Postcards from Pinsk

by Larry Duberstein

  Thus at his worst Orrin might find Eli cavalier, and confide to Marcy, “That lad of yours may rot in Limbo, if he don’t do worse.” But in brighter concerned moments he could tell her what a lucky girl she was, and mean it absolutely.

  18

  On the tenth day of April Orrin walked off to a late matinée, and walked back home in an unusually thoughtful state. Letting himself into the flat, he was distracted momentarily by the portrait of Paperman, casually reading on the couch. The apparition was so bizarre and unexpected that he thought at first it was a wax-work, some sort of a put-on.

  Which it was, for Eli ostentatiously brandished a copy of Finnegans Wake and was simply awaiting Orrin’s comment. It was not the practical joke that made Orrin smile, however, but the image it called up, of Eli speed-reading on the pot.

  “A way a lone a lost a loved a long,” said Orrin.

  “Come again?”

  “I guess you won’t have reached the end yet. I was just quoting from your light reading there. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary—”

  “God, that’s impressive! You’ve got it word for word.”

  “I’ve always had a faculty for remembering great poetry.”

  “Is that what this is? Marcy says it’s a novel in the form of a dream.”

  “It’s certainly not a legal brief, anyway. But Eli, if you don’t mind, I need a minute or two in the study. Will you be around?”

  “I was thinking dinner at The Bayou. Definite case of cajun fever tonight—blackened redfish and a bucket of beer?”

  “Fine. I believe in obeying a whim. But I do need a little time.”

  Paperman could hardly overlook a pronounced sobriety in Orrin, not the literal absence of alcohol indicators but an oddly sombre bearing that he had not seen before. He could never have guessed the cause of it was a Hollywood movie, nor could he guess that Orrin had already begun to discuss this movie with him, aloud and gesticulating on the spongy greensward of the Common like some Hyde Park hobo blaring the Good News from within his narrow locked destiny.

  It was a simple and utterly fabulous story about a tough Philadelphia cop thrown together with a lovely Amish widow. You knew there would be cultural conflict and you knew there would be sexual attraction. You liked the woman at once, slightly salty and ironic inside her cultural strait-jacket; you liked the cop better with time, as did the grudging Amish people.

  The cop turns out to be a skilled carpenter. He goes about repairing bird-houses, fashioning elaborate wooden toys, and lending an expert hand at the community barn-raising. As a cop he appals the Amish; as a woodworker he wins their admiring nods and glances, becomes in effect one of them. Shameless Hollywood formula (the carpenter-hero rising on the heavy timber frame might as well be Errol Flynn clambering up the sails and rigging in Captain Blood) yet it works its way with the audience, Orrin included.

  In fact it is a revelation to Orrin, fusing through him like fire racing down a roll of loose newsprint. The bare ability to do practical things that every country boy could once do—pound home a peg, trim off a tenon!—makes this man heroic. In our time of pushbutton everything, of dustbuffing professionalism, a hero is the man who can do something. Hollywood was clearly onto this. They had that awful Rocky boxer (even that worked) and they had the black man who knew all about cotton farming and saved Sally Field’s mortgage … But it was no joke. However manipulative, it was not mere manipulation. It was felt.

  We are the Hollow Men, Orrin thought, shivering at his desk, we truly are. Elspeth doesn’t hate me, Gail probably doesn’t hate me either, they just don’t know I’m there. I don’t exist anymore. And the clients, the lovely fundfilled clients, I could be the bloody wall and they would dole out their treasure to wail at it, just so long as the wall was listed at a good address downtown.

  Was this the sort of epiphany that came unto suicides? This kind of terrible insight, so strong and obvious? Orrin Summers had known despair in many forms, but here was a different order of emotion, here was emotional knowledge. And what, at this point, could one do? Go out and start hoeing potatoes? How would he advise a client? Badly, was all he could think.

  Paperman’s voice jarred him from brown study. Collapsed on his elbows, eyes barely open, Orrin had risen to a slightly ethereal state in which the physical realities of the room (a voice, the light) seemed foreign. It had been ten minutes.

