Like Life (20 page)

Or else there was the house dream. Always the house dream, like the movie of the dream of the house. She would find a house, knock on the door, and it would open slowly, a wedge of dark, and then stop, her own profile greeting her, hanging there midair like a chandelier.

Death
, said her husband, Rudy. He kept a small hatchet under the mattress, in case of intruders.
Death.
Last year she had gone to a doctor, who had looked at her throat and a mole on her back, studying them like Rorschachs for whatever he might see in them. He removed the mole and put it floating in a pathologist’s vial, a tiny marine animal. Peering in at her throat, he said, “Precancer”—like a secret or a zodiac sign.

“
Pre
cancer?” she had repeated quietly, for she was a quiet woman. “Isn’t that … like
life
?” She was sitting, and he was standing. He fumbled with some alcohol and cotton balls, which he kept on the counter in kitcheny-looking jars, the flour and sugar of the medical world.

He took her wrist and briefly squeezed. “It’s
like
life, but it’s not
necessarily
life.”

THERE
WAS
a wrought-iron fence all around and a locked gate, but it was the bird feeder she remarked first, the wooden arms, the open mouth of boards stuck up there on a single leg. It was nearing Valentine’s Day, an angry slosh of a morning, and she was on her way to a realtor, a different one this time, not far from the Fourth and Smith stop of the F train—from where you could see the Statue of Liberty. On her way, she had come upon a house with a bird feeder. A bird feeder! And a tree in front, a towering oak, over one hundred fifty years old. A grade school teacher had brought her class to it and now stood in front of it, pointing and saying, “A hundred and fifty years ago. Can anyone tell me when that was?”

But it was the bird feeder, initially: a cross with an angle-roofed shelter at the head—a naked scarecrow bedecked with horizontals like a Frank Lloyd Wright house, or an alpine motel, its wooden ledges strewn with millet seed. In the freckled snow below lay tiny condiment cups of peanut butter, knocked to the ground. A flibberty squirrel, hopping and pausing in
spasms, lifted each cup to his nose and nibbled. On the feeder itself was a pair of pigeons—lidless, thick-necked, municipal gargoyles; but there, wasn’t that also a sparrow? And a grosbeak?

The house was a real house, one of the few left in New York. A falling-down Edwardian Gothic with a cupola, once painted a silvery gray and now chipping. There was a porch and latticework of carpenter’s lace—a house one would go to for piano lessons, if people still took piano lessons, a house invariably seized for a funeral home. It was squeezed between two storefronts—the realtor’s and a laundromat.

“You’re looking for a one-bedroom?” said the realtor.

“Yes,” said Mamie, though it suddenly seemed both too little and too much to ask for. The realtor had the confident hair and makeup of a woman who had lived forever in New York, a woman who knew ever so wearily how to tie a scarf. Mamie studied the realtor’s scarf, guessing the exact geometry of the folds, the location of the knot. If Mamie ever had surgery, scars in a crisscross up her throat, she would have to know such things. A hat, a scarf, a dot of rouge, mints in the mouth: Everyone in New York was hiding something, eventually.

The real estate agent took out an application form. She picked up a pen. “Your name?”

“Mamie Cournand.”

“
What
? Here. You fill this out.”

It was pretty much the same form she’d filled out previously at other agencies. What sort of apartment are you looking for; how much do you make; how do you make it …?

“What is children’s historical illustrator?” deadpanned the realtor. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I, uh, work on a series of history publications, picture books actually, for chil—”

“Free lance?” She looked at Mamie with doubt, suspicion, and then with sympathy to encourage candor.

“It’s for the McWilliams Company.” She began to lie. “I’ve got an office there that I use. The address is written here.” She rose slightly from her seat, to point it out.

The realtor pulled away. “I’m oriented,” she said.

“Oriented?”

“You don’t need to reach and point. This your home and work phone? This your age …? You forgot to put in your age.”

“Thirty-five.”

“Thirty-five,” she repeated, writing it in. “You look younger.” She looked at Mamie. “What are you willing to pay?”

“Urn, up to nine hundred or so.”

“Good luck,” she snorted, and still seated in her caster-wheeled chair, she trundled over to the file cabinet, lifted out a manila folder, flipped it open. She placed Mamie’s application on top. “This isn’t the eighties anymore, you know.”

