Nothing Is Terrible Page 18

  “Come to my house.”

  “Asshole.”

  I looked in on the old man, who sat in bed silently mouthing words, his arms stretched out along his small legs, palms up as if in supplication.

  I went to the bedroom of the erstwhile couple and opened the drawer where Skip kept roughly $10,000 in walking-around money. I grabbed a stack of twenties and joined Mittler on the street, where we had a moral struggle about whether to take a cab, which I won.

  At his condemned house I told Mittler I couldn’t sleep in his hammock with him because my foot needed not to be touching anything. He gathered rectangular naked foam-rubber mats from around the building and laid them down on the floor of his room, one adjacent to the next, creating a soft place for two people to sleep. I told him I did not want him sleeping next to me because he might inadvertently kick my foot in his sleep, plus I needed to be alone without anyone touching me so he should just get up into his damn hammock. He did. We lay in the semidark, I on my adjacent foam-rubber rectangles, he in his hammock above me, not sleeping. I watched the rhombuses of pale light move across the ceiling as the cars and trucks passed on Houston Street.

  An hour into our silence Mittler blurted, “You’re not grateful I cared for you with my survival skills.”

  I told him, using the term dipshit, that he was the whole reason I had a cut foot, and so much for our having been protected by his stupid tree, et cetera. He intimated that the tree was maybe trying to teach me a lesson and I asked him what sort of lesson and he said it was for the tree to teach and me to learn. I said that yes, in fact he was right, that indeed the lesson was not to spend time with him, Mittler, again, ever, and I hopped down the stairs of Mittler’s condemned building.

  Chetty lay asleep on the soft, damp bed of sand that was piled up against the building on the sidewalk. The sun, which just now rose over the borough of Queens, cast a few rays of orange light on the bottoms of Chetty’s dirty, naked, east-facing feet. I hopped down to Houston Street and caught a cab home.

  Home was not the comfy place it once had been. The house smelled bad. Cockroaches and mice strolled the floors and countertops of the kitchen. Dust was general over the rugs, the stairs, the hallways and books. It had been dirty before, but the dirt had not been embedded in the infrastructure as it was now. Outside my window the air grew cold and dark, and trees whose names I did not know gave up their leaves.

  It was all I could do to prevent a mold from consuming the skin and mouth of the old man. I rarely left the house. I thought of the two people I loved best moving over the surface of the earth. I thought of all the things they did and said and were. I hated the stupid way I flitted from one to the other, causing harm in my inimitable carefree manner. I wished to be certain of anything. I spent days at a time in bed reading books. I read The Children’s Hour and Tea and Sympathy and Woodworking for Morons and The Cake Bible and Prolegomena and Tales of Love and A Lover’s Discourse and Seven Types of Ambiguity and Amongst Women and The Long Lavender Look and Berlin Stories and The High Peaks Trail Guide and Divorce Talk and On Death and Dying and Civilization and Its Discontents and Playing and Reality and Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Gibbon. I don’t know Gibbon’s first name. Few people do, but everyone knows that you have to say “Gibbon” after you say “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” That is not something you learn from books but from living with people who read them.

  I didn’t run, reader, I didn’t sprint. I didn’t bounce on the bed. I didn’t punch or tackle anyone, or take a walk. I wiped the skin of Hoving with a warm, soapy cloth, and succumbed to lethargy, and was seventeen.

  In the middle of December, Tommy got out of jail and Skip Hartman moved back to New York City. First thing she did: hired a cleaning service. Second thing: bought calf-length flower-print skirts and pretty clips for her thick gray hair that now hung halfway down her back. She announced that she did not wish to sleep in the bed that I was sleeping in. I volunteered to move in with Hoving, whom I liked. I set up a cot in the living room, shut off the lights, undressed, and inserted my naked body into a sleeping bag on top of the cot in much the same way as I remembered the slick, bare glans of Mittler’s penis, grown soft, sliding back into the clothlike sheath of his foreskin after he made love to me.

  Hoving screamed. “What is it?” I asked.

