No Lease on Life

by Lynne Tillman

—Tompkins Square Park, please.

  —You’re taking me to the cemetery.

  —What’d you say?

  —You’re taking me to the cemetery.

  The cab slowed approaching a red light. Elizabeth opened her door and jumped out. She slammed the door hard. Taxi drivers hated that.

  The proofroom was air-conditioned. One of the two obese men, the nicer, funnier one, was there. He didn’t sweat much, except for the top of his bald head. Beads of sweat collected there. He had ten fragile hairs, and the sweat flattened those. His bald head was damp and shiny. He was fastidious about his appearance. Roy called him Proofroom Fats.

  Proofroom Fats was in an OK mood. When the other obese man wasn’t around, he was nicer to Elizabeth.

  Jean-Henri Dunant. 1828–1910. Swiss philanthropist, born in Geneva, inspired the foundation of the International Red Cross after seeing the plight of the wounded on the battlefield of Solferino. His efforts brought about the Conference at Geneva (1863) from which came the Geneva Convention (1854). In 1901, with Frederic Passy, he was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize.

  Gisela was right. It didn’t mention his incarceration in a mental hospital. Probably censored by the Swiss government. Everyone else in the room was sullen. The room was correcting articles about the richest people in the world. They read about personal net worth and assets slipping from $2.2 billion to $1.8 billion. She’d been in the room, off and on, more than seven years. She’d cut her proofroom teeth reading about prisons managed by private corporations which profited off prisoners by cutting out desserts, about the parasitic nature of senior citizens, who vote, that’s all, so why bother about them, they’re just a drain on the economy. The first year was the hardest. She became used to it. Newcomers found it demoralizing.

  A snail goes to the police station. He’s all beat up. The cop asks who did it. The snail says, a turtle. Can you describe the turtle, the cop asks. How big was he? What color? The snail says, I don’t know. It all happened so fast.

  After five years, she was allowed to attend the veterans’ party. It was in honor of the boss’s birthday. Employees were given bonuses equivalent to the years he’d lived plus how many they’d worked for the company. There was a system to the giving that was strictly followed. The boss handed envelopes to all the workers after lunch under a circus ten.

  The veterans were transported to the boss’s estate by bus. Two busloads of workers arrived at the estate on a warm morning in September. They were allowed the run of the place, allowed to see the master’s bedroom, swim in the pool, play tennis. Elizabeth hung out on the lawn and avoided the main house. She watched the misshapen scene. The servants, the house slaves, served canapes. The house slaves wore white aprons over black uniforms. They scorned the field slaves, the workers brought to the main house as a treat by the master. The house slaves’ disdain was painted on their pinched, colorless faces. They held the silver trays painfully far from their bodies, for the field slaves, the lowlife from the city.

  Elizabeth didn’t eat the cheesy hors d’oeuvres. She talked to people from the room. The proofreaders were scattered uncomfortably over the plush, rolling green lawn. They were unsuitable, not designed for it, eyesores to the house slaves.

  One of the boss’s sons appeared. The nice, quiet one. He was taking pictures. Without a word, he shot them.

  —You didn’t ask for my release, Elizabeth said.

  —Your release is when you sign the back of your paycheck, he said.

  He snapped another picture. He didn’t take his eyes from the back of the camera. It took a second, then he realized the naked truth of his words. He became flustered and loped off.

  —You could get fired, the nasty obese man warned.

  —He doesn’t have the courage of his convictions, she said.

  Toadies are taking over the world was what she thought.

  A man was fucking a girl in the ass. He comes and says, wasn’t that amazing? She says, Actually I found it humiliating. He says, That’s a pretty big word for a ten-year-old.

  Elizabeth wasn’t going to this year’s veterans’ party. The supervisors weren’t happy about it. In a feudal place, employees were expected to show their servile gratitude to the boss.

  She worked with her feet on the table of her cubicle, if the editors didn’t barge into the room to check up on the misfits, who were in charge of correcting them, which was a joke, and if they did, she read copy with her feet on the floor.

