Like Life

  Oh, honey, they sigh; oh, honey, they say,

  there are small things to give and to sell,

  and Heaven’s among us

  so work can be play at the …

  There were other stanzas, too many, and she sped through them. She took a sip of water and read a poem called “Sleeping Wrong.” She slept wrong on her back last night, it began, and so she holds her head this way, mad with loneliness, madder still with talk. She then read another long one, titled “Girl Gets Diphtheria, Loses Looks.” She looked up and out. The audience was squinting back at her, their blood sugar levels low from early suppers, their interest redirected now and then toward her shoes, which were pointy and beige. “I’ll close,” she said loudly into the mike, “with a poem called ‘Le Cirque in the Rain.’ ”

  This is not about a french monkey circus

  discouraged by weather.

  This is about the restaurant

  you pull up to in a cab,

  your life stopping there and badly,

  like a dog’s song,

  your heart put in funny.

  It told the story of a Manhattan call girl worrying a crisis of faith. What is a halo but a handsome accident / of light and orbiting dust. What is a heart / but a … She looked out at the two elderly women sitting polite and half attentive, unfazed, in the front row. One of them had gotten out some knitting. Odette looked back at her page. Chimp in the chest, she had written in an earlier draft, and that was what she said now.

  Afterward a small reception was held out by the card catalogs. There were little cubes of pepper cheese, like dice, placed upon a table. There was a checkerboard of crackers, dark and light, a roulette of cold cuts. “It’s a goddamn casino.” She turned and spoke to Pinky, who had come up and put his arm around her.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said. “I’ve been eating venison and thinking of you.”

  “Yes, well, thank you for coming, anyway.”

  “I thought you read very well,” he said. “Not all of it I understood, I have to admit. Some of your stuff is a little too literaturey for me.”

  “Really,” said Odette.

  People shook her hand. They looked at her quizzically, came at her with assumptions, presumptions, what they believed was intimate knowledge of her. She felt unarmed, by comparison; disadvantaged. She lit up a cigarette.

  “Do you really feel that way about men?” asked a man with a skeptical mouth.

  “Do you really feel that way about women?” asked someone else.

  “Your voice,” said a young student. “It’s like—who’s that actress?”

  “Mercedes McCambridge,” said her friend.

  “No, not her. Oh, I forget.”

  Several elderly couples had put on their coats and hats, but they came up to Odette to shake her hand. “You were wonderful, dear,” said one of the women, gazing into Odette’s nose.

  “Yes,” said the other, studying her own botched knitting—a scarf with an undulating edge.

  “We come to these every year,” said a man standing next to her. He had been searching for something to say and had come up with this.

  “Well, thank you for coming this year as well,” said Odette, stupidly, and dragged on her cigarette.

  Kay Stevens, the woman in charge of the fellowship readings, came up and kissed her on the cheek, the sweet vanilla wax of her lipstick sticking like candy. “A big success,” she said quickly, and then frowned and hurried off.

  “Can I buy you a drink somewhere?” asked Pinky. He was still standing beside her, and she turned to look at him gratefully.

  “Oy,” she said. “Please.”

  Pinky drove them out past the county line to Humphrey Bogart’s. He toasted her, flicked a sparkly speck of something from her cheek, looked into her eyes, and said, “Congratulations.” He grew drunk, pulled his chair close, and put his head on her shoulder. He listened to the music, chewed on his cocktail straw, tapped his feet.

  “Any requests?” the bandleader rumbled into the mike.

  “O, give us one of the songs of Zion,” shouted Pinky.

  “What was that?” The words popped and roared in the mike.

  “Nothing,” said Pinky.

  “Maybe we should go,” said Odette, reaching for Pinky’s hand beneath the table.

  “OK,” he said. “All right.”

  HE STRUCK a match to a candle in the dark of his bedroom, and the fire of it lit the wall in a jittery paint. He came back to her and pressed close. “Why don’t I go with you to New York?” he whispered. She was silent, and so he said, “No, I think you should stay here. I could take you cross-country skiing.”

  “I don’t like cross-country skiing,” she whispered back. “It reminds me of when you’re little and you put on your father’s slippers and shluff around the house like that.”

  “I could take you snowmobiling up by Sand Lake.” There was another long silence. Pinky sighed. “No, you won’t. I can see you phoning your friends back East to tell them you’d decided to stay and them shrieking, ‘You did what?’ ”

  “You know us East Coasters,” she said desperately. “We just come into a place, rape and pillage.”