  “I cannot tolerate the darkness,” he said, half reclining on his seven pillows, for he did not ever lie down that I knew of. “I must be able to look down and see my own body in the middle of the night, else how do I know it is there?”

  I turned on the light and dozed off.

  “Yes, my pretty, yes, my pretty ones, you shall not go hungry,” I heard him say several hours later.

  The radiator in the living room was going full blast. I was covered in sweat. “Who you talking to?” I asked, not entirely awake.

  “The mice in my bed.”

  I jumped up and ran to him. His legs were parted on the white sheet. With his left hand, he pointed down at the area of his crotch where, in the palm of his right hand, he held his thin, elongated old man’s penis and testicles before him carefully, like delicate pets.

  I said, “Those are the mice?”

  “Yes. They’re hungry. Would you be so kind as to buy them a lump of cheese, dear girl? You see I’ve forgotten my wallet.”

  “I would love to but I only have a nickel, which my mother gave me to buy pencils and things for school.”

  “Yes, I quite see your predicament,” he said sadly.

  “Are they good friends?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The mice. Do they treat you well?”

  “Yes, yes. They’re lovely.”

  “They are lovely. Do they give you trouble, ever?”

  “Oh, sometimes they create quite a lot of mischief but just now they are being very gentle.”

  “You don’t ever sleep, do you?”

  “Not a wink.”

  I was trying to be really nice to Skip Hartman because I loved her and I thought, foolishly, that she was mad at me. What I mean is that I knew I had wounded her in her heart, and I just assumed that everyone responded to such wounds as I did—with intense, violent anger.

  Since I slept poorly in Hoving’s room, I went down to the kitchen at four o’clock one morning shortly after Skip’s return and baked the angel food cake with butter-cream frosting that I had read about in The Cake Bible. Later that morning at the breakfast table, after the three of us had eaten the cake, Skip Hartman touched one of her hands with the other. I said, “Why don’t you touch my hand?”

  “I think you know why. We must determine, my dear girl, what you will do and where you will live, now that your eighteenth birthday is approaching and you do not love me in the way that I wish to be loved.”

  “But I think I’m starting to again.”

  She gave me a look.

  “You could try just enduring me,” I said.

  “Yes, that is one of the possibilities I am considering.”

  “That’s what people used to do in the nineteenth century.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I read it.”

  “Where?”

  “I forget.”

  “Husbands also used to lock their wives in insane asylums, as did for example Charles Dickens,” she said.

  “I prefer the enduring thing. We endure each other because we love each other and romantic love is difficult and good and enduring.”

  “Ah, she has become a philosopher of love. I am eating cake with Socrates.”

  I walked out of the kitchen and up to the room from which I had been displaced—my room—and closed the door and wedged a straight-backed wooden chair beneath the doorknob. I opened the French windows and paced the room. I wished for the cold wind to come blowing down the littered avenues of my thoughts and sweep away the garbage. After several hours I sat down on the bed to compose an original love poem for Skip Hartman.

  Just as I was done writing
the first draft of the poem, Skip knocked on the door, and when I didn’t answer she banged on the door, then pounded on the door, then shouted through the door, “Open this fucking door!” While she was doing that, I was not making major structural changes to the poem, I was mainly copying it out in a clean hand, because the visual presentation of a poem is important, especially as I would be giving the poem to the woman who had taught me penmanship. I removed the chair. She came in and said, “It’s freezing in here!” and closed the windows. I handed her the poem, which was basically the same poem Mittler had written to me only without the references to trees.

  She read it.

  “How could you have written this?”

  “Because I love you.”

  “No. What I mean is that I think you did not write this. You didn’t write this.”

  “Yes, that’s what I was doing while you were pounding on the door.”

  “No. You plagiarized.”

  I could not speak. As far as I know—which is not very far in such matters—this was the first time in my life that I could not think of something to say to Skip Hartman. I believed that I understood the predicament of Myra: how can one speak when a lie is untenable and the truth is unbearable?

