No Lease on Life Read online

  The room didn’t let outside light in, it kept them separated from the world. While Elizabeth did hot reads and cold reads, even while she focused on the little black marks on shiny white paper, she deliberately thought about other things. She tested herself. It was possible to catch mistakes without being resigned. She never entirely submitted to the page at hand.

  Elizabeth liked some of her fellow workers. Even one of the disappointed fat men had his moments. Everyone does. The other disappointed fat man was her sole implacable foe. He was unattractive and self-righteous. He collected stamps. He was easy to hate, and he hated her. He despised her. She could see it in his eyes. He was a company boy. Every time Elizabeth used the company mail he was offended, outraged. She flaunted it in front of him whenever she could. She liked having him as an enemy.

  —Enemies last longer than friends, enemies define you, friends don’t, Elizabeth said to Roy.

  —They’re both under dickheads in the dictionary.

  —Dickheads won’t be in there.

  Apart from her enemies who had been her friends, and apart from some of her co-workers who hated her, Elizabeth had pretty good relations with friends and with most people on the block.

  Except her landlord’s manager, Gloria. Elizabeth complained to Gloria about the upkeep of the building. There was no upkeep. Gloria was married to the owner. She had a vested interest.

  Elizabeth modulated her voice when she complained to Gloria. The Big G always smiled. It was a careful, broad smile. It was plastered across a too-rouged white face. Elizabeth would let them know when there was a gas leak, if there was the sick smell of gas in the building. She’d tell them there was no heat or hot water that day. Gloria always thanked her. Gloria was blustery and bad-tempered. She enjoyed deceiving tenants, renting and not renting, evicting or threatening eviction, delaying work on broken-down apartments, stalling tenants about the boiler in the basement being fixed or replaced.

  Elizabeth didn’t want to linger next to Gloria in the office. The Big G reeked of discontent, of frustration. From Gloria’s point of view, she was made to sweat unnecessarily. She was the one who was wronged. When the Big G spoke about how hard it was being a landlord, how many things they had to take care of, how many boilers were broken down and how many tenants in their buildings didn’t have heat and hot water, she rustled with indignation.

  We don’t have the time to get to the halls. But, dear, we’ll get to it as soon as we do. We have emergencies right now. I’ll talk to Hector when I have the chance.

  Hector was the super of the building. Hector lived on the first floor. He’d been the super way before Elizabeth and Roy moved in. He was entrenched. Hector was a courtly man, part French, Greek, and Spanish. Talking to him about cleaning the halls, which was his job, was like talking to the morons on the street, Hector was imperious to dirt. He was completely unmoved by and indifferent to dirt and emergencies. He caused dirt and emergencies. What Elizabeth wanted was modest. Relatively clean halls and stairs.

  Elizabeth tried to reason with Gloria.

  —Our halls need to be cleaned weekly.

  —The people in apartment F, they’re the problem. It’s their cigarettes. They’re pigs.

  —It’s not just them. The halls get dirty. They need to be cleaned weekly.

  —The super’s too old.

  —Why don’t you hire someone to help Hector, once a week for twenty-five dollars?

  —We can’t afford that.

  —We shouldn’t have to live with garbage in the halls.

  —Hector has a drinking problem.

  —I know.

  —You get rid of Hector. Get a petition going with the other tenants.

  —I don’t want to get rid of Hector. Your job is to keep the building clean.

  The Big G clenched her teeth.

  —Do you know Hector hates you? she said.

  —What?

  —Hector hates you.

  —Why are you telling me this?

  —I think you should know.

  —Why do I need to know?

  —I think you should know.

  —Have you told Hector I’m the one complaining about the halls?

  —You must have complained to him.

  —I haven’t talked to him, except to say hello, in two years. You told him I was complaining.

  The Big G was trapped in a discoverable lie. People lie about the obvious. People do the obvious. Elizabeth lifted her head high and told the Big G she was cruel. Then she walked out of the office. Hector’s alcoholism and indifference to filth, and the Big G’s obnoxious presence, were preferable to nothing, to no super at all. For a long time Elizabeth avoided the Big G and hardly ever called the office. If she saw Gloria on the street, Elizabeth pretended to be blind.

