I Shudder

by Paul Rudnick

  “And I love you!” the wife yowled, with the extension cord still draped, if more loosely, around her neck. “The only reason I slept with your brother is because he reminds me of you!”

  “It’s true!” said the brother, cradling his shattered arm. “The whole time we were doing it, she kept saying, ‘You’re not half as good as your brother! Or your dad’!”

  “You really said that?” Mr. Demetrios, instantly remorseful, asked his wife.

  “Of course,” said Mrs. Demetrios. “When you’re here, you’re the only one I will ever love!”

  “What have I done!” cried Mr. Demetrios, as he and Mrs. Demetrios fell into each other’s arms. The brother tried to applaud, which caused him to scream.

  “It’s so romantic,” said Lucy, as she prepared a plastic splint for the brother. “They’ve been together for so long, and they’re still so passionate. All three of them.”

  As I placed Mr. Demetrios’s ear, which had fallen off during the embrace, into a small Styrofoam cooler, I looked up, into Lucy’s eyes. She was so lovely and so involved and so adept, that all I could say was, “Lucy?”

  “Elyot?”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Say yes!” urged Mrs. Demetrios, clutching her bosom; she’d now tied the extension cord into a decorative bow.

  “Yes!” said Lucy.

  3.

  Lucy and I were both shocked, not just because, inspired by a scene of domestic gore, we were getting married, but because I had done something so spontaneous, and so epically out of character. And once I began, I couldn’t stop. “Lucy,” I said, in the ambulance, as we drove the now cooing Demetrios family to the hospital, “let’s drop these folks off, and then keep going. Let’s get married today!”

  “Oh, yes!” said Mrs. Demetrios.

  “You’ll never regret it!” said Mr. Demetrios.

  “Never!” said Mr. Demetrios’s brother.

  “What?” asked Mr. Demetrios, as his brother had spoken into his missing ear.

  “Are you sure?” Lucy asked, “All of you? Because, Elyot, you know I love you, but we don’t have to rush into this. It’s so…not you.”

  “I know!” I said, “And that’s what’s so interesting. What if I actually broke free, and became someone else? What if I surrendered, to pure blissful anarchy? What if I…wore sneakers? Even—sneakers with Velcro straps? With the straps undone?”

  “He’s in love!” cried Mrs. Demetrios.

  “Who are you?” Lucy asked me, laughing.

  “I don’t know!” I said, and for the first moment in my life, this didn’t seem to matter. For once, I wasn’t worrying about what I was wearing, or about what everyone else was wearing, or about how the world was going terribly wrong, and when and how I might point this out to everyone. I could barely remember my own name or my profession or my favorite shade of off-white: Was it parchment or eggshell or bone? Or even blanched almond? I didn’t care!

  For once I wanted nothing in my life to be cautiously measured, assiduously weighed, or painfully honed. I wanted to plunge in, to forge ahead, to flap my arms and chew with my mouth open and spend money heedlessly and then I wanted to declare bankruptcy and yet continue to spend, buying a home spa with fifteen pulsing underwater power jets! I wanted to be an American! At the hospital, I had Lucy arrange our blood tests, and then, with the siren at full blast, we raced downtown to City Hall, for our license and our ceremony.

  “But, Elyot—City Hall?” Lucy asked, as we waited in the antechamber, with the other couples. “Is City Hall really you?”

  “I don’t know!” I said. “And I don’t care! Look what you’ve done to me!”

  “Elyot?”

  “But, Lucy, what about you? I know you said yes, but is this what you want? Am I railroading you into all this?”

  “Elyot, I’ve fallen out of a helicopter into a village where even the seven-year-olds have rocket launchers. I’ve paddled a bark canoe up the Amazon, where something the size of a pigeon turned out to be a mosquito. I’ve driven my ambulance into the middle of a gang war, where all of my windows got smashed by a guy who’d shot his cousin at point-blank range because the cousin had brushed against his leather jacket. But do you know why I want to marry you?”

  “Why?”

  “Because for the first time in my life, I’m scared.”