  “That boy Mittler wrote you a love poem and you thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just change a few words and give it to the old hag. She won’t know the difference.’ ”

  “That’s not fair. I wasn’t thinking ‘old hag.’ ”

  “Yes, you are right. It is not fair of me to say that when you speak to yourself of me you say ‘old hag.’ How terribly unfair of me to say that. My dear, sweet, wild girl,” she said, as the teardrops came quickly one after the other from her eyes, “what have I done to you from the very moment of our acquaintance that has not been unfair? Perhaps nothing. You must leave this house. That you must do so—” she stopped talking for a moment. “That you must do so is as obvious as it is awful. You mustn’t waste a moment more of your precious life in this house. Please. Today you must leave. You must leave within the hour. I will go out of the room now. Whatever you wish to take from this house belongs to you. Once you have left, do not come back. I will pack you a dinner.”

  I wore my hiking boots and a warm coat on my back—one of the big black woolen men’s coats that Skip hated. I stuffed a backpack with half a dozen pairs of underwear, two extra bras, a pair of sneakers, some T-shirts, $10,000 in cash, and a paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice, which I was rereading at the time. I went into the kitchen and saw the tongue sandwich wrapped in plastic on the kitchen counter. I wanted to know where the woman was who had made the sandwich. I tried to think of her. I tried to form the words of whole sentences she had ever said to me in order to carry her out of the house in my mouth. I thought of You are introducing me to aspects of myself that I hadn’t an inkling existed before I met you, and I thought of Touch the bottoms of my feet lightly with your fingers, please, and How humiliated I am to love a child, and I thought of “I think of it with wonder now, the glass of mucus that stood on the table in front of my father all weekend,” and “and he was always quietly arrayed,” and, of course, You mustn’t waste a moment more of your precious life in this house. But all the words she had said changed when I said them. A word her narrow lips had formed perfectly in the air got sloppy on its way across the thick little swamp of my lips. And so instead of what she said, I thought of what she looked like. I stood next to the kitchen counter touching the plastic wrap on the tongue sandwich with my bare fingers. The new wrinkles in Skip Hartman’s face were most satisfying for me to picture. In my mind I saw the small, soft gathering of skin along the line of her jaw and underneath her chin. I saw the radial grooves in the skin at the outer sides of her eyes. I saw the tiny vertical wrinkles that connected the base of her nose to the top of her mouth and resembled the negative image of a skyful of thin bolts of lightning as seen from far away at night. I compared and contrasted the virile, taut tummy of the robust woman I had met in her middle thirties with the larger, wider, softer, puffy belly of the sad, gray-haired lady who had just made me a sandwich. And then I thought of the supreme instance of the skin of her silken white-and-blue breasts swooping down to the rough, bunched-up red-brown skin of her unsuckled nipples. And then I did not know why I had begun to think of those breasts; I knew only that I wanted them here now in the kitchen, so much that it made me tremble, and I knew that I would not have them or hold them or taste them ever again in my life because of having been rash, duplicitous, and young.

  I crossed the threshold of the house and entered the world. A fierce, cold wind blew from east to west down in the street. The air had grown dark and dropped below freezing. I walked into the wind. When I had gone ten feet down the block I heard the tiny sound of the voice of Hoving Harrington Hartman push through the wind. “My child!” he called to me. “I am hungry! Would you fix me a bowl of soup?” I did not turn around. I continued to walk away from him. “Yes, of course,” he said. “You are young and you must enjoy this spirited time of your life,” he called, his voice almost inaudible now. I did not answer him.

  This was a wicked cold night, and bleak. By bleak I now mean that the sky offered nothing in the way of comfort, and my mind responded to the sky’s nothing with nothing of its own. I walked down Lexington Avenue and shivered. I could have checked into a hotel but what then? For someone who continued to keep all people at bay with my perpetually rejuvenating force field of hatred and suspicion, I was oddly unsuited to being alone. I did not know how to be alone.