  She was no more blind than most people. Elizabeth noticed other buildings in the neighborhood. Some of their halls gleamed. They shocked her with their simple cleanliness, which was just an absence of filth. Her friend Larry’s building was clean. He paid less rent than she did. He liked her apartment better. It was bigger. Maybe her friend Larry’s hallways were clean because he had a super who was like her aunt and uncle. They cleaned their apartment the whole weekend, together. They enjoyed it. After she found out what they did every weekend, Elizabeth stopped visiting them.

  Maybe, Elizabeth decided, the point was to hire someone who’s compulsive about dirt, someone who has to clean. Someone who’d be happy to do it for nothing. Some halls and buildings were immaculate. She’d seen them. Some garbage cans were not overflowing. Some buildings had enough garbage cans, and garbage wasn’t all over the street. If they had someone who was obsessed with dirt, who was driven to be clean, someone you wouldn’t want to know, but someone who was essentially harmless, and they hired him or her to help Hector, life would be better.

  Roy told Elizabeth she was crazy.

  A man goes to Hell and the Devil says, I usually don’t do this, but I’ll give you your choice of room for eternity. So he takes the man to the first room. All the people are ankle deep in shit. In the second room all the people are knee-deep in shit. In the third room all the people are waist-deep in shit, and they’re drinking coffee. The man says, I guess I’ll take the third room. The Devil says, OK. Then he turns to the people in the third room and yells, Coffee break’s over. Back on your heads.

  Elizabeth knew the halls could be maintained, even in her degraded neighborhood. It couldn’t be accomplished if the super, whose job was to clean and maintain the building, was a pathological junk collector.

  Hector was incapable of throwing anything out. He was attached to garbage. He was like a vampire running a blood bank or a pyromaniac firefighter. The firefighter goes rushing to a fire, he knows what his job is, to put out the fire, but he’s on the fire-red engine, where he’s wanted to be ever since his mouth was snatched away from his mother’s breast, and now he’s racing to a fire, he’s along for the ride, for the thrill of it, and once he’s there, he doesn’t want to extinguish the fire. The flames shoot up around him, they engulf him like a large woman, he’s swallowed up and warm. But he looks around, and he sees his buddies in danger, and they see him. He’s hanging back, or worse, he’s feeding the flames, so he has to pretend to fight the fire he loves. If there aren’t enough fires, he sets them. He’s unfit for his job.

  Hector the super.

  Sol Wachtler was chief justice of New York State. He stalked and threatened a woman who’d rejected him. You’d think that a judge who jails people for committing stupid, venal acts, who get caught by making asinine mistakes, would not make them himself. He can’t stop himself, can’t help himself. He’s possessed, obsessed. Wachtler threatens her—her name is Joy—over his car phone. Traceable. Stupid.

  Hector the super and Gloria.

  There was a Mets catcher, Mackey Sasser. He had to quit playing. He developed a block against throwing the ball back to the pitcher on the mound. He couldn’t throw it. He could throw the ball over the pitche
r’s head, to the second baseman, but not to the pitcher. The Mets put him in the outfield for a while. It wasn’t his position. His position was behind the batter, squatting. But he was neurotic, blocked. His time in baseball was over.

  Hector the super was blocked. He couldn’t do the job he was paid to do.

  Hector’s apartment was incomprehensible. He, his wife, their grown children and their kids and an old dog lived in it. It was like the halls and stairs. But it was also cluttered with old newspapers, boxes, broken knickknacks, unrepairable lamps, and bottles for recycling that were never recycled, only stored. The overwrought apartment was stacked with unusable junk from the street. Sometimes, when Elizabeth happened to be walking downstairs or upstairs, and Hector or his wife happened to open their door a crack, she spied a narrow pathway between piles of boxes. She saw years of accumulation, things hanging from the ceiling and everything thrown together, piled up, even several broken-down wooden dressers stacked on top of each other that reached to the ceiling. She couldn’t take it in. The halls and marble stairs in a turn-of-the-century building built for immigrant labor could be kept tidy, even though the building stood shabby and tired in a mongrel neighborhood. It couldn’t if the super’s attitude toward his own apartment challenged and expanded the limits of what was fit for human habitation. His apartment exceeded standards. It was a mental condition, an excessive response to the burden of the physical world on the mental one. There didn’t seem to be a table or chairs. There didn’t seem to be chairs to sit on or beds, but she couldn’t see that far back into the long apartment.

