Postcards from Pinsk

by Larry Duberstein

  Not ready to head straight back home, Orrin turned in the direction of the Esplanade. He was glad he’d kept his head. He had fallen, but not too far, for the incarnate silk of her skin, for the soft colors nestled in the planes of her face. The sky was webbed with brittle frost, and icy slivers of wind lanced through his chest, yet Orrin felt free and safe—for the moment safe. And though it had been close with him, safety right now was more important to him than sex.

  Where the delta widened at the Esplanade, the gusting wind seemed to skim a coat of ice onto the gold-lit river in one sweeping pass, then dust it over with powdery snow before veering wildly across the open plain. Orrin had reached the band-shell and climbed the granite step. Inside the curving confines of the denuded shell, the wind grew quickly hysterical.

  Orrin had a brief playful fantasy of assuming the conductor’s pose, gazing out over the summer evening concert-goers, but he could not physically manage it, as the wind buffeted him back. This was a little scary. He tried to sing and then to yell louder than the wind, but it was no contest; under an acoustical avalanche, Orrin no longer felt playful.

  He jumped down and landed running, impressed to near panic by the power of. the night. You could stay out a moment too long and be damaged, even killed, by moving air! And he had stayed too long already: breath very short and toes so numb he was stumbling inland toward the Back Bay. When at last he gained the shelter of narrow streets, he fell gratefully into the first public house he saw, a place called Tom & Viv’s, with asparagus ferns in the window and blessed greenhouse warmth inside.

  “Do you by any chance serve hot coffee?” he asked, managing to push the words past numb lips to a young lady in red vest over black shirt behind the bar.

  “No sir we don’t,” she said, in the singsong voice of the phone company robot.

  “Good. I’ll have a double whiskey, neat, please. Bushmills?”

  “We do have that.”

  He could barely hold onto the first glass that she brought him, but matters steadily improved to the point where he was tossing them down quite nimbly. And before his twenty was exhausted, Orrin heard himself loudly insisting the heat be turned down and a laughing woman two stools west was offering him ice cubes au paume. An evening of extremes, certainly.

  But had that pretty girl in the red vest really asked him to leave? Doubtful. Or immaterial, as he was ready now for the wending homeward and was happily wending, if betrayed once or twice by his sense of direction. Floating upstreet, feeling fine under the stars, craving those warm heavy covers.

  Finding himself on Marlborough, however, not half a block from Gail, was a coincidence too great to overlook. Indeed it would be downright rude to be this close by and not at least say hello. So he picked his way along the wrought iron to Number 232 and was about to press her bell.

  Then he thought better of it. This was a first visit, coming somewhat late at night, and of course unexpected as well. Rather than jar her nerves with a sudden buzz, might it not be wiser to venture round to the fire escape, ascend, and tap gently on her glass? In the undertow of a wave of sentiment, Orrin stood ready to show any consideration, large or small.

  He rose like an angel ascending, weightlessly, feet barely skimming the iron treads. Dizzy from the aggregate height of many stairs and landings (and from the aggregate hooch as well), winding past granite lintels till he all but lost count, Orrin finally stopped to catch his breath. Above the blooming stalks of brightness that lined the alley like sentinels, under winter skies that spread an umbrella of soft light, Orrin inhaled a deep peace.

  Gail looked peaceful too, perfectly still beneath a thick blue comforter just like the one they had shared so long—the one he used still. Oddly, she had twisted some gadgetry into her hair, but Orrin knew better than to complain. Strictly her business. She did something similar once before and he had asked her to stop, after he dreamed recurringly of leeches slapping onto her skull. Oh she was bitter that time! His dreams, she raged, could not take precedence over her reality.

  He had always loved her best in sleep—no, not best, but most easily. Never saw her asleep without experiencing his love keenly, just as it was with the children. Perhaps they loved him too, when he lay dreaming. Perhaps they would love him to distraction, love him endlessly, in death. So little conflict among the deceased …

  But Orrin was not considering a dramatic death. In fact a quick glance at the ground made him grip the rail firmly with both hands. Then a perfectly appalling sight nearly blew him loose. Gail’s blue comforter had lifted, like an angry tide, and swinging his legs off the far side of the bed was a large jaundiced hairy man. The back of his neck lay in folds, like a stack of doughnuts, and his shoulders had sprouted clumps of black hair like epaulettes. And this man stood, as casual as Caesar rising from his throne, and wandered out to a dimly lit plum-carpeted hallway.

