Like Life

  “Rudy. My husband.”

  “Whatever,” said Goz, and she went into a stall and closed the door.

  None of the English seemed to be getting sick. This caused much whispering in the Indian villages. “We are dying,” they said. “But they are not. How come?”

  And so the chief, weak and ailing, would put on English clothes and go to the Englishmen (picture).

  “THIS IS for Seth Billets,” Mamie said, handing the receptionist a large manila envelope. “If he has any questions, he can just phone me. Thanks.” She turned and fled the building, taking the stairs rather than the elevator. She never liked to meet with Seth. He tended to be harried and abstracted, and they worked just as well together on the phone. “Mamie? Great stuff,” he liked to say. “I’m sending the manuscript back with my suggestions. But ignore them.” And always the manuscript arrived three weeks later with comments in the margin like Oh please and No shit.

  She bought a paper and walked downtown toward some galleries she knew on Grand Street, stopping at a coffee shop on Lafayette. Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

  “You want something or nothing?” the waitress asked her.

  “What?” Startled, Mamie ordered the Slenderella.

  “Good choice,” said the waitress, as if it had been a test, and then hurried to the kitchen in a palsied jog.

  Mamie spread the paper out at a diagonal and read, the pages stoically full of news of the war in India and, locally, of the women’s bodies dredged up weekly from the Gowanus Canal. Disappeared women, with contusions. Beaten and drowned. Secretaries, students, a Rosie or two.

  The Slenderella came with egg salad, and she ate it slowly, dissolving it in her mouth, its moist, mothering yellow. On the obituary page there were different deaths, young men, as in a war, and always the ending: He is survived by his parents.

  Leaving the paper on the table as a tip, she spent the rest of the morning wandering in and out of galleries, looking at paintings that seemed much worse to her than Rudy’s. Why these and not her husband’s? Painting pictures was the only thing he had ever wanted to do, but no one was helping him. Age had already grabbed him in the face: His cheeks sagged houndishly, his beard was shot with white. Bristly hairs sprouted like wheat from his ears. She used to go with him to art openings, listening to people say bewildering things like “Syntax? Don’t you just love syntax?” or “Now you know why people are starving in India—we had to wait an hour for our biriyani!” She began to leave early—while he lingered there, dressed in a secondhand pair of black leather pants he looked terrible in, chatting up the dealers, the famous, the successful. He would offer to show them his slides. Or he would go into his rap about Theoretical Disaster Art, how if you can depict atrocities, you can prevent them. “Anticipate, and imitate,” he said. “You can preclude and dispirit a holocaust by depriving it of its originality; enough books and plays and paintings, you can change history by getting there first.”

  One East Village dealer looked him heavily in the eye and said, “You know, in a hive, when a bee has something to communicate, it does a dance. But if the bee does not stop dancing, the others sting it to death,” and the dealer then turned and started talking to someone else.

  Rudy always walked home alone, slow across the bridge, his life exactly the same as it was. His heart, she knew, was full of that ghetto desire to leap from poor to rich with a single, simple act, that yearning that exhausted the poor—something the city required: an exhausted poor. He would comb the dumpsters for clothes, for artbooks, for pieces of wood to build into frames and stretchers, and in the early hours of the morning he would arrive home with some huge dried flower he had scavenged, a wobbly plant stand, or a small, beveled mirror. At noon, without an apartment to paint, he might go into the city, to the corner of Broadway and Wall, to play his harmonica for coins. Sea chanteys and Dylan. Sometimes passersby would slow down on “Shenandoah,” which he played so mournfully that even what he called “some plagiarist of living,” in a beige all-weather coat, “some guy who wears his asshole on his sleeve,” might stop on his lunch hour to let a part of himself leap up in the hearing, in communion, in reminder of times left behind. But mostly, everyone just sailed past, tense with errands, stubbing their feet on the shoe box Rudy’d placed on the sidewalk for contributions. He did not play badly. And he could look as handsome as an actor. But mad—something there in the eyes. Madmen, in fact, were attracted to him, came bounding up to him like buddies, shouting psychotically, shaking his hand and putting their arms around him while he played.

