In the Flesh

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Jason was a traitor. He ran kisses up her freckled arms. “Weeny! My weeny!” They drank the unstrained juice in sips from the same glass.

  Later, I went downstairs and called Howard at the studio from a pay phone. “She has to go.”

  “I know that. Don’t you think I know that?”

  “I mean forever.”

  “Paulie, what do you want me to do?”

  “Nominate her for Miss Subways. Get her deported. Howard, I don’t know. Why don’t you find her a husband?”

  “Ha ha. Very funny. Should I look in the Yellow Pages?”

  “Well, you married her.”

  “That’s another story,” he said, but I refused to listen.

  “Ask around,” I said, and I hung up.

  At home again, I tried my own hand. “Stand up straight,” I told Renee. “Give them both barrels.” When she did, the narrow points of her breasts thrust out like drill bits. “No no, relax.” I let her try on some of my clothes, but they enveloped her like tents. Instead, we worked on makeup and her psychological approach to men. But it all seemed useless. In ten minutes there were smudges under her eyes from the mascara, and lipstick on her teeth.

  “Relax,” I told her. “That’s the whole secret,” and she collapsed in a heap as if her spinal cord had been severed.

  That night Howard came home with a man, a trumpet player who sometimes sat in with the Fantasy Five. I had never met him before. He wore dark glasses and a bitter smile. He was divorced too, and spoke about getting burned once and never playing with fire again.

  “Oh, terrific,” I said to Howard, without moving my lips.

  But he shrugged. He had done his share. Now it was up to me. I did the best I could, flaunting my domestic joy at this hostile stranger, like a bullfighter’s cape. But everything must have seemed bleak to him, through those dark glasses. My dinner was loaded with cholesterol killers, the apartment was overheated and confining. Someone was deflating the tires on his car parked three city blocks away.

  Of course Renee didn’t help at all. She pretended to be our eldest child, and ate her French fries with her fingers. There was a huge pink stain on the front of her blouse.

  “I’ll call you,” the man said to her when he left, a phrase torn from memory. We were all surprised that he even bothered.

  “You didn’t have to, Howard,” Renee said later, as if he had brought her a frivolous but thoughtful gift.

  From our bed, Howard and I lay listening for night sounds from the living room and we were rewarded. In her sleep, Renee called out and I could feel Howard next to me, poised for flight on the edge of the mattress.

  Dear Abby/Ann Landers/Rose Franzblau,

  What should I do?

  Signed,

  Miserable

  Dear Mis,

  Do you keep up with the national scene? Can you discuss things intelligently with your husband; i.e., name all the cabinet members, the National Book Award nominees, the discoverer of the oral polio vaccine? Have you looked in a mirror lately? Do you make the most of your natural good looks? Go to an art gallery, prepare an exciting salad for dinner, reline your kitchen shelves with wild floral paper. And good luck!

  The days went by and somehow we began to settle in as if things were fine, as if Renee belonged on our couch every night, leaving those shallow depressions in the pillows.

  My mother called to offer some advice. “Get rid of her,” she said.

  My father picked up the bedroom extension and listened. I could hear the rasp of his breath.

  “Hello, Dad,” I said.

  “Are you on, Herm?” my mother asked. “Is that you?”

  My father cleared his throat right into the mouthpiece. He was going to offer advice as well, and his style was based on Judge Hardy in the old Mickey Rooney movies. Kindly. Dignified. Judiciously stern. All his days he sat for imaginary Bachrach portraits, in the subways, in the movies. “What I would do …” he said, and then he paused.

  My mother waited. I waited. I tapped my foot on the kitchen tile.

  “What should she do?” my mother insisted. “Should she throw her out the window? Should she stuff her into the incinerator?”

  “I believe I was speaking,” Judge Hardy said.

  “Oh, pardon me,” my mother said. “For living.”

  “What I would do,” he began again, “is seek professional advice.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Yes,” he said, admiring the echo of his words. “Professional advice.” He paced in his chambers.

