In the Flesh

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “That’s only grease,” Howard said. “Don’t dramatize.” Then, “Who are you going with?”

  “What?” I had lost track.

  “Who are you going with to New Mexico?”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s a good one. Oh, ha ha ha.”

  “Why are you laughing? What’s so funny?”

  “Who am I—ha ha—going with? Ha ha ha.”

  “Paulie, I don’t see the joke. What’s so funny? Answer me.”

  But I couldn’t answer, and I couldn’t stop laughing either. It wasn’t funny, I knew, just terribly ironic. But I felt weak against that giddy onset of laughter, and dangerously close to weeping.

  “You don’t expect me to believe this, do you?” Howard asked. “I know you. You wouldn’t leave your precious city unless you had a damn good reason. Stop it, Paulie. You’re hysterical.”

  “Ha ha ha. Oh God, I can’t. Oh no. It’s killing me.” I held my side where it ached, just above my waist.

  “But it’s not funny,” Howard shouted. “You’re hysterical. It must be the fever.”

  “Then hit me,” I gasped, between bursts of laughter. “Isn’t that—oh ha—what you’re supposed to do? Go ahead, hit me.”

  “Will you cut it out, Paulie? Will you just please cut it out?”

  The tears were running now. “Don’t,” I moaned. I laughed and laughed, holding up my hand like a traffic cop to ward off his words.

  Howard seemed worried. “Look, I’ll talk to you,” he said. “Do you want to talk? We’ll eat supper, okay?” To prove his good will, he sat down at his place at the table.

  But I had started a shuffling dance step and I was making playful little jabs, like a boxer, at Howard’s arms, his head, his neck. “Go ahead, why don’t you hit me?”

  He put one hand up to protect himself and the other reached out and held my wrist. It was only a restraining gesture, but still the first time he had touched me in such a long while.

  “Let go,” I said, trying to pull free. I was vaguely aware of something burning in the oven, of distant street noises and footsteps in the apartment overhead. “Let go, you bastard, or I’ll kill you!”

  By then he had both wrists. He was standing again and he was shaking me, just hard enough to send my fevered head into another spin of vertigo. I used my feet then, kicking at his shins with my soft, weathered slippers, aiming my knee at his groin.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said, sidestepping, losing his grip on one of my hands. “Are you crazy?”

  But I reasoned that I was relentlessly sane, that craziness seemed like an unattainable luxury, an enviable escape. And I was so tired. My knees buckled and I reached behind me for support. My hand landed in a moist tangle of potato peelings and apple cores. Apples, I thought bitterly. “Apples!” I shouted. “Oh, damn you, damn you to hell!” My fist closed around something, metal or plastic. Without looking back, I raised it in swimming fury, and, with a feeling close to ecstasy, brought it hard against his chest.

  Howard staggered back. He fell against the table, moving it noisily to the far wall, rattling silver, upsetting china. His hand moved across his chest as if he were going to make a declaration or swear his allegiance to the flag. Something—blood, was coming out between his fingers.

  I looked at my own hand, still clenched. It seemed to be someone else’s, or my own still, but disembodied and out of my control. I was holding the apple corer. I had stabbed Howard with the apple corer.

  “Oh, my dearest!” I cried, rushing him.

  “I’m wounded,” he said, in a soft, cautious voice. “I think I’m wounded.”

  “Oh, my God, let me see.” I pulled his hand away, ripped his shirt open where the blood was following the oxford weave in a slow trickle. There, below the nipple, was a crescent-shaped puncture wound with fresh blood just welling up. “Let me, let me,” I murmured. “Shhh, shhh,” even though he wasn’t saying anything at all, just staring down at himself in horror. He was always such a coward about blood, about the frailty of human flesh, and it was me who had brought him now to this mortal recognition.