  It was too much to expect a man to bear this silently (unhealthy for that matter to do so) yet Orrin tapped at first with the greatest respect and delicacy. That was the point after all, to arrive as gently as possible. But it did make sense to have this out with Gail alone, before the ape man returned. “Gail,” he whispered, tapping more insistently, with his house key. “Gail!”

  When finally she stirred and turned a baffled squint to the manic rattling of the two sash against the flimsy lock that joined them, Orrin had a second shock. Her face was grotesque, sadly altered, like a nightmare Disney witch, the mouth set in an angry sneer, eyes narrowed in powerful caricature of soured womanhood. Not at all like Gail, not at all, and indeed—he finally realized—not her in fact. Who was this woman, and how had she gained entrance to Gail’s rooms? “You’re not my wife!” he roared through the glass.

  Yet through his genuine rage and confusion, Orrin began to feel a seeping relief that Gail had not been sleeping with the ape man after all. It now appeared a mistake had been made, and regardless of who had made it, the correct response was flight. Orrin fled, riding gravity down while resisting only its extremes, until near the bottom all coordination departed his limbs and he clattered down the last flight loosely, in almost a free fall. He snatched at the flowing spokes to slow this terrible momentum, but the balusters proved much too quick for him.

  Though he hurt literally all over, Orrin found the strength to run again, for a police siren came rising like the wail of an animal and sent one clean stroke of terror to his racing battered heart. So quickly, though. What a wonderfully responsive police force, he couldn’t help thinking with considerable civic pride, as he ran from them raggedly.

  He flagged, sagging against a brick garden wall, as the sirens grew fainter. The trouble was elsewhere, apparently, nothing to do with Gail or the ape man. And as the sound drained away, Orrin thought about the scene that must be playing itself out upstairs. The woman shrieking, the ape man gallumphing in, glancing round and assuring her it was just a nightmare; if sensitive or clearheaded, recalling for her some recent experience that might have triggered the dream; and she resisting his version until at last he held her, fetched her hot milk with sugar and vanilla, and the face in the window began to seem unreal after all.…

  On Commonwealth, in the smoky shimmering frost, Orrin hailed a cab and rode home. He crashed onto the bed like a bag of sand. Talk about hitting the wall! Even as a youth, he had never run as he had run tonight; in the past decade he’d scarcely run a step. Four in the morning, good to be home.

  He slept fitfully, in half-hour patches, and the oddest dream kept intruding through a dark rainy morning. Clyde and Elspeth, side by side in twin beds like his and Barney’s, the ones with wild west decals on the headboard. They looked like furious munchkins, Clyde and El, faces squashed with anger as each pounded away on a mound of vanilla ice cream—a huge mound the size of a heavy punching bag—whaling away with chafed fists. Their blows would flatten the stuff, shaping it this way and that like dough.

  A bolt of sunlight, the eery luminous kind that has just burned through a dark cloudbank, came in
the bay, striking a page on the dining table. It made the words on this unsigned mysteriogram seem a directive from God himself:

  DENIAL DENIED?

  AFFIRMATION AFFIRMED?

  LIFE DOES GO ON?

  It was not from God, of course, but from Paperman. Pressing his case, as always, and floating out to sea on a raft of false assumptions. Orrin had to smile. At least Eli had washed the pots before going off and yes, in his infinite wisdom, had left a shot of black coffee in the red pot upon the white stove, for his room-mate.

  14

  Life did go on, and Orrin knew perfectly well that to deny one’s sexuality was a serious business. Yet he had lived so long without one (a sexuality, that is), he could still underestimate it in the abstract. Had it remained abstract, there might have been no problem. But something had triggered him—a confluence of events, really—and left him in a state of sexual longing.

