The Mirror in the Mirror
By Jack Dann
So, like most things, it began and ended in the bathroom. Specifically, a bathroom in Lighthouse Point, Florida and a bathroom in the dilapidated Lucerne Hotel on West 79th Street in New York City. (It might also be noted that there is a third bathroom involved in this story, located in the swanky Pierre Hotel on New York’s Upper East Side. However, I will leave it to the reader to determine whether this one is an integral part of the story’s resolution or merely an epilogical literary device.)
And I should tell you that all these bathrooms were the very same bathroom. Sort of, but not really. To explain, allow me to introduce you to Norman and Laura Gumbeiner, who on Wednesday, November 10th, 2020, at 9:30 in the morning, were standing beside each other in their ensuite bathroom located in their stucco, pink, single-story, two-bedroom house overlooking the Intercoastal Waterway.
“Can’t you see I’m in the bathroom?” Norman asked, as he swished his chrome safety razor in the faux-antique marble sink’s frothy hot water. He was a spry eighty-five-year-old hypochondriac, who often deflected his wife’s sarcastic remarks about his attention to body, mind, and receded hairline by repeating the canticle that “What you call hypochondria is what has kept me alive all these years.” Or he would ask, “Do you think colonoscopies where precancerous growths are discovered every time should not be performed?” Or, if he was in a really expansive mood, he would soliloquize about his encounters with Fuch’s dystrophy, urinary infections, arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, amongst a host of other undeniable empirical ‘proofs’—all that to crush, to utterly crush his white-haired (with a touch of hairdresser’s blue), seventy-nine-year-old assailant.
Laura looked intently at her husband’s reflection in the bronze framed mirror, which was a family heirloom (her family) and would be out of place in any bathroom, except perhaps one in Windsor Castle. She was already dressed, showered, and perfumed. A handsome, if rather overweight woman, Laura Gumbeiner smelled like happy memories of Coney Island.
“You’re mowing the lawn today,” she said sweetly, talking directly to the reflection, as if by doing so, she wouldn’t have to interact with the familiar stranger beside her.
“You’re not my boss. And I’ll mow the goddamn lawn—”
“Today,” Laura, said, recasting what he was about to say.
In response, Norman nicked his chin with the razor, then jutted his jaw forward so that his life mate could apply the styptic pencil she already had in hand.
“Okay, I’ll do it this afternoon.”
“Not in that heat you won’t. You’ll do it this morning.” She smiled wryly. “And after that, who knows? If you’re not exhausted, maybe a little hanky-panky.”
He smiled back at his wife in the mirror. “But if I take one of those get-up-and-do-your-duty pills and have a heart attack, it’ll be on your head.”
“I’ll take that chance,” she said. Then she made an odd gurgling sound and suddenly stepped backwards, as if she had just seen a ghost, which, in a sense, she had.
“Whasamatter?” Norman asked, turning towards his wife. He still had patches of shaving soap under his sideburns.
“Look!”
“At what?”
“At yourself. There.” She pointed at the mirror, then stepped forward, looking intently into it. “At us.”
Norman complied, looked at their reflections in the mirror, and repressed a fart. “Yes, I see you, and I see me. Now what the hell’s the matter with you?”
“Look at us. We’re…young.”
“Okay, if you say so, we’re young. We’re as young as we feel.” He scowled at himself, just now remembering the film As Young as You Feel with Monty Woolley and Marilyn Monroe. He grimaced. He had a gray age mark on his left cheek, folds in his neck—what the hell did they call them? chicken somethings—and what he thought of as old-men’s earlobes. And when he looked at his wife in the mirror, he could see that she, too, had spots and the selfsame chicken skin under her chin. But he considered her pretty, nevertheless.
“No, Norman. Look!” She looked at him directly for an instant, saw the old man that he was, shook her head in disappointment, and then turned back to the mirror. “My mother,” she said, talking to the mirror, “may-she-rest-in-peace, was right. She once told me that this was her second-chance mirror.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Norman asked, pulling a monogrammed washcloth from the heated towel rail and wiping the soap off his face.
