope, old rags, hay, and newspaper; he introduced himself as “Tripper"; as Groucho Marx said, “Ah, he was a witty man.” Ralph soon left her, Bible and all—“I have my pride!”—I like to think of him saying, and went to San Francisco, Land of Heart’s Desire, where he worked for a time in the Classifieds department of the Chronicle. Claire’s child was stillborn and she and Ray moved to Phoenix. Soon after Ralph left town, Inez told Bill that she’d been having second thoughts and felt it was best for her to be alone for a while. Bill understood, surely, and asked her if maybe she could let him have fifty bucks or so, he had some dry cleaning and laundry and, you know. Sure, she said, you need clean clothes. Right, he said, his terrifying guitar slung over his shoulder.

  Snow

  HE STOOD IN THE WINDLESS COLD, WATCHING THE skaters at Rockefeller Center, their voices and laughter clear in the gray late afternoon. She wore a black silk blouse, they were in somebody else’s apartment, it was early morning. They drank coffee with the friend whose apartment it was and then he left for work. There was a girl in a bright green skating costume with a matching tam, the hem of the skirt trimmed with fur. They undressed and made love on the couch and then lay quietly, smoking, snow whirling past the windows into the street, the trees bordering the park opposite glowing with accumulating whiteness. He lay half-asleep, his lips against her shoulder, her breath warm and slow on his flesh. The girl fell and the young man she was with helped her up; neither of them could skate very well, but they were young and perfect. She put on a record that the friend had left on the coffee table: “You Better Go Now.” The girl had long, straight legs and good thighs but her physical beauty could not keep her from looking awkward on the ice, and this awkwardness, he knew, endeared her to the young man. Jeri Southern sang, a small and absolute perfection, long lost and almost forgotten: “Remind Me.” They made love again, the voice soft from across the dim room, the snow getting thicker, blunting the street noises, piling up on the windowsills.

  Remind me

  Not to mention that I love you

  The girl and her friend were gone, and it had begun to snow. They dressed and looked at each other and he felt such a sudden surge of misery that he thought he’d have to sit down. She put on her coat and a scarf. Do you want to have some breakfast? she said, it’s not quite nine o’clock, we ca
n go to the Automat on Broadway? He put his collar up against the snow and started walking toward Fifth Avenue. He put his collar up against the snow and took her hand and they started walking toward Broadway. Her hair glittered with snowflakes and her eyes were ebony in the platinum light. I don’t want to leave you, he said, I don’t want you to leave. We’re going to have breakfast, she said, and then I have to go home. Stay today, he said, or tonight, I mean come back tonight. Let’s not talk about this now, she said, please please, let’s walk and have breakfast and be with each other the way we can, all right? He decided to walk to Forty-second Street and get the subway at Grand Central. He didn’t feel so good, maybe he’d stop off at a little bar he liked off Vanderbilt Avenue. He could have a drink, or a couple of drinks, or he could get drunk. He stopped in front of a candy store and he held her at the waist. All right, he said, but this is really impossible, it’s sad and impossible. Let’s just, she said, let’s just—you’re going to kill me if you don’t stop saying what you say. All right, he said, all right. It was harder to be with her than not to be with her, that was the truth. She had a way of tilting her head, a way of just doing it.

  I had a feeling when I met you

  You’d drive me crazy if I let you

  A Familiar Woman

  DOCTOR GREENLEAF SENT HIS NURSE TO THE LAB TO PICK up a temporary bridge and two posts for a patient who would be in the following morning at nine. It was late in the afternoon and he told her to go home from the lab with the prosthesis—he’d see her in the morning. His last patient of the day, Claire Page, had to have a broken root removed from a molar, a procedure that he was hoping he could accomplish with little trouble. Doctor Greenleaf, whom his patients called Ralph, was nervous and excited—although he denied this to himself—for he would be alone with Claire, a sturdy, subtly provocative widow in her mid-forties, a strawberry blonde with a clear complexion and brown eyes. He was, to be blunt, sexually obsessed with her, and regularly fantasized about the two of them, rapt in their passion, together on a beach in the Caribbean, a chalet in the Swiss Alps, an autumnal path in Central Park, all of these civilized adventures preludes or postludes to shameless, burning sex. He would, in this blurry and absurd romance of a future, be free, of course, of Inez, his bored wife, and their two spoiled, graceless children; Claire would love him, deeply yet sadly, for she would feel the guilt of the femme fatale, the carnal engine that would shatter his troubled, unhappy, yet safe and, of course, lawful marriage. Yet their erotic attraction to each other would be so intense as to drive them to abandon and sacrifice everything to their sacred lust, a lust that thrilled and blinded and made them drunk; so Ralph knitted these clichés together. When Claire walked into his operating room, he was already half-aroused by his recurrent daydream and its elaborations. She settled into the chair and he lowered it to its horizontal position. He glanced at her legs, which, he was certain, oh yes, yes, he was certain that she’d revealed, as if accidentally, to mid-thigh. Sure, she had slipped her skirt up as she made herself comfortable in the chair. She felt, of course she did, she felt as he did! She smiled at him, nervously, pulling at her paper bib, her wondrous hair gleaming in the cold light of his overhead lamp. He’d use a light general anesthetic, he said, just a little, so she wouldn’t have to put up with the numbness of an injection, she’d be able to enjoy her dinner. She was pleased, for she dreaded dentistry, despite Ralph’s gentle expertise, he’d been such a wonderful dentist for her. She was under, and Ralph began working on her tooth, but it was almost impossible for him to concentrate. His breathing was ragged and he was fully erect. He watched his hands, tender and strong and caring, push her skirt up carefully and slowly, watched them fondle her belly and thighs and crotch, watched them unbutton her blouse and caress her breasts. He opened his fly and began to masturbate, then bent to kiss her between her legs. He was moaning, and Claire woke up just as his nurse entered the room. His nurse entered the room! For the smallest sliver of a second he thought that he could just kill the two women and flee. There is little point in detailing what happened after this incident, save to say that the newspapers and local television stations wiped out his career overnight, he lost his license, and he spent eleven months in prison after pleading to two counts of lewd and lascivious conduct, reduced from sexual battery and attempted rape. A lawsuit, of course, was pending. Inez took the opportunity to file for divorce so that she could marry a good friend of theirs, Marty, with whom she’d been sleeping for three years—although she actually made love to him on his office desk every two weeks or so. When she saw Claire she thought her a brassy, overweight whore, of course, and doubted that Ralph, that cold fish, ever did anything at all with her or with any other woman—awake, asleep, unconscious, or dead! When Ralph was released from prison, he left the state when it was legally permissible to do so and disappeared for three years, after which he landed, as they say, in Oldsmar, Florida, a small gulf town, with a license to practice in the state in hand. He opened an office, hired a nurse and a part-time receptionist, a woman older than he, whom he married a year later. One afternoon, a voluptuously built woman in her mid-forties came into the office to make an appointment for an initial checkup and routine hygiene and cleaning. She was a widow, it turned out, and her name, quite unbelievably, was Claire. She was, too, a strawberry blonde, although this state had been attained with professional aid. But still. But still. Coincidence, as life proves over and over again, is so routine as to beggar comment. He smiled warmly at Claire as his wife made the appointment and noticed that her legs and hips were very much like Claire’s, they were Claire’s. Perhaps she would need, in the future, some extensive dental work, a new partial; or perhaps she would have to come in late, the last patient; she might need emergency care on a Sunday. This time he’d give Claire enough to keep her peacefully under for a good while, long enough for him to show her that he still loved her, and to do his work the right way, befitting a doctor of his experience and abilities.