In the Flesh

by Hilma Wolitzer

  When they came upstairs again, the men were leaning toward one another and whispering in what looked like collusion to me. But then the children’s playful shrieks reached a new imperative level, and a couple of minutes later Jason came sobbing into his father’s arms.

  “What is it?” Howard asked, frisking him for possible injuries, and we were finally led by a shuddering and barefoot Jason to the front of the house. On the lawn, Roberta and the other children were dancing in a mad circle like witches. Jason’s shoes were scattered, one near a lamppost, the other in the driveway, and the children were chanting in high voices: “Get-off-my-property, get-off-my-property!”

  Of course they were chastised for being unfriendly, for not sharing graciously what they were so fortunate to have. Jason’s shoes were retrieved, put back on and double-knotted for security. All of them were sent inside to watch television with a reward of ice cream for the effected truce.

  But it was exactly the right incident, come just in the nick of time. Over their heads, Howard and I finally looked at one another in acknowledgment. He smiled and winked broadly and we were saved.

  13

  The operator brings us together.

  Do you take this woman

  this call?

  Other voices rest on our line.

  Out of town birds say

  Hello? Hello? before

  flying off.

  Prairies, mountains, cities

  make me deaf

  make me shout

  until your voice, warmed

  to life in a nest of

  wires, tells my name.

  November 30, 1960

  DOWN IN FLORIDA, HOWARD’S father died in his sleep, moving Howard up one generation and canceling forever his coming attractions of life. His father had been such a gloomy man, given to terrible bulletins of what it was like to be forty or fifty or sixty.

  Howard has early gray hairs and he’s always been worried about growing old. Promises of pensions, matured insurance policies and senior citizen discounts didn’t cheer him at all. “Distinguished one minute, extinguished the next,” he said, and I couldn’t argue with that.

  I encouraged him to do exercises in the morning. Slowly, slowly, like Lazarus, he rose into situps, pulling his prospects into shape. I bought sunflower seeds and he nibbled on them, sowing them into furrows under the sofa cushions. He said he couldn’t in good conscience eat butter anymore. Instead he ate honey and wheat germ and remarked on the early deaths of famous nutritionists. They die the same ways we do, he said, even in car wrecks and floods.

  Now his own father was dead of natural causes. I helped Howard to pack a suitcase so that he could visit his mother in Florida for a few days and prepare her for survival.

  “Why are you packing these?” he demanded, pulling out his bathing trunks and the T-shirt with crossed tennis rackets on the pocket.

  “It’s hot down there,” I said. “You’re going to Florida.”

  “I’m not going for fun, you know.” He crammed other things into the suitcase instead: gray scratchy sweaters, dark socks for the sober business of mourning; forcing New York and winter, the gloom of subways and museums, in with his underwear.

  “Listen, my love,” he said, when he was all packed. “You know I hate to leave you like this. But we’ll keep in constant touch.”

  The children and I stayed in the airlines terminal until the plane lifted him away.

  Back in the apartment again, things weren’t so bad. I made a baked eggplant for supper, something I like that Howard hates. I slept in the middle of the bed, using both pillows. I kept all the lights on, a childhood luxury.

  Still, Howard was everywhere: his fingerprints in crazy profusion on the furniture, his Gouda cheese gathering mold in the refrigerator, the memory of his sleeping hand on my hip. All night I was a sentry waiting for morning, while the children breathed softly on the other side of the wall.

  In the daytime I sat with the other mothers in the playground. The baby slept under cold sweet blankets in her carriage, and I rocked her in an unbroken rhythm, like a tic.

  Jason was in the sandbox, among friends. They poured sand into his cupped hands and it slid down the front of his nylon snowsuit.

  All around me, my potential friends sat on benches. On the bench facing me there were two black women in bright winter coats and scarves. Every once in a while their voices came toward me on the wind, deep and resonant, as if they were speaking all the songs from Porgy and Bess. I thought I could fall asleep listening to their voices, feeling as peaceful and drugged as I did when Howard combed my hair.

