Lucinella

by Lore Segal

  “Yes,” says William. William has a good imagination. We lie on the couch together and I tell him my theory that kitsch is visited upon our generation because of Adam’s second disobedience in swallowing the core of that apple, though god knows god did his damndest to keep us from the knowledge that his secret name is I AM NOT and the corollary nonexistence of our souls exemplified in the stupidity of the proportions, the dishonesty of shape, the venal color and fabric of this kind of furniture, so would William please always put the chair in that corner when it’s not in use?

  “Okay,” says William.

  Why doesn’t he mind? Next day I take the bus downtown to buy myself a leather belt, and put it on under my blouse. I take the elevator to the furniture department—my chair’s still here. I ride down to stationery. There’s this poem I am going to write, for which I need a brand-new notebook. At home I find the right white folder to put it in. Surprise!

  I go into the bathroom and find William’s towel scrumpled on the towel rack. I make my first notch in my belt for straightening it out without a word, and a second one, next day, because I keep my mouth shut about the chaos in his papers. I’m surprised when my mouth opens and hollers, “Why is that chair not put back in the corner?”

  “Because I’m sitting in it!” William shouts.

  When our eyes retract into their sockets and the floor stops heaving, it has been established: William and I can yell at one another. (This is Saturday).

  “Where, Lucinella, is the bourbon? Why is it never where it was?”

  “Because, oh William, don’t you understand that it is searching for its Platonic shelf?”

  Sunday.

  “Lucinella, where’s the chair?”

  “I put it in the closet. William, can you imagine walking around all day with an ugly object continually in your peripheral vision? Will?”

  “What?”

  “How come you don’t mind my nagging you?”

  “Mind!” says William. “I hate it!” He unbuttons his shirt and shows me his leather belt. Two notches Thursday. One, when I nagged him to straighten out his towel in the bathroom, and one to please put the chair back in the corner. Four Friday: one chair in the corner, one shoes on the bedspread, and two scrumpled towels. Saturday—

  “Hold everything!” I cry, and show him my notches for all the times I kept quiet. “William? I’ve often wondered, why don’t you straighten out your towel on the towel rack?”

  “Never occurs to me,” he says.

  “You think you ever will straighten it?”

  “Probably not,” William says. “Lucinella,” he says, “will you marry me?”

  Ulla calls me on the telephone. “And when,” she asks, “am I going to meet your William?’

  “As soon as I get everything in order, we’ll have a party,” I promise.

  “How will I ever get everything in order!” I ask William. “As soon as I get one thing straightened out, you come and mess it up again, you scrumple up your towel, your papers are in chaos, and you lie with your shoes on the white bedspread instead of sitting up when you write, William, how come you do everything wrong all the time?”

  “Which reminds me, Lucinella, what’s happened to the chair?’

  “I put it in the basement.”

  “First you made it stand in a corner, now you’ve nagged it clear out of the house!”

  “William? How come you never nag me?’

  “What about?” asks William.

  “Whatever you can’t stand about me.”

  William is thinking. “When you keep nagging I sometimes want to murder you, but I can stand it.”

  “Why don’t you tell me to straighten out my towel on the rack?’

  “Because I don’t care if it’s scrumpled.”

  “But, William, a scrumpled towel cannot dry!”

  “Lucinella, sweetheart, love! A dry towel does not move my imagination!”

  “Nag me. Go on,” I say.

  William looks harried. “You’re a slob,” he says.

  “No, I mean something true about me. Go on.”

  “You are a true slob,” William says.

  “A slob, William! I! Who can neither eat nor write nor love so long as my house is not in perfect order, how am I a slob?’

  “Your towel is scrumpled in the bathroom. Lucinella, I don’t care—”

  “Ah, but,” I say, “that’s different, don’t you see, that’s only because I haven’t got around yet to straightening it out. Nag me some more.”

  “The kitchen,” says William, “is in such a shambles we have to eat out.”

  “Only till I find the right Contact paper,” I explain, “which they no longer manufacture. Go on.”

