Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (16 page)

He was the only man I ever knew, this pedagogue in pajamas, who did not want power over me. In conversation, he was always testing my independence of thought. Once, I remember, he observed, “Marxism has tended to flourish in Catholic countries.”

“What about China?” I said.

“Is China your idea of a Catholic country?”

“No, but, um—”

“See what I mean?” he said, laughing.

I had learned my lesson.

To divest himself of sexual power over me, he encouraged me to go dancing with other men while he was away. Then we held regular critiques of the boyfriends I had acquired. My favorite, a good-looking Tex-Mex poet named Dan Juan, provided us with rich material for instruction and drill.

“What is it you like about Dan Juan?” the Chairman asked me once.

“I’d really have to think about it,” I said.

“Maybe he’s not so interesting,” said the Chairman.

“I see your point,” I said. Then, with the rebelliousness of the politically indolent, I burst into tears.

The Chairman took my hand and brooded about my situation. I think he was afraid that helping me to enter into ordinary life—to go out with Dan Juan and then to learn why I should not be going out with him and so forth—might not be very much help at all.

Finally, he said, “I don’t like to think you’re alone when I’m not here.”

“I’m not always alone.”

“I’d like to give you a radio.”

THE radio never reached me, although I do not doubt that he sent it. His only other gifts we consumed together: the bottles of rice wine, which we drank, talking, knowing that while this was an individual solution, it was simple to be happy. Now other women have pointed out to me that I have nothing to show for the relationship. Adenauer gave Fran a Salton Hotray. Stalin gave Harriet a set of swizzlesticks with little hammer-and-sickles on the tops. William Dean Howells gave my Great-Aunt Jackie a diamond brooch in the form of five ribbon loops terminating in diamond-set tassels, and an aquamarine-and-diamond tiara with scroll and quill-pen motifs separated by single oblong-cut stones mounted on an aquamarine-and-diamond band. That I have no such mementos means, they say, that the Chairman did not love me. I think they are being too negative, possibly.

THE Chairman believed that the most revolutionary word is “yes.” What he liked best was for me to kiss him while murmuring all the English synonyms for “yes” that I could think of. And although neither of us believed in a life beyond this one, I feel to this day that I can check in with him if I close my eyes and say yes, yeah, aye, uh-huh, indeed, agreed, natch, certainly, okeydoke, of course, right, reet, for sure, you got it, well and good, amen, but def, indubitably, right on, yes sirree bob, sure nuff, positively, now you’re talking, yep, yup, bet your sweet A, O.K., Roger wilco over and out.

1977

VERONICA GENG

OUR SIDE OF THE STORY

A
NECDOTAL
material has its place—neither Ed nor I is in a position to deny that. In fact, we got pretty deeply into that issue on our first date, drinking Rolling Rock beer at the Superba and telling all the stories we’d each heard about how horrible the other person was—stories that would curl your hair—and then finding out that while they weren’t untrue, exactly, they hadn’t been put into a full perspective. So we’re highly aware that the anecdote in reportage, while useful, needs to be interpreted very, very cautiously.

That caution is exactly what we find lacking in the way people are now jumping to conclusions about us on the basis of these “eyewitness” reports being spread around by recent visitors to our Village apartment—not only journalists but private citizens who have come down here on junkets to see how our new regime is working out. Naturally, we hoped they would drum up popular support for our internal struggle to create a better life. We even hoped they might influence policy toward us. So much for hope. Their reports always begin with the person’s breast-beating explanation of how painful it is for them to be honest about what they saw—how they had been our biggest supporters at first, and how their initial gush of sympathy gradually dried up as they were forced to confront the evidence of their senses. Far be it from us to question their sincerity, but a lot of their disillusionment is of their own creation, stemming from their original need to see me and Ed in mythic terms. Right off the bat they convinced themselves that Ed and I were going to demonstrate the impossible: that two people with bad reputations—I and Ed—could get together and be transformed overnight into a model relationship.

