The Sleep-Over Artist

by Thomas Beller

  “In short, I’ve had no serious complaint with the way the building is run,” he went on. “Until now. Now I stand before you with a complaint. The complaint is twofold. One, as we all know, there has been a mandate, an edict, a command, issued from on high, that we must all replace our windows with a very specific kind of window, at great expense to ourselves. That is the major issue. The windows. The other issue, more abstract but equally important, is the appalling manner in which this edict has been handled, the bullying, uncivil behavior of the board and particularly its president, Ms. Ganesh, and…and that is what I am here today to say. That this windows issue must be discussed and also that I am nominating myself for a seat on the board, as a write-in candidate for this evening’s vote. I am the anti-windows candidate.”

  He sat down.

  “We already discussed the windows issue last meeting,” someone called out in complaint.

  “Well, let’s discuss it some more!” came a cry from another part of the room. A mood of insurrection was slowly taking hold. A murmur swept the room. It was a strange unnatural sound, as though a secret tunnel existed deep below the building through which a trainload of troops and weapons was rumbling along in the dark, far beneath the slippers and loafers and sneakers and spit-polished shoes that sat on the cool marble floor of the lobby of this august civilized building on Riverside Drive that, like many stately old buildings, had a name emblazoned on its awning. The building was named after its most famous tenant, with the peculiar article “the” placed before his name, as though to accentuate the fact that this wasn’t a man, it was a building.

  Thus: “The Babe Ruth.”

  ELAINE GANESH WAS president of the board of directors of The Babe Ruth co-op. She was halfway through her current two-year term as board member. It was the fifth consecutive two-year term she had held. Every two years a piece of paper was circulated to all the apartments in the building naming various candidates for the board of directors. These names had brief but intense biographies attached to them. You didn’t move into the building without credentials and money, and in the few sentences available the candidates spelled out, in varying degrees of discretion, what their credentials were and how they had made their money. Usually they were lawyers or investment bankers.

  Ms. Ganesh, as it happens, was neither. She had run, along with other members of her family, a stationery store on Broadway, Ganesh Stationery, that her father had started. For most of her adult life she had been employed full-time at the store, along with her brother. The store had put her brother and her through college. It had been her father’s entire life. It was prosperous at a time when Broadway was practically a slum. It was a tightly run ship, which her father captained; she and her brother were the lieutenants. She had grown up a few blocks away, at Seventy-eighth Street and West End, and when she and her husband, Jarell, moved into The Babe Ruth after they were married, in 1970, it gave her an intense satisfaction to think that there was now a neat triangle formed by her store, her home, and her parents’ home.

  Then her father died, and if that wasn’t bad enough, her brother immediately began the heresy that had split them ever since. He wanted to expand Ganesh Stationery—not just increase the size of the home store, which her father had been slowly expanding for years, but expand into other locations. And in order to do this he would have to borrow against the store, to mortgage the main store so he could open a shop on Seventh Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street.

  Seventh Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street was not a Ganesh neighborhood! Hordes of people from everywhere swarmed across the avenue. A stationery store thrived on a combination of regular customers and people who were so flummoxed by the idea of buying a gift that they resorted, with great relief, to buying a pen. A pen could be fancy, opulent, and interesting and was, by definition, useful, since absolutely everyone had to use it once in a while, if only to sign a check. Her father had understood this and, on several occasions, been presented with a plaque by the Montblanc corporation naming him as one of its most productive sales outlets in the United States.

  Her brother’s idea was to set up a shop devoted exclusively to pens. And the horror of it was that in his will, her father had left her and her brother an exactly equal amount of shares, but they were joined, also as an equal partner, by their Aunt Flo, her father’s sister, who lived in New Jersey and had a perverse and infuriating love affair going on with Elaine’s younger brother, whom she had attacked with pinches and gifts and little baby sounds since the day he was born. Of course she would side with him! And did. And in her fury at this turn of events—that the course of the steady moneymaking ship of Ganesh Stationery should change so abruptly, and so soon after their father’s death!—she had, in protest, sold out to her brother. She had washed her hands of the whole mess. She had walked.

