Passion and Affect (4 page)

Talk shows were only one of the things Charlotte hated. She hated frozen vegetables and spoke about it. She hated prepackaged cheese that had paper between the slices, and American gin, plastic dishes; she hated orange flavoring, instant iced tea, spaghetti sauce in cans, Corfam, spray bottles, and paperback editions. Furthermore, she refused to wear makeup of any sort or to have her hair styled, and at one time she had threatened to become a vegetarian, but Benno had lured her to her senses with Irish bacon. It was a, good thing, Benno often thought, that Charlotte was good-looking, because left to her own devices, she might have been deeply unattractive and never noticed. She was a large, tall woman, with the coloring of a milkmaid, the laugh of a longshoreman, and the legs of a diver. Her hair was straight and as coarse as a horse's mane and it was dark around her white face. She looked at various moments like a Kabuki dancer, a pale Apache warrior, a colt, or Michelangelo's
David
, had it been female. It was all right for her to be natural about herself, Benno thought, because she was so striking, but she wasn't a very good cook, or rather she was a plain cook. In her naturalism she made everything she cooked taste as if it had been boiled with apples and vitamin pills.

He mulled Charlotte over. He was not actively glad she was gone, but he could not have been in his current state of mind if she were here. He was glad she had all her quirks; those were the things he had loved her for first, but they had lived with him for nine years like lice or germs; they had slept with him; they had been intimate with him; they were part of him. He yawned.

Four weeks had passed since Charlotte's departure. The house was as neat as she had left it, but Benno's habits had begun to change. The first week she was gone he had bought a frozen cake, a frozen three-layer cake. He took it out of its icy little box as if it were an icon. It had the consistency of a sponge and tasted like slightly rubbery chocolate. Its frosting was a kind of cherry-flavored whipped gum. He had never seen anything like it. At the first bite, he reeled back with astonishment: it was sublime. The next week he bought several frozen cakes and some candy bars made chiefly of preservatives and artificial coloring. He tried a frozen Mexican dinner, but whatever was sleeping in those little tin trays tasted like hot spiced mud and looked like primal slime. He discovered frozen orange juice, AM radio, ladies' magazines, electric toothbrushes, and thrillers. But it was the discovery of television he loved best of all. He sat before it, beginning with the early evening news, a glass of milk and a slab of frozen cake on a plate, and watched. Often he would turn the sound off and make up lines for the newsmen. He became all the voices on the ads: the hysterical mother anxious about household odor, the bumbling father banished to the garage, the teenage bride with detergent worries. It kept him vastly amused for several weeks, and then he began to get somewhat depressed.

Once at his office, he was useless for an hour every morning, his eyes wincing at the memory of a dark room, sharp gray glare, and dazzling white shirts. He would stare out the window and lean over his drawing board. These days it took quite a while to wake up. When Charlotte was around, he woke up as fast and clean as a freshly snapped twig. Now he crawled out of sleep, like a wounded fly climbing out of a sticky cup. For that hour at work when he was not quite awake, he was the emotional equivalent of a hyperfertile field: everything took instant bloom. Stories in the newspapers touched him. Secretly in the men's room, he wept about the war, the lost and found columns, the return of the wounded soldiers, the brides on the society page. Gradually he became fond of that hour, and savored it like ambrosia.

It was high summer and the streets shimmered out waves of heat that fluttered like lingerie. Dry, parched leaves shriveled on the trees. The office was as cold as a meat locker, and Benno, braised by the pavement, roasted in the subway, and boiled in the elevator, stood in his office basking in the exquisite cool relief. On very hot mornings, he felt as if he were being remorphized into a human as the air-conditioner gradually evaporated his hot, tortured animal sweat. He felt very well, but he was lonesome.

The girl who brought him his coffee every morning was a fat, high-waisted married girl called Sylvia. She interested him only insofar as that her breasts appeared to be perfectly conical. At the moment she was on vacation with her husband, whom Benno imagined to have dents in either side of his chest gouged by his wife's sharp bosom. The girl who brought him his coffee this morning was therefore not Sylvia. Whatever her name was, she was tall and thin with a wide mouth and a row of squat, even teeth. Her hair was an unnatural red and she was wearing a slick little dress made from a plastic fiber that looked slightly musty and wet. On her feet were thin shoes the color of mirrors. “What's your name?” asked Benno, not knowing on which word to put the emphasis.

