If I Told You Once: A Novel (21 page)

The butcher glared.

My mother tugged me away from the display window. My breath had clouded the glass.

What are we doing here? I asked.

This way, she said and steered me to the stairs that led to the apartments above.

On the second floor the hallway was narrow, high ceilinged and dark. The paneled walls glistened with varnish, or perhaps condensation. Water dripped and echoed somewhere. I could not see the end of the hall.

My mother rapped at one of the doors. We heard shuffling feet; the door opened and a large red-haired woman ushered us in.

The apartment was close and cluttered; everything seemed out of scale, and awry, as if a dollhouse had exploded. Claw-footed chairs crowded around a coffee table buried under telephone directories and loaded ashtrays. Bookshelves were crammed with trinkets, encrusted teacups, a fishbowl filled with murky scum, photograph albums. Doilies covered every surface. Drapes hid the windows and much of the walls. Great fuzzy piles of knitting covered the sofa and lay in corners like a slowly encroaching moss, like cobwebs or dust balls run amok.

A radio played soft music. There was a smell, both sweet and faintly unpleasant, like food left out too long. The red-haired woman took my coat from my shoulders. She was my mother’s age, with perfectly white, flawless skin; it was soft and sagging with age, but still striking. Her hair was a strident, metallic color that did not match her skin, a botched dye job. She had green eyes, eyebrows painted on in dramatic sweeps, a round, ample body; she wobbled on her feet as if her shoes were too small.

I knew immediately that this woman and my mother were old acquaintances; they stood silently, giving each other long assessing looks; understanding passed between them in the tightening of a mouth, a tug at a sleeve.

The woman turned to me, took my hand between her hot, damp palms. Come in, sit down, she said and her accent was like my mother’s; they were from the same place. I’m Annabelle, she said; I saw my mother flinch at the name.

This is
Sashie,
my mother said firmly.

Shirley, I corrected, nodding and smiling.

Annabelle gave me an understanding look.

She hobbled stiffly to the chairs, adjusting cushions, tsking softly in her throat as puffs of dust rose up. She tinkled and rattled as she moved, she wore several strings of beads, and two pairs of glasses on chains around her neck, as well as a third pair hooked in the bosom of her dress.

We sat.

Your mother tells me you’re looking for a man, Annabelle said briskly.

Ah, well, not— I began. Annabelle and my mother both leaned forward intently. And then it all became clear: the photograph albums, the cardboard boxes brimming with letters and pictures, stacked everywhere.

I don’t need a matchmaker, I said sharply.

She blinked her eyes innocently: Oh, but I’m not—

I snapped: My mother didn’t tell me why we were coming here. I’m sorry to waste your time— I rose, thinking:
calmly,
Shirley, a lady never loses her temper.

Annabelle raised her hands. She said: I’m hardly a matchmaker, Shirley dear.

She’s not, Sashie, that’s not why we’re here, my mother told me.

I don’t need this, I’m perfectly capable of meeting a man myself; in fact, I
have;
in fact, I’ve met
several!
I said.

Of course you have, Annabelle said soothingly. Of course you don’t need a matchmaker. A lovely, talented girl like you? Hardly! She smiled ingratiatingly and said: Look at you! Beautiful! Boyfriends right and left!

Careful, Shirley. Under no circumstances does a lady slap someone in the face, no matter how much she wants to.

I said this to myself and very slowly sank into my seat.

Annabelle leaned forward and clasped my hands. Her breath smelled of cigarettes and dinner, pickled beets and boiled cabbage. She said: There are plenty of men in the world for you, too many, it makes it difficult to find exactly the right one. I’m going to help you with that.

How?

You’ll see, she said and smiled. Shirley, she said, the world is full of fine men, handsome men, but you can’t go out and have them as easy as picking flowers. You find a man, you have to
wait,
you have to let him
notice
you, wait for him to ask. Men get to choose first; a girl can say only yes or no. You can’t approach a man yourself, not if you’re a lady, and I know that you are. Men are dull witted, it takes time, there are always complications. I’m going to save you time, save you the trouble; here
you’ll
be the one to choose, you’ll get to take home exactly the one you want.

Really?

She nodded.

