Like Life (6 page)

“Amen!” someone called out.

“Yahoo,” shouted Harry.

“Can you help me, people, earthlings. I implore you. Anything you can spare will aid me in my goal.” The Christmas tree lights zipped around his head, people started to applaud, and everyone dug into their wallets to give money. When the lights came on, and the train started to go again, even the man with the hungry kids was smiling reluctantly, though he did say to Lothar, “Man, I thought this was
my
car.” When the train pulled into Forty-second Street, people got off humming, slapping high fives, low fives, though the station smelled of piss.

Harry’s happiness lasted five days, Monday through Friday, like a job. On Saturday he awoke in a funk. The phone had not rung. The mail had brought him no letters. The apartment smelled faintly of truck and sewage. He went out to breakfast and ordered the rice pudding, but it came with a cherry.

“What is this?” he asked the waiter. “You didn’t use to do this.”

“Maraschino eyeballs.” The waiter smiled. “We just started putting them on. You wanna whipped cream, too?”

When he went back home, not Deli but a homeless woman in a cloth coat and sneakers was sitting in his doorway. He reached into his pocket to give her some change, but she looked away.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I just have to get by here.” He took out his keys.

The woman stood up angrily, grabbing her shopping bags. “No, really, you can sit here,” said Harry. “I just need to get by you to get in.”

“Thanks a lot!” shouted the woman. Her teeth were gray in the grain, like old wood. “Thanks!”

“Come back!” he called. “It’s perfectly OK!” But the woman staggered halfway down the block, turned, and started screaming
at him. “Thanks for all you’ve done for me! I really appreciate it! I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me my whole life!”

To relax, he enrolled in a yoga class. It was held three blocks away, and the teacher, short, overweight, and knowledgeable, kept coming over to Harry to tell him he was doing things wrong.

“Stomach in! Shoulders down! Head back!” she bellowed in the darkness of the yoga room. People looked. She was not fond of tall, thin men who thought they knew what they were doing. “Head back!” she said again, and this time tugged on his hair, to get his head at the right angle.

“I can’t believe you pulled my hair,” said Harry.

“Pardon me?” said the instructor. She pressed her knee into the middle disks of his spine.

“I would just do better,” said Harry loudly, “if you wouldn’t keep touching me!”

“All right, all right,” said the teacher. “I won’t touch you,” and she walked to the other side of the darkened room, to attend to someone else. Harry lay back for the deep breathing, spine pressed against the tough thread of the carpet. He put his hand over his eyes and stayed like that, while the rest of the class continued with headstands and cat stretches.

The next week Harry decided to try a calisthenics class instead. It was across the street from the yoga class and was full of white people in pastel Spandex. Serious acid disco blared from the corner speakers. The instructor was a thin black man, who smiled happily at the class and led them in exercises that resembled the motion of field hands picking cotton. “Pick that cotton!” he shouted gleefully, overseeing the group, walking archly among them. “Pick it fast!” He giggled, clasping his hands. “Oh, what sweet revenge!” The class lasted an hour and a half, and Harry stayed on for the next class as well, another hour and a half. It strangely encouraged and calmed him, and
when he went to the grocery store afterward, he felt almost serene. He lingered at the yogurt and the freshly made pasta. He filled his cart with mineral water, feeling healthy and whole again, when a man one aisle away was caught shoplifting a can of bean-with-bacon soup.

“Hey!” shouted the store manager, and two large shelf clerks grabbed the man with the soup. “I didn’t do nothing!” yelled the man with the soup, but they dragged him by the ears across the store floor to the meat counter and the back room, where the butchers worked in the day. There they began to beat him, until he could no longer call out. Trails of red smeared the floor of the canned goods aisle, where his ears had split open like fruit and bled.

“Stop it!” cried Harry, following the men to the swinging meat doors. “There’s no reason for this sort of violence!” and after two minutes, the employees finally let the shoplifter go. They shoved him, swollen and in shock, out the swinging doors toward the exit.

Harry turned to several other customers, who, also distressed, had come up behind him. “My God,” said Harry. “I had two exercise classes today, and it still wasn’t enough.” He left his shopping cart and fled the store for the phone booth outside, where he dialed the police. “I would like to report a crime. My name is Harry DeLeo, and I am standing on the corner of Eighth and—”

“Yeah. Harry DeLeo. Trucks. Look, Harry DeLeo, we got real things,” and the policeman hung up.