  “Sorry to disturb you, Orrin. Should I tell him to call back?”

  “No, that’s fine, Eli. Thank you.”

  Orrin took the call, listless at his desk. He had missed hearing the ring somehow, and was immediately at sea with his caller.

  “Report? What report? I’m afraid you have the advantage of me, sir.”

  “The information, Doctor Summers, that you requested.”

  “But I requested none. I am sure this is an honest mistake, Mr.——?”

  “Bemis.”

  “Yes. Mr. Bemis. But I am not the Summers you want.”

  “Then what are you doing answering his telephone? What’s our little game here?”

  “I regret this—truly I do. You say I asked you for some information?”

  “That’s correct. Information concerning your daughter, a Miss Elspeth Summers, address unknown. Information which I have gathered in this report.”

  “Now, Bemis, it occurs to me that this may all be a practical joke on my room-mate’s part. Did you, that is, were you engaged by a tall young man with a full head of thick brown hair?”

  “No sir, by a man of slightly better than average height, lean build, in his fifties I would say, with wavy gray hair neatly barbered.”

  “My God, man, where? Where did you see me?”

  “Right here in this office, sir. You came here and you left a large cash deposit with me—though I may be brain-dead to remind you of it. Are you hurting here or is this a game of ours? Maybe you took a blow on the head?”

  “To be sure I did, Bemis. But how do we conclude this business? Mail it? Can you mail it to me at my office?”

  “You asked me not to, sir, but I can, if you will take care of the bill first. I have that ready also.”

  Shame had succeeded worthlessness in Orrin’s orbit of emotions. He must have done this—hired a private detective to hound Elspie!—and he must have done it in a stupor so opaque as to obliterate all memory of the occasion. When could such a thing have taken place? The man Bemis alluded to the 30th of March but the day stood on his desk calendar as a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, with four regular sessions, no personal or social notations. Mystery.

  Right now the thing was to pay the fellow off, incinerate his “information” (without so much as a glance at it), and pretend it never happened. To spy upon one’s own seed! Such espionage was insupportable, frankly dishonorable, and damned expensive into the bargain. This Bemis wanted hundreds and he’d apparently had hundreds already. Man Crushed By Dollars!

  Under siege at his own desk, Orrin suddenly smiled. He tried to arrest this movement of his face and managed only to modify the smile, make it crooked. So many odd fragments, though, in the puzzle of life, such messy little shards of psycho-biography to sort and stack. Doodling on the corner of his blotter that constituted the Papermeter, or Eli Log (In___Out___), he was suddenly famished, starving.

  Oh crisis was rising on all sides for sure—he could hear collisions in the air above him, could sniff the smoke of roiling flames—yet he was desperately hungry and rushed past Paperman to the pantry. There he ripped salty crackers from a cellophane packet and plugged them into his mouth by twos, dry, shaking his head and shrugging in lieu of words that would be lost in mush.

  Paperman naturally wondered what the phone call could have meant, having seen it transport Orrin from uncharacteristic gravity to a flat-out goofiness. Yet Orrin testified that the call was “nothing at all, just some fellow I forgot I’d ever met, actually”, and his lightheadedness and concomitant lightness of stride was “chance, purely somatic.” But or
dering a glass of milk with his redfish? Was that somatic too?

  “Just nod if I guess right,” said Eli, settling in comfortably behind a large plate of greens. “Or better yet—tap once on the table if I’m right, twice if I’m wrong, and three times if you just won the Lottery.”

  “It’s nothing, Eli. I am unchanged.”

  “Gail called.”

  Orrin tapped three times on the table. Eli rolled his eyes.

  “You really won’t tell, will you.”

  “Nothing to tell. A man for whom I have no explanation called me on the telephone. And then I was seized with appetite. That’s it. I did see a film—disturbing and not very good. What else can I tell you? Yesterday I don’t even recall: did it take place or was it rained out?”

  “The movie was disturbing, you said.”

  “Did I say that? Well and it was disturbing—though only to me I am sure. It was meant to be fun. Country folk building a barn—”

  “I’ve seen more disturbing stuff than that lately.”

