Anagrams

  Gerard and I lived across the hall from one another. Together we had the entire top floor of a small red house on Marini Street. We could prop the doors open with bricks and sort of float back and forth between our two apartments, and although most of the time we would agree that we were living together, other times I knew it wasn’t the same. He had moved to Marini Street after I’d been there three years, his way of appeasing my desire to discuss our future. At that point we’d been lovers for nineteen months. The year before he’d unilaterally decided to go on living on the other side of town, in a large “apartment in the forest.” (He called my place “the cottage in the city.”) It was too expensive, but, he said, all wise sparkle, “far enough away to be lovely,” though I never knew what he thought was lovely at that distance—himself or me or the apartment. Perhaps it was the view. Gerard, I was afraid, liked the world best at a distance, as a photograph, as a memory. He liked to kiss me, nuzzle me, when I was scarcely awake and aware—corpse-like with the flu or struck dumb with fatigue. He liked having to chisel at some remove to get to me.

  “He’s a sexist pig,” said Eleanor.

  “Maybe he’s just a latent necrophiliac,” I said, realizing afterward that probably they were the same thing.

  “Lust for dust,” shrugged Eleanor. “Into a cold one after work.”

  So we never had the ritual of discussion, decision, and apartment hunting. It was simply that the Indian couple across the hall broke their lease and Gerard suddenly said during the Carson monologue one night, “Hey, maybe I’ll move in there. It might be cheaper than the forest.”

  We had separate rents, separate kitchens, separate phone numbers, separate bathrooms with back-to-back toilets. Sometimes he’d knock on the wall and ask through the pipes how I was doing. “Fine, Gerard. Just fine.”

  “Great to hear,” he’d say. And then we’d flush our toilets in unison.

  “Kinky,” said Eleanor.

  “It’s like parallel universes,” I said. “It’s like living in twin beds.”

  “It’s like Delmar, Maryland, which is the same town as Delmar, Delaware.”

  “It’s like living in twin beds,” I said again.

  “It’s like the Borscht Belt,” said Eleanor. “First you try it out in the Catskills before you move it to the big time.”

  “It’s living flush up against rejection,” I said.

  “It’s so like Gerard,” said Eleanor. “That man lives across the hall from his own fucking heart.”

  “He’s a musician,” I said doubtfully. Too often I made these sorts of excuses, like a Rumpelstiltskin of love, stickily spinning straw into gold.

  “Please,” cautioned Eleanor, pointing at her stomach. “Please, my B.L.T.”

  These are the words they used: aspirate, mammogram, surgery, blockage, wait. They first just wanted to wait and see if it was a temporary blockage of milk ducts.

  “Milk Duds?” exclaimed Gerard.

  “Ducks!” I shouted. “Milk ducks!”

  If the lump didn’t go away in a month, they would talk further, using the other three words. Aspirate sounded breathy and hopeful, I had always had aspirations; and mammogram sounded like a cute little nickname one gave a favorite grandmother. But the other words I didn’t like. “Wait?” I asked, tense as a yellow light. “Wait and see if it goes away? I could have done that all on my own.” The nurse-practitioner smiled. I liked her. She didn’t attribute everything to “stress” or to my “personal life,” a redundancy I was never fond of. “Maybe,” she said. “But maybe not.” Then the doctor handed me an appointment card and a prescription for sedatives.

  There was this to be said for the sedatives: They helped you adjust to death better. It was difficult to pick up and move anywhere, let alone from life to death, without the necessary psychic equipment. That was why, I realized, persons in messy, unhappy situations had trouble getting out: Their strength ebbed; they simultaneously aged and regressed; they had no sedatives. They didn’t know who they were, though they suspected they were the browning, on-sale hamburger of the parallel universe. Frightened of their own toes, they needed the bravery of sedatives. Which could make them look generously upon the skinny scrap of their life and deem it good, ensuring a calmer death. It was, after all, easier to leave something you truly, serenely loved than something you really and frantically didn’t quite. A good dying was a matter of the right attitude. A healthy death, like anything—job promotions or looking younger—was simply a matter of “feeling good about yourself.” Which is where the sedatives came in. Sedate as a mint, a woman could place a happy hand on the shoulder of death and rasp out, “Waddya say, buddy, wanna dance?”