  In the days following Eli’s dinner party, Orrin suffered spells of harsh jealousy over Gail and her hirsute companion in the blue bed. Alice Harris looked up one morning to find him in a trance of fury, grinding his jaws. “Doctor?” she had interrupted herself to say, and Orrin swabbed on a thin smile over the inner murderous indexes. “Sorry, Alice. Gas bubbles, you know. Please go on.”

  Certainly she went on, for how could gas bubbles faze a true-life sufferer like Alice. But the gas was real, as were the injuries to knee, wrist, and kidney he had sustained on the fire escape at Gail’s.

  In calm hours he could excuse her behavior. A free woman, after all, residing in a free country. He was not fool enough, however, to excuse it solely on the grounds that it had been someone else in the ape man’s boudoir. That would be naive, inasmuch as he had simply never found the right window. Hold her blameless because she cavorted beyond his range of vision? When she might well have a lover of her own, whether hirsute or smooth? At least Orrin was tactful and did not mention his suspicions to her phone answering device.

  But it wasn’t only Gail. There was Tia Adams—alternately seductive and repulsive to him, and wasn’t that transparent to a scholar of the mind! Tia whom he had weighed so parsimoniously, turning her over in his palm like a stone of questionable worth. He had sat in smug judgment of this pleasant pretty woman, and who was he to do such a thing? A damned sight older than she was, and every bit as desperate and alone. And perhaps she wasn’t desperate at all—that was just an impression, or even less, an assumption. What about her judgments on him? How did he look under unkind light?

  Weighed and found wanting, yet in this curious lustridden aftermath, Orrin found himself wanting her, instead. He was jealous of her strength, jealous of Eli’s confidences, jealous even of the implicit ex-husband with whom there were apt to be the shameless brief reunions taken on the wing. Jealous and more. He summoned up the unseen silken mounds of her bottom scuttling and resettling on his corduroy cushions and went on to imagine them in the privacy of her home, bared casually to the bedding, to the sunlit windowpanes—such treasure he had spurned.

  Embittering too was the feeling he might have missed his chance. He somehow expected more from Tia, or from Eli on her behalf. Expected further opportunities to deny his sexuality here. (She would supplicate while he stood firm; Eli would jest while he dissembled.) To deny his sexuality in the void, against the brief and now clearly withdrawn possibility of not denying it, seemed especially disheartening. “The rejector experiences the feeling of rejection,” he noted for cross-reference, but with little balm.

  He could even daydream of young Marcy Green. Eli, with his commitment to staying uncommitted, was in effect taking advantage of Marcy. That charming young lady, thought Orrin, it could be me taking advantage of her instead! Such notions, carnal thoughts of Marcy, he recognized as smoke on the wind, yet he had them and so had in due course to note them, for he was denying his sexuality, not his rationality as well.

  These women were suddenly vivid flesh to him, at times obscenely so, as they spun through his restless mind like temptation’s wheel of fortune, now one now another and soon enough almost anyone. Women on the street, or the sweet sisterly Sarah at her desk, the deserving Bensonhurst, her calves surpassing shapely one afternoon in youthful blue tights and oxblood strollers. He experienced such a polymorphous temptress that he was forced to conclude he was horny, and that denying his sexuality at this time was a business so serious as to be worthy of reconsideration. Perhaps he should call Tia Adams after all—but for a date?

  Eli was no help in the crisis. He simply wasn’t there. Orrin even tried finding him at work, only to be treated to the absurd cover story, “Mr. Paperman is out of town for the week.” Maybe so, if he and Marcy had ambled up to Ipswich for a bucket of clams, or slid out to Stockbridge for some cross-country skiing at cozy inns. No way would he, Orrin G. Summers, leave complex personal messages such as had formed on his tongue in the face of so canny an evasion as that.

  Left to his own devices at a time when he really did need company (needed Eli’s company specifically, for at The Club this sort of thing bore no discussion), Orrin indulged in a fantasy of exclusion where Eli and Marcy were pointedly avoiding him, taking refuge in youthful embraces, in laughter and handholding in the sheltered booths of small snug restaurants, not to mention the hours of intimate post-coital converse. Out of town!