“I never knew what it meant until now,” she whispered, mesmerized, for the reflection in the mirror was that of a sleek, ash-blond young woman: her face slightly asymmetrical, full lips, large boat-blue eyes, a somehow quizzical face that most people—men especially—found charming. She smiled at herself and then extended her hand toward the mirror…into the mirror.
It was blood warm, viscous and slippery as mercury; and as she felt its palpable adamantine suction, she grasped Norman’s arm. Although he resisted, reflexively, she pulled him right through the mirror. Pulled him over to the other side. Pulled him right back to their old apartment situated in 1965. November 10th.
The day before, a distant Canadian power station had failed at 5:27 p.m., plunging New York City into star-ceilinged darkness until 3:30 a.m.
3:30 a.m. today.
It was now 9:35 a.m., New York time.
#
I won’t burden you with the astonishment that the Gumbeiners felt at that isometric moment of transition. Whatever it was, you’ve just imagined it according to your own cultural frame of reference. And after their initial gob smacking, disorienting shock subsided…after they made what might be referred to as mad, passionate love before they could even reach the bed…and after they, finally, showered and changed into their ‘old’ tight-fitting sweater and jeans vestments; Laura found a jar of instant Sanka decaffeinated coffee and boiled some water.
They sat quietly at the kitchen table in their respectively bewildered states of continued shock and sipped the acrid brew out of chipped mugs. Norman sniffed the flat black liquid and wished for a strawberry latte from the cappuccino machine that was sitting on a counter in what had once been their kitchen on the other side of the mirror. He looked at the young woman who had been his wife for almost sixty years and felt yet another non-chemically induced stiffness. And so they watched the traffic on West 79th Street and Broadway. And they listened to the horns blaring, listened to the background roar of the city until Laura broke their trance of silence.
“I’ve told you what Mother said the last time I saw her in the nursing home.”
“That was a terrible nursing home,” Norman said, remembering how the hallway doors clicked shut and locked.
“Pay attention, Norman! You’re not eighty-five anymore. You’re—”
“Thirty.” Yes, that was right, he thought. He was here…and he was there. It was like seeing double images. You’re thirty and you’re in law school. And you hate it. You want to be a writer, but your father’s will specified law school, all expenses paid, or no bequest. (I might add that Norman became—or had been, depending on your perspective point—a war correspondent and the editor-in-chief of a second-tier local news magazine. He never managed to finish law school. But all that was now in the future, and Norman’s problem was that he had already lived it…unless, of course, it could be changed.)
(Supplemental: Although Laura had no grand aspirations to be a writer, she would attend literary gatherings with her husband and begin what she called “noodling” after meeting an editor at a writers’ conference. Thereafter she would make a very comfortable six-figure income writing a series of best-selling novels in her spare time under the pseudonym Candy Cartman. All of this, of course, being dependent upon the above-mentioned reader’s perspective point and the mutability of time and alternity.)
“Norman!”
“Yes, I’m listening! And I remember: your mother told you to remove the mirror from the room as soon as s
he died and that you only live twice.”
Laura looked at him coolly, her eyes now blue green, her face perfect and unblemished.
No wonder old people want to be young, Norman thought, then said, “But as I’ve told you a thousand times, she was not in her right mind. She thought that she was James Bond. It wasn’t her fault, it—”
“It was true,” Laura said, musing, “and Mother was right. We lived once, and this—right here, right now—is twice. And, incidentally, Mr. Armchair Psychoanalyzer, she never thought she was James Bond!”
“It’s crazy, that’s what it is. You and I are hallucinating. Maybe we just died, and these are my last thoughts like in that Twilight Zone episode where the guy is being hanged, and the rope breaks or something; and he runs around happy as Larry until the last scene when his neck is broken because it was all a dream. Like that.”
“So we both just died in the bathroom. Both of us. At the same time.”
“No,” Norman said, “I just died. You…you’ll live to a hundred and twenty. Or, more likely, I’m asleep and right now this minute I’m having a dream, or a nightmare about your mother.”
“My mother?”
