Like Life (19 page)

This month Dennis was reading books written supposedly for women, titles like
Get Real, Smarting Cookie, Get Real
and
Why I Hate Myself.
“Those books are trouble,” said Mave. “Too many well-adjusted people will endanger the arts in this country. To say nothing of the professions.” She studied Dennis’s flipped-over tie, the soft, torn eye of its clipped label. “You choose to be healthy, and you leave too many good people behind.”

But Dennis said he identified, that the books were amazing, and he reached into the book bag he now carried with him everywhere and read passages aloud. “Here,” he said to Mave, who had brought her own whiskey to the place and was pouring it into a water glass from which she had drunk all the water and left only the ice. She had had to argue with the waitress to get ice. “Oh, no—here,” Dennis said. He had found another passage from
Why I Hate Myself
and started to read it, loud and with expression, when suddenly he broke into a disconsolate weep, deep and from the belly. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

Mave shoved her whiskey glass across the table toward him. “Don’t worry about it,” she murmured. He took a sip, then
put the book away. He dug through his book bag and found Kleenex to dab at his nose.

“I didn’t get like this on my own,” he said. “There are people responsible.” Inside his bag Mave could see a newsmagazine with the exasperated headline:
ETHIOPIA
:
WHY
ARE
THEY
STARVING
THIS
TIME
?

“Boredom is heartless,” said Dennis, the tears slowing. He indicated the magazine. “When the face goes into a yawn, the blood to the chest gets constricted.”

“Are you finished with my drink?”

“No.” He took another gulp and winced. “I mean, yes,” and he handed it back to Mave, wiped his mouth with a napkin. Mave looked at Dennis’s face and was glad no one had broken up with her recently. When someone broke up with you, you became very unattractive, and it confirmed all the doubts that person had ever had about you to begin with. “Wait, just one more sip.” Someone broke up with you and you yelled. You blistered, withered, and flushed. You apologized to inanimate objects and drank when you swore you wouldn’t. You went around humming the theme to
Valley of the Dolls
, doing all the instruments even, lingering on the line about
gotta get off, gonna get, have to get.
… It wasn’t good to go out on that kind of limb for love. You went out on a limb for food, but not for love. Love was not food. Love, thought Mave, was more like the rest rooms at the Ziegfeld: sinks in the stalls, big deal. Mave worked hard to forget very quickly afterward what the men she went out with even looked like. This was called sticking close to the trunk.

“All yours,” said Dennis. He was smiling now. The whiskey brought the blood to his face in a nice way.

Mave looked down at her menu. “There’s no spaghetti and meatballs here. I wanted to order the child’s portion of the spaghetti and meatballs.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” said Dennis, shaking a finger for emphasis. With his books away and the whiskey in him, he seemed more confident. “Did I tell you the guy my wife’s seeing is Italian? Milanese, not Brooklyn. What do you suppose that means, her falling in love with an Italian?”

“It means she’s going to feel scruffy all the time. It means that he will stare at all the fuzzies on her shirt while she is telling him something painful about a childhood birthday party nobody came to. Let’s face it: She’s going to start to miss the fact, Dennis, that your hair zooms out all over the goddamn place.”

“I’m getting it cut tomorrow.”

Mave put on her reading glasses. “This is not a restaurant. Restaurants serve different things from this.”

“You know, one thing about these books for women, I have to tell you. The whole emphasis on locating and accepting your homosexual side is really very powerful. It frees and expands some other sort of love in you.”

Mave looked up at him and smiled. She was drawn to the insane because of their blazing minds. “So you’ve located and accepted?”

“Well, I’ve realized this. I like boys.
And
I like girls.” He leaned toward her confidentially. “I just don’t like
berls.
” Dennis reached again for Mave’s whiskey. “Of course, I am completely in the wrong town. May I?” He leaned his head back, and the ice cubes knocked against his teeth. Water beaded up on his chin. “So, Mave, who are
you
romancing these days?” Dennis was beginning to look drunk. His lips were smooth and thick and hung open like a change purse.

