“But, Dennis, really, why do you think so much about love, of someone loving you or not loving you? That is all you read about, all you talk about.”
“Put the starving people of the world together in a room, and what you get is a lot of conversation about roast beef. They should be talking about the Napoleonic Code?” At the mention of roast beef, Mave’s face lit up, greenish, fluorescent. She looked past Dennis and saw the waitress coming toward their table at last; she was moving slowly, meanly, scowling. There was a large paper doily stuck to her shoe. “I mean …” Dennis was saying, looking pointedly at Mave, but Mave was watching the waitress approach. Oh, life, oh, sweet, forgiven for the ice … He grabbed Mave’s wrist. There was always an emergency. And then there was love. And then there was another emergency. That was the sandwiching of it. Emergency. Love. Emergency. “I mean, it’s not as if you’ve been dozing off,” Dennis was saying, his voice reaching her now, high and watery. “I mean, correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ve been having this conversation alone.” He tightened his grip. “I mean, have I?”
Like Life
Everybody likes the circus.
Clowns! elephants! trained horses! peanuts!
Everybody likes the circus.
Acrobats! tight-rope walkers! camels! band music!
Suppose you had a choice of going to the circus
or painting a picture. Which would you choose?
You’d choose the circus.
Everybody likes the circus.
ALL THE MOVIES that year were about people with plates in their heads: Spirits from another galaxy gather in a resort town at night, taking over the townspeople — all but the man with the plate in his head. Or: A girl with a plate in her head wanders a city beach, believing she is someone else. Evidence washes up on shore. There are sailors. Or: A woman dreams of a beautiful house in which no one lives, and one day she passes the actual house — a cupola, gables, and a porch. She walks up to it, knocks on the door, and it is opened slowly by her! a woman who is a twin of herself, grinning. She has a plate in her head.
Life seemed to have become like that. It had burst out of itself, like a bug.
In February a thaw gave the city the weepy ooze of a wound. There were many colds, people coughing in the subways. The sidewalks foamed to a cheese of spit, and the stoops, doorways, bus shelters were hedged with Rosies — that is what they were called — the jobless men, women, children with gourd lumps or fevers, imploring, hating eyes, and puffed lavender mouths, stark as paintings of mouths. The Rosies sold flowers: a prim tulip, an overflowing iris. Mostly no one bought any. Mostly it was just other Rosies, trading bloom for bloom, until one of them, a woman or a child, died in the street, the others gathering around in a wail, in the tiny, dark morning hours, which weren’t morning at all but night.
THAT YEAR was the first that it became illegal — for those who lived in apartments or houses — not to have a television. The government claimed that important information, information necessary for survival, might need to be broadcast automatically, might need simply to burst on, which it could do. Civilization was at stake, it was said. “Already at the stake,” said others, who had come to suspect that they were being spied on, controlled, that what they had thought when they were little — that the people on the television could also see you — now was true. You were supposed to leave it plugged in at all times, the plastic antenna raised in a V — for victory or peace, no one could say.
Mamie lost sleep. She began to distrust things, even her own words; too much had moved in. Objects implanted in your body — fillings, earrings, contraceptives — like satellite dishes, could be picking up messages, substituting their words for yours, feeding you lines. You never knew. Open your mouth, it might betray you with lies, with lackadaise, with moods and speak not your own. The things you were saying might be old radio programs bounced off the foil of your molars, or taxi calls fielded by the mussely glove of your ear. What you described as real might be only a picture, something from Life magazine you were forced to live out, after the photography, in imitation. Whole bodies, perhaps, could be ventriloquized. Approximated. You could sit on the lap of a thing and just move your lips. You could become afraid. You could become afraid someone was making you afraid: a new fear, like a gourmet’s, a paranoid’s paranoia.
This was not the future. This was what was with you now in the house.
Mamie lived in a converted beauty parlor storefront — a tin ceiling, a stench of turpentine, and extra sinks. At night her husband, a struggling painter, moody and beer-breathed, lay sleeping next to her, curled against her, an indifferent whistle in his nose. She closed her eyes. What all to love in the world, went a prayer from her childhood. What all to love?
The lumber of his bones piled close.
The radiator racked and spitting. Heat flapping like birds up the pipes.
SHE REMAINED AWAKE. On nights when she did sleep, her dreams were about the end of life. They involved getting somewhere, getting to the place where she was supposed to die, where it was OK. She was always in a group, like a fire drill or a class trip. Can we die here? Are we there yet? Which way can it possibly be?
Or else there was the house dream. Always the house dream, like the movie of the dream of the house. She would find a house, knock on the door, and it would open slowly, a wedge of dark, and then stop, her own profile greeting her, hanging there midair like a chandelier.
Death, said her husband, Rudy. He kept a small hatchet under the mattress, in case of intruders. Death. Last year she had gone to a doctor, who had looked at her throat and a mole on her back, studying them like Rorschachs for whatever he might see in them. He removed the mole and put it floating in a pathologist’s vial, a tiny marine animal. Peering in at her throat, he said, “Precancer”—like a secret or a zodiac sign.
“Precancer?” she had repeated quietly, for she was a quiet woman. “Isn’t that … like life?” She was sitting, and he was standing. He fumbled with some alcohol and cotton balls, which he kept on the counter in kitcheny-looking jars, the flour and sugar of the medical world.
He took her wrist and briefly squeezed. “It’s like life, but it’s not necessarily life.”
THERE WAS a wrought-iron fence all around and a locked gate, but it was the bird feeder she remarked first, the wooden arms, the open mouth of boards stuck up there on a single leg. It was nearing Valentine’s Day, an angry slosh of a morning, and she was on her way to a realtor, a different one this time, not far from the Fourth and Smith stop of the F train — from where you could see the Statue of Liberty. On her way, she had come upon a house with a bird feeder. A bird feeder! And a tree in front, a towering oak, over one hundred fifty years old. A grade school teacher had brought her class to it and now stood in front of it, pointing and saying, “A hundred and fifty years ago. Can anyone tell me when that was?”
But it was the bird feeder, initially: a cross with an angle-roofed shelter at the head — a naked scarecrow bedecked with horizontals like a Frank Lloyd Wright house, or an alpine motel, its wooden ledges strewn with millet seed. In the freckled snow below lay tiny condiment cups of peanut butter, knocked to the ground. A flibberty squirrel, hopping and pausing in spasms, lifted each cup to his nose and nibbled. On the feeder itself was a pair of pigeons — lidless, thick-necked, municipal gargoyles; but there, wasn’t that also a sparrow? And a grosbeak?