Other people

by Sol Stein

  "That's not what I mean. Francine, the man who — that man, is it possible you did something to entice him?"

  "Of course not!" Her face flowered in a blush.

  "Are you sure?"

  "Oh, Dad, what do you think I am?"

  "I once thought I knew."

  I took the envelope out of my pocket, opened it where it'd been Scotch-taped down, and took the photograph out. It was a Polaroid picture of Francine completely nude, stretched out like an odalisque, posing.

  "Who took this?" I asked, handing it to her, remembering both the anger and excitement I had felt when I first came upon it.

  "Where did you find this?"

  "Thank God I found it and not your mother. Who took it?"

  "It's really not your business."

  "You are free to do whatever you like, Francine, but anyone who will pose for a lascivious photograph like that could have a very difficult time persuading the authorities or a jury that she was innocent of enticement. It wasn't taken by a woman, was it?"

  "No."

  I had expected her to hand it back to me. Or tear it up. She did neither.

  "I'm going up," she said. "Good night."

  Those words were in the coldest voice she had ever used with me. Might she be thinking why had I not destroyed the photograph when I found it wedged behind a drawer of her dressing table when I moved it into the attic? Might she be wondering how often I had looked at it? I had produced something unspeakable. And the worst was I wanted that picture back.

  Nine

  Thomassy

  The line of Francine's neck was a stretched, soft "s" from below her earlobe to the delicate indentation just above her collarbone. Was it that, or the high cheekbones and the almond eyes? I was used to observing the details of appearance the way a detective looks for clues. I observed Francine, however, the way one reacts in a museum when you turn a comer into a room and suddenly see an exquisitely beautiful portrait of an unknown woman and begin to wonder what she was like to the man who, in life, touched her. Thomassy, I told myself, you are not a gallery goer; your natural habitat is the raucous courtroom full of thieves, adversaries, and spectators. She is not your scene. This is not your type of woman.

  Like most men of my generation, I was accustomed to admiring the shape of a woman's calf when she crossed her legs. If a woman wore décolletage, I was aware of the part of her bosom that showed and of the part that didn't show. If a young lady was walking ahead of me, I'd notice the tuck at her waist or the way the halves of her buttocks alternated as she walked. Then all of a sudden kids were all over the streets saying This is my body, so what.

  In my peek-a-boo generation, even the best of women were brought up as cockteasers. Now that they're older and hear the clock running, they're as determined to get under the sheets as any man. That's your type of woman, Thomassy. You go to dinner, a movie, then fuck. If she's married, you meet someplace safe and fuck. It's a simple program. What the hell are you doing watching that undeniably erotic line of Francine Widmer's neck as if she were an eighteenth-century painting? She's a braless kid. A client.

  I had a mentor in law school who said, Don't put your penis in your pocketbook Leave clients alone.

  "I don't think you've got a case," I told her.

  She didn't expect me to say that. She thought she'd been convincing.

  "We don't have the ingredients," I said. "When you're cooking, you lay out the steak, the potatoes, lettuce and tomatoes for a salad, right, and you know you've got a meal in the making."

  "Don't condescend to a woman by using kitchen examples. In the kitchen, I improvise. So can you."

  "What I meant was I don't see the ingredients of a case a D.A. can go into a courtroom and prove. He needs to say that a certain individual did so-and-so. This is the evidence. And he's got to know opposing counsel won't upset his prima facie case. He can't just wing it. Too much would depend on how he delivered his testimony, how well you stood up under cross-examination in very tough territory."

  "And you wouldn't want the D.A. to risk his reputation on me as a witness?"

  "We don't have any other witnesses. And not much in the way of corroborative evidence."

  "You don't want to take this on."

  "I'm not prepared to make a commitment," I said.

  She looked at me, then said, "I won't let you down."

  "I didn't mean that."

  "I'm a good student," she said.

  "I'm sure."

  "How good a teacher are you?"

