The Return of Marvin Palaver

by Peter Rabe

“Stop talking, Abbie, talking, talkingawking — ”

  I don’t know how to spell the other noises.

  You don’t need to guess what’s going on here, but maybe you should take a guess where this shtupping is going on.

  Here we have a perfectly decent condo with kitchen, big dinette, bigger living room, decent bath, and a bedroom so large it would accommodate a king size and a queen size, you should pardon the expression. And these two people are down there on a little rug in front of the fireplace with two lions for end irons crouching down and looking straight out at the living room.

  I figured, mazel tov, I’ll go in there, they can’t see me, and I’ll try and connect with that accountant of mine, considering that my business was really urgent.

  It was going to take some effort Even if I had been visible, that Abbie couldn’t see, hear, or pay attention to anything. If the truth were told, he was right then and there going to pieces, groaning and jerking around like somebody with problems of the nervous system, while Ruthy lay there with her legs up and wide, a regular V for victory, and poor Abbie scissored inbetween and jerking. She, on the other hand, smiled up at the ceiling, very happy about everything, when she sighed and moved her eyes.

  She was now looking straight at me. She made a very noisy gasp (which made Abbie very happy) and then she screamed.

  “Good God it’s — big as — bigger than life size — ”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah — ”

  “Shut up, Abbie, it’s your fat old….”

  I whisked away from there, more shocked than she was.

  She could see me, which was just another example of how death doesn’t solve anything.

  I stayed at a distance while they got themselves together again, and when they finally went to eat, I stayed behind Ruthy and melded myself half-way into the wall. I figured, let them have a nice, peaceful meal, that should get them tired, and as soon as they were sleepy enough to leave each other alone, I’d get in there and move Abbie’s thoughts in the right direction. That was the wish. The reality was something else.

  They had the chicken on the table, the gravy, potatoes, and the spinach too. But they weren’t eating much. Abbie sat there dressed casual, playing with his food. He still didn’t have any pants on but he was wearing a robe, a very handsome blue robe on that body without any belly, a blue that went well with his sandy hair and a face like from an old coin. No wonder that Ruthy wouldn’t leave him alone, even on a rug.

  She didn’t have a belly either, but I could tell she was built for babies. Except she wore glasses, black frames like her hair which was polished stone black, like my Sarah before she went grey.

  Ruthy sat there at the table wearing sweats, the kind that turn everything in it into a sack of potatoes. But I’ll give her this, she looked handsome even then, except for her mood which was terrible.

  “I do not hallucinate. I am intelligent, accurate in my perceptions, and not given to idle fantasies about fat persons who are dead. Particularly not a louse like your uncle.”

  “Alright, alright. Here, you should take more gravy.”

  “There is enough evidence cited in the literature at the present time to make an apparition no great shakes when it comes to an open minded observer. Startling, yes. To be doubted, no. So I really don’t care much for the implication that I was beside myself due to your ministrations, or that I had temporarily flipped out.”

  “Well, you were pretty gone there, on the rug, you’ll grant that much, won’t you? This gravy…”

  “That was sex. I’m talking apparitions perceived by an unprejudiced eye.”

  “On that rug, Ruthy, the world of the imagination and the world of flesh and….”

  “Why would I imagine anything as reprehensible as your uncle Marve whom I avoided even when he was trying to be nice?”

  “He was a nice person. Some times.”

  “I don’t dislike him. He is not important to me, but I do draw the line when he’s standing there and watches me making love. This is a dirty old man so obsessed that he has to come back from the dead to watch two people screw on a rug, for godsake. That’s disgusting, Abbie. Would you hand me that gravy, please?”

  “I still think….”

  “Don’t. He’s fat, dead, and he’s a crook. I don’t want to hear about him.”

  Abbie didn’t say anything else and ate. But as soon as Abbie kept still, like she wanted, she also wanted to know what he was thinking.

  “You are thinking about him, aren’t you?”

  “Not really. Just the crook part. That’s an exaggeration, in a way, but that estate business is a real problem because of the way he kept his books.”

  And that was going to be my in. He was confused about the books? Well, he was going to be so pleased when some very sudden ideas would come to him which would help straighten everything out. Except, I was not able to make my move just yet.

  They were done with the chicken and everything else on the table but then the next move was Ruthy’s, which left me out.

  “Leave the dishes,” she said, and got up from the table.

  I forgot to mention that she was wearing sweats on the top, but not on the bottom.

  “The few evenings I’m free to spend here at home, Abbie, I don’t want to spend in the kitchen with the soapy water,” and a few more endearing remarks like that while she marched Abbie to the bedroom this time, not the rug.

  The poor boy was just completely spineless with her and Ruthy, whom I bear no ill will, had this thing about showing her power. She is crazy about that boy, but more important, she is very unsure of herself, which is on account of such things as the glasses and because she’s still going to school at her age instead of the normal things which are done by a grown woman. So what it comes down to, she needs a lot of proof that she’s grown up and somebody, which she gets by pushing Abbie around. I mean, what normal person goes to bed and it isn’t even nine o’clock yet?

