Like Life (3 page)

Two pulled a dollar from his pocket. “There you go, my man,” he said. It suddenly seemed to Mary that she would have to choose, that even if you didn’t know who in the world to love, it was important to choose. You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one’s heart to knock against like a spook in the house.

Two had no money for a cab but wanted to walk Mary home, one arm clamped around her back and upper arms. They made their way like this across the city. It used to be that Two would put a big, limp fish hand in the middle of her spine, but Mary would manage to escape, stopping and pointing out something—“Look, Halley’s Comet! Look, a star!”—so now he clamped her tightly, pressed against his side so that her shoulders curved front and their hips bumped each other.

Mary longed to wriggle away.

At her door she thanked him. “You don’t want me to come upstairs with you?” Two asked. “I haven’t seen you in so long.” He stepped back, away from her.

“I’m so tired,” said Mary. “I’m sorry.” The Hamilton Pork men stood around, waiting for another delivery and grinning. Two gave her back her suitcase and said, “See ya,” a small mat of Dixie cup and gum stuck to one shoe.

Mary went upstairs to listen to the messages on her machine. There was a message from an old school friend, a wrong number, a strange girl’s voice saying, “Who are you? What is your
name?” and the quick, harried voice of Number One. “I’ve forgotten when you were coming home. Is it today?” Then another wrong number. “Who are you? What is your name?” Then Number One’s voice again: “I guess it’s not today, either.”

She lay down to rest and didn’t unpack her bag. When the phone rang, she leaped up, and the leap knocked her purse and several books off the bed.

“It’s you,” said Boy Number One.

“Yes,” said Mary. She felt a small, short blizzard come to her eyes and then go.

“Mary, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said, and tried to swallow. When tenderness ended, there was a lull before the hate, and things could spill out into it. There was always so much to keep back, so much scratching behind the face. You tried to shoo things away, a broomed woman with a porch to protect.

“Did you have a good trip?”

“Fine. I was hoping you might be there to meet me.”

“I lost your postcard and forgot what—”

“That’s OK. My brother picked me up instead. I see what my life is: I tell my brother when I’m going to be home, and I tell you when I’m going to be home. Who’s there to greet me? My brother. We’re not even that close, as siblings go.”

One sighed. “What happened was your brother and I flipped a coin and he lost. I thought he was a very good sport about it, though.” The line fell still. “I didn’t know you had a brother,” said One.

Mary lay back on her bed, cradled the phone close. “How does the campaign look?” she asked.

“Money’s still coming in, and the party’s pleased with the radio spots. I’ve grown weary of it all. Maybe you could help me. What does the word
constituent
mean? They keep talking about constituents.” She was supposed to laugh.

“Yes, well, Canada was a vision,” said Mary. “All modern and clean and prosperous. At least it looked that way. There’s something terribly wrong with Cleveland.”

“Cleveland doesn’t have the right people in Washington. Canada does.” Number One was for the redistribution of wealth. He was for cutting defense spending. He was for the U.S. out of Latin America. He’d been to Hollywood benefits. But he’d never once given a coin to a beggar. Number Two did that.

“Charity that crude dehumanizes,” said Number One.

“Get yourself a cola, my man,” said Number Two.

“I have to come pick up my paycheck,” said Mary.

“Sandy should have it,” said One. “I may not be able to see you, Mary. That’s partly why I’m calling. I’m terribly busy.”

“Fund-raisers?” She wrapped the phone cord around one leg, which she had lifted into the air for exercise.

“That and the boys. My wife says they’re suffering a bit, acting out the rottenness in our marriage.”

“And here I thought you and she were doing that,” said Mary. “Now everybody’s getting into the act.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to have two boys,” he said. “You just don’t know.”

MARY
STRETCHED
OUT
on her stomach, alone in bed. A dismantled Number Three, huge, torn raggedly at the seams, terrorized the city. The phone rang endlessly. Mary’s machine picked it up.
Hello? Hello?

“I know you’re there. Will you please pick up the phone?”

“I know you’re there. Will you please pick up the phone?”

“I know you’re there. I know you’re there with someone.”

There was a slight choking sound. Later there were calls where nobody said anything at all.

In the morning he called again, and she answered. “Hello?”