  In the courtroom you learn that a witness who's a rug is no fun, you need the resilience, the springback of a witness who tries to parry your questions.

  "I can't work with air. I need provable facts. Evidence."

  "If I were dead, that would be the kind of evidence you're looking for."

  "That's evidence only that you're dead. The body might show how you came to be dead, and if it wasn't from natural causes, we'd still need evidence as to who did it. Rapists don't leave fingerprints on their victims."

  "I get it," she said. "Rape is an inconvenient crime. It's hard for whiz-bangs like you to lay out the meat and potatoes and know how you're going to win your case before you start. You don't like to take chances!"

  "Miss Widmer, it's you who'd be taking chances. You're the one whose life is going to get pulled apart on the witness stand. Do you know how many rape cases end in conviction? Very, very few."

  "It's your conviction I want right now."

  "I'm not the jury."

  "Juries are audiences. You're the actor who convinces them, aren't you?

  Why am I sitting around taking crap from this kid?

  "Mr. Thomassy," she said, "I bet you feel more comfortable with robbery or murder…"

  "Yes I do!"

  "You men are capable of working both sides of that street. You can rob and be robbed, you can kill, and you can be killed. But when it comes to rape we're not equal because you can rape us and we can't rape you and that's why you don't know how I feel!"

  "Now take it easy."

  "Easy? What are women to do? We've got this opening a thousand loonies out there are trying to get into, and most of them aren't afraid to try because men have been getting away with it for centuries. She was seducing me, they say. Look at the provocative clothes she was wearing, they say. Look at the way she was walking around half-naked, she was asking for it, they say. Right? All women ask for it. Right Mr. Thomassy?"

  "Some do."

  "Even supposedly nice guys like you believe those arguments. Next you'll tell me there are SM freaks who say they like to be forced. That's another lie. They like to pretend to be forced. If one of those scenes turns into a real rape, I mean an uncontrollable rape the woman can't do anything about, you'll see how quickly her kink unkinks. Nobody likes real violence done to them! And besides, we're not talking about an occasional freak with special tastes. We're talking about the great majority of women who thrive on tenderness and affection and can't get the message through to male lunkheads that we don't want to be raped any more."

  "Men get raped, too," I said.

  "In jail."

  "Right."

  "Well at least those rapists are in jail, and that's where I want Koslak!"

  It was then, behind her strident syllables, I began to remember my father's voice.

  Francine continued, "What do you men expect us to do if we live alone, get behind double locks on the door, not let anyone in where we live, put a sign on the door, go away, no soliciting, no neighbors, no visiting hours from anybody? Should I buy a gun? Should I use it? Or is it that you guys want me to be tempted to marry some idiot just so I won't be a vulnerable woman living alone?"

  George, my father had said, you have hair above your privates, there is something you must know. Wait till your mother goes to sleep.

  "And," said Francine, "what are we supposed to do out in the street, carry a machine gun?!"

  I was thirteen when my father decided to have that talk with me
. My mother, complaining of a headache, drifted off to bed soon after dinner. I remember I was whittling something in front of the fireplace when Papa touched my shoulder — I hadn't heard him come up behind me — and I dropped the knife with a clatter.

  "Pick it up," he said.

  I picked up the knife. My instant fantasy was to stick it into him.

  "Close the blade," he said. I felt he could read my mind.

  "Put it away, George," he said.

  I pocketed it. Only then did he pull the rocking chair so that we were sitting side by side, staring into the fire, more comfortable for both of us because we could look at the fire instead of each other.

  "I am going to talk to you about sex," he said in that smoke-dry voice that resonated with authority.

  I waited.

  "Sex is very important. Like horses."

  This was before he had given up on me and horses.

  "Men," he said, "have a thing like a stick."

  I could feel him glancing sideways at me.

  "A woman," he continued, "has in front a hole for the stick, you know this?"

  I nodded.

  "That is sex," he said.

