When You Are Engulfed in Flames (7 page)

One afternoon Oprah interviewed a group of women who had overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Susan fell overboard while sailing and managed to survive for six days by clinging to a cooler. Colleen taught herself to read and got a job as an executive secretary. The third guest, a poet, had recently published a memoir about her cancer and the many operations performed in an effort to reconstruct her jaw. The poet and I had met and spoken on several occasions. Now here she was on
Oprah,
and nothing would do until I ran across the hall to tell Helen. She’d been half watching from her spot on the radiator and didn’t seem terribly impressed with my news.

“You don’t get it,” I said, and I pointed to the screen. “I
know
that person. She’s my friend.” It was too strong a word for what was, at best, a nodding relationship, but Helen didn’t need to know that.

“So what?” she said.

“So I have a friend on
Oprah.
”

“Big deal. You think that makes you special?”

If Helen had known someone who’d appeared on
Oprah,
she’d have had T-shirts made up, but of course that was different. She was allowed to brag and name-drop, but no one else was. Announce an accomplishment — signing a book contract, getting your play reviewed in the
Times
— and her hackles would go up. “You think your shit smells better than mine? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“But you’re
old,
” I once told her. “Your job is to be happy for me.”

“Stick it up your ass,” she said. “I’m not your goddamn mother.”

With the exception of my immediate family, no one could provoke me quite like Helen could. One perfectly aimed word, and within an instant I was eight years old and unable to control my temper. I often left her apartment swearing I’d never return. Once I slammed her door so hard, her clock fell off the wall, but still I went back — “crawled back,” she would say — and apologized. It seemed wrong to yell at a grandmother, but more than that I found that I missed her, or at least missed someone I could so easily drop in on. The beauty of Helen was that she was always there, practically begging to be disturbed. Was that a friend, or had I chosen the wrong word? What was the name for this thing we had?

When I told Hugh about the Oprah business, he said, “Well, of course she acted that way. You were being pretentious.”

The word threw me. “‘Pretentious’ is knowing someone who met Pina Bausch, not someone who met Oprah.”

“It depends on what circles you’re running in,” he said, and I supposed he was right, not that it gave Helen anything to be snippy about. I’d lost count of all the times she’d mentioned her friendship with John Gotti, head of the Gambino crime family. “He’s a very good-looking man,” she’d say. “Pictures don’t do him justice.” After pressing, I learned that by “friend” she meant they had been introduced at a party thirty years earlier and had danced for two minutes before someone cut in. “John is very light on his feet,” she told me. “That’s something most people don’t know about him.”

“Maybe they’ll bring it up at his murder trial,” I said.

Helen fell in the tub and sprained her wrist. “That’s it for the cooking,” she told us. “You’re not getting any more free meals out of me.”

Hugh and I shuffled back across the hall and shut the door behind us. No more “Famous Veal Cutlet”! No more “Famous Sausage Casserole”! No more “Famous Chicken with the Oriental Vegetables”! We could hardly believe our luck.

While Helen was laid up, I went to the store for her. Hugh took down her trash and delivered her mail. Joe, a widower now, offered to help as well. “Anything that needs doing around the house, you just let me know,” he told her. He meant that he’d change lightbulbs or run a mop across her floor, but Helen took it the wrong way and threw him out of her apartment. “He wants to give me a bath,” she told me. “He wants to see my twat.”

It was shocking to hear this word from a seventy-three-year-old woman, and in response I winced.

“What?” she said. “You think I ain’t got one?”

Three months after Hugh joined the scenic union, the membership voted to go on strike. This is the group that paints backdrops for movies and plays. I wanted to be supportive, and so I tried coming up with slogans that might sound good on a picket sign: “Broadway Gives 829 the Brush-off” was my idea, as was “Scenic Painters Find New Contract Unpaletteable.”

On the first morning of the strike, Hugh left the house at 7:00 a.m. A short while later, Helen called. I normally wouldn’t pick up at that hour, but her voice on the machine was slurred and frantic, and so I answered. Since I had known her, Helen had, in her words, “taken” three strokes. They were, she’d admit, little ones, but still it worried me that she might have had another, and so I got dressed and headed across the hall to her apartment. The door jerked open before I could knock, and she stood in the frame, her lower jaw sunken, the lip invisible. It seemed that she had been at her window, surveying the scene below, and when the super in the building across the street threw a lit cigarette into our trash can, she yelled at him with such force that she blew her lower plate right out of her mouth. “Itch in da schwubs,” she said. “Go giddit.”

