I Am No One You Know (33 page)

Mrs. Halifax was saying terrible words. Yet so calmly, gently.

“It’s the only way, Rickie. For now. To preserve our love, we must say good-bye temporarily.”

“ ‘Temporarily’—what’s that?”

“Until you’re eighteen, darling.”

“Three fucking years—isn’t it?”

“Those years will pass swiftly, darling. I promise.”

“I could kill him! Your h-husband.”

“Excuse me, Rickie? What?”

“I could! I have the power.”

Mrs. Halifax felt a thrill of almost sexual pleasure.
He does love me. Adores me. Here’s proof.

But she insisted no, no. Better that they never see each other again than that Rickie commit so reckless an act. Better to renounce their love. They must say good-bye, and they must not seek each other out. They must not even call each other on their cell phones. At school, they must not make eye-contact. This, they must
vow.

I
N HIS STEP-DAD’S
tool box covered in cobwebs Rickie located the claw hammer. Heavy! In his mind the hammer had been more of some kind of idea of a hammer but in actual life, it was heavy, and bigger
than he’d expected. Must’ve weighed ten pounds. He swung it in his hand. He wondered, would it fit into his backpack?

I
T WAS
R
ICKIE
who weakened. He called Mrs. Halifax on his cell phone. His voice was so raw, at first he couldn’t speak. Mrs. Halifax had been drinking (at midday, not like her!) and immediately she succumbed. The Chevy station wagon had been repaired, she swung by to pick her eager young lover up behind Home Depot and they drove to one of their secret places, a marshy area off the Turnpike north of Newark Airport where an access road led to a cul-de-sac amid six-foot rushes that rustled romantically in the wind and dank pools of standing water in which part-submerged tires crouched like alligators.

It was then and in that place that they knew: their love was hopeless and yet it was hopeless to resist their love.

W
HEN THAT EVENING
Mrs. Halifax returned to her wood-frame and brick home on Cedar Drive in which she continued to live with Dwayne Halifax she steeled herself for her husband’s accusatory or caustic or threatening remarks but a surprise awaited her: it was Dwayne’s new strategy to ignore
her.
In the Barcalounger in the TV room the balding pot-bellied man did not deign to glance around at her as if she, the sole breadwinner in the family, the one to pay their insurance premiums, were nothing but a servant! Still, Mrs. Halifax murmured an excuse. Where she’d been, and why. For always she had an excuse. And in her arms a stack of student folders. “Guess I’ll be up late tonight.” Mrs. Halifax spoke earnestly, innocently. Her nipples were still erect from her lover sucking at them and the soft white flesh of her inner thighs chafed as if on fire.

“M
RS.
H
ALIFAX,
I have the means.”

Have the means.
Such a strange phrase from the boy’s lips.

“Oh, Rickie. Noooo.”

Kisses to stop his mouth. But he wrenched his mouth away. He was panting, stubborn. “A hammer. That’s all you need.”

A hammer? What was Rickie talking about? Mrs. Halifax pressed her hands against her ears, her brain was blanking out.

Uncanny how she’d been so absolutely the dominant one at the
first, by degrees Rickie Swann was taking on a new ardent urgent role. His voice cracked less frequently. It was becoming a man’s voice. He’d gained weight. He called her on her cell phone at all hours though weakly she’d asked him not to call her at home, at night.

“Like, ‘household accident.’ I was reading some statistics.”

“Rickie, what statistics? Where?”

Dwayne was insured for $90,000. Not much, with inflation. But wasn’t there double indemnity or something, accidental death? A man in his physical condition, atrophying limb, slipping in the bathtub. Falling down the stairs. Falling down the cellar stairs. There were diverse
means.

“They always suspect the spouse, Rickie. On TV.”

“You wouldn’t be there, Mrs. Halifax. You’d be, like, at school.”

“Even so…”

“Let me! Mrs. Halifax,
I want to.
”

She’d told him about Dwayne striking her that night. Other times, before he’d decided to give her the cold shoulder, shoving her and threatening her. Maybe she shouldn’t have told Rickie. The boy was so excitable and protective where Mrs. Halifax was concerned.

