No Lease on Life (20 page)

Roy was watching
The Simpsons
.

—There’s a man in the hallway, she said.

—Yeah?

—He stinks.

—Who doesn’t.

Elizabeth forgot about Vomithead and Hector. After a while, she forgot about the drunk hulk in the hallway. She knew he could hear every sound in their apartment. He was probably leaning against their wall, listening to the Knicks game.

A ventriloquist’s act is going nowhere. He’s competing with TV and movies, he’s lost his audience. His agent comes to him and says, Listen, I can’t represent you anymore. No one’s booking you. You’re going to have to find a new line of work. So the ventriloquist opens a store. It’s called speak to Your Dead Relatives. The first day a woman comes in and says, I’d like to speak to my dead husband. The ventriloquist says, That’ll be one hundred dollars. Then she says, And I’d like him to speak to me. The ventriloquist says, That’ll be two hundred dollars. And, he adds, if he speaks to you while I’m swallowing a glass of water, that’ll be three hundred dollars.

During a commercial Elizabeth poured a beer and went to the window. A lot of people had the game on. Small windows glowed inside big windows. she looked down. The street was empty.

—Come here, look at this, Roy said.

A white car on a highway crossed the screen. The Knicks game was interrupted by a newsman’s voice. A white car was driving alone on a six-lane highway.

—Weird, Roy said.

The game was being interrupted. Elizabeth knew interruptions were life. Nine black-and-white police cars were following a white car, a Bronco, and they were in formation, keeping their distance. O.J. Simpson’s inside, an announcer said. His ex-wife, Nicole, and her male friend, Ron Goldman, were murdered last week. O.J.’s under arrest for the murders. He’s got a gun to his head. His best friend, A.C. Cowlings, is driving, speaking to the cops on a car phone. O.J.’s going to kill himself.

Roy and Elizabeth watched the game and the car. The Knicks were beating the Rockets. O.J. couldn’t turn himself over to the cops. He wanted to see his mother. Patrick Ewing was sweating, drenched. A.C. kept talking to the cops on the car phone. O.J. wanted to go to his mother, to his home or to the cemetery, to Nicole’s grave. Starks missed a basket. Elizabeth started to cry.

—What’s the matter? Roy asked. The Knicks are winning.

If he did it, anyone could do it. No one was safe from each other or from themselves. He wants to go home to his mother.

—I just saw him in
Naked Gun 33½
. He was funny, she said.

—The first
Naked Gun
was funnier.

Elizabeth walked to the window. The white car was traveling on the highway across most of the green screens.

Helen phoned.

—They’re waving to him, she said.

—The cars are parked on the highway…

—I love live TV.

—Me too.

Helen walked fast and didn’t stand and talk in doorways, which drove Elizabeth crazy. Helen got to the point and didn’t turn life’s puny moments into rites of passage. She didn’t make cruel and unusual demands. Elizabeth hoped it would last. Helen drove a school bus for a private school. Her psychiatrist parents felt they’d raised a failure. Helen told them it was better than dancing naked on top of a bar.

—What’re you going to do? Helen asked.

—Nothing. Are you going anywhere?

—Nowhere fast.

They always said that.

The car turned into O.J.’s driveway. Cowlings parked it at the front door. Cowlings got out, O.J. was hidden, there was confusion, Cowlings talked with some police, finally O.J. emerged. He surrendered.

How do you know when a cop is dead?

The doughnut falls out of his hand.

The Knicks won by seven points. Heavenly screams of basketball joy rang down the block. Some morons had congregated on the church steps. The news kept showing clips of another friend of O.J.’s reading O.J.’s suicide letter. Elizabeth had another beer. She studied the morons. They looked like the ones from last night. Some of the Pick Me Up crusties were with them.

—Get away from the window, Roy said.

—No.

—You’re going to get killed.

—So what.

Elizabeth thought about murder, about dying, throat slashed, blood gushing.

—When you’re old, and your friends start dying all around you, don’t you think that’ll be hard?

—It depends on whether they owe me money or not, Roy said.

If O.J. could do it, anyone could do it. Husbands murder their wives, ex-wives all the time. They murder them in courtroom hearings about protection orders against them.

