Bluebeard's Egg (9 page)

“I’ve got myself an accountant,” Loulou said loudly, to break the spell.

“You’ve
got
him, but have you
had
him yet?” Bob said. The others laughed, all except Calvin, and began discussing the accountant’s chances of escape from Loulou, which they rated at nil. They went on to detail the positions and locations in which Loulou could be expected to finally entrap him – under the desk, on top of the filing cabinet – and the injuries he would sustain. They pictured him fending her off with pens.

Loulou gnawed grimly at a chicken leg. They didn’t believe any of this would happen, of course. They were too conceited: having known them, how could she stoop so low? Little did they know.

Loulou approaches the door of the dry-goods store, whistling Mozart between her teeth. Partly she’s thinking about the accountant and what his body might be like under his suit, but partly she’s thinking about tomorrow, when she has to start work on an order of twelve slab planters for one of her good customers. Either way, it’s a question of the right placement of the feet. Like a judo expert, which she is not, Loulou is always conscious of the position of her feet in relation to the rest of her.

The accountant is waiting for her, shadowy behind the dust-filmed glass of the door. It’s after six and the store is closed. Loulou said, slyly, that she couldn’t make it any earlier. She didn’t want the little bald-headed man lurking around.

The accountant unlocks the door and lets her in. They go back through the smell of wool and freshly torn cotton into his office, and Loulou dumps out her bag of receipts (done up in bundles, with elastic bands: she’s not without a sense of decency), all over his desk. He looks pleased, and says they certainly do have a lot of things to catch up on.

He brings in some cups of tea, sits down, picks up a newly sharpened pencil, and asks her how much of her living space can be written off as working space. Loulou explains about the coach-house. She doesn’t use any of the actual house herself, she says, not for working, because the poets are always using it. Sometimes they live there too, though it depends.

“On what?” says the accountant, frowning a little.

“On whether they’re living anywhere else,” says Loulou.

When he hears that they don’t pay rent, the accountant makes a tut-tutting sound and tells Loulou that she should not let things go on like this. Loulou says that the poets never have any money, except sometimes from grants. The accountant gets out of his chair and paces around the room, which is difficult for him because Loulou is taking up a lot of space in it. He says that Loulou is allowing herself to be imposed upon and she should get herself out of this situation, which is doing her no good at all.

Loulou may have felt this herself from time to time, but hearing the accountant say it right out in the open air disturbs her. Where would the poets go? Who would take care of them? She doesn’t wish to dwell on this right now, it’s far too complicated, and perhaps even painful. Instead she stands up, plants her feet firmly apart, intercepts the accountant as he strides past, and, with a tug here and a little pressure there, ends up with his arms more or less around her. She backs herself up against the desk for balance, puts one hand behind her, and upsets his cup of tea into the wastepaper basket. He doesn’t notice a thing; luckily it isn’t hot.

After a short time the accountant takes off his silver-rimmed glasses, and after another short time he says, in a voice half an octave lower than his normal one, “I wasn’t expecting this.” Loulou says nothing – she lies only when absolutely necessary – and starts undoing his vest buttons. When she’s down to the shirt he lifts his head, glances around the room, and murmurs, “Not here.” Which is just as well, because he hasn’t got his carpet yet and the floor is painted concrete.

He leads her into the darkened dry-goods store and begins sorting through the bolts of cloth. Loulou can’t figure out what he’s doing until he selects a roll of dark-pink velvet, unfurls it, and lays it out on the floor behind the counter, with a little flourish, like a cloak over a mud puddle. Loulou admires the way he does this; he’s too deft not to have done it before. She lies down on the pink velvet, reaches up for him, and after a few minutes of shaky-fingered fumbling with the clothes they make love, somewhat rapidly. This floor is concrete too and the pink velvet isn’t very thick. Loulou worries about his knees.

