The Wonders of the Invisible World

by David Gates

  “Which shit is that?” I say.

  “That.” He points to the window giving onto the air shaft. “You don’t hear that?” Only now am I aware that the music, so-called, from the next building has started up. Boom-badoom, boom-badoom. The air shaft is only about that far across, and they keep it up eighteen hours a day. “I live here,” he says. “Why do I live here? Even fucking Bernie Adler couldn’t hack it—Mr. New York. In his fucking co-op in Riverdale.”

  “Wasn’t part of it that they were sending Winnie to Horace Mann?” I say. That “I” of his is echoing.

  “Fucking Riverdale. I mean, isn’t that what the place was in Nancy Drew? Riverdale?”

  “River something,” I say. “I wasn’t all that big into Nancy Drew.”

  “The blue roadster,” he says. “Sometimes I just want to fucking scream.”

  “I think we’re both sort of burned out,” I say.

  “Oh, so sorry, have we been neglecting your problems? Nap time and its discontents?”

  Fuck you.

  He sits up and starts his thing of running fingers through his hair, hard. “I am disgusting,” he says. “I’m so fat now I’m out of breath coming up the stairs.”

  I glance over. He’s got just the teensiest little roll, about that big, above his belt, the way anybody gets if they’re sitting. “You’re the same as you were,” I say.

  “I smell like a pig, too. Come home and I take a bath and it’s like I can’t get clean.”

  “What is this about?” I say.

  He says, “I can understand why you would lose interest.”

  “What?” I say. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but—oh, God, look, it’s late, I’m exhausted—”

  “I need to talk to Bernie,” he says.

  “Okay, fine,” I say. “Talk. You can pick up a phone.”

  He gets the phone and starts jabbing numbers. “I know Bernie, he’ll still be there.” He listens for a long time.

  “It’s after nine,” I say.

  “He should be there. Jesus, if even Bernie is in on this thing.”

  “What thing?” I say.

  “Dinah. What have we been talking about the last three hours? Jesus. I feel like I’m going out of my mind here. I mean, maybe I should be insulted that I’m not important enough for them to even try to get to. What do you think? Should I try to call like Mike McAlary?”

  Mr. I-Don’t-Read-the-Tabs. “I don’t know what to say about it,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “This is some serious shit going down in this city.”

  He’s in bed, asleep, by the time the news comes on. No follow-up about the march: it might as well have happened a year ago.

  I zap the thing off when they say sports is next. I get up and go into the kitchen and open the Norhay (I mean, it is funny, kind of) and have a good long slug of Tropicana HomeStyle, right from the carton. Then I mosey back out and over to the bookshelves, hands clasped behind my back like Prince Charles or something inspecting the royal guards. Queen of all she surveys. You wouldn’t believe what’s here. I mean, Journey to the End of the Night? Chaucer, Chesterton, Dickens, the complete everything of T. S. Eliot, Faulkner Fitzgerald Freud, what looks like all the Hemingway in the world (which would figure), Langland Lawrence Lorca, Melville, Nabokov, O’Connor O’Neill Orwell, Peacock Plato Pinter Poe Pound. If they bombed all of New York but miraculously not us, you could start Western civilization all over again. Though lately Tobias’s intellectual life is mostly turning on the TV and complaining about how stupid it is. Which I guess is better than Rodney King over and over, or when Bernie gave him that tape of Koyaanisqatsi and we had that for the next month. But what really pisses me off as somebody who’s Jewish is all this Ezra Pound: the big fat Cantos of, Literary Essays of, I mean it goes on. Who but Tobias would have Jefferson and/or Mussolini? Plus not one, not two, but three biographies, plus two books just on the treason thing that he got locked up for and rightly so. Sometimes when Tobias isn’t here I’ll read around in these books just to give myself a good hit of how totally unbelievable this man was. I mean, every other word out of his mouth is kike, and this is the great poet supposedly, and what Tobias thinks is a good idea to have in what after all is my home, too. I fantasize sometimes about making a big stink and demanding that he at least put Ezra Pound away where I won’t have to see it every day of my life. I’d be like Hey hey, ho ho, Ezra Pound has got to go. But I can’t really imagine having the energy to get into a big hoo-ha with Tobias over Ezra Pound, or anything else, like having no sex life. What I think is that he should know not to have books where every other word is kike without my having to say anything. So I don’t say anything.