  They probably ordered out. She and Roy ordered takeout from Chinese, Thai, and Italian restaurants. On another night, Elizabeth was walking along the street. A foreigner approached her.

  —Please, could you ask me, he said.

  —Tell you.

  —What means no menus?

  Buildings have NO MENUS signs in their windows or on their front doors. Thousands of menus for takeout restaurants are thrown into vestibules. It’s the super’s job to get rid of them. Hector never did. He didn’t even save them. Elizabeth picked them up and threw them out. The Big G said it wouldn’t pay to put a notice in the window saying NO MENUS. Restaurants ignored them.

  —No menus means the tenants of the building don’t want restaurants to advertise their menus for takeout food…

  —Takeout food?

  —Takeout food is food you can order over the phone from a restaurant. The restaurant delivers it to your apartment.

  —Delivers?

  —They send a boy or a man on a bicycle usually. He carries the food you ordered.

  —Why take out?

  —So you don’t have to cook. So that you don’t have to go out to eat. You can eat in.

  —Eat in?

  —Eat in your apartment. It’s short for eat in your apartment.

  —No menus, thank you, he said.

  —You’re welcome, Elizabeth said.

  He turned away. He appeared confused. He looked at the sign on the door again. NO MENUS. He was apartment hunting. He turned her way again. He pointed to the sign and, after an exaggerated sigh of relief, mimed for her benefit, he smiled poignantly. He waved good-bye.

  Because of Hector, the landlord regularly received health and building violations. The landlord had to pay the City for the misdeeds of its super. Finally Hector was ordered by the City to clean out the basement. It was a fire hazard.

  Modern architects denied buildings basements and attics, banished them. Basements were where people had stored the inadmissible and unnecessary. The modern idea was rational, no one should hold on to anything, people should live neatly in a clean place in the present, which was ridiculous, since the present is collecting irrationally as the past, but now, with those disorderly shelters gone, everyone had to get rid of things continuously. There was no breathing room for the wretched, the worthless, the disgusting, the disreputable.

  Sometimes Elizabeth understood Hector.

  The basement in this premodern tenement was like his apartment, but it was home to the boiler. Hector’s behavior and activity in the irrational basement was an immediate, imminent fire hazard. Oil, rags, and newspapers were stored near the boiler. He left them to combust.

  Hector stored junk in the hallway. No one could get past his door. You had to shove cartons out of your way. Your clothes got dirty. There was no path. There’d be no chance in a fire. A News Channel 4 Special reported that a fire engulfs a tenement in seconds, no one gets out alive. Everyone in her building would die, no tenant had a chance to escape, because Hector’s crap was blocking the exit. There were fire escapes. But if you weren’t near them, the front door was the rational exit. There was no rational exit. She didn’t want to be burned to death.

  Hector couldn’t contain it, himself. He couldn’t stop it, himself. He couldn’t control himself or what he’d collected. It spread everywhere. The landlord didn’t fire him. The Big G said it was because they were trying to help him. Hector was old, he was an alcoholic, he had worked for them a long time, he was nice. Everyone felt sorry for him. No one wanted him to lose his job. He was just in the wrong job. But they didn’t fire him mostly because Hector worked cheap. He added to his puny salary by collecting bottles, the ones he hardly ever returned. He couldn’t give them in.

  In the spring, summer, and fall, Hector and his wife set up a table in front of the building to sell some of the stuff he found on the street, couldn’t keep, or couldn’t throw out. Elizabeth despaired of the table in front of the building. Elizabeth discarded shoes or clothes in garbage bags. She set them on the sidewalk. Her throwaways landed on the table outside the building. She’d see a pair of her torn underpants or a ripped sweater hours later. Homeless people had no chance to rummage through the garbage bags and find something to wear. Even if she no longer owned it, after throwing it away, she was frustrated to see it lying forlorn on Hector’s table. Mrs. Hector usually sat behind the table, grinning. In the heat of summer, Mrs. Hector relaxed under an umbrella. She watched TV too. They had an extension cord that ran from their apartment to the street.