  The ceremony was brief and basic, as performed by a savvy, middle-aged female judge, with pleasingly honey-colored bouffant hair and the acid swirls of a Pucci blouse topping her black robes. She looked at Lucy and then at me, with a degree of doubt.

  “Are you sure about this?” asked the judge.

  “Yes,” said Lucy, who was holding a bouquet of white Casablanca lilies, which we’d bought at a nearby Korean deli, and which she’d bundled with some tongue depressors and syringes from the ambulance supply.

  “Yes,” I said, with a Casablanca lily pinned to the lapel of my navy blazer, where the Demetrios family’s blood had barely dried.

  “You don’t look like any of our usual couples,” the judge commented. “And it’s not because you’re not pregnant, or drunk. But I’ve been marrying people for over thirty years, and I’ve never come across a couple quite like the two of you. And I mean this in the best possible way, but you look like a fairy tale where, instead of marrying the prince, the princess is marrying the wizard.”

  “I know,” said Lucy, taking my hand, “but I would never marry a prince. That’s too easy. That’s just a crown and a castle.”

  “And you, Mr. Wizard, with that thing on your head…” She was staring at my derby, which I’d banded with yellow crime-scene tape. “Are you sure?”

  I looked into Lucy’s eyes, and she nodded, as if we were both standing at the edge of a cliff, with common sense and forethought and statistical probability running toward us, yelling, “Don’t jump!”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “I feel like a scientist, combining two volatile elements,” said the judge. “I’m either going to cure cancer, or blow up the world.”

  “Either way,” I said, “it’s a big day.”

  4.

  Our wedding night was euphoric, as we made love and ate ruffled potato chips and swigged orange juice and, most enchantingly, discussed all of the other couples that we’d met at City Hall. “I loved those two eighty-five-year-olds,” said Lucy, “because they’d been high school sweethearts, but then they’d broken up and they’d both married other people and had kids, but then both of their spouses died and they’d found each other again at their fiftieth high school reunion. And whenever the clerk used the words ‘husband’ or ‘wife,’ one of them would always ask, ‘Wait, you mean this one or the dead one?’”

  “My favorite was the blind couple,” I said, “because they were so devoted, and because the husband took me aside and whispered, ‘So she’s pretty, right? Really pretty? And she says she’s twenty-eight, what do you think?’”

  We finally fell asleep, rapturously exhausted, in each other’s arms. The problems only began at eleven a.m. the next day, when we woke up. As I opened my eyes, I saw Lucy, still asleep. And I thought, she’s beautiful and I love her and I’m so transported, and yet…she’s in my apartment. I tried to banish such a selfish and petty train of thought, as Lucy yawned and opened her eyes.

  “Good morning, you,” she said, stretching in the sunlight.

  “Good morning,” I said, trying to keep the discomfort out of my tone.

  “I love you,” she said, still not moving from the bed.

  “And I love you,” I replied, “and I have a wonderful idea. Let’s get out of bed, and pick up our clothes. Off the floor.”

  Of course, I was being polite, since before I’d fallen asleep I’d stowed the remaining orange juice in the refrigerator, and tossed the empty potato chip bags down the incinerator chute in the hall. Then I’d smoothed my shirt and my suit with a hand steamer, placed both garments on wooden hangers, and returned them to my closet. I’d inserted cedar
trees into my shoes, which were then slipped into individual clean white linen drawstring bags and stored in their original box, and then I’d draped my necktie with the other members of its color family on the rack attached to the back of my closet door. My cuff links, watch fob, collar stays, and suspenders were then deposited in their labeled compartments in my great-grandfather’s gold-embossed Florentine kidskin accessories caddy, my socks were hand laundered, matched, rolled, and filed in their drawer, and my wallet and loose coins were symmetrically arranged atop my bedside table, beside my crystal carafe of ice water, my bud vase containing a single unopened white tea rose, and my Bible, by which I mean Emily Post’s original etiquette manual, the edition aimed at families with at least five servants.

  Lucy’s clothing had been flung carelessly over my single chair and her shoes were strewn haphazardly beneath it. This is the chair carved to resemble a human skeleton, and even in death, it looked outraged.

