The house was a real house, one of the few left in New York. A falling-down Edwardian Gothic with a cupola, once painted a silvery gray and now chipping. There was a porch and latticework of carpenter’s lace — a house one would go to for piano lessons, if people still took piano lessons, a house invariably seized for a funeral home. It was squeezed between two storefronts — the realtor’s and a laundromat.
“You’re looking for a one-bedroom?” said the realtor.
“Yes,” said Mamie, though it suddenly seemed both too little and too much to ask for. The realtor had the confident hair and makeup of a woman who had lived forever in New York, a woman who knew ever so wearily how to tie a scarf. Mamie studied the realtor’s scarf, guessing the exact geometry of the folds, the location of the knot. If Mamie ever had surgery, scars in a crisscross up her throat, she would have to know such things. A hat, a scarf, a dot of rouge, mints in the mouth: Everyone in New York was hiding something, eventually.
The real estate agent took out an application form. She picked up a pen. “Your name?”
“Mamie Cournand.”
“What? Here. You fill this out.”
It was pretty much the same form she’d filled out previously at other agencies. What sort of apartment are you looking for; how much do you make; how do you make it …?
“What is children’s historical illustrator?” deadpanned the realtor. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
“I, uh, work on a series of history publications, picture books actually, for chil—”
“Free lance?” She looked at Mamie with doubt, suspicion, and then with sympathy to encourage candor.
“It’s for the McWilliams Company.” She began to lie. “I’ve got an office there that I use. The address is written here.” She rose slightly from her seat, to point it out.
The realtor pulled away. “I’m oriented,” she said.
“Oriented?”
“You don’t need to reach and point. This your home and work phone? This your age …? You forgot to put in your age.”
“Thirty-five.”
“Thirty-five,” she repeated, writing it in. “You look younger.” She looked at Mamie. “What are you willing to pay?”
“Urn, up to nine hundred or so.”
“Good luck,” she snorted, and still seated in her caster-wheeled chair, she trundled over to the file cabinet, lifted out a manila folder, flipped it open. She placed Mamie’s application on top. “This isn’t the eighties anymore, you know.”
Mamie cleared her throat. Deep in the back she could feel the wound sticking there, unhealed. “It hasn’t not been for very long. I mean, just a few years.” The awkward, frightened look had leaped to her eyes again, she knew. Fear making a child of her face — she hated this in herself. As a girl, she had always listened in a slightly stricken way and never spoke unless she was asked a question. When she was in college she was the kind of student sometimes too anxious to enter the cafeteria. Often she just stayed in her room and drank warm iced tea from a mix and a Hot Pot. “You live right over here?” The realtor motioned behind her. “Why are you moving?”
“I’m leaving my husband.”
The corner of her mouth curled. “In this day and age? Good luck.” She shrugged and spun around to dig through files again. There was a long silence, the realtor shaking her head.
Mamie craned her neck. “I’d like to see what you have, at any rate.”
“We’ve got nothing.” The realtor slammed the file drawerand twisted back around. “But keep trying us. We might have something tomorrow. We’re expecting some listings then.”
THEY HAD BEEN married for fourteen years, living on Brooklyn’s south slope for almost ten. It was a neighborhood once so Irish that even as late as the fifties, kids had played soccer in the street and shouted in Gaelic. When she and Rudy first moved in, the area was full of Italian men who barely knew Italian and leaned out of the windows of private clubs, shouting “How aw ya?” Now Hispanic girls in bright leotards gathered on the corner after school, smoking cigarettes and scorning the streets. Scorning, said the boys. Artists had taken up residence, as well as struggling actors, junkies, desperate Rosies in the street. Watch out, went the joke, for the struggling actors.
Mamie and Rudy’s former beauty parlor now had a padlocked door and boarded front windows. Inside remained the original lavender walls, the gold metallic trim. They had built a loft at one end of the place, and at the other were bookcases, easels, canvases, and a drawing table. Stacked against the wall by the door were Rudy’s huge paintings of snarling dogs and Virgin Marys. He had a series of each, and hoped, before he died, before I shoot myself in the head on my fortieth birthday, to have a gallery. Until then he painted apartments or borrowed money from Mamie. He was responsible for only one bill — utilities — and on several occasions had had to rush out to intercept Con Ed men arriving with helmets and boots to disconnect the electricity. “Never a dull moment,” Rudy would say, thrusting cash into their hands. Once he had tried to pay the bill with two small still lifes.
“You don’t think about the real world, Rudy. There’s a real world out there.” There was in him, she felt, only a fine line between insanity and charm. “A real world about to explode.”
“You don’t think I worry about the world exploding?” His expression darkened. “You don’t think I get tears in my eyes every fucking day thinking about those Rembrandts at the Met and what’s going to happen to them when it does?”
“Rudy, I went to a realtor today.”
Probably in their marriage she had been too dreamy and inconsistent. For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.
“Again?” Rudy sighed, ironic but hurt. Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks. You had to learn the sleight-of-hand, the snarling dog, the Hail Marys and hoops of it! Through all the muck of themselves, the times they had unobligated each other, the anger, the permitted absences, the loneliness grown dangerous, she had always returned to him. He’d had faith in that — abracadabra! But eventually the deadliness set in again. Could you live in the dead excellence of a thing — the stupid mortar of a body, the stubborn husk love had crawled from? Yes, he thought.
The television flashed on automatically, one of the government ads: pretty couples testifying to their undying devotion, undying bodies. “We are the Undying,” they said, and they cuddled their children, who had freckles that bled together on the cheeks, and toys with glassy button eyes. Undying, the commercials said. Be undying. “I can’t bear it,” Mamie said. “I can’t bear the brother and sister of us. I can’t bear the mother and son of us. I can’t bear the Undying commercials. I can’t bear washing my hair in dishwashing liquid, or doing the dishes in cheap shampoo, because we’re too broke or disorganized or depressed to have both at the same time.” Always, they’d made do. For toilet paper they used holiday-imprinted napkins — cocktail napkins with poinsettias on them. A big box of them, with a tray, had been sent to Rudy by mistake. For towels they used bath mats. For bath mats more poinsettia napkins. They bought discount soaps with sayings on the label like Be gentle and you need not be strong. “We’re camping out here, Rudy. This is camping!” She tried to appeal to something he would understand. “My work. It’s affecting my work. Look at this!” and she went over to a small drawing table and held up her half-finished sketch of Squanto planting corn. She’d been attempting a nuclear metaphor: white man learning to plant things in the ground, which would later burst forth; how the white man had gotten carried away with planting. “He looks like a toad.”