  “You know,” said Pinky, “I think you are probably the smartest person I have ever known.”

  She stopped breathing. “You don’t get out much, do you?”

  He rolled back and stared at the shadowed ceiling, its dimples and blotches. “When I was in high school, I was a bad student. I had to take special classes in this house behind the school. It was called The House.”

  She rubbed his leg gently with her foot. “Are you trying to make me cry?”

  He took her hand, brought it out from beneath the covers, up to his mouth, and kissed it. “Everything’s a joke with you,” he said.

  “Nothing’s a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.”

  THEY SPENT one last night together. At his house, late, with all the lights off, they watched another cassette of Holocaust Survivors. It was about a boy forced to sing for the Nazis, over and over. Because he could sing, he was the last to be shot in the head, and when they shot him they missed the center of his brain. He was found alive. “I must think of happy things,” he said now, old and staring off. “It may not be what others do, but it is what I must do.” He had a beautiful voice, said a woman, another survivor. It was beautiful like a bird that was also a god with flutes.

  “Heavy,” murmured Pinky, when it was over. He pressed the remote control and turned away in the darkness, toward the wall, in a curve of covers. Odette pulled herself close, placed her hands around to the front of him, palms over the slight mounds of his breasts, her fingers deep in the light tangle of hair.

  “Are you OK?” she asked.

  He twisted toward her and kissed her, and in the dark he seemed to her aged and sad. He placed one of her fingers to his face. “You never asked about this.” He guided her finger along his chin and cheek, letting it dead-end, like the scar, in his mustache.

  “I try not to ask too many things. Once I start I can’t stop.”

  “You want to know?”

  “All right.”

  “I was in high school. Some guy called me a Jew, and I went after him. But I was clumsy and fat. He broke a bottle and dragged it across my face. I went home and my grandmother nearly fainted. Funny thing was, I had no idea that I was Jewish. My grandmother waited until the next day to tell me.”

  “Really,” said Odette.

  “You have to understand midwestern Jews: They’re afraid of being found out. They’re afraid of being discovered.” He breathed steadily, in and out, and the window shade flapped a little from being over the radiator. “As you probably know already, my parents were killed in the camps.”

  Odette did not say anything, and then she said, “Yes. I know.” And at the moment she said it, she realized she did know, somehow had known it all along, though the fact of it had stayed beneath the surface, gilled and swimming like a fish, and now had burst
up, gasping, with its mouth wide. “Are you really leaving on Friday?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Friday. Are you?”

  “I’m sorry, I just didn’t hear what you said. There’s wind outside or something.”

  “I asked you if you were really leaving on Friday.”

  “Oh,” she said. She pressed her face hard into his neck. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  He laughed wearily. “Sure,” he said. “All right,” knowing better than she at that moment the strange winding line between charity and irony, between shoplifting and love.

  During that last day she thought of nothing but him. She packed and cleaned out her little apartment, but she had done this so often now in her life, it didn’t mean anything, not in the pit of her, not anything she might have wanted it to mean.

  She should stay.

  She should stay here with him, unorphan him with love’s unorphaning, live wise and simple in a world monstrous enough for years of whores and death, and poems of whores and death, so monstrous how could one live in it at all? One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them. She should live where there were trees. She should live where there were birds. No bird, no tree had ever made her unhappy.

  But it would be like going to heaven and not finding any of your friends there. Her life would go all beatific and empty in the eyes. And if he came to New York, well, it would bewilder him. He had never been before, and no doubt he’d spend all his time staring up at the skyscrapers and exclaiming, “Gosh, look how tall those suckers are!” He would slosh through the vagrant urine, shoelaces untied. He would walk through the dog shit awaiting him like mines. He would read the menus in the windows of restaurants and whistle at the prices. He would stare at a sidewalk drunk, prone and spread-eagled and fumbling at the crotch, and he would say, not unkindly, “That guy’s really got his act together.” He would look at the women.

  And her restlessness would ripple, double, a flavor of something cold. She would turn from him in bed, her hands under the pillow, the digital clock peeling back the old skins of numbers. She would sigh a little for the passage of time, the endless corridor of it, how its walls washed by you on either side—darkly, fast, and ever, ever.

  “WHAT DO YOU DO, you stay overnight on the road somewhere?” he said, standing next to her car in the cold. It was Friday morning and spitting snow. He had come over and helped her load up the car.

  “I drive until dark, then I check into a motel room and read until I fall asleep. Then I get up at six and drive some more.”