“You slept with someone last night, didn’t you?” said Two.

There was a long silence. “I wasn’t going to,” Mary said finally, “but I kept getting these creepy calls, and I got scared and didn’t want to be alone.”

“Oh, God,” he whispered, a curse or was it love, before the phone crashed, then hummed, the last verse of something long.

IN
THE
PARK
a young woman of about twenty was swirling about, dancing to some tape-recorded arias and Gregorian chants. A small crowd had gathered. Mary watched briefly: This was what happened to you when you were from Youngstown and had been dreamy and unpopular in high school. You grew up and did these sorts of dances.

Mary sat down at a bench some distance away. The little girl who had twice spat on her walked by slowly, appraising. Mary looked up. “Don’t spit on me,” she said. Her life had come to this: pleading not to be spat on. Was it any better than some flay-limbed dance to boom box Monteverdi? It had its moments.

Not of dignity, exactly, but of something.

“I’m not going to spit on you,” sneered the girl.

“Good,” said Mary.

The girl sat down at the far end of the bench. Mary kept reading her book but could feel the girl’s eyes, a stare scraping along the edge of her, until she finally had to turn and say,
“What?”

“Just looking,” said the girl. “Not spitting.”

Mary closed her book. “Are you waiting for someone?”

“Yup,” said the girl. “I’m waiting for all my boyfriends to come over and give me a kiss.” She closed her eyes and smacked her lips in the air.

“Oh,” said Mary, and opened her book again. The sun was beating down on the survivor. Blisters and sores. Poultices of algae paste. The water tight as glass and the wind, blue-faced,
holding its breath. How did one get here? How did one’s eye-patched, rot-toothed life lead one along so cruelly, like a trick, to the middle of the sea?

AT
HOME
the phone rang, but Mary let the machine pick it up. It was nobody. The machine clicked and went through its business, rewound. Beneath her the hooks and pulleys across the meat store ceiling rattled and bumped. In a dream the phone rang again and she picked it up. It was somebody she knew only vaguely. A neighbor of Boy Number Two. “I have some bad news,” he said in the dream.

IN
THE
PARK
the little girl sat closer, like a small animal—a squirrel, a munk, investigating. She pointed and said, “I live that way; is that the way you live?”

“Don’t you have to be in school?” asked Mary. She let her book fall to her lap, but she kept a finger in the page and her dark glasses on.

The girl sighed. “School,” she said, and she flubbed her lips in a horse snort. “I told you. I’m waiting for my boyfriends.”

“But you’re always waiting for them,” said Mary. “And they never get here.”

“They’re unreliable.” The girl spat, but away from Mary, more in the direction of the music institute. “They’re dead.”

Mary stood up, closed her book, started walking. “One in the sky, one in the ground,” the girl called, running after Mary. “Hey, do you live this way? I thought so.” She followed behind Mary in a kind of traipse, block after block. When they got as far as the Hamilton Pork Company, Mary stopped. She clutched her stomach and turned to look at the girl, who had pulled up alongside her, perspiring slightly. It was way too warm for fall. The girl stared at the meat displayed in the windows, the phallic harangue of sausages, marbled, desiccated, strung up as for a carnival.

“Look!” said the girl, pointing at the sausages. “There they are. All our old boyfriends.”

Mary took off her dark glasses. “What grade are you in?” she asked. Could there be a grade for what this girl knew in her bulleted heart? What she knew was the sort of thing that grew in you like a tree, unfurling in your brain, pushing out into your fingers against the nails.

“Grade?” mimicked the girl.

Mary put her glasses back on. “Forget it,” she said. Pork blood limned their shoes. Mary held her stomach more tightly; something was fluttering there, the fruit of a worry. She fumbled for her keys.

“All right,” said the girl, and she turned and loped away, the bones in her back working hard, colors spinning out, exotic as a bird rarely seen unless believed in, wretchedly, like a moonward thought.

               
HARRY
LIVED
near Times Square, above the sex pavilion that advertised
25 CENT
GIRLS
. He had lived there for five years and had never gone in, a fact of which he was proud. In the land of perversities he had maintained the perversity of refusal.