  “It’s not normal,” my mother said. “It’s not nice.” Her opinion about other things as well: homosexuality, artificial insemination, and the hybridization of plants.

  The next day I lent Renee twenty dollars from the household money and I looked through the classified ads for a new apartment for her. “Change your luck,” I advised, like a dark gypsy.

  When the children were napping, the doorbell rang. An eye loomed back at mine, magnified through the peephole.

  “Who?”

  “Renee there?”

  My heart gave tentative leaps, like the first thrusts of life in a pregnancy. I opened the chains and bolts with trembling hands and ran inside. “It’s a man!” I hissed, rebuttoning Renee’s housecoat, combing her hair with my fingers. But it was no use. She still looked terrible, abused and ruined.

  The man burst into the room.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, it’s you!” Renee said.

  “I told you,” he said. “When I want something, I go after it.”

  “Well, just piss off, Raymond. You make me sick.”

  “It’s you and me, baby,” he said. “All the way.”

  I watched from the doorway. He was a big ox of a man, the kind who invites you to punch him in the belly and then laughs at your broken hand. There was a cartoon character tattooed on his forearm—Yogi Bear, or maybe Smokey.

  “Call the police,” Renee said wearily.

  “The police?”

  “Why fight nature, Renee?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” I said with a conspiratorial wink.

  “He’s a maniac,” she explained. “He’s the one I told you about. From the unemployment.”

  My hope began to ebb. “Well, you could just give him a chance.”

  Jason came in from the bedroom then, squinting in the assault of light. “Stop hollering,” he said.

  “My intentions are honorable,” the maniac said, crossing his heart. “Cute kid,” he offered, referring to Jason.

  I reached for that slender thread. “Do you like children?” I asked.

  He leaned on his wit. “Say, I used to be one myself!” He laughed and laughed, wiping tears from his eyes.

  “Renee Renee,” I said. “Introduce me.”

  “He-has-a-prison-record,” she sang in falsetto behind her hand.

  They might have been political arrests for all I knew, or something else that was fashionable. “Honi soit,” I said.

  “Bad checks,” Renee answered. She was relentless.

  I always try to find the good in people and he had nice eyes, gray with gorgeous yellow flecks. I offered him coffee and he accepted. Renee sat down finally, giving in.

  They were married two weeks later. Howard gave the bride away, which may not be traditional, but it meant a lot to me, for the symbolism. I gave them a silver-plated bread tray and sincere wishes for the future. Raymond had a lead on a job in Chicago and they left in a hailstorm of rice for the airport.

  “That’s that,” I said, never believing it for a moment.

  15

  In the zoo

  the animals are stunned by night

  and dream their jungle dream.

  They move with restless joy

  in herds, away from city life

  where mating is arranged.

  April 15, 1961

  IT WAS ONLY SUNDAY. It was only my own flesh, pale and sleep-creased and smelling like bread near my rooting nose. Nothing special had
happened, for which I was grateful. Anything might happen, for which I was expectant and trembling ready.

  On the other hand, Howard was depressed, hiding in the bedclothes, moaning in his dream. Even without opening my eyes, I could feel the shape of his mood beside me. Then my eyes opened. Ta-da! Another gorgeous day. Just what I expected. The clock hummed, electric, containing its impulse to tick, the wallpaper repeated itself around the room, and Howard pushed into the pillows, refusing to come to terms with consciousness.

  My hand was as warm and as heavy as a baby’s head, and I laid it against his neck, palm up. If I let him sleep, he would do it for hours and hours. That’s depression.

  Years ago, my mother woke me with a song about a bird on a windowsill and about sunshine and flowers and the glorious feeling of being alive that had nothing in the world to do with the sad still-life of a school lunch and the reluctant walk in brown oxfords, one foot and then the other, for six blocks. It had nothing to do with that waxed ballroom of a gymnasium, and the terrible voice of the whistle that demanded agility and grace where there were only clumsy confusion and an enormous desire to be the other girl on the other team, the one leaping toward baskets and dangling ropes.

