Nothing Is Terrible Page 11

  Mittler was, you may remember, the boy who had cut me so lovingly with his pocketknife in grade school. I think I had forgotten about him without ceasing to love him. I wanted to rush into his arms and hug him and press my whole body against him, but his was a tough, sharp, unhuggable body. The best I could do was to say “Mittler!” piteously, as if I were saying the name of a puppy that had been rescued from under the ice of a frozen pond. His eyes flicked toward me and away again.

  “Come in,” I said. I opened the door wider, so that my visitors could see the used socks lying randomly on the floor of the entrance foyer, and the layer of dust covering the oaken banister of the staircase.

  “You come out,” Dierdre said. “It stinks in there.”

  Dierdre and I sat next to each other on the front stoop and Mittler sat behind and above and between us on the landing. I had to crane my neck to see him, which I did continuously in the hot sunlight. I was looking for vestiges of the Mittler I remembered, and I found few; the amorphous earth garments were about the extent of it. I was trying to see if the nape of his neck was what it once had been. His nape had left its mark on my consciousness—I retained a lot of affection for the two dark points of hair that grew back there on the day I tried to have sex with him in the boys’ bathroom. Sitting on the stair below him, I really had to contort myself to glimpse the back of his neck. With economical head movements, he did not let me.

  “Mittler’s famous now, right, Mittler?”

  “Fame is rot,” whispered Mittler.

  “Mittler’s famous and brave and lives in New York City in a tent.”

  “Is that true, Mittler?”

  “Is what true?”

  “The tent.”

  “Sometimes I sleep in a tent and sometimes at my dad’s house.”

  “He sleeps in a tent in Central Park!” Dierdre said. Dierdre was the most annoying person in the world. When you’re ten years old, annoyingness can give you a kind of authority. When you’re sixteen, you’re just annoying.

  “Mittler, tell her about how you fought off those guys from your tent in the middle of the night in Central Park.”

  “No.”

  While both Mittler and Dierdre were unhappy, Dierdre’s unhappiness seemed false compared to that of Mittler, who could barely part his lips to speak, he was so authentically depressed.

  “Did you fight off some guys, Mittler?”

  “Yes he did because you see Mittler has turned his back on humanity, so he sleeps in this tent somewhere in Central Park which he won’t tell me where, and he was sleeping one night when these boys who were out wilding came up and attacked the tent and they were kind of hitting him with baseball bats through the fabric of the tent and Mittler’s been doing all these push-ups lately? So he comes out of the tent and takes one of the guys’ baseball bats away from him and hits him with it and the other guys run away.”

  “Mittler, did that happen?”

  “No.”

  “Mittler is the Central Park Tent Man from the tabloids. He has a whole belief system.”

  “What’s your belief system, Mittler?”

  “My belief system is, everything everyone else believes, I don’t believe.”

  I liked the new misanthropic verbal style of Mittler. He had whittled down the ruminations of his early youth into these brief pronouncements, which stung and which he wouldn’t even look at you while saying. He stared at a little crust of dark red sandstone on the stoop and then picked at it with his fingernail until he realized I was watching him pick at it. He stopped picking and sat there much like a stone himself. The new Mittler: vibrant, yet almost dead.

  Dierdre said, “Mittler wakes at sunrise each morning and makes whalebone carvings. He doesn’t eat meat. He believes in photosynthesis for all living creatures. He sleeps in a hammock suspended over broken glass. He does yoga. He doesn’t need anybody. He takes no pleasure in life. He’s thinking of giving up movies.”

  “What movies do you watch, Mittler?” I asked.

  “Only Japanese movies now. Slow movies about thirst and violence and death. I’ll be giving those up soon too. They pollute you. I don’t want to think anymore. Thinking prevents you from living.”

  I was leaning back and arching up off the step I was on, trying to look up that soft, dark place, Mittler’s nape. He turned his head slightly.

  “Mittler doesn’t believe in love,” Dierdre said.

  “You don’t believe in love?”

  “Love is banal,” Mittler said. “Love is a mob religion. Millions of people love every day. How vulgar. Mobs of people loving two by two.”

  “Then why did you come here?” I said. He seemed to implode when I said it.

  “Basically I dragged him,” Dierdre said. “He needs to resolve issues.”

  Mittler said, “ ‘Basically.’ Is that all you can say? Is everything ‘basically’ to you? You dragged me or you didn’t drag me. ‘Basically.’ How about shut up from now on. Take a vow of silence, Dierdre.”

  “Well, you know, fuck you, Mittler, because I am trying to help you and no one appreciates me, and Mary, you’re looking at me the whole time like I’m some ant or piece of dog doo so just fuck everybody except me who’s sitting on this stoop right now.”

  I kept quiet because have you ever noticed how people attack each other and they are wrong, and then people defend themselves and they are also wrong?

  Skip Hartman approached the stoop carrying two hand-tailored shopping bags. For a woman who was mostly restraint, she cried, “Oh, Mittler!” orgasmically, rushed to him, clung to him, and pressed his forehead to her lips. I was not jealous to see my Skippy doing something I was too chicken to do, but satisfied to be represented in the world by one so bold and clear of mind as she. She released Mittler back into the air. His skin was blotchy. He stood still and centered back into himself and, through utter stillness, got the blood back down out of the patches of his face. Skip ran a hand affectionately through Dierdre’s hair and said, “Darling, you’re so pretty.”