“Oh, Rickie. Sweetie. I don’t think so.”

That was one evening. Another time, maybe ten days later, Rickie showed up wearing the black backpack she’d bought him at the Nickel and a look in his young fierce face warned her
He’s got the hammer. He’ll kill you then somehow himself
and she felt a sensation of drowning, but this turned out to be ridiculous paranoid thinking for all Rickie wanted to do that evening was go bowling! At the Shamrock, he suggested, but Mrs. Halifax said definitely no, she drove them to the Starlite Lounge & Bowling Alley in New Brunswick. Whatever would happen, would happen. She was resigned by this time. She’d had a pregnancy scare, and she was all right now but during the scare she’d been resigned. She seemed to know they’d had children together in the past. Of course, they’d had children together in the past. And it had happened not once but many times. Better for them to know nothing of what’s to come. Her colleagues at Grover Cleveland were watching her covertly she knew. Entering the teachers’ lounge, she’d hear them go suddenly quiet. She’d see the exchange of glances. She knew. Though no one would confront her. No one dared accuse her.
Better for her not to imagine: lurid news headlines, tabloid TV. Possibly she’d be arrested. Possibly, arrested, she would be several months pregnant with Rickie Swann’s child.
She would have the baby in the women’s prison.
Or maybe, her sentence would be suspended by the court, she’d be on probation. An injunction not to see her former student ever again. Or maybe—oh God, this was scary!—Rickie Swann would hammer out Dwayne Halifax’s brains and track through the house incriminating prints from his Nike jogging shoes in blood, tissue, brains, and splintered skull fragments while she, Mrs. Halifax, was at a teachers’ conference in Trenton! Or maybe, and she was leaning in this direction, they would another time and more permanently renounce their love. They would become celibates, saints.

But tonight was bowling. Tonight they drove to New Brunswick to the Starlite Lounge & Bowling Alley. Where nobody knew them, nor gave them more than a fleeting glance. A still-young mother and her teenaged son, they looked like. Except these two got along really really well. Laughing and teasing, even kissing. Naturally Rickie was the better bowler, long-limbed, fast, giving the ball a deft twist of his wrist as he released it, but Mrs. Halifax wasn’t bad considering she hadn’t bowled since she’d been a girl. Gripping the heavy ball against her breasts she hurried forward in quick mincing steps like a shore bird, breathless, blushing, stooping to release the ball without giving it much momentum so amid the brutal festive sounds of other balls striking pins her own made its slow way forward only to
thunk!
in the gutter. Mrs. Halifax sighed, “Oh damn!” but Rickie told her, “It’s okay, Mrs. Halifax, try again. You get a second chance.”

I
N
S
TRAND
U
SED
B
OOKS
on Broadway and Twelfth one snowy March early evening in 1956 when the streetlights on Broadway glimmered with a strange sepia glow, we were two NYU girl-poets drifting through the warehouse of treasures as through an enchanted forest. Just past 6:00
P.M.
Above light-riddled Manhattan, opaque night. Snowing, and sidewalks encrusted with ice so there were fewer customers in the Strand than usual at this hour but
there we were.
Among other cranky brooding regulars. In our army-surplus jackets, baggy khaki pants, and zip-up rubber boots. In our matching wool caps (knitted by your restless fingers) pulled down low over our pale-girl foreheads. Enchanted by books. Enchanted by the Strand.

No bookstore of merely “new” books with elegant show window displays drew us like the drafty Strand, bins of books untidy and thumbed through as merchants’ sidewalk bins on Fourteenth Street,
NEW THIS WEEK, BEST BARGAINS, WORLD CLASSICS, ART BOOKS

50%
OFF, REVIEWERS’ COPIES, HIGHEST PRICE $1.98, REMAINDERS

25¢—$1.00. Hard-cover/paperback. Spotless/battered. Beautiful books/cheaply printed pulp paper. And at the rear and sides in that
vast echoing space massive shelves of books books books rising to a ceiling of hammered tin fifteen feet above! Stacked shelves so high they required ladders to negotiate and a monkey nimbleness (like yours) to climb.

