Stolen Pleasures (19 page)

Speaking of Leonardo da Vinci (I speak of him because I can't bring myself to speak of what is closest to my heart) I was looking through his journals down in the basement of the City Lights Bookstore today and I came across one thing he says that goes I Never Grow Weary of Being Useful. That got me between the eyes. That's what I'd like to be. Useful. But nobody has any use for me so I am useful just to the two cats from upstairs and some pigeons that all look alike when I go to feed them crumbs in the park across from the Catholic Church.

No more delays! It's time to go back. No more sidetracks! (I began this diary with an
O
because it looks imposing, but no more flourishes!) It's time to go back to the day he moved in upstairs, two weeks ago, and misfortune began to fall on me like bits of plaster falling from the ceiling as the ceiling prepares to fall in from his footsteps up there which I hear like giant's footsteps. They are quiet but of such meaning to me! The young couple upstairs who sublet the apartment and the cats told me he was Dutch and an architect and they hoped that the young man and myself would get along fabulously together. The girl uses words like that because she is jaded and must make life seem fabulous because she has only begun it and to think otherwise would be disastrous. They are a polite young couple and I know when they return they'll come down the back stairs with a little gift for me from Scandinavia or Italy, which is where interesting gifts come from that cost next to nothing. No more delays! The day he moved in I saw him from my window, I looked down at him from behind my curtains as he got out of his Fiat and lifted out some luggage, and my first thought was Now if I had a son that is how he would look, that is who he would be. How do you know? I asked myself. How do you know a son of yours wouldn't look like your father as you remember him, more like a plucked turkey than a man—Poor Father, Forgive Me!—gawky and sad, a plumber with a lower lip like a pitcher spout, same kind I've got. Or like your brother, a hulk with little hands that smelled of bay rum because his father's hands smelled of honest underground. How do you know a son of yours would look like that stranger down there? The son idea left soon enough, left me with an ache
in my heart that was my recognition of him as more unmentionable than son. I have a lot of old magazines under my bed and I went through them for clippings that might interest him. I have art magazines and architecture magazines, all printed on slick paper, magazines I found two for a nickel and smelling of dampness at the Salvation Army, rummage sales, old bookstores. Well, I snipped out pictures of beautiful buildings in Brazil, in Israel, I snipped out page after page of articles that I didn't fully understand because I'm no architect and folded them neatly and put them in his mailbox which is next to mine by the front steps. Then a day later I wrote a little note, or to be precise about it, I printed it because I print nicely, almost professionally, like the print you see on architectural drawings at the museum, and I said I hoped he could make use of the articles and pictures I'd left in his mailbox, the note just an afterthought, as if I'd thought that he might be wondering who put in the clippings and it was impolite to keep him guessing. But I couldn't make myself sign my name. My name meant too much when I imagined it at the bottom of that note. It made me wonder too much who I was. I even left a painting of mine leaning up against his front door, a portrait that I did at Galileo Adult Night School, of a woman in a black lace mantilla, and it had my initials on it. My initials on that picture explain everything but he hasn't come down yet to ask me, “Are your initials KW, by any chance?” If he did come down I wouldn't tell him I lost my job as cafeteria helper. Because he would want to know why, and how can I tell him it was because of him? That would be the last thing he'd expect to hear, that an old woman he never saw before lost her job because he moved in upstairs above her. I can't even explain it to myself in this journal.

There is an old man I chat with whenever I meet him on the street. On a leash he's got a dog the size of a dried pea. Without a leash he wouldn't know where it was. Today I saw him coming a long way off. He walks so slowly because he went to extremes in his youth. He has pores deep as craters and a nose like a purple onion that is further evidence of extremism. Today he says, “Did you see in the paper this morning where nine out of ten men interviewed say they can't understand women? Women live by their emotions and men live by their minds and we shouldn't even try to figure out what you're going to do next?” “Crud!” I shout, thrusting my flubby old face in his flubby old face, and I pull up my rummage sale skirt to show him my varicose veins under the black stockings that hide the veins but not the lumps they make. “You think I got these lumps from my emotions dancing me around? I got them from mental conscientiousness,” I said. “Standing-up jobs all my life, elevators, counters, cafeterias. I got a record of sixty-three years stability.” And he laughs in a spitty way because he's got no answer he learned from a newspaper.