  No one on the street could have anything for nothing. Even the most useless object. It happened everywhere, shoplifted books, furniture off the back of a truck, the worn and the used, peoples’ lives on the ground, bargains on blankets.

  Everyone wanted a bargain. Even if it was stolen.

  There was a man on Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue at Christmas selling answering machines in their boxes for twenty dollars. Elizabeth was with her friend Helen. The guy hawked hard and fast. A crowd gathered around him.

  —With a remote, twenty dollars. A bargain.

  —Can I see one?

  —Factory sealed.

  The hawker held up a box.

  —Why’s a piece of tape there? It was opened.

  —Factory rejects, lady, you want it or you don’t. Twenty dollars. A bargain. Remote.

  All the while he’s talking to her, he’s selling them briskly to people rushing by, people listening for thirty seconds, people convinced quickly. They take twenties out of their bags or pockets, then move on. A bargain. Elizabeth wanted a new answering machine. She hesitated. Helen said, If you want it, get it. Elizabeth handed the hawker a twenty, took the answering machine. She and Helen went for coffee. Elizabeth opened the box and pulled out a brick.

  That was a while ago.

  It was weird to see your torn underpants, your former underpants, with a fifty cents sign pinned to them. Elizabeth would glance at the table, her rejects, and smile at Hector’s wife.

  Mrs. Hector was friendly. The Hectors were good people. Mrs. Hector always said hello. She lifted her head up and down. She patted the dog. Their dog was big and slow, an old dog with a human name. Elizabeth would shake her head up and down in return or say hello. Then she’d go upstairs. She’d go inside. Elizabeth had no place inside for Mrs. Hector’s table outside, though it was there. She didn’t mention it to anyone.

  �
��He’s the one who’s supposed to keep the halls clean, Roy.

  —Drop it.

  —It’s insane.

  —So what.

  —Why do we have to live like this?

  —Forget it.

  Sometimes Elizabeth had the urge to sneak in and view Hector’s apartment, the way she viewed dead bodies in coffins at funerals. From a distance, tentatively.

  Now Frankie walked out to the street. He usually opened up the laundromat. That’s strange, Elizabeth thought, staring at Frankie, who didn’t notice her at the window, at least she didn’t think he did, because if he did, he would say Hey or Yo, they went back years together, it was too early for the laundromat to open. Frankie probably couldn’t sleep either.

  Elizabeth’s chin rested on her hand. The night air was becoming lighter and thinner, distended.

  Frankie lived in the Lopez apartment two floors below Roy and her. His mother had died not long ago. Elizabeth had known Frankie since he was five. Now he was an adult, he played basketball, he was strong, a regular guy. He was trying to stay away from girls, he told her. He already had two kids, and he was only nineteen. He’d grown up in a way she couldn’t understand. He knew that.

  People with some money can bury their dead or cremate them. The Lopezes were poor in grief. When Frankie’s mother, Emilia, died, the funeral parlor wouldn’t bury her until all the money came from social services. You can expire waiting for social services. Gay Men’s Health crisis gave the family some of the money, Emilia had died of AIDS, but her embalmed body was kept over the weekend in a dismal funeral parlor on Second Avenue. The Lopezes had come to the parlor on a Friday, to take the body away, to bury Emilia, but the parlor wouldn’t let them remove the body. The entire family was there, and they couldn’t bury her. People with money can bury their dead. The funeral parlor charged them over four thousand dollars for a bare room and some miserly solicitousness.

  Roy and Elizabeth paid their respects. The children wanted her to touch their mother’s stiff body. She tried to slip a rose under the swollen hand, but she couldn’t. The children, some grown, smiled at Elizabeth. Then they smiled at their young, dead mother. Emilia. She was a tenderhearted woman. Often she lived in the building, when Roy and Elizabeth had just moved in, Emilia restrained her kids from stealing their mail. They did it once or twice, but Emilia made them return it to Elizabeth. The kids liked to bust open mailboxes. Emilia stopped them. Elizabeth rented a post office box anyway.