Like Life (21 page)

“It was full of newspapers and tin cans, stuff like that. I don’t know.”

She couldn’t even say when the love between them had begun to sicken, how long it had been gasping drearily over its own grave of rage and obligation. They had spent over a third of their lives together—a third, like sleep. He was the only man who had ever, even once, claimed to find her beautiful. And he had stuck with her, loved her, even when she was twenty and in terrified thrall to sex, not daring to move, out of politeness or was it timidity. He had helped her. Later she learned to crave the drugged heart of sex, the drugs at the core of it: All the necessary kissing and fussing seemed only that—necessary—to
get to the drugs. But it had all been with Rudy, always with him. “Now we are truly in cahoots,” she exulted, the day they were married at the county clerk’s.

“I don’t look good in cahoots,” he said, his arm swung loosely around. “Let’s go get tattoos.”

What kisses there were in disappointment; sorrow fueled them, pushed them to a place. The city writhed, and the world shut down all around. Rudy gave pouting mouths to his Virgin Marys, popped open cans of beer, watched old movies on TV. “
You are happy until you say you are happy. Then you are no longer happy.
Bonnard. The great painter of happiness articulating itself to death.”

Maybe she’d thought life would provide her with something more lasting, more flattering than sexual love, but it never had, not really. For a while, she’d felt like one of the girls on the street corner: a world of leotards and drugs—drugs you hungered for and got to fast.

“Don’t you think we have a very special love?” asked Rudy. But she wasn’t believing in special love. Even when everyone was being practical, she believed—like a yearning for wind in winter—in only one kind of love, the kind in art: where you die for it. She had read too many books, said Rudy, Victorian novels where the children spoke in the subjunctive.
You take too much to heart
, he wrote her once, when she was away, living in Boston with an aging aunt and a sketch pad.

“I would never die for you,” she said softly.

“Sure you would,” said Rudy. He sighed, lay back. “Do you want a glass of water? I’ll get down and get it.”

At times her marriage seemed like a saint, guillotined and still walking for miles through the city, carrying its head. She often thought of the whole apartment going up in flames. What would she take with her? What few things would she grab for her new life? The thought exhilarated her.
You take too much to heart.

IN
THE
HOUSE
DREAM
, she walks in past the gate and the bird feeder and knocks on the door. It opens slowly and she steps in, in and around, until it is she herself who is opening it, from the other side, wondering who has knocked.

“
Death
,” said Rudy again. “Death by nuclear holocaust. Everyone’s having those dreams. Except for me. I’m having these completely embarrassing nightmares about bad haircuts and not knowing anyone at a party.”

In the morning, sun spilled in through the window by the bed. There was more light in the apartment in winter when there was snow on their overhang and it reflected sunlight inward, making garnet of the rug and striping the bed. A stray tomcat they had befriended, taken in, and fed lounged on the sill. They called him Food Man or Bill of the Baskervilles, and occasionally Rudy was kind to him, lifting the cat up high so that it could check out the bookcases, sniff the ceiling, which it liked to do. Mamie put birdseed out in the snow to attract pigeons, who would amuse the cat through the glass when he was inside. Cat TV. Rudy, she knew, hated pigeons, their lizard feet and pea brains, their strangely bovine meanness. He admired his friend Marco, who had put metal stakes outside on his air conditioner to keep pigeons from landing there.

Ordinarily Mamie was the first one up, the one to make coffee, the one to head cautiously down the makeshift rungs hammered in the side post, the one to pad out to the kitchen area, heat up water, rinse out mugs, brew coffee, get juice, and bring it all back to bed. This was how they had breakfast, the bedclothes a calico of spills.

But today, as on the other days he feared she would leave him, Rudy wormed naked out of the covers before her, jack-knifed at the loft’s edge, descended to the floor with a thump. Mamie watched his body: lanky, big-eared; his back, his arms, his hips. No one ever talked about a man’s hips, the hard twin
saddles of them. He put on a pair of boxer shorts. “I like these underwear,” he said. “They make me feel like David Niven.”