  Lucy gradually roused herself and slipped into my best dressing gown, the one in a Black Watch woolen plaid with quilted satin lapels and a tasseled belt. As I was trying to surreptitiously de-rumple the sheets, Lucy sprawled back onto my campaign bed, munching my new favorite breakfast cereal, a muesli of steel-cut oats, walnut clusters, and honey-roasted crickets. She was eating this cereal with her hand, right from the box.

  “Lucy,” I said evenly, “I love you, but I don’t love crumbs.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “and oh my God, I’ve finished the whole box. Elyot, I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s…fine,” I said, trying to ignore the fact that she was now holding the box upside down and shaking it, allowing the cereal dust to fall onto my great-grandmother’s matchlessly threadbare Oushak rug.

  After Lucy bathed, I went into my bathroom, which has not been updated since the building was constructed in 1870, and which therefore boasts white subway tile with narrow black tile accents, nickel and porcelain fixtures, a clawfoot tub, and a floor of small, octagonal black and white tiles. My grooming products are arranged, by size, in a row of frosted, ribbed glass jars with nickel-plated lids, and my towels are the thickest, whitest Egyptian cotton, with a black embroidered border and my monogram. A person’s bathroom, I believe, is the only three-dimensional expression of their soul.

  Lucy had used a towel as a bath mat, and she’d run my tortoise shell comb through her hair, and had then left the comb dangling precariously over the edge of the sink. There were small dabs of my English tooth powder on the etched and beveled mirror over the sink. Lucy had also soaked a washcloth and left it dripping over the lip of the tub. As you can imagine, I was having trouble breathing.

  “So, Elyot,” said Lucy, as I left the bathroom and noticed that, while she’d made a half-hearted attempt at straightening the sheets and bedcoverings on the campaign bed, she’d also rearranged the matching cushions so that they made no sense at all. It was like Chernobyl. “Elyot,” she wondered, “do you think we should live here or at my place, or should we find a bigger place of our own?”

  I tried to smile, or at least to inhabit the body and lips of someone who, at some point in the future, would be able to reclaim his smiling muscles. My brain was in shreds. Lucy lived in a one-bedroom in a white-brick high-rise in Murray Hill, an apartment which she was subletting from a nurse who was taking a year off to visit her five sisters, each of whom lived in a different midwestern state. Lucy’s sublet included commemorative plastic plates, purchased at highway rest stops, picturing the official flower, bird, and nickname of each sister’s home state, hanging on the wall of the breakfast nook and arranged around a large, full-color photograph, draped in black polyester crepe, of the nurse’s dead Siamese cat.

  I considered finding a new apartment, for Lucy and myself. This would be an apartment where I would have to respect Lucy’s belongings, and where she would, on occasion, undoubtedly touch or use or sit on mine. It would be an apartment where, even if, for a split second, I could place everything harmoniously, it would never remain so, or not for very long. It would be an apartment, maybe even a roomy and desirable apartment, perhaps with a river view and central air conditioning, but, above all else, it would be an apartment and a life which I would be expected to share. For better or for worse, I know myself. And every day, I try desperately to improve the world, to reach out and to devote myself to helping others. Although of course I fall hideously short, but I aspire, as we all must, to a form of Gandhi-like largesse. But there are restrictions and amendments and codicils to my agreement with humanity. And this was the deal breaker: I don’t share.

  I looked at Lucy, who was still fresh and winning and altogether sensational, and who deserved only the utmost happiness. Then I looked at my apartment, where, at that time, I’d already lived for twenty years. I looked at the unassailable dimensions of my single room, at the furniture chosen with more care than any nation selects its leaders, at a life distilled to an essence of pristine, limitless, impossible elegance. Between this marvelous woman and this flawless studio apartment, I had never been so gut-wrenchingly torn.

  “This isn’t going to work, is it?” asked Lucy, without even a hint of accusation. She’d been watching me, in my agony. She knew me, better than anyone ever had. And she loved me, not despite my majestic lunacy but because of it.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, and, for a moment, I almost wished I was someone else, someone normal, someone who wasn’t anguished by the single white porcelain plate, lightly smeared with jam, which Lucy had left tilted in the sink. Smeared. Tilted.