“Well,” says the accountant. Then he sits up and starts putting on his clothes. He does this very skilfully. Loulou wishes he would wait a few minutes – it would be friendlier – but already he’s doing up his buttons. Maybe he’s afraid someone will come in. He rolls up the pink velvet and inserts the bolt back into its proper slot on the shelf. They go back to his office and he locates his glasses and puts them on, and tells her he’ll have some figures for her in maybe two weeks. He doesn’t say anything about seeing her in the meantime: perhaps his image of her as a delicate artistic flower has been shaken. He kisses her good-bye, though. The last thing he says to her is, “You shouldn’t let people take advantage of you.” Loulou knows he thinks he’s just done this very thing himself. He’s like the poets: he thinks she can’t see through him.

Loulou decides to walk back to her house, which is at least a mile away, instead of taking the streetcar. She needs time to calm down. On the one hand she’s elated, as she always is when she accomplishes something she’s set out to do, but on the other hand she’s disoriented. Is she different now, or not? Apart from the actual sex, which Loulou would never knock, and it was fine though a little on the swift side, what has it all boiled down to? She doesn’t feel more known, more understood. Instead she feels less understood. She feels nameless. It’s as if all those words which the poets have attached to her over the years have come undone and floated off into the sky, like balloons. If she were one of the poets, she would get something out of this: this is exactly the sort of thing they like to write about. A non-event, says Phil, is better to write about than an event, because with a non-event you can make up the meaning yourself, it means whatever you say it means. For the poets nothing is wasted, because even if it is, they can write about the waste. What she ought to do is throw them all out on their ears.

Loulou reaches her three-storey red-brick house and notes, as she always does, the mangy state of the lawn. The poets are divided on the subject of the lawn: some of them think lawns are bourgeois, others think that to say lawns are bourgeois is outdated. Loulou says she’ll be damned if she’ll cut it herself. The lawn is a stand-off. She goes up the front walk, not whistling, and unlocks her front door. In the hallway the familiar smell of the house envelops her, but it’s like a smell from childhood. It’s the smell of something left behind.

The poets are in the kitchen, sitting around the table, which is littered with papers and coffee cups and plates with crumbs and smears of butter on them. Loulou looks from one poet to another as if they are figures in a painting, as if she’s never seen them before. She could walk out of this room, right this minute, and never come back, and fifty years later they would all still be in there, with the same plates, the same cups, the same crumby butter. Only she doesn’t know where she would go.

“We’re out of muffins,” says Bob.

Loulou stares at him. “Piss on the muffins,” she says at last, but without conviction. He looks tired, she thinks. He is showing signs of age, they all are. This is the first time she’s noticed it. They won’t go on forever.

“Where’ve you been?” says Calvin. “It’s past seven-thirty.” This is his way of saying they want their dinner.

“My God, you’re helpless,” says Loulou. “Why didn’t you just phone out for some pizza?” To her knowledge they have never phoned out for pizza. They’ve never had to.

She sits down heavily at the table. The life she’s led up to now seems to her entirely crazed. How did she end up in this madhouse? By putting one foot in front of the other and never taking her eyes off her feet. You could end up anywhere that way. It isn’t that the accountant is normal, any more than the poets are; nor is he a possible alternative. She won’t even sleep with him again, not on purpose anyway. But he is other, he is another. She too could be other. But which other? What, underneath it all, is Loulou really like? How can she tell? Maybe she is what the poets say she is, after all; maybe she has only their word, their words, for herself.

“Pizza”
Bob is beginning, in an injured tone. “Pig of a dog.…” But the others shut him up. They can see that something is wrong, and they very much don’t want to know what.

“Reify the pizza,” says Calvin to Phil. “You use phone. Is modern western invention of technology.” Now they’re pretending to be foreigners of some kind. This is a game they play more frequently when there is tension in the air than when there isn’t.

“Insert finger in possible small hole,” says Calvin. “Twist wrist.”

“With anchovies then,” says Bob, not joining in. Loulou hears their voices coming to her across space, as if they’re in another room. What she sees is the grain of the wood in the table right by her hand.

“Loulou thinks to
reify
means
to make real,”
says Phil to everyone, when he’s hung up the phone. They’re always talking about her in the third person like that, telling each other what she thinks. The truth is that she’s never heard the word before in her life.

“So what is it, smartass?” says Loulou with an effort, squeezing out a little belligerence to set them at ease.

“If Loulou didn’t exist, God would have to invent her,” says Bob.

