Good on Paper

by Rachel Cantor

  I kicked my blankets to the floor. Time to do something. Organize under the kitchen sink, flush the coffeemaker with baking soda. As I left my room, something crunched underfoot: a Popsicle-stick throne Ahmad had made for Tink—a throne, flattened now by my big foot.

  What do you think, Tink? I asked, the hall nightlight illuminating the shape of things. Should I move to Connecticut? Will I lose my daughter if I don’t?

  Tink kept his counsel, proving his wisdom, yet again.

  •

  The next morning, the spices were in alphabetical order and Andi was none the worse for wear. She was playing with the Lewinsky paper dolls and singing “Home, Home on the Grange,” which is how Pammy insisted the song went. She’d already eaten—I saw the remnants of grape jelly omelet in the sink. As I made eggs for myself, I imagined the New York things we might do: pizza picnic on the Staten Island Ferry? Counting seagulls on the Circle Line? Inventing Mongolian ancestors at Ellis Island? But Andi had a better idea. She ran into the kitchen wearing a frilly dress Aunt Emma had sent her. Pammy had invited her overnight; she wanted to go now. She’d already filled her backpack with essential toys and, I hoped, some underwear.

  Whoever heard of going to a sleepover at ten in the morning? I asked. And why did she want to go so far from her mama?

  She’s only upstairs! Andi said, giving me the look seven-year-olds cultivate that says, Where did I find this mother, is there any chance I can take her back?

  I thought you didn’t like Pammy.

  What’re you talking about?

  Did you have enough breakfast?

  Pammy’s mother bought Drake’s Cakes! she said mysteriously.

  Oh, I said. Does Drake bake a good cake?

  There was that look again.

  Okey doke, I said. Eskimo kiss!

  We rubbed noses and off she ran.

  27

  FALSE FRIENDS AND TRUE

  I found myself looking out the bedroom window at Benny’s side display, wishing I were a birdwatcher and could produce binoculars. What did I hope to see? Benny and Psychogirl smooching by All Things Green (books on the environment, money, and “envy management”)? Ahmad was hum-singing along with Glenn Gould in the living room. Maybe he thought he could draw me out, pretend nothing had happened, pretend he wasn’t playing Connecticut tug-of-war with our little girl. He needed to apologize: confession, contrition, reparation, change.

  Benny, Connecticut, the possible addition to our family—I needed help sorting it out, but where? Once upon a time, I’d have called Jeanette, Jonah’s sister. She was the one friend other than Ahmad who’d stayed true when I had a child. Some dropped me; others changed the subject when I talked about cracked nipples, the miracle of life. I hadn’t felt the loss, because I had Ahmad and Andi—I had my family. But Jeanette became a better friend then, visiting when Ahmad was teaching so I could shower, bringing me chocolates, telling somewhat relevant stories about her Dotty’s colic, never asking when I’d lose my baby weight. We didn’t have much in common except high school in Rome, and Jonah, but I enjoyed our confidences and the girly things we did—like getting our legs waxed and watching the weepies. She wasn’t great at managing her own life, but she was terrific at managing mine.

  My stories ended that. She hadn’t minded “Tibet, New York,” about Jonah’s last days—it had moved her, even, she’d said so more than once. But in “Domino,” my most recent, published a year ago, I’d imagined us in high school: Jonah at fourteen, defacing a portrait Ahmad had made of me, my Botticelli hair flying wild, and jerking off in a tree as he watched T. and me making out in a copse. I made things up to “tell a deeper truth”; Jeanette said I’d made Jonah out to be a pervert—why would I do that? She wouldn’t return my calls.

  When Ahmad went to his studio, I grabbed a book from his bookshelf: Poverty and Landlessness. Tiny print, grainy black-and-white photos—it was perfect! I called Jeanette, said her daughter Dotty had left a book last time she’d babysat. I’d be in the neighborhood, should I maybe drop it off?

  Oh, Jeanette said. Sure.

  •

  I brought Romei’s “Screen” with me and reread it on the downtown bus—the crashed parties, the rendezvous in the park. I stalled in the consummation scene, stared at it as we bumped down Broadway, came to myself only after we passed Fairway. I elbowed my way off and walked back up to Seventy-ninth. As I waited for the crosstown, I kept staring at the page. Something wasn’t right.

