Desperate Characters

“There are only answering services,” Mike said, putting the phone down. “There’s not much point in leaving this number. Listen, I want you to go to the hospital. It’s six blocks from here and they have an emergency room that’s not bad. They’ll fix you up and you’ll have a peaceful night.”

“Did you know?” she began, “that Cervantes wanted to come to the New World, to New Spain, and the king wrote across his application, ‘No, tell him to get a job around here’? Isn’t that a funny story?”

He watched her, unmoving, his hands folded lightly, his shoulders hunched—it must be the way he listened to patients, she thought, as though he were about to receive a blow across the back.

“Just a story …”

“What’s the matter?”

“I wish I were Jewish,” she said. “Then when I died, I’d die as a Jew.”

“You’ll die as a Protestant.”

“There aren’t many left.”

“Then as a Gentile. I asked you, what’s the matter? Are you working on anything?”

“I haven’t wanted to work; it seems futile. There are so many who do it better than I do. I was sent a novel to translate but I couldn’t understand it, even in French. It simply irritated me. And I don’t have to work.”

“Tell me a little Baudelaire,” he said.

“Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux,

Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux—”

She broke off, laughing. “Why, you love it! You should see your face! Wait! Here!” and she snatched up a hand mirror from the top of a bureau and held it in front of him. He looked at her over the mirror. “I could smack you,” he said.

“No, no … you don’t understand. I liked the way you looked. That I could just recite a few lines and evoke that look!”

“Helpless bliss,” he said, getting to his feet.

“You know that Charlie and Otto are ending their partnership?”

“Otto doesn’t confide in me.”

“They can’t get along any more,” she said, replacing the mirror and turning back to him. “It’ll change our life, and yet it is as though nothing has happened.”

“It won’t change your life,” he said with a touch of impatience. “Maybe your plans, but not your life. Charlie, as I remember him, which is vaguely, is a bleeding heart, dying to be loved. He has the face of a handsome baby, doesn’t he? Or am I thinking of one of my patients? And Otto is all restraint. So the machine stopped functioning.” He shrugged.

“The truth is—” she began, then paused. He waited. “It wasn’t a machine,” she said quickly. “That’s an appalling view of what happens between people.”

“What did you start to say?”

“But are you saying what went on between them was only a mechanical arrangement of opposites, Mike?”

“All right, then, it wasn’t. The words don’t matter anyhow. Otto didn’t seem distressed.”

“We’d better go down,” she said.

But he had left her and was standing near the window, staring at the floor. As he lifted his head, she saw what he had been looking at. She walked over to him. They both looked at the stone on the floor. There were a few shards of broken glass around it. Mike picked it up. It filled the palm of his hand.

“The drapes must have muffled the sound,” he said. They both looked down at the street; the broken pane where the stone had entered was at the height of Mike’s brow. “It must have been in the last hour,” he said. “I was up an hour ago, getting aspirin for someone, and I stopped by here, I’ve forgotten why, and I know the stone wasn’t here then.”

Someone walked by on the street below, a St. Bernard puppy shambling along beside him. In all the windows of the opposite houses, lights shone. Car hoods glinted. Mike and Sophie silently watched a man investigating the contents of his glove compartment. A news truck rumbled by.

“Don’t mention it to Flo. I’ll clean it up. Who could have done it? What am I supposed to do?” Then he shook his head. “Oh, well, it’s nothing.” He smiled at her and patted her arm. “Sophie, would you like me to send you to a friend of mine? A friend I think highly of? A first-rate man? Member of the Institute?” He hefted the stone, looked back out the window.

“Thanks, Mike, but no.”

“But at least go to the hospital,” he said, without looking at her at all. She stared at him a moment, then left the room. Otto was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, a glass in his hand. He held it out as she neared the bottom.

“Ginger ale,” he said.

THREE

“I’m tired of parties,” Otto said in the taxi. “I get so bored. Movie talk bores me. I don’t care about Fred Astaire, and he doesn’t care about me. I care even less about Fellini. Flo is self-important simply because she knows actors.”

“Why did you say you hadn’t seen Death Takes a Holiday? I know you saw it because we saw it together. And you were crazy about Evelyn Venable. You talked about her for weeks … those bones, that fluty voice, you said she looked the way Emily Dickinson should have looked … don’t you remember?”