“God, hell,” says Phil.
“We
would. We did it the first time, right?”

This is going too far for Loulou. Nobody invented her, thank you very much. They make things up about her, but that’s a whole other story. “Up your nose,” says Loulou.

“To reify is to make into a thing,” says Phil, “which, as I’m sure most of us will agree, is hardly the same.”

Loulou looks around the room. They are all in place, they’re all watching her, to see what she will say next. She sticks out her chin at them. “Why not?” she says. “What’s the big difference?” and they relax, they laugh, they give each other little punches on the shoulder as if they’re part of a team and they’ve just scored a point. That, they tell each other, is just like Loulou, and suddenly she sees that this is what they require of her, possibly all they require: that she should be
just like Loulou
. No more, but certainly no less. Maybe it’s not so bad.

Uglypuss

J
oel hates November. As far as he’s concerned they could drop it down the chute and he wouldn’t complain. Drizzle and chill, everyone depressed, and then the winter to go through afterwards. The landlord has turned down the heat again, which means Joel has to either let his buns solidify and break off or use the electric heater, which means more money, because the electricity’s extra. The landlord does this to spite him, Joel, personally. Just for that, Joel refuses to move. He tells other people he likes the building, which he does: it’s a golden oldie, a mansion that’s seen better days, with an arched entrance-way and stained glass. But also he won’t give the old rent-gouger the satisfaction. Becka could handle him, when she was still living here. All she’d had to do was lean over the banister while the old bugger was standing below, and use her good voice, the furry one, and up went the temperature; a trick that’s not possible for Joel.

He’d like to be someplace warm, but who can afford it? Too bad they made grants taxable, not that he’s likely to get another one the ways things are going.

Things are not going too well. He’s beginning to think street theatre should stay in California: up here you can only do it three months of the year, and some of that is too hot, they steam inside those outsize masks. Even directing is no picnic. Last summer he got a sunburn, on the top of his head, where he’s beginning to go bald. It was right after this that Becka caught him in the bathroom, standing with his back to the mirror, looking at his head from behind with a plastic violet-framed hand mirror, hers. She wouldn’t let up on that for weeks. “Checked out your manly beauty this morning?” “Thought about Hair-Weeve?” “You’d look cute as a blonde. It would go with the skull.” “Chest wigs yet?” “You could cut off some of your beard and glue it on the top, right?” Maybe he had it coming; he remembered getting onto her about spending twenty-five dollars at the hairdresser’s once, soon after she’d moved in with him. It was her twenty-five dollars, but they were supposed to be sharing expenses. He’d called it an indulgence. She remembered that he remembered, of course. She has a memory like a rat-trap: full of rats.

Joel’s fingers are cold. The apartment is like a football game in the rain. He puts down the black Bic ball-point with which he hasn’t written anything for the past half hour, stretches, scratches his head. He recalls, for an instant and with irritation, the Italian calligraphy pen Becka affected for awhile: an affectation that has gone the way of all the others. Then he turns back to square one.

The piece they’re working on is for two weeks from now: the Crucifixion according to Solemate Sox, with management as Judas. They’re going to do it right beside the picket lines, which will cheer the picketers up, or that was the general idea. Joel isn’t too sure about this piece, and there’s been a certain amount of debate about it within the group. The concept was Becka’s: she justified it by saying they should pick symbolism the workers can tune into, and most of these workers are Portuguese, they’ll know all about Judas, you only have to look at the statues on their lawns, all those bleeding plaster Jesuses and Virgin Marys with their creepy-looking babies. Though for the same reason some of the others felt that Christ as a large knitted sock, in red and white stripes, might turn out to be too much for them. There could be a communications breakdown. Joel himself had been uneasy, but he’d voted on Becka’s side, because they’d still been trying to work it out then and he knew what hell there would be to pay if he’d come out against her. Just another example, she would have said, of how he would never let her express herself.