AT
NIGHT
Harry slept in the other room, the “living” room, the room decorated in what Breckie called Early American Mental Institution, the room away from the windows and the trucks, on the sharp-armed sofa, damp towels pressed at the bottom of the bedroom door, so he would not die in his sleep, though that had always been his wish but just not now. He
also pressed towels against the bathroom door, in case of an overflow. Safe, barricaded, sulfurous, sandwiched in damp towels like the deviled eggs his mother used to bring to picnics: When he slept he did so dreamlessly, like a bug. In the mornings he woke early and went out and claimed a booth in The Cosmic Galaxy until noon. He read the
Times
and now even the
Post
and the
News.
Sometimes he took notes in the margins for his play.
He felt shackled in nightmare, and in that constant state of daydream that nightmare gives conception to, creature within creature.
In the afternoons he went to see teen movies starring teens. For brief moments they consoled him in a way he couldn’t explain. Perhaps it was that the actors were all so attractive and in high school and lived in lovely houses in California. He had never been to California, and only once in the last ten years—when he had gone home with Breck to visit her parents in Minnesota—had he been in a lovely house. The movies reminded him of Breckie, probably that was it, those poreless faces and hairless arms, those idealistic hearts knowing corruption for the first time and learning it well. Harry would leave the movie theater feeling miserable, stepping out into the daylight like a criminal, shoulders bent into coat-hanger angles, in his body the sick heat of hangover, his jacket rumpled as a sheet.

“Harry, you look like shit,” said Deli in front of his building. She was passing out fliers for the 25 Cent Girls pavilion. She was wearing a patched vinyl jacket, a red dress, and black pumps with no stockings. “But hey. Nothing I can do for you—except here.” She handed him a flier.
Twenty-five Cents! Cheap, Live, and Naked!
“I got myself a day job—ain’t you proud of me, Harry?”

Harry
did
feel proud of her, though it surprised him. It did not feel quite appropriate to feel proud. “Deli, I think that’s great,” he said anyway. “I really do!” Peep show fliers were a start. Surely they were a start.

“Yeah,” said Deli, smiling haughtily. “Soon you be asking me to marry you.”

“Yup,” said Harry, jiggling the key in the lock. Someone in the middle of the night had been jabbing at it with a knife, and the lock was scraped and bent.

“Hey, put on some of that music again, would you?” But Harry had gotten the door open, and it slammed behind him without his answering.

There was mail: a form letter from an agency interested in seeing scripts; an electric bill; a letter from the Health Department verifying his complaint call and advising him to keep after the precinct dispatcher; a postcard for Breckie from some old friend named Lisa, traveling through Italy.
What a place, gal
, it said.
Hello to Harry.
He put it on his refrigerator with a magnet. He went to his desk and from there stared over at it, then stared back at his desk. He went to the window overlooking the street. Deli was still down there, passing out fliers, but people were not taking them anymore. They were brushing by, pretending not to see, and finally she just stood there, in the middle of the sidewalk, frowning, no longer trying, not thrusting a flier out to anyone, just letting the crowds break in front of her, like a wave, until she turned and walked with them, up to the corner, to the light, and threw her fliers into the trash, the way everyone else had done.

The next day Harry got a phone call from Glen Scarp. “Harry, my man, I’m in Jersey directing a scene for a friend. I’ve got an hour between seven and eight to have a quick drink with you. I’m taking a chopper. Can you make it?”

“I don’t know,” said Harry. “I’m busy.” It was important to be cagey with these guys, to be a little unavailable, to act as if you, too, had a helicopter. “Can you give me a call back later?”

“Sure, sure,” said Scarp, as if he understood too clearly. “How about four-thirty. I’ll give you a call then.”

“Fine,” said Harry. “I should know better then what my schedule’s like”—he stifled a cough—“for the evening.”

“Exactly,” said Scarp. “Fabulous.”

