After Claude (3 page)

“Claude darling, let’s not waste our breath on that piece of garbage. Admit you were as bored as I. I mean, two solid hours of crawling, trudging, groaning, it could depress even a normal person. Everyone mumbling and dragging around like a pack of junkies. And Salome’s dance. I ask you? Every religious sect agrees it was a sexy dance, but Mr. Authentic is so determined to stupefy his public that he finds a pudgy twelve-year-old that your raving child molester would scorn, he stuffs her in a cardboard poncho, she does a few clumsy umbrella steps, and King Herod, equally obese, rushes her a gourmet dish, namely the head of John the Baptist. It makes you wonder if the sins Christ was ranting about all had to do with overeating. Are we to believe that Christianity was nothing more than the feeble beginnings of Weight Watchers?”

Claude, his arms tightly wrapped around his chest, his crossed legs encased in tight white jeans, said, “I don’t want to discuss the movie.”

“I couldn’t agree more. To hell with the rotten movie. Admit it was torture, so we can talk about us.”

Claude sighed.

“Stop suffering so much,” I cried. “It’s getting all over the taxi.”

A tiny, stubborn, human part of me needed to hear that Claude hated the movie, because, believe me, it’s no holiday for a woman of my refined tastes to discover she’s living with a fool.

I closed my eyes as the taxi shot across Fourteenth Street, barely scraping past a cross-town bus. The driver reacted the way all cab drivers react when they cross Fourteenth Street, which is as though they’ve entered the Inferno. He couldn’t have been more lost or confused. This was the point at which Claude was stuck with the terrible possibility of the meter suddenly doubling. He all but rested his head in the goon’s lap, guiding him down Seventh Avenue and into Bleecker Street, as if he were docking the
Queen Mary.
We never got driven to the door, because that meant circling an entire city block. The taxi came to a shuddering halt at the corner of Bleecker and Morton, Claude breathlessly absorbed in calculating a ten percent tip. The cabbie grudgingly dropped coins, one by one, into Claude’s extended palm, neither of the men considering my prolonged exposure to heat prostration. The transaction completed, Claude went dashing down the street without waiting for me. I scurried after him, already concerned with other matters, such as how I could get to the top floor of our brownstone without being spotted by the psychopath who occupied the ground-floor apartment and spent her days and nights watching for me with murder in her heart.

D
URING
my six months of drudgery with Claude, we shared his top-floor apartment in a brownstone on Morton Street. It was a terrific floor-through apartment with two huge rooms, a separate kitchen, beamed ceilings, real plank floors, a skylight, and a fireplace that worked. Talk about the Jewish Conspiracy. I’d like to meet one Frenchman living in anything but splendor anywhere in the world. The lease on the apartment was held by French Television, C.I.A. agents please note.

Claude was supposedly covering news and producing documentaries on the American way of life, for instant viewing in France, in order to make the inhabitants of that cemetery even more smug about their beautifully preserved plots and monuments. Claude’s reports were like riot commercials. Student riots, antiwar riots, gay-liberation riots, convention riots, prison riots, ghetto riots; in short, Democracy at work. The only faces he ever filmed were covered with blood or gas masks. His documentaries tore off the masks, so you got the backs of people’s heads describing how they became junkies, prostitutes, criminals, old, sick, and crazy. It was a genuine treat to watch one of Claude’s specials; rush home, lock all the doors and windows, check out the closets and under the beds, and commence sewing the family jewels into the old fur coat.

To Claude’s prejudiced eyes, everything and everyone American was revolting, with the possible exception of migratory workers and Hopi Indians, and you can imagine how they hung around us in droves. This business of Claude being so madly in love with the so-called underprivileged is a joke I’d like to clear up. He made innumerable Communist speeches about injustice and corruption, but when it came down to real life, all he actually cared about were titles and tits. His voice would go hushed and worshipful when he spoke of anyone who came from a family, in quotes, as if the rest of us had emerged fully formed from garbage pails. All these real people from real families were French, naturally, because for some mysterious reason, when it came to Americans, he made no distinctions between inspired intellectuals and the bums blocking their doorways.