A minute later I was downstairs searching the planter in front of our building. There I found a beer bottle, a slice of pizza with ants on it, and, finally, the dentures, incredibly unbroken by their five-story fall. It is not unpleasant to hold someone else’s warm teeth in your hand, and before returning upstairs, I paused, studying the damp plastic horseshoe that served as Helen’s gum. What made it all look so fake was its perfection. No single tooth protruded or towered above its neighbor. Even in shape and color, they resembled a row of ceramic tiles.

Back upstairs, I found Helen waiting on the landing. She slid the dentures, unwashed, back into her mouth, and it was like popping the batteries into a particularly foul toy. “Rat bastard motherfucker could have set our whole building on fire.”

In the mornings Helen listened to the radio, an oldies station I referred to as “K-WOP.” All the singers seemed to be Italian, and all were backed by swollen string arrangements. Whenever a favorite song came on, she’d crank up the volume, subjecting us to countless versions of “Volare” and “That’s Amore.”

Radio meant a lot to Helen, but only
her
station. When I was invited to record a series of commentaries for NPR, she took no interest whatsoever. The morning my first story was broadcast, she pounded on our door. I was in the bedroom with a pillow over my head, so Hugh answered, and gestured to the air around him. “Listen,” he whispered. “David is on the radio.”

“So what?” Helen said. “A lot of people are on the radio.” Then she handed him an envelope and asked if we’d mail in her stool sample. “It’s not the whole thing, just a smear,” she told him. When the broadcast was over and I finally got out of bed, I noticed that she’d posted her stool sample with Christmas stamps and included the spidery handwritten message “Happy Holidays.”

Our building was full of people who, for one reason or another, had found their way onto Helen’s shit list. Some were doomed right from the start: she didn’t like their looks or the sounds of their voices. They were stuck up. They were foreign. Our landlord had a small office just off Bleecker Street, and Helen used to call him at least three times a day. She was like the secret police, always watching, always taking notes.

Then the landlord died, and the building was sold to a real estate conglomerate located somewhere in New Jersey. The new owners didn’t care that the woman on the second floor had found a black boyfriend, or that the super was composing electronic music instead of improving his English. Overnight Helen became powerless, and those who had lived in fear of her grew progressively more defiant. You’d think she would hate being called a tattletale or, even worse, “a nosy old bitch,” but, strangely, such names seemed only to invigorate her.

“You think I can’t kick your ass?” I’d hear her yell. “Ya mutt, I’ll mop the fucking floor with you.”

The first few times I heard this, I laughed. Then it was me she was threatening to mop the floor with, and it suddenly didn’t seem so funny. This was another of those arguments that came out of nowhere: a word here, a word there, and the next thing I knew we were at each other’s throats. Ironically, the fight started over a blown fuse. My electricity had gone out, and I needed a key to the basement. Helen had one, and when she refused to loan it to me, I told her she was being an asshole.

“That’s better than being a drunk,” she said, and she waited a moment for the word to settle in. “That’s right. You think I don’t see you with the empty cans and bottles every morning. You think I can’t see it in your swollen face?”

Had I not been so loaded that I could barely stand, my denial might have carried a bit more weight. As it was, I sounded pathetic. “You don’ know. Anything about . . . what. Goes on with. Me.”

We were in her doorway when she put her hands on my chest and pushed. “You think you’re tough? You think I can’t kick your ass?”

Hugh came up the stairs just then, his ears ringing from all the noise. “You’re like children, the both of you,” he told us.

Following our little scene, Helen and I didn’t talk for a month. I’d hear her in the hall sometimes, most often in the morning, giving food to Joe. “It’s my Famous Pasta Fagioli, and that one next door, the Greek bastard, would die if he knew I was giving it to you.”