  I looked up and found our kitchen window nineteen stories up. I marked it with a mental X the way vacationers mark their hotel rooms on postcards. Having a terrible time. Wish you were here.

  In the laundry room the man from apartment 16J was waiting for his wash to be finished. There was something intimate in our sitting together like that, watching his sheets tangled and thrashing like lovers in the machine. Pajamas, nightgowns, towels, mingling, drowning.

  We smiled at one another but we didn’t speak. His wife, I’d heard, was a forbidding woman. Wretched hair, folded arms, a masculine swagger.

  But he looked like a passionate man. You can tell sometimes by the urgency of gestures and by the eyes. His wife went to work and he was home alone all day because of some on-the-job compensation case. He jammed his laundry, still damp and unfolded, into a pillow case and he left.

  What part of him was wounded or damaged?

  That night Howard called from Florida. We shouted to one another over the distance of rooftops and highways.

  “I’m lonely,” I said.

  “Me too,” he answered.

  “How is your mother?” I asked.

  “It’s very sad down here,” he said.

  His mother pulled the phone from his hand. “Your husband is your best friend in the whole world!” she shouted.

  Then Howard was back. “They had two of everything. Place mats. Heating pads. Barcaloungers.”

  “You were his favorite!” his mother cried, currying false favor for the dead.

  Of course it wasn’t true. If such things can be measured, I may well have been Howard’s father’s least favorite. I remembered how he tried to buy me off before the wedding. Bygones.

  “What can I say?” I said.

  Then Howard spoke. “I’m trying to straighten things out. It could take a few extra days. It’s really sad here.” He kept his voice low, but it sounded sun-nourished, tropical.

  Later the phone rang again and this time it was a breather. I figure it had to be that love-locked man in 16J. The woman he was married to would never bend to ecstasy. Instead she was the prison matron of his lust, the keys to everything hanging just out of reach below her waist. Did he know Howard was away? News travels fast in these big buildings.

  “Who is this?” I demanded, but he chose to remain silent, to contain his longings for other days, better times.

  One day the children and I went to visit my mother and father. Everything in their apartment was covered in plastic: lampshades, sofas, chairs. Photographs ticked away in mirror frames and on tables. The phantom of death was there and I embraced my father in a wrestler’s hold.

  “How are you!” I cried.

  “Don’t worry about him,” my mother said. “He’s not going anyplace.”

  “I’m in the pink, Sis,” my father admitted.

  Back home again, Howard called and I tried to keep things light. “We all miss you terribly,” I said. “We’ve had colds. Jason wanted to know if your plane crashed.”

  “The kid said that?” Howard asked. He spoke soothing words to Jason. I held the receiver to the baby’s ear too.

  “It snowed again,” I told him.

  He said it was murderously hot in Florida and there were jellyfish in the water. He had to wear his father’s swim trunks. “This business could break your heart,” he said.

  16J’s wife came to collect money
to combat a terrible disease.

  “Come right in,” I said. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  I went to get my purse, leaving her, stonefaced, alone with the children. Did she suspect anything? Had she come to give fair warning? What would she say, that gauleiter of dreams?

  But she said nothing. After she left the apartment I looked for messages, for words printed in furniture dust. But there was only my receipt for the donation and a pamphlet telling why I should have given more.

  “It is lonely here,” I thought. Quiet as an aftermath. Howard’s presence was fading. Only the Gouda cheese, unspeakable now. His mother had never liked me either. She used to send him to the store for Kotex to remind him of her powers. She bought him a meerschaum pipe and a spaniel puppy to divert his course. But I was triumphant anyway.

  Now I imagined a thousand and one Floridian nights, the air conditioner humming in orchestral collusion with her voice, her voice buying time. She had an armory of ammunition, steamer trunks stuffed with childhood. In my head I scratched the air conditioner for the sake of authenticity. She fanned him with a palm leaf instead, a cool maternal breath on his burnished head. “So, where was I?” she asked.

