No Lease on Life (7 page)

Elizabeth worried that mentioning his deafness would offend him. She wasn’t going to pretend that screaming into the phone was easy or adequate. They had to communicate. Herbert responded. Maybe he wasn’t sensitive or maybe she hadn’t offended him. He was accustomed to being deaf. He was used to the stupidities of the nondeaf. He was happy to help, he said, when they met, face to face, in front of the building. She thought he said that, or that’s what she heard, because he didn’t pronounce words clearly. She had to interpret. She may have confused his complaints for others he didn’t have. She shouted her thanks, and they shook hands. He helped Ernest and her contact some other tenants in his building.

Ernest and Elizabeth went to see one of them. He lived in the alleged same building as theirs. Architecturally it had been the same—Roy said she was going to see how the other half lived. The other half had been a mirror image, but the landlord recently halved all the apartments. Then reconditioned them. The ceilings were lower and made of a porous material. The apartments smelled bad. They lacked proportion. They were hopeless, shapeless.

His apartment had no outside or available light. It was probably illegal to have just one window looking out on a wall. Elizabeth could hardly breathe. The place was a hole, in a desperate condition. The guy was cute, even handsome. Elizabeth knew that no one would expect the condition he lived in from the way he looked. It was like the super Hector’s apartment, though she’d never had the chance to enter Hector’s. It was smaller than Hector’s and the cute guy was the only person in it. All the shit was his.

To him, it meant nothing. She could see that. His surroundings meant nothing to him. There could have been decades of vomit caked on the walls and floors, he wouldn’t have noticed. He didn’t see it or smell it. He must have also been like Hector in that way, except he was a rock musician, not a super. The decals on his guitar case announced his seat in the theater of life. Lobster of Hate was the decal she liked best. She’d heard them play.

People live in very strange conditions. People live in situations no one talks about. People live in ways no one sees. People live in ways that aren’t described and have to be forgotten if they are. People live in ways that no one wants to hear about or can accept, so no one hears about them, no one’s told, no one listens. No one would believe the descriptions. TV sitcoms were descriptions of a very few situations. All situations might ultimately be comedies, but all comedies and situations weren’t on television. So few of them surfaced, so few situations ever lit up the screen, everything was predictable.

The cute guy’s place wasn’t predictable, not from the way he looked. It wasn’t that unusual either, except no one talked about it. People live like this voluntarily. People are free to live like this.

Ernest took notes on the yellow pad while the cute guy talked. Ernest was stable and winning. Elizabeth wandered mentally while Ernest talked to the guy. He was collecting information for their dossier to the City. That was their agenda.

She was collecting other information. She was taking her own notes. She was looking around. She was taking in the guy and his place. It was hard. But she found a way not to be there. She wasn’t fucking the cute musician in her head, she couldn’t bring herself to do it, with him and Ernest in the room. Instead she saw the girl he’d brought back from a club, it was very late, and they were both high, drunk, stoned, and he opens his door, and the girl gasps, she has an asthma attack because of the years of dust, so they never fuck. Or, maybe they do fuck, she’s really turned on by the shit they’re fucking in, she’s from a strict family in the Midwest, or from an upstate New York farm, and she’s never seen anything like this, and she thinks it’s romantic. Elizabeth couldn’t remember if she found this scene romantic when she was twenty. Fucking on dirty clothes. She was too old to be young, couldn’t revive her adolescence like a comeback career. She didn’t think she’d be rejuvenated by fucking him. She could imagine it. The smells would be the same, the actions would be the same, nothing would be changed. But she was older. She was going to grow even older, old, and she was going to become less flexible and drier and more indifferent and she’d eventually become decrepit no matter who or what she fucked, and then she would breathe her last breath and expire. It was inevitable.

The cute guy had filed a complaint with the City once, he told them. Ernest and Elizabeth had him sign his name to their petition. It felt like success. Then they started to leave. The cute guy said to Elizabeth, How’s about getting together again and talking about the situation? Ernest shot Elizabeth a look. Elizabeth said, Whatever, I mean, whatever Ernest wants…. She pretended she didn’t realize what kind of situation he had in mind. She wondered if Ernest was jealous. Ernest never referred to it. Ernest had deep reserves.