Every night he's got a woman up there. Maybe it's his sister visiting him because he's emotionally disturbed and she comes by at suppertime to bring him cheeses and chocolates and pastries to cheer him up. Or maybe it's his very wealthy mother who because she is so wealthy and swims a lot in her swimming pool and wears Helena Rubenstein cosmetics can sound so light and so young up and down the stairs. She is up there now, I can hear her heels tap-clacking
around up there. Sometimes in the morning he comes down the stairs singing and I have to clap my hands over my ears, I can't bear to think he comes down happy because the woman was with him the night before. It's his sister, I'm sure of it, and he sings because he has Dutch chocolate in his pockets to eat while he sits at the drawing board. Why doesn't he investigate? Old fool, what does he care there is an old woman down below who lost her job? You could never convince him it was his fault. What I should have done is write down what happened the day it happened. Now it is confused in my memory. Besides the intervention of time, which is a bad enough intervention, I haven't eaten well. The money from the last check went on the rent and the utilities and some small items of food in addition to the chicken necks which I cooked up for the two cats although I ate the broth myself. Not only do I feed myself but I feed the two cats that he forgets to feed. He is too busy feeding the girl! The girl! Whatever it is she wants to be fed. Great God, what a wonderful thing to be a girl and be fed! Fed! Fed! Until you are plump and sleek and sassy and delirious!

It's wise to get down the day I was fired at the Eunice B. Stratton Grammar School, because I need to try to remember why for my own good. When the reason gets away from me I get scared and wonder what crazy fault in me did me out of a job. Why was I fired? I refused to serve the children their hot lunches. There were all those trays, there were all those little faces moving along above the trays, gazing down into the containers of vegetable soup, mashed potatoes, cream corn. Everything was as it always is in every school
where I worked as substitute cafeteria helper. But I refused to serve them. Why? Well it occurred to me that food was abominable and that if they continued to eat, the kids at the Stratton School and every school in the city, if they went on eating their hot lunches every day they would only be preparing themselves to suffer, they would only grow up to suffer. The pity for them stopped up my mouth. The pity had been in my mouth for days already and I'd given up breakfast and was feeling nauseated over that variety of foods. So there I stand in my white uniform and my gray hair all neatly tied back in a skimpy ponytail with a bit of green ribbon so my hair doesn't get in the food, my hands washed, my bony hands antisepticized by the strong amber soap that drips down from a glass ball in the lavatory, and a bit of cheery lipstick on my thin lips, there I stand with the children piling up, piling up, and I can't lift my hand with the ladle in it. No, I can't hop and skip to the piping little voices from the little heads on the trays. “Serve! Serve! What's wrong? Serve!” I hear the voices of my co-workers, of my supervisor, who is a large, sloppish woman even in the neat uniform. She is hissing over my shoulder as she shoves me aside and grabs the ladle herself. We make a pair, I think, she with her busty waist and me straight as a uniformed stick, she the talkative, ladling, eating kind (it always made me queasy to sit opposite her after the kids were out of the cafeteria and see her talk with watery mayonnaise on her lower lip) and me the untalkative, unladling, uneating kind. Why right then I thought to myself that I had no business in the food industry even if it was seeing that children got a hot nourishing lunch. So I was not surprised when I was notified after all the kids were served and I was still standing there with my hands hanging
down that I was dismissed. It was the pity for them that wouldn't let me use that ladle. No, it was pity for myself because the young man moved in upstairs and if he came down to ask me about my initials what difference would it make since the initials belong to an old woman? The pity for them and for me is all one pity and it's got to the point now where it won't let me talk to anybody. It's difficult for me to tell the vegetable man who's in charge of the stall outside the Buon Gusto Market what I want, ten cents of broken asparagus, a wilted lettuce for a nickel, mainly because I don't want anything but you have to eat to stay alive. Sometimes he sells me what I don't ask for because he hears nothing from me. It seems to me that there is not enough communication to be had over small transactions like the sale of vegetables and that all my life that was all I ever had, small transactions. But he can't hear a thing so he pops the vegetables into the bags and when I get home I find myself with cauliflower and chard, things I never eat, that the very smell of sickens me. So I throw it all away. I can't bear the sight of food anyway so it's all to the good that it's not what I asked for. When I pass Stella's Bakery and see the cakes and hot cross buns, when I pass the Safeway Market and see the big red letters about juicy chuck roasts, when I pass the restaurants and see through the glass the customers eating rich soup or cutting steaks or sipping wine, or when I read in the gossip column that at the Taj of India the gossiper was served fowl covered with gold leaf as in the days of the Moguls, why I think of the part in the Russian novel where the poor student sits in the railway compartment, starving, and the fat Kulak couple who are facing him take out their bread and sausage and eat without offering him any and without any embarrassment. When I eat my
toast and drink my tea I feel the eyes of the poor on me. I don't feel poor when I eat so I don't like to eat. I can't seem to think about all the hungry people in the world because there are too many to think about at one time, so the student on the train is everybody, he is the children at the school, he is myself, he is hungry of body and soul. No, I don't like to eat anymore. Even if I had a job I think I'd eat less than I used to.... The above reason for losing my job sounds like a reasonable reason when I write it and read it, but I'm afraid that in a little while, when I'm doing something else, the reason will sound like nothing but that crazy quirk I was afraid to admit to.