He hopes it won’t rain: if it does, the giant sock will get waterlogged, among other things. Maybe they should scrap it, try for another approach. Whatever they do, though, they’ll probably have the assistant manager and the old boy himself coming outside and accusing them of anti-Semitism. This happens to Joel a lot; it’s escalated after the piece on Lebanon and arms sales to South Africa they did outside the Beth Tzedec on Yom Kippur. Possibly the portable canvas mass grave, filled with baby dolls and splashed with red paint, had been going too far. A couple of the troupe members had wondered whether it was in bad taste, but Joel had said that bad taste was just an internalized establishment enforcer.

Joel doesn’t believe in pulling punches. And if you punch, they punch back. It’s getting so he can hardly go to parties any more. Though it’s not all parties he should avoid, only certain kinds, the kinds where he will find his own second cousins and men he went to
shul
with, who are now dentists or have gone into business. Even before the Lebanon piece, they were none too polite. At the last party, a woman he didn’t know at all, an older woman, came up to him and said, “Instead of shaking your hand I should kick you in the stomach.”

“What for?” said Joel.

“You know what for,” the woman said. “You’ve got a nerve. Eating our food. Better you should choke.”

“Don’t you think there should be an open discussion of the situation?” said Joel. “Like they do in Israel?”

“Goys have no right,” said the woman.

“So who’s a goy?” said Joel.

“You,” said the woman. “You’re not a real Jew.”

“All of a sudden you’re some kind of self-appointed committee on racial purity?” said Joel. “Anyway, read the Torah. They used to stone the prophets.”

“Shmuck,” said the woman.

Joel tries not to let it get to him: he’s got his credentials ready. You want murdered relatives? he’ll tell them. I’ve got.

Then how can you betray them? they’ll say. Spitting on the dead.

You think they’d agree with what’s happening? he’ll say. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Then there’s a silence in him, because that’s a thing no one will ever know.

Joel’s head hurts. He gets up from his desk, sits down in the chair he thinks in, which is like the one at home that his father used to lie in to read the paper, a Lay-Zee-Boy recliner, covered in black naugahyde. Joel bought his at least third-hand from the Goodwill, out of nostalgia and a wish for comfort; though Becka said he did it to affront her. She could never stand any of his furniture, especially the Ping-Pong table; she was always lobbying for a real dining-room table, though, as Joel would point out with great reasonableness, it wouldn’t have a double function.

“You’re always talking about bourgeoise,” she’d say, which wasn’t true. “But that chair is the essence. Eau de bourgeoise.” She pronounced it in three syllables:
boor-joo-ice
. Maybe she did this on purpose, to get at him by mutilating the word, though the only time he’d corrected her (the
only
time, he’s sure of that), she’d said, “Well, excuse me for living.” Could he help it if he’d spent a year in Montreal? And she hadn’t. He couldn’t help any of the things that he had and she hadn’t.

Early on, he thought they’d been engaging in a dialogue, out of which, sooner or later, a consensus would emerge. He thought they’d been involved in a process of mutual adjustment and counter-adjustment. But viewed from here and now, it was never a dialogue. It was merely a degrading squabble.

Joel decides not to brood any more about boring personal shit. There are more important things in the world. He picks up this morning’s paper, from where it lies in segments on the floor, in which he knows he will read distorted and censored versions of some of them; but just as he’s settling down to the purblind and moronic “Letters to the Editor” section, the phone rings. Joel hesitates before answering it: maybe it will be Becka, and he never knows which angle she’ll be coming at him from. But curiosity wins, as it often does where Becka is concerned.

It isn’t Becka though. “I’m going to cut your nuts off,” says a male voice, almost sensuously, into his ear.

“To whom do you wish to speak?” says Joel, doing his best imitation of an English butler from a thirties film. Joel watches a lot of late movies.

This isn’t the first phone call like this he’s had. Sometimes they’re anti-Semites, wanting to cut his Jewish nuts off; sometimes they’re Jews, wanting to cut his nuts off because they don’t think he’s Jewish enough. In either case the message is the same: his nuts must go. Maybe he should introduce the two sides and they could cut each other’s nuts off; that seems to be their shtick. He likes his where they are.

Joel’s elocution throws the guy and he mumbles something about dirty Commie bastards. Joel tells him that Mr. Murgatroyd is not home at the moment; would he care to leave his name and number? The coward hangs up, and so does Joel. He’s sweating all over. He didn’t when this first started happening, but the ones at two
A.M
. have been getting to him.

