Postcards from Pinsk

by Larry Duberstein

  This was not the truth, or if half true was not to the point. Orrin did have mixed feelings about their social circle, but he never failed to enjoy the conviviality of their gatherings. He enjoyed belonging, welcomed the stock jibes and the waxing heedlessness, swapping dance partners to the accompaniment of those stock jibes as well. Such charades might be shamelessly hollow by dispassionate standards, but Orrin was not one to shortsell mere comfort, or fun.

  He sat this one out, however, alone and palely loitering on Filbert Street with a sweet old British lady on the TV who would stumble over a fresh corpse every time she left off her knitting. (Luckily she was a detective of sorts, and managed to finger the criminal.) Orrin three-fourths wished he had elected to flaunt Marcy after all. There they would be, for starters, he and Marcy, and he might like that. How much better to inspire gossip instead of pity! And the rusty knife might prove just the ticket for high and mighty Gail Summers. It takes a lawyer, sometimes, to locate that old killer instinct.

  He one-fourth wished he had gone even without Marcy, gone alone. For he was alone now anyway and the fact was Orrin had slipped back a centimeter or two from some of his self-imposed reforms. As his solitude had subtly expanded, he had again found it tricky selecting his behaviors. Looking down the barrel now toward a lonely slush-filled Sunday, he could foresee further slippage, to the dismal strains of trash-sports on television.

  So he played it safe and stayed in bed all Sunday morning. He was tired. He wasn’t just hiding under the covers, he was resting, and helping to restore the balance of sleep in the world which Paperman so constantly disrupted. Such a dim, gray sloppy universe displayed itself above the half-curtained sash that he was sure it was still late morning when he rose at two to brew some coffee.

  Walking out briefly for the papers, he watched the jolly legions mill about, as if this squashy mess were the softlit snow of picturebook Christmas. Rowing past him with their bundles, sometimes clasping hands—he even saw a child skipping, and decided things must not be so bad after all. The air wasn’t cold, it was refreshing, extremely; and the Common wasn’t crowded either, it was ample host to a teeming cheerful community, like those shown in paintings by Prendergast.

  “Care to invest, sir? In a good man’s immediate future?”

  Orrin looked up in amusement when he heard the music of importunity, the sound of Pigford cadging. And it was he, though the petition had not been addressed to Orrin but to the bright young couple before him.

  Curious to see how much they would cough up, not wishing to hinder Pigford’s undeniable style, he waited to one side with his hello. But as he audited this and the following transaction (“Allay your conscience, sir? Help the cold and homeless? Twenty-five cents lets you sleep like a baby …”) Orrin began to doubt he would greet his friend this afternoon.

  Pigford was good. (“Alms for mittens? My phalanges cry out to you, sir …”) It might have been fun to see how he made out over the course of an hour, chart his hits and misadventures. Judging from early returns—all paper, no coins—his hourly wage might well exceed that of an attorney.

  But Orrin felt slightly deflated, almost betrayed. It was idiotic to feel proprietary about a beggar and yet he found he liked P. Jones all over again, while Jones’ affection for him was made to seem in retrospect spurious. Jones would settle for anyone. Orrin could hope it was not so, but he could not overcome it enough to step up and say a friendly hello. In truth, he was afraid Pigford would not recognize him.

  Orrin spent the early evening cleaning up the flat, and brooding over his missed connection with Pigford. It was terribly complex for a simple and irrelevant situation. His several collections of dust and paperclips and pennies floated like a necklace of islands, an archipelago, on the polished aqueous hardwood.

  No use doing much in Eli’s room. There the prospect was always grim. The one window opened on an unbroken facade of blackened red brick, never a hint of brightness. Eli was so rarely around in daytime that he might never notice or care, but to Orrin the light and sunlight were vital to one’s frame of mind. He respected primal clichés, was alert to facts as seemingly divergent as bears hibernating, chickens ceasing to lay their eggs in December, Swedes stepping blandly out of tenth floor windows in the noontime shadows that engulfed them.