The upsetness is with me again. The day I was fired I wasn't upset in this way even though it was an important job and they make you sign an oath about not being a member of an organization that seeks to tear down the government. The upsetness began when I learned there aren't any jobs around for a woman who's sixty-three years old. I knew this before but it didn't mean much because I had a job, but when I didn't have a job anymore then the fact there wasn't any upset me. I am in the habit of stealing old Sunday newspapers from the woman who lives upstairs across from the architect. She is a mouse-sized woman who works at a florist's. She leaves the papers outside her back door intending to throw them away later, so it's not really stealing on my part but it would be polite of me to ask for them. However, I don't like to humble myself mainly because I don't care for her. It began, my not caring for her, the day I was taking an oil painting of mine down the front stairs to see if some gallery would hang it up, and she passes me going up and asks to see it,
but all she can say is “Isn't that pretty?” Does she think I'm a fool that I like my work called pretty? I concluded then that she was the fool if she thought I was fool enough to fall for a word like pretty. There are fools and fools, and some you can become fond of but she is a fool that you avoid. Anyway, they insult you to your face, the want ads. They say Girl Under twenty-five or Must Be Young and Attractive. I used to say Crud To You, meaning the employers, but after I got fired I read the ads and got upset. Maybe I ought to go over to file for my unemployment insurance, but since I was only a part-time worker and not that regular and making close to nothing I'm not sure if anything is coming to me. Besides, there are so many people in lines and so many spaces to fill in, so much milling around and so many faces that don't know one another. The thing to do is not be upset and the way to do it is to let pleasure set in. You can make yourself glad you've got no job and glad you're not looking forward to any. This is better than being upset. Besides, since I may decide to not eat, it doesn't matter whether I've got money coming in or not.... It's 9 pm. I can hear the faraway noise that comes up from the ships and the piers down the hill when they work all night and the sound of the air conditioner that goes day and night in the Roma Macaroni Factory across the street. Upstairs I hear the woman laughing.

They are quarreling across the hall, the taxi driver with the Hungarian name whose grandfather was a count and his sweet, naggy wife. They have a black poodle named Valentina. They also have an old dog shaky in the legs that some family in the
neighborhood abandoned when they moved away and it's got a sad, resigned look such as I've never seen on any face before, man or beast. It lies at the foot of the front steps and you have to step over him, coming or going. I wonder if I have the same kind of face with some anxiety mixed up in it. Whenever I see sad faces on cats and dogs I wonder how I look myself. Today is the first hot day of the year, it came unexpectedly, and they are getting ready to go to the beach. It's three o'clock already. He's carrying out canvas chairs to the car and an armload of odds and ends and he's shouting at her to “Hurry, for God's sake, or the best part of the day will be gone!” “Please! The umbrella!” she cries. “The umbrella!” and runs back up the stairs and unlocks the door again. Great God, the day is gone already and when they get to the beach, a strong wind will be blowing, cold and gritty.... They're gone, thank God, with their two dogs. It's a warm day, the acacia trees are dropping their tiny, rusty yellow puffs, I see sweepings of them in the sidewalk cracks whenever I go out, and the blossoms on the few fruit trees in the neighborhood smell nice, like the white mice I used to have when I was a child. Tonight I'll go up the backstairs and knock at his door. He ought to feed those two cats himself and not leave them for me to feed because I've got nothing to feed them with and I can't bear the sad faces of all the animals around here on the front and back stairs.