I met Claude the freezing February night of Rhoda-Regina’s convenient nervous breakdown. Rhoda-Regina is my ex-best friend and current enemy. I had been crashing in her garden apartment following my return to America after five enriching years abroad. Claude found me huddled on the bottom step of the stoop, after R.-R., in a unique display of American hospitality, had flung all my belongings onto the street. As a matter of fact, I met all my neighbors that famous night, because when a mad woman is screaming and throwing things and is finally bundled off to Bellevue, New Yorkers will gather around and gawk. Only Claude, being a foreigner, offered to help and whisked me up to his top-floor apartment to be a combination concubine-drudge. I have since realized that he hoped I was a victim of rape, or at least a junkie, two of his favorite American specimens.

I went up the stairs behind Claude, tiptoeing like a thief, out of consideration for R.-R., who was long out of the hospital but subject to relapses at the sound of my voice or footsteps. It is ironic how my behavior is determined by the insanity that surrounds me.

We got safely into the apartment, and for a moment I thought we had wandered into the prison laundry as depicted in
The Big House.
The drenching heat had solidified into vapor, and I blindly fumbled for the overhead-light switch. Claude would sooner have seen me dead than leave the air conditioner operating in his absence, which meant that by the time we cooled the oven under the roof, we were both too wasted for it to matter.

“Whew,” I gasped, “they’ve overloaded the boilers. This tub is about to explode. Off with your shoes, man, be ready to abandon ship.”

Claude’s heavy-lidded eyes were fixed on me in hate and loathing. It was too hot to contend with his temperament. I kicked off my sandals and proceeded to unbutton my sleazy cotton shirtwaist. I walked to the window and pressed Mr. Fedder’s magic button. Claude still didn’t move. I unhooked my clinging, shapeless bra and dropped it onto the floor.

“Are you planning to stand there all night, Claude? Are you by any chance the new warden in this hole?”

No answer. I headed for the bedroom, where, blinded by droplets of sweat dripping into my eyes, I managed to find my Japanese kimono mixed in with the sheets on the unmade bed. When I came back into the living room, Claude was still standing sentinel at the door.

“Is anything bothering you?”

He responded with an unintelligible mumble.

“Please.” I folded my robe over my damp belly and tied the rope sash. “Speak up. I’m not Helen Keller. I can’t put my fingers on the radiator and hear what you’re saying.”

In spite of the heat I felt the slight, familiar stirrings of appetite. I advanced to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. The cool air trapped inside felt good, but regardless of weather, opening refrigerator doors makes me happy. My Jewish abductors were insane on the issue of opening refrigerators. If you so much as tried to sneak a look at the pickings, one of them would come running in after you, yelling, “Close that door. All the food will rot.” As if you were unsealing King Tut’s tomb.

I carried the plate of curly roast beef into the living room and put it on the round oak table where we did our eating.

“Are you hungry?” The creep still didn’t answer. The fact is that Claude, not having been raised by kidnappers, was habituated to regular meals, not scavenging.

“I’m not hungry.” It walked! It talked! It went to the kitchen and got itself a can of beer.

“I can’t find the opener,” he complained, in that same hurt voice I’d been tolerating for two full weeks.

“Why don’t you telephone Paul Newman? I read he always wears a can opener around his neck, like a cross. Maybe he’ll lend you his.”

Claude broke his heart and tore off the aluminum ring on the beer can. He really didn’t approve of these modern conveniences. Better for me to do nothing but keep track of his household utensils.

“That movie has certainly put you in a wonderful mood,” I told him, twisting my wet hair into a knot and pinning it to my skull. “Remind me not to attend any more public executions with you.”

“That’s the last movie I’m taking you to.”

“I want that in writing.”

“You don’t enjoy anything but those stupid quiz shows you watch all day.”

He came and sat in the captain’s chair opposite mine and rested his arm on the oak table. The apartment was furnished very Village Traditional. A bit of Americana, Japanese lampshades, Swedish rugs, Mexican candlesticks, Indian bedspreads, and for color, buckets of sickly avocado plants that Claude accused me of drowning.

I made myself a roast-beef sandwich with one slice of rye bread and folded the tidbit into my mouth. Claude followed the action as if I were a boa constrictor swallowing a pig.

