No Lease on Life (11 page)

The man in the third-floor window closed his blinds. He turned on the light. He dressed. He cursed.

Jeanine was on another couch, at home, coming down. Her mother was screaming at her, Jeanine ignored her.

—You pay to stay home, you pay to stay somewhere else. I gotta give her drugs, because I know she has a fit. She’s had a hard time. My mother’s father raised them. Her mother abused them from when she was little. My mother was in the hospital for three years because she was getting beaten very badly. Then they grew up in homes, because they took them away from her father because back then it was a man with little girls. Then my mother came back home, and she was with my father since she was thirteen years old. My father was older, twenty-six, she was like thirteen or something. Hello. She should have realized then the man had a problem.

Elizabeth couldn’t help herself. She tucked the street, the endless night, away, into her, she couldn’t keep her eyes open, and when she couldn’t see what was going on, all the details, the sidewalk antics, when everything was crushed, broken up, and shoveled into the unruliness called her, exceeding her, all more and less than her, then sleep found her, against her will.

Now Elizabeth didn’t exist to herself. She wasn’t anywhere.

A circus tent fell down, they were trapped, rabid dogs were roaming, cars overturned, bridges down, wolves with blood on their mouths grimaced, some people escaped, they carried everything on their backs, there were cresting waves and falling screams, a vast territory with decrepit buildings, and something was moving very fast, she was in slow motion.

Her feet were stuck, the boss was not in his office, and her mother was sad, she was unable to walk, and small people, dwarfs, made high-pitched yowling noises, they were bedraggled, they were children, and no one had shoes on, her mother was wasting away, dying, she didn’t think anyone loved her, she couldn’t remember who loved her, she wouldn’t ever again know where she was, and Elizabeth, who was old, then young, a teenager, walked unevenly into the movie theater, with her mother, who was frail, she had to be carried to her seat, but she didn’t have her ticket, and handed in her shoes which didn’t have heels on them, and a black ten-year-old boy with a golden boombox told her a glass bottle had exploded, white hyenas had thrown bottles at him, and the young boy dropped his pants, and there were shards of glass stuck in his ass, he was bleeding, Jeanine was in a doorway, a woman’s face appeared in a mirror, she was putting on make-up, her face was a nightmare, she was almost dead, and popcorn was overflowing, and greasy, and her shoes were wrong, and they wouldn’t let her in, she pulled a long hair from her coat, and her mother was lost, it would be her turn next, where’s the ticket to leave, and there was jostling for a place, ladders collapsing, and noise, but somehow she entered the hall, nothing on the screen, a rope around her waist, she was tugged along, she saw some friends, she was naked suddenly, they asked, what are you doing here, you weren’t supposed to be here, you don’t live here…

YOU DON’T LIVE HERE.

THIS IS A BLOCK PARTY.

I have never believed in decorating cells.

—
Nelson Mandela
,
on visiting his former cell at Robben Island

We can only laugh when a joke has come to our help.

—
Sigmund Freud

In jail, after she’d murdered the moron, she’d be given one phone call, but only after she’d demanded it. She’s gonna lawyer up, a sleek cop would whisper to his partner, the beer-bellied one. Elizabeth didn’t know who she’d phone from jail. Roy would think it was a joke. She didn’t have a lawyer.

I have the right to remain silent. I have the right to remain single. I have the right to live with someone. I have the right to have a lawyer. I have the right to be sad. I have the right to be stupid. I have the right to be happy when other people are miserable. I have the right to make one telephone call.

Silently Elizabeth gave herself a Miranda warning. You aren’t Latin, you aren’t going to wiggle your hips for money and wear fruit on your head, you aren’t going to turn yourself in to the authorities, even though you are guilty. You will try to destroy the authority within. You are not going to destroy yourself. You will sleep tonight. You are going to quit your job. You are going to tell the fat man off. You are going to tell her to leave you alone.

A car alarm shrieked. The block’s wake-up call. Elizabeth flipped over on the couch. She covered her ears with her hands. The alarm screeched, wailed, pulsated, pounded. It demanded and sounded like inevitability. It was torture. There were fewer car alarms. No one paid attention to them because they cried wolf.

The chimes on the church across the street rang dully a few minutes after the hour. 8 
A.M.

Her friend used to keep a dozen eggs on his windowsill. When a car alarm went off under his window, especially when he was sick and couldn’t sleep, he was always ready to toss eggs. He was tall and had long arms. She never asked him if he hit a car. It was too late to ask. He was dead.

Elizabeth watched the clock tick silently while the car alarm screamed. If one of her foes saw her throw eggs, and that foe owned the car or knew the person whose car it was, if the young super caught her doing it, it could mean trouble for her on the block. She worried about retaliation.

Cops didn’t respond to car alarms. She didn’t want to think about her dead friend. If she phoned the cops, they’d say they were sending a car. They always said that.

Being alive was its own reward.

Roy was sleeping. So was Fatboy. The alarm clock rang. Unconscious, Roy reached for it. He had a hard time finding it on the floor. He did and shut it off. He was still in Roy’s underworld. The car alarm stopped. Heavy feet stomped up the stairs. Doorbells buzzed. Their doorbell. Twice. Rebellious, resigned, Elizabeth grunted and crossed the room. She walked to the broken clothes closet. She was naked. She pulled on her thickest robe. It was the Con Ed man.

The Con Ed man always rang twice. He appeared regularly, once a month. Depending on how eager he was to finish his day, which was the beginning of her day, he woke her at 7, 8, or 9 
A.M.
She’d put on her robe—he’d be shouting, CON ED CON ED CON ED, buzzing everyone’s doorbell—and she’d let him in. He’d beam his flashlight at the meter, he’d punch in the numbers on his blue electronic notepad. Then he’d leave.

Elizabeth wondered how he felt about people in general, what kind of feelings he had about waking everyone, if he did, and how he felt about seeing people in semiconscious states, in their ratty robes, or half-naked, and whether he wanted the job so that he could see people like that. She wondered if his job made him like people more or less.

Elizabeth yelled, OK, wait a second. Her nakedness was covered. She opened the door to Con Ed. It was 8:30 
A.M.

—You’re late, she said.

He grinned and flashed his light at the meter, punched in the numbers. He appeared sheepish. He bent his head down as he walked out the door. He always lowered his head. He was tall, not as tall as her dead friend. Elizabeth shut the door behind him.

In the hospital her dead friend said to his mother, I’m at peace, then he shut his eyes, went to sleep, and left the world in the early morning of an Independence Day.

The Con Ed man shouted again, CON ED CON ED. Some tenants never opened their doors to him. He probably didn’t take it personally, unless he was paranoid. Some tenants figured that the amount of gas and electricity Con Ed estimated was less than what they actually