He made coffee from water they stored in a plastic garbage barrel. They had it delivered this way, weekly, like seltzer, and they paid twenty dollars for it. They washed dishes in the water that came through the faucets, and they even took quick showers in it, though they risked rashes, said the government doctors. Once Mamie hadn’t heard a special radio warning and had taken a shower, scrubbing hard with an old biscuit of loofah, only to step out with burning welts on her arms and shoulders: There had been a chemical pumped into the water, she learned later, one thought to impede the growth of viruses from river-rat fleas. She had soothed her skin with mayonnaise, which was all they had, and the blisters peeled open to a pink ham flesh beneath.

Except for the pleasure of Rudy bringing her coffee—the gift of it—she hated this place. But you could live with a hate. She had. It was so powerful, it had manners; it moved to one side most of the time to let you pass. It was mere dislike that clouded and nagged and stepped in front of your spirit, like a child wanting something.

Rudy returned with the coffee. Mamie rolled to the bed’s edge and took the poinsettia tray from him, as he climbed back up and over her. “It’s the Coffee Man,” she said, trying to sound cheerful, perhaps even to chirp. Shouldn’t she try? She placed the tray between them, picked up her coffee, and sipped. It was funny: With each swallow she could recast this fetid place, resee it with a caffeinated heart’s eye, make it beautiful even. But it would be the drizzle of affection felt for a hated place before you left it. And she would leave. Again. She would turn the walls and sinks and the turpentined dust to a memory, make it the scene of mild crimes, and think of it with a false, willowy love.

But then you could get to calling everything false and willowy
and never know anymore what was true and from the heart.

The cat came and curled up next to her. She massaged the cool, leathery wafer of its ear and plucked dust from its whiskers. He cocked his head and closed his eyes sleepily, content. How sad, she thought, how awful, how fortunate to be an animal and mistake grooming for love.

She placed a hand on Rudy’s arm. He bent his head to kiss it, but then couldn’t bend that far without spilling his coffee, and so straightened up again.

“Are you ever lonely?” Mamie asked him. Every moment of a morning seemed battled for, the past and future both seeking custody. She laid her cheek against his arm.

“Mamie,” he said softly, and that was all.

In the last five years almost all of their friends had died.

THE
AGENT
had on a different scarf today—a turquoise jacquard, twisted into a long coil that she wore wrapped around her neck like a collar. “A room,” she said quickly. “Would you settle for a room?”

“I’m not sure,” said Mamie. When she spoke with someone snappy and high-powered like that, she felt depressed and under siege.

“Well, come back when you are,” said the agent, in her chair, trundling toward the files.

Mamie took the train into Manhattan. She would walk around the art galleries in SoHo, after she dropped off a manuscript at the McWilliams Company. Then she would come back home via the clinic. She had her glass jar in her purse.

In the McWilliams bathroom was a secretary named Goz, whom Mamie had spoken to a few times. Goz was standing in front of the mirror, applying eye makeup. “Hey, how ya doin’?” she said, when she saw Mamie.

Mamie stood next to her, washed her face off from the subway, and dug through her purse for a hairbrush. “I’m OK. How are you?”

“All right.” Goz sighed. She had two wax perfume wands, mascara, and several colors of eye shadow spread out on the mirror ledge. She scrutinized her own reflection and sucked in her cheeks. “You know, it’s taken me years to get my eye makeup to look like this.”

Mamie smiled sympathetically. “A lot of practice, huh.”

“No—years of
eye makeup.
I let it build up.”

Mamie leaned over and brushed her hair upside down.

“Hmmm,” said Goz a little irritably. “What have you been doing these days?”

“Oh, a children’s thing again. It’s the first time I’ve done the pictures
and
the text.” Mamie straightened and threw her head back. “I’m, um, dropping off a chapter for Seth today.” Her hair fell around her face in a penumbra. She looked insane.

“Oh. Hmmm,” said Goz. She was watching Mamie’s hair with interest. “I like
neat
hair. I don’t think a woman should look as if sex has already happened.”

Mamie smiled at her. “How about you? You going out a lot, having fun?”

“Yeah,” said Goz a little defensively. Everyone these days was defensive about their lives. Everyone had settled. “I’m going out. I’m going out with this
man.
And my friends are going out with these
men.
And sometimes we all go out together. The
trouble is we’re all about thirty years younger than these guys. We’ll go to a restaurant or something and I’ll look around the table and like every man at our table is thirty years older than his date.”