Joel doesn’t want to turn into one of those paranoids who dive under the sofa every time there’s a knock at the door. No Gestapo here, he tells himself. What he needs is some food. He goes out to the kitchen and rummages through the refrigerator, finding not much. Of the two of them, it was Becka who’d done most of the shopping. Without her, he’s reverted to his old habits: pizza, Kentucky Fried, doughnuts from the Dunkin’ Donuts. He knows it’s unhealthy, but he indulges in unhealth as a kind of perverse rebellion against her. He used to justify his tastes by saying that this was what the average worker eats, but he knew even at the time that he was using ideology to cover for addiction. He must be getting middle-aged though, because he’s still taking the vitamin pills Becka used to foist on him, threatening him with beri-beri, constipation, and scurvy if he dodged. He recalls with some pain her roughage phase.

The truth is that even Becka’s normal cooking, good though it was, made him nervous. He always felt he was in the wrong house, not his, since he’d never associated home with edible food. His mother had been such a terrible cook that he’d left the dinner table hungry more evenings than not. At midnight he would prowl through his mother’s apartment, stomach growling so loud you’d have thought it would wake her up, on bare criminal feet into the kitchen. Then followed the hunt for the only remotely digestible objects in the place, which were always baked goods from stores like Hunt’s or Woman’s Bakery, apple turnovers, muffins, cupcakes, cookies. She used to hide them on him; they’d never be in the refrigerator or the breadbox, not once she’d figured out that it was him who’d been eating them at night. Carefully, like a safe-cracker turning a sensitive combination lock, he’d dismantle the kitchen, moving one pot at a time, one stack of dishes. Sometimes she’d go so far as to stash them in the living room; once, even in the bathroom, under the sink. That was stooping pretty low. He remembers the sense of challenge, the mounting excitement, the triumph when he would finally uncover those familiar sweet oily brown-paper bags with their tightly screwed tops and their odour, faintly stale. He has an image of himself, in his pyjamas, crouching beside the cache he’s just dragged out from under the easy chair, cramming in the Chelsea buns, gloating. Next day she’d never mention it. Once or twice he failed, but only once or twice. She never mentioned that, either.

Now, prodding the shambles in his own refrigerator, Joel can’t find anything to eat. There’s half a pint of yoghurt, but it’s left over from Becka and, by now, questionable. He decides to go out. He locates his jacket finally, which is in the nest of clothing at the bottom of the hall closet. Things somehow don’t stay hung up when he hangs them. The jacket has
Bluejays
across the back and is ravelling at the cuffs; it has grease on it from where he crawled under the car, years ago, trying to prove to someone or other that he knew why it was leaking; a futile exercise. The car had been completely irrational; there was never a plausible explanation for any of the things it did, any of the parts that fell off it. Joel felt that driving it was like thumbing your nose at the car establishment, at car snobbery, at the Platonic idea of cars; he refused to trade it in. This was the car that finally got stolen. “They were doing us all a favour,” said Becka.

Becka once threatened to burn his Bluejays jacket. She said if he had to wear a stupid macho label, at least he could pick a winner; which goes to show how much she knows about it. Expos she could live with. By that time he’d started ignoring her; the text anyway, not the subtext. In so far as that was possible.

As he’s doing up the zipper the phone rings. Joel thinks it may be another nut-cutter; he should get a telephone-answering machine, the kind you can listen in on. But this time it really is Becka. The small sad voice tonight, the one he never trusts. She’s more believable when she’s being loud.

“Hi, Becka,” he says, carefully neutral. “How are things going?” She was the one who walked out, though “walked” is too mild a description of it, so if there’s conciliation to be done she can do it. “You want something?” he adds.

“Don’t be like that,” she says, after a short evaluating pause.

“Like what?” he says. “What am I being like that’s so terrible?”

She sighs. He’s familiar with these sighs of hers: she sighs over the phone better than any woman he’s ever known. If he hadn’t been sighed at by her so often, if he didn’t know the hidden costs, he’d fall for it. She dodges his question, though; once she’d have met it head-on. “I thought maybe I could come over,” she says. “So we could talk about it.”