“Greenie,” said the girl, setting the cup on the drawing board.

“Greenie?” asked Benno.

“Yeah,” said the girl, looking around the office. It had a drawing board, a wooden work table, and walls of cork for sticking up designs and plans.

“What kind of a name is Greenie?” asked Benno. “Is it really Greenie?”

“Yeah,” said the girl. “I swear to God. I don't know what kind of name it is. It's my name. It isn't short for anything.” Then she vanished after looking Benno in the eyes for several seconds.

Benno considered her. On the one hand, she was very ugly. On the other hand, she was very beautiful. She had those squat teeth, and squat hands that didn't seem to belong to her tall, thin body. Her technicolor hair was tied back with a brilliant green-and-yellow ribbon. She was flat-chested and had the kind of sparse, bony body that looks as if it will make up in childish, game animation what it lacks in fullness. She seemed a rather simple girl. He thought of the look she had given him, and he remembered that she had very queer eyes. They were a fairly run-of-the-mill amberish brown, but whereas most people's eyes turned color, or changed expression, her eyes shifted from one extreme to the other while the rest of her face remained perfectly frozen except for her jaw, which lifted itself only to chew gum. Her eyes had been, from second to second, intelligent and piercing and then completely blank and vacant. What a nice girl, he thought, Greenie. She had a fairly lowish voice that was tarred by her adenoids and feathered by her cigarettes, which made it slightly husky. It was pretty effective.

Greenie was incandescent. She wore silvery powder, pearlized makeup, and vaseline on her eyebrows. She went off like a flashbulb. On the hot subways, crowds turned rank, rotted, and brown like jungle vegetation, but Greenie—he imagined her—Greenie would stand unaffected, her face a perfect, unmoving waxy mask of that silver stuff she shone with. Benno closed his door and sipped his coffee.

At lunchtime, Greenie reappeared. In her nasal voice she said, “Want lunch?”

Without thinking he said: “If you do.”

And she said: “You can buy it for me.”

He said: “If you eat it with me.” And she nodded. Benno thought this was one of the most romantic conversations he had ever had.

For lunch, Greenie had cherry soda, shrimp salad on pale white bread, potato chips, a chocolate drink, and a Mars bar. Benno had roast beef on dry toast. He sat drinking his coffee with his feet up. Greenie sat in a wicker chair with her legs twined around each other. Benno felt a surge of love, admiration, and cheer. She was awfully nice and very easy in a way that suggested she was either insane, or perfectly level.

“What's your last name, Greenie?” Benno asked.

“Frenzel,” said Greenie. Up close, freckles appeared under her silvery powder. Her hair was like a coiled piece of copper and smelled of perfume and lacquer. She took off her shoes and put her feet up. Benno noticed that she had painted her toenails pearly pink. He was stupefied, astonished and filled with happiness. She was a walking museum of wonders, Benno thought.

“What do you do here, Greenie?” Benno asked.

“I'm taking over for Sylvia. You think she's on vacation, and she is, but she isn't coming back. She's gonna have a baby.” Greenie handed him a chocolate cupcake, filled with cream. “She told me to have a look at you.”

“Oh?” said Benno.

“Yeah,” said Greenie, smoking. “She said you were pretty nice.”

“Am I?” asked Benno, in a tone of unsure passion.

“Yeah,” said Greenie in her post nasal drip voice. “Shaw.” She enunciated certainty as if announcing the name of the playwright. She gathered up the cups and napkins and wrappings, and disappeared.

For two weeks, Greenie was his lunch companion. At night, Benno peopled his television ads with her, substituting her face for those of the actresses, and, watching the news, he heard the events of the day recited through her husky, adenoidal voice. All the girls dancing for cleaner laundry were attached to her legs. At night, he dreamed bright dreams in which fruit dropped out of trees and burst in Technicolor at his feet. Girls floated on green lawns, and Greenie did an ad in television black and white for cat food. In his dream, Greenie was a cat. She was complete cat, complete woman. She was lying down wearing a dress. Her eyes had a slightly amused look, a look of hers he had recently discovered and she cooed out of a round mouth: “Every cat is a woman. Every woman is a cat.” In her hand she held a can of tuna fish.