All the TVs across the street showed the white Bronco and the cop cars in formation, reruns of his run from the cops.

She didn’t want to do time for doing a moron. Murdering someone you loved made more sense. In a flaming instant of furious, senseless passion, she could stab Roy in his heart. Then he’d be dead. It was too final. All she wanted was to hurt him, teach him a lesson. If she could imagine it, it didn’t mean she could do it, it was just within reach, in the realm of possibility, which was important, because as you got older, you felt more limited.

There was a sharp knock at the door.

Roy was in cyberspace.

It was Ernest.

—Hector’s been fired, he said.

—What’d he do? Why was he in disgrace?

—I don’t know. But it must have been really bad, because we have no super.

Ernest came in, and they sat down at the rectangular kitchen table. Elizabeth opened some beers. She wasn’t in love with him anymore. They had a lot in common.

—We have no super. What if something happens? she asked.

—We’ll call the landlord’s office.

—At night?

—I don’t know.

—Are they going to hire a new super?

—They’ll try to rent Hector’s apartment for big bucks.

—They’ll have to get his stuff out.

—That could take a year.

They emptied their glasses. Elizabeth sighed and opened more bottles.

—What if the electricity goes out at midnight? she asked.

—I don’t know.

—What if the boiler explodes at 3 
A.M.
?

—We’re dead.

—Hector was better than nothing.

—We’ll have to contact the City.

—In the middle of the night?

—If it’s an emergency, we’ll call the fire department or the cops. What else can we do?

I don’t want to be sorry to lose a super like Hector. I want to be free of Hector and the cops, she thought.

—You know, the cops never get right on it, Elizabeth said.

—Yeah, they’re hanging out or practicing cop triage. I saw this rookie at the corner today, and both of us were standing near this crazy, he’s wearing farmer overalls, a tall, skinny loony dude, with a real long gray beard, a white guy, maybe fifty, and he’s talking to himself, and then he starts shouting, over and over, like he’s giving a sermon, somebody’s got to stand up for the character of the girls.

Ernest was really amused by that. He repeated it. People repeat what they like.

—Somebody’s got to stand up for the character of the girls.

Two Greek women are in a field. One of them pulls an enormous carrot out of the ground. She says to the other woman, This reminds me of my husband. The other woman looks at the huge carrot. What, because of the length? No, she says. What, the circumference? she asks. No, the woman says, the dirt.

Elizabeth wanted a quiet night and a relatively good super. People got a little of what they wanted. No one ever got enough.

Across the street Frankie was closing the laundromat, pulling down the great, tired, yawning gate. Ernest and Elizabeth finished the last of the beer.

—I hate calling the cops, she said.

—I hate calling the City. Same difference, he said.

It was past midnight when Elizabeth said good-night to Ernest. Roy was in bed, and she lay down next to him. They watched the end of a
Honeymooners
episode.

One of these days, Alice, one of these days, POW, right in the kisser.

Ralph Kramden threatened Alice, he never hit her. The morons were carousing in the background.

—Hector’s been fired. We don’t have a super, Elizabeth said.

—We never had a super. I’m going to sleep.

—You are? How can you?

—Easy.

She hated him now.

Elizabeth went to the window. Fatboy trotted over jauntily and stuck his nose through the gate. Elizabeth opened the police-approved window-gate doors, which she’d spent some real money on when they moved in, to prevent break-ins by spidery fifth-story men and to allow her, Roy, and Fatboy to get out fast in case of a fire. She raised the window as high as it would go, then the two of them climbed through and settled on the fire escape. Fatboy was happy. She wished she were him.

The morons were vocalizing, inventing their own brand of superrepellent sounds. Their whole existence was flawed.

Two Polish-Americans go to Poland, to see their ancestral homeland. They sight-see all day and at night go to a bar. One of them says to the other, I think that’s the Pope. He points to a man at the end of the bar. The friend says, What would the Pope be doing here? I don’t know. He could be visiting Poland like us, says the first. He’s Polish. He could have come home, making a visit. I really think that’s him. You’re crazy, says the second. I’m going to ask him, the first one says. So he goes to the far end of the bar, and asks the man, Are you the Pope? The man looks at him and says, Fuck off. He walks back to his friend and tells him, I asked him if he was the Pope and he said, Fuck off. The friend says, So, I guess we’ll never know.