“If looks could kill,” I told him in between chews, “you’d soon find but that yours couldn’t.”

I adjusted my robe. “So tell me what was so inspiring about that movie? If it was about any other Jewish fag and his mother, would you be so impressed?”

Claude sighed.

“Stop sighing. What terrible thing am I doing to you? I figure we went to a movie, we got home alive, now let’s discuss it like two normal human beings.”

“You don’t need me for that. Why don’t you do six normal people discussing it?”

“Is that supposed to mean that you don’t feel you’re getting equal time in our exchange?; Because, if so, I feel obliged to tell you that it seems to me I spend close to one hundred percent of my time asking you what you think about things and getting grunts for answers. Legally, I should be required to apply for a cabaret license in order to live with you. For instance, I’d like to ask you something right now. Why are you looking at me as though red ants are crawling out of my mouth?”

“Don’t be disgusting.”

“Okay, black ants. And what is this new development that everything I say is nauseating or disgusting?”

Claude’s face went soft with suffering. He became the handsome young priest trying to coax the suicidal maniac off the ledge of the thirty-seventh floor.

“You’re right, Harriet. I know I’m being hard on you, but that’s because there’s something I want to talk to you about and I’m finding it difficult.”

“Take your time,” I said playfully, “just don’t take as long as that fag took to die.”

“Stop calling him a fag,” Claude shouted, his sallow skin suddenly flushed. “You make me sick.”

“Thank you,” I shouted back, because there’s a limit to even the most understanding woman’s capacity for abuse.

“I make you sick? Some skinny guy schlepping a hunk of wood that weighs a ton up a steep hill for the express purpose of getting nailed to it, that was beautiful? But I make you sick?”

“We won’t discuss the movie,” he announced for the millionth time, though it seemed to me he was the one who kept bringing it up. He spread his hands flat on the table and stared at his fingers, waiting no doubt for a larger crowd to gather.

He spoke slowly. “Harriet, we can’t go on living together.”

“Because of a lousy movie?” I exclaimed in disbelief.

“Forget the movie. The movie is typical. If anything gives me pleasure, you automatically hate it.”

“Not true. You’re wrong. It’s crazy to twist my opinions into personal attacks, Claude. I swear, I genuinely hated it. Excuse me for not being the Marquis de Sade, but my idea of entertainment is not to watch someone bleed to death, even if he is God.”

His voice got soft and mean. “Has anyone ever told you what a terrible bore you are?”

“Me a bore?” I laughed, amazed that the rat would resort to such a bizarre accusation. I have since learned never to be amazed at what men will resort to when cornered by a woman’s Intelligence.

“When you get an idea in your head, when you have an opinion, which is always, you’ve got to make a speech about it, not once, but ten times. If anyone manages to break in, you bury them; you grind them into little pieces with your big mouth. I’ve had it, Harriet. I want you out.”

“Out? Out where? What are you talking about?” In my alarm I plunged the mustard knife into the heart of the macaroni. “Okay, I get a bit carried away. Maybe I’m too insistent, too eager to communicate. But that just runs in my blood. It’s very American to share experiences.”

I felt myself babbling to gain time, to find a foothold, because the alarming depths of Claude’s anger made me feel like the innocent wife who has stopped to admire a sunset and is about to be pushed off the cliff by her homicidal husband.

“Like hell. You don’t communicate. You trample over other people’s feelings. You don’t even listen to what anyone else says, except to tell them how stupid they are. Anyway, I don’t wish to share your experiences any more.” His voice was shaking with fury.

“Not true, not true. You’re misinterpreting my enthusiasm. It’s in my nature to have strong opinions. But your reactions are much more important to me than good sense. For all I know, it was a wonderful movie.”

“I am not simply talking about your boring opinions but about the disgusting way you go berserk when I’m not in total agreement with you. I must like what you like, and hate what you hate, which is everything, or I get no peace. Harriet, this battle between us must end.” He slammed his beer can on the table.

I looked at him in stupefied silence, unable to speak, because in order to perform that function, it is necessary to swallow. My protest stayed lodged in my throat. Never, not for one second, had it occurred to me that we were battling.