  Actually, I don’t know why I’m even bothering to look at the books, because I already know what I’m going to do: I’m going to go rent Beauty and the Beast again. When Tobias is out he’s out, and RKO Video doesn’t close until eleven. This is truly a stupid obsession, but harmless, I guess. I mean, by comparison. I get my purse and duck my head into the bedroom: Tobias’s shoulder is rising and falling. I’m out the door.

  Same as every Friday and Saturday night, crowds of hooting white kids wander this neighborhood because of the bars. I say kids; in their twenties, really. In packs and couples. Barelegged girls, noisily drunk—you can tell they’re going to be sick and sorry—held up by what look like frat boys who probably all work on Wall Street and could buy and sell you by snapping their fingers. And in front of every bar and deli, some homeless man shaking a paper cup. I go into a Koreans’ for my usual thing of M&Ms, pay with a dollar bill and, back on the sidewalk, drop the change into a dirty hand.

  RKO Video is bright and empty; except for the clerks I’m the only one here. They’ve got The Shining on the overhead TVs, right at the part where Shelley Duvall is looking at the huge stack of pages Jack Nicholson has typed. I go straight to Children’s: sure enough, three copies of Beauty and the Beast. You never have a problem renting Beauty and the Beast, which I thought was weird until I realized everybody with kids already has it and who else would want it. Strange feeling, bringing it up to the counter. It seems sicker than something from Adult X.

  I went to see Beauty and the Beast when it first came out because I wanted to know what the kids at Helping Hands knew. It’s like if you had a real job you’d read Crain’s New York Business. Anyhow, it blew me away: I was like crying and crying. Of course I asked myself why. I mean, am I not Dinah Keltner? So okay, you got your buttons pushed by really, really expert moviemakers who know that everybody wants perfect love. At least Tobias wasn’t on hand to see me lose it. I think I keep going back and renting the video because I’m into the way it just dependably rips me open. I sort of knew this afternoon, when I was helping Gwendolyn on with her backpack (she’ll get one arm through and just flail with the other), that if I got any time by myself over the weekend I’d probably watch it again.

  Back in the apartment, I look in on Tobias—dead to the world—then close the bedroom door. I tear the corner off my M&Ms and zap the TV on, but when I try to push the tape into the thing there’s already something in there. Tobias says one of these days I’m going to wreck it, just shoving something in without checking. I hit EJECT and out pops the tape with KING BEATING hand-lettered on the label. Great, so we’re back to this. I stick Beauty and the Beast in, hit PLAY and go sit on the sofa. The FBI warning comes on and then it really hits me how stupid this is. You’re going to cry when they start to fall in love and cry more when the Beast dies (or maybe it’s supposed to be a near-death experience the way he’s sort of floating up) and then really lose it when all the stuff in the castle goes back to being real. So you have your big cry, and so what. I pick up the zapper and zap the thing off and get a screenful of snow and a snowy roaring. I zap it back on and it picks right up where the FBI warning turns color, and it’s like it was just waiting for me and would have waited and waited. I rattle the first M&Ms into my palm. A yellow, a brown and a brown.

  Around four in the m
orning I wake up when I hear Tobias moving around. The toilet flushes and that line pops into my head, Watch waterfalls of pity roar. Now, that dates you. If I don’t watch it, I’m going to be wide awake. I hear him out in the other room fooling with the VCR, and then he’s walking this way and the door closes. I can’t remember him getting back in bed, but there he is when I wake up in daylight, one foot with a dirtied white sock poking out from the comforter. My first thought of the day is: And we are supposedly good people.

  Tobias and I got married in 1981, both of us having had our grand passions: mine a husband, his somebody named Dorothy who he said went crazy. (I actually found out a little more than that, but it was like pulling teeth.) Our first date he took me to Cinema Village to see The Parallax View. “It’s basically a Hollywood piece of shit,” he said, “but you should probably see it.” It turned out this was his fourth time going. Afterward we went to the Little Finland Bar and talked about movies, having agreed that telling life stories was a cliché. Not that movie talk wasn’t. He said his favorite film was Blow-Up, though he said he knew he was supposed to say it was The Searchers or something. I forget what I said mine was: I certainly at that point wasn’t going to admit to The Way We Were. I married him because:

  It was charming that he had asked me out to a movie he called a piece of shit. Still more charming that this wasn’t calculated.