  And once she realized, like someone jerking awake from a bad dream, the enormity of what she had done, of the break she had made with her routine and her past (but her father was dead! And at the hands of horrible careless doctors and forgetful nurses! So what was there to break from anyway!), she threw herself—with the same energy with which she used to patrol the store’s floor, scoping out potential shoplifters and keeping an ever-vigilant eye out for bashful and slightly ashamed gift-shoppers who needed a kind but firm hand to guide them to the pen section and a nice $125 Montblanc—into the process of steering the groaning, tottering, leaking ship of The Babe Ruth.

  By sheer force of will she got herself elected to the board on her first try, and she became its president—which meant that she received more votes than any other candidate—on her second. She radiated competency as the sun radiates light. People were blinded by it, burned by it, basked in it, hid from it, rued its force, but on the whole were resigned to its presence. For the last ten years she had been preoccupied with the fate and well-being of this building, and now a small group of residents were showing their ingratitude with this display of churlish, childish whining. She knew what was good for the building. These complainers just lived in it.

  Her long, red, perfectly manicured fingernails tapped gently against the table as Arnold Lovell spoke, making a barely audible clicking sound, like the feet of a cantering horse. She used to stand behind the pen counter, with its glass case perfectly polished, not a smudge on it, the various pens sitting in their velvet cases like precious jewels, and gently let her fingernails rap against the glass. She had a superstitious idea that this sound, this brittle yet gentle clicking sound, was like a mating call to pen buyers, who would hear it subliminally, and drift, without knowing why, to the pen counter, where she would greet them with a dazzling smile and a list of reasons why this day might be the day they stepped up to quality, to the top of the line, to the best that money can buy: Montblanc.

  EVE FADER SCANNED the room one more time looking for her son. She was part of the small band of renegade tenants who had convened to discus how to combat this horrible windows problem. Everyone had his or her own particular motivations. For some it was the expense, and for others it was the intrusion of workers smashing around in their house, and for yet others (though the minority) it was aesthetic, a protest against the cold modern windows and dead metal frames replacing that which was wooden and old and had character and a certain warmth. For Eve Fader it was all these things plus the sheer bullying audacity, the uniformity of it, the centralized authority handing down an edict that could not be questioned. It touched a still-raw nerve related to the intractable rules of the kibbutz where she had grown up. These were her windows and no one was going to unilaterally tell her what to do with them! The old windows had nice wooden French panes, civilized if a little disheveled, and the new ones were cold brown metal that created one big pane of glass, a dumb slab of cold modernity through which the outside world could pour unmitigated. Alex had promised to come as a show of support as soon as he got off work. They saw each other for brunch every two weeks or so, but she let him float freely in the world and waited for him to come to her. This wa
s a rare request. Her eyes sifted through the crowded lobby—more crowed than she had ever seen it—but she didn’t see him.

  ALEX SAW HER, though. He stood way in the back, almost at the elevator, watching Arnold Lovell speak, while a single thought palpitated over and over in his mind: “I saw his daughter’s vagina.”

  Normally the word “vagina” was one he tried to avoid, because it seemed medical, and he didn’t like his sex to be medical. But now that phrase flashed like a blinking neon sign in his mind. “That man who stands before you has a daughter whose vagina was the first I ever saw!”

  The assembled throng—normally a group who could be called people, or civilians, or citizens, but on this occasion, shmushed into tightly packed metal folding chairs, amidst the strange no-man’s-land of the lobby, wore the peculiar mantle of “shareholders”—elicited from Alex all sort of confused feelings. This windows thing had completely engrossed them; he had never seen so many people at a board meeting. It seemed preposterous and also somehow wondrous that he was standing in the building where he had grown up. He had left the place of his childhood, but the place of his childhood hadn’t left. It was still here, as were many of the people.