  Frankly Orrin was feeling a little loosely wrapped all week. He could attribute this in part to the mean climate of March, when a cold damp wind careened through Boston like an unpleasant child sustaining his tantrum for weeks. Whatever had made him unstable, though, Orrin knew that he was, and knew that this was a time for laying low. On the message pad above his desk, he had writ large NO CALLS TO FAMILY and just below it DO NOT HASSLE THEO.

  A period of assessment, then, and maybe best to tone down the vocals at work too, lest in babbling he loose some thunderbolt of indiscretion upon Harris or the new one, Sinclair-Fugard from Cape Town. A white South African who had married a black South African and then fled to academic shelter in America (they both taught the philosophy of language, whatever that was), she couldn’t stand her husband yet lived in desperate fear that he or anyone else should come to know it, and conclude it had a racial basis. So she was pitted squarely, hysterically, against herself.

  Orrin always felt a twinge of guilt in billing out Cat Therapy as they called it; for dropping into a state of professional catatonia while one’s patient flailed in confusion. Fortunately this one, Sinclair-Fugard, could benefit best from Cat, just bailing out bilge-water. In any event it was the only safe course for Orrin. GO CAT WITH THESE, he told his message pad to tell himself, until this crazy wind coursing through me dies down.

  “Three hundred dollars a day just to turn the lights on!” Orrin had fulminated at a client once, in a time of similar unreliability. And the client, a very young man who shot rats in his Belmont cellar where according to the best researches there were none, had stood up and shrugged, “Hell, turn ’em out, then,” and had never come back to conclude his treatment.

  It seemed to be passing over. Certainly it was fine most of every day. There was one public occasion, however, which Orrin could not avoid: Air Force Two (opening for Warts & All) at The Rat.

  For some reason he had pictured Elspeth and her band in astronaut gear, floating on a gravity-free platform as they clutched their flyaway guitars and drums. But the space programmers had just blown up The Lady in Space, a New England schoolteacher along for the ride. They blew her up over the Florida sea, actually, nowhere close to outer space, and for days it was all anyone could talk about. They showed the contraption explode time and again, in slow motion and stop-action, and they badgered little kids across America to venture forth and give expression to their pain.

  Every station hired its own shrink to come on the air and explain America’s emotions. Orrin, who had accepted such gigs in the past, the King and Kennedy assassinations, wondered privately if anyone knew where the emotions would go, now that TV was bringing us real violence as
well as the unreal. How did lines get drawn? Most commentators were saying TV brought the disaster closer, made it immediate for the millions, an instant transcontinental trauma. Orrin suspected the reverse, that we were distanced from it, and from ourselves; from everything. That increasingly the national trauma was numbness, passivity. Certainly it was his own.

  In any event he was forced to imagine a whole new look for Elspeth, and put her in a baggy double-breasted suit, doubled over a gleaming saxophone and wailing. (This image he drew from a new People magazine in his own waiting-room, a photo of another young lady who had been assailed by the blues in her suburban bedroom.) What he really needed was a look for himself, a disguise, as he would never plan to disport himself cognito at The Rat.

  True, she might not even recognize him. She had not looked at him, seen him, in years. But there remained the chance that something in the features, or the manner, could trip an antediluvian trail of association leading back to him, and Orrin was not willing to risk it. Very dead set against a scene of any kind (steady-all-boats was still the prescription), he went to work in earnest.

  The wig was almost enough. It snapped onto his skull in such a way that neither its own vile rubbery shell nor Orrin’s barbered gray hair showed a trace. Instantly redheaded, newborn to a wild youthful exuberance, he looked in the mirror like Dylan Thomas coming through the carwash. What could he add? A cigarette, loose on the lip; dark glasses with the wraparound L.A. look; a seersucker jacket one size too small.

  Given the late hour of this special occasion, and the unfamiliar locus, it seemed to call for the dulling of certain senses, consonant with the enlivening of others, a tricky job which Orrin trusted to Bushmills of County Cork, who surely had the expertise. There had been similar compromises earlier in the week, but the difference here was justification, and justification sped the benign essence through the system circulataire. Orrin could feel the flow inside him, could almost see it sailing along his bends and freshets like a sunny amber trout stream.