  Also, you could get chores done.

  You could get groceries bought.

  You could do laundry and fold.

  Gerard’s Dido and Aeneas was a rock version of the Purcell opera. I had never seen it. He didn’t want me going to the rehearsals. He said he wanted to present the whole perfect show to me, at the end, like a gift. Sometimes I thought he might be falling in love with Dido, his leading lady, whose real name was Susan Fitzbaum.

  “Have fun in Tunis,” I’d say as he disappeared off to rehearsals. I liked to say Tunis. It sounded obscene, like a rarely glimpsed body part.

  “Carthage, Benna. Carthage. Nice place to visit.”

  “Though you, of course, prefer Italy.”

  “For history? For laying down roots? Absolutely. Have you seen my keys?”

  “Ha! The day you lay down roots …” But I couldn’t think of how to finish it. “That’ll be the day you lay down roots,” I said.

  “Why, my dear, do you think they called it Rome?” He grinned. I handed him his keys. They were under an Opera News I’d been using to thwack flies.

  “Thank you for the keys,” he smiled, and then he was off, down the stairs, a post-modern blur of battered leather jacket, sloppily shouldered canvas bag, and pantcuffs misironed into Möbius strips.

  · · ·

  During rehearsal breaks he would phone. “Where do you want to sleep tonight, your place or mine?”

  “Mine,” I said.

  Surely he wasn’t in love with Susan Fitzbaum. Surely she wasn’t in love with him.

  Eleanor and I around this time founded The Quit-Calling-Me-Shirley School of Comedy. It entailed the two of us meeting downtown for drinks and making despairing pronouncements about life and love which always began, “But surely …” It entailed what Eleanor called, “The Great White Whine”: whiney white people getting together over white wine and whining.

  “Our sex life is disappearing,” I would say. “Gerard goes to the bathroom and I call it ‘Shaking Hands with the Unemployed.’ Men hit thirty, I swear, and they want to make love twice a year, like seals.”

  “We’ve got three more years of sexual peak,” says Eleanor crossing her eyes and pretending to strangle herself. “When’s the last time you guys made love?” She tried looking nonchalant. I did my best. I sang, “ ‘January, February, June, or July,’ ” but the waitress came over to take our orders and gave us hostile looks. We liked to try to make her feel guilty by leaving large tips.

  “I’m feeling pre-menstrual,” said Eleanor. “I was coerced into writing grant proposals all day. I’ve decided that I hate all short people, rich people, government officials, poets, and homosexuals.”

  “Don’t forget gypsies,” I said.

  “Gypsies!” she shrieked. “I despise gypsies!” She drank chablis in a way that was part glee, part terror. It was always quick. “Can you tell I’m trying to be happy?” she said.

  Eleanor was part of a local grant-funded actor-poets group which did dramatic and often beautiful readings of poems written by famous dead people. My favorites were Eleanor’s Romeo soliloquies, though she did a wonderful “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I was a crummy dancer with no discipline and a scorn for all forms of dance-exercise who went from one aerobics job to the next, trying to convince students I loved it. (“Living,
acting, occurring in the presence of oxygen!” I would explain with concocted exuberance. At least I didn’t say things like “Tighten the bun to intensify the stretch!” or “Come on, girls, bods up.”) I had just left a job in a health club and had been hired at Fitchville’s Community School of the Arts to teach a class of senior citizens. Geriatric aerobics.

  “Don’t you feel that way about dancing?” Eleanor asked. “I mean, I’d love to try to write and read something of mine, but why bother. I finally came to that realization last summer reading Hart Crane in an inner tube in the middle of the lake. Now there’s a poet.”

  “There’s a poet who could have used an inner tube. Don’t be so hard on yourself.” Eleanor was smart, over-thirty, overweight, and had never had a serious boyfriend. She was the daughter of a doctor who still sent her money. She took our mutual mediocrity harder than I did. “You shouldn’t let yourself be made so miserable,” I attempted.