We were enchanted with the Strand and with each other in the Strand. Overseen by surly young clerks who were poets like us, or playwrights/actors/artists. In an agony of unspoken young love I watched you. As always on these romantic evenings at the Strand, prowling the aisles sneering at those luckless books, so many of them, unworthy of your attention. Bestsellers, how-tos, arts and crafts, too-simple
histories of.
Women’s romances, sentimental love poems. Patriotic books, middlebrow books, books lacking esoteric covers. We were girl-poets passionately enamored of T. S. Eliot but scornful of Robert Frost whom we’d been made to memorize in high school—slyly we communicated in code phrases from Eliot in the presence of obtuse others in our dining hall and residence. We were admiring of though confused by the poetry of Yeats, we were yet more confused by the lauded worth of Pound, enthusiastically drawn to the bold metaphors of Kafka (that cockroach!) and Dostoevsky (sexy murderer Raskolnikov and the Underground Man were our rebel heroes) and Sartre (“Hell is other people”—we knew this), and had reason to believe that we were their lineage though admittedly we were American middle class, and Caucasian, and female. (Yet we were not “conventional” females. In fact, we shared male contempt for the merely “conventional” female.)

Brooding above a tumble of books that quickened the pulse, almost shyly touching Freud’s
Civilization and Its Discontents,
Crane Brinton’s
The Age of Reason,
Margaret Mead’s
Coming of Age in Samoa,
D. H. Lawrence’s
The Rainbow,
Kierkegaard’s
Fear and Trembling,
Mann’s
Death in Venice—
there suddenly you glided up behind me to touch my wrist (as never you’d done before, had you?) and whispered, “Come here,” in a way that thrilled me for its meaning
I have something wonderful/unexpected/startling to show you.
Like poems these discoveries in the Strand were, to us, found poems to be cherished. And eagerly I turned to follow you though disguising my eagerness, “Yes, what?” as if you’d interrupted me, for possibly we’d had a quarrel earlier that day, a flaring up of tense girl-tempers. Yes, you were childish and self-absorbed
and given to sulky silences and mercurial moods in the presence of showy superficial people, and I adored and feared you knowing you’d break my heart, my heart that had never before been broken because never before so exposed.

So eagerly yet with my customary guardedness I followed you through a maze of book bins and shelves and stacks to the ceiling
ANTHROPOLOGY, ART/ANCIENT, ART/RENAISSANCE, ART/MODERN, ART/ASIAN, ART/WESTERN, TRAVEL, PHILOSOPHY, COOKERY, POETRY/MODERN
where the way was treacherously lighted only by bare sixty-watt bulbs, and where customers as cranky as we two stood in the aisles reading books, or sat hunched on footstools glancing up annoyed at our passage, and unquestioning I followed you until at
POETRY/MODERN
you halted, and pushed me ahead and around a corner, and I stood puzzled staring, not knowing what I was supposed to be seeing until impatiently you poked me in the ribs and pointed, and now I perceived an individual in the aisle pulling down books from shelves, peering at them, clearly absorbed by what she read, a woman nearly my height (I was tall for a girl, in 1956) in a man’s navy coat to her ankles and with sleeves past her wrists, a man’s beige fedora hat on her head, scrunched low as we wore our knitted caps, and most of her hair hidden by the hat except for a six-inch blond plait at the nape of her neck; and she wore black trousers tucked into what appeared to be salt-stained cowboy boots. Someone we knew? An older, good-looking student from one of our classes?
A girl-poet like ourselves?
I was about to nudge you in the ribs in bafflement when the blond woman turned, taking down another book from the shelf (e. e. cummings’
Tulips and Chimneys
—always I would remember that title!), and I saw that she was Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn Monroe. In the Strand. Just like us. And she seemed to be alone.

Marilyn Monroe, alone!

Wholly absorbed in browsing amid books, oblivious of her surroundings and of us. No one seemed to have recognized her (yet) except you.

Here was the surprise: this woman was/was not Marilyn Monroe. For this woman was an individual wholly absorbed in selecting, leafing through, pausing to read books. You could see that this individual was
a
reader.
One of those who
reads.
With concentration, with passion. With her very soul. And it was poetry she was reading, her lips pursed, silently shaping words. Absent-mindedly she wiped her nose on the edge of her hand, so intent was she on what she was reading. For when you truly read poetry, poetry reads
you.

