Self-Help (Vintage Contemporaries) (3 page)

It is like typing a telephone directory. Get tears in your eyes.

C
LIENTS
T
O
S
EE

1. Fallen in love(?) Out of control. Who is this? Who am I? And who is this wife with the skis and the nostrils and the Tylenol and does she have orgasms?

2. Reclaim yourself. Pieces have fluttered away.

3. Everything you do is a masochistic act. Why?

4. Don’t you like yourself? Don’t you deserve better than all of this?

5. Need: something to lift you from your boots out into the sky, something to make you like little things again, to whirl around the curves of your ears and muss up your hair and call you every single day.

6. A drug.

7. A man.

8. A religion.

9. A good job. Revise and send out resumes.

10. Remember what Mrs. Kloosterman told the class in second grade: Just be glad you have legs.

“What are you going to do for Christmas?” he says, lying supine on your couch.

“Oh. I don’t know. See my parents in New Jersey, I guess.” Pause. “Wanna come? Meet my folks?”

A kind, fatherly, indulgent smile. “Charlene,” he purrs, sitting up to pat your hand, your silly ridiculous little hand.

He gives you a pair of leather slippers. They were what you wanted.

You give him a book about cars.

“Ma, open the red one first. The other package goes with it.”

“A coffee grinder, why thank you, dear.” She kisses you wetly on the cheek, a Christmas mist in her eyes. She thinks you’re wonderful. She’s truly your greatest fan. She is aging and menopausal. She stubbornly thinks you’re an assistant department head at Karma-Kola. She wants so badly, so earnestly, to be you.

“And this bag is some exotic Colombian bean, and this is a chocolate-flavored decaf.”

Your father fidgets in the corner, looking at his watch, worrying that your mom should be checking the crown roast.

“Decaf bean,” he says. “That’s for me?”

Say: “Yeah, Dad. That’s for you.”

“Who is he?” says your mom, later, in the kitchen after you’ve washed the dishes.

“He’s a systems analyst.”

“What do they do?”

“Oh … they get married a lot. They’re usually always married.”

“Charlene, are you having an affair with a married man?”

“Ma, do you have to put it that way?”

“You are asking for big trouble,” she says, slowly, and resumes polishing silver with a vehement energy.

Wonder why she always polishes the silver
after
meals.

Lean against the refrigerator and play with the magnets.

Say, softly, carefully: “I know, Mother, it’s not something you would do.”

She looks up at you, her mouth trembling, pieces of her brown-gray hair dangling in her salty eyes, pink silverware cream caking onto her hands, onto her wedding ring. She stops, puts a spoon down, looks away and then hopelessly back at you, like a very young girl, and, shaking her head, bursts into tears.

“I missed you,” he practically shouts, ebullient and adolescent, pacing about the living room with a sort of bounce, like a child who is up way past his bedtime and wants to ask a question. “What did you do at home?” He rubs your neck.

“Oh, the usual holiday stuff with my parents. On New Year’s Eve I went to a disco in Morristown with my cousin Denise, but I dressed wrong. I wore the turtleneck and plaid skirt my mother gave me, because I wanted her to feel good, and my slip kept showing.”

He grins and kisses your cheek, thinking this sweet.

Continue: “There were three guys, all in purple shirts and paper hats, who kept coming over and asking me to dance. I don’t think they were together or brothers or anything. But I danced, and on ‘New York City Girl,’ that song about how jaded and competent urban women are, I went crazy dancing and my slip dropped to the floor. I tried to pick it up, but finally just had to step out of it and jam it in my purse. At the stroke of midnight, I cried.”

“I’ll bet you suffered terribly,” he says, clasping you around the small of your back.

Say: “Yes, I did.”

“I’m thinking of telling Patricia about us.”

Be skeptical. Ask: “What will you say?”

He proceeds confidently: “I’ll go, ‘Dear, there’s something I have to tell you.’ ”

“And she’ll look over at you from her briefcase full of memoranda and say: ‘Hmmmmmm?’ ”

“And I’ll say, ‘Dear, I think I’m falling in love with another woman, and I
know
I’m having sex with her.’ ”

“And she’ll say, ‘Oh my god, what did you say?’ ”

“And I’ll say: ‘Sex.’ ”

“And she’ll start weeping inconsolably and
then
what will you do?”

There is a silence, still as the moon. He shifts his legs, seems confused. “I’ll … tell her I was just kidding.” He squeezes your hand.

Shave your legs in the bathroom sink. Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition. Wives are like cockroaches. Also part of a great historical tradition. They will survive you after a nuclear attack—they are tough and hardy and travel in packs—but right now they’re not having any fun. And when you look in the bathroom mirror, you spot them scurrying, up out of reach behind you.