But I don’t want to get bogged down in generalizations about what’s wrong with
their
relationships to make them so desperate for a myth. Let me just take some of the specific stories they’ve been reporting, and deal with those. This one guy, a foreign correspondent who has actually moved into our building, has been saying he often sees a queue outside our apartment door—as he puts it, “like in Eastern Europe.” From what we’ve heard, he goes into vivid detail about long lines of depressed-looking people shifting from foot to foot, wearing shabby clothes, carrying pathetic little parcels and lunchboxes, etc. He says one time a dowdy woman in a babushka, with a heartbreakingly small chicken she was dangling by the feet, told him tearfully that she’d been waiting outside our door for over two hours.

Now, Ed and I have been victims lately of a certain amount of economic sabotage—mainly from the Manhattan Cable TV company, Con Edison, and the phone company—and more than likely what this guy saw was a few repairmen, etc., who had failed to show up at the assigned time and then, hearing a radio or something in the apartment, assumed we were home and hung around trying to get in. As for the all too colorful touch of the woman with the undersized chicken: first of all, it was a Cornish game hen, Ed’s favorite food; and second of all, the woman was his mother (who would be astonished to hear the word “dowdy” applied to herself, or “babushka” to the Hermès scarf she wears to cover her curlers). She had come over to cook dinner for Ed’s birthday while we went to a movie, and she accidentally locked herself out when she went into the hall (absent-mindedly holding the game hen), thinking she heard a burglar.

It’s true that Ed and I have some problems in the area of consumer goods. We wouldn’t dream of minimizing that. And if some of our visitors get disenchanted when they see us using paper towels for napkins because we ran out—granted, they have a valid point, and we’re working on a better-organized central system of supply. But lately one of Ed’s ex-girlfriends—who of course claims that she always wished us the best and feels just awful being obliged to say anything negative about us—has been blabbing it around that we’re so unhappy we don’t even have enough faith in our relationship to invest in the basic necessities. She made her observations on a couple of transient visits to our place while I was away on business and Ed let her come over out of the goodness of his heart—and, I might add, her idea of “basic necessities” is a decadent bourgeois fantasy. She has gotten enormous mileage out of recounting how shocked she was when she saw that we don’t have a toaster. For her information, we make toast in a frying pan because we prefer it that way.

Another thing these reports always mention is the bribes. They say Ed’s and my relationship is corrupted by bribery at every level. One story that comes up over and over (always in the same words, curiously enough) is that I was seen going to various Village stores, buying stuff, and getting it wrapped up in pathetic little parcels, and then later that evening was seen giving the same parcels to Ed as a bribe to keep him at home. Again, the details are accurate as far as they go, but the story fails to mention that it was Ed’s birthday eve, when (using money we could have spent on a toaster) we threw a huge birthday party, at which some of the guests apparently got too drunk to put what they saw into context. On top of which, when their own rowdiness provoked a noise complaint from upstairs, they went and reported the next day that Ed and I were destabilizing our neighbors.

Then there’s the stuff about low morale—how Ed and I have such a demoralizing effect on each other that neither of us has been able to make a dentist’s appointment for the entire year we’ve been together. The woman who’s the source of this news may not have realized, as she flipped through our appointment books while Ed was in the bathroom, that we have our own priorities and are not in the habit of going to the dentist right around the time of Ed’s birthday, or on other days when we have a lot on our minds—for example, when my birthday is coming up.

Oh, well—whatever we do or don’t do is grist for their mill now that this revisionist line about us has set in. If Ed pinches me on the bottom in public, it’s seen as evidence that we have a degenerate, sexist relationship—which makes us hypocrites into the bargain, since that’s the kind of relationship we set out not to have. It doesn’t occur to people that if Ed pinches me on the bottom, maybe he’s doing it for exactly that reason—that he’s being
ironic.

