No Lease on Life (17 page)

—If a carpenter used the wrong tool, he couldn’t hang a door properly, Proofroom Fats said.

He was on a roll.

—Always “he,” Sally said.

Sally had been in the proofroom the longest.

—There are typos in the
Times
’ headlines, Fats went on.

He ignored her.

—The
New York Times
fired all its proofreaders years ago, Sally said.

The room was a den for a dying breed. Nearly extinct. The room corrected errors no one would’ve noticed. Double quotes inside the period were moved outside the period, different than was changed to different from. The room scorned “between you and I.” The correct “me” sounded lower class to people who ached to sound classy. The room understood that all mistakes entered the language after being repeated enough, and someday they’d be correct, so eventually no one writing or speaking would be aware that over time and imperceptibly an array of former misfits had deformed and degraded the language. Language would become garbage. It’d spill out their mouths.

—Language is already garbage, Margaret said.

Margaret was either a meek woman or a snob. She hardly ever spoke. She didn’t like Elizabeth’s aggressiveness.

They worked in fear. They feared the reduction of their hours, they feared learning they were no longer needed, maybe only one or two of them, they feared becoming redundant. They were skilled workers, too expensive for the company to pay for what everyone knew was unnecessary. They feared being fired.

Some compliments were sent their way. A few. Their work, when it was good, was invisible. The room approached invisibility, like soundtracks in movies. Elizabeth liked movie music.

Two and a half hours later, Elizabeth was released. She made chump change and fulfilled her obligations to the room. She’d keep her objections to language and life to herself.

A man goes hunting for bears. He sees one, takes aim, and just misses. The bullet grazes the bear’s shoulder. The bear gets really angry and goes over to the man. He says, you just missed me, you tried to kill me, I’m really pissed at you. I’m going to make you go down on me. So the bear forces the man to go down on him. The man does it. He’s chagrined and runs out of the woods. A week later he goes hunting again, finds the bear again, takes really good aim, fires, but misses. The bear’s really pissed off. He goes over to the man and forces him to have sex with his arms tied behind him. The man comes back a week later, sees the bear, takes really careful aim, shoots, and misses the bear again. The bear goes over, he’s even more pissed off, and he sodomizes the man. The next week the man comes back, takes arm at the bear, and misses again. This time the bear goes over to the man and puts his paws on the man’s shoulders. The bear says, This isn’t really about hunting, is it?

The sun was lower in the sky, the feeble beginnings of dusk filtered through the dust.

It was less muggy. The start of another weekend. The hitters from Jersey and Queens, the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, were getting ready to flood the neighborhood. Some came running, some came racing in, piled into cars, weekend warriors cruising for pleasure, release, some joy in the commission of small-time crimes. In the summer, on weekend nights it was better to be inside.

Elizabeth knew her route by heart. Any change in her beat was an irregularity, not life-threatening, unless it was.

Imperfect strangers hurried by her. They took up space. They were full of themselves, of piss, like her. They came from disturbed families and controlled hideous feelings which controlled them. Their views of events developed from events and sensations they couldn’t remember. Nothing came out in the wash. Everyone performed circus acts of confusion and covered them over like cats cover shit in litter boxes.

Nothing human is unique.

Human beings were walking near her, heading somewhere to something. Life was just around the corner. Without want, their lives would collapse, no one would go anywhere, or do or make anything. Lust marked their hapless faces and misshaped them. They were generally lusterless and misshapen.

Lustful faces gazed anonymously into shop windows or at each other. Lips pursed and relaxed and opened and closed in exasperation and people breathed in and out, heavily, sighing, and they struggled to keep moving. Some walked with a lilt, life was a song they’d written.

Elizabeth reviled the song, pitied the suckers.

An upper-middle-class woman rushed out of a store onto the sidewalk. A little boy about three toddled after her, crying, Mommy, mommy. The woman ignored him and kept walking. He couldn’t catch up to her. She pretended to let him, he got closer to her, he stopped crying, and then she raced away again, leaving him alone in the middle of the busy sidewalk. He started crying again, sobbing, Mommy, mommy.