  Paulie’s mother kept his family together and got murdered by the man she loved. When Paulie went homeless, he got better.

  Elizabeth would be here forever for a home and get worse. She was silent, intent upon being silent. She surveyed the room. The readers were concentrating on little black marks on shiny white pages. Doing cold reads.

  Elizabeth caught several big mistakes. She corrected them, tidied them up. She was paid for that. She was a superintendent like Hector. But she did her job.

  If the errors had gone into the magazine, the room would be in trouble. After the issue appeared, and the offending mistake on the offending page was noticed, it would be copied and sent to the senior editors, maybe even the boss. They’d return copies of the page or pages to the supervisors of the room, and the proofreader would be talked to, and individuals would be warned if it was the second time, fired if they’d been responsible for several mistakes or for one really serious, embarrassing miss that made the company look bad.

  A proofreader capped the “t” in a sentence about “tony Bennett College.” “Tony Bennett College.” He was fired.

  That was before Elizabeth arrived.

  In time every new reader was told the tale of the proofreader’s Tony Bennett error, usually over takeout food. The newcomers learned they could be fired for their errors. The longtimers laughed so hard they couldn’t eat. Except for the obese men. They could always eat.

  The room parried its futility, fought against its marginality with righteousness. They discussed their endangered work, how no one cared about mistakes in books and newspapers, how editors and especially writers didn’t know what they were doing.

  —If a carpenter used the wrong tool, he couldn’t hang a door properly, Proofroom Fats said.

  He was on a roll.

  —Always “he,” Sally said.

  Sally had been in the proofroom the longest.

  —There are typos in the Times’ headlines, Fats went on.

  He ignored her.

  —The New York Times fired all its proofreaders years ago, Sally said.

  The room was a den for a dying breed. Nearly extinct. The room corrected errors no one would’ve noticed. Double quotes inside the period were moved outside the period, different than was changed to different from. The room scorned “between you and I.” The correct “me” sounded lower class to people who ached to sound classy. The room understood that all mistakes entered the language after being repeated enough, and someday they’d be correct, so eventually no one writing or speaking would be aware that over time and imperceptibly an array of former misfits had deformed and degraded the language. Language would become garbage. It’d spill out their mouths.

  —Language is already garbage, Margaret said.

  Margaret was either a meek woman or a snob. She hardly ever spoke. She didn’t like Elizabeth’s aggressiveness.

  They worked in fear. They feared the reduction of their hours, they feared learning they were no longer needed, maybe only one or two of them, they feared becoming redundant. They were skilled workers, too expensive for the company to pay for what everyone knew was unnecessary. They feared being fired.

  Some compliments were sent their way. A few. Their work, when it was good, was invisible. The room approached invisibility, like soundtracks in movies. Elizabeth liked movie music.

  Two and a half hours later, Elizabeth was released. She made chump change and fulfilled her obligations to the room. She’d keep her objections to language and life to herself.

  A man goes
hunting for bears. He sees one, takes aim, and just misses. The bullet grazes the bear’s shoulder. The bear gets really angry and goes over to the man. He says, you just missed me, you tried to kill me, I’m really pissed at you. I’m going to make you go down on me. So the bear forces the man to go down on him. The man does it. He’s chagrined and runs out of the woods. A week later he goes hunting again, finds the bear again, takes really good aim, fires, but misses. The bear’s really pissed off. He goes over to the man and forces him to have sex with his arms tied behind him. The man comes back a week later, sees the bear, takes really careful aim, shoots, and misses the bear again. The bear goes over, he’s even more pissed off, and he sodomizes the man. The next week the man comes back, takes arm at the bear, and misses again. This time the bear goes over to the man and puts his paws on the man’s shoulders. The bear says, This isn’t really about hunting, is it?

  The sun was lower in the sky, the feeble beginnings of dusk filtered through the dust.

  It was less muggy. The start of another weekend. The hitters from Jersey and Queens, the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, were getting ready to flood the neighborhood. Some came running, some came racing in, piled into cars, weekend warriors cruising for pleasure, release, some joy in the commission of small-time crimes. In the summer, on weekend nights it was better to be inside.