  “So, like, what are you bringing with you to read?” he asked. He seemed unhappy.

  She had a Vogue magazine and The Portable Jung. “Something by Jung,” she said.

  “Jung?” he asked. His face went blank.

  “Yeah,” she sighed, not wanting to explain. “A book he wrote called The Portable Jung.” She added, “He’s a psychologist.”

  Pinky looked her deeply in the eyes. “I know,” he said. “You do?” She was a little surprised.

  “Yeah. You should read his autobiography. It has a very interesting title.”

  She smiled. “Who are you? His autobiography? Really?”

  “Yeah,” said Pinky slowly. “It’s called Jung at Heart.” She laughed loud, to please him. Then she looked at his face, to fix him like this in her mind. He was wearing a black shirt, a black sweater, black pants. He was smiling. “You look like Zorro today,” she said, strangely moved. The spidery veins at his temples seemed like things under water, tentacular and drowned. She kissed him, long and at the rim of his ear, feeling in the rolls and spaces of her brain a winding, winding line. She got into the car. Though she hadn’t even started up the engine, her departure had already happened, without her, ahead of her, so that what she now felt was the taunt of being left behind, of having to repeat, to imitate, of having to do it again, and now, and again.

  “All this wandering that you do,” he said, leaning in the window, his face white as a cream cheese, his scar the carved zigzag of a snowmobile across a winter lake. Wind blew handsomely through his hair. “How will anyone ever get close to you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She shook his hand through the window and then put on her gloves.

  And she thought about this all across Indiana, beneath the Easter hat of sunset that lit the motel roof in Sandusky, through the dawn of Pennsylvania, into which she soared like a birth—like someone practicing to be born. There were things she’d forget: a nightgown stuck on a hook behind the bathroom door, earrings on the motel nightstand. And all love that had overtaken her would have to be a memory, a truck on the interstate roaring up from the left, a thing she must let pass.

  She would park the car right off Delancey Street; there would be a spot across the street from the hotel with the Pepsi sign and HOTEL in lights beneath. All night, sirens would keen, and traffic would whoosh and grind its way down Houston, down Canal, toward the Holland Tunnel—a bent sign to which aimed straight at her window. She would get up in the morning and go for sundries; at the corner bodega the clerk would mispress the numbers on the register, and the toothpaste would ring up at $2,000. “Two thousand dollars!” the clerk would howl, standing back and looking at Odette. “Get a real toothpaste!” From a long distance, and at night, a man would phone to say, doubtfully, “I should come visit on Valentine’s,” history of all kinds, incongruous and mangling itself, eating its own lips.

  If she had spurned gifts from fate or God or some earnest substitute, she would never feel it in that way. She felt like someone of whom she was fond, an old and future friend of herself, still unspent and up ahead somewhere, like a light that moves.

  Starving

  Again

  DENNIS’S EX-WIFE had fallen in love with a man she said was like out of a book. Dennis forgot to ask what book. He was depressed and barely dating. “I should have said to her, ‘Yeah, and what book?’ ” Dennis was always kicking himself on the phone, not an easy thing, the tricky ouch of it. His friend Mave tended to doodle a lot when talking to him, slinky items with features, or a solitary game of tick-tack-toe. Sometimes she even interrupted him to ask what time it was. Her clock was in the other room.

  “But you know,” Dennis was saying, “I’ve got my own means of revenge: If she wants to go out with other men, I’m going to sit here and just let her.”

  “That’s an incredibly powerful form of revenge,” said Mave. She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth. When she was on the phone she often had to improvise Dennis’s face from a window: the pug nose of the lock, the paned eyes, the lip jut of the sill. Or else she drew another slinky item with features. People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane.

  They met for dinner at some sort of macrobiotic place, because Dennis had recently become obsessed. Before his wife left him, his idea of eating healthy had been to go to McDonald’s and order the Filet-o-Fish, but now he had whole books about miso. And about tempeh. Mostly, however, he had books about love. He believed in studying his own heart this way. Men were like that, Mave had noticed. They liked to look in the mirror. For women, mirrors were a chore: Women looked, frowned, got out equipment, and went to work. But for men mirrors were sex: Men locked gazes with their own reflections, undressed themselves with their eyes, and stared for a shockingly long time. Mave believed that not being able to see your life clearly, to scrutinize it intelligently, meant that probably you were at the dead center of it, and that couldn’t possibly be a bad thing.

  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 end
anger 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.