The bewildered little boy nearly fell into the street. Cars skidded and stopped. Mommy walked faster, and the distance lengthened, and the kid grew more hysterical and tripped over his stubby legs, as he tried to keep up and obliterate the violent gap.

—You can’t do that to that kid. I’m watching you, Elizabeth shouted.

She turned herself into a stern and forbidding character, an upstanding citizen, even as sweat coated her thighs.

The woman halted in place. She allowed the little boy to catch up to her. Elizabeth watched. The woman took her son’s hand. She didn’t look at him and she didn’t look back at the stern figure who’d threatened, I’m watching you. Mother and son turned a corner and disappeared from sight. The woman would beat him later, at home. She wouldn’t be surveilled by a City agency.

Elizabeth liked the role, vigilante, citizen executioner. She wanted to arrest the mother. She thought she should. They were enough like each other for her to yell at the woman without fear of the woman’s coming after her. She was able to intimidate her. She had to seize any opportunity she could.

What do you call one white guy with two black guys?

A victim.

What do you call one white guy with twenty black guys?

Coach.

What do you call one white guy with two thousand black guys?

Warden.

What do you call one white guy with 200,000 black guys?

Postmaster General.

It was not the best of times, it was not the worst of times. Comparisons were stupid. Reason was history.

Elizabeth breathed automatically. Her past and future gasped together. She exhaled a current of air, time. The atmosphere was a weight on everyone. Thick, wet air contained the city.

—If it’s the end, you might be relieved, one guy said to another.

They were walking in front of her, fusion candidates for a new order, a threat to the visible old order. They broke one mold, established another. They might become research scientists or rob banks. No one would be able to describe them accurately for a police drawing.

—He might’ve been Caucasian with some Asian, or African with some Puerto Rican and Chinese, I don’t know, part Indian maybe, too.

The boys laughed raucously. Nothing permanent could ever happen to them. It was a feeling she remembered.

Elizabeth had another feeling now, a sensation, a close feeling, something was close, too near like a bad dream below the surface. It might just be the closeness of the young night forcing itself upon her after hours of airless air-conditioning. She crossed streets several times as she walked closer to her block.

Sometimes she varied her route, just to vary it. Sometimes she crossed the street to avoid an encounter, sometimes she crossed the street because she thought she was being followed. She crossed the street to avoid an encounter with the Korean florist. The Korean florist ran out to the sidewalk anyway and waved wildly. He usually did when he saw her, especially when his wife wasn’t in the shop. Elizabeth didn’t go into the store much, ever since the florist had taken her hand, when his wife wasn’t there, faced her, and stated solemnly, I love you.

He was new to the neighborhood. His English wasn’t good. She gave him the benefit of the doubt. He might’ve meant it in a different way, but she didn’t go into his shop much anymore. Passing it was a problem. He knew she wasn’t going to buy flowers from him. He was disappointed, he was resigned. She didn’t return his love.

Korean florists were usually part of a Korean grocery store. This man was on his own, a maverick, an outcast from the immigrant Korean community. He had a small shop with the usual and limited number of flowers. He was a disgrace, scorned by his native community. As he sucked on his cigarette and stared at the sidewalk, he was figuring how to outfox his enemies. Maybe he thought if Elizabeth loved him and married him, he’d be all right, he’d get a green card, they couldn’t get him.

Elizabeth avoided him and entered the pasta store.

—Ciao, bella, the pasta man said.

The pasta man made fresh pasta and mozzarella, and he cured olives, in his other store in Brooklyn. He or his son brought the food to the block six days a week.

The pasta man cut a chunk of parmesan cheese. He bagged a pound of multicolored fettuccini for a German guy with bleached blond hair. The guy paid. The pasta man nodded conspiratorially at Elizabeth when the door shut after the German.

—I worked in Germany, in a factory, because my brother was an engineer, and he says, Come, come, you make more money in Germany, so I did, for three years, I go, but I no like it. No, Germany, no, factory. It’s not…

He pointed around the store.

—Pasta is my life. Pasta and focaccia and sun-dried tomatoes. It’s what I love.

The pasta man was an inspiration to her and the block.