  “Don’t look,” I told him. “Let me,” and I wiped, first with the hem of my nightgown, and finally with some wet paper toweling. After a while my heart slowed and I saw that it wasn’t bad, that it wasn’t really deep. The blade of the apple corer was bent almost at a right angle to the handle. “It’s only a flesh wound,” I said. “Howard, it’s all right.”

  By then he was paler than I had ever seen him, and dazed-looking as if he had suffered a blow to the head instead.

  “Howard, Sweetheart, are you all right? Oh, I didn’t mean it.”

  “A little light-headed,” he said. “The shock … the blood …” His forehead and lip glistened.

  I took his hand and led him into the bedroom and he went with me like a small and trusting child.

  “Just lie down,” I said. “Here, put your feet up.” Strangely, I felt much stronger then myself, as if it were a question of taking turns, one of us powerful and one of us vulnerable at all times. My turn, I thought, and I pulled off his shoes, putting my hands inside them to catch their warmth as I lowered them to the floor. I put the other pillow under his feet.

  “Just till I catch my breath,” Howard said. “What’s that smell? Is it still bleeding?”

  “Only Vicks,” I said. “No no, don’t look at it, it’s stopped. But I have to bathe it now. Will you let me bathe it? I won’t hurt you.” I knelt at the side of the bed with a basin of warm soapy water and the king-sized Band-Aids I kept for the children’s scraped knees. I could see his heart leaping under his breastbone. I worried about putting the Band-Aid across the hair of his chest, where it would surely get stuck. I went to the desk drawer and found my manicuring scissors.

  He started, as if from a doze. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. Just rest. Only these hairs.” I snipped carefully, Delilah, letting the soft, dark tendrils scatter on the sheet. Power, I thought. Power and love.

  And then without thinking at all, I lay down next to him and took his hand in mine. “Howie? I didn’t mean it,” I said. “Do you know that? It was the fever. I must have been crazy.”

  He didn’t answer and I wondered if he had fallen asleep. Battle-weary and vanquished, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable. Violence wasn’t that far from sex, just as I’d always suspected, and I could have drifted into a kind of post-coital dream myself. But when I lifted my head to look at Howard, he was staring straight ahead across the room.

  “Howard?”

  “It was an act of love,” he said at last.

  “What?”

  “Love,” he said again, and this time his voice was stronger and full of wonder. “Oh, Paulie, listen, I’ve come to my senses.”

  39

  I CALLED THE ART Students’ League to say I was quitting, but I felt I owed Douglas a more personal notice of farewell. He hadn’t asked too many questions about Howard and me in the first place. In his gentle way, Douglas never urged me to talk about anything painful. He knew the basic facts of my life, and he recognized the underlying sadness that was there, even in the midst of our fun. I think he was secretly thrilled with what he saw as romantic tragedy.

  “Unfinished business,” I told Howard brusquely, as I left the apartment to speak to Douglas. I allowed Howard his own conclusions. I felt entitled to a little mystery, and besides, I hardly wanted the details of his departure from Mrs. X. My restless imagination had wandered into speculation anyway, and I had visions of frenzied kisses, and of carefully packed, zippered garment bags, fat with the costumes of their affair: boa-trimmed negligees, pom-pommed mules, underwear that would disintegrate in a laundromat.

  Howard had come back with the same suitcase, as crazily crammed as it had been the day he left. I gave him one triumphant glance, but I didn’t offer to help him unpack.

  I called Douglas from the drugstore phone. “I have to tell you something,” I said. “I’m coming over.”

  Douglas was
scared. “What? What is it?” he asked, his quavering voice giving him away.

  Poor Douglas. Did he think I was calling to say I was pregnant? He should have known I had long outgrown the wanton optimism that allowed mistakes like that. Maybe he’d be relieved to find it was only love’s betrayal and the homing instinct of a strayed husband.

  But when I saw him and told him about Howard’s return, he didn’t act relieved at all. He seemed shocked and sad. “Wow,” he said, letting himself fall backward into a chair. “I don’t know why, but I didn’t expect this.”

  Oh God, was he going to cry? “I didn’t either,” I said. “It just happened.”