“My God!”

“And Fredric March, you said, was a perfect expression of an American idea of death, a dissipated toff in a black cape.”

“You stored all that away?” he asked wonderingly.

“You fell asleep and everyone knew you were asleep. Mike poked me and told me to take you home.”

“They were all trying to out-memory each other. It just proved how old we all are.”

“You have to make an effort.”

“What were you doing upstairs with Mike?”

“He called some doctors about the cat bite.”

“He thinks you ought to see someone?” he asked, alarmed.

She held up her hand. “Look how swollen it is!” she said. She flexed her fingers and groaned. “Perhaps if I soak it, the swelling will go down.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“Nobody was in. Don’t you know you can’t get a doctor any more? Don’t you know this country is falling apart?”

“Just because you can’t get a doctor on Friday evening does not mean the country is falling apart.”

“Oh, yes it does. There was a stone in their bedroom. Someone had thrown a stone through the window. It must have happened just before we arrived. Picked up a stone from somewhere and tossed it through the window!” As she was speaking, she took hold of his arm and now, as she became silent, her grip tightened as though only her hand could continue the burden of her thoughts.

“That’s awful,” he said. The taxi was idling. Otto saw they were home. He paid the driver. Sophie, suddenly animated by a murky but powerful conviction that she knew what was wrong with everything, ran up the steps. But she had to wait for Otto; she didn’t have her keys. He climbed the steps slowly, looking at the change in his hand. Sophie’s access of energy, so startling as to verge on pain, died at once. As they walked into the dark hall, the telephone rang.

“Who …?” he began. “At this time of night,” she said, as Otto went to the phone. But he didn’t touch it. It rang three more times, then Sophie pushed past him and grabbed the receiver. Otto went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “Yes?” he heard her say. “Hello, hello, hello?”

No one answered, but there was a faint throb as though darkness had a voice which thumped along the wire. Then she heard an exhalation of breath.

“It’s some degenerate,” she said loudly. Otto, a piece of cheese in one hand, gestured to her with the other. “Hang up! For God’s sake, hang up!”

“A degenerate,” she said into the mouthpiece. “An American cretin.” Otto stuffed the cheese in his mouth, then snatched the phone from her hand and replaced it with a bang in its cradle. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you!” he cried.

“You could ask,” she said, and began to cry. “I’ve been poisoned by that cat.” They turned to look at the back door.

“My God! It’s back!” she exclaimed.

A gray shape was huddled against the bottom of the door, toward which Otto ran, waving his hands and shouting, “Get out!” The cat slowly raised its head and blinked. Sophie shuddered. “I’ll call the A.S.P.C.A. tomorrow,” Otto said. The cat got up and stretched. They saw its mouth open as it looked up at them hopefully. “We can’t have this,” Otto muttered. He looked reproachfully at her.

“If I don’t feed it, it’ll give up,” she said mildly.

“If you allow it to …” He turned off the living room lamp.

“Why didn’t you answer the phone?” she flung back at him as they went up the stairs. “You’re becoming an eccentric, like Tanya.”

“Tanya! I thought Tanya lived her whole life on the phone.”

“She won’t answer it any more unless she’s just broken off a love affair.”

“Love affair,” he snorted, following Sophie down the hall to their bedroom. “Tanya and love!”

“She calls up people, though.”

“I hate Tanya.”

They stood facing each other beside the bed. “You’ve never told me that,” she said. “I’ve never heard you say that you hated anyone.”

“I only just realized it.”

“What about Claire?”

“Claire is all right. What do you care what I think about Tanya? You don’t like her yourself. You hardly ever see her.”

“I hardly ever see anyone.”

“Why do you make me feel it’s my fault?”

“You haven’t explained about not answering the phone,” she said accusingly.

“Because I never hear anything on it that I want to hear any more.”

They were both standing rigidly, each half-consciously amassing evidence against the other, charges that would counterbalance the exasperation that neither could fathom. Then he asked her directly why she was angry. She said she wasn’t angry at all; it was just so tiresome of him to indulge himself about the telephone, to stand there so stupidly while it rang, to force her to do it.

