Like Life Page 16

  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?”

  “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 gra
ve 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 Indians weren’t used to the illnesses that the English brought with them to the new world. Many Indians got sick. When they got chicken pox or mumps, they sometimes died. A very proud Indian might happen to wake up one morning and look in the mirror he’d gotten from an English trader and see red spots polka-dotting his face! The proud Indian would be very upset. He might hurl himself against a tree to maim himself. Or he might throw himself over a cliff or into a fire (picture).

  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 s
he 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. Thetrouble 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?”