In the Slammer With Carol Smith (18 page)

‘Go on.’ I feel like a Dr. Cee.

‘So he says, weak as a kitten, “We never got to do anything, Joe—be compassionate. Long time no see.” … I was in health, you see. So we hadn’t. He says, “You’re my pickup now. And I knew you weren’t wearing your watch.”’

He claps the board together hard. ‘And at four am that morning he goes to the hospital. Lee.’

So that’s their names: Lee. And Joe.

‘Here.’ He hands me the board and the sack of chips. ‘Thanks for the game.’

Clutching both board and chips my hands are full, a warning sensation. ‘Gosh. I forgot my Shelter-Pak.’

‘Oh boy. In the station? Too bad. Lots of those around now. But they cost.’

I feel in my slacks pocket. Martyn’s keys. I’d been taking just those when on short errands from the pad. They look at you funny otherwise, in the food stores. ‘No—it’s okay. I left it where I’m—where I work.’

‘Work.’ He brightens. ‘I’d like to go back now. But they have somebody.’ He gets me a shopping bag. ‘Here. You got car-fare?’

‘It’s only to the fur district. I’ll walk.’

‘Fur—’ he says. ‘You’re not—standing on those corners—at night?’

‘Me?’

‘Used to be boys there. No cops.’ His mouth tics. ‘Long ago. Excuse it.’

‘No, the girls are over on Fourth. Real beauties. High-class.’ Long silk legs, and in winter, fur coats blown wide. ‘No, on our block there’s only the anti-fur activist. She stays late. But I don’t think she tricks. Except maybe for the animals.’

I’ve made him laugh. Good crowns on his teeth. I see him easy among the church purchasers, in a white shirt and bible-black tie.

‘So, one of your old pals put you up, eh? Maybe a guy?’

‘Just a friend. He’s in Africa.’ I like mentioning that. A friend, a pad, a favor given. It grounds me. Which even the confirmed floater can now and then crave. It brings me out of the cold. But should I want to be?

The shopping bag he’s brought is gray with a white cross on its front. ‘So what did you commit? To have to do time for so long. Riots? Get dragged from the White House lawn? Hunger strike?’

I shrug.

‘So it’s over. Like when I finished my military service. And you don’t know what you did it for either, do you.’

‘Keep your shopping bag,’ I say.

‘Ah, come on.’ He’s stashing in some green.

‘Don’t do that. No.’

‘Tide you over. Or maybe you’re already on the welfare.’

Disability—I have the disability. Once I could say that like a password. Why’s it sticking in my craw?

‘I have a—family trust.’

When I raise my eyes his face has got it, that stare. When people look too long. ‘So that’s it. I should have known. But you’re—so together, otherwise.’ He touches my shoulder, a finger brush, like he might get a shock. ‘Maybe you do have that pad; maybe you don’t. You haven’t been to the shelters yet; I can tell. I won’t ask what you do. You hang out that area though, there used to be security guards; they could be rough.’ He’s talking fast now—the way he would’ve to Lee, when they first met? ‘Case you get stuck, there’s a priest runs a damn decent soup kitchen. Near that Limelight disco, used to be a church I supplied.’ When he hunches up the fringe of hair on his nape shows dyed. ‘Maybe it still is a church, daytimes.’

He refolds the shopping sack and presses it on me.

I take it. ‘I’ll remember you guys.’ I see that’s thanked him. ‘And the board is a doozy.’ I smooth it. ‘Just to carry it gives me an air of distinction. Like if I had an Italian bike.’

To weave that in gives me a real sensation, like I’m linking the bad times, mending them into the now. Cold turkey is not that good for the now.

He thinks I’m being funny? So why not be?

‘Maybe I’ll start a checkers club.’

He shakes his head at me. Like when the hospital aides guided some of us on practice trips downtown, and passersby at first took us for girls on an outing from some private school. ‘Must have been a charmer, when you were—twenty-eight. Or younger.’

‘Uh uh. In college, I was the one got charmed.’

‘Knocked up?’

‘Group charmed.’

‘Hah. See a lot of that, down here. Can turn you a loner, on the rebound.’

‘Loner?’ I scan the musty arrangements, this waiting-game he still plays. On the one memory, hoarded. While outside, out that door, on line or not, the city’s monuments at least join up with you as you meet them. The pavement strides under you. The heads populate the air. ‘Maybe. But in company.’

In a pause like that, in such a house, I swear you can hear the pillows mewl.