  “—Religious farmers, taking their identity from what they did each day, you know.”

  “Aha,” said Paperman, organizing his fish onto a fork. Do I sense an identity crisis here?”

  “Well you know I always take these movies too much to heart. But I’d say no, more like a crisis of self-esteem. Divorce of men and means. Seligson.”

  “Never read Seligson,” Eli smiled, mimicking the clipped footnoting speech pattern that Orrin fell into sometimes. Orrin did often convey his thoughts in an academic shorthand, as though making notes, because he reasoned from situation to idea rather than idea to situation. That, after all, was Freud’s great error.

  “No loss. Suffice to say the world is going to hell in a handbasket, Eli. One psyche after another, tumbling like autumn leaves.”

  “Come on. Because we aren’t still attached to the soil, this is? Is that what Seligson says? I mean, Orrin, there isn’t enough soil to go around anymore.”

  “Exactly. And so the world. A wasteland—and we are the hollow men.”

  “Please. Those old soiled farmers would have given every bushel of corn and potatoes for a Whopper-with-cheese and some cable TV in the evening. They do, in fact: check out Middle America some time.”

  “Mystery,” said Orrin.

  He felt no need, no desire to convince Eli of anything, nor did he feel by now the crisis he was trying to describe. He was just enjoying the fish and salad, and feeling mildly surprised that one could have well-being without self-esteem. But it was simple: add two, take away two, carry the hyphen.

  “What’s new with you, Eli? How’s Marcy?”

  “Fine, she’s fine. She tried to get you last night, actually. We want you to join us for the weekend, if you’re interested.”

  “The weekend?”

  “We’re going up to Killington to toss a few snowballs and warm our toes by the fire. It’s a dirt-cheap late-season deal and she thought you might like to get away too. You could view it as a Mexico-of-the-North.”

  The program of inclusion had gone too far. Yes, there might be a slight temptation to travel in pleasant company, but Eli could hardly want this and even Marcy was just being a good girl. The threesome was a fifty-fifty proposition at best; gratifying as it unfolded, it generally left him more keenly aware of his actual status than ever, for by now Orrin was no longer denying his sexuality on principle, he was simply stuck with denial, as though holding an outdated bank draft.

  “A way a lone a lost a loved,” he said.

  “Is that a yes? You’ll be very close to the soil, O’Summers. Less than two feet of base and powder, I’d guess.”

  “The thing of it is,” said Orrin, not entirely apropos of what Eli had just said to him, “I don’t do anything. I do exist, I suppose, and yet I simply exist. I pass the time, as the French say. So I need someone to not do anything with—to make the nothing into a little something. Or if it doesn’t, then at least you don’t feel so personally that it isn’t. Am I making sense?”

  “Not much. Better tell me the name of this flick, O’Summers, I want to have it banned in Boston.”

  “It’s an absolutely harmless trifle—guns and kisses. I honestly don’t recall the name of it. And I’m fine. But I don’t think I will ski Killington this time around, thanks. Tell Marcy, and you too my friend, it was very sweet to ask. The truth is I hope to see my wife this weekend.”

  “Gail did call.”

  “No, no she didn’t. But she always enjoyed The Rites of Spring Dance at The Club and I have hopes she will be joining me for it Saturday.”

  Hopes he did have, and perhaps Gail really could be enticed. So many nice memories, so many old friends—why not Saturday? It would soon be one year apart for them and if they passed that milestone Orrin feared the separation might stick. Right now was the time to get things straightened out; now or never possibly, for the Rites of Spring figured to be the best shot he would have.

  Now as they sipped the strong chicory coffee and nibbled the rich pecan pie, Orrin was working on Gail, pressing his case, and it was remarkable how his expression could show a dreamy pleasure in the pastry while behind his smiling eyes bitter phrases crackled back and forth.