  I ducked into Grand Central Station to warm up. It was late, and a few derelicts and homeless folks—probably without $10,000 in their pockets—loitered around the enormous room whose ceiling was a comfortingly intelligible miniature of a sky that was in reality chaotic and brutal. I sat on the marble steps near the Vanderbilt exit and tried hard to think about a lot of things at once, kind of like what I’m doing now in the comfort of my own home, as they say. Reader, I have found that living is like memoir writing: when I want most urgently to understand my life, I am least able to do so; later, when it doesn’t matter so much, everything becomes clear for a brief interval; later still, I hardly remember what it was I had wanted so desperately to understand.

  On the marble steps, I recalled Skip Hartman’s remark that everything she had ever done to me was unfair. That was not true. While it may have been unfair of her to have bought me at the age of eleven, it was decidedly fair of her to have rescued me at the age of eleven. And as it was with Skip’s buying and rescuing, so it was with my loving and hating: I am someone who, for better and for worse, doubles up, emotionally and otherwise.

  By tapping his nightstick on the stair next to my thigh, a uniformed police officer communicated to me that I could not sit on the marble steps any longer. In full knowledge that I would somehow manage to hurt the boy who was my destination, I walked down through the bitter cold to East Second Street.

  I saw myself as a runaway train hurtling out of Grand Central Station on its way to a wreck, and carrying one passenger, a little woman who stood in the window waving frantically; was she waving for help, was she waving for everyone to get out of the way, or was she just waving hello?

  12 Unrelenting Pleasure

  Shivering, Distraught, I walked down to Mittler’s building, found him in, and frantically assaulted his arms and lips and head with a series of compliments. “Stop it,” he said. “How’s your foot?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I was standing inside his orange tent, the top of my head grazing its soft ceiling.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  I sat and offered him half the tongue sandwich Skip Hartman had made me. He dissolved powdered fruit-and-vitamin mix in a quart of water and served me in a collapsible tin cup. We listened to each other chew and swallow.

  “Skip kicked me out,” I said.

  He said nothing. We fell asleep on opposite sides of the tent.

  In the morning, Mittler made us tea and showed me his ne
w device. “You can puncture any part of your body with this. Well, not any part, but any part you can fit in between here and here.” This thing looked as if a small sewing machine had mated with a gun.

  “What’s the point?”

  “The point is I’m going to puncture my mouth.”

  “Puncture your mouth? That’s like making a hole in a hole.”

  “I mean my lip.”

  “Which lip?”

  He pointed to a place on his upper lip that, were he to sneer, would fold upward.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “To have an actual wound in a place that’s kind of already wounded anyway.”

  “Your lip is wounded?”

  “My mouth.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I can never say what I mean.”

  “So a hole in your lip is going to fix that?”

  “No!”

  “What then?”

  “It’ll just look cool and kind of wounded.”

  “It’ll look like a moth is eating your face.”

  “No, it’s a tiny hole, and you put something through it like a small gold ring.”

  “Oh, you mean you’re going to pierce your lip. Why the hell didn’t you say so?”

  “See what I mean?”

  It was true that Mittler, despite the forcefulness of his ideas, spoke awkwardly He became graceful and found peace in tasks that required physical technique. And so I felt pleasure in sipping the tea he had made and in watching him oil and load his lip-ring gun; pleasure but not happiness, for pleasure is just pleasure and not a balsam against disappointment, separation, grief.

  “Merry Christmas, guys,” someone said. It was Chetty. He had been hiding under an army blanket at the back of the tent, and was syringe-thin.

  “It’s Christmas?” Mittler and I said.

  “Wow, I can’t believe that bitch threw me out on Christmas Eve!”

  “The little orphling was abandoned on Christmas Eve?” Chetty asked. “Mildred and I have come to cheer everybody up. Oh, Mildred! You may come in!” Mildred entered, nearly as thin as Chet, topless, wearing a long Indian print skirt. Thick tufts of light brown hair grew from under her arms. Her breasts were much like those of a boy. “I present to you Mildred Wanwood,” Chetty said. Mildred curtsied shyly. “Mildred likes to stand alone outside someone’s private dwelling and wait to be asked in. She can’t shake off the loneliness of property ownership. She grew up in Englewood Cliffs. Mildred, give the children their toys.”