‘I have company—’ he says. The words shake, like a rattle he keeps handy. ‘You don’t have another person’s load in your life—you don’t have a life.’

I ease toward that door always kept ajar. I can see Lee’s reason for it.

‘Free shower, any time—’ he calls after me. ‘Only if you don’t have the crabs.’

So you can only qualify here if you’re not lousy to begin with.

As I edge further, he calls like an echo: ‘What’s your na-ame?’

I see his misery. Lead a too personal life and your woe will be custom-designed.

I can’t think of any of my names I would want to leave here. In this halfway house, where the stove that should warm has no pipe.

Quick, ankle it over the sill.

‘I’ll send you a card.’

This is a Friday dusk. Everybody on the avenue knows that; so do I. Offices are letting out as daily, but there’s an edge to the voices saying, ‘Good Night.’ A weekend flurry is in the air, even for those who have no weekends. I am walking back to my office. The calendar, whether I keep to it or violate it, has been seeping into my bones.

Also—have I begun to cherish events that face me toward others? Or even to initiate those? The accidental graze, for which one apologizes? The weather-chat? The smile at a child? I have taken the subway—countermanding the walking code. To a man who boarded a bus without the proper change, I was the first to offer. I have entered shops only to dally. My infringements have been endless, given the logic I had been living under. Yet I feel less and less reprobate.

On exiting Joe and Lee’s I had an impulse to turn down Christopher Street and join that line. I knew better than to do so. To impose what I am not on what they are—as they might see it? That warmth, that solidarity, that intermittent agony, was not for me. Nor the sex. And Christopher Street was not on my way. Yet I had the impulse—toward.

In the hospital, we were all wary of that recommended reaching out. On my ward of eight to twelve youngish men and women, everyone sensed when a member was ‘going off of sick’ as it were—that is, relearning the manners of health, or able to assume those sufficiently. Those patients, as they left, were seen as traitors to the madnesses or mental injuries that whelmed the rest of us, and which also were the hospitals raison d’etre and research glory. The cured were seen as mercenaries for the norm.

And we could clock the terms of the cure, in our deviantly uncanny way. We knew what health was in the way a man with one leg observes a man with two.

—‘What’s going on in me is like an inner tuning,’ my room-mate, shortly to be released, confided. ‘It’s like in your body, your head, there is a pattern violin. And each day, you tighten the strings. Then play.’ Of course we were a mildly non-delusionary, non-violent ward, mostly obsessives of familial despair. Or broken world-crockery, like yours truly.

‘Madness is bad melodrama,’ my actress room-mate says scornfully. ‘It’s no wonder we can each see each other’s, but not our own.’ Health—or cure, crept up on you, a delicate accretion that you had best keep mum about. For since it was never totally positive, perhaps merely not negative, and often only an acceptable equilibrium, it was simply there or not, explicit as a chord. And you couldn’t just evoke it. ‘Or God knows, cheer it on.’

For even a cure could rampage, to a fine or classic result. On the day Heather (diagnosis, ‘involutional despair’) was leaving to resume touring with the company she had been invalided out of two years before, she reported to me: ‘That art therapy aide I loathe, the one that’s always encouraging but really believes we’re all too eccentric to make real worthy use of our talents.… So when I came to say goodbye—for I’m really trying, y’know, she said: “Now Heather, smile. Like they say Leonardo even meditated with a smile.” And I said: “And breathed from the diaphragm”—and barfed all over her smock.’

Then she hugged me, Heather did. We had never. ‘Remember me, Carol. Memory is faith.’—And now I have. With a smile.

When I let myself in, the Shelter-Pak left behind when I’d rushed out is sprawled just inside the door. Its sides are caved in, like a cat’s after giving birth. Each day I have mined it more. On foot, one keeps a hard core of necessaries ever at reach. Now they have entrenched themselves in the places that habit appoints. Toothbrush in the bathroom glass, jacket on the hook. Towel and extra panties on the bathroom line. My wallet still lies within, along with a passport case big enough for all the archive of identity I must present to keep my allowance coming. I have no need here for alley comforts like the pewter flask for water, and the collapsible cup, so they too are in the pocket reserved. In the pocket next to those, the sanitaries, and a small pouch containing a nail scissors, file and tweezers in golden German brass, that I bought the minute I came out of jail. The hospital had confiscated them, then returned them when I left. They are more than implements. They are history. Like the one prescription, which is out of date.