The other tenants never materialized, they never answered Elizabeth’s carefully crafted letters. They could have been eliminated, through intimidation for one thing. It was not out of the question—Elizabeth could imagine it—that the renovations started and the tenants, the complaining ones, were not told when the walls were going to be torn down, because the Big G hated them, the way she hated Elizabeth, a little less, and some were lying in bed and the walls fell on them, so their legs were broken, or they were buried under the debris or in a wall. A cryptic end in a tenement crypt. Improbable.

They were eliminated because the noise of construction, the daily crash and boom, drove them out, drove them screaming into the night, or, when the walls came down, and the vermin came out and bit them, the tenants’ legs became swollen and inflamed and covered in red itchy wounds, and, marked by disease, they fled, yelling about bugs and rats, about hardy roaches. They were driven out, and the landlord could raise the rent. Or the drilling and banging every day ended their relationships, decimated their tenuous loves, and they broke up, broke their leases, or they developed respiratory illnesses, living in dust for months, and they fled their homes, and the landlord had its way, forced them out. The landlord could raise the rent the way it planned, and the landlord did raise the rent on the smaller, blighted apartments, on the newly fixed-up, reconditioned hovels.

That was a while ago.

Two women are at a hotel in the Catskills. One says, The food is terrible here. Yes, the other says, and there’s so little of it.

Now a few people were leaving their floor-throughs or one-bedrooms, or studio apartments, to go to work. The blue collars. The housekeepers. The train conductors. The nurses. Some people were coming home. The prostitutes, the bartenders, the club managers, the clubgoers, the musicians, the alcoholics, the night people. There weren’t as many of them as those going to day jobs. There were several taxi drivers.

One night a taxi—a checker—was parked across the street. Elizabeth noticed some movement in the front seat. She couldn’t tell what it was. She watched. The driver was getting a blow job. The prostitute’s head went up and down, up and down, up and down. Then it stopped, the movement stopped, and, like an animal stuck in the mud, the taxi driver, who was large, rolled over and lay on top of the poor prostitute.

The taxi driver had a huge ass. The moon was out, a full moon, and the moon lit his ass, spotlighted it. If it was done in the movies, no one would believe it.

He starts to fuck her and his big white ass, all lit up, goes up and down, up and down, up and down.

Three people come out of the front door of a building. Two men, one woman, maybe coming from a party, maybe they’d had a menage a trois. They looked preppy. Maybe they’d had coffee. one of the men immediately spots the taxi driver’s big ass humping up and down, up and down, the moon shining on it, but he doesn’t want the woman to see. He positions himself between her and the taxi. But finally they all see it. The three stand there, spellbound on the sidewalk, watching until the taxi driver comes. Then the driver sits up, the prostitute sits up, and he starts the car and drives away.

The hooker was probably from the next corner. It was before AIDS hit big-time. There were a lot more hookers on the next block. They all had habits and most of them were gone now, dead. The serial murderer Joel Rilkin killed at least one of them. The mother of one of the murdered hookers said in the
Times
, “Think of her as a girl, my daughter, not just as a whore.” There were always ripe, new working girls. They faded fast.

It was pretty late the night Elizabeth and Ernest left the cute guy’s hideous hole. But that night, and it was the only one, Ernest and Elizabeth went for a serious cup of coffee in a nearby cafe. Elizabeth’s regular, the Pick Me Up.

Even though it was late and cold, the crusties—that’s what Roy called them—weren’t far away. They were never far away. They were lying on the street near the Pick Me Up with their dogs and their dogs’ puppies. Elizabeth liked the puppies. They would be raised to be vicious. The crusties were probably already training them to go for people’s throats when they didn’t give them money. The crusties thought of themselves as road warriors, except they never moved, they sat or lay on the sidewalk, and then in a group they’d move off, they never walked alone, they were terrified kids who talked shit to everyone in the neighborhood, they looked miserable, they smelled terrible, they didn’t shower even in the summer, so their piercings became infected. Except for a few of the females who retained surprisingly old-fashioned feminine wiles, all the others smelled of things no one wanted to get near.