  Elizabeth knew her route by heart. Any change in her beat was an irregularity, not life-threatening, unless it was.

  Imperfect strangers hurried by her. They took up space. They were full of themselves, of piss, like her. They came from disturbed families and controlled hideous feelings which controlled them. Their views of events developed from events and sensations they couldn’t remember. Nothing came out in the wash. Everyone performed circus acts of confusion and covered them over like cats cover shit in litter boxes.

  Nothing human is unique.

  Human beings were walking near her, heading somewhere to something. Life was just around the corner. Without want, their lives would collapse, no one would go anywhere, or do or make anything. Lust marked their hapless faces and misshaped them. They were generally lusterless and misshapen.

  Lustful faces gazed anonymously into shop windows or at each other. Lips pursed and relaxed and opened and closed in exasperation and people breathed in and out, heavily, sighing, and they struggled to keep moving. Some walked with a lilt, life was a song they’d written.

  Elizabeth reviled the song, pitied the suckers.

  An upper-middle-class woman rushed out of a store onto the sidewalk. A little boy about three toddled after her, crying, Mommy, mommy. The woman ignored him and kept walking. He couldn’t catch up to her. She pretended to let him, he got closer to her, he stopped crying, and then she raced away again, leaving him alone in the middle of the busy sidewalk. He started crying again, sobbing, Mommy, mommy.

  The bewildered little boy nearly fell into the street. Cars skidded and stopped. Mommy walked faster, and the distance lengthened, and the kid grew more hysterical and tripped over his stubby legs, as he tried to keep up and obliterate the violent gap.

  —You can’t do that to that kid. I’m watching you, Elizabeth shouted.

  She turned herself into a stern and forbidding character, an upstanding citizen, even as sweat coated her thighs.

  The woman halted in place. She allowed the little boy to catch up to her. Elizabeth watched. The woman took her son’s hand. She didn’t look at him and she didn’t look back at the stern figure who’d threatened, I’m watching you. Mother and son turned a corner and disappeared from sight. The woman would beat him later, at home. She wouldn’t be surveilled by a City agency.

  Elizabeth liked the role, vigilante, citizen executioner. She wanted to arrest the mother. She thought she should. They were enough like each other for her to yell at the woman without fear of the woman’s coming after her. She was able to intimidate her. She had to seize any opportunity she could.

  What do you call one white guy with two black guys?

  A victim.

  What do you call one white guy with twenty black guys?

  Coach.

  What do you call one white guy with two thousand black guys?

  Warden.

  What do you call one white guy with 200,000 black guys?

  Postmaster General.

  It was not the best of times, it was not the worst of times. Comparisons were stupid. Reason was history.

  Elizabeth breathed automatically. Her past and future gasped together. She exhaled a current of air, time. The atmosphere was a weight on everyone. Thick, wet air contained the city.

  —If it’s the end, you might be relieved, one guy said to another.

  They were walking in front of her, fusion candidates for a new order, a threat to the visible old order. They broke one mold, established another. They might become research scientists or rob banks. No one would be able to describe them accurately for a police drawing.

  —He might’ve been Caucasian with some Asian, or African with some Puerto Rican and Chinese, I don’t know, part Indian maybe, too.

  The boys laughed raucously. Nothing permanent could ever happen to them. It was a feeling she remembered.

  Elizabeth had another feeling now, a sensation, a close feeling, something was close, too near like a bad dream below the surface. It might just be the closeness of the young night forcing itself upon her after hours of airless air-conditioning. She crossed streets several times as she walked closer to her block.

  Sometimes she varied her route, just to vary it. Sometimes she crossed the street to avoid an encounter, sometimes she crossed the street because she thought she was being followed. She crossed the street to avoid an encounter with the Korean florist. The Korean florist ran out to the sidewalk anyway and waved wildly. He usually did when he saw her, especially when his wife wasn’t in the shop. Elizabeth didn’t go into the store much, ever since the florist had taken her hand, when his wife wasn’t there, faced her, and stated solemnly, I love you.