“Let’s go to bed,” he said wearily.

She gave him an ironic look, which he ignored. She was really wondering what would happen if she told him the telephone call, that sinister breathing, had frightened her. He would have said, “Don’t be foolish!” she concluded. “Stop telling me I’m foolish,” she wanted to shout.

He was hanging up his suit. She watched him straighten the pants. “You ought to throw out the underwear you’re wearing,” she said. “It’s about to fall apart.”

“I like it when they get so soft, after I’ve had them a long time.”

He sounded rather plaintive. She felt kinder toward him. There was something funny about people’s private little preferences and indulgences, something secretive and childlike and silly. She laughed at him and his soft old underwear. He looked down at himself, then at her, as he stripped off the shorts. His expression was complacent. Let him be complacent, she thought. At least, they’d avoided a pointless quarrel. She wondered if Tanya had ever tried to seduce Otto. Then she remembered Tanya’s only visit to Flynders. Otto had been shocked, morally outraged really, when he had accidentally discovered that Tanya had used every drawer in an immense bureau for the few articles she’d brought with her that weekend. “My God! She has a scarf in one drawer, a pair of stockings in another, one girdle in another. What kind of a woman is it who would use all the drawers in a chest just because they’re there?” he had cried to Sophie.

“Tanya is pretty awful,” Sophie said as Otto got into bed next to her. “I bet she’s awful to make love to. I bet she can hardly take her eyes off herself long enough to see who she’s in bed with.”

“Go to sleep,” he pleaded. “You’re going to wake me up.” She subsided without complaint. She wasn’t irritated with him now, and it didn’t seem to matter why she had been. She examined her hand and decided to give it a soaking. It certainly hurt.

When Sophie awoke, it was 3:00 A.M. Her hand, doubled up beneath her, was like an alien object which had somehow attached itself to her body, something that had clamped itself to her. She lay there for a moment, thinking of the cat, how surprised she’d been, seeing it again, when she and Otto had come home. It had looked so ordinary, just another city stray. What had she expected? That it would have been deranged by its attack on her? That it planned to smash and cuff its way into their house and eat them both up? She got up and went into the bathroom. The swelling, which she had managed to reduce earlier by the long soak in hot water, had returned. She filled the basin and immersed her hand. Then, looking at her face in the mirror over the sink—she didn’t want to see what she was doing—she began to press the fingers of her other hand against the swollen mass of skin. When she looked down, the water was clouded. She flexed her fingers, then made a fist.

When she got back into bed, she half threw herself against Otto’s back. He groaned.

“My hand is worse,” she whispered. He sat up at once.

“We’ll call Noel first thing in the morning,” he said. “If we have to, we’ll drive up to Pelham and drag him to his office. You’ve got to have that looked at.”

“If it isn’t any better.”

“Anyway.” Otto fell back against the pillows. “What time is it?” There were times when he felt he had not had a full night’s sleep since he had been married. Sophie seemed to take a special pleasure in night conversations.

“Three. Did you notice how young Mike behaved? How he looked? Did you see that Hungarian ribbon around his forehead, or folk art ribbon, or whatever it was?”

“Don’t talk about it,” he said sharply. “Just don’t bring it up. It only makes me angry. Wait till he tries to get a job.”

“He’ll never get a job. Mike will fund him. And the hair. He was playing with it all the time I was talking to him. Pleating it, braiding it, stroking it, pulling it.”

“What did you talk to him about?”

“Stupid things, stupidly.”

“They aren’t all that bad,” Otto said.

“Water babies. They come out of faucets, not out of people.”

“They want to be Negroes,” Otto said, yawning.

“I wish I knew what they’re up to,” she said, suddenly remembering she had told Mike’s father that she wanted to be a Jew.

“They’ve chosen to remain children,” he said sleepily, “not knowing that nobody has that option.”

What was a child? And how would she know? Where was the child she had been? Who could tell her what she had been like? She had one photograph of herself at four, sitting in a wicker rocker, a child’s chair, her legs straight out, in white cotton panties, wearing someone’s Panama hat that was too big for her. Who had assembled all those things? Panama hat, wicker chair, white cotton panties? Who had taken that picture? It was already turning yellow. What did young Mike, dirty, mysterious, seemingly indifferent, speaking that hieratic lingo that both insulted and exiled her, have to do with her childhood? With any childhood?