The crusties spit at people who walked on the sidewalk near them. You went out to get a newspaper in the morning, and even if you didn’t look at them, which Elizabeth didn’t, she never looked at them if she could help it, they made nasty comments and spit. She was walking behind a guy in shorts. He passed the crusties, and one said to the other, Let’s kill him. The guy stumbled, completely weirded out. The crusties weren’t liked on the block or in the neighborhood, not even by other so-called outlaws. They spit at people in the morning before they were barely awake. They said things like, Let’s kill him, for no reason. They pretended to be squatters. They were nothing, and there was nothing to them. If you open your eyes, get dressed, walk outside to get a cup of coffee, and someone spits at you for no reason, first thing, the spitter is nothing, doesn’t deserve to live. Not everyone does. Elizabeth wouldn’t even talk about it.

Elizabeth never gave the crusties money. She gave other people money. Tyrone who hung around the building, a nameless woman with a nameless dog, Earl who was up from the south, permanently jobless, and the Hispanic guy with a patch over his eye, those two alternated duty at the post office, manned the door with cups in hand. But she never gave the crusties money. Even though they had dogs. It was a gimmick, an affront. She considered carrying a machete the way Ricardo did on Halloween. She would wave it in the air when any of them spit at her.

Ricardo lived below her, with Frankie and his grandmother, who was Ricardo’s mother, and the other kids, in the crowded Lopez apartment. There were many children. The children had children. Elizabeth came to appreciate the continuity. She saw life going on, stunted and obstructed as it usually was, but she could understand generations because of the Lopezes. They were people who would survive almost anything.

Ricardo had been away a long time, since before Elizabeth and Roy’s time, that’s what Frankie told her, Ricardo was away, until Frankie told her that Ricardo had been in jail, for drugs. Now he was back, on the block. He carried a machete on Halloween. He stood in front of the laundromat, across the street, holding the machete down the side of his leg. His mother stood next to him, and inside the laundromat Frankie was helping people with their wash. Ricardo was a Puerto Rican nationalist. The Puerto Rican flag hung from their fire escape all year long.

Elizabeth saw the machete. Ricardo held it tight against the side of his body. It shimmered along the leg of his black sweatpants. He had sweat on his forehead. Ricardo explained that gangs were going up and down the streets, with razors, slashing people. For no reason. He was going to get them if they tried anything here. He glared and looked up the block. She knew he wouldn’t kill her, he’d protect her. She lived in his building, she was in his territory, and he liked her. She’d let him patronize her, be macho for her as much as he wanted. She’d like to see him slice off one of the crusties’ heads.

There are three people—a priest, a rabbi, and a lawyer—standing outside a school. It’s on fire, burning down. Children at the window screaming, crying. The Rabbi goes, Oh my God, oh my god… The children, the poor children. The lawyer says, Oh, fuck the children. The priest says, You think we can?

That night when Ernest and Elizabeth walked to the Pick Me Up the crusties were lying on the sidewalk. One of them spit. His spit didn’t hit her. That was lucky. Elizabeth was ready to hit him. She wanted to ask the most disgusting crustie, Do you have sex together? How? But she and Ernest had to talk about the tenant situation and their letter.

Ernest hadn’t gotten any roles lately. He read a lot of the books in the bookstore where he worked. They discussed, with an intensity that astonished Elizabeth, the letter to the landlord. Elizabeth didn’t want the letter to be too meek or too hawkish. She wanted the right tone. When you demand to be treated fairly, you must appear to be just, right but not righteous, and, especially, Elizabeth knew, you must appear to be above suspicion mentally. The last thing she wanted the City to think was that she and Ernest were irrational, that they didn’t have a reasonable leg to stand on.

The very next night Ernest came over. He sat next to her on a chair. She sat at her desk, at her laptop. Roy sat in the kitchen, reading. She typed the letter. They considered everything in it, every detail.

To the City,

xxx and xxy are TWO SEPARATE buildings…[they both wanted capital letters]. No hallway renovation was done in our building; in fact there is NO downstairs hallway at all [a surprising turn; good to be entertaining]… Tenants of our building do not benefit from the hallway work done on the building next door—they are ENTIRELY separate buildings [making the point another way]… Landlord has been belligerent with tenant, who complained of inadequate hall maintenance. [The tenant was Elizabeth. Ernest urged, Go on, put that in. Elizabeth happily typed it in.]… Entry to xxx can be made without key, merely by pushing door open. (Tenant complains of strange man sleeping in hallway 4/93.) [Ernest was on the top floor. Homeless people slept and shit at his door.]… Tenants feel it is unfair for building to have been neglected for so long and then landlord receives increase for fixing it. [Absolutely, they said in unison.]