Elizabeth bought a carton of milk from the corner bodega. Run by Syrians. A familiarly strange man brushed against her as she entered. He glanced at her. She glanced at him. He was the kind of guy she might’ve fucked years ago. He was a certain type, and for that type, she was a certain type. There’s an instant attraction, unquestioned, and there’s hardly any bother. Before AIDS, you’d fuck.

Three teenaged boys were at the counter. Two bought potato chips, the third couldn’t decide. He wavered, swaying stoned in front of the ice cream freezer. He held up the line. The Syrian owner was patient, Elizabeth wasn’t.

—Do you know what you want? Elizabeth asked.

—I want a woman. Wanna jump my bones?

The teenager leered at her lopsidedly.

—I’m too old for you, she said.

She didn’t believe that. Lust didn’t wither with age. Maybe he thought she was a working girl. The boys snickered.

She studied him. He was a kid and he was talking up for skeletal sex, for boning, moaning, raplike sex, not rapture, maybe rapture. Duck lips uber alles, ducks don’t have lips, no bones about it, no flesh, no sins of the flesh. He’s not cute enough.

—I don’t want to jump your bones, Elizabeth said.

The boy looked shocked, knocked back into a littler place. The Syrian grocer didn’t smile or laugh. The exchange may have been objectionable to him. But he’d heard and seen worse since he left Syria. His bodega was on the corner where Jeanine worked.

His brother had dropped to the bottom of the drug well. His brother must’ve tried the stuff one night, maybe the first time he was given it free, a taste, so he wouldn’t chase the dealers from the corner, territory that was always being negotiated, and then he did the stuff again, and more, and had to pay, and did more and more, and then she didn’t see him in the store, she saw him on the corner, she saw him wasting away, becoming weightless, becoming angrier, arguing with himself. Then she didn’t see him at all.

There are a couple of white guys in Africa. They’re captured by remote tribe. The chief says, You have two choices, Death or Ru Ru. The first guy says, Well, death’s kind of final. So I guess I’ll take Ru Ru. The Chief turns around to his 150 best warriors and he calls out, Ru Ru. The warriors line up and each one sodomizes the guy, until he’s a bloody mess and dies. The Chief goes up to the next guy and says, Death or Ru Ru? So the guy says, I guess I’ll take death. The Chief turns to his warriors and says, Death… by Ru Ru.

The young Korean woman at the dry cleaners had elaborately painted fake nails. They didn’t interfere with her picking up dry cleaning slips, writing them and handing customers their cleaning.

The young woman frowned as she handed Elizabeth her cleaning. She was ordinarily oppressively happy, especially after she’d gone shopping and found something great. But her previous customer had accused her of deliberately destroying his best suit.

—He’s paranoid, Elizabeth said.

—I don’t care he’s annoyed…

—Par-a-noid…

—Whatever, he shouldn’t talk to me like that.

Elizabeth left, carrying pasta, bread, milk, and a long and heavy bag of cleaning encased in plastic. It touched the ground. She felt burdened.

Everyone was hanging out, expecting a cooler night.

A grizzled waste of a man, around sixty, ambled toward her, he nearly collapsed, then raised himself up and hit into her, hit hard against her, bounced off her, and grunted. He produced other guttural sounds. His trousers were down around his thighs. He was blind drunk. A young Hispanic guy was chasing after him. He had a ring in his ear.

—Fucking pervert, fucking pervert! he yelled.

The Hispanic guy stopped. He was enraged, steaming. He rubbed the ring in his ear.

—What’s up? Elizabeth asked.

—The fucking pervert was taking his pants down in front of the kids—FUCKING PERVERT—I can’t stand that shit.

—The Boys Club?

—He’s going up to the kids and saying, Want to see a big one? A real big one? FUCKING PERVERT!

The Hispanic guy kept looking down Avenue A and yelling at the drunk. The old man was laughing, holding his trousers with his hands, rambling and hitting into other people.

—I fucking hate those guys.

The Hispanic guy spit. He strutted in circles. Neck straining, veins popping, bug-eyed with fury, he watched the drunken man. Elizabeth watched with him. Nothing to do. They both walked away. She wondered how many men were exposing their penises to kids, at any one time in the Western world, the part that was awake when she was.