“Otto?” But he was asleep. A car went by. A slight breeze came through the open window, carrying with it the sound of a dog’s bark. Then she heard knocking, a fist on wood. She went to the window and looked down at the ledge which hid from view the stoop and anyone who might be standing there.

There was a kind of grunt, then several sharp raps, then a whisper. Had her scalp really moved? She looked back at the bed. Then she went to the hall and down the stairs, her hand held stiffly against the soft folds of her nightgown.

Stopping at the front door, hidden by the curtains which covered the glass insets, she listened and looked. On the other side of the door, a large body swayed, a large head veered toward the door, then away.

“Otto …” sighed a voice sadly.

Sophie unlocked the door. Charlie Russel was standing there, one lapel turned up.

“Charlie!”

“Ssh!”

He stepped into the entryway and she closed the door. Then they were close to each other like two people about to embrace. She felt his whole face watching her like an enormous eye. “I’ve got to talk to Otto,” he whispered intensely.

“He’s asleep.”

“I’m in a terrible state. I have to see him.”

“Now? You’re crazy.”

“Because I couldn’t see him a second before now. Because it’s taken me all this time, from this morning when I last set eyes on him, to get to the point where I am. I don’t care what time it is.” He reached out and gripped her arms.

“I won’t wake him,” she said angrily.

“I will.”

“You’re going to hurt my hand. A cat bit me.”

“I feel murdered,” Charlie said, letting go of her all at once and leaning against the wall. “Listen. Let’s go out and get a cup of coffee. Now that I think about it, I don’t want to see that bastard.”

“Does Ruth know where you are?”

“Ruth who?”

“That’s some joke,” she said. “I don’t like wife jokes. They drive me up the wall. Don’t make wife jokes to me.”

He stooped and peered into her face. “You sound mad.”

“I am mad,” she said.

“Will you? Have a cup of coffee?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s make a getaway,” he said, clapping his hands together.

“I’ve got to get dressed. Don’t make any noise. I’ll be right down. There’s a chair. Don’t move.”

She dressed silently; even the sleeves of her blouse, drawn up carefully over her arms, made no sound. It was as though she was only thinking about getting dressed.

Otto lay diagonally across the bed, one knee protruding from beneath the blanket. She brushed her hair quickly and pinned it, reached for a purse on the bureau, then left it there, putting her house keys in her pocket. As she picked up her shoes from the closet and tiptoed from the room, she felt, for a vertiginous moment, an unlawful excitement.

FOUR

They went down the street silently, quickly, like conspirators, speaking only when they had turned a corner and were headed for downtown Brooklyn.

“Where are we going?” he asked. “Is there anything open?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been around here at this hour. Did you come by subway?”

“No. I took a taxi. He dropped me at the wrong corner, but I was too tired to argue. I walked to your house.”

“Did you tell Ruth you were coming?”

“No. I had gone out to a movie. A man who was sitting beside me told me I was talking to myself. I told him not to interrupt, then, and he told me I was fucking up his one night out. So I left and got a taxi and went to a Bickford’s, which was full of people talking to themselves. Christ! Look at the paper all over the sidewalks.”

“Please. Don’t talk to me about garbage.”

They had come to an intersection. From the west, bearing down on them with an echoing bang and rattle of mechanical parts, came a bus. It went through the red light. The driver was hunched forward, his arms encircling the wheel, his hands hanging down like paper hands. There was only one passenger, an old woman with dazzling white hair. She looked at once majestic and mindless.

“What is she thinking about?” Sophie said.

“Nothing. She’s asleep.”

The light changed and changed again. Discarded wrappings and newspapers rustled all around them. A block away, a few figures stood torpidly outside the windows of a lunch counter. As they walked toward it, Sophie could see two men inside, moving briskly as they rinsed out thick white cups and scrubbed a grill. The people outside were simply standing there, watching. Across the street, near a subway exit, a short fat dark man wearing a tiny black hat was staring down at a sewer grating. He had the stunned immobility of a displaced person who had come as far as he could without further instructions.

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