  But people with money wouldn’t give it to a guy with a harmonica. A guy with a harmonica had to be a drinker. To say nothing of a guy with a harmonica wearing a T-shirt that read: Wino Cogito: I Think Therefore I Drink. “I forget sometimes,” said Rudy, unconvincingly. “I forget and wear that shirt.” People with money would spend six dollars on a cocktail for themselves, but not eighty cents toward a draft beer for a guy with a shirt like that. Rudy would return home with enough cash for one new brush, and with that new brush would paint a picture of a bunch of businessmen sodomizing farm animals. “The best thing about figure painting,” he liked to say, “is deciding what everyone will wear.”

  On days when he and his friend Marco got apartment-painting work, they would make real money, tax free, and treat themselves to Chinese food. They called their housepainting partnership We Aim for the Wall, and as a gimmick they gave out balloons. On these occasions rich people liked them—“Hey, where’s my balloon, guys?”—until they discovered liquor missing or unfamiliar long-distance calls on their phone bills. As a result, referrals were rare.

  And now something was happening to him. At night, even more than before, he would push her, force her, and she was growing afraid of him. I love you, he would murmur. If only you knew how much. He’d grip her painfully at the shoulders, his mouth tight on hers, his body hurting her. In museums and galleries he quietly mocked her opinions. “You don’t know anything about art,” he would say, scornfully shaking his head, if she liked something by someone who wasn’t Rembrandt, someone he felt competitive with, someone his own age, someone who was a woman.

  She began going alone, as now, whizzing around the gallery partitions and then stopping, long, in front of a piece she liked, one that pulled her in and danced a little before letting her go. She liked scenes, something with water and a boat, but she rarely found any. Mostly there was only what she called Warning Label art: Like Man, said one. Love Hates, said another.

  Or she would go to a movie. A boy with a plate in his head falls in love with a girl who spurns him. He kidnaps her, feeds her, then kills her by opening up her skull to put a plate in there, too. He props her up in a chair and paints watercolors of her in the nude.

  On the subway back, in the afternoon, every beggar seemed to her to have Rudy’s face, turning, leering. They would come upon her suddenly, sit next to her and belch, take out a harmonica and play an old folk tune. Or sit far away and just look. She would glance up, and every bum in the car would have his stare, persistent as pain.

  She got off at Fourth Avenue and dropped her jar off at the clinic.

  “We’ll telemail you the results,” said a young man in a silvery suit, a technician who eyed her warily.

  “All right,” she said.

  To console herself she went to a shop around the corner and tried on clothes. She and Rudy used to do this sometimes, two young poor people, posing in expensive outfits, just to show the other what they would look like if only. They would step out of the dressing rooms and curtsy and bow, exasperating the salesperson. Then they would return all the clothes to the racks, go home, make love. Once, before he left the store, Rudy pulled a formal suit off the rack and screamed, “I don’t go to these places!” That same night, in the throes of a nightmare, he had groped for the hatchet beneath him and raised it above her, his mouth o
pen, his eyes gone. “Wake up,” she’d pleaded, and squeezed his arm until he lowered it, staring emptily at her, confusion smashed against recognition, a surface broken for air.

  “COME HERE,” Rudy said, when she got home. He had made a dinner of fruit and spinach salad, plus large turkey drumsticks that had been on sale—a Caveman Special. He was a little drunk. The painting he had been working on, Mamie could see now, was of a snarling dog leaping upon a Virgin Mary, tearing at her lederhosen—not a good sign. Next to the canvas, cockroaches were smashed on the floor like maple creams.

  “I’m tired, Rudy,” she said.

  “Come on.” The cabbagey rot of his one bad molar drifted toward her like a cloud. She moved away from him. “After dinner I want you to go for a walk with me, then. At least.” He belched.

  “All right.” She sat down at the table and he joined her. The television was on, a rerun of Lust for Life, Rudy’s favorite movie.

  “What a madman, Van Gogh,” he drawled. “Shooting himself in the stomach. Any sane person would shoot themselves in the head.”