  He was a romantic.

  He was a left-wing romantic. I think he thought of himself as like a John Wayne with good politics. He used to say, “Get your ham and eggs over here.” You know, one wanted to be wanted.

  These days I can’t even bear to think about stuff we did in bed, some of which I got him into doing. What I used to love was him getting his pleasure, which of course I’m sure now was probably just a power thing on my part, bitch that I am. I would watch his face scrunch up and then go blank. He would say, “Oh, this is the only time I ever really and truly relax.” Of course in two minutes he would be like, Can I get you something? Washcloth? Glass of water? Get you a drink? We were the best, that’s what’s killing. The best for us. Which is why it’s just so weird that he would turn around and stop. Gee, you don’t think he’s passive-aggressive, do you? I’m ashamed to even remember this, but I actually at one point bought this book on living with the passive-aggressive man. My first and only self-help book, except for one about depression. I hid it under the mattress like pornography: I think the last time Tobias made a bed was when he went to sleep-away camp. But I used to fantasize that he would somehow find it and know because I’d hidden it that it must be super-important to me and bingo, we’d begin to talk. I eventually put the thing in the garbage. So it’s now in the Great Kills Landfill, where archaeologists of the future can find it in the same undisintegrated bag with our undisintegrated junk mail. They’ll know our names and what our problem was and be sad that the answer (now found by science) had been so simple all along.

  Tobias in those days got his hair cut short at a real barbershop and said that while he once thought drugs were revolutionary (having been stoned, he said, for the entire Nixon administration, 1969–1974) he now considered them decadent. When he did anything at all (which really wasn’t that often), he drank like a tragic proletarian. At the time I met him he was running the local assemblyman’s office, a storefront around the corner from where we live now, which later became a David’s Cookies that went out of business. The assemblyman fired him for wearing a FREE JOHN HINCKLEY button in the office (this made the papers at the time), which Tobias claimed was protected political speech. What was actually happening, he was all set to go to work for Bernie Adler, who had started this thing for the homeless and who everybody thought was a saint because he’d worked for Allard Lowenstein, and Tobias just wanted to—his words—go out in a blaze of glory.

  I at the time was just trying to get over my divorce and waiting tables and taking one course a semester at Hunter toward a teaching certificate because it was too late for anything better. (I’m still nine credits short, and will be when I die.) So one day I was complaining to this friendly woman in one of my classes (who turned out to be Margaret) about the rats in my building and she said her husband knew somebody in the assemblyman’s office. Well, I was a woman who knew my rights, so in I marched. The first thing I remember Tobias actually saying beyond, like, How do you do, was when I told him who owned the building and he said, “What, are you shitting me?” Apparently this landlord was well known to everybody on the East Side except me for being some judge’s brother-in-law or whatever he was; his buildings had rats and lead paint and drunken supers and no heat for weeks on end, and what your recourse was, Tobias said, was not to live in his buildings.

  If you ask Tobias what it’s like working for the homeless, he’ll be a real prick and tell you he works with the homeless. But mostly he doesn’t talk like your usual lefty, and that was another thing I thought was great about him. Don’t get him started on the word empowerment. He’s even down on African-American, though he wouldn’t say so to anybody but me. Movement types were already into this kind of talk when I met Tobias, except you didn’t have the expression PC back then; Tobias called them college pussies. I thought it was cool that his friends were relatively no-bullshit people like Bernie Adler, who actually grew up working-class. It wasn’t cool that the worst insult he could come up with was calling someone a vagina, but I gave him credit for what I thought was the meaning behind it. He would talk about college pussies, and yet just about the only films he would go see were foreign, and his idea of decor was (still is) brick-and-board shelves with every book he ever had in college plus the hundreds he’s picked up since.