Mamie cleared her throat. Deep in the back she could feel the wound sticking there, unhealed. “It hasn’t not been for very long. I mean, just a few years.” The awkward, frightened look had leaped to her eyes again, she knew. Fear making a child of her face—she hated this in herself. As a girl, she had always listened in a slightly stricken way and never spoke unless she was asked a question. When she was in college she was the kind of student sometimes too anxious to enter the cafeteria. Often she just stayed in her room and drank warm iced tea from a mix and a Hot Pot. “You live right over here?” The realtor motioned behind her. “Why are you moving?”

“I’m leaving my husband.”

The corner of her mouth curled. “
In this day and age?
Good luck.” She shrugged and spun around to dig through files again. There was a long silence, the realtor shaking her head.

Mamie craned her neck. “I’d like to see what you have, at any rate.”

“We’ve got nothing.” The realtor slammed the file drawer
and twisted back around. “But keep trying us. We might have something tomorrow. We’re expecting some listings then.”

THEY
HAD
BEEN
married for fourteen years, living on Brooklyn’s south slope for almost ten. It was a neighborhood once so Irish that even as late as the fifties, kids had played soccer in the street and shouted in Gaelic. When she and Rudy first moved in, the area was full of Italian men who barely knew Italian and leaned out of the windows of private clubs, shouting “How aw ya?” Now Hispanic girls in bright leotards gathered on the corner after school, smoking cigarettes and
scorning
the streets.
Scorning
, said the boys. Artists had taken up residence, as well as struggling actors, junkies, desperate Rosies in the street.
Watch out
, went the joke,
for the struggling actors.

Mamie and Rudy’s former beauty parlor now had a padlocked door and boarded front windows. Inside remained the original lavender walls, the gold metallic trim. They had built a loft at one end of the place, and at the other were bookcases, easels, canvases, and a drawing table. Stacked against the wall by the door were Rudy’s huge paintings of snarling dogs and Virgin Marys. He had a series of each, and hoped, before he died,
before I shoot myself in the head on my fortieth birthday
, to have a gallery. Until then he painted apartments or borrowed money from Mamie. He was responsible for only one bill—utilities—and on several occasions had had to rush out to intercept Con Ed men arriving with helmets and boots to disconnect the electricity. “Never a dull moment,” Rudy would say, thrusting cash into their hands. Once he had tried to pay the bill with two small still lifes.

“You don’t think about the real world, Rudy. There’s a real world out there.” There was in him, she felt, only a fine line between insanity and charm. “A real world about to explode.”

“You don’t think I worry about the world
exploding
?” His expression darkened. “You don’t think I get tears in my eyes
every fucking day thinking about those Rembrandts at the Met and what’s going to happen to them when it does?”

“Rudy, I went to a realtor today.”

Probably in their marriage she had been too dreamy and inconsistent. For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

“Again?” Rudy sighed, ironic but hurt. Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks. You had to learn the sleight-of-hand, the snarling dog, the Hail Marys and hoops of it! Through all the muck of themselves, the times they had unobligated each other, the anger, the permitted absences, the loneliness grown dangerous, she had always returned to him. He’d had faith in that—abracadabra! But eventually the deadliness set in again. Could you live in the dead excellence of a thing—the stupid mortar of a body, the stubborn husk love had crawled from? Yes, he thought.

The television flashed on automatically, one of the government ads: pretty couples testifying to their undying devotion, undying bodies. “We are the Undying,” they said, and they cuddled their children, who had freckles that bled together on the cheeks, and toys with glassy button eyes.
Undying
, the commercials said.
Be undying.
“I can’t bear it,” Mamie said. “I can’t bear the brother and sister of us. I can’t bear the mother and son of us. I can’t bear the Undying commercials. I can’t bear washing my hair in dishwashing liquid, or doing the dishes in cheap shampoo, because we’re too broke or disorganized or depressed to have both at the same time.” Always, they’d made do. For toilet paper they used holiday-imprinted napkins—cocktail napkins with poinsettias on them. A big box of them, with a tray, had been sent to Rudy by mistake. For towels they used bath mats. For bath mats more poinsettia napkins. They bought discount soaps with sayings on the label like
Be gentle
and you need not be strong.
“We’re camping out here, Rudy. This is camping!” She tried to appeal to something he would understand. “My work. It’s affecting my work. Look at this!” and she went over to a small drawing table and held up her half-finished sketch of Squanto planting corn. She’d been attempting a nuclear metaphor: white man learning to plant things in the ground, which would later burst forth; how the white man had gotten carried away with planting. “He looks like a toad.”