  “I don’t have those pills,” said Eleanor. “Where do you get those pills?”

  “I think what you do do in the community is absolutely joyous. You make people happy.”

  “Thank you, Miss Hallmark Hall of Obscurity.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “You know what poetry is about?” said Eleanor. “The impossibility of sexual love. Poets finally don’t even want genitals, their own or anyone else’s. A poet wants metaphors, patterns, some ersatz physics of love. For a poet, to love is to have no lover. And to live”—she raised her wine glass and failed to suppress a smile—“is to have no liver.”

  Basically, I realized, I was living in that awful stage of life from the age of twenty-six to thirty-seven known as stupidity. It’s when you don’t know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don’t even have a philosophy about all the things you don’t know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight. Nonetheless you tried things out: “Love is the cultural exchange program of futility and eroticism,” I said. And Eleanor would say, “Oh, how cynical can you get,” meaning not nearly cynical enough. I had made it sound dreadful but somehow fair, like a sleepaway camp. “Being in love with Gerard is like sleeping in the middle of the freeway,” I tried.

  “Thatta girl,” said Eleanor. “Much better.”

  On the community school’s application form, where it had asked “Are you married?” (this was optional information), I had written an emphatic “No” and next to it, where it asked “To whom?” I’d written “A guy named Gerard.” My class of senior citizens somehow found out about it and once classes got under way, they smiled, shook their heads, and teased me. “A good-humored girl like you,” was the retrograde gist, “and no husband!”

  Classes were held at night on the third floor of the arts school, which was a big Victorian house on the edge of downtown. The dance studio was creaky and the mirrors were nightmares, like aluminum foil slapped on walls. I did what I could. “Tuck, lift, flex, repeat. Tuck, lift, flex, now knee-slap lunge.” I had ten women in their sixties and a man named Barney who was seventy-three. “That’s it, Barney,” I would shout. “Pick it up now,” though I didn’t usually mean the tempo: Barney had a hearing aid which kept clacking to the floor mid-routine. After class he would linger and try to chat—apologize for the hearing aid or tell me loud stories about his sister Zenia, who was all of eighty-one and mobile, apparently, as a bug. “So you and your sister, you’re pretty close?” I asked once, putting away the cassettes.

  “Close!?” he hooted, and then took out his wallet and showed me a picture of Zenia in Majorca in a yellow bathing suit. He had never married, he said.

  The women mothered me. They clustered around me after class and suggested different things I should be doing in order to get a husband. The big one was frosting my hair. “Don’t you think so, Lodeme? Shouldn’t Benna frost her hair?” Lodeme was more or less the ringleader, had the nattiest leotard (lavender and navy stripes), was in great shape, could hold a V-sit for minutes, and strove incessantly for a tough, grizzly wisdom. “First the hair, then the heart,” bellowed Lodeme. “Frost your heart, then you’ll be okay. No one falls in love with a good man. Right, Barn?” Then she’d chuck him on the arm and his hearing aid would fall out. After class I would take a sedative.

  There was a period where I kept trying to make anagrams out of words that weren’t anagrams: moonscape and menopause; gutless and guilts; lovesick and evil louse. I would meet Eleanor either for a drink at our Shirley School meetings or for breakfast at Hank’s Grill, and if I got there first, I would scribble the words over and over again on a napkin, trying to make them fit—like a child dividing three into two, not able to make it go.

  “Howdy,” I said to Eleanor when she arrived and flopped down. I had lovesick and evil sock scrawled in large letters.

  “You’re losing it, Benna. It must be your love life.” Eleanor leaned over and wrote bedroom and boredom; she had always been the smarter one. “Order the tomato juice,” she said. “That’s how you get rid of the smell of skunk.”

  · · ·

  Gerard was a large, green-eyed man who smelled like baby powder and who was preoccupied with great music. I’d lie there in bed explaining something terrible and personal and he’d interrupt with, “That’s like Brahms. You’re like Brahms.” And I’d say, “What do you mean, I’m old and fat with a beard?” And Gerard would smile and say, “Exactly.” Once, after I’d shared with him the various humiliations of my adolescence, he said, “That’s kind of like Stravinsky.”