  False friends! The passage was littered with them. Words in one language that trick you into thinking they’re related to words in another (like Andi, who appears related to Ahmad, but isn’t). Like fame, which in Italian means not fame but hunger.

  When the crosstown arrived, I went straight to the back and looped my arm around a pole. Had false friends insinuated themselves into Romei and Esther’s Eden? No. Were they reflected in the mirror as Romei posed in the clothes he’d “liberated” from his friends’ closets? No. They were only here, in the consummation scene. Baffled, I got off at Sixty-eighth and Third. Had Romei meant to do this? He must have. But why? Was he testing me, daring me to make a novice’s mistakes?

  C’mon, Shira, I thought as I walked up Third Avenue. Why would he do that? Surely he was making a point about the lack of correspondence between the character Romei and his English-speaking love. Interesting, but who would notice but me? I couldn’t make his plays on words evident in translation—once translated, they’d disappear. (No one would look at the word bookstore and think, Bookstore is libreria in Italian, which doesn’t mean library—what is that crafty poet up to!) Romei’s joke would be visible only to the reader of Italian, and only if he were thinking about how it might translate.

  Was it my imagination? No, because there they were. Ten classic examples on one page alone.

  But I had arrived at Jeanette’s building, a freakishly tall stack of condos on East 70th. I pushed the pages into my mom-bag.

  Jeanette had moved here from Brooklyn Heights, determined to start anew after her divorce. She’d tossed everything she’d purchased with her ex, and redecorated every room except Dotty’s, which Dotty, at the tender age of twelve, had refused to cede to her mother’s stencils and window treatments, preferring instead to cover her walls with anything that might remind her of her uncle—or rather, her memory of Jonah or, increasingly, her memory of having had a memory of him: photos of Tibetan tangkas, monkey-headed gods, reproductions of his paintings from a gallery catalogue, a photo of him holding baby Dotty on his lap, blown up to poster size.

  Jeanette thought it fetishistic, creepy even, but put up with it because, as her therapist said, we all grieve differently.

  How could I forget him? Dotty asked one day. Uncle Joe was everything to me, but now all I remember is him looking like this, she said, pointing at the poster-size photo, or that, pointing to framed photos on her bookshelf.

  That’s life cutting you some slack, I said.

  It’s not right to forget someone you love, she said.

  You were only seven, I said. Give yourself a break.

  So the divinities came off the walls, replaced by teen idols, boys I didn’t recognize, with longish hair and doe eyes and, later, Che Guevara, images of the people united, never to be defeated, marching toward their bright, socialist-realist future.

  Jeanette eventually combined her interior decoration mania with real estate work, entering the renovate-a-crummy-building-and-sell-it-for-a-killing business. Only she joined the bandwagon a moment too late and, I suspect, applied too bourgeois a taste: her renovations didn’t appeal to the Lower East Side set. She declared bankruptcy, but in the process found a new beau—a master carpenter (her term, not his) named Georges, whom she called her Silver Lining, as in, there always is one. Georges was plump and affectionate, except when he disappeared, returning days later all glum and taciturn. It’s just his way, Jeanette said, forgetting that this had been her ex’s way as well. Soon she was back to selling real estate and happier than e
ver. Or she was last time I saw her.

  I barely recognized her when she came to the door. She used to have what you might call big hair, but she’d cut it short—a mistake. She was wearing a white blouse with a red-piped Peter Pan collar, puffed sleeves, a red knee-length skirt, and a ruby pendant in the shape of a heart.

  Like the new haircut! I said, when she said hello but didn’t invite me in. Very smart!

  Thank you, she said, and almost smiled, but remembered herself.

  Does it have to be this way? I said. Really? We were friends once.

  Jeanette shook her head, as if dismissing me. Do you have the book? she said. For a crazy moment I thought she was asking for Romei’s pages, that she’d been ordered by the Great Man to get them back.

  Right! I said, and reached into my bag. Poverty and Landlessness.