“Yes, your mother and her mirror. So, I’ll tell you what…I’m going to go back into the bathroom, and maybe if I can push myself back through her fakakta mirror, I’ll wake up.”
Laura sipped her coffee, looked at him coolly again, and shrugged. “Knock yourself out. But why on earth would you want to go back to being…”
“To being what?”
“Old and smelling like an old towel.”
“Okay, that’s it!”
Norman rose, told Laura he really was going back ‘home’ (for a decent cup of coffee), admitted that the dream part of getting laid was terrific, and then shambled into the bathroom: his unconscious hadn’t quite caught up to his new situation, and he still thought his right knee was arthritic.
He stared at himself in the mirror. Pretty good looking: prematurely graying hair, manly scars from a terrible case of pimples in adolescence, cleft chin, well-defined pecs instead of saggy man boobs. He pressed his hand against the mirror. It was cool, actually cold. He pressed harder and told himself to wake the hell up. The mirror frame creaked from the pressure of his hand on the mercury-coated glass it surrounded. But he couldn’t push back into his old, or, rather, his other bathroom in Lighthouse Point.
And he didn’t wake up into his Floridian future.
He grimaced at himself, then raised his arms into a bodybuilder’s pose—he was scarecrow skinny, but muscular—and said, “Maybe this isn’t such a bad dream. Maybe…”
But he knew…oh, he knew.
He remembered the lines of a poem by Juvenal that he had inserted into a one-act play that never saw the proverbial light of day:
Like warmed-up cabbage served at each repast,
The repetition kills the wretch at last.
#
Thus the minutes, hours, days, and years passed; and repetition it was, repetitions of repetitions, (accompanied, of course, by the ever-pivotal soupçon of non-repetition): shower, morning coffee, Norman rushing to catch the D train to St. John’s Law School in Brooklyn, hot bagels and late-night study sessions with his five-member study group; and Laura kissing Norman goodbye before leaving for the advertising agency that just bordered on the Bronx, an advertising agency that she one day owned and relocated to the West Village (after she had signed Maria Chorale Cosmetics and Raimond International Resorts); and she worked late and met Norman at the Stage Deli to share a bowl of matzah ball soup and an enormous hot pastrami sandwich; and Sundays walking around the 79th Street Boat Basin, and movies, and cooking in the grease-stained kitchen; and Norman graduated law school with honors and (of course) passed the New York Bar exam and joined the law firm Hensley, Lowry, Graham & Gallagher, and started climbing the ladder to partnership, and then moving to Sea Gate in Brooklyn, and as every hour and every day of another life slipped from memory, they were replaced by the real moments of the ever-moving, punishing, dog-eat-dog present; and then moving back to Manhattan, this time to the Upper East Side, to a seven-figure-price-point, four-bedroom ‘residence’ in the Pierre on Fifth Avenue; and Laura opened satellite agencies in Boston, Palm Beach, and West LA, and…
…and as evidenced above and repeated again (for repetition is one of the leitmotifs of this story) they forgot. Forgot their old life, forgot all the joys and pains of what we might call their first life, as their trajectories toward another futurity worked themselves out.
And, yes, as you might have guessed by following the trail of metaphorical breadcrumbs I’ve left, they separated.
In 1985.
Well, it wasn’t really much of an adjustment, as they were rarely in the same place at the same time. In February of 1999, however, Norman was having lunch (yes, with Laura, for they were never formally separated or divorced, just “detached”) at Barbetta’s on West 46th Street when he inhaled a bite of aged Wagyu filet steak. The waiter, an elegant-looking young man from Ecuador, performed a perfect Heimlich maneuver, which worked, but for the fact that Norman suffered a massive heart attack just as the half-chewed piece of steak shot out like a projectile, smashing one of the electric candles in the overhead crystal chandelier.
Laura, heartbroken, gave a moving valediction at his exquisitely tasteful funeral, supervised his burial in the Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing (the very same cemetery in which Emanuel Weiss, an ex-member of Murder Incorporated, and Selig Grossinger, founder of Grossinger’s Resort, resided), and commissioned a monument commensurate with his status.
