No Lease on Life Page 8

  The young super might grab his wrench and strike violently at her skull, knocking out enough brain cells to alter her functioning. She’d be mentally disabled. Or, if the car landed on her legs, maybe she wouldn’t die, she’d only be crippled for life. That would be worse than death. She’d have to move out of her rent-stabilized apartment on the fifth floor. It was a walk-up.

  Elizabeth held her vulnerable head in her hands. She rocked.

  She knew about several people’s failed suicide attempts. They were in wheelchairs or using canes. Everyone hated them for what they’d done to themselves. There’s no sympathy for failure and no sympathy for failed suicides who end up crippled. Failure doesn’t negate failure. Elizabeth ended a friendship with someone who tried to kill himself. It was cruel, it was inexplicable. Cruelty and kindness are. Elizabeth had the sense that the guy would hurt someone else, her, because you hurt the ones you love, who are within reach, because he failed at killing himself.

  Another light went on. A first-floor window. Then a fourth-floor window. Maybe other supers were waking up, readying themselves to meet and greet the day. There’d be garbage on the streets. They knew that. They were prepared for that.

  A woman super, Polish or Ukrainian, created a racket every other day, fixing her garbage cans. She was pretty old, so she couldn’t lift them. She’d drag them from one part of the sidewalk to another, drag drag drag, clank clank clank. Elizabeth never called the cops or yelled out the window even though the woman woke her. The old Polish woman did her job, she kept her part of the sidewalk clean. She placed the covers on the garbage cans. She wasn’t Hector.

  It was too early for the old Polish super in her weather-beaten brown coat, flannel nightgown, funny plastic shoes, and babushka. Summer or winter. A jogger trotted by. Elizabeth ignored joggers. Especially when they spun their heels at red lights and jogged in place beside her, waiting for the light to change. They panted and sweated and gulped water from plastic bottles. She expected them to drop dead next to her.

  If Elizabeth became crippled and ugly, no one would feel sorry for her, even though it wasn’t her fault, and she wasn’t trying to commit suicide, although some people would say, Living in that neighborhood is suicide, what’d she expect? Crippled, she’d have to move. She wouldn’t be able to walk up or down four flights of stairs, and no one would be able to carry her. Not even Roy. He’d probably leave her. She wouldn’t be able to exercise. She’d become enormously fat. She’d wallow in her weight, her rolls of fat. It would be her only reward. Maybe she’d need an oversized wheelchair. She wondered if they were available or if you had to have them custom made. That would cost a fortune. She had no place to keep it.

  She didn’t want to move. She didn’t want to be crippled. The man next door was crippled. He had a ground-floor apartment. He’d never move. He couldn’t roll into Kim’s Video Store because it wasn’t wheelchair friendly. The wheelchair man told her that. She thought of speaking to the owner. He’d begun as a dry cleaner and branched into video stores. He probably never thought about wheelchair access.

  She dreaded apartment hunting, standing in the center of an empty apartment with a rent she couldn’t afford, even though she’d rather die than live in it. It was grotesque, being enclosed by four shabby walls, and not being able to afford it, or even finding yourself considering renting it. It was tenement despair. What you really wanted was inaccessible. With or without a wheelchair. Pathetic. It made her want a house that wasn’t for rent, that couldn’t be taken from her, anywhere, a house anywhere except in the country. She knew some people who liked to apartment hunt. It was inconceivable. It’s what makes horse racing. No one she knew followed the races.

  —Even a journey of a thousand miles begins with the following cancellations, Roy said once.

  Elizabeth’s murderous impulses were ordinary, that’s what made them dangerous. She’d never do time, like Jeanine, who expected it, like middle-class kids expect to go to college. Elizabeth wouldn’t do time, unless life became more unpredictable than it had been. It could happen in time. Time could do it to her, do her, anything could happen.

  The super who hated her walked back into his apartment building.

  She even hated the way he walked. It was an insolent, arrogant swagger, almost indecent. He disappeared into his pitiful, creepy world, hidden in his apartment building. His building was next to the laundromat.