Two of the morons rolled on the sidewalk, holding their sides, shitting themselves with goofy laughter. Three other morons and one veteran crustie looked on, bored.

There is no super. I’ll murder them, one by one, she thought.

The worst person, John Wayne Gacy, who painted clowns and performed sadistic tricks in a clown costume for children in hospitals, then buried thirty-six boys in a tunnel in his basement, or Jeffrey Dahmer, who dissected road-kills when he was a kid, then turned into a cannibal who ate boys because he wanted to keep them from leaving, or the woman who dropped her infant out the window, or the woman who thought her child was possessed by the devil, so she scalded her to death, cleansing her of evil, the worst person is understandable, only human. Some people’s wounds never heal. Cats let sick kittens die or kill them. The game was long over. The street jumpstarted and buzzed with an overflow of Knicks’ victory high. Someone might get lucky.

A couple of the crusties on the church steps roused themselves from their stupor. They started hopping, whooping, and yipping. Elizabeth focused on the loudest moron. He was shrieking, throwing his fat head back and shrieking. She didn’t think they could see her. Suddenly the loudest moron glared defiantly at the windows of people trying to sleep and turned his boombox up, as loud as it would go. He blasted it. It was an act of civil war.

Elizabeth lay down on the fire escape and went rigid. She kept her head low, her body flat, held herself back, and just stayed down.

Drop dead. Stop it. Drop dead. Stop it. Drop dead, stupid. Doing nothing was her civil right, doing nothing was her civic duty. Nothing is hard to do.

When Westley Dodd was little, he used to sit at his window and stare at the kids in the playground across the street. Dodd began exposing himself at thirteen, then he molested one hundred little boys, then he murdered three, took pictures of them. He confessed everything. He’d never been praised, he’d never been touched, he lived in an emotional desert, an emptiness, no one laid a hand on him for love or hate, and growing up as he watched the kids squealing in the school playground, all he could think about was how he wanted to hurt them. When he was arrested, he said he’d hoped to kill many more boys. He said he didn’t think he had any feelings abour anything.

Elizabeth didn’t have the right profile to be a serial killer, she didn’t have a child to drop out a window, she had a lot of feelings, all her feelings were bad now, she had nothing against Fatboy.

One of the morons leaped on a car and banged it with a quart bottle of beer. The bottle shattered and several windows across the street squealed open. The ancient black woman with a Chihuahua came to her window, she was wheelchairbound, but she had a portable phone. She’d call the cops. They’d get right on it, they’d say, then they’d put the phone down and grin contemptuously at each other in the station house.

Last week an alarm pulsed and throbbed across the street on the top floor of the ancient black woman’s building. A thousand-watt bulb blazed and flashed on and off, while the alarm throbbed and sobbed. Elizabeth phoned.

—There’s something weird going on across the street.

—Yeah, we’ve had calls, we’ll send a car. We’ll get right on it.

For another hour the light flashed and the alarm whined.

Elizabeth phoned again.

—Did you send a car?

—Yeah, we sent a car. We didn’t see nothing.

—The alarm’s still going, and the light’s still flashing.

—We drove past and we didn’t see nothing.

—Did you look up?

They didn’t look up. They didn’t get out of the car. An apartment had been robbed and ransacked, the tenants were away, their alarm went off, the cops didn’t hear it or see it, they didn’t look up. They shouldn’t be cops.

A man’s disgusted. He just wants out. So he decides to go to a local monastery. The head monk says he can enter, except he must agree to take a vow of silence. No one in the monastery is allowed to speak at all, except for two words on New Year’s Day. The man says fine. So he enters, and at the end of his first year, on New Year’s Day, the monk asks him if he has two words he wants to say. The man says, Fruit stinks. Then another year passes, and the monk asks the man if he has two words he wants to say. The man says, Bed hard. After the third year, on New Year’s Day, the monk asks the man, Do you have two words you want to say? The man says, I quit. The monk says, I’m not surprised. All you’ve done since you got here is complain.