As Laura’s mother had always said, “Well, dead is dead.”
#
Mother’s aphorism, however, wasn’t strictly true.
Norman was certainly dead, and Laura grieved for his loss; grieved as we all do for all the “could have beens,” and then, as most of us do, she slid back into life, slid back into the moment-by-moment, numbing comfort of repetition and regularity until, yes, you guessed it: Wednesday, November 10th, 2020, at 9:30 in the morning.
Laura had elected to skip her Wednesday Morning Club: she just wasn’t in the mood for mahjong, chamomile tea, and the usual array of finger sandwiches, scones, marmalade, lemon curd, herbed butter, and pickled salmon. And she wasn’t in the mood to spend the usual time painting her face and coordinating an appropriate wardrobe assemblage. So she slept in, then took a wake-up Adderall and made her autogenic way to the bathroom for a pee.
Her bathroom in the Pierre was large and ornate enough to give her mother’s mirror an appropriate rather than garish pride of place. She leaned her pelvis against the lip of the sink and looked at her reflection. Then, as she had done once before, a lifetime before, she made an odd gurgling sound and suddenly stepped backwards, as if she had just seen a ghost—or, rather, two ghosts—for reflected in the ornately framed mirror was herself…and Norman. Both old. Together.
Norman’s face was partially lathered with shaving soap. He winked at her, or perhaps he just blinked. She could see a powdery white spot of aluminum sulfate on his chin where, theoretically, moments ago she had applied a styptic pencil.
“Norman?” she asked.
“Okay, I’ll do it this afternoon,” Norman said, looking blankly into the mirror. He was referring to Laura’s previous request to mow the lawn—that being the Laura on the Lighthouse Point side of the mirror.
And Laura, second-chance Laura, if you like, extended her hand toward the mirror. She expected the surface to be blood warm and viscous, expected it to be as slippery as mercury…expected to feel the mirror’s palpable adamantine suction. She pressed against the glass, which felt cool, actually cold. Resistant as time itself.
She pressed harder, pushed against the mirror, which was nothing more than a large, impermeable object affixed firmly to the bathroom wall; she pushed against it with both hands until her arms ached from the pressure and her palms felt hot, as if pulsing in time to some unknown rhythm. Finally, she
gave up, stepped back, and stared intently, desperately into the mirror.
But there was nothing there, nothing to see and regret, just an empty reflection of the other side of the room…
Heartbreak Hotel
By Dirk Flinthart
The applause dies away. Elvis watches as Marilyn stumbles in her high heels on the steps leading backstage, the tight, sequinned dress restricting her movements. Frank catches her before she can fall, holding her a little too long, a little too close. Elvis checks the impulse to intervene. Marilyn knows her way around men.
She pushes away from Frank and composes herself. “Do you think they liked it?” she asks in that breathy, little-girl voice. “I…I couldn’t see past the footlights.”
“Sure, doll,” says Frank. “Look at you! What’s not to like?” Smiling, but those blue eyes are slow and cold, and he wets his upper lip with the tip of his tongue. Marilyn moves closer to Elvis, holding his arm the way a small child might hold a plush toy, for comfort.
“It was a good set, Marilyn,” Elvis says. “It’s always good. They love you.”
“It’s just…I couldn’t see anyone. Was there…is there a good audience tonight?”
“You can’t see squat without those glasses of yours,” Frank says. “Good audience? Listen! They’re lapping up Bob’s stuff.”
A ripple of laughter makes its way backstage, and then another, and another as Bob delivers his trademark one-liners, playing the crowd like an instrument.
“It’s always a good audience,” Elvis says.
“Always the same audience,” Marilyn says. “I worry maybe they’ll get bored.”
“With you?” He smiles. “That just couldn’t ever happen.” He listens for a moment, and hears a familiar punchline. The audience dissolves into hilarity. “Bob’s nearly done.” He glances at Frank. “You ready?”
Frank makes finger-guns and shoots Elvis with imaginary bullets. “I’m always ready,” he says. “Just show me the mike.” He saunters away, tugging his fedora down over one eye.
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