  The laundromat was one of the centers on the block. She could watch the dryers from her window. She and Roy knew when to do the laundry. From their windows they could see how many dryers were empty. They could also check when their dryer had stopped spinning.

  It’s impossible to be on both sides of the window simultaneously. Windows were paradoxical. She was vulnerable with them, vulnerable without them. She had to be wary of attack, but she had to be open. She was not an eyeless mollusk in a cave, she needed air and light. At the window, she made an effort to think about how she was seen and if she was being seen. She was like a window, she thought, sometimes transparent, usually paradoxical, and always open to tragicomic views of life.

  She liked watching people do their laundry, but she didn’t like doing it. Roy did the laundry more than she did. It didn’t bother him. Occasionally she found herself enjoying it. She recognized that the pleasure might be the onset of a disease, wholesomeness. Clothes just became dirty again, dirtier, so the activity was endless and unimportant. People washed and dried their clothes in moments of great, incommensurable despair. For many, it was their finest hour.

  It depended on your point of view. Views were always a problem. Elizabeth didn’t own her view. A builder could buy air rights to the building across the street and destroy what she saw, steal her light.

  Finally Jeanine finished the guy off. They left the doorway. Maybe he was a cop.

  —All the guys I have used to be cops. Isn’t that weird? Some no-good man-that’s my worst addiction. I’m addicted to no-good men.

  The sun was orange and furious. It was engorged, insensible. There was nothing Elizabeth could do about Jeanine, the elusiveness of sleep, or the stagnant effects of memory. Sleep wouldn’t absolve her anyway. It wasn’t her friend. Who was a friend. Friends and enemies come and go. They’re turncoats, reversible. She hated reversible coats. She didn’t see the point.

  Elizabeth turned herself inside out and threw herself into reverse, into regret, remorse, and the puny unspeakable.

  You wonder why as you sit and nurse old wounds and new sores you wonder why I vanished that night, you were inside yourself, rotting like dead meat, your paranoid stories poisoned me, it’s my fault I listened, I’m tired of doing that, even so I love our past, isn’t that funny, but I can’t be next to it, you don’t hear yourself, you have no idea.

  She wouldn’t have friends or enemies for long because life was mercilessly and mercifully short. Her days were numbered. Her nights didn’t count. She had to put up with noise. Noise was the voice of the people. Raucous laughter erupted from somewhere. Then a bloodcurdling scream and more bloodstopping laughter.

  Hector was the super of her building. He couldn’t take care of it. He spoiled it, he dirtied it. His very existence negated what he was paid to do. She had to accept that. The problem isn’t always plain incompetence and poor administration. It must have to do with why people take the jobs they do, even if they think they don’t want to do them. They take them because they can’t do them. Maybe they hate what they’re doing. Not being able to do it, constitutionally, is another thing. Working a job that attacks your worst habit occurs all the time. It’s not an accident. People who don’t understand mental illness and who are punitive, people with a little money, moderately well-off people, think neuroses are a luxury. They blather on about poor people, how the poor don’t have time to be neurotic. It only demonstrates the narrow-mindedness of the nonpoor. If they’re out of work, which makes them poor and crazy, the poor have all the time in the world to be neurotic.

  Rich people were block
ed. Poor people were blocked. They blocked other people. She saw them. They set up obstacles for themselves, for her and everyone else. It was amazing she could walk down the block.

  Elizabeth pictured a listing in the employment section of the Times:

  HELP WANTED

  Someone who would never have considered it, because it’s menial work, someone who finds pleasure in fixing

  Someone who would never have considered it, because it’s menial work, someone who finds pleasure in fixing and washing things, think about this: You might consider becoming a super. If anxious about maintenance, you’d do the job well, if worried about spots and grime, you might be the one. You could achieve success in an underestimated field. Any tenant can attest to how important a super is.

  It’s a small world, someone said to Jackie Curtis.

  Not if you have to clean it, Jackie Curtis answered.

  Her day was about to eclipse her night.