  I didn’t want to get up either, at least until I had grown out of it, grown away from teachers, grown out of that baby-plump body in an undershirt and little stockings. I would get up when I was good and ready, when it was all over and I could have large breasts and easy friendships.

  Howard always blamed his depression on real things in his current life because he didn’t believe in the unconscious. At parties where all the believers talked about the interpretation of dreams, about wish-fulfillment and symbiotic relationships, Howard covered his mouth with one hand and muttered, “Bullshit.”

  Was he depressed because his parents didn’t want him to be born, because his mother actually hoisted his father in her arms every morning for a month, hoping to bring on that elusive period? Not a chance!

  Was he sad because his sister was smarter in school, or at least more successful, or because she seduced him to the point of action and then squealed? Never!

  He was depressed, he said, because it started to rain when he was at a ballgame and the men pulling the tarpaulin over the infield seemed to be covering a common grave. He was sad, he said, because the landlord is a prick, and the kid living upstairs roller-skates in the kitchen.

  Ah, Howard. My hand was awake now, buzzing with blood, and it kneaded the flesh of his neck and then his back; worked down through the warm tunnel of bedclothes until it found his hand and squeezed hard. “It’s a gorgeous day, lover! Hey, kiddo, wake up and I’ll tell you something.”

  Howard opened his eyes, but they were glazed and without focus. “Huhnn?”

  “Do you know what?” I searched my head for restorative news. His vision found the room, the morning light, his whole life. His eyes closed again.

  “Howard, it’s Sunday, the day of rest. The paper is outside, thick and juicy, hot off the press. I’ll make waffles and sausages for breakfast. Do you want to go for a ride in the country?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Paulie, will you leave me alone? I want to sleep.”

  “Sleep? Sweetheart, you’ll sleep enough when you’re dead.”

  I saw that idea roll past his eyelids. Death. What next?

  The children made waking sounds in the other room.

  “Come on, sleepyhead, get up. We’ll visit model homes. We’ll look in the paper for some new ones.” I patted him on the ass, a loving but fraternal gesture, a manager sending his favorite man into the game.

  Why was I so happy? I decided it was the triumph of the human spirit over genetics and environment. I knew the same bad things Howard knew. I had my ups and downs, traumas, ecstasies. Maybe my happiness was only a dirty trick, another of life’s big come-ons. Maybe I’d end up the kind who weeps into the dishwater and always keeps the window shades drawn.

  But in the meantime I whipped up waffle batter, poured golden juice into golden glasses, while Howard sat in a chair dropping pages of the Times like leaves from a deciduous tree.

  I sang songs from the forties, thinking there’s nothing like the comfort of your own nostalgia. I sang “Ferryboat Serenade,” I sang “Hutsut Rallson on the Rillerah.” The waffles stuck to the iron. “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me,” I warned Howard, willing coffee and waffle smells into the living room where he sat like an inmate in the wintry garden of a small sanatorium.

  “Breakfast is ready!” I had the healthy bellow of a short-order cook.

  He shuffled in, still convalescing from his childhood. The children came in too, his jewels, his treasures. They climbed his legs to reach the table, to scratch themselves on his morning beard. Daddy, my Daddy, and he ran his hands over them, a blind man trying to memorize their bones. The teakettle sang, the sun crashed in through the window, and my heart would not be swindled.

  “What’s the matter, Howie? If something is bothering you, talk about it.”

  He smiled, that calculated, ironic smile, and it occurred to me that we hardly talked about anything that mattered anymore. I had waited all my life to become a woman, damn it, to sit in a kitchen and say grown-up things to the man facing me, words that would float like vapor over the heads of my children. Don’t I remember that language from my own green days; code words in Yiddish and pig latin, and a secret but clearly sexual jargon that made my mother laugh and filled me with a dark and trembling longing and rage?

  Ixnay, the idkay.

  Now I wanted to talk over the heads of my own children, in the modern language of the cinema. There were thousands of words they wouldn’t understand and would never remember, except for the rhythm and mystery. Fellatio, Howard. Cunnilingus.