  Howard’s hair lifted lightly in the breeze. His eyes shut. Her voice shuffled into his sleep, into mine.

  In the middle of the night I heard footsteps in the hallway outside the apartment. Then an eloquent silence. I tiptoed to the door, pressed my ear against it. “Who’s there?” I whispered. “Is it you?”

  But no one answered. Deferred passion could drive a man crazy, I knew. He would probably want bright lights on to match the intensity of his craving, and a million weird variations on the usual stuff. His sheets in the washing machine were green, I remembered. Small scattered flowers on a limitless green field.

  I went back to bed and let my blood settle. Maybe it was my motherhood he coveted. There are men like that, childless themselves, who long for the affirmation of new life around them. Mother. Food. Ecstasy. Love. Between a woman’s thighs they can either be coming or going, just delivered into the world or willing to leave it in one exquisite leap of desire.

  My mother said, “He’s taking his sweet time about coming home.”

  “Things are bad there,” I said. “You know Florida.”

  “I know one thing,” she said darkly.

  I called Howard but no one answered. I let the phone ring fifty times. They were walking together under palm trees, their faces painted with sunlight and shadow. Later, they would go marketing, just enough for the two of them. Then they would rest on the Barcaloungers.

  The man in 16J paced restlessly in his apartment, a junior four with a bad exposure. The couple next door threw crockery and curses, like Maggie and Jiggs. The incinerator door clanged. Children’s voices rose from the playground.

  The next day I called Howard again. His mother answered the phone. They were just going to have lunch. I could hear dishes clatter, water running.

  “What’s up?” Howard asked. He wondered why I was calling before the rates changed.

  “There’s this man,” I said.

  “Who? What? I can’t hear you, wait a minute.” The background noises subsided.

  “A madman!” I screamed at a splintering pitch. Then, softly, “I think he’s fallen in love.”

  “What!” Howard shouted. “Has he touched you? My God, did you let him?”

  “It hasn’t come to that,” I said. “Not yet.”

  The plane circled for two hours before it came down. Howard looked like a movie star, tanned and radiant. The children wriggled to get to him. He carried a cardboard box under his arm. Souvenirs, I thought. Presents. A miniature crate of marzipan oranges. A baby alligator for Jason.

  When we were in the car, Howard opened the box. There were no presents. There were just some things of his father’s that his mother wanted him to have. Shoe trees. An old street map of Chinatown and the Bowery. A golf cap with a green celluloid visor. It was a grab bag of history, her final weapon.

  Oh, it had seemed so easy. The car was stuck in an endless ribbon of traffic. My hand rested on Howard’s knee, and the children were asleep in the back seat. I would have settled for just this, all of us stopped in time.

  But Howard sighed. “A man has to live,” he said.

  14

  RENEE WOULDN’T REALLY LET Howard go either. Her hold on him wasn’t even sexual. I knew I could have dealt with that. It would have been an all-out war and I would have won, because there is something final, about me—and steadying.

  She started calling up more often. She left cryptic messages for Howard. She even left messages with Jason who was only three or four at the time and loved to answer the telephone. Jason called her Weeny, insinuating her further into our lives with that nickname. “Weeny needs ten,” he would tell me.

  It seemed to me we gave her plenty of money, although she had given up all legal rights to alimony. They were married only seven months and she decided she didn’t deserve alimony after such a short alliance, that you can’t even collect unemployment insurance until you’ve been on the job for a while. But we were always giving her money, anyway—ten here, five there. Ostensibly they were loans, but Renee was hard-pressed to pay them back.

  I suggested to Howard that we adopt her, that it would be cheaper, tax-wise and all, but Howard seemed to consider the idea seriously, getting that contemplative look in his eye, chewing his dinner in that slow, even rhythm. I imagined Renee living with us, another bed in that crowded, converted dinette where the children slept.