  Some will never be clean enough, some can’t clean, some don’t want to, some are doomed, some want others to do it for them, some hate putting their hands in hot water. Some love filth and shit and dirt, some roll in it. Not that many, but some. Hector is one. But some people love cleaning so much, they can hardly admit it. Their hands become raw and dry and they keep their hands in steaming water and they soak off life’s filth, and they make themselves smell good and they let nothing collect on their tables or on the floor. They’re happy. They’re clean. They think they’re safe. They’ve kept life’s grime off them. It’s a constant battle. They’re private sanitation workers. Cleanliness is next to anything. It’s just itself. It becomes its opposite, a viler identical twin.

  Maybe Hector understood this and didn’t even try. He collected instead. If it can’t be cleaned, it can be collected.

  Anyone can collect anything, any dumb trinket is collectible. Put enough of them together and you’ll get money for the collection. Some other moron will give you money because you collected hotel matchbooks, coasters, or autographs from movie stars who’d spit on you if they could. Empty feelings were temporarily negated by being smothered and surrounded by thousands of the same kind of thing, mounting and mounted. People start collecting on a whim. It just happened, they say. They just started. They started with one baseball card, porcelain cupid, button, postcard, and then it took over their lives, consumed them. They never know why. They say, I thought I’d get another one, then I wanted another one, and suddenly, I wanted this one, and then I wanted all of them. I had to have the whole set, all of them. The stuff’s all around them, in boxes or cartons, or displayed on shelves. It fills their houses and their lives, the irresistible, the harmless. Their impulses are everywhere. The stuff that isn’t collectible collects inside them, silently, cunningly.

  What she collected kept her from sleeping. Elizabeth shook herself. She didn’t want to go under.

  Why do WASPs like taking planes?

  For the food.

  Two men strolled along the street, talking casually. To them everything was cool. They were in love, they were inviolable. On the next corner they could be murdered by a moron. She’d probably be murdered. Her life would come to its pathetic statistical end, and she wouldn’t have murdered anyone, wouldn’t know the thrill.

  Mindless, heartless, she was on the edge. She was close to the bliss of being unconscious, bodiless. She rubbed her eyes.

  Frankie came out on the street again. It was time to open the laundromat. Frankie stretched floridly. His long tan arms flew out from his body and reached to the torrid sky. He stretched his legs. He was a dancer, limbering up. He glanced both ways. He wasn’t afraid of cars. He took in the street. It was his as much as anybody’s. It was his more than anybody’s. He took out the key to the laundromat. He unlocked the padlock. He lifted the heavy iron gate on the plate-glass window. He pushed it up and grunted. The heavy gate made a dramatic, yawning sound.

  Frankie’s presence was a comfort. Frankie was doing what he was supposed to do. Elizabeth’s eyes shut. Her head dropped. Her troublesome body relaxed. She slid onto the couch. She slid below the window and disappeared from sight. Frankie entered the laundromat.

  The man in the third-floor window closed his blinds. He turned on the light. He dressed. He cursed.

  Jeanine was on another couch, at home, coming down. Her mother was screaming at her, Jeanine ignored her.

  —You pay to stay home, you pay to stay somewhere else. I gotta give her drugs, because I know she has a fit. She’s had a hard time. My mother’s father raised them. Her mother abused them from when she was little. My mother was in the hospital for three years because she was getting beaten very badly. Then they grew up in homes, because they took them away from her father because back then it was a man with little girls. Then my mother came back home, and she was with my father since she was thirteen years old. My father was older, twenty-six, she was like thirteen or something. Hello. She should have realized then the man had a problem.

  Elizabeth couldn’t help herself. She tucked the street, the endless night, away, into her, she couldn’t keep her eyes open, and when she couldn’t see what was going on, all the details, the sidewalk antics, when everything was crushed, broken up, and shoveled into the unruliness called her, exceeding her, all more and less than her, then sleep found her, against her will.

  Now Elizabeth didn’t exist to herself. She wasn’t anywhere.

  A circus tent fell down, they were trapped, rabid dogs were roaming, cars overturned, bridges down, wolves with blood on their mouths grimaced, some people escaped, they carried everything on their backs, there were cresting waves and falling screams, a vast territory with decrepit buildings, and something was moving very fast, she was in slow motion.