Harry kept his dirty clothes in a laundry bag at the bottom of his closet. He grabbed the bag up, crammed into it two other pairs of underwear, which had been floating around, and dashed across the street to the Korean laundromat with a large box of generic heavy-duty laundry detergent. He did his wash in an excited fashion, got pushy in claiming a dryer, went next door and ordered a fried egg sandwich to go, with ketchup, and ate it back at the laundromat, sitting on the window ledge, next to a pimp with a satin tie.

At four-thirty, when Scarp called, Harry said, “All’s squared away. Just name the place.”

This time they met at a restaurant called Zelda. Harry was wearing clean underwear and socks.

“No one ever uses apostrophes anymore, have you noticed?” said Harry. He had been here before and had, in fact, said this before. “It makes restaurants sound like hurricanes.” Zelda specialized in eclectic Louisiana cooking. It served things like salmon fillets with macaroni and cheese, both with bones. Capes, ponchos, and little sundresses hung from the ceiling. It was strictly a crazed southern woman’s idea of a restaurant.

Harry and Scarp sat in the bar section, near the piano, hemmed in on every side by potted plants.

Scarp was fishing for descriptions. “There’s no—”

“Business like show business!” burst out Harry.

“Yes,” said Scarp, a little taken aback. He was dressed in jeans and a linen shirt. Again he wore a broach, this time of peridot and garnet, fastened close to the collar. He was drinking a martini.

Harry wasn’t drinking. He’d ordered seltzer water and took big handfuls of mixed nuts from the bowl in front of him. He hadn’t had a cigarette since the trucks had started
coming, and now he found himself needing something to put in his mouth, something to engage his hand on its journey up from the table and back down again. “So tell me about this thing you were shooting in New Jersey,” Harry began amiably, but a nut skin got caught in his throat and he began to choke, his face red and crumpling, frightening as a morel. Scarp pushed the seltzer water toward Harry, then politely looked away.

“It’s a project that belongs to an old buddy of mine,” said Scarp. Harry nodded at him, but his eyes were tearing and he was gulping down seltzer. Scarp continued, pretending not to notice, pretending to have to collect his thoughts by studying objects elsewhere. “He’s doing this film about bourgeois guilt—you know, how you can be bourgeois and an artist at the same time …”

“Really,” croaked Harry. Water filmed his eyes.

“… but how the guilt can harrow you and how in the end you can’t let it. As Flaubert said, Be bourgeois in your life so that you may be daring in your art.”

Harry cleared his throat and started to cough again. The nut skin was still down there, scratching and dry. “I don’t trust translations,” he rasped. He took an especially large swallow of seltzer and could feel the blood leave his face a bit. There was some silence, and then Harry added, “Did Flaubert ever write a play?”

“Don’t know,” said Scarp. “At any rate, I was just shooting this one scene for my friend, since he was called away by a studio head. It was a very straightforward cute meet at a pedicurist’s. Have you ever had a pedicure?”

“No,” said Harry.

“You really have to. It’s one of the great pleasures of life.…”

But I have had plantar’s warts. You have to put acid on them, and Band-Aids.…

“Do you feel all right?” asked Scarp, looking suddenly concerned.

“Fine. It’s just I quit smoking. Suddenly there’s all this air in my lungs. What’s a cute meat?”

“Cute meet? It’s Hollywood for where two lovers meet and fall in love.”

“Oh,” said Harry. “I think I liked myself better before I knew that.”

Scarp laughed. “You writers,” he said, downing his martini. “
We
writers, I should say. By the way, I have to tell you: I’ve ripped you off mercilessly.” Scarp smiled proudly.

“Oh?” said Harry. Something lined up in him, got in order. His back straightened and his feet unhooked from the table legs.

“You know, when we met last time, I was working on an episode for the show where Elsie and John, the two principals, have to confront all sorts of family issues, including the death of an elderly relative.”

“That doesn’t really sound like ripping me off.”

“Well, what I’ve done is use some of that stuff you told me about your family and the radon gas—well, you’ll see—and that fabulous bit about your Aunt Flora dying while you were dating the Kennedy girl. It’s due to air early next month. In fact, I’ll give you a call when I find out exactly.”

Harry didn’t know what to say. The room revolved dizzyingly away from him, dumped him and spun, because he’d never really been part of it to begin with. “Excuse me?” he stammered. His hand started to tremble, and he moved it quickly through his hair.