  “Of course,” said Mamie, staring into the spinach leaves; orange sections lay dead on the top like goldfish. She chewed on the turkey leg, which was gamy and dry. “This is delicious, Rudy.” Any sane person would shoot themselves in the head. For dessert there was a candy bar, split in two.

  They went out. It was dusk, the sun not setting as quickly as in January, when it descended fast as a window shade, but now slowing a little, a lingering, hesitant light. A black eye yellowing. They walked together down the slope toward South Brooklyn, into the streak of orange that would soon be night. They seemed somehow to be racing one another, first one of them slightly ahead, then the other. They passed the old brick row homes, the St. Thomas Aquinas Church, the station stop for the F train and the G, that train that went nowhere, it was said, because it went from Brooklyn to Queens, never to Manhattan; no one was ever on it.

  They continued walking beneath the el. A train roared deafeningly above them. The streetlights grew sparse, the houses smaller, fenced and slightly collapsed, like the residents of an old folks’ home, waiting to die and staring. What stores there were were closed and dark. A skinny black Labrador in front of one of them sniffed at some bags of garbage, nuzzled them as if they were dead bodies that required turning to reveal the murder weapon, the ice pick in the back. Rudy took Mamie’s hand. Mamie could feel it—hard, scaly, chapped from turpentine, the nails ridged as seashells, the thumbs blackened by accidents on the job, dark blood underneath, growing out. “Look at your hands,” said Mamie, stopping and holding his hand under a streetlight. There was melted chocolate still on his palm, and he pulled it away self-consciously, wiped it on his coat. “You should use some lotion or something, Rudy. Your hands are going to fall off and land on the sidewalk with a big clank.”

  “So don’t hold them.”

  The Gowanus Canal lay ahead of them. Already the cold sour smell of it, milky with chemicals, blew onto their faces. “Where are we going, anyway?” she asked. A man in a buttonless coat approached them from the bridge, then crossed and kept walking. “This is a little weird, isn’t it, being out here at this hour?” They had come to the drawbridge over the canal and stopped. It was strange, this toxic little vein, strange to stand above it, looking down at night, in a dangerous neighborhood, as if they were in love and entitled to such adventures. Sometimes it seemed she and Rudy were two people attempting to tango, sweating and trying, long after the orchestra had grown tired, long after everyone else had gone home.

  Rudy leaned his arms on the railing of the bridge, and another train roared over them, an F train, with its raspberry-pink square. “This is the highest elevated in the city,” he said, though the train was drowning him out.

  Once the train had passed, Mamie murmured, “I know.” When Rudy started giving tours of Brooklyn like this, she knew something was the matter.

  “Don’t you bet there are bodies in this water? Ones the papers haven’t notified us of yet? Don’t you bet that there are mobsters, and molls, and just the bodies of women that men never learned to love?”

  “Rudy, what are you saying?”

  “I’ll bet there are more bodies here,” he said, and for a moment Mamie could see the old familiar rage in his face, though it flew off again, like a bird, and in that moment there seemed nothing on his face at all, a station between trains, until his features pitched suddenly inward, and he began to cry into the sleeves of his coat, into his hard, gravelly hands.

  “Rudy, what is it?” She stood behind him and held him, put her arms around his waist, her cheek against his back. There had been times he had consoled her this way, times when he had simply rubbed her back and connected her again to something: Those times when it seemed she’d floated off and was living far away, he had been like a medium calling her from the dead. “Here we are in the Backrub Cave,” he’d said, hovering above her, the quilt spread over them both in a small, warm hut, all the ages of childhood returning to her with his hands. Life was long enough so that you could keep relearning things, think and feel and realize again what you used to know.

  He coughed and didn’t turn around. “I want to prove to my parents I’m not a fuck-up.” Once, when he was twelve, his father had offered to drive him to Andrew Wyeth’s house. “You wanna be an artist, dontcha, son? Well, I found out where he lives!”

  “It’s a little late to be worrying about what our parents think of us,” she said. Rudy tended to cling to things that were beside the point—the point was always too frightening. Another train roared by, and the water beneath them wafted up sour and sulfuric. “What is it, really, Rudy? What is it you fear?”