  He saw his mother’s neck craning with concern, looking for him. Her face wore that serious expression she got when she felt a serious injustice had been done and needed to be combated.

  It was a cold November night, and the lobby was steamy with so many people. He took off his coat and dropped it over his bag. This bag, though not a proper briefcase, had a distinctly professional air to it.

  He had just arrived from Panda Productions, where he had for the last year been working. He had signed on with the idea that he might get to travel the world helping produce and shoot the nature documentaries the company specialized in. But instead he had spent the last six months working as associate producer on a documentary called The Suicide Seed, about the effects of a special genetically engineered seed that produced one bountiful harvest and then promptly died, requiring the farmer to buy a whole new batch the next year. It was generally known as “the Terminator Seed.”

  The Suicide Seed was the idea of the documentary’s director and driving force, and, therefore, his boss—a committed ecologist turned filmmaker named Claire Marshall. She was a sleek, beautiful woman in her thirties with murderous bedouin eyes, the eyes of someone who has lived through war and witnessed horrible things. That was his first impression of her, at least. The war she had lived through, it turned out, was a marriage. The war/marriage was now over.

  Claire was a serious woman. She laughed rarely, but when she did laugh it was almost frightening. She became convulsed, her face scrunched up as though she were weeping, and the whole thing took place in utter silence, with occasional little trills escaping. It was as though some demon had possessed her. Alex had seen her weep with laughter about the most ridiculous things, but mostly she spent her days being furious with the world and whichever of its inhabitants happened to be in her immediate vicinity.

  If all this wasn’t enough to keep Alex at an utterly respectful and self-preserving distance, she happened to be English. Her accent was deliciously imperious, clipped, and regal. Mary, the receptionist, referred to her as “her majesty,” but only behind her back.

  The Suicide Seed. He thought it was catchy. But mostly he had proceeded with a sense of ironic detachment. The work was interesting, though. He had traveled to Idaho to interview farmers, there was a shoot in India scheduled, and he had corresponded extensively with all sorts of activists from Peru to Seattle. Gradually his ironic detachment slowly evolved into something else. He had decided Claire was really onto something.

  Alex had taken one look at her, heard her accent, felt the delicious causticity of her gaze, observed her madly energized proficiency, her competence, her zeal for making the world a better place even if it meant working absolutely all the time, and promised himself that he would not get involved with this woman.

  Almost immediately, he got a crush on her. But the next line of defense was to simply ignore the crush and maintain a professional relationship. That line had held. Whenever his eyes fell upon her he thought: Don’t do it! But just the other day he turned around to find Claire behind her desk, phone held idly in hand, staring at him with those panther eyes while she absently stroked the space just above her upper lip with her index finger. Her shapely, cruel mouth, to which he had begun paying a great deal of attention, seemed especially full and carnivorous. There was so much sexuality in that absent-minded stroking of the ridge above her upper lip that he had nearly broken out in a sweat.

  He had managed to divert his growing interest in the woman into a growing interest in her cause. Now, standing in the lobby of The Babe Ruth, he though about how the suicide rate among farmers in India was apparently at an all-time high because they were being forced to deviate from centuries of farming tradition by American multinational corporations. He was in the midst of planning the three-week shoot, setting up interviews, helping Claire script the general architecture of this segment of the movie. Faced with such concerns, who cared about new windows!

  ARNOLD LOVELL DRONED on. To Alex’s not very responsible thirteen-year-old self this man had entrusted his two-year-old daughter, Amy, and her older brother, Robert, age five. It was Alex’s one and only foray into the entrepreneurial world of baby-sitting. Amy had lain in her diapers on her back, in her crib, nearly as white and pale as the sheet beneath her, but for the wild blueness of her eyes and the puckered gurgling pink of her mouth.