  “No no no,” Douglas said. “I’m not blaming you.”

  That confused me a little. I didn’t think I had confessed guilt. But I took it as the cue for my next move. “Howard’s the children’s father; he’s still my husband. He regrets everything.”

  “Right, right,” Douglas agreed, raising one hand and then letting it drop into his lap. “I think you’re doing the right thing, the only thing. It’s just that I didn’t expect it just now.”

  “I didn’t either,” I said again, and we had come around full circle. I felt more than a little uncomfortable struggling for words in that room where we had attempted so little conversation before. The place was as disordered as the first time I’d seen it, the unmade bed hogging most of the space, looking like an absurd memorial to our relationship.

  Douglas himself had come to the door barefoot, wearing only unbelted jeans. His naked chest was as gorgeous as a laborer’s, as vulnerable as a child’s. I had once loved only Howard’s body, praised its beauty and imperfections alike, celebrated its companionship with mine. Now I knew how men feel in their arrow-straight lust for certain women. I, too, had become a connoisseur of flesh.

  On the way to Douglas’s place, I had played out this scene between us in my head, preparing both parts, directing all the action. After all, I was tougher, older, probably born wiser than Douglas.

  He was dear, even precious, but still a little comical, a perpetual kid.

  Hey kid, put on your pants, my husband’s home. And there’s more to life than surefire fucking. Even Howard’s found that out now.

  I gave Douglas terrific lines too—lines that showed a new mature strength, that damned the conventions of marriage and all limits on desire. But he wouldn’t say them.

  I felt a flutter of disappointment and impatience. I knew that the last thing I needed was resistance, a lover who wasn’t going to give me up without drama. And yet, I wanted a little drama, a minor performance in which we formally acknowledged the sacrifice we were making.

  Howard had given up Mrs. X in the middle of his passion. The possibilities of their farewell scene flashed before me again and I felt mean-spirited with envy, while Douglas sat slumped and defeated, his eyes filling with tears.

  Douglas, I wanted to say, don’t be so honorable, don’t be so sad. Be angry. Howard is the interloper here, not you, with your good will and your grilled cheese and your innocent drawings.

  Even Jason and the baby put up a courageous fight when they were afraid of losing something they wanted.

  This isn’t fair, I thought. It hurts too much to be fair. And for one wild moment I wondered if I really had to give Douglas up, if I just couldn’t keep him somewhere safely on the sidelines, the way Howard had once kept Mrs. X. My back-street cowboy. But in the next instant I knew it was a crazy notion, crazy and childish. It would never have occurred to Douglas anyway. That wasn’t how his mind worked. This was a happy ending, no matter how lousy we both felt. It was the sort of ending he loved best in the movies, too. He would miss me all right, in body and in spirit. He would miss the boy and the girl too, the idyll of all our good times together. Still, Douglas would want to do what he thought of as the right thing. Maybe he believed it was the kind of suffering he needed, the pain that would make him a deeper artist.

  He stood. “I’m going to miss you a lot, Babe,” he said, that last word almost inhaled in a sob.

  How I wished then that he’d straighten the bed or put on a shirt, either gesture final, and appropriate to the end of things between us.

  But instead he reached out slowly to me, and I took his hands in mind. “Dearest Douglas. Oh, goodbye,” I said, and when we embraced, the fierceness of his hug forced out my breath and I was startled by that familiar jolt against my belly.

  40

  Every day

  I move to

  a new neighborhood,

  making doorkeys

  useless.

  No one here

  speaks English,

  or remembers

  my mother.

  But the slatted

  sun still seeks

  dust

  felled by polish,

  those chairs

  with the gentle

  curves

  of seated women,

  and the child

  who waits

  in a worn Persian

  bower

  for a time

  to push off.

  April 23, 1962

  “WHAT I WOULD DO,” my mother said, “is rip their hearts out, both of them, and feed the pieces to the cats and dogs in the neighborhood.” She said it quite calmly while she wrapped an ashtray in a page of the New York Post and tucked it into a carton.