“These days?” There were little ways like this of stalling for time.

“These right here.”

“Right here. These. I’ve been seeing Mitch again a little.”

Dennis dropped his forehead into his palm, which had somehow flown up from the table, so that the two met midair in an unsightly smack. “Mitch! Mave, he’s such a womanizer!”

“So I needed to be womanized. I was losing my sheen.”

“You know what you do? You get all your boyfriends on sale. It’s called Bargain Debasement. Immolation by desire.”

“Look, you need to be womanized, you go to a womanizer. I don’t take these things seriously anymore. I make it a point now to forget what everybody looks like. I’m being Rudolf Bing. I’ve lost my mind and am traipsing around the South Seas with an inappropriate lover, and I believe in it. I think everybody in a love affair is being Rudolf Bing anyway, and they’re vain to believe otherwise.… Oh, my God, that man in the sweater is feeling his girlfriend’s lymph nodes.” Mave put away her reading glasses and fumbled around in her bag for the whiskey flask. That was the thing with hunger: It opened up something dangerous in you, something endless, like a universe, or a cliff. “I’m sorry. Rudolf Bing is on my mind. He’s really been on my mind. I feel like we’re all almost like him.”

“Almost like Bing in love,” said Dennis. “
What a day this has been. What a rare mood I’m in.
” Mave was in a long sip. “I’ve been listening to that
Live at Carnegie Hall
tape too much.”

“Music! Let’s talk about music! Or death! Why do we always have to talk about love?”

“Because our parents were sickos, and we’re starved for it.”

“You know what I’ve decided? I don’t want to be cremated. I used to, but now I think it sounds just a little too much like a blender speed. Now I’ve decided I want to be embalmed, and then I want a plastic surgeon to come put in silicone implants everywhere. Then I want to be laid out in the woods like Snow White, with a gravestone that reads
Gotta Dance.
” The whiskey was going down sweet. That was what happened after a while, with no meal to assist—it had to do the food work on its own. “There. We talked about death.”

“That’s talking about death?”

“What is
kale
? I don’t understand why they haven’t taken our order yet. I mean, it’s crowded now, but it wasn’t ten minutes ago. Maybe it was the ice thing.”

“You know what else my wife says about this Italian? She says he goes around singing this same song to himself. You know what it is?”

“ ‘Santa Lucia.’ ”

“No. It’s the ‘Addams Family’ theme song:
Their house is a museum, when people come to see-um
 …”

“Your wife tells you this?”

“We’re friends.”

“Don’t tell me you’re friends. You hate her.”

“We’re friends. I don’t hate her.”

“You think she’s a user and a tart. She’s with some guy with great shoes whose coif doesn’t collapse into hairpin turns across his part.”

“You used to be a nice person.”

“I never was a nice person. I’m still a nice person.”

“I don’t like this year,” said Dennis, his eyes welling again.

“I know,” said Mave. “Eighty-eight. It’s too Sergio Mendes or something.”

“You know, it’s OK not to be a nice person.”

“I need your permission? Thank you.” This was what Dennis had been doing lately: granting everyone permission to feel the way they were going to feel regardless. It was the books. Dennis’s relationship to his own feelings had become tender, curatorial. Dismantling. Entomological. Mave couldn’t be like that. She treated her emotional life the way she treated her car: She let it go, let it tough it out. To friends she said things like “I know you’re thinking this looks like a ’79, but it’s really an ’87.” She finally didn’t care to understand all that much about her emotional life; she just went ahead and did it. The point, she thought, was to attend the meager theater of it, quietly,
and not stand up in the middle and shout, “Oh, my God, you can see the crew backstage!” There was a point at which the study of something became a frightening and naive thing.

“But, Dennis, really, why do you think so much about love, of someone loving you or not loving you? That is all you read about, all you talk about.”