I could go through every one of these stories—the one about us being seen drunk on the street (it was Ed’s birthday, for heaven’s sake!), the one about me being seen at midnight wearing dark glasses and looking “alienated” (I’d simply had too much to drink), etc. I could go bing bing bing, right down the list, but what good would it do? People just aren’t skilled at interpreting what they see, and we can’t spend the rest of our lives correcting them. If some intelligent, attractive person wants to move in with us for a few months and really observe us with an open mind, great. Otherwise, everybody who’s interested can find out all they need to know by going to the Superba, where we still hang out, and looking at the front table, where recently Ed carved our initials in a heart. The heart was already there, along with a mess of other old carvings, and when Ed put our initials inside it, they looked raw and pale by comparison. He wanted to age them by rubbing them with cigarette ash, but I said no, I liked it that they looked fresh. I said all the other initials had probably been carved by people who hate each other now and are no longer even on speaking terms. Ed said I was right—that we were still new, even though the heart was old and ready-made.

1984

GEORGE W. S. TROW

DO YOU KNOW ME?

I
WAS
well known. I was so well known everyone knew me. I was the best-known person in the world. I put on my plaid shirt and my thick boots and the thin-wale corduroy pants and I was the best-known person in the world. And then I went slowly. I looked in the mirror. I wore the thin-wale corduroy pants because I think the thick-wale is effeminate. I went out my door. I went down the stairs. I lived on the second floor—no indoor entrance; I had to walk up and down outside stairs to get in and out. Outside stairs. My outside stairs. My weather-stained porch. Not a very pretty porch. No room for a nice chair. Paint peeling off, just like loneliness sloughing off the skin. Onto the sidewalk. I walked onto the sidewalk, watched the sidewalk, focussed on the sidewalk. I saw my thick boots only as a blur. So cracked, that sidewalk. The little shoots of grass, the roots of trees working the cement into dust. I was so well known that that sidewalk was well known.

I was quite well known when I was still quite young. I had many friends. Bobbi and Sammi and Tadi and Ronee and Bilye. I had so many friends. I liked friends who were girls but had boys’ names, but ending in a different letter than a boy’s name would. That was the kind of friend I wanted, and that was the kind of friend I had. That was my preference. My preference was for people just like that. I wanted to be specific. I wanted to be so specific that no one would have any doubts. That was the only reason I was that well known. Because it was so specific. Because there wasn’t any doubt. People with a name like Sammi or Ronee or Jami or Tonee knew that kind of name was my preference. That made me well known.

Would you know me if I showed you my papers? Would you know me if I showed you my Bulldog Editions? Would you know me if I showed you my Special Home Editions? Would you let me show you the Blue Final and the Final Blue? Will you glance at my papers? Will you have a look? Do you know me when you have a look? Do you know me when I call you on the phone? Do you know me when I walk on the sidewalk, when I watch the cracks? Do you lie there and think, “It’s him. He’s on the sidewalk”?

Do you remember the texture of my nose? The slightly grainy texture, as though it had been rubbed and rubbed and rubbed? Do you have a general impression of my face—just that, a
general
impression? Nothing more than that? Just a vague feeling that the face is a type of face, a face of a type that a certain kind of person would have? Is it
abstract,
the way you feel, when I tried so hard to supply detail? I wanted everything so clear, so specific. I went to so much trouble. I dressed in a certain way. I dressed three times. I put on my clothes and then I took them off, and then I put them on and then I took them off, and then I put them on in a final way that was very specific. Then I walked slowly. Keeping my eye on the pavement. I made the pavement so specific. I made my friends so specific. Sometimes it happened that they thought they were general, but they were wrong. I made them specific, down to the details. I knew all the details and went over them three times. That was my preference.

Do you remember my preference? Do you remember the way I made them nervous? That was part of the preference. Do you remember the way I made them reluctant to wear their uniforms in public? That was part of my preference. So specific, my preference. So specific, the way the little uniforms looked under a big bulky coat. Would you know me if I wore a uniform? Would you know me if I wore a bulky coat? Would you know me if I moved a step closer? Would you know me if I took off my hat? Would you know me if I showed you a clipping? Would you know me if I took a clipping and circled my name so it would stand out, and then attached a small piece of white paper (with gum or mucilage) with my name typed out just like my name typed out on the Linotypes and on the wire services and on the special identification cards they require in so many places, typed out on plastic? Would you know me if I typed my name out? Would you know me if I asked you for a dime? Would you know me if I asked to walk you home?