Still, this woman was—Marilyn Monroe. And despite our common sense, our scorn for the silly clichés of Hollywood romance, still we halfway expected a Leading Man to join her: Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Marlon Brando.

Halfway we expected the syrupy surge of movie music, to glide us into the scene.

But no man joined Marilyn Monroe in her disguise as one of us in the Strand. No Leading Man, no dark prince.

Like us (we began to see) this Marilyn Monroe required no man.

For what seemed like a long time but was probably no more than half an hour, Marilyn Monroe browsed in the
POETRY/MODERN
shelves, as from a distance of approximately ten feet two girl-poets watched covertly, clutching each other’s hands. We were stunned to see that this woman looked very little like the glamorous “Marilyn Monroe.” That figure was a garish blond showgirl, a Hollywood “sexpot” of no interest to intellectuals
(we
thought, we who knew nothing of the secret romance between Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller); this figure more resembled us (almost) than she resembled her Hollywood image. We were dying of curiosity to see whose poetry books Marilyn Monroe was examining: Elizabeth Bishop, H.D., Robert Lowell, Muriel Rukeyser, Harry Crosby, Denise Levertov…Five or six of these Marilyn Monroe decided to purchase, then moved on, leather bag slung over her shoulder and fedora tilted down on her head.

We couldn’t resist, we had to follow! Cautious not to whisper together like excited schoolgirls, still less to giggle wildly as we were tempted; you nudged me in the ribs to sober me, gave me a glare signaling
Don’t be rude, don’t ruin this for all of us.
I conceded: I was the more pushy of the two of us, a tall gawky Rima the Bird Girl with springy carroty-red hair like an exotic bird’s crest, while you were petite and dark haired and attractive with long-lashed Semitic sloe eyes, you the wily gymnast and I the aggressive basketball player, you the
“experimental” poet and I drawn to “forms,” our contrary talents bred in our bones. Which of us would marry, have babies, disappear into “real” life, and which of us would persevere into her thirties before starting to be published and becoming, in time, a “real” poet—could anyone have predicted, this snowy March evening in 1956?

Marilyn Monroe drifted through the maze of books and we followed in her wake as through a maze of dreams, past
SPORTS,
past
MILITARY,
past
WAR,
past
HISTORY/ANCIENT,
past the familiar figures of Strand regulars frowning into books, past surly yawning bearded clerks who took no more heed of the blond actress than they ever did of us, and so to
NATURAL HISTORY
where she paused, and there again for unhurried minutes (the Strand was open until 9:00
P.M.
) Marilyn Monroe in her mannish disguise browsed and brooded, pulling down books, seeking what? at last crouched leafing through an oversized illustrated book (curiosity overcame me! I shoved away your restraining hand; politely I eased past Marilyn Monroe murmuring “excuse me” without so much as brushing against her and without being noticed), Charles Darwin’s
Origin of Species
in a deluxe edition. Darwin!
Origin of Species!
We were poet-despisers-of-science, or believed we were, or must be, to be true poets in the exalted mode of T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats; such a choice, for Marilyn Monroe, seemed perverse to us. But this book was one Marilyn quickly decided to purchase, hoisting it into her arms and moving on.

That rakish fedora we’d come to covet, and that single chunky blond braid. (Afterward we would wonder: Marilyn Monroe’s hair in a braid? Never had we seen Marilyn Monroe with her hair braided in any movie or photo. What did this mean? Did it mean anything?
Had she quit films, and embarked on a new, anonymous life in our midst?
)

Suddenly Marilyn Monroe glanced back at us, frowning as a child might frown (had we spoken aloud? had she heard our thoughts?), and there came into her face a look of puzzlement, not alarm or annoyance but a childlike puzzlement:
Who are you? You two? Are you watching me?
Quickly we looked away. We were engaged in a whispering dispute over a book one of us had fumbled from a shelf,
A History of Botanical Gardens in England.
So we were undetected. We hoped!