  I heard no further sound, not even his breathing. After a bit, I turned just enough to glimpse his leathered visage. He was floating in a memory somewhere. Suddenly he sensed my intrusion and turned toward me. I quickly averted my gaze back to the fire. I felt I had embarrassed him.

  "I have more, George."

  My mind whirred with the possibilities: more about the stick and the hole? How women get pregnant? How masturbation can bring on blindness?

  "Your mama," he said, then stopped.

  I imagined his leather face over my mother's, her submissive expression, he with his nightshirt pulled up exposing his flat buttocks, she with her nightgown pulled to her waist.

  "Your mama was not my first wife."

  At thirteen I was a champion of overheard conversations. With my ear against the bedroom wall I had heard snatches. And the jangling of the brass bed that had given me my first guilty erections.

  "You did not know this?"

  "No," I lied.

  From the depths of his chest came a sound of remembered regret, a sigh of such profound dimensions that I couldn't imagine what words were to come after.

  "In my sixteenth summer in the land of Ararat I took in a Catholic ceremony a girl named Shushan Harossian as my wife. She was a cousin of a cousin from Zeytoon, very beautiful dark hair, a face like an olive blossom. Her three brothers and her father and mother were taken from Zeytoon by the Turks into the desert and that was that. She was hidden by a priest who arranged for her to be taken by a merchant to us in Marash for safety.

  "When we see each other, it was an explosion of love, and everyone believes that living in the same house we will not be able to keep from each other, so we are quickly married.

  "Our marriage was not a week old when the Turks come, three thousand soldiers crying out La ilaha ill-Allah uhammed Rasula-llah. There is no other God but one God and Mohammed is his prophet. The Turks let it be known that any Armenian who deserts his Christ will be spared. Perhaps there were cowards. I knew none. We prayed, we offer our devotion to God, then my father hurries my mother and the younger children to the church, it is a sanctuary he says. But I have heard of the burning of churches. I plead with my father to let Shushan and me hide in the cellar, where the small treasures of our family are hidden away under rugs. My father calls me a fool of love, he says we will die at the hands of the Turks, and he slams the door so that it shakes the house, as he runs after my mother and the younger children to the church of their salvation.

  "Shushan, obeying her bridegroom's instructions, puts bread and cheese away in the cellar. Then, when the shouting is already very near, Shushan suddenly says we have not locked the door behind my father! I say they will break any door that is locked. But Shushan, without my permission, leaves the sanctuary of the cellar. I can hear them, I shout 'Come back, come back!' but it is too late. A Turk pushes open the door. He is tall and has a pock-marked face. He sees Shushan and she scurries away from the direction of the cellar door in order not to reveal my hiding place. The Turk cries to his comrades that the infidels have left an angel behind. They come, six or seven of the beasts. Two of them hold her on the floor as she struggles, my heart bursts because I can see everything from a crack in the cellar door, and the leader opens his pants, his stick is curved like a scimitar, and he falls to his knees, and Shushan screams as he leans forward, shoving his stick like a madman."

  I cannot look at my father when his eyes are wet like a woman's. My hands are clasped white until he speaks again.

  "That is sex," says my father at last, "All the Turks — may they rot in hell — have sex with Shushan, who a week before was a virgin. Should I not have risen from my knees and with my bare hands raged at them with their swords? Am I a coward to have stayed in the cellar?"

  Papa now looks toward me to forgive him. My mouth is dry, as if I am choked with sesame seeds.

  "You couldn't do anything," I say.

  He continues, "That is not the end. The leader goes to the door to call other infidels. My pearl, Shushan, struggles to her knees, begging 'No more, no more,' the Turk who was first draws his scimitar and with a cry curves it over his head then down with the yell of a beast, beheading her."

  My father, the horseman with infinite strength, now cried from the depths of his chest an agony that had been carried within him for more than half a century, from the world of Ararat to America. I was then three years younger than he was as a bridegroom. In his place, I would have wanted to fight, not to lose but to win! It was at that moment I have since felt that I swallowed the seed of a Maccabee.