“You’ve never even stepped in? Just once, during the day?” asked his girlfriend, Breckie. “Just to see? I mean,
I
have.” Breckie was finishing up her internship at St. Luke’s. She was a surgeon and worked with beating and stabbing victims brought into the emergency room. She liked getting her hands on the insides of a thing. It had to do with her childhood.

“Someday when I’m rich,” said Harry. “It’s not as if it’s free.”

Harry was a playwright, which made it, he felt, appropriate to live in the theater district. Also, the rent was cheap and he could play his Maria Callas records loud without causing a stir. The neighborhood, after all, was already in a stir. It was a living, permanent stir. He felt he felt relaxed there. He did.

He did.

And if once in a while a small rodent washed up into the toilet or dashed out from under the radiator, Breckie’s cat almost always got it.

Harry had started writing plays because he liked them. He
liked the idea of an audience: live guests in front of live performers. It was like company at holidays: all those real-life, blood-gorged bodies in one room, those bunches of overdressed grapes; everyone just had to be polite. They had no choice. That, thought Harry, was civilization. Harry had had a play produced once as part of a city competition that had named him one of the three top up-and-coming under-thirty playwrights. His picture had appeared with pictures of the other two in the
New York Times
, all of them wearing the same tie. The tie had belonged to the photographer, who had made them all wear it, individually, like a jacket in a restaurant, but besides that it had been an exuberant event. The play itself was a bleak, apocalyptic comedy set in the Sheep Meadow at Central Park in the year 2050. A ranger stood stage left for the four-hour duration of the play; other characters had love affairs and conversations. It was called
For Hours See a Ranger
, and it had run for five days in a church basement in Murray Hill.

Since that time Harry had been working on what he hoped would be his masterpiece. The story of his life.
O’Neillian
, he called it.

“Sounds like
chameleon
,” said Breckie. Her work took a lot out of her.

“It’s about the ragtag American family and the lies we all tell ourselves.”

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

Harry had been writing the play for years. Mostly he worked at night, tucked in out of the neighborhood’s gaud and glare, letting what he called “the writing fairies” twinkle down from their night perches to commune with his pen. He was very secretive about his work. He had never shown Breckie more than a page of it, and the two or three times he had taken portions to the photocopier’s it had sent him into the flush and sweat of the shy. It wasn’t that he didn’t have confidence in it. It was simply that the material felt so powerful to him, its
arrangement so delicate, that a premature glimpse by the wrong person might curse it forever. He had drawn heavily from his life for this play. He had included the funniest family anecdotes, the most painful details of his adolescence, and the wrenching yet life-affirming death of his great-aunt Flora, Fussbudget Flora, whose dying word had been “Cripes.” He had suffered poverty for this play, and would suffer more, he knew, until its completion, living off the frugally spent prize money and the occasional grant he applied for and received. When his cash was low, he had, in the past, done such things as write articles for magazines and newspapers, but he had taken the work too personally and had had too many run-ins with editors. “Don’t fuck with my prose,” he’d been known to say in a loud voice.

“But, Harry, we need to shorten this to fit in an illustration.”

“You’re asking me to eat my children so you can fit in some dumb picture?”

“If you don’t want a picture, Harry, go publish in the phone book.”

“I have to think about this. I have to think about whether or not I can really eat my children this way.” But once he had nibbled at the limbs, he found it was not such a far cry to the vital organs, and soon Harry got good at eating his children. When his articles appeared, often there were two pictures.

And so Harry stopped writing journalism. He also turned down offers to write for “the movies, those pieces of crap” and had had to resist continually the persistent efforts of a television producer named Glen Scarp, who had telephoned him every six months for the last four years, since Harry had won the prize—“Hey, Harry, how’s it goin’, man?”—trying to get him to write for his television series. “TV,” Scarp kept saying, “it’s a lot like theater. Its roots are in theater.” Harry never watched television. He had an old black-and-white set, but the reception was bad because he and Breckie lived too close to the Empire
State Building, the waves shooting out over them and missing the apartment altogether. Once in a while, usually after he got a call from Glen Scarp, Harry would turn the TV on, just to see if things had changed, but it was always a blare of static and police calls from the squad cars that circled the block like birds. “We’re going to have to face it,” he said to Breckie. “This television is just a large, broken radio with abstract art on the front.”