  So I figured, let them and sollst mir sein qesind. Let them get it over with, because they got to get exhausted sometime before morning.

  Could I be wrong? I had no idea how long this could take. I hung around, I drifted back and forth, and all this business seemed to me very boring. In that state, and for no other reason, did I find myself drifting along to that other place, the street without houses where there was a light at the end.

  It was surprising for me to discover, but this place was not boring, even though there was nothing to see. The closest thing by comparison that came to my mind was my easy chair after dinner. There was nothing to see there either, and still I was never bored.

  I think that feeling of very nice everything, I think it had to do with the light. So even though I had other things on my mind, I slowly let myself move there, just a little.

  “How nice you’re back!”

  Him again. I stopped moving immediately.

  “I’m not back. I’m killing time, is all. Then I have to get back.”

  “I see,” he said.

  Not so friendly this time. He took a deep breath, the way a fat man does it, chin way out to help the chest get some room and in the meantime all the double chins disappear for one critical moment. Damn if he didn’t remind me of somebody again.

  When he was done with that labor he looked at me with a half smile only and at the same time made the eyebrows tilt up in the middle. This was a look like from a doctor who is getting ready to tell you that you’re going to die.

  “I was going to talk to you about that.”

  “Don’t bother. I’m dead already.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, I haven’t got time right now, for whatever.”

  “Marvin,” he said and put a hand on my shoulder, which made me notice that we were exactly the same size. “You have got to understand something about this place, Marvin. It isn’t a railroad station where you just come and then go. It’s a place where you come to stay and then you notice it’s wonderful.”

  “It ain’t Club
Med, I can tell you.”

  “You haven’t seen all of it yet. For instance, if you’d just let yourself move to the level of the light, you see up there where that rabbit is going?”

  There was that damn rabbit again, walking on two legs and shaking the pocket watch around.

  “You telling me that a place what’s right for a demented animal with a watch is the place for me? Get serious, boychik. I got business elsewhere.”

  “What I’m trying to tell you, Marve, you’ve got to start accepting the fact that you’re here now You can’t keep going back and forth, because there comes a point where you can’t get back in.”

  “For this I should worry?”

  “Maybe you should, considering the alternative.”

  “The what?” which I said not because I wanted to know what the word meant but because I was angry.

  No alternative always meant: Now you do it my way and no more questions which is no way to run a life, or whatever.

  “Just because a man’s dead,” I told him, “is no reason to treat me like an idiot. I got business elsewhere, not here. I don’t need streets with no houses, or a white light bulb in the distance, or a chat with a rabbit what’s got a watch but can’t read time. It’s not a smart place and I’m going.” I turned away.

  “Marve,” he said behind my back. “When you get there, if you can’t be smart, at least try to be nice.”

  The man was a meshuggener. He’s telling me, a business man, to be nice?

  Chapter 7

  The Sorrows of Sleeplessness

  I don’t know how much time had passed, but by the looks of it, enough. Abbie was flat on his back and staring at the ceiling, and Ruthy lay next to him, propped on one elbow, and talking to him.

  “I am not one of those chicken brained groupies of the occult, dear. I’m an intelligent woman. That means, when I see something it’s there, and that thing, all three hundred pounds of him, was there.”

  “Ruthy, I’m tired of talking.”

  He is tired and it’s from talking? But she went right on.

  “What I want to know is, what is he after? They only come back, because they’re after something.”

  “A restless spirit seeking sleep, the balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second remedy — “

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “Ruthy, I’ve got every excuse not to,” and he turned on his left side, facing her. He always used to sleep on his left side. “Because I’m tired, I’ve got to get up early for that executor crap, and I’ve had a lot of activity here, not to mention a lot of things on my mind.”

  “What things on your mind?”

  “What things. I’m a book keeper, things like that, and tomorrow early that executor’s crap.”

  Ruthy said something else, a regular yenta all of a sudden, where she got the stamina I’ll never know, but no difference, Abbie was asleep.

  But even after he was under I had to wait before I could get in there and put the thoughts in the right direction, because the sleep was that heavy, like a door I couldn’t budge.

  Then he started to dream, very anxious, all about how he worried about that lousy Palaver estate. I could work with that.

  “Seven a.m., seven a.m.,” I started out easy.

  That was a mistake. He woke up, thinking he had overslept. He jerked around to look at the clock which had the face lit up and right away jerked back to the pillow and was asleep, just like that. Meanwhile Ruthy, she didn’t move. She looked very sweet sleeping there, like they all do.

  Abbie, on his own pillow, was sliding away into sleep, except not so deep this time. I was there, catching him.

  “To solve all the problems you got,” I intoned into the dreamscape he had made there. It was a street without houses and a Good Humor man came driving along. He drove his white truck and the little bells were going plinkuplink.

  “I wanna ice cream.”

  Was I going to have a problem here? Abbie, my accountant, my executor of the will, all of a sudden he was four years old.

  “Abbie, darling, you can’t stay a four year old potz all your life. Grow up already, because I got wonderful news for you.”

  “I wanna ice cream.”

  “So eat the vershtunkene ice cream already and listen to your nice Uncle Marve.”

  “Yehk!”