  “Lucinella, I don’t give a good goddamn, but, sweetheart, why is your underwear all over the floor?”

  “Tomorrow I will go downtown and find us a beautiful old chest with the right drawer for each category of clothing.”

  “Meanwhile,” says William, “may I just wipe the black smudge off your nose?”

  “Leave it!” I say. “I’m saving it. First, I have to get things on their proper shelves in the kitchen and you have to file your papers, and when the house is in order there will be a Great Washing. Oh, William, my face and hands will be as pink as new soap, I’ll brush my hair, exercise, eat the right foods, learn French. William, you won’t recognize it’s me!”

  I call Ulla on the telephone. “I’ll probably marry William. Ulla?” I say because I can’t hear her smiling.

  Ulla says, “Great!” She asks me if I’ve heard about this new and completely different magazine published by this guy Maurie. “I want you to meet him,” she says.

  “I want you to meet William!” I say. “We’ll have a party.”

  “Maurie,” Ulla says, “has fantastic taste. He can smell a good poem.”

  “So can William. William can—”

  “Winterneet says Maurie is the best editor in town. You should see the list of his contributors,” and Ulla keeps on keeping on about this Maurie. I feel the bitterness of deprivation.

  That is the moment, while I’m talking to Ulla and my back is turned, that chaos gets his foot in the door. William is lying on the couch with his shoes on the white bedspread, very excited. He says he’s writing a poem called “The True Slob,” about a perfectionist in a chronic state of desperation, and he’s using one of my pencils!

  He’s shocked at the way I howl. “You don’t understand anything,” I mumble, sitting on the floor and feverishly sharpening the eleven other pencils to precisely equal the diminished length. One breaks. Rapidly, so my left hand won’t know it, my right drops it in the garbage, where William finds it the next day and says, “Look, Lucinella, a perfectly good pencil in the garbage.”

  I put my head down, crying in despair. William takes me in his arms. “Lucinella! Sweetheart! What’s the matter?”

  “You!” I say. William strokes my hair. “Me. Everything!” He kisses my forehead. I am weeping disconsolately. “Both our towels are scrumpled in the bathroom, one pencil is shorter than the eleven others, and the black lead from the shavings is all over the floor, and my new filing system doesn’t work! I’ve lost my editor. I can’t figure out what color he is in.”

  “Why don’t you file him alphabetically?” William suggests. “Lucinella, don’t. Why are you tearing up your colored folders? Don’t throw them in the garbage! Lucinella, where are you going?”

  “Downtown, to get myself a brand-new set from A to Z. I’m starting from scratch,” I say.

  The doorbell rings.

  It’s the Fuller brush man, coat flapping. He looks exhausted. His tie is knotted like a rope around his neck; his eyes pop.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “but I was on my way downtown.”

  The Fuller brush man says he has a present for me. “Free sample of Paradise Cleaner. Spray, wipe, and it stays wiped once and for all.”

  “Which,” and I smile into the Fuller brush man’s beautiful pr
otruding eyes, “you and I know to be morally impossible.”

  “Millions in research have been sunk into perfecting this scientific miracle. Let me demonstrate.” He’s walking into my foyer.

  “I’m sorry about the mess …”

  The Fuller brush man addressees an area of floor the size of a man’s fist. “Spray and watch.”

  William comes and squats beside me. We watch the wetness glisten before seeping down into the layers of dust, street dirt, household droppings, and pencil shavings which I’ve been ripening on my floor against the day of the Great Cleaning.

  “Wait,” he says, “and wipe.”

  I wipe, I rub, scrub, scrape. “We didn’t wait long enough,” I say to console the Fuller brush man. “Maybe it’s because I didn’t let the floor scraper put on sealer, the dirt’s ground right into the open pores.”

  The Fuller brush man takes a plastic bag out of his sample case and says, “This is dirt. Throw some on the place we sprayed. Go on,” he says. “More, don’t be shy. The molecular structure of Paradise has been altered so it will repel the neutrons of dirt into eternity. It is a scientific impossibility for dirt ever to settle here again.”