  Eli knew he had lost him again (whether to Gail, the movie, or Seligson’s crisis of self-esteem) and waited sympathetically. Poor Orrin really was on edge these days and his demands kept coming right to the surface as a result. Last week Eli had absently picked up the Papermeter (down to .80 hours per 24) and asked what it was all about. “Don’t be disingenuous, Eli,” Orrin had smiled at him, “That’s my area.”

  The smile was hardly a nice one and Orrin’s demanding, almost childlike candor made Eli a little nervous. But it was interesting. And Eli found it curious that at times Orrin seemed to be going mad—perhaps he already had—and yet a good attorney could argue that no pattern of behavior was saner.

  Orrin dreamed again that night. He and Gail were in a restaurant arguing, and though their disagreement was soft and civil, it was at the same time implicitly painful. Then he realized it wasn’t Gail, it was Eli Paperman and no wonder he made the mistake: Eli now had the exact same air of disengagement that Gail had worn so often the last year at Acorn Street.

  For all of Orrin’s clarity and logic, Eli just kept staring at him as though measuring the criminally insane for institutional clothing. And Orrin was discouraged. He could see that it would only go on and degenerate. He was frayed by the tension between an irresistible desire to prolong it and the urgent need to shake off all the cobwebs that had so grotesquely ensnared him.

  The real problem these days was that waking afforded little relief. It was better, like climbing out of a coffin each morning into a brighter, airier world. But the tension remained, dogging him through the day, and the ache had become incorporated, as natural to him now as breathing.

  19

  Bemis (more familiarly designated The Eagle Eye Security) was right there on Beacon Street, in the long block before Orrin’s office. The second-storey plateglass with stencilled letters, the floral casting of the lintels, nasturtium tubs in front—Orrin had seen the exterior a thousand times. Once (apparently) he had gone inside as well.

  Now he was inside a second time, but Bemis the man remained unreconstructed in memory, even when glimpsed face-on across a chipped white formica desk as barren as the Alaskan tundra. The lone object on this slab of real estate was a brown glass paperweight Buddha—or possibly, on second glance, paperweight Bemis. Small eyes in a smooth round head for each of them.

  “Bemis, I have to say—with an eye toward your reputation—that this business of refusing to take a check does make it all seem a bit shady.”

  “You want to go modern, I told you I take credit card, Master and Visa. Plastic or cold cash, because anything else is not money.”

  “My checks are money. Besides, look how easily you could blackmail me if I welshed.”

  “I’m an investigator, Doctor, not a blackmailer. Is it suc
h a bad idea to see my bill is paid? No. So thank you very much, here is your receipt, and here is your report.”

  “Page and a half? Bemis, yours is the life. Do you realize that at these rates, this sheet is worth a million times more than gold?”

  “What’d Einstein’s Theory of Relativity weigh?” said Bemis, in concise defense of the value of words, or perhaps paper. Orrin pretended not to hear him, as he blithely fluttered the sheet of expensive sentences. “I’ll run it down for you.”

  “Pardon?” He could act deaf to Bemis, or blind to the report, but it was awkward doing both at the same time.

  “First of all, you got the address and telephone there, and that’s plain enough. As requested. Now the apartment is rented by Commonweal Realty—who are biggies, owning quite a few dozen—to a Joseph Mirak. Mirak doesn’t exist, as such. The real tenant, or the real renter is a Carl Bailey, who is living now in Roxbury and who sublets the place to your daughter’s boyfriend. Follow?

  “Hickey.”

  “The boyfriend’s name is not Hickey, as you had surmised, but a Genghis Ferguson, formerly of Roxbury. A drummer in the reggae band Bottled Spirits, but makes his living as a salesman.”

  “Seems unlikely, all of it. A Genghis Ferguson? And working as a salesman? I mean really, Loomis.”

  “I don’t suggest the young man was born with the name, Doctor S., though among your black families you will find some colorful names tossed around. Your island people also—names you are hearing for the first time. And southerners, black, white, and mulatto, will go poetic on you with names. But hey, this was not a title search I did here—the man’s friends call him Genghis.”

  “And what does he sell? Fuller Brushes or The Encyclopedia Brittanica? No, let me guess—software.”