  "Those who fled to the church lived?" I asked.

  "For an hour. They died in the flames. I was the only one left."

  I got up and put my arms around Papa's hunched shoulders, and we cried together for his lost love, for the confession of his cowardice, and for the absence of justice in the world, and for the new burden of the vocation I had found.

  "Men don't understand rape," Francine was saying. "They never have."

  I was silent for a moment, but she wanted a response from me, so I said, "They never have. Look, can you come back tomorrow at the same time?"

  When she left, I sat in the near-darkened office, knowing it would be a half hour before my date would arrive. Geraldine would expect dinner, which we would have, and bed, which we would not have this evening, for with my father's memories thundering in my head, I was not seducible.

  Ten

  Koslak

  I ain't seen the girl around. She must be keeping to herself. Fuck her, I got Mary.

  Mary's out, dropping the kids off at her mother's. She likes partyin' better when the kids aren't in the house.

  Wonder what's taking Jason so fucking long, he must have a single-pole switch down in the basement somewhere.

  I get awful restless just waiting so I called the station. When the kid answers, I said, "Jim, you handle things, I won't be back today. Just remember the pumps show the number of gallons pumped since I left. Don't take the money home with you, ha, ha. Just stash it you know where. Yeah, I hear them honkin'. See ya tomorrow."

  The doorbell rings and it's Jason, holding a switch in that left claw and a screwdriver and tape in his right.

  "Hi," he says. "Which room?"

  "Bathroom," I says.

  I really had to get used to him bein' superintendent, you know. It used to be old guys was superintendents, but Jason had to be no more than thirty or so, like a grown-up hippie sort of, a good-looking guy, beard, wears jeans instead of coveralls, and that clamp is really somethin'. I tried to get him to talk about it once or twice. All I learned is that the government paid for it and he works the mechanical arm off straps around his shoulders.

  He was taking the old switch out of the wall and I says, "Don't you turn the fuse first?" and he says, "If you do it right, you don
't get no shock."

  I'm sittin' on the edge of the tub — I mean I'm not going to sit on the pot watching him, am I? — and I say, "Hey, Jason, how come you sometimes wear the arm and sometimes not?"

  "That's a very personal question," he says. Then he laughs. Every time that guy laughs I think he must be on somethin', just when he laughs I mean. "My turf," he says, "is two more buildings sides this one. You know how many women in this old parking lot got husbands go to work?"

  "Plenty."

  "Well, they get put off some, some of them do, by the mechanical thing, it just takes too much of their attention, so when I'm sniffing round the lot for today's pussy, I take it off. You know something?" And he says this like he's telling me the world's number one super-secret. "When I'm naked, they find that stump real attractive. I mean it's healed perfect, and the skin around the end is real smooth and sensitive like the end of a big cock. Some of them ask to feel it, you know. Most people don't understand women, they're much more freaky than people think. And something else. Women want it a lot more than their propaganda lets on. All you got to do is let 'em get past the propaganda, and you're home."

  While he was wrapping black plastic tape around the wire where the old cord was frayed, I was sure he was gonna get a shock, but he didn't.

  "You get a lot of pussy in these buildings?" I ask.

  "You know how many times I get called for the sink's stopped up and it's nothing, or the light won't work when it's just the bulb, and there she is in a housecoat saying thank-you-very-much-don't-you-want-a-cold-drink and I know I've got a new pussy on the block. The old ones don't bother with the jazz, they just call up and say do I got a minute. That minute sometimes takes half an hour. It's a goddamn good thing I don't have a boss looking over my shoulder on this job. He'd wonder where I was sometimes. There."

  The plate was back on the box. He flicked the switch. "All set," he says.

  I reach in for four bits to tip him and say, "You ever get to the one downstairs?"

  "Widmer?"

  "Right below."

  "That's Widmer. She's not home daytimes. She works."