As they are getting ready to go out, she begins to tell him the story of how she met her lover. While she is talking, he discovers that he has lost one of his expensive gloves and he is immediately upset and distracted. He leaves her to look for his glove downstairs. Her story is half finished and he does not find his glove. He is less interested in her story when he comes back into the room without having found his glove. Later when they are walking together on the street he tells her happily how he has bought his girlfriend shoes for eighty dollars because he loves her so much.
When she is alone again, she is so preoccupied by what has taken place during the visit with her husband that she walks through the streets very quickly and bumps into several people in the subway and the train station. She has not even seen them but has come down on them like some natural element so suddenly that they did not have time to avoid her and she was surprised they were there at all. Some of these people look after her and say “Christ!”
In her parents’ kitchen later she tries to explain something difficult about the divorce to her father and is angry when he doesn’t understand, and then finds at the end of the explanation that she is eating an orange, though she can’t remember peeling it or even having decided to eat it.
Cockroaches in Autumn
On the white painted bolt of a door that is never opened, a thick line of tiny black grains — the dung of cockroaches.
They nest in the coffee filters, in the woven wicker shelves, and in the crack at the top of a door, where by flashlight you see the forest of moving legs.
Boats were scattered over the water near Dover Harbor at odd angles, like the cockroaches surprised in the kitchen at night before they move.
The youngest are so bright, so spirited, so willing.
He sees the hand coming down and runs the other way. There is too far to go, or he is not fast enough. At the same time we admire such a will to live.
I am alert to small moving things, and spin around toward a floating dust mote. I am alert to darker spots against a lighter background, but these are only the roses on my pillowcase.
A new autumn stillness, in the evening. The windows of the neighborhood are shut. A chill sifts into the room from the panes of glass. Behind a cupboard door, they squat inside a long box eating spaghetti.
The stillness of death. When the small creature does not move away from the lowering hand.
We feel respect for such nimble rascals, such quick movers, such clever thieves.
From inside a white paper bag comes the sound of a creature scratching — one creature, I think. But when I empty the bag, a crowd of them scatter from the heel of rye bread, like rye seeds across the counter, like raisins.
Fat, half grown, with a glossy dark back, he stops short in his headlong rush and tries a few other moves almost simultaneously, a bumper-car jolting in place on the white drainboard.
Here in the crack at the top of the door, moving on their legs, they are in such numbers conscious of us behind our flashlight beam.
It is in his moment of hesitation that you sense him as an intelligent creature. Between his pause and his change of direction, you are sure, there is a quick thought.
They eat, but leave no mark of eating, we think. Yet here in the leaf edge, little crescent shapes — their gradual bites.
He is like a thickened shadow. See how the shadow at the crack of a window thickens, comes out from the wall, and moves off!
In the cardboard trap, five or six of them are stuck — frozen at odd angles, alive with an uncanny stillness, in this box like a child’s miniature theater.
How kindly I feel toward another species of insect in the house! Its gauzy wings! Its confusion! Its blundering walk down the lampshade! It doesn’t think to run away!
At the end of the meal, the cheeses were brought. All white except the Roquefort, they lay scattered over the board at odd angles, like cows grazing or ships at sea.
After a week, I take a forgotten piece of bread from the oven where they have visited — now it is dry, a bit of brown lace.
The white autumn light in the afternoon. They sleep behind a child’s drawings on the kitchen wall. I tap each piece of paper and they burst out from the edges of pictures that are already filled with shooting stars, missiles, machine guns, land mines …
The Bone
Many years ago, my husband and I were living in Paris and translating art books. Whatever money we made we spent on movies and food. We went mostly to old American movies, which were very popular there, and we ate out a lot of the time because restaurant meals were cheap then and neither of us knew how to cook very well.
One night, though, I cooked some fillets of fish for dinner. These fillets were not supposed to contain bones, and yet there must have been a small bone in one of them because my husband swallowed it and it got caught in his throat. This had never happened to either of us before, though we had always worried about it. I gave him bread to eat, and he drank many glasses of water, but the bone was really stuck, and didn’t move.
After several hours in which the pain intensified and my husband and I grew more and more uneasy, we left the apartment and walked out into the dark streets of Paris to look for help. We were first directed to the ground-floor apartment of a nurse who lived not far away, and she then directed us to a hospital. We walked on some way and found the hospital in the rue de Vaugirard. It was old and quite dark, as though it didn’t do much business anymore.
Inside, I waited on a folding chair in a wide hallway near the front entrance while my husband sat behind a closed door nearby in the company of several nurses who wanted to help him but could not do more than spray his throat and then stand back and laugh, and he would laugh too, as best he could. I didn’t know what they were all laughing about.
Finally a young doctor came and took my husband and me down several long, deserted corridors and around two sides of the dark hospital grounds to an empty wing containing another examining room in which he kept his special instruments. Each instrument had a different angle of curvature but they all ended in some sort of a hook. Under a single pool of light, in the darkened room, he inserted one instrument after another down my husband’s throat, working with fierce interest and enthusiasm. Every time he inserted another instrument my husband gagged and waved his hands in the air.
At last the doctor drew out the little fishbone and showed it around proudly. The three of us smiled and congratulated one another.
The doctor took us back down the empty corridors and out under the vaulted entryway that had been built to accommodate horse-drawn carriages. We stood there and talked a little, looking around at the empty streets of the neighborhood, and then we shook hands and my husband and I walked home.
More than ten years have passed since then, and my husband and I have gone our separate ways, but every now and then, when we are together, we remember that young doctor. “A great Jewish doctor,” says my husband, who is also Jewish.