  “Capillary action,” says William, as we watch the wetness seep upward. It has fused my and the Fuller brush man’s dirt to the consistency and color of mud.

  “How much,” I ask, “would it take to do this floor?”

  “Including the foyer?” The Fuller brush man squints his eyes to make an educated estimate. “Gallon would do it at a pinch, gallon and a half is ample!” He takes out his order book, and lends me his ball-point pen. I sign over to him my common sense in return for which he guarantees me the millennium.

  III

  Thursday we visit Ulla. She’s moved in with Maurie. “Lucinella!” she cries. “You’re looking fabulous!” (I am? I’m trying for a glimpse of myself looking fabulous in the hall mirror behind Ulla, who is beautiful in shirt and jeans.) Now Ulla is shaking hands with William, now he turns to hang up his coat, now she must see the meagerness of the back of his neck.

  “They’re here! Maurie!” cries Ulla. Through a half-open door we can see a bed, the soles of a pair of shoes, a stomach on which stands a fat manuscript.

  “He’ll be out in a minute,” Ulla says. “Come in. Sit. So! How is everything! Maurie?”

  “Nice place,” I say. “And so near the park!”

  “Very,” says Ulla. “So, how’s everything! You’re looking fabulous! Maurie! It’s just this writer keeps bugging and bugging him about his manuscript.”

  “We know about writers! Ulla, let the poor man alone. Must be one hell of an undertaking to get out a magazine,” I say, to cover for Maurie, for Ulla’s sake, and for my sake too. If it is not his overwhelming duties that keep Maurie from leaping up to meet me, it would prove that I am not the kind of woman who compels mankind to its feet. Generations of men now alive will fail to come leaping when I’ve left William, and my old age will die of loneliness.

  No, it won’t! Here he comes, a snub-nosed, fat young man; his polished round face reflects light. His pale eyes, naked without brows or lashes, regard me through the two thick circles of his rimless lenses with a look of unusual intelligence. Trust Ulla to sleep only with what’s best in the arts. Maurie says he wants to see some of my poems for his magazine. In the pause which follows, Maurie does not say he wants to see some of William’s poems, seems not to see William, and William says, “When is your first issue coming out?”

  “We’ve brought out two already,” says Maurie.

  “Must be one hell of an undertaking,” I say.

  “It’s called The Magazine,” says Ulla, “a perfectly new concept in publishing. It prints only what is genuinely new and excellent in contemporary writing.”

  “In contradistinction,” says William, “to the kind of magazine which specializes in publishing what’s phony, old hat, and second-rate?”

  “In contradistinction,” says Maurie, “to all others, whose editors have neither guts nor taste.”

  “Whereas you recognize the excellence that everybody else has missed?”

  “That’s right,” says Maurie, with an extraordinary smile, showing the charming small gap between his two front teeth.

  “However original the text,” says William, “which, by definition, means without anything to which it can be compared, you always understand right away what it means, and how it works.”

  “Not always right away,” says Maurie.

  “In fact,” William says, “confess. The less you understand, the more it turns you on. If it looks funny on the page, you run and publish it.”

  “I never run,” says Maurie. “I’m fat, as you see. I have a slow metabolism, I like lying down. Reading gives me pins and needles and makes my scalp crawl, so when a manuscript looks like it might be good, I frown, I pretend I’ve fallen asleep. If I still feel myself airborne, I publish.”

  “And you are never wrong,” says William, “never mistake a fad for a movement, hysteria for passion?”

  “Every morning at 3 a.m. I wake and wonder what the hell I’m doing,” says Maurie, smiling at me.

  Ulla catches my eye, meaning: “Can you help liking him?” I’m trying to catch William’s, meaning: “Cool it.”

  “And the world,” William says, “will be so good as to suddenly produce this reservoir of genius for you to edit?”

  “Oh, genius, my goodness!” Maurie says. He doesn’t blink exactly. How would I put it into words, this passing shadow that has altered the light of Maurie’s stare, meaning he has heard all this so many times before and always in a voice congratulating itself on its remarkable astuteness?