  And I said, annoyed, “What, he didn’t get his period until the ninth grade? At least it’s consoling to know that everything that’s happened to me has also happened to a famous composer.”

  “You don’t really like music, do you?” said Gerard.

  Actually, I loved music. Sometimes I think that’s the reason I fell in love with Gerard to begin with. Perhaps it had nothing to do really with the smell of his skin or the huge stretch of his legs or the particular rhythm of his words (a prairie reggae, he called it), but only to do with the fact that he could play any instrument that had strings—piano, banjo, cello—that he composed rock operas and tone poems, that he sang pop and lieder. I was surrounded by music. If I was reading a newspaper, he would listen to Mozart. If I was watching the news, he’d put on Madame Butterfly, saying it amounted to the same thing, Americans romping around in countries they didn’t belong in. I had only to step across the moat of the hallway and I would learn something: Vivaldi was a red-haired priest; Schumann crippled his hand with a hand extender; Brahms never married, that was the biggie, the one Gerard liked best to tell me. “Okay, okay,” I would say. Or sometimes simply, “So?”

  Before I met Gerard, everything I knew about classical music I’d gleaned off the sound track record of The Turning Point. Now, however, I could hum Musetta’s Waltz for at least three bars. Now I owned all of Beethoven’s piano concertos. Now I knew that Percy Grainger had been married in the Hollywood Bowl. “But Brahms,” said Gerard, “now Brahms never married.”

  It’s not that I wanted to be married. It’s that I wanted a Marriage Equivalent, although I never knew exactly what that was, and often suspected that there was really no such thing. Yet I was convinced there had to be something better than the lonely farce living across town or hall could, with very little time, become.

  Which made me feel guilty and bourgeois. So I comforted myself with Gerard’s faults: He was infantile; he always lost his keys; he was from Nebraska, like some horrible talk show host; he had grown up not far from one of the oldest service plazas on I-80; he told jokes that had the words wiener and fart in them; he once referred to sex as “hiding the salami.” He also had a habit of charging after small animals and frightening them. Actually, the first time he did this it was with a bird in the park, and I laughed, thinking it hilarious. Later, I realized it was weird: Gerard was thirty-one and charging after small mammals, sending them leaping into bushes, up trees, over furniture. He would th
en turn and grin, like a charmed maniac, a Puck with a Master’s degree. He liked also to water down the face and neck fur of cats and dogs, smoothing it back with his palms, like a hairdresser, saying it made them look like Judy Garland. I realized that life was too short for anyone honestly and thoroughly to outgrow anything, but it was clear that some people were making more of an effort than others.

  In my early twenties I got annoyed with women who complained that men were shallow and incapable of commitment. “Men, women, they’re all the same,” I said. “Some women are capable of commitment, some are not. Some men are capable of commitment and some are not. It’s not a matter of gender.” Then I met Gerard, and I began to believe that men were shallow and incapable of commitment.

  “It’s not that men fear intimacy,” I said to Eleanor. “It’s that they’re hypochondriacs of intimacy: They always think they have it when they don’t. Gerard thinks we’re very close but half the time he’s talking to me like he met me forty-five minutes ago, telling me things about himself I’ve known for years, and asking me questions about myself that he should know the answers to already. Last night he asked me what my middle name was. God, I can’t talk about it.”

  Eleanor stared. “What is your middle name?”

  I stared back. “Ruth,” I said. “Ruth.” Hers, I knew, was Elizabeth.

  Eleanor nodded and looked away. “When I was in Catholic school,” she said, “I loved the story of St. Clare and St. Francis. Francis gets canonized because of his devotion to vague, general ideas like God and Christianity, whereas Clare gets canonized because of her devotion to Francis. You see? It sums it up: Even when a man’s a saint, even when he’s good and devoted, he’s not good and devoted to anyone in particular.” Eleanor lit a Viceroy. “Why are we supposed to be with men, anyway? I feel like I used to know.”

  “We need them for their Phillips-head screwdrivers,” I said.

  Eleanor raised her eyebrows. “That’s right,” she said, “I keep forgetting you only go out with circumcised men.”