  “That’s your mother for you,” my father said in wondering admiration.

  She continued. “Plain death would be too good for them. They’d have to suffer a lot first.”

  Ma, I wanted to say, what about forgive and forget? What ever happened to turn the other cheek, and live and let live? But I didn’t say anything, just sighed and looked at the stripped walls of my living room where paintings had left lighter spaces like ghostly shadows of themselves.

  “Well, at least you’re getting out of this dump,” she said. “At least you’ll be living in a real house.”

  It was the worst thing she could have said. I still felt a tearing and unreasonable love for that apartment where Howard and I had begun. I missed everything already: even the indelible sink stains and the crowded cupboards, the poor narrow light and the faulty plumbing. I felt as if I simply belonged there, as if it were my natural home.

  But there were a thousand good reasons to leave. At the head of the list, of course, was Mrs. X herself, slender and fragrant, and only yards away again in Building C. And Howard and I definitely needed something else, a symbolic change to mark this turn our lives had taken. Our apartment really was terribly small. The children and their belongings were forcing us into corners. I looked around, eager to find fresh fault with it, but my eyes filled with tears.

  “You’re depressed,” my mother said accusingly.

  “No, no, it’s not that. It’s just that I got my period this morning. You know I’m always a soft touch on the first day.”

  My father, who had been packing books, began to whistle tunelessly between his teeth, and he moved to the window. I had forgotten about him, that talk like this always embarrassed him. It was what he called “woman’s talk,” that dealt with human functions or illness. It occurred to me then that despite all the man-made words for our parts, worshipful or degrading, women still have a closer, more loving and critical sense of our own bodies.

  Maybe, in the same way, we have a deeper sense of where and how we live. I looked at the chaos around us. Practically everything Howard and I owned was in cartons and barrels. We were transporting it all from one place to another like exiles.

  The supermarket boxes had brought in nests of waterbugs and roaches. In the last nights when one of the children woke and called for water, an insect freeway came to frenzied life in the sudden kitchen light. Thinking that they would still be here after we were gone, I went after them with folded newspapers and a misdirected rage.

  Howard was wild about moving, kept up a manic monologue about space and light and air. Cancer, heart attacks, even the common cold, were waiting
for us like muggers in the dark alleys of the city. He wondered if I realized the inevitable relationship that would develop between our children in that crowded room they shared. Already there were minor seductions and an outbreak of bathroom language.

  I didn’t remind him of how we used to laugh at model tract houses and ridicule the plastic lives of people in the suburbs. He probably wouldn’t have listened anyway, in his new intense state. One night he swore off cigarettes forever and made us all accompany him to the incinerator where he sacrificed an unopened carton to the flames below. He hugged and kissed the children until they shrieked complaint, and it seemed he was always near me, always bumping into me. We collided in the hallway or when we took turns in the bathroom, and even in our sleep like two blind night animals.

  “I guess you forgive him,” my mother said. “You’re such an easy person. Maybe that’s your whole trouble.”

  I wondered what she would say if she knew about Douglas, or about the stabbing, if she could have seen the blackness in my eyes and in my heart. But maybe she would have decided that I had been merciful, or at least just.

  I didn’t answer and she said, “Oh no, not me, sister. He’d have to win back my respect, prove himself before I’d look into those bedroom eyes again.”

  “Ma,” I said.

  “I’m different,” my father said. “If he walked into this room this very minute, I’d shake his hand and wish him all the luck in the world.”

  “You!” she said, wiping him out with a glance.

  “Howard’s not walking in, Dad,” I said. “You know that. I told you he’s giving a lesson until six tonight.”

  “I only said, if he did. Listen, Sis. Put the past behind you. It’s a brand-new page and everything’s going to get better.”

  “Well, maybe things will be different,” my mother conceded. “You’ll be living in the country, for one thing. It’s a different pace.”