Like Life

  “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.

  “I’ll give you a call. When it’s on.” Scarp frowned.

  Harry gazed at the striated grain of the table—a tree split to show its innards. “What?” he said, finally, slow and muzzy. He picked up his seltzer, knocked it back fast. He set the glass down with a loud crack. “You’d do that for me? You’d really, honestly, do that for me?” He was starting to yell. The people at the table nearest the piano turned to look. “I have to go.”

  Scarp looked anxiously at his watch. “Yes, I’ve gotta run myself.”

  “No, you don’t understand!” said Harry loudly. He stood up, huge over the table. “I have to go.” He pushed back his chair, and it fell all the way over into a plant. He strode quickly toward the door and pushed against it hard.

  The night was just beginning to come, and come warmly, the air in a sweet, garbagey thaw. Midtown was crawling with sailors. They were all youthful and ashore and excited to be this way, in their black and white-trimmed suits, exploring Manhattan and knowing it, in this particular guise, to be a movie set they had bought tickets to, knowing the park was up, the park is up! knowing there were girls, and places where there were girls, who would pull you against them, who knew what you knew though they seemed too bonelessly small to. Harry loped by the sailors, their boyish, boisterous clusters, then broke into a run. Old men were selling carnations on the corner, and they murmured indecipherably as he passed. The Hercules was showing Dirty Desiree and Throbbin’ Hood, and sailors were going in. Off-duty taxis sped from their last fares at the theaters to the Burger King on Ninth for something to eat. Putting block after block beneath his feet would clear his heart, Harry hoped, but the sailors: There was no shaking them. They were everywhere, hatless and landlubbed with eagernesses. Up ahead on his block, he saw a woman who looked like Deli strolling off with two of them, one on each arm. And then—it was Deli.

  He stopped, frozen midstride, then started to walk again. “Aw, Deli,” he whispered. But who was he to whisper? He had tried to be a hooker himself, had got on the old hip boots and walked, only to discover he was just—a slut.

  The Battery’s down, he thought. The Battery’s down. He stood in front of the 25 Cent Girls pavilion. Golden lights winked and dashed around the marquee.

  “Wanna buy, man?” hissed a guy urinating at the curb. “I got bitches, I got rods, I got crack.”

  Harry stepped toward the cashier in the entrance booth. He slid a dollar under the glass, and the cashier slid him back four tokens. “What do I do?” he said, looking at the tokens, but the cashier didn’t hear him. Two sailors came up behind, bought four dollars’ worth, and went inside, smiling.

  Harry followed. The interior was lit and staircased like a discotheque, and all along the outer walls were booths with wooden doors. He passed three of them and then stumbled into the fourth. He closed the door, sat down on the bench, and, taking a deep breath, he wept, hopelessly, for Breckie and for God and for that life here that seemed always parallel to his own, never intersecting, like some opposite shore of river he could never swim across, although he kept trying. He looked at the tokens in his hand. They were leaving bluish streaks in the dampness there, melting if not used. He fumbled, placed one in the slot, and a dark screen lifted from behind the glass. Before him, lit and dancing, appeared a 25 Cent Girl, naked, thirtyish, auburn-haired and pale: National Geographic goes to Ireland. There was music playing, and she gyrated to it, sleepy and indifferent. But as he watched she seemed to lift her eyes, to spot him, to head toward his window, slow and smiling, until she was pressing her breast against his pane, his alone. He moaned, placed his mouth against the cold single rose of her nipple, against the hard smeared glass, though given time, in this, this wonderful town, he felt, it might warm beneath his labors, truly, like something real.

  Joy

  IT WAS A FALL, Jane knew, when little things were being taken away. Fish washed ashore, and no one ate a clam to save their lives. Oystermen netted in the ocean beds, and the oysters were brought up dead. Black as rot and no one knew why. People far from either coast shuddered to think, saw the seas and then the whole planet rise in an angry, inky wave of chowder the size of a bowl. It was as far as their imaginations would allow, and it was too far. Did this have to do with them? They flicked off their radios, left dishes in the sink, and went out. Or they tuned to a station with songs. It was a season for losing anything small, living trinkets you’d thought were yours—a bracelet of mother-of-pearl, a lover’s gift, unhinged and slipping off into the night like something yearning and tired. The rain stopped dry. The ground crumbled to lumps, and animals maddened a little with thirst. Squirrels, smelling water on the road, gnawed through the hoses in cars and later died on the shoulders. “Like so many heads,” said a radio announcer, who then played a song.

  Jane’s cat itself had fleas, just the barest hint, and she was going to get rid of them, take the cat to the groomer’s for the bath–dip–comb-out. There were rumors about fleas. They could feast on you five or six times a day and never let go. You could wake up in a night sweat with a rash and your saliva gluey and white, in ligaments as you tried to speak. You could look out at your life and no longer recognize it.

  The groomer was at a vet’s on the west side of town. It was where rich people took their cats, and it made Jane feel she was giving her cat the best possible care. This was a cat who slept on the pillow next to her at night. This was a cat who came running—happy to see her!—when she drove up in front of the house.

  This particular morning she had to bring her cat in before eight. The dogs came in at eight-o-five, and the vet liked the cats to get there earlier, so there would be no commotion. Jane’s cat actually liked dogs, was curious about them, didn’t mind at all observing them from the safet
y of someone’s arms. So Jane didn’t worry too much about the eight o’clock rule, and if she got there late, because of traffic or a delayed start on the coffee she needed two cups of simply to get dressed in the morning, no one seemed to mind. They only commented on how well-behaved her cat was.

  It usually took fifteen minutes to get to the west side, such was the sprawl of the town, and Jane played the radio loudly and sang along: “I’ve forgotten more than she’ll ever know about you.” At red lights she turned to reassure the cat, who lay chagrined and shedding in the passenger’s seat. Ahead of them a station wagon moved slowly, and Jane noticed in the back of it a little girl waving and making faces out the rear window. Jane waved and made faces back, sticking out her tongue when the little girl did, pulling strands of hair into her face, and winking dramatically first on one side and then the other. After several blocks, Jane noticed, however, that the little girl was not really looking at her but just generally at the traffic. Jane re-collected her face, pulled in her tongue, straightened her hair. But the girl’s father, at the wheel, had already spied Jane in his rearview mirror, and was staring, appalled. He slowed down to get a closer look, then picked up speed to get away.

  Jane got in the other lane and switched stations on the radio, found a song she liked, something wistful but with a beat. She loved to sing. At home she had the speakers hooked up in the kitchen and would stand at the sink with a hollow-handled sponge filled with dish detergent and sing and wash, sing and rinse. She sang “If the Phone Don’t Ring, I Know It’s You” and “What Love Is to a Dove.” She blasted her way through “Jump Start My Heart,” humming on the verses she didn’t know. She liked all kinds of music. When she was a teenager she had believed that what the Muzak station played on the radio was “classical music,” and to this day her tastes were generous and unjudging—she just liked to get into the song. Most of the time she tried not to worry about whether people might hear her, though an embarrassing thing had happened recently when her landlord had walked into the house, thinking she wasn’t home, and caught her sing-speaking in an English accent. “Excuse me,” said the landlord. “I’m sorry.”