An hour of gimlets after work, a quick browse through Barnes and Noble, and he looks at his watch, gives you a peck, and says: “Good night. I’ll call you soon.”

Walk out with him. Stand there, shivering, but do not pout. Say: “Call you ‘later’ would sound better than ‘soon.’ ‘Soon’ always means just the opposite.”

He smiles feebly. “I’ll phone you in a few days.”

And when he is off, hurrying up Third Avenue, look down at your feet, kick at a dirty cigarette butt, and in your best juvenile mumble, say: “Fuck you, jack.”

Some nights he says he’ll try to make it over, but there’s no guarantee. Those nights, just in case, spend two hours showering, dressing, applying makeup unrecognizably, like someone in drag, and then, as it is late, and you have to work the next day, climb onto your bed like that, wearing perfume and an embarrassing, long, flowing, lacy bathrobe that is really not a bathrobe at all, but a “hostess loungecoat.” With the glassed candle by your bed lit and burning away, doze off and on, arranged with excruciating care on top of the covers, the window lamp on in the living room, the door unlocked for him in case he arrives in a passionate flurry, forgetting his key. Six blocks from Fourteenth Street: you are risking your life for him, spread out like a ridiculous cake on the bed, waiting with the door unlocked, thinking you hear him on the stairs, but no. You should have a corsage, you think to yourself. You should have a goddamned orchid pinned to the chest of your long flowing hostess coat, then you would be appropriately absurd. Think: What has happened to me? Why am I lying like this on top of my covers with too much Jontue and mascara and jewelry, pretending casually that this is how I always go to bed, while a pervert with six new steak knives is about to sneak through my unlocked door. Remember: at Blakely Falls High, Willis Holmes would have done anything to be with you. You don’t have to put up with this: you were second runner-up at the Junior Prom.

A truck roars by.

Some deaf and dumb kids, probably let out from a dance at the school nearby, are gathered downstairs below your window, hooting and howling, making unearthly sounds. You guess they are laughing and having fun, but they can’t hear themselves, and at night the noises are scary, animal-like.

Your clock-radio reads 1:45.

Wonder if you are getting old, desperate. Believe that you have really turned into another woman:

your maiden aunt Phyllis;

some vaporish cocktail waitress;

a glittery transvestite who has wandered, lost, up from the Village.

When seven consecutive days go by that you do not hear from him, send witty little postcards to all your friends from college. On the eighth day, when finally he calls you at the office, murmuring lascivious things in German, remain laconic. Say:
“Ja … nein … ja.”

At lunch regard your cream of cauliflower soup with a pinched mouth and ask what on earth he and his wife
do
together. Sound irritated. He shrugs and says, “Dust, eat, bicker about the shower curtain. Why do you ask?”

Say: “Gee, I don’t know. What an outrageous question, huh?”

He gives you a look of sympathy that could bring a dead cat back to life. “You’re upset because I didn’t call you.” He reaches across the table to touch your fingers. Pull your hand away. Say: “Don’t flatter yourself.” Look slightly off to one side. Put your hand over your eyes like you have a headache. Say: “God, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he says.

And you think: Something is backward here. Reversed. Wrong. Like the something that is wrong in “What is wrong with this picture?” in kids’ magazines in dentists’ offices. Toothaches. Stomachaches. God, the soup. Excuse yourself and hurry toward the women’s room. Slam the stall door shut. Lean back against it. Stare into the throat of the toilet.

Hilda is worried about you and wants to fix you up with a cousin of hers from Brooklyn.

Ask wearily: “What’s his name?”

She looks at you, frowning. “Mark. He’s a banker. And what the hell kind of attitude is that?”

Mark orders you a beer in a Greek coffee shop near the movie theater.

“So, you’re a secretary.”

Squirm and quip: “More like a sedentary,” and look at him in surprise and horror when he guffaws and snorts way too loudly.

Say: “Actually, what I really should have been is a dancer. Everybody has always said that.”

Mark smiles. He likes the idea of you being a dancer.

Look at him coldly. Say: “No, nobody has ever said that. I just made it up.”

All through the movie you forget to read the subtitles, thinking instead about whether you should sleep with Mark the banker. Glance at him out of the corner of your eye. In the dark, his profile seems important and mysterious. Sort of. He catches you looking at him and turns and winks at you. Good god. He seems to be investing something in all of this. Bankers. Sigh. Stare straight ahead. Decide you just don’t have the energy, the interest.