But wary now, and sobered. For what if Marilyn Monroe had caught us, and knew that we knew?

She might have abandoned her books and fled the Strand. What a loss for her, and for the books! For us, too.

Oh, we worried at Marilyn Monroe’s recklessness! We dreaded her being recognized by a (male) customer or (male) clerk. A girl or woman would have kept her secret (so we thought) but no man could resist staring openly at her, following her, and at last speaking to her. Of course, the blond actress in Strand Used Books wasn’t herself, not at all glamorous, or “sexy,” or especially blond, in her inconspicuous man’s clothing and those salt-stained boots; she might have been anyone, female or male, hardly a Hollywood celebrity, a movie goddess. Yet if you stared, you’d recognize her. If you tried, with any imagination you’d see “Marilyn Monroe.” It was like a child’s game in which you stare at foliage, grass, clouds in the sky, and suddenly you see a face or a figure, and after that recognition you can’t not see the hidden shape, it’s staring you in the face. So too with Marilyn Monroe. Once we saw her, it seemed to us she must be seen—and recognized—by anyone who happened to glance at her. If any man saw! We were fearful her privacy would be destroyed. Quickly the blond actress would become surrounded, mobbed. It was risky and reckless of her to have come to Strand Used Books by herself, we thought. Sure, she could shop at Tiffany’s, maybe; she could stroll through the lobby of the Plaza, or the Waldorf-Astoria; she’d be safe from fans and unwanted admirers in privileged settings on the Upper East Side, but—here? In the egalitarian Strand, on Broadway and Twelfth?

We were perplexed. Almost, I was annoyed with her. Taking such chances! But you, gripping my wrist, had another, more subtle thought.

“She thinks she’s like
us.
”

You meant: a human being, anonymous. Female, like us. Amid the ordinary unspectacular customers (predominantly male) of the Strand.

And that was the sadness in it, Marilyn Monroe’s wish. To be
like us.
For it was impossible, of course. For anyone could have told Marilyn Monroe, even two young girl-poets, that it was too late for her in history. Already, at age thirty (we could calculate afterward that this was her age) “Marilyn Monroe” had entered history, and there was no escape from it. Her films, her photos. Her face, her figure, her name. To enter history is to be abducted spiritually, with no way back.
As if lightning were to strike the building that housed the Strand, as if an actual current of electricity were to touch and transform only one individual in the great cavernous space and that lone individual, by pure chance it might seem, the caprice of fate, would be the young woman with the blond braid and the fedora slanted across her face. Why? Why her, and not another? You could argue that such a destiny is absurd, and undeserved, for one individual among many, and logically you would be correct. And yet: “Marilyn Monroe” has entered history, and you have not. She will endure, though the young woman with the blond braid will die.
And even should she wish to die, “Marilyn Monroe” cannot.

By this time she—the young woman with the blond braid—was carrying an armload of books. We were hoping she’d almost finished and would be leaving soon, before strangers’ rude eyes lighted upon her and exposed her, but no: she surprised us by heading for a section called
JUDAICA.
In that forbidding aisle, which we’d never before entered, there were books in numerous languages: Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Russian, French. Some of these books looked ancient! Complete sets of the Talmud. Cryptically printed tomes on the cabala. Luckily for us, the titles Marilyn Monroe pulled out were all in English:
Jews of Eastern Europe; The Chosen People: A Complete History of the Jews; Jews of the New World.
Quickly Marilyn Monroe placed her bag and books on the floor, sat on a footstool, and leafed through pages with the frowning intensity of a young girl, as if searching for something urgent, something she knew—knew!—must be there; in this uncomfortable posture she remained for at least fifteen minutes, wetting her fingers to turn pages that stuck together, pages that had not been turned, still less read, for decades. She was frowning, yet smiling too; faint vertical lines appeared between her eyebrows, in the intensity of her concentration; her eyes moved rapidly along lines of print, then returned, and moved more slowly. By this time we were close enough to observe the blond actress’s feverish cheeks and slightly parted moist lips that seemed to move silently.
What is she reading in that ancient book, what can possibly mean so much to her? A secret, revealed? A secret, to save her life?