  He rattled the real estate section and slowly turned the pages.

  “Well, did you find a development for us? Find one with a really inspired name this time.” On other days we’d gone to Crestwood Estates. Seaside Manor (miles from any sea), to Tall Oaks and Sweet Pines, to Chateaux Printemps and Chalets-on-the-Sound.

  All the worthwhile land was being gobbled up by speculators and those tall oaks and sweet pines fallen to bulldozers. The newer developments were farther and farther from the city. Someday there wouldn’t be any model homes left for our therapeutic Sundays. Maybe later, when we were old, we’d visit the Happy Haven and the Golden Years Retreat, to purge whatever comes with mortality and the final vision.

  But now Howard was trying. “Here’s one,” he said. “Doncastle Greens. ‘Only fifty minutes from the heart of Manhattan. Live like a king on a commoner’s budget.’ ”

  “Let me see!” I rushed to his side, ready for conspiracy. “Hey, listen to this. ‘Come on down today and choose either a twenty-one-inch color TV or a deluxe dishwasher, as a bonus, absolutely free!’ Howie, what do you choose?”

  But Howard chose silence, would not be cajoled so easily, so early in his depression.

  I hid the dishes in a veil of suds and we all got dressed. The children were too young to care where we were going, as long as they could ride in the car, the baby steering crazily in her car seat and Jason contemplating the landscape and the faces of other small boys poised at the windows of other cars.

  The car radio sputtered news and music and frantic advice. Buy Duz! Drive carefully! Have a nice day! It was understood that Howard would drive there and I would drive back.

  He sat forward, bent over the wheel, as if visibility were poor and the traffic hazardous. In fact, it was a marvelous, clear day and the traffic was moving without hesitation past all the exits, past the green signs and the abandoned wrecks like modern sculpture at roadside, past dead dogs, their brilliant innards squeezed out onto the divider.

  Jason pointed, always astounded at the first corpse, but we were past it before he could speak. It occurred to me that there were families everywhere holding dangling leashes and collars, walking through the yards of their neighborhoods, calling, L
ucky! Lucky! and then listening for that answering bark that would not come. Poor Lucky, deader than a doornail, flatter than a bathmat.

  I watched Howard, that gorgeous nose so often seen in profile, that crisp gangster’s hair, and his ear, unspeakably vulnerable, waxen and convoluted.

  And then we were there. Doncastle Greens was a new one for us. The builder obviously dreamed of moats and grazing sheep. Model No. 1, the Shropshire, recalled at once gloomy castles and thatched cottages; Richard III and Miss Marple. Other cars were already parked under the colored banners when we pulled in.

  The first step was always the brochure, wonderfully new and smelly with printer’s ink. The motif was British, of course, and there were taprooms and libraries as opposed to the dens and funrooms of Crestwood Estates, les salons et les chambres des Chateaux Printemps. Quelle savvy!

  The builder’s agent was young and balding, busy sticking little flags into promised lots on a huge map behind his desk. He called us folks. “Good to see you, folks!” Every once in a while he rubbed his hands together as if selling houses made him cold. During his spiel I tried to catch Howard’s eye, but Howard pretended to be listening. What an actor!

  We moved in a slow line through Model 1, behind an elderly couple. I knew we’d seen them before, at Tall Oaks perhaps, but there were no greetings exchanged. They’d never buy, of course, and I wondered about their motives, which were probably more devious than our own.

  Some of the people, I could see, were really buyers. One wife held her husband’s hand as if they were entering consecrated premises.

  I poked Howard, just below the heart. I could talk without moving my lips. “White brocade couch on bowlegs,” I muttered. “Definitely velvet carpeting.” I waited, but Howard was grudging.

  “Plastic-covered lampshades,” he offered finally.

  I urged him on. “Crossed rifles over the fireplace. Thriving plastic dracaena in the entrance.” I snickered, rolled my eyes, did a little soft-shoe.

  But Howard wasn’t playing. He was leaning against the braided ropes that kept us from muddying the floor of the drawing room, and he looked like a man at the prow of a ship.