  Maybe others, their lives lit strongly from within, could afford to overlook this aspect. Clyde and Elspeth, as children, would invariably choose the darkest corners in which to read, or absently switch on some souldraining overhead fluorescent—all the same to them. And Orrin would mouse around perfecting their light, stressing a proper respect for their eyesight (“You only get one pair”) while secretly tending their mortal souls.

  In Paperman’s dark vacant digs, Orrin nudged a few things around and switched on the bedside lamp, just so the room would feel better to him whenever he wandered past the door. And decided against going back out to look for Pigford.

  “Marcy’s taken a job. With the Watertown School Department.”

  “Has she really?”

  “Special instructor in dance and exercise, that’s her title. She’ll go around from school to school.”

  “That’s odd. She told me she hated teaching dance. She really did say it with some conviction, Eli.”

  “Oh I know. She hates teaching serious dancers. But these are just kids, blue collar kids mostly, who have to be charmed into giving it a try. She might take a shine to that. Who knows, maybe it’ll turn out to be her mission in life.”

  Orrin thought of Clyde, called early yet softly to a professorship; of Elspeth, hellbent for rock-and-roll; of Gail, belatedly feeling her way as a freelance editor, rather courageous of her, really.

  “You seem a little subdued, Orrin. Something bad happen at the party?”

  “One can only hope so, but if it did I missed it.”

  “I was afraid of that. Marce loved the idea, by the way.”

  “Oh well, I had a nice quiet evening here.”

  “Speaking of which, how’s tomorrow for company?”

  “Marcy?”

  “Tia. She wants to see my new dwellingplace. And she also did mention that I owe her thirty-five dinners. So I thought we’d cook up a nice spaghetti.”

  “Eli, really—I’m not interested.”

  “Not interested in spaghetti? That’s only because you just finished breakfast. Trust me, O’Summers, your appetite will return.”

  “I do hope that’s not a play on words.”

  “It’ll be fun for you, Orrin, I promise. She’s a smart lady and you’ll love her Alabama drawl. I could add that she is sexy, but I won’t. Though that means I can’t titillate you with detailed descriptions of her round firm silken buttocks—”

  “Enough, Paperman. I can only take so much suppression of descriptive detail. The point is I am denying my sexuality. This has been decided after careful consideration of the subject in dreamwork. What is she, though, Swedish? An Alabama Swede?”

  “Not Swedish, just a Dorothea who got shortened along the way. But Tia aside, Orrin, speaking generally—don’t you think it’s time for you to step out a little?”

  “I can’t tell you how reassuring it is that you see such a potential in me. It isn’t easy, you know, starting life over.”

  “Uh-oh. I knew it wasn’t just Gail.”

  “Well of course. What’s the point, you see, at fifty-eight, really fifty-nine. It’s hardly an age for getting a new life.”

  “Wow, I hope you don’t get any middle-aged customers in your headshop! Orrin, even the Mean American Male will live to the age of seventy-one.”

  “You have told me all about him, Eli.”

  “That’s thirteen years, man. And your health is perfectly good, you could easily have thirty years. But take the thirteen just as a figure.”

  “Thirteen, yes.”

  “Say you were twenty and someone proposes to you, Hey I can slide you right on up to thirty-three, no problem. Or you were thirty and he offers to scoot you ahead to for
ty-three.”

  “So much math!”

  “Orrin, I want a better answer than that.”

  “You lawyer. Look, my dear friend, all time is not the same. Some years must weigh differently in the scheme of a psycho-biography.”

  “Right. And this could be the best of times for you, not the worst. Think of the freedom you have. The financial security. The knowledge.”

  “Oh balls.”

  “Don’t say balls, it doesn’t become a man of your years.”

  Orrin’s eyes shot up, but he knew he’d been entrapped when he saw the Paperman grin. Caught biting off a protestation of his right to a foulmouthed youthful outlook, he could hardly go ahead with the plaint of age.

  What the hell, all he really wished to do was deny his sexuality, and even a young man could do that. A young priest would have to do it, and priests were not insane. (Though actually, Orrin had seen Bamford’s paper arguing the reverse—that priests were ipso facto whacko—and had found it surprisingly credible, for Bamford.)