  We went into the kitchen, which was about the worst room of the house. “I could clean this place for you in a day,” Mittler said.

  Skip said, “Well, Mittler, that’s very nice—”

  “I don’t do things because they’re nice. I do things because they’re useful. I need money for food.”

  “Oh, please, Mittler, you’re sixteen and your dad has a huge house in the suburbs,” Dierdre said.

  “I cannot accept your offer, if offer indeed it was,” Skip said, “because, though it may not look like it, I do have rather a delicate arrangement with another to clean house.” Skip seemed pathetic then but I loved her anyway. I noticed with interest that I loved her even more when she did things that I found disagreeable. I was sixteen and I think it is fair to say that my ability to love was improving, even as I continued to express my love awkwardly and inconsistently at best. I nuzzled her armpits with the top of my head, as I often did in bed or while we were standing alone in the kitchen. “Could you stop that now?” she said to me.

  “You’re a fool,” I said. “Stephen Samuels is taking advantage of you and you’re letting him ’cause he’s black.”

  “How would you know such a thing?”

  “Doesn’t take a forty-year-old.”

  “Fine. Clean the house, Mittler. What do I care? Stephen Samuels can screw himself.” I loved when she lost adult perspective and behaved rashly. Who knows what kind of teenage years she had? Probably restrained and boring.

  “I’ll be here at eight A.M. tomorrow with my cleaning tools,” Mittler said.

  “Eight A.M. is not convenient for us, Mittler,” Skip said.

  “Eight A.M. is when I can do it.” Mittler had found a wall near the kitchen door to press his bunched-up back against à la Malcolm X in the days leading up to his assassination.

  “As a housecleaner, you cannot bend the world to your will,” Skip said.

  “That’s when I can do it.”

  “Then you will no
t do it.”

  “I have to leave now.” He sprang up off the wall and pivoted neatly toward the door.

  “Don’t listen to her,” I said. “Eight A.M. is fine.”

  Skip said, “Damn you! You can’t do that!”

  “Yes I can.”

  “All right, Mittler. Fine.”

  Mittler pivoted back, bowed to Skip, repivoted, and was gone.

  Dierdre had sat down at the kitchen table, soaking up the scene. Skip stared at me. She said, “Dierdre, Mary and I would like to be alone.”

  “But I just got into the city. It’s like a whole day. Where am I supposed to go?”

  “You are several blocks from the Metropolitan Museum.”

  “Eeew.”

  “Well, you may do what you like but you must fend for yourself.”

  “Can’t I just stay here for a while? I won’t be in you guys’ way.”

  “Good.” Skip took me harshly by the arm and led me up the stairs to our bedroom. There, she said, “You have humiliated me in front of your friends.”

  “Well, that’s because you—”

  “Wait, I’m not finished. It is hard, but I am getting used to it. Furthermore, I understand it is often my own rigidity that leads to these moments of humiliation. I am trying to learn.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Sorry I humiliated you.”

  We stared at each other. There was a look of shy hopefulness in her face. This was a good moment for us. It was beautiful to be wrong together with Skip Hartman.

  She attacked me with an arduous kiss. She removed my clothes and her own as fast as she could. While I stood in the center of the room, she gave my body’s entire surface the vigorous Hartman rubdown. She picked me up over her shoulder as if she were a fireman risking his life to save me from a burning building. She laid me down on my side on the bed and put her hard fingers with the close-cropped nails inside of me. I loved the chaotic effect of Skip Hartman’s passion on my mind. I loved the little unrelated thoughts that passed through me as she took over my body. She caressed and squeezed the various and diverse parts of me with one hand, while with the other she did something shockingly pleasurable inside me. After a while, she straddled my hip and rocked hypnotically back and forth with more and more and more pressure and speed until she practically drove me down inside the soft foam core of the mattress. All the while my mind, working on some principle of its own, formed a hazy picture of Dierdre, sitting in our kitchen, doing absolutely nothing with nowhere to go and nobody to call for her, a child at loose ends in a house of lovers.

  Skip Hartman did not wish to be at home when Mittler cleaned house, so she left at 7:59 A.M. Even when she did tell me where she was going, there hovered about a Hartman departure an air of mystery. I didn’t think she was necessarily lying to me, but on the other hand she could say “I’ll be spending the afternoon at Lord and Taylor” and have in mind a different meaning of Lord & Taylor than the standard one. Or she could say, as she did that Saturday morning, “I will be at the green market in Union Square. The best wine and fish and corn are available at this hour, and then it’s nice to linger among the vegetation for the morning, to walk down along the vegetables and inhale their vapors. People are polite at the green market. These are the same people who push at Balducci’s and Fairway. People develop gentle farm manners. The average New Yorker rises to the level of the nobility of the vegetation at the open-air market in Union Square.” She could say that, and its meaning would stand in the world not literally but like one of the modern poems that she loved so well. In a modern poem about the green market, the green market wouldn’t be the green market, it would be death, or maybe longing. Whereas when I say, “Skip Hartman left the house and the sky was bleak,” I mean only that she left and it was bleak.