  Her feet were stuck, the boss was not in his office, and her mother was sad, she was unable to walk, and small people, dwarfs, made high-pitched yowling noises, they were bedraggled, they were children, and no one had shoes on, her mother was wasting away, dying, she didn’t think anyone loved her, she couldn’t remember who loved her, she wouldn’t ever again know where she was, and Elizabeth, who was old, then young, a teenager, walked unevenly into the movie theater, with her mother, who was frail, she had to be carried to her seat, but she didn’t have her ticket, and handed in her shoes which didn’t have heels on them, and a black ten-year-old boy with a golden boombox told her a glass bottle had exploded, white hyenas had thrown bottles at him, and the young boy dropped his pants, and there were shards of glass stuck in his ass, he was bleeding, Jeanine was in a doorway, a woman’s face appeared in a mirror, she was putting on make-up, her face was a nightmare, she was almost dead, and popcorn was overflowing, and greasy, and her shoes were wrong, and they wouldn’t let her in, she pulled a long hair from her coat, and her mother was lost, it would be her turn next, where’s the ticket to leave, and there was jostling for a place, ladders collapsing, and noise, but somehow she entered the hall, nothing on the screen, a rope around her waist, she was tugged along, she saw some friends, she was naked suddenly, they asked, what are you doing here, you weren’t supposed to be here, you don’t live here…

  YOU DON’T LIVE HERE.

  THIS IS A BLOCK PARTY.

  I have never believed in decorating cells.

  —Nelson Mandela,

  on visiting his former cell at Robben Island

  We can only laugh when a joke has come to our help.

  —Sigmund Freud

  Day and Night

  In jail, after she’d murdered the moron, she’d be given one phone call, but only after she’d demanded it. She’s gonna lawyer up, a sleek cop would whisper to his partner, the beer-bellied one. Elizabeth didn’t know who she’d phone from jail. Roy would think it was a joke. She didn’t have a lawyer.

  I have the right to remain silent. I have the right to remain single. I have the right to live with someone. I have the right to have a lawyer. I have the right to be sad. I have the right to be stupid. I have the right to be happy when other people are
miserable. I have the right to make one telephone call.

  Silently Elizabeth gave herself a Miranda warning. You aren’t Latin, you aren’t going to wiggle your hips for money and wear fruit on your head, you aren’t going to turn yourself in to the authorities, even though you are guilty. You will try to destroy the authority within. You are not going to destroy yourself. You will sleep tonight. You are going to quit your job. You are going to tell the fat man off. You are going to tell her to leave you alone.

  A car alarm shrieked. The block’s wake-up call. Elizabeth flipped over on the couch. She covered her ears with her hands. The alarm screeched, wailed, pulsated, pounded. It demanded and sounded like inevitability. It was torture. There were fewer car alarms. No one paid attention to them because they cried wolf.

  The chimes on the church across the street rang dully a few minutes after the hour. 8 A.M.

  Her friend used to keep a dozen eggs on his windowsill. When a car alarm went off under his window, especially when he was sick and couldn’t sleep, he was always ready to toss eggs. He was tall and had long arms. She never asked him if he hit a car. It was too late to ask. He was dead.

  Elizabeth watched the clock tick silently while the car alarm screamed. If one of her foes saw her throw eggs, and that foe owned the car or knew the person whose car it was, if the young super caught her doing it, it could mean trouble for her on the block. She worried about retaliation.

  Cops didn’t respond to car alarms. She didn’t want to think about her dead friend. If she phoned the cops, they’d say they were sending a car. They always said that.

  Being alive was its own reward.

  Roy was sleeping. So was Fatboy. The alarm clock rang. Unconscious, Roy reached for it. He had a hard time finding it on the floor. He did and shut it off. He was still in Roy’s underworld. The car alarm stopped. Heavy feet stomped up the stairs. Doorbells buzzed. Their doorbell. Twice. Rebellious, resigned, Elizabeth grunted and crossed the room. She walked to the broken clothes closet. She was naked. She pulled on her thickest robe. It was the Con Ed man.