  I knew intuitively when she was calling. The telephone had a certain insistence to its ring, as if she were willing me to answer it. She wanted to know if Howard remembered a book she used to have, something she was very sentimental about. Could he possibly have taken it by mistake when they split up? Would I just look on the shelf while she held on?—it had a blue cover.

  She called to say she had swollen glands, that she had been very tired lately, and in fluorescent light she could see right through to her bones.

  We sent her ten dollars for the doctor. We sent her five for a new book. The annulment had been legitimate and final, but Renee hung in, a dubious inheritance.

  One morning, Jason answered the phone. “Weeny,” he said, narrowing his eyes, waiting for my reaction.

  But I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. “Oh?” I said it coolly, raising my eyebrows. “What does she want?”

  She wanted to stay with us for a few days. Some madman she’d met at the unemployment office was after her, a real psycho. Renee thought everyone she met was a real psycho.

  “I’ll have to speak to Howard about it,” I told her, and I hung up.

  I watched a kids’ television program with Jason. We tried to make a Japanese lantern, following easy directions, but it fell apart. I decided to speak to Jason instead. “Renee wants to stay here for a few days.”

  “In my bed?” He looked hopeful.

  “Of course not. On the sofa, in the living room. What do you think?”

  “I hate this stupid lantern!” he cried, ripping it to pieces.

  The baby was standing in her crib, toes splayed, rattling the bars. “Guess what? Renee is coming,” I told her, despising my own precocity.

  That night I gave the news to Howard carefully, as if I believed it might be fatal. He sighed, but I could tell that he was secretly pleased. He wanted to know how long she would stay, what time she would need the bathroom in the morning, and if I could possibly make some butterscotch pudding, her favorite.

  “Jesus!” I slammed pots and pans around, and Howard shivered with fear and happiness.

  After dinner I called Renee and told her yes. “Only for a couple of days,” I said severely.

  “Oh, you’re a pal!” she cried.

  Later, she exclaimed over the pudding and threw Howard a knowing look. Was I a fool? But her bones pushed their way through her clothing. Her nostrils were red and crusty from a lingering cold. Even Howard
’s famous benevolence wouldn’t be enough. Under the table I found the substantial truth of my own thigh, and I grew calm again.

  Of course the living room was closed to us for our nightly consultation. Renee was there with a stack of magazines, a dish of trembly pudding, and the radio tuned to some distant and static-shot program.

  I drew Howard into the bedroom and shut the door. It was my turn and I settled into 1942 with a minimum of effort. It was a memorable year, because my parents were discussing a possible divorce on the other side of the bedroom wall. How was that for trauma? I was Gloria Vanderbilt, a subject of custody, an object of sympathy. I imagined myself little again, diminished in bedclothes, and I reinvented their conversation.

  “What about the kid?” my mother asked.

  “Oh, you’re the one who always wanted a kid,” my father answered.

  Next to me, Howard moved restlessly. “It’s a good thing Renee and I didn’t have any children,” he said.

  “That’s true,” I said and then I tried to continue my story. But Renee coughed in the other room, two throat-clearing blasts that pinned us to the pillows.

  “What’s that?” Howard said.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! You broke my train of thought again!”

  “I’m sorry. I only asked.”

  “Forget the whole thing. It’s no use telling you anything lately anyway.”

  “Go ahead, love,” he said, rubbing my back in conciliation. “Come on, Paulie, start from ‘Oh, you’re the one who always wanted a kid.’ ”

  I felt glum. “Forget it,” I said.

  “Jesus!” Howard said. “I’m going to have to stop smoking. Just feel this. My pulse is so slow, my blood must be like clay.”

  In the morning Renee was watching the playground, from the shelter of the curtains, like a gangster holed up in a hideout.

  “I’m a wreck,” she said. “I keep thinking that nut is going to come here.”

  “Why should he come here? How could he even know where you are? Renee?”

  She didn’t answer. She moved to the sink, where she squeezed fresh orange juice into a glass with her bare hands. I wished Howard could have seen that. The untapped strength of that girl!