It was a stranger who brought us back together. In the ten or so years before she retired, Helen cleaned house for a group of priests in Murray Hill. “They were Jesuits,” she told me. “That means they believe in God but not in terlet paper. You should have seen their underwear. Disgusting.”

In her opinion, a person who hired a housekeeper was a person who thought himself better than everyone else. She loved a story in which a snob got his comeuppance, but the people I worked for were generally pretty thoughtful. I felt like a bore, telling her how unobtrusive and generous everyone was, and so it came as a pleasant surprise when I was sent to clean an apartment near the Museum of Modern Art. The woman who lived there was in her late sixties and had hair the color of a newly hatched chick. Mrs. Oakley, I’ll say her name was. She wore a denim skirt with a matching blouse and had knotted a red bandana around her throat. With some people this might be it, their look, but on her it seemed like a costume, like she was going to a party with a cattle-rustling theme.

Most often a homeowner would take my jacket, or direct me toward the closet. Mrs. Oakley did neither, and when I made for the brass rack that she herself clearly used, she said, “Not there,” her voice a bark. “You can put your things in the guest bathroom. Not on the countertop, but on the toilet.” She pointed to a door at one end of the foyer. “Put the lid down first,” she told me. “Then put your coat and scarf on top of the lid.”

I wondered who would be stupid enough not to have understood that, and I imagined a simpleton with a puzzled expression on his face. “Hey,” he might say. “How come my jacket’s all wet? And while we’re at it, who put this turd in my pocket?!”

“Something amuses you, does it?” Mrs. Oakley asked.

I said, “No. Not at all.” Then I jotted down the time in my portable notebook.

She saw me writing and put her hands on her hips. “I am not paying you to practice your English,” she told me.

“Excuse me?”

She pointed to my notebook. “This is not a language institute. You are here to work, not to learn new words.”

“But I’m an American,” I told her. “I spoke English before I got here. Like at home, growing up and stuff.”

Mrs. Oakley sniffed but did not apologize. I think she wanted a foreigner so badly that she heard an accent where there was none. How else to explain it? Being a desperate, godforsaken immigrant, it went without saying that I coveted everything before me: the white wall-to-wall carpet, the framed reproduction of Renoir’s
Brat with Watering Can,
the gold-plated towel rack in the marble master bathroom.

“I have very nice things,” she announced. “And I expect to
still
have them after you’ve left.”

Was this the moment I decided to make up with Helen, or was it later, when Mrs. Oakley screamed at me for opening the medicine cabinet? “When I told you to clean the master bathroom, I meant everything
but that.
What are you, an idiot?”

At the end of the day I caught the subway home. Helen was staring down from her window as I approached our building, and when I waved at her, she waved back. Three minutes later I was sitting at her kitchen table. “So then she told me, ‘I have very nice things and I expect to still have them after you’ve left.’”

“Oh, she was asking for it, that one,” Helen said. “What did she say when you slapped her?”

“I didn’t slap her.”

She looked disappointed. “OK, then, what did you break on your way out?”

“Nothing. I mean, I didn’t walk out.”

“Are you telling me you stayed and took that shit?”

“Well . . . sure.”

“Then what the fuck?” She lit a fresh cigarette and tucked her disposable lighter back into her pack. “What the fuck are you good for?”

The first time I went to Normandy I stayed for three weeks. After returning, I went straight to Helen’s, but she refused to hear about it. “The French are faggots,” she said. As evidence, she brought up Bernard, who was born in Nice and lived on the fourth floor.

“Bernard’s not a homosexual,” I told her.

“Maybe not, but he’s filthy. Did you ever see his apartment?”

“No.”

“OK then, so shut up.” This was her way of saying that the argument was over and that she had won. “I bet you’re glad to be back, though. You couldn’t pay me to go overseas. I like it where’s it’s civilized and you can drink the water without running to the terlet every five minutes.”

While in France, I’d bought Helen some presents, nothing big or expensive, just little things a person could use and then throw away. I placed the bag of gifts on her kitchen table and she halfheartedly pawed through it, holding the objects upside down and sideways, the way a monkey might. A miniature roll of paper towels, disposable napkins with
H
’s printed on them, kitchen sponges tailored to fit the shape of the hand: “I don’t have any use for this crap,” she said. “Take it away. I don’t want it.”