  I was thin and pale and dark, as I may already have told you (and I have no idea what I’ve already told you; Don’t look back could be my autobiographer’s motto), but I was not the languishing kind of thin and pale and dark. I was the wiry kind, as in electrical wire, with electricity running through, so it was hard for me to stay in bed past 7:30 A.M. But the anticipation of being alone in the house with Mittler was so intense that I could not move. Well, I could squirm; I could get up and do mattress trampoline exercises; I just could not leave the perimeter of the bed, at least not until Mittler rang the bell a minute after Skip left.

  “Is Miss Hartman here?”

  “ ‘Miss Hartman’ is not here.”

  “I’ll get to work then.” He moved past me into the front hall with a light blue vinyl suitcase.

  “What’s in the suitcase?”

  “Cleaning equipment.”

  “What kind of cleaning equipment?”

  “Sponges, mostly.” He stood within view of the mirror in the front hall, seeming to try not to look at himself in it. “I’m uncomfortable,” he said. “I’d like to be supervised by Miss Hartman.”

  “Supervised how?”

  “Like she would be here so you couldn’t say things like ‘supervised how.’ ”

  “Mittler, you’re cute!” I tried a hug. His body became a device for not being hugged. He poked me in the breast with something sharp, his fist, I guess it was.

  “I’m leaving,” he said.

  “Don’t! I’ll let you alone. It’ll be like I’m not even here.”

  Mittler shrank into a decision-making stance with his palms pressed against his thighs. “I’ll start in the kitchen,” he said.

  I had the air conditioner in the bedroom blasting against the heat and humidity. The sky looked as if it was about to rain, which is what I meant before about the sky being bleak, in case that wasn’t clear. I cowered under the fluffy duvet, except for my head, which poked out the top of the duvet so that I could read poems with it. I started to read one that goes,

  Time will say nothing but I told you so,

  Time only knows the price we have to pay;

  If I could tell you I would let you know.

  I didn’t like that one and started another that goes, “Two loves have I of comfort and despair.” I didn’t like that and tried the one that goes,

  Lucky and Unlucky

  mean the same thing, like flammable and inflammable.

  Then I threw all the poetry books on the floor, because what good is poetry if it doesn’t calm you down? I went all the way under the fluffy duvet and I lay under there breathing in the air I breathed out, to the rhythm of “Time will say nothing but I told you so.”

  Soon I got up and did some deep knee bends and some stretching and sprintwork in the bedroom and hallway. Then I did stairwork while Mittler was trying to vacuum the stairs.

  “You smell like ammonia,” I said on the way down.

  “You have something on your shirt,” I said on the way up.

  He said, “Cut it out or I’m leaving.”

  I cooled down in the bedroom and took a shower in the rainforest environment of the bathroom and got dressed. I got undressed and put my flannel pj’s back on and got under the covers and went to sleep and woke up and called Tommy.

  “Hello?” Myra said.

  “Myra, put Tommy on.”

  “Hello?” Tommy said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Me who?”

  “Mary.”

  “I can’t horse around now. We’re moving.”

  “What?”

  “We saved up enough money to move into a nice house up north of here.”

  “How thrifty of you.”

  “I’d love to stay on the phone and be insulted but the movers are here.”

  “What town?”

  “Marmot, the new planned and gated community. We’re quite impressed with it.”

  “What’s the phone number up there?”

  “Hartman has the information.”

  “How come nobody told me you were moving?”

  “I have to go supervise.”

  “You’re
a dick.”

  “Nice talking with you.”

  Mittler stood in the bedroom doorway with the vacuum cleaner hose in one hand and the body of the vacuum in the other. “I have to clean in here.”

  “Hello, Mittler.” I was in my pajamas on the edge of the bed with the phone in my hand.

  “I can’t clean with you in here.”

  “So skip this room.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “Is what supposed to be funny?”

  “Skip this room.”

  “Oh.”

  “I can’t Skip the room.”

  “Why?”

  “I gave my word.”

  “Oh, your word.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You have a word, and you give it.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Let me ask you something,” I said.

  “What?”

  “What do you do every day?”

  “Like what do you mean?”

  “You wake up in your tent in Central Park and …?”

  “I meditate.”

  “What kind of meditation, transcendental?”

  “No, it’s my own kind of meditation which I developed. It’s similar to worrying.”

  “Then what do you do?”

  “Breakfast.”

  “Which is?”

  “Pint of coffee.”

  “How do you make coffee in a tent?”

  “I have a small portable camping stove that burns white gas which I have to go up to Scarsdale to get because it’s illegal in the city because somebody like me with a different political philosophy might be tempted to make an explosive device and blow something up with the white gas which I haven’t ever seriously considered doing. I don’t make the coffee in the tent I make it on the lip of the tent.”

  “Oh. The lip.” Mittler’s neck got blotchy.

  “You’re making it hard for me to clean the room.”

  “How about after the coffee?”

  “I pace.”

  “Like back and forth in your tent?”