“Put the starving people of the world together in a room, and what you get is a lot of conversation about roast beef. They should be talking about the Napoleonic Code?” At the mention of roast beef, Mave’s face lit up, greenish, fluorescent. She looked past Dennis and saw the waitress coming toward their table at last; she was moving slowly, meanly, scowling. There was a large paper doily stuck to her shoe. “I mean …” Dennis was saying, looking pointedly at Mave, but Mave was watching the waitress approach.
Oh, life, oh, sweet, forgiven for the ice
 … He grabbed Mave’s wrist. There was always an emergency. And then there was love. And then there was another emergency. That was the sandwiching of it. Emergency. Love. Emergency. “I mean, it’s not as if you’ve been dozing off,” Dennis was saying, his voice reaching her now, high and watery. “I mean, correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ve been having this conversation alone.” He tightened his grip. “I mean, have I?”

               
ALL
THE
MOVIES
that year were about people with plates in their heads: Spirits from another galaxy gather in a resort town at night, taking over the townspeople—all but the man with the plate in his head. Or: A girl with a plate in her head wanders a city beach, believing she is someone else. Evidence washes up on shore. There are sailors. Or: A woman dreams of a beautiful house in which no one lives, and one day she passes the actual house—a cupola, gables, and a porch. She walks up to it, knocks on the door, and it is opened slowly by
her! a woman who is a twin of herself, grinning. She has a plate in her head.

Life seemed to have become like that. It had burst out of itself, like a bug.

In February a thaw gave the city the weepy ooze of a wound. There were many colds, people coughing in the subways. The sidewalks foamed to a cheese of spit, and the stoops, doorways, bus shelters were hedged with Rosies—that is what they were called—the jobless men, women, children with gourd lumps or fevers, imploring, hating eyes, and puffed lavender mouths, stark as paintings of mouths. The Rosies sold flowers: a prim tulip, an overflowing iris. Mostly no one bought any. Mostly it was just other Rosies, trading bloom for bloom, until one of them, a woman or a child, died in the street, the others gathering around in a wail, in the tiny, dark morning hours, which weren’t morning at all but night.

THAT
YEAR
was the first that it became illegal—for those who lived in apartments or houses—not to have a television. The government claimed that important information, information necessary for survival, might need to be broadcast automatically, might need simply to burst on, which it could do. Civilization was at stake, it was said. “Already at the stake,” said others, who had come to suspect that they were being spied on, controlled, that what they had thought when they were little—that the people on the television could also see you—now was true. You were supposed to leave it plugged in at all times, the plastic antenna raised in a V—for victory or peace, no one could say.

Mamie lost sleep. She began to distrust things, even her own words; too much had moved in. Objects implanted in your body—fillings, earrings, contraceptives—like satellite dishes, could be picking up messages, substituting their words for yours, feeding you lines. You never knew. Open your mouth,
it might betray you with lies, with lackadaise, with moods and speak not your own. The things you were saying might be old radio programs bounced off the foil of your molars, or taxi calls fielded by the mussely glove of your ear. What you described as real might be only a picture, something from
Life
magazine you were forced to live out, after the photography, in imitation. Whole bodies, perhaps, could be ventriloquized. Approximated. You could sit on the lap of a thing and just move your lips. You could become afraid. You could become afraid someone was making you afraid: a new fear, like a gourmet’s, a paranoid’s paranoia.

This was not the future. This was what was with you now in the house.

Mamie lived in a converted beauty parlor storefront—a tin ceiling, a stench of turpentine, and extra sinks. At night her husband, a struggling painter, moody and beer-breathed, lay sleeping next to her, curled against her, an indifferent whistle in his nose. She closed her eyes.
What all to love in the world
, went a prayer from her childhood. What all to love?

The lumber of his bones piled close.

The radiator racked and spitting. Heat flapping like birds up the pipes.

SHE
REMAINED
AWAKE
. On nights when she did sleep, her dreams were about the end of life. They involved getting somewhere, getting to the place where she was supposed to die, where it was OK. She was always in a group, like a fire drill or a class trip. Can we die here? Are we there yet? Which way can it possibly be?