  “The Three Stooges,” he said. “Poverty, Obscurity, Masturbation. Also the three E’s. Ennui. Anomie. Misery. Give me one good reason why we should go on living.” He was shouting.

  “Sorry,” she sighed. She pulled away from him, brushed something from his coat. “You’ve caught me on a bad day.” She searched his profile for an emotion, one that had found dress but not weapons. “I mean, it’s life or nothing, right? You don’t have to love it, you only have to—” She couldn’t think of what.

  “We live in a terrible world,” he said, and he turned to look at her, wistful and in pain. She could smell that acrid, animal smell hot under his arms. He could smell like that sometimes, like a crazy person. One time she mentioned it, and he went immediately to perfume himself with her bath powder, coming to bed smelling like her. Another time, mistaking the container, he sprinkled himself all over with Ajax.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

  “Yes,” she said, fear thick in her voice. “Can we go back now?”

  He would sit among them with great dignity and courtesy. “You must pray to this god of yours that keeps you so well. You must pray to him to let us live. Or, if we are to die, let us then go live with your god so that we too may know him.” There was silence among the Englishmen. “You see,” added the chief, “we pray to our god, but he does not listen. We have done something to offend.” Then the chief would stand, go home, remove his English clothes, and die (picture).

  GOZ WAS IN the ladies’ room again, and she smiled as Mamie entered. “Going to ask me about my love life?” she said, flossing her teeth in front of the mirror. “You always do.”

  “All right,” said Mamie. “How’s your love life?”

  Goz sawed back and forth with the floss, then tugged it out. “I don’t have a love life. I have a like life.”

  Mamie smiled. She thought how nice that might be, to be peacefully free from love—love and its desire for itself—a husband and wife like two army buddies with stories and World Series bets.

  “It’s pure, it’s stripped, it’s friendly. Coffee and dispassion. You should try it.” She ducked into one of the stalls and locked it. “Nothing is safe anymore,” she called out from inside.

  MAMIE LEFT, went to a record store, and bought records. No one had been buying them for years now
, and you could get them for seventy-five cents. She bought only albums that had a song with the word heart in the title: The Vernacular Heart, Hectic Heart, A Heart Is Just a Bicycle Behind Your Ribs. Then she had to leave. Outside the dizzying heat of the store, she clutched them to her chest and walked, down through the decaying restaurant smells of Chinatown toward the Brooklyn Bridge. The sidewalks were fetid and wet, and the day was warm, as if spring had already come. Everyone was out walking. She would stop at the clinic on the way home and drop off her jar.

  She thought of a dream she had had the night before. In the dream a door in the apartment opened up and suddenly there were more rooms, rooms she hadn’t known existed, a whole house beneath, which was hers. There were birds living inside, and everything was very dark but beautiful, room after room, with windows open for the birds. On the walls were needlepoint samplers that read: Die Here. The real estate agent with the scarf kept saying, “In this day and age” and “It’s a steal.” Goz was there, her blond hair tipped in red and growing dark roots. Tricolor like candy corn. “Just us girls,” she kept saying. It was the end of the world, and they were supposed to live there together, as long as it took to die, until their gums felt strange and they got colds and lost their hair, the television all dots and snow. She remembered some sort of movement—bunched and panicky, through stairwells, corridors, dark tunnels hidden behind paintings—and then, in the dream, it untangled to a fluttering stasis.

  When she reached the bridge, she noticed some commotion, a disturbance up ahead, halfway across. Two helicopters were circling in the sky, and there was a small crowd at the center of the pedestrian walk. A fire truck and a police car whizzed by beneath her on the right, lights flashing. She walked to the edge of the crowd. “What is it?” she asked a man.

  “Look.” He pointed toward another man, who had climbed out over the iron mesh and crossbeams, out to the far railing of the bridge. His wrists were banded in black, and his hands held on to the suspension cables. His back arched and his body swayed out over the water below, as if caught in a web of steel parallelograms. His head dangled like someone crucified, and the wind tore through his hair. In the obscured profile, she thought she could make out the features.