My mother said: I don’t want you wasting your time, chasing this one and that one. Find the right one now, spare yourself and me the trouble.

I looked from one to the other. So you’re
not
going to show my picture to a bunch of middle-aged men and their mothers, and ask them what they think? I asked Annabelle.

She laughed.

And you’re
not
going to show me a bunch of men’s photos, men hiding their bald heads under hats, their fat stomachs behind car doors, themselves ten years ago? You’re not going to read me their lists of requirements?

Hardly, she said.

No letters? No chaperoned meetings?

She laughed again. I own this building, she said as if that explained everything.

She stood with a clink and a clatter, my mother stood, I stood, and we all filed out of the apartment.

I followed Annabelle’s stiff hobbling gait down the hall. In a dark corner she stopped, removed a ring of keys from her pocket, and unlocked a door no wider than a single board.

My mother and I followed her up a narrow, grimy staircase and down a narrower passage. At first I heard nothing but the soft fall of dust, the skittering of mice. I noticed smells of soap, of sweat, of bedclothes, and the sounds of living, oblivious behind the walls.

As my eyes adjusted to the dimness I saw that the building had been remodeled at some point; the original rooms had been divided into smaller apartments with flimsy thin walls, and the passage we stood in had been carelessly left over. I followed Annabelle, my right hand brushing cold brick, the left plywood. The newer walls were so thin they faintly glowed with light, and seemed to quiver with noise and breath like the tight head of a drum.

Hush, someone said.

I bumped into Annabelle’s soft back. She had paused before a splinter of light, a peephole in the wall. She peered in, the light slicing across the green glass of her iris. She moved aside, beckoned to me. When I hesitated, she seized my head in her impatient hands and forced it to the opening.

Oh, I said. I saw a man, a small drab man sitting on one chair with his feet up on another, his shoes off, wearing trousers over long underwear and eating beans out of a can with a fork.

His socks were all holes, his suspenders hung around his hips, the ends of his straggly mustache fell in his mouth, he chewed beans with a kind of abstracted concentration, his throat working. How he ate those beans, grinding them to mash, his mouth going round and round, as if they were the most important thing in the world!

Oh no, I said.

We shuffled on. Annabelle beckoned me to another peephole, and I bent to look.

I smelled sweat. Then a glistening figure hopped into view, disappeared, hopped in again. He was stripped to the waist, wearing an athlete’s tight short pants, his hands held in fists. He was boxing with himself, dancing lightly on his toes, circling, ducking, hooking and jabbing at the air.

The sweat dripped from his face, he grunted like an animal, he blotted his face with a towel. The hair spread in an irregular pattern over his chest and stomach and in two fugitive tufts on his shoulders.

His apartment was bare, only a narrow iron bed and a chair. A long mirror stood propped against the wall. The man abandoned his invisible opponent, bounced to the mirror, punched the air twice, then stopped and looked at himself. He looked a long time, flexing his muscles, looking deeply, lovingly.

No.

In the next room I saw a man still in the vest and tie he had worn to his work. He sat at a table reading a newspaper, pushing up his glasses with an index finger. Every few moments something he read seemed to anger him so much that he slammed the paper down and swore incoherently. Then he would pick up the paper and resume his reading. Sometimes he grew so incensed that he leaped up from his chair and raged about the room, muttering and spitting and shoving the furniture about. Eventually he would quiet down and pick up the paper again, only to be offended anew.

We moved on.

Men are at their truest when they are alone, Annabelle said.

We paused at other apartments. Annabelle took a kind of vicious, condescending interest in the men; she looked and smacked her lips, nearly sneered. My mother seemed indifferent; an uninterested zoo visitor.

We climbed another narrow flight of stairs and peeped into a new series of apartments.

I lingered for a long time at some of the rooms. Annabelle and my mother did not try to rush me.

I saw a man with a beautiful face, lovely blue eyes and blond curls like an angel, but his body was a broken puppet’s, he was staggering and drunk, the bottle still in his hand, his shirt twisted nearly backward. As I watched he turned toward me, he seemed to meet my eyes, he stumbled forward, clasped his hands, rolled up his eyes in a pious and holy expression. And then as I watched he bent double and began to vomit.

