“What? Broadway?”
“No, no, not yet anyway.”
“Well, that takes time, don’t it? She shouldn’t be discouraged.”
I went into Maureen’s bedroom, a tiny cell just big enough for a bed and a night table with a lamp on it. Because the closet door could only be opened halfway before it banged against the foot of the bed, I had to reach blindly around inside until I came up with a nightdress that was hanging on a hook. “Ah,” I said, nice and loud, “here it is-right…where…she said!” To complete the charade, I decided to open and then shut loudly the drawer to the little night table.
A can opener. In the drawer there was a can opener. I did not immediately deduce its function. That is, I thought it must be there to open cans.
Let me describe the instrument. The can-opening device itself is screwed to a smooth, grainy-looking wooden handle, about two and a half inches around and some five inches long, tapering slightly to its blunt end. The opening device consists of a square aluminum case, approximately the size of a cigarette lighter, housing on its underside a small metal tooth and a little ridged gear; projecting upward from the top side of the case is an inch-long shaft to which is attached a smaller wooden handle, about three inches long. Placing the can opener horizontally over the edge of the can, you press the pointed metal tooth down into the rim, and proceed to open the can by holding the longer handle in one hand, and rotating the smaller handle with the other; this causes the tooth to travel around the rim until it has severed the top of the can from the cylinder. It is a type of can opener that you can buy in practically any hardware store for between a dollar and a dollar and a quarter. I have priced them since. They are manufactured by the Eglund Co., Inc., of Burlington, Vermont-their “No. 5 Junior” model. I have Maureen’s here on my desk as I write.
“How ya’ doin’?” the cop called.
“Oh, fine.”
I slammed the drawer shut, having first deposited the No. 5 Junior in my pocket.
“So that’s it,” I said, coming back around into the living room, Delilah glued to my trouser cuff.
“Mattress look okay to you?”
“Great. Perfect. Thanks again. I’ll be off, you know-I’ll leave the locksmith to you then, right?”
I was one flight down and flying, when the young cop appeared at the landing over my head. “Hey!”
“What!”
“Toothbrush!”
“Oh!”
“Here!”
I caught it and kept going.
The taxi I flagged down to take me crosstown to Susan’s was one of those fitted out like the prison cell of an enterprising convict or the den of an adolescent boy: framed family photographs lined up on the windshield, a large round alarm clock strapped atop the meter, and some ten or fifteen sharpened Eberhard pencils jammed upright in a white plastic cup fastened by a system of thick elastic bands to the grill separating the passenger in the back seat from the driver up front. The grill was itself festooned with blue-and-white tassels, and an arrangement of gold-headed upholstery tacks stuck into the roof above the driver’s head spelled out “Gary, Tina & Roz”-most likely the names of the snappily dressed children smiling out from the family photographs of weddings and bar mitzvahs. The driver, an elderly man, must have been their grandfather.
Ordinarily I suppose I would have commented, like every other passenger, on the elaborate decor. But all I could look at and think about then was the Eglund Company’s No. 5 Junior can opener. Holding the aluminum end in my left hand, I passed the larger handle through a circle formed out of the thumb and index finger of my right hand; then, wrapping the other three fingers loosely around it, I moved the handle slowly down the channel.
Next I placed the handle of the can opener between my thighs and crossed one leg over the other, locking it in place. Only the square metallic opening device, with its sharp little tooth facing up, poked out from between my legs.
The cab veered sharply over to the curb.
“Get out,” the driver said.
“Do what?”
He was glaring at me through the grill, a little man, with dark pouches under his eyes and bushy gray eyebrows, wearing a heavy wool sweater under a suit. His voice quivered with rage- “Get the hell out! None of that stuff in my cab!”
“None of what? I’m not doing anything.”
“Get out, I told you! Out, you, before I use the tire iron on your head!”
“What do you think I was doing, for Christ’s sake!”
But by now I was on the sidewalk.
“You filthy son of a bitch!” he cried, and drove off.
Clutching the can opener in my pocket and holding the diary in my lap, I eventually made it to Susan’s-though not without further incident. As soon as I had gotten settled in the back seat of a second cab, the driver, this one a young fellow with a wispy yellow beard, fixed me in the rearview mirror and said, “Hey, Peter Tarnopol.” “What’s that?” “You’re Peter Tarnopol-right?”
“Wrong.” “You look like him.” “Never heard of him.” “Come on, you’re putting me on, man. You’re him. You’re really him. Wow, man. What a coincidence. I just had Jimmy Baldwin in here last night.” “Who’s he?” “The writer, man. You’re putting me on. You know who else I had in here?” I didn’t answer. “Mailer. I get all you fuckin’ guys. I had another guy in here, I swear to fuck he musta weighed eighty-two pounds. This tall string bean with a crew cut. I took him out to Kennedy. You know who it was?” “Who?” “Fuckin’ Beckett. You know how I know it was him? I said to him, ‘You’re Samuel Beckett, man.’ And you know what he said? He says, ‘No, I’m Vladimir Nabokov.’ What do you think of that?” “Maybe it was Vladimir Nabokov.” “No, no, I never had Nabokov. Not yet. What are you writin’ these days, Tarnopol?” “Checks.” We had arrived at Susan’s building. “Right here,” I told him, “that awning.” “Hey, you live all right, Tarnopol. You guys do okay, you know that?” I paid him, while he shook his head in wonderment; as I was leaving the taxi, he said, “Watch this, I’ll turn the corner and pick up fuckin’ Mala-mud. I wouldn’t put it past me.”
“Good evening, sir,” said Susan’s elevator man, appearing out of nowhere and startling me in the lobby, just as I had made it gravely past the doorman and was removing the can opener from my pocket…But once inside the apartment I pulled it from my pocket again and cried out, “Wait’ll you see what I got!”
“She’s alive?” asked Sysan.
“And kicking.”
“-the police?”
“Weren’t there. Look-look at this!”
“It’s a can opener.”
“It’s also what she masturbates with! Look! Look at this nice sharp metal tooth. How she must love that protruding out of her-how she must love to look down at that!”
“Oh, Peter, where ever did you-“
“From her apartment-next to her bed.”
Out popped the tear.
“What are you crying about? It’s perfect-don’t you see? Just what she thinks a man is-a torture device. A surgical instrument!”
“But where-“
“I told you. From her bedside table!”
“You stole it, from her apartment?”
“Yes!”
I described to her then in detail my adventures at the hospital and after.
When I finished she turned and went off to the kitchen. I followed her and stood by the stove as she began to brew herself a cup of Ovaltine.
“Look, you yourself tell me I shouldn’t be defenseless with her.”
She would not speak to me.
“I am only doing what I have to do, Susan, to get sprung from this trap.”
No reply.
“I am tired, you see, of being guilty of sex crimes in the eyes of every hypocrite, lunatic, and-“
“But the only one who thinks you’re guilty of anything is you.”