  Thanks, Jeanette said. I’ll give this to Dotty.

  She’s a fine girl. You deserve maximum credit.

  Thank you, Jeanette said, looking inside the book and smiling.

  I could use some pointers right about now.

  Andi?

  Yes, I said, and before I knew it, I was sniffling into my MOM! handkerchief. I’d intended to grovel with more dignity.

  Jeanette sighed.

  You’d better come in. And take this, she said, handing me back the book. It’s Ahmad’s. See? she said, and pointed to the frontispiece, From the library of.

  Oh, I said, wiping my nose on my Barnard T-shirt. No kidding.

  •

  Jeanette pulled out the Chex Party Mix and made us strawberry daiquiris. Never too early for drinks, she said, as long as we call it brunch.

  I told her about Mirabella, Connecticut, the choice it seemed I’d made.

  Ahmad’s in a tough spot, she said. He doesn’t want to lose you, or Andi.

  Why would he lose Andi? I said. He’ll only lose her if he moves to Connecticut!

  It’s not that simple, she said, and pulled a Marlboro out from under the coffee table, lit it with a gold lighter that read, Saleswoman of the Year 1996. She kept a pack scotch-taped there, available for “emotional emergencies.” Listen, she said, after offering me one (I said no), maybe you won’t move to Connecticut, maybe it was wrong of him to use Andi to get to you, but she’s part of his life. Whatever you decide, you’ll have to come to an arrangement.

  She sucked on her cigarette, closing her eyes in bliss.

  He can offer her so much more than I can, I said. What if she refuses to live with me?

  Jeanette smiled: she knew I was thinking of Dotty. When Jeanette’s ex got custody, Dotty kept returning to Jeanette, sometimes in the middle of the night, carrying toys and, ever sensible, a store of apples in her knapsack.

  Andi loves you. You’re her mother.

  It’s not that simple, I said.

  Yes, it is.

  It is?

  Yup.

  I took that in.

  I meant what I said about Dotty, by the way. You should be proud.

  Dotty is a worrisome child, Jeanette said. She wants the condo association to organize a gold cooperative for Y2K. Can you believe it? We should convert our savings into gold and buy a safe together. These are people who can’t decide what color to paint the foyer!

  Dotty’s got her head on straight. She’ll be fine.

  She is good, isn’t she? Jeanette asked, smiling slightly, as if not to tempt fate.

  Speaking of apartments, Jen: two bedrooms in Manhattan. With a study—what are we talking? We’d need a real kitchen, of course. And two bathrooms. Eventually Andi’s going to need her own bathroom.

  Jeanette just looked at me.

  You don’t want to know.

  I do, I said. At least I think I do.

  She named some numbers.

  I’m not talking Fifth Avenue, Jen! I’m talking my neighborhood, so Andi doesn’t have to change schools.

  Jen shook her head.

  That is my neighborhood?

  That’s Harlem, honey. Up and coming, or so they say.

  Maybe I will have one of those cigarettes, I said, trying to laugh. It had been a long time since I’d looked for an apartment. After I left my husband at thirty-five, I moved in with my father; when he died, I went to India. I came home pregnant, and Ahmad took me in. It had been since I was a grad student! Twenty years!

  I don’t handle the kind of properties you’d be looking for, Jeanette added. No margin in it. I could possibly introduce you to someone, if it comes to that.

  I nodded halfheartedly as Jeanette lit our cigarettes two at once, Leslie Howard style.

  So, she said, as if getting to the point, love interest?

  Jeanette despaired of seeing me properly coupled: singleness such as I’d enjoyed much of my life was not, she assured me, a state favored by nature.

  No, I’d invariably say, blue food is not favored by nature, but the she-lion hunts alone!

  Jeanette bristled at that: she often served blue food.

  Between cigarette-induced coughs, I confessed to confusion about Benny.

  (He sounds nice, she said. He’s taken, I said. What’s taken can be untaken. Jeanette! All’s fair! I didn’t want to explain how I couldn’t compete with someone like Marie, how one man couldn’t be interested in both her and me. He’s lying to me, I said. He deserves a chance to explain. Is he cute? and so on.)