  “The point is you aren’t starting life over at fifty-whatever. You are, though divorced from this particular woman, continuing your life. Come on, O’Summers, you must have said this to lots of people.”

  “Must I have?”

  “It comes down to this: I owe the lady thirty-five dinners and I have to pay one of them back tomorrow night. So you get to eat my famous spaghetti for free, if you’ll just agree to do a little of the shopping.”

  “Paperman, you wear an opponent down.”

  Paperman was indeed a mighty engine. What he lacked was a transmission. One required a number of forward gears to propel oneself through life, not to mention the invaluable reverse and good old neutral, readiest of them all. But Eli could not idle, or roll slowly forward as the emotions sorted themselves out. No place for neurosis in his automotive metaphor. Like Goose Gossage in ’78, he had just the one speed.

  13

  After the introductions, Orrin went back to the kitchen, where he was simmering the sauce according to Eli’s detailed notes—two sheets of yellow legal paper! Offset behind the crockpot, Jack-and-Liz were furtively burning on the little nine-inch TV, a trick he picked up from Gail.

  Annoyed at simply missing the news, or stealing glances at it in harried fragments, Gail had finally resolved upon a tiny countertop TV for the kitchen, and had announced her resolve so stridently that Orrin was moved to bring one home for her the very next afternoon. He knew it was Gail’s nature never to act on such needs, never to get around to it.

  This time she fooled him, arriving an hour afterwards with the exact same set—indeed from the same store and on the same credit card. They laughed about this, and left it hanging as to which of them would return a set for credit. Jokingly Orrin suggested they keep both and when the bill arrived contend it was an obvious mistake (charged twice for the same item!) and insist the matter be straightened out at once.

  But Orrin was busy and Gail, he later decided, was clinging to her own purchase as some sort of symbolic act. As a result they kept both sets, and this too was symbolic, for soon enough their existence broke in two and the little televisions parted like puppies pulled from the warmth of the litter.

  “Let me take over here, Orrin—Mother Paperman’s Special Sauce after all. I should at least stir it once or twice. It smells wonderful.”

  Orrin leaned forward for a whiff, so he could zap Jack-and-Liz on the sly. He missed what Eli was saying—fennel?—as from the corner of his eye he watched Jack’s unsuspecting face bend out of shape, then shrink down to an intense dot of white light and go to green.

  “So!” he said, forced out to the living room, where Tia sat, a brownhaired woman in a tasteful white wool dress. But that was all he said.

  Orrin did not feel perverse ever, it was just that sometimes he was perverse, and for a few agonizing seconds now he could only smooth the antimacassar and swirl the ice in his drink. Then, luckily, a nervous pretty smile spread across Tia’s features and both of them felt the weight had lifted.

  “I love your place,” she said. “Though how you can bear to live with Eli Paperman is beyond my feeble powers of reasoning.”

  “Oh he’s probably easier to put up with than I am. I can’t cook and I’m a sprawler. My projects end up in all the good spots and his are forced into dusty corners—such as his room.”

  “I heard that,” called Mother Paperman from the kitchen. “I demand a reduction on next month’s rent, under the dust clause.”

  “Really, Eli is a delight, even with all his manic demented activities.”

  “I heard that!”

  Tia poured them more wine. Here was a woman of middle age—a mother, an attorney, somebody’s ex-wife—yet Orrin could not help classifying her as a “date”, whether his or Eli’s, and therefore an uncaged phenom to be fed and weighed.

  “My son Mickey is very fond of Eli—wanted me to take him in. Eli threw a football to him one afternoon years ago and became, chemically somehow, a surrogate daddy right on the spot. Though I suppose I’m going out on a limb using such terminology in your presence—”

  Orrin waved it away, but could not resist a brief perverse silence. This much you learned: when people spoke with a shrink, they were ever mindful of the fact.

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “Take him in? Why because he’s impossible, of course. One minute he’s right there organizing the tiniest detail of your life for you—against your will, generally—and the next thing you know he has vanished from your sight for months, like a merchant marine.”

  “That does seem to be his pattern.”