In the mornings, now, there was a knife edge on his bleariness. Every hair on his body, every cilia sensitized itself to pick up Greenie. He could feel the television-broken veins in his eyes strain to see every possible bit of her. She brought the coffee and before lunch said very little except, “Yeah, shaw.”

After several lunches, Benno found out that she was twenty-three, that she had a boyfriend called Roger whom she “liked fine,” that she had quit college after two years, and that she wore a size nine narrow shoe. She lived with her sister in Brooklyn; her parents had retired and moved to California. Benno gathered they were rather agèd. Her sister, she explained, was a beatnik who had married a stockbroker, and they had a house in Brooklyn Heights, or at least the stockbroker did, and everybody thought that she, Greenie, was very rich when actually, she said in a flat monotone, her brother-in-law was rich but she had to pay room and board.

At lunch, Greenie put her feet up and ate Oreo cookies and smoked. She drank cherry soda and had tuna fish with extra mayo every day except Friday, when she had shrimp salad. She answered his questions at length and said, “Yeah, shaw.” The air-conditioner hummed tunelessly.

One afternoon, they got up at the same time to get the coffee, and Benno caught the image of the two of them in the mirror.

He was tall and solid and looked like anything dark: Portuguese, Armenian, Lebanese, Puerto Rican. Benno had a wide face with a flat nose, and eyes that were very dark in color, but almost transparent, like cooked sugar. Actually he was a nice Jewish boy whose mother was Russian. He was tall and woodsy, and his hair was very thick and cut so that it looked very long when it was actually quite short. Greenie, next to him, was an apparition. She wore an electric blue dress made of artificial silk with five enamel rings on her right hand. She wore blue plastic shoes and her hair was done in burnished curls around her silvery face.

On Friday, Benno said, “Will you have dinner with me?”

“Yeah,” said Greenie.

“At my house?”

“You married guys kill me,” Greenie said without inflection.

“My wife is away,” said Benno.

“Yeah,” said Greenie, rubbing her lower lip. “Yeah.” She sat down and then got up. “Yeah, shaw,” she said.

Through the afternoon, she assumed a phlegmatic silence and walked rather heavily, clattering her heels. At three o'clock, she brought him his afternoon coffee. She sat in his chair and smoked. The cigarettes she smoked were mentholated and smelled like the air-conditioned inside of a cheap drugstore, and the stubs she left in the ashtray had a rim of pearly pink around the filter.

Out on the street, they walked stiffly. It was more than hot: it was like being under a damp blanket in the tropics. The sky was heavy and yellow, the air hung in layers too wet to rise, and the headline of the evening paper indicated that the air pollution index was unhealthy. Benno's collar melted and his suit turned to Pablum. Greenie, next to him, lived in an air-conditioned world of her own that followed her wherever she went. Not a ringlet drooped. His face, washed with sweat and soot, felt gray, but she was the pearl of the Orient, and where the soot fell freely on the populace, it had enough sense to stay away from her.

Charlotte had chosen their apartment because it was plain, because it was spacious, and because it had good light. Since she needed absolute darkness to get to sleep, blackout shades had been provided for all the windows (including the living room in case she should want to nap on the couch). Benno kept the shades down, and the apartment when they entered it was dark and cold. It was like walking into a cave. They stood in the hall recovering and then Benno took Greenie into the den and offered her the leather chair. He sat on a burlap sofa and they drank cherry soda, which he had bought on the way home.

“'S nice room,” said Greenie. Benno looked around. It was a nice room—a nice, plain, bare room and she looked like the Albert Memorial in it. He was very glad she was there.

“It's six o'clock,” he said. “Do you want to watch the news?”

“Yeah,” said Greenie. “Shaw. I always watch the news.” He turned on the set. It glowed like a fungus. “What's on tonight?” asked Greenie.

“I don't know,” said Benno. “I just turn the dial and find out.”

“Well, that's dumb,” Greenie said. “That way you could be missing something good. Gimme the paper.” She went carefully down the listings and with a red pencil worked circles around the night's program. “See?” she said. “That's all the good stuff.”