  “What kind of talk is that from a nice boy to his dear uncle who loves him?”

  “I don’t wanna ice cream that tastes like spinach.”

  I was starting to have as much tzurres in dreamland as I was used to in real life. The same with Abbie, of course, except he handled that by changing the dream.

  In 1951 I used to have a wall calendar with pictures of American scenery, which is how I happened to know that Abbie was now in the Grand Canyon. He was in a diner in the Grand Canyon, looking at a plate of spinach on the counter in front of him. He was thinking: Why in hell didn’t I order the ice cream?

  He was thirty years old, like right now, and the waitress came up, a woman so fat she ought to be ashamed of herself, and she wanted Abbie to pay. Except my Abbie didn’t have any money.

  I tried to get in there and make the fat lady say something helpful, like: Never mind, I’m going to solve all your problems, when Abbie just changed the dream again. He was now standing all alone in the big, rugged canyon.

  “I’m going to solve all your problems,” I started again, making the sound come rolling along the canyon and booming like out of the Burning Bush.

  “I’ll be damned. You mean that?”

  “Sure. A kleinigkeit“

  “Wow! You talk Yiddish too!”

  “Does the Pope wear a beanie?”

  “I’m really impressed. This is terrific!”

  “That’s okay. Don’t grovel. So here’s the solution. Go to Marve’s office and there in the locked file under Orders, Special, get the bill of lading for the carbon steel, and give that to Schlosser.”

  He stood there for a while in the big Grand Canyon and in the silence of nature and didn’t say a thing. Then he recovered himself from the experience.

  “That’s it? You mean that’s it?! The Great Solution from the Yiddishe bush? Come on, you’ve got to be kidding!”

  “Don’t talk smart. You want to balance the dear Uncle’s books, you do like it says here.”

  “Oh that — ”

  Such disappointment I hadn’t heard since the ice cream that came out like spinach, only this time he didn’t move off into another dream, he just dropped out of it and went into a sleep with nothing else in it.

  As for me, once you’re dead you don’t sleep, which is maybe some kind of advantage when you’ve got something to do, but all I could do was wait around till Abbie woke up in the morning. Right then I made the mistake of drifting around without watching.

  I was moving towards that light again. Maybe I could even have enjoyed it a little, except right then that fat guy came sliding in.

  “I was starting to worry about you,” and he looked at me, as if I owed him for worrying.

  But like always, it didn’t take long and he started smiling again. Right away I got suspicious.

  “What’s to worry?” I said. “I don’t overeat, because I don’t eat. I don’t oversleep, because I don’t sleep. And when it comes to anything else, all I do is float.” Then I gave it the Cup of Gracie, as we used to call it. I said, “Besides, I’m dead, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  He sighed and folded his hands across his stomach. This looked so phony to me, I immediately unfolded my own and stuck them in my pockets. Wouldn’t you know it, so did he. He was hoping, I guess, he’d come on like a fat guy looking devil-may-care. That’s a laugh.

  “Don’t you think I know what’s been going on?” not so devil-may-care. More like a Jewish mother. “You’ve not been a very nice person, Marvin.”

  “I deserve this?” and I took my hands out of my pockets. “I deserve a fat person should come around and tell me how to live now that I’m dead? Not
any more, Mister Goody Two Shoes. Not when I got business.”

  “Marvin. You better listen to this.”

  “Why, there’s worse things than being dead?”

  “Please be serious, Marvin. I mean it.”

  He looked so worried, I was afraid he might start to cry, if I kept on talking. So I made it short.

  “I’m serious too. So I’m leaving.”

  “Wait! Listen! If you’re leaving and you’re not back here — Wait a minute, I’ve got to translate that into time — Nine o’clock.”

  “Or else?”

  “That’s right. Nine in the morning or else,” and this time, just like that and no smiles, he disappeared.

  Chapter 8

  In the Morning, Weak Coffee

  I came back so careful you wouldn’t believe, looking out for Ruthy, but at six in the morning she had the eagle eyes closed. Meanwhile Abbie, such a dear boy, he was up and worried.

  A little time on the toilet, a shower, a shave, a brush and a spritz on the teeth, and what comes out of the bathroom is a new man who can do things and move things and change the world. In the case of Abbie, he also needed a cup of coffee.

  I could tell why these two were not married. Ruthy didn’t show up in the kitchen till the coffee was done in that electric machine. Abbie, no matter how busy with his tie and his fly and hopping around while he put on his shoes, he poured coffee into mugs on the breakfast table — pardon me, it’s a counter these days like in a drugstore — and now Ruthy came shlepping in.

  I have got to be fair. She looked better than a shlepper, even with the glasses and the hair standing up on the side where she slept.

  She sat down, took her mug, took a sip, and put the mug back down.

  “You in a hurry?” she said. No good morning, no how are you, dear, just something you could say with a grunt.

  “Good God, yes,” while Abbie tried to drink coffee and tried to get his collar to lie down in back all at the same time.

  “Because, in your haste, you seem to have put two spoons of coffee into enough water for six cups.”

  “God — I must have lost count.”

  “How can anyone lose count up to the number two?”