  Was it his fault that her diaper had somehow become unfastened? Some technically faulty Pampers product was responsible for the sudden and unexpected visitation upon his thirteen-year-old consciousness of a part of the female anatomy that he had been speculating about, with skin-abrading intensity, for months. But he had not been speculating about it in its two-year-old incarnation! But there it was. Who was he to complain?

  Alex had thought it would be Robert Lovell, the skinny-necked, wide-eyed maniac whose eyebrows kept shooting up into the vast expanse of his oversmart forehead, who was going to provide the real baby-sitting challenge. But at nine-fifteen in the evening, a mere forty-five minutes after his bedtime, Robert the lunatic had been board-gamed to sleep, and it was pretty little gurgling Amy who lay awake and ready for action in the bright white lights of her pantrylike room.

  In the lobby, seventeen years later, it occurred to him that he was supposed to turn off the lights. Idiot! No wonder the kid was awake!

  But then he remembered that he had done so; he had flicked the switch and taken perhaps half a step towards the door in darkness, when suddenly the pudgy living breathing and until that moment utterly docile baby let out an outrageous earsplitting near-death series of cries and yelps. So he had flicked the switch back on, peered into the crib—the very act of which calmed her—and then left to watch Charlie’s Angels. At ten, the Lovells were still not home, and he had sauntered back in to discover the baby just where he had left her, on her back, smiling in the bright light, except she had somehow disrobed herself, shed her Pampers, and was in the nude.

  Baby nudity had never before meant anything to Alex. But the illicit thrill of being alone with another human being who was substantially less powerful than himself, and of being alone in someone else’s apartment, and of being in charge of everything when he was so obviously and manifestly incapable of being in charge of anything, including himself, all this had conspired to suddenly fixate Alex’s attention and energy on the small smiling slit of this two-year-old sex goddess. He looked for a few moments until a wave of disgust mixed with silliness came over him and he went back to the TV. Now he stood in the lobby and thought, can you damage someone just by looking?

  “I have recently, and at great personal expense, installed a set of steel windows in all eight of the windows in my apartment,” Mr. Lovell said.

  Alex scanned the audience for signs of the conspiratorial group that had put Lovell up to this. They had
scattered throughout the crowd as though in precaution against attack. The Meyers, Ann Melrose and her husband, Mel, the Siegenthalls, and his own mother, who watched with a mixture of pride and real concern as Mr. Lovell spoke. He saw in her face a lovely kind of nobility. Her sense of justice was an anchor which was secured firmly in the ocean floor of his soul; knowing it was there allowed him to range freely on the high seas of immorality. She had a fantastically good ear for corruption, and not just your local-politician-with-hand-in-till variety. She had perfect pitch for the small corruptions of the soul. She sincerely believed that this whole windows episode was an outrage against that which made life livable.

  Alex himself wavered on the matter.

  It was true that the board had always seemed unnecessarily unpleasant. Since it was a co-op, his mother was a shareholder, not a renter. This was not a situation where there was an evil landlord versus innocent tenants. The tenants were, in a sense, the landlord, so the evil landlord was an evil within. And Evil’s personification for the last ten years had been the horrific Ms. Ganesh, a figure both unique in her Mephistophelian countenance and also incredibly familiar; nearly all of these old buildings that lined Riverside Drive and West End Avenue, and onward to points east, had volunteers whose life revolved around running them, volunteers whose altruism had somehow become perverted into a crazed power hunger, who saw their buildings as ships of which they were captain. There was something about co-ops that was like a fertile swamp from which such larvae always sprang.

  It seemed as if there had always been a feud between his mother and the co-op board, a feud that began over Alex’s incessant throwing of things out the window, his drum-playing, and his endless throwing of a tennis ball against the front of the building. The latter had provoked a sign, installed when he was eleven, that read “No ball playing.” Sad as he was not to be able to play ball, it nevertheless instilled feelings of pride in him every single time he passed it, knowing he was solely responsible for the fact The Babe Ruth had a sign that read “No ball playing” right next to its entrance.