  “Ulla, why don’t you show us the apartment? Coming, William?”

  “You go,” he says. For William to get out of his chair presupposes he is sitting in it, which presupposes that he exists, and Maurie’s failure to fully perceive him has called this into question. William must force his image to register on Maurie’s vision and his words to take on substance in Maurie’s imagination. William says, “So what’s to be with poor old Meyers? His Pulitzer has done him in. He tells me he feels the world watching over his shoulder and can’t write.”

  “I’m publishing a poem he’s just finished in the next issue,” says Maurie.

  When Ulla and I return, William is sitting in his chair reading an advance copy of The Magazine. Maurie is lying on the sofa picking his nose behind a fat manuscript.

  “Lunchtime! William! Maurie?”

  Maurie is asleep.

  “MauRIEEEEE!”

  Now Maurie remembers the call he’s got to put through to the printer and carries his plate to the phone table in the hall.

  Has it occurred to William that we could put our coats on and go home? And leave Ulla with the salad and quiche she’s made specially for us, and the color rising into her head, and the increasing pitch of her conversation, in which I join her. We talk about lettuce and patty shells and the narrowness of New York kitchens, to cover Maurie’s continued absence and the deepening dullness of William’s silence, and after lunch maybe the two of them will sit and talk.

  After lunch Ulla impales Maurie with a look. “The weather is fabulous, Maurie, let’s go for a walk in the park!”

  Maurie says, “Great, you do that, which will give me a chance to look over Winterneet’s new poem before he arrives.”

  Now are we going to say, “Maurie, go to hell,” and put on our coats and go home?

  We put on our coats and follow Ulla into the park, and maybe when we get back, over coffee, Maurie will see how interesting William and I really are.

  Ulla is pointing out the prospects. I say, “Fabulous! Great!” and “Oh wow!” but really I am staring down into my Underground, where I collect the men since Adam who have ignored me. The trouble is my face. It’s not the kind that topples towers, Paris was quite right. And Lancelot wore Guinevere’s favor on his sleeve instead of mine. It was Hélöise got Abélard! (I would have liked
him.) It was for Mrs. Simpson that a man gave up the British Empire. Even this grocery boy hiking his package up under his arm, as he waits for the light to change, does not bother to look and see me. I feel the draft from William’s Underground and take his hand. He squeezes mine. Why can’t one make that do?

  When we get back, there’s J. D. Winterneet, sitting with Maurie. He’s pleased to see me. I can always tell. I introduce William. “I’m so pleased, sir, to meet you!” William says. Winterneet gives him his hand. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I didn’t catch the name.”

  Ulla brings coffee, which Maurie and Winterneet carry into the other room so they can work.

  Maurie! Come back! One moment of your full attention would lift this curse and we could go home.

  “Maurie! They’re leaving!”

  Maurie comes to the door promptly, takes my hand. “Remember, a couple to half a dozen of your poems, depending on the length. William, goodbye. We’ll see you.”

  “See my ass,” William says.

  We walk holding hands. “Maybe I could send him the one where Margery has got to marry God the Father, though Jesus is the one she likes,” says William. “Lucinella, do you love me?”

  What, William, now? When you are yellowish, pinch-nosed, and chicken-necked? Snubbing does not become a man.

  I kiss the sleeve of his jacket.

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Probably,” I say.

  The next day Ulla calls to say she thinks William is terrific.

  “He is?” I say.

  Is he, I wonder.

  The poet goes to heaven. For three

  weeks the choir of angels sings

  his praises, then they take a

  coffee break. The poet cries,

  “Nobody loves me!”

  Robert Pack

  The bell rings. It’s the mailman, for William. A note from The Magazine. William unfolds it and reads:

  Margery and God terrifically funny.

  If you can fix weakness in second

  stanza let me see it again.

  Maurie.

  “William? What’s the matter?” William is frowning. He says, “It’s not his not accepting it. I couldn’t care less. It is his magazine to publish in, or not, what he sees fit. It’s the arrogance of ‘Fix weakness’! I don’t rate a definite article?”