"You know me," she said. "I grew up in a trailer. Your own father made you a retard. You tell me why you want to have kids."
Gerard thought about the little deaf boy in his class, a boy named Barney, how just today Barney had said loudly in his garbled and unconsonanted speech, "Please, Mr. Maines, when you stand behind, can you stomp your feet louder?" The only way Barney could hear the music and the beat was through the vibrations in the floor. Gerard had smiled, kind and hearty, and said "Certainly, young man," and something raced and idled in his heart.
"Sometimes I think that without children we remain beasts or dust. That we are like something lost at sea."
Benna looked at him and blinked, her eyes almost swelling, as if with allergy. She took a long glug of near-beer, swallowed, then shrugged. "Do you?" she said. "I think maybe I'm just too exhausted from work."
"Yes, well," said Gerard, attempting something lighthearted. "I guess that's why they call it work. I guess that's why they don't call it table tennis"
"What are you watching?" Gerard had knocked on her door and sauntered in. Benna was curled under a blanket on the sofa, watching television. Gerard tried to smile, had even been practicing it, feeling the air on his teeth, his cheeks puff up into his vision, the slight rise of his ears up the sides of his head.
"Some science-fiction thing," she said. "Escape from something. Or maybe it's invasion of something. I forget."
"Who are those figures rimmed in neon?" he asked, sitting beside her.
"Those are the love-killers. They love you and then they kill you. They're from another planet. Supposedly."
He looked at her face. It was pale, without make-up, and the narrow planes of her cheeks seemed exquisite as bone. Her hair, pulled off her face into a rubber band, shone auburn in the lamplight. Just as she was, huddled in a blanket that had telltale signs of dog hair and coffee, Gerard wanted more than anything else to hold her in his arms. And so, in a kind of rush out of himself, he leaned over and kissed Benna on the mouth.
"Gerard," she said, pulling away slightly. "I like you very much, but I'm just not feeling sexual these days."
He could feel the dry chap of her lips against his, still there, like a ten-second ghost. "You go out with men," he insisted, quickly hating the tone of his own voice. "I hear them."
"Look. I'm going through life alone now," she said. "I can't think of men or penises or marriage or children. I work too hard. I don't even masturbate."
Gerard sank into the back of the sofa, feeling himself about to speak something bitter, something that tomorrow he would apologize for. What he said was, "What, do you need an audience for everything?" And without waiting for a reply, he got up to return to his own apartment where visitor and home, like a rigged and age-old game, would taunt him even through the blinds. He went back across the hall, where he lived.
* * *
Strings Too Short to Use
although i was between jobs and afraid I would slip into the cracks and pauses of two different Major Medical policies, I was pleased when they said I had a lump in my breast. I had discovered it on my own, during a home check, had counted to twenty and checked again, and even though Gerard had kept saying, "Where? There? Is that what you mean? It feels muscular," I brought it in to them.
"Yes," the nurse-practitioner said. "Yes. There's a lump in your breast."
"Yes, there is," said the surgeon standing beside her like a best man.
"Thank you," I said. "Thank you very much." I sat up and put my clothes back on. The surgeon had pictures of his wife and kids on the wall. The whole family looked like it was in high school, pretty and young. I stared at them and thought, So? I slipped my shoes on, zipped up my fly, tried not to feel somehow like a hooker.
This is why I was pleased: The lump was not simply a focal point for my self-pity; it was also a battery propelling me, strengthening me—my very own appointment with death. It anchored and deepened me like a secret. I started to feel it when I walked, just out from under my armpit—hard, achy evidence that I was truly a knotted saint, a bleeding angel. At last it had been confirmed: My life was really as difficult as I had always suspected. "It's true. It's there," I said to Gerard when I got home.
"Who's there?" he muttered, preoccupied and absent as a landlord. He was singing the part of Aeneas in a local production of his own rock opera, and he was on his way downtown to shop for sandals "that sort of crawl up the leg."
"This is not a knock-knock joke, Gerard. The lump. The lump is there. It's now a certified lump."
"Oh," he said slowly, soft and bewildered. "Oh, baby."
I bought big stretchy bras—one size fits all, catches all, ropes all in and presses all against you. I started to think of myself as more than one organism: a symbiotic system, like a rhino and an oxpecker, or a gorgonzola cheese.
gerard and i lived across the hall from each other. 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. "Wa
it 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 Mobius 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 iaround 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, over-weight, 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 marrie
d, 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."