  “Oh, Elyot,” said Lucy, “I think that the very best marriages never last more than a day.”

  “Really?”

  “I think I knew that we could never really be together. But I just wanted to be able, at least for a day, to call myself Mrs. Elyot Vionnet. Just to see the expression on people’s faces.”

  “I will always love you,” I swore, and I meant every word. “Now get out.”

  In Pieces

  When some people are asleep they look like little angels. When Candida is sleeping, she looks like she’s listening patiently, as the angels plead their case and explain why they’re necessary, right before Candida begins grabbing each angel by the throat and ripping its wings off.

  While Candida’s natural facial expression, even in repose, is one of bitingly intelligent fury, she’s also compassionate. She was a religious studies major in college, and she’d be a great minister or rabbi if only, as she puts it, “all of the major religions weren’t so incredibly fucked.” Candida is someone who, if a homeless crackhead tried to mug her, would tell the crackhead, “Look, we both know why you’re doing this, and why it’s the drug cartels and the mob and ultimately the current administration who are profiting from your misery. And if you’d like, I can try and get you into a treatment program, and then I’d have you take an aptitude test, because your street skills could most likely be translated into a decent career. And you probably don’t have any place to live, so we can work on that, and please don’t be offended, but a shower isn’t going to kill you. So what do you say?” By this point the crackhead would have forgotten that he was trying to rob Candida and he’d be gratefully holding her backpack while she got her mail.

  Candida is small and wiry, and her short dark curls sometimes get her mistaken for a sexy Greek delivery boy. I first met her at a party, and as we spoke, we kept being interrupted by a spindly guy who wanted us to follow him into another room, where he was going to play his flute. When he intruded once too often, Candida turned to him and said forcefully, but without raising her voice, “We’re trying to have a conversation, which you are welcome to join, but if you don’t stop bothering us, and everyone else, I’m going to shove that flute so far up your ass that it’s going to come out your mouth.”

  Candida was raised in a well-to-do family on Central Park West. She once showed me a short promotional film in which, as a five-year-old, she’d been asked, by friends of her parents, to play with a new doll. In t
he film, the very young Candida has pink satin bows in her hair and wears a ruffled pink party dress. She holds a doll, dressed in an identical outfit, in her fist, at arm’s length; Candida stares at the doll with revulsion and pity, as if she can’t decide whether to yank its head off or send it to a gulag for reeducation.

  Because she believes in common sense and justice, Candida is fearless. The only time I ever saw her quaver was when, as a favor to her mother, she’d agreed to wear a dress to a family wedding. I’ve seen a photo of Candida in what ended up as an embroidered black velvet bolero and matching skirt ensemble: she looks like there are rifles being pointed at her, just off camera. Before she’d gone to this wedding, she’d asked me to accompany her, for moral support, to buy the appropriate women’s shoes. It took me at least forty-five minutes to coax Candida from the street and into the shoe store, and another half hour to calm her into taking a seat and trying on a one-inch heel. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!” she wailed, as a small crowd of salespeople tried to soothe her. “Why are you torturing me?”

  For such a forceful personality, Candida never prejudges anyone. She actually listens, and she can be sympathetic to the most unlikely causes. For a hard-core liberal, she’s never knee-jerk or doctrinaire, and her sense of humor can surprise people. She was once part of a feminist discussion group where the women decided to rename their genitalia, since so much of the standard nomenclature has been coined by men. “Womynflower” and “herzone” were mentioned as more sensitive possibilities, and then Candida said, “You know, I’ve always kind of liked ‘gash.’”

  For a time, Candida was roommates with Kelly, a conceptual artist who used their small apartment, without asking, as her personal gallery. Kelly had used black spray paint to stencil the words “In the refrigerator…” on the front door of that appliance; and inside, scotch-taped to the vegetable crisper, was a sheet of notebook paper typed with the words, “…there is no confusion.” Kelly had placed a chocolate chip cookie with a bite out of it on top of the toilet seat, and, after using the commode, guests were told to put the cookie back on the toilet seat, because the entire process was “a piece.” Or, as I like to think of it, “a peece.”