  But in the past few years he’s stopped going to any movies at all. He wouldn’t even go see Schindler’s List, and I worry about him getting out of touch. But he’s still the only man I personally know who wears a beret, which he says is because in the wintertime he can pull it down over his ears, but what I think it is, it’s because he wants to make sure you know he’s an intellectual. So then he has to go around saying fucking this and fucking that to compensate. Growing up in Binghamton and graduating from Penn State, that was how I used to read it all—and of course the usual male thing where if you’re sensitive you have to not seem to be, which is the meaning behind pussy. I wonder how he read me back then. I was there and okay-looking, that was probably about the extent of it, why lie. He’s a hard worker, Tobias, but lazy about his life.

  Lugging the laundry, I squint against the morning sun. I need to get something in my stomach, but there’s a homeless man with a shopping bag in front of the Koreans’—same guy from last night?—so I decide to put the clothes in first and maybe he’ll be gone. Saturday mornings you can pretty much always get a machine if you come before eight-thirty; after nine o’clock, forget it. If you thought about it in a victimized way you could think of going to the Laundromat as part and parcel of everything else, like having the tub in the kitchen and parking on the street. Tobias absolutely forbids paying someplace to wash and fold, not so much because of the twenty dollars it just about ends up being but for class reasons: paying somebody to handle and smell your dirty clothes perpetuates the division between the clean and the unclean or something. Which I basically agree with, though I don’t see him ever doing the wash. But mostly I don’t mind because at least it gets me up and out. Saturday morning used to be our morning in bed; Sunday morning, we agreed, was a cliché. Plus for me additionally, spending Shabbos in bed was a fuck-you thing. Yet also in some slantwise way reverent. Now I’d just as soon get something accomplished.

  And although I know what he’s saying about the wash-and-fold, I don’t go all the way with Tobias in seeing absolutely everything as being about class. Like we got into this huge thing at the time Margaret asked me if I wanted to come to work at Helping Hands. For me, the class reasons against working at a day-care place that costs like a thousand dollars a month were canceled out by the feminist thing of women getting into the workforce. Except of cours
e that they’re already in the workforce because they have to be because the whole economic system is so fucked, which Tobias would say comes right back to the thing of class again, so where did your feminism get you? And at a thousand dollars a month, these are not beaten-down women. Okay, Tobias is right: my politics aren’t all that thought-out. But on the other hand, I get something out of being with the kids, and I don’t really feel like arguing the point.

  I told Margaret that Tobias and I didn’t have children because we can’t, which I think was okay to say because I’m pretty sure she would never bring it up with him. The truth is, I always used to think I might someday want to do something and then not be able to do it if I had a kid. That plus Tobias’s political problems about it: too many children already starving globally and so forth and so on. Though since I’m going to be forty in addition to not having sex anymore, I guess you could say that at some point it got decided. One of those hard-to-pinpoint points, like the thing about when does life begin. As it’s worked out, I get a lot of the good stuff that goes with kids of your own and get spared the worst, like being afraid every minute that they’re going to die. What I end up with is the moderately precious moments. At nap time, Gwendolyn is usually too wired to sleep and, quote, helps me by going around and patting the other children, though I discourage her made-up lullabies, which tend to get loud. Then we go into the big playroom, where I can watch them through the doorway, and we read. But deep down we both know what the deal is. I mean, what childless woman hasn’t had her life brightened, temporarily, by some other woman’s child? It’s the oldest, most disgusting story in the world.

  I flomp the laundry bag down in front of the row of top-loaders. One thing that’s feminist about doing your husband’s wash plus your own plus the sheets and towels, you have to be strong to carry it all. I untie the knot in the drawstring and start tossing whites into one machine, bright colors into another and dark stuff into a third. Between us, Tobias and I have a lot of black jeans and T-shirts. Lately he’s even been getting on my case about stuff like tying up the laundry bag, supposedly I’m being anal. “You tie the drawstring again every time you put in a pair of socks?” he said the other day. “Christ, it even looks like a puckered asshole.” This is the man who used to sing, Every night/why do I/quake with fright?/’Cause my Dinah might/change her mind about me. Sometimes I’m afraid there’s something wrong with him, like he has a brain tumor. I mean, not just his moods but the way he sleeps. I just try to bite my tongue when he gets evil, which really probably isn’t as often as I tend to think it is.