The keys are still in my hand. I always pause over what to do with them. On the table they are too prominent. Up on a shelf is iffy; I might forget which, and once have. Finally, I pick a shelf and let one of the two keys hang over the edge. There is no key-pocket in the Shelter-Pak.

Hours later, I am still leaning over the checker board. Unfolded, in the clearer light here, its noble squares present themselves like a vale I can enter, a contested realm that those behind the bar of a single vision may view.

In Martyn’s large dictionary, the definitions of the noun ‘game’ runs and romps through seven inches of the finest print. I like best the one that reads: ‘A diversion of the nature of a contest, played according to the rules and decided by superior skill, strength, or good fortune.’ I indeed have had my rules; the strength may well be in question. As to fortune, whose score is ever truly in? One synonym, ‘an undertaking,’ daunts me. And ‘a person’s policy’ makes me rueful. I have nothing so organized.

Down that long column of print huntsmen sport and play; beneath it are batteries of quotes from the awesome personages a dictionary prefers: Wolsey. Byron. Buonaparte.

Outside the ‘office’ is that single line of drums. They know what they play for, or knew. But they are not me.

The nobility of the old games lies in the alternatives—never in the score. I touch my forehead to the checker board’s mirror-glaze, the better to see my adversary. The counters can remain in their bag; they are not needed.

I am the red. I am the black.

The phone has rung twice during my occupancy. Once, a bond salesman: ‘Is this the lady of the house? May I speak to your spouse?’—who hung up when I did not immediately reply, leaving me to fabricate rejoinders all afternoon. ‘Waal, it’s me who has the money.’ … ‘Sorry, she’s not here.’

The second call, only last week, was from the woman who was once Martyn’s wife. She had sounded warm, husky, irregular, indeed a person from a caravan, and hard-nosed on what she was after. She wanted to leave Martyn her annual address, ‘But he’d have to write by return mail,’ yet gave it to me. ‘Thameside, can you spell it?’ I said yes, I could spell Thames, and she softened. ‘The children are mad for tennis. We’re to settle in as near Wimbledon as we can manage.’

Finding that hilarious—will she haul them out of Squatterville to dress them in whites?—I kick my feet in the air. Are the caravans too being wooed away from their solemn abstentions? The feet, now that I notice them as more than vehicles, are still slim and arched; walking hasn’t flattened them. But the Stabilizers are shabby. Almost tramp.

‘So Martyn’s in Africa. Once again. And you are—?’

Nervy of her. ‘I work in the—use the office.’

‘Um.’ I hear her surmise.

‘And use the tub.’

‘Tub?’ She tinkles it.

‘Well, you know the New York climate.’ I hear myself providing the sophisticated return her accent demands. In college we used to chat to each other in fake accents. Since then I haven’t had much real access to a phone.

‘Ah.’ I hear her revising me. ‘I don’t, actually. Never been to New York. Of course the children are wild to go.’

I begin to hear how she underwrites her life. As Martyn hinted.

‘Those must be your kids up on the bulletin board.’

‘Bulletin board? … Ah yes. Always the impresario, isn’t he? … So he’s posted the pics I sent on, has he? I shall tell them. You can’t do much of that in a caravan.… Or you don’t.… Well … thanks very much, Miss—?’

‘Smith. Carol Smith.’

‘Miss Smith. Well, then—’

‘Please … it’s your call … but could we reverse charges? I want to ask you something.’

‘About Martyn, eh? Never mind the charges. Fire away.’

‘No, about caravans. Are they like our trailers? Or more like a bus?’

‘They were gypsy vans. When my Rom great-grandmother lived in one, they would have been carts. Now you wouldn’t know them for that. Or only a few.’ A long pause. ‘Once you put the curtains up, it’s a house on wheels, whatever else. And when the chi—the kids—kick up a rux, to go to school. Mad for it.’

I see the children circling the vans, slavering, to make them stop.

‘A house that moves—’ I say.

‘Or gets pushed,’ she says with a sigh. ‘Why? You fancy one?’

‘Oh no. No, I live out of my backpack.’

‘Ah. Hostels.’

‘No traveling, no. Except around the city. Outdoors.’

‘Hul-lo. A slogger.’ I hear her added whisper:
hence the tub.…
‘Beg pardon.’

I look at my shoe. ‘That’s okay. That’s what we do. Oh, not Martyn. Persons like me.’

‘Persons—’ she tinkles. ‘You Americans are so—formal. You are, aren’t you? American?’