  Okay, the rabbi’s out, she eventually agreed. Anyone else?

  I shook my head.

  Shira! You gotta get out there!

  I’ve suffered from a lack of female guidance, I admitted.

  You want female guidance? I’ll give you female guidance!

  She stubbed out her cigarette and inspected me.

  Stand, she said. I complied. She looked pointedly at my midsection and said, You’re spending too much time at Cuppa Joe’s. Only a true friend would tell you.

  I looked down, pressed my hands against my belly, acknowledged there was more give and take there than there used to be.

  More? she asked. I nodded meekly. What kind of bra are you wearing? From the looks of it, it’s one of those athletic bras that smush you down.

  I looked down again.

  No, I really am this small.

  Jeanette tsk-tsked me. No one’s ever that small, she said, and gave me a short course on miracles. Push yourself up by your bra straps!

  Isn’t that deceptive?

  Poor dear, she said, shaking her head. Men are beasts. They’re wonderful, adorable beasts, and we love them, but they need to think they’re getting titties, big titties.

  Even if they’re not?

  Especially if they’re not.

  I didn’t understand, but promised to think about it. Then we made more daiquiris.

  You know my ex has prostate cancer, Jeanette said, as she dumped frozen blueberries into the blender. Did Dotty tell you?

  Dotty doesn’t talk about her father. Is he okay?

  I don’t think so, she said, reaching for the rum, which was still on the counter. I bear him no ill will, you know. I should. I should want to pull his fucking prostate out with my teeth.

  Ghoulish, Jen! I like it!

  She cracked up as she reached back inside the freezer for ice. But I say, live and let live. Ever tempted to rake your exes over the coals? she asked, tearing open a packet of daiquiri mix.

  I knew what she meant: Would I defame one in a story?

  You know what they say? I asked.

  Tell! she said, and poured what must have been a quart of Nutrasweet into the blender.

  If you put an ex in a story, give him a small you-know-what and make him impotent. He’ll never say it was him! No one gets sued!

  From that elevated point, we ascended farther, discussing size in general—one of us claiming it made no difference, the other claiming it made all the difference in the world—then size in particular, as in our exes, the hypothetical endowment of movie stars, politicians. All in all, an edifying afternoon. When I left, we promised to have lunch,
watch weepies over what Dotty once called “white” ice cream, and never fall out of touch again. (Yes, that’s how we referred to our falling out, as a falling out of touch.) Because we were true friends, true-blue friends! Drinking true-blue drinks and eating true-blue food!

  These were hysterical concepts, so we clung to each other at the front door, shouting and laughing. I was still laughing as I descended in the elevator. True friends, blue friends, true-blue false friends! And was struck sober on Third Avenue.

  Maybe there were no false friends in Romei’s work. Maybe the false friends were true friends. Was this possible?

  Taxi, Miss?

  I stared at the doorman.

  Casino, yes: in Italian, casino means mess, and Romei’s home is a mess, but bedding Esther is also a gamble. Yes, Esther’s body is caldo, or warm, but maybe in another sense it’s cold. Romei felt fame, but perhaps his greatest hunger was not for Esther, but for fame. Why mention the libreria, the bookstore-that-isn’t-a-library, if not to suggest that the couple didn’t know if their story was borrowed or bought, a one-night stand or something that would last? When Esther decides that Romei is simpatico, does she in fact mean nice or does she think he feels sympathy? Does he? He does!

  It was as if Romei were writing in two languages at once, as if two stories were playing themselves out together, one reflected in the mirror of the other. Words that appeared related, words that usually confused readers with their non-correspondence, were miraculously made cognate, reconciled by the all-powerful poet—but why? To suggest that as ill-advised as this coupling appeared, it was also good and right?

  But why the sleight of hand? Only the translator, if she were lucky, or maybe (maybe!) the rare bilingual reader, could rescue significance from this mirror. And what did the translator care?

  This translator cared. This sort of thing had not been done before. It was marvelous! Everyone would have to know! I would let them know! I’d write an introduction! A Translator’s Note! A wise and learnéd piece, delicate in its approach, tensile in its construction. An introduction to be photocopied and cited by graduate students everywhere!