“He looks like a catcher for the Boston Red Sox.” Rudy smiled. Would she smile? He grew mock-serious: “The faculties of discernment and generosity are always at war. You must decide whether you will be muse or artist. A woman cannot be both.”

“I can’t believe you,” she said, staring accusingly around their apartment. “This is not life. This is something else,” and the whole ill-lit place stared back at her, hurt, a ditzy old beauty parlor flunking someone else’s math.

“Forget this Squanto thing,” he said, looking compassionate. “I’ve got an idea for you. I’ve thought about it all day: a children’s book called
Too Many Lesbians.
” He began motioning with his arms. “Lesbians in bushes, lesbians in trees … 
Find the lesbians
 …”

“I’m going out for some air,” she said, and she grabbed her coat and flew out the door. It was evening already, zinc gray and chill, the puddles freezing on the walks in a thin glaze. She hurried past the shivering Rosies at the corner, hurried six blocks in a
zigzag
to look at the bird feeder again. Visit a place at night, she knew, and it was yours.

When she reached it, the house was dark, holding its breath, soundless so as not to be discovered. She pressed her face against the gate, the hard cilia of its ironwork, and sighed, longing for another existence, one that belonged to a woman who lived in a house like this, the lovely brow of its mansard roof, thoughtful
with rooms. She felt a distrust of her own life, like those aerospace engineers reluctant to fly in planes of their own design, fearing death by their own claptrappery.

The bird feeder stood tall as a constable. There were no birds.

“
YOU
SHOULD
never leave. You just always come back,” whispered Rudy.
A tourist in your own despair
, he had once said. It was the title of one of his paintings. One of a snarling dog leaping over a sofa.

She stared through the small window by their bed, a strip of sky and one dim star, an asterisk to take her away briefly to an explanation—the night bragging a footnote. He held her, kissed her. Here in bed was when he seemed to her not to be doing imitations of other people. After fifteen years, she had seen all the imitations—friends, parents, movie actors—until it was a little scary, as if he were many different people at once, people to turn to, not in distress, but like a channel on television, a mind gone crazy with cable. He was Jimmy Stewart. He was Elvis Presley. “When you were growing up, were your parents funny?” she asked him once.

“
My parents?
You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “I mean, once in a while they
memorized
something.” He was Dylan on the harmonica. Lifelike; absolutely lifelike. He was James Cagney. He was some musical blend he called Smokey Robinson Caruso.

“Don’t you think we’d have beautiful children?” Rudy now pleaded, sleepily, his hand smoothing the bangs off her brow. “They’d be nervous and insane,” she murmured.

“You’re strung out about your health.”

“But maybe they’d also be able to do imitations.”

Rudy kissed her throat, her ears, her throat again. She had to spit daily into a jar she kept in the bathroom, and to visit the clinic regularly, bringing the jar.

“You think we don’t love each other anymore,” he said. He was capable of tenderness. Though sometimes he was rough, pressing himself upon her with a force that startled her, wanting to make love and kissing her meanly against the wall:
come on, come on
; though his paintings had grown more violent, feverish swirls of men in business suits sodomizing animals:
this is my statement about yuppies, OK?
; though in coffee shops he often lorded over her spells of sorrowful boredom by looking disgusted while she blinked soggily into her lunch—here without his clothes on, with her face open to him, he could be a tender husband. “You think that, but it’s not true.” Years ago she had come to know his little lies, harmless for the most part and born of vanity and doubts, and sometimes fueled merely by a desire to hide from things whose truth took too much effort to figure out. She knew the way he would tell the same anecdotes from his life, over and over again, each time a little differently, the exaggerations and contradictions sometimes having a particular purpose—his self-portrait as Undiscovered Genius—and sometimes not seeming to have one at all. “Six inches from the door was an empty shopping cart jammed up against the door,” he told her once, and she said, “Rudy, how can it be six inches from the door but also jammed up against it?”