  He was new to the neighborhood. His English wasn’t good. She gave him the benefit of the doubt. He might’ve meant it in a different way, but she didn’t go into his shop much anymore. Passing it was a problem. He knew she wasn’t going to buy flowers from him. He was disappointed, he was resigned. She didn’t return his love.

  Korean florists were usually part of a Korean grocery store. This man was on his own, a maverick, an outcast from the immigrant Korean community. He had a small shop with the usual and limited number of flowers. He was a disgrace, scorned by his native community. As he sucked on his cigarette and stared at the sidewalk, he was figuring how to outfox his enemies. Maybe he thought if Elizabeth loved him and married him, he’d be all right, he’d get a green card, they couldn’t get him.

  Elizabeth avoided him and entered the pasta store.

  —Ciao, bella, the pasta man said.

  The pasta man made fresh pasta and mozzarella, and he cured olives, in his other store in Brooklyn. He or his son brought the food to the block six days a week.

  The pasta man cut a chunk of parmesan cheese. He bagged a pound of multicolored fettuccini for a German guy with bleached blond hair. The guy paid. The pasta man nodded conspiratorially at Elizabeth when the door shut after the German.

  —I worked in Germany, in a factory, because my brother was an engineer, and he says, Come, come, you make more money in Germany, so I did, for three years, I go, but I no like it. No, Germany, no, factory. It’s not…

  He pointed around the store.

  —Pasta is my life. Pasta and focaccia and sun-dried tomatoes. It’s what I love.

  The pasta man was an inspiration to her and the block.

  Elizabeth bought a carton of milk from the corner bodega. Run by Syrians. A familiarly strange man brushed against her as she entered. He glanced at her. She glanced at him. He was the kind of guy she might’ve fucked years ago. He was a certain type, and for that type, she was a certain type. There’s an instant attraction, unquestioned, and
there’s hardly any bother. Before AIDS, you’d fuck.

  Three teenaged boys were at the counter. Two bought potato chips, the third couldn’t decide. He wavered, swaying stoned in front of the ice cream freezer. He held up the line. The Syrian owner was patient, Elizabeth wasn’t.

  —Do you know what you want? Elizabeth asked.

  —I want a woman. Wanna jump my bones?

  The teenager leered at her lopsidedly.

  —I’m too old for you, she said.

  She didn’t believe that. Lust didn’t wither with age. Maybe he thought she was a working girl. The boys snickered.

  She studied him. He was a kid and he was talking up for skeletal sex, for boning, moaning, raplike sex, not rapture, maybe rapture. Duck lips uber alles, ducks don’t have lips, no bones about it, no flesh, no sins of the flesh. He’s not cute enough.

  —I don’t want to jump your bones, Elizabeth said.

  The boy looked shocked, knocked back into a littler place. The Syrian grocer didn’t smile or laugh. The exchange may have been objectionable to him. But he’d heard and seen worse since he left Syria. His bodega was on the corner where Jeanine worked.

  His brother had dropped to the bottom of the drug well. His brother must’ve tried the stuff one night, maybe the first time he was given it free, a taste, so he wouldn’t chase the dealers from the corner, territory that was always being negotiated, and then he did the stuff again, and more, and had to pay, and did more and more, and then she didn’t see him in the store, she saw him on the corner, she saw him wasting away, becoming weightless, becoming angrier, arguing with himself. Then she didn’t see him at all.

  There are a couple of white guys in Africa. They’re captured by remote tribe. The chief says, You have two choices, Death or Ru Ru. The first guy says, Well, death’s kind of final. So I guess I’ll take Ru Ru. The Chief turns around to his 150 best warriors and he calls out, Ru Ru. The warriors line up and each one sodomizes the guy, until he’s a bloody mess and dies. The Chief goes up to the next guy and says, Death or Ru Ru? So the guy says, I guess I’ll take death. The Chief turns to his warriors and says, Death… by Ru Ru.