I saw a man I thought I liked, he seemed sober and industrious, he sat hunched over a desk with papers spread all about him. His brow was deeply furrowed, his fingers ink stained and his lips too, from nibbling the pen.

Perhaps he was a poet, a composer. Perhaps he was a genius in need of affection.

But then I heard him mutter numbers, costs. He was merely doing accounts. Then I saw the thinness of the shirt where it stretched over his shoulders, worn nearly transparent. I saw his too-long hair hanging over his collar, his worn-down shoes, the meanness of his possessions and the careless clutter all around him.

I could never care for a man who cared so little for himself.

I saw one man who seemed more alive than the rest. He was shirtless, his arms sinewy and strong. His eyes were wild, he grinned with white square teeth. Then he spoke, he was laughing, he had a beautiful laugh. There was music in the room, and candles. I saw a handsome camel-hair overcoat hung over a chair. I wanted to know his name.

I saw him crouching over the bed at the far side of the room, he was talking and cooing, stroking, I thought perhaps there was a dog on the bed. A cat.

Then I heard soft feminine laughter.

Annabelle pulled me along, whispering apologies.

I looked in on every little cell. One room was exquisitely decorated, Oriental rugs on the floor, red leather armchairs, stuffed game birds, a grandfather clock looming in a corner. But the resident was short and fat and triple chinned, pompous and monocled; he strained the seams of his fine clothes. And beneath the veneer there was a whiff of vulgarity: he moved his lips as he laboriously read the paper; he drank his port and belched and chomped a cigar; with those finely manicured hands he scratched himself in ways a gentleman should not.

I watched men eating, reading, sleeping, polishing their shoes with earnest attention. I saw men studying comic books as solemnly as they would the Bible; I saw a swaybacked, pear-shaped young fellow practicing his walk with a book balanced on his head and I had to look away. I saw a man playing the trumpet, and my heart went out to him, a musician, a creative soul. But the sounds he made were terrible, and his neighbors on all sides banged on the walls and shouted at him, and he cursed back at them with a self-righteous anger that was ugly to see.

I saw a man sitting hunched on the edge of the bed in his underwear, looking at a magazine held two inches from his face, his other arm working like a piston.

I saw a man on his knees, eyes closed, a rosary in his hands.

I saw a man cleaning a disassembled gun.

I saw a man tentatively removing his hairpiece, then rubbing ointment into the angry rash it had left on his scalp.

I saw a man carefully lining up rows of pills in a rainbow of colors, dozens of them in neat regiments. I saw him pour himself a tall glass of water. He had a long horse face, pale lank hair lying across his forehead.

We climbed more stairs, I browsed through more men’s lives; they were as wide-eyed and oblivious as fish in an aquarium.

This will never work, I whispered finally. How can I possibly find—

But Annabelle hushed me and nudged me to the last flight of stairs. Top floor, I keep the best ones up here, she said.

I wanted to go home, I was exhausted.

And then I saw him.

He was so handsome, so full of life. His face was a healthy color, his hair thick and dark. As I watched he combed it back and smoothed it until it shone like patent leather. His face was square and sharp cornered, the eyebrows were active little punctuation marks. He was a big man, broad shouldered, but light on his feet as he walked from closet to dresser to mirror. He wore a lovely gray suit that fit him perfectly. I watched as he stood before the mirror knotting his tie. He fixed it once, scowled at it, undid it and tied it again twice more.

He did not stop until it was perfect.

He tied his shoes, whistling. Whistling! How can you not like a man who whistles?

The apartment was tidy. Unlike the other apartments which smelled of sweat or medicine or lingering food, his apartment smelled impersonal. Like a coat closet, it smelled of leather, wool, rubber boots.

There were small photographs hung on the walls, propped on the dresser. The sepia-toned cardboard kind, of the sort my mother kept.

Probably his parents came from over there as well. We had that in common.

He stood before the mirror smoothing his shirt. He stuck out his chin, studying one profile then the other. I did not think him vain. He acted like a man with a fine new car: not vain, simply justifiably proud. He looked strong. He looked as if he had a healthy appetite. He moved with dancing steps.