“A father-daughter banquet,” said Mamie, trying to joke. “We used to have those at our church.”

Goz stared at her. “Yeah,” she said, finally turning to put away all her makeup. “You still with that guy who lives in a beauty parlor?”

“Rudy. My husband.”

“Whatever,” said Goz, and she went into a stall and closed the door.

“
THIS
IS
for Seth Billets,” Mamie said, handing the receptionist a large manila envelope. “If he has any questions, he can just phone me. Thanks.” She turned and fled the building, taking the stairs rather than the elevator. She never liked to meet with Seth. He tended to be harried and abstracted, and they worked just as well together on the phone. “Mamie? Great stuff,” he liked to say. “I’m sending the manuscript back with my suggestions. But ignore them.” And always the manuscript arrived three weeks later with comments in the margin like
Oh please
and
No shit.

She bought a paper and walked downtown toward some galleries she knew on Grand Street, stopping at a coffee shop on Lafayette. Usually she ordered a cup of coffee
and
a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

“You want something or nothing?” the waitress asked her.

“What?” Startled, Mamie ordered the Slenderella.

“Good choice,” said the waitress, as if it had been a test, and then hurried to the kitchen in a palsied jog.

Mamie spread the paper out at a diagonal and read, the pages stoically full of news of the war in India and, locally, of the women’s bodies dredged up weekly from the Gowanus Canal. Disappeared women, with contusions. Beaten and drowned. Secretaries, students, a Rosie or two.

The Slenderella came with egg salad, and she ate it slowly, dissolving it in her mouth, its moist, mothering yellow. On the obituary page there were different deaths, young men, as in a war, and always the ending:
He is survived by his parents.

Leaving the paper on the table as a tip, she spent the rest of the morning wandering in and out of galleries, looking at paintings that seemed much worse to her than Rudy’s. Why these and not her husband’s? Painting pictures was the only thing he had ever wanted to do, but no one was helping him. Age had already grabbed him in the face: His cheeks sagged houndishly, his beard was shot with white. Bristly hairs sprouted like wheat from his ears. She used to go with him to art openings, listening to people say bewildering things like “Syntax? Don’t you just love
syntax
?” or “Now you know why people are starving in India—we had to wait an hour for our biriyani!” She began to leave early—while he lingered there, dressed in a secondhand pair of black leather pants he looked terrible in, chatting up the dealers, the famous, the successful. He would offer to show them his slides. Or he would go into his rap about Theoretical Disaster Art, how if you can depict atrocities, you can prevent them. “Anticipate, and imitate,” he said. “You can preclude and dispirit a holocaust by depriving it of its originality; enough books and plays and paintings, you can change history by getting there first.”

One East Village dealer looked him heavily in the eye and
said, “You know, in a hive, when a bee has something to communicate, it does a dance. But if the bee does not stop dancing, the others sting it to death,” and the dealer then turned and started talking to someone else.

Rudy always walked home alone, slow across the bridge, his life exactly the same as it was. His heart, she knew, was full of that ghetto desire to leap from poor to rich with a single, simple act, that yearning that exhausted the poor—something the city required: an exhausted poor. He would comb the dumpsters for clothes, for artbooks, for pieces of wood to build into frames and stretchers, and in the early hours of the morning he would arrive home with some huge dried flower he had scavenged, a wobbly plant stand, or a small, beveled mirror. At noon, without an apartment to paint, he might go into the city, to the corner of Broadway and Wall, to play his harmonica for coins. Sea chanteys and Dylan. Sometimes passersby would slow down on “Shenandoah,” which he played so mournfully that even what he called “some plagiarist of living,” in a beige all-weather coat, “some guy who wears his asshole on his sleeve,” might stop on his lunch hour to let a part of himself leap up in the hearing, in communion, in reminder of times left behind. But mostly, everyone just sailed past, tense with errands, stubbing their feet on the shoe box Rudy’d placed on the sidewalk for contributions. He did not play badly. And he could look as handsome as an actor. But mad—something there in the eyes. Madmen, in fact, were attracted to him, came bounding up to him like buddies, shouting psychotically, shaking his hand and putting their arms around him while he played.