  “Anyhow, he’s too young for me. I am forty-four going on fifty and that boy is thirty-something going on twenty-something.”

  Orrin was ready to place his bet. He was neither omniscient nor clairvoyant, could not read green tea-leaves, promote the constellations, or look into a man’s eyes and lay all past sins at his feet. But he had this one wired. These two had slept together years ago, two or three times at most, and because neither one had fallen hard they chose to drop it rather than involve the son under false pretenses. And now they had something rare and fine, a friendship, like brother and sister yet cleansed of the Freudian shrapnel.

  They sat to dinner and the conversation flowed smoothly, though perhaps the wine did too. Tia seemed to lapse from polish, eating ravenously amid a flurry of excuses for her appetite. “It’s just so delicious!” she said, as though resolving her own bafflement as to why she kept hammering down the sausage.

  Orrin guessed she was tipsy, and he knew that his own kindness toward her had been inconsistent. Nonetheless he found her gluttony slightly offputting, and something in her posture now, pitched forward toward the sauce-boat, gave him alarm. For a second he was sure she would suddenly bring it all back home. Then a more charitable rush overtook him.

  Tia helped here by returning from a washup transformed, with shining naked face and brown hair tousled. Humming to herself with the absentmindedness of the mentally incarcerated, she was now altogether lovely. Of course Orrin had also taken a mellowing dose, and may have been rounding up. Certainly he had compromised his own wine with very little of Paperman’s hyperactive pasta, or the small bitter salad.

  “Did I mention that Tia is a criminal lawyer?”

  “No more so than most, surely? But you enjoy defending the innocent?”

  “I’m afraid very few of my boys are innocent.” For a few beats, Tia seemed to be tabulating them in her mind. “Hardly any.”

  “You say my boys. You like them personally?”

  “I do, often. I would probably have to pay you millions to find out why I do.”

  “True, my dear, except that it doesn’t matter why, so long as you are happy with yourself And that pearl comes absolutely free of charge—though the spaghetti will be nine ninety-five plus tax and tip.”

  As she laughed, merry eyes and flyaway hair, Orrin discovered that he had come to feel altogether uncritical regarding T
ia Adams. By now Eli’s phrase about her silken buttocks hung in his mind, as she shifted those very resources over the sofa cushions. He had to stifle an urge to brush one light wisp of hair from her brow. And the idea that she should travel home unaccompanied on the Red Line (as she insisted she could and would) was unthinkable to the outmoded gentleman in him.

  “You will allow me, as a courtesy, to walk you to the train, at least. Call it a compromise, between your principles and mine.”

  “I won’t for one second allow it,” she laughed, but I will graciously accept your offer, Orrin. It will be a pleasure to walk out with you.”

  With her plantation-days drawl, Tia might have been satirizing his manners or merely enjoying his company; Orrin did not know which. Under the gaslights and the rivet-rattling signs on Charles Street, he was tempted to take her arm. To do so seemed only appropriate, but he resisted the temptation and she did not (as he imagined her doing) slide her own arm inside the crook of his. Indeed, she charged down a sidewalk every bit as briskly as her partner Paperman—possibly a barristerial affliction?

  “Well, here we are, Dorothea.”

  “Oh. He told you. He isn’t supposed to tell people.”

  “My parents did the same thing to me. My father’s name was John and he always hated the plainness of it. So he came up with Jessica, Barnaby, and Geoffrey for us. Geoffrey Orrin Summers, that’s me. Two ‘f’s’ and a ‘g’ in the Geoffrey.”

  “A distinguished moniker.”

  “I tried to shake it in college. Left high school as Orry and resurfaced freshman year as Jeff. Jeff Summers. But it wasn’t me. I never responded to it, you know.”

  “What’s in a name.”

  “Whatever you say. Dorothea.”

  All this went on and still he did not take her arm, wrestling inwardly against his own like Doctor Strange-love. Everything about Tia seemed to inspire uncertainty in him, but uncertainty seemed to mean inaction. They shook hands—yet another ambiguous moment, faces poised—and then her train was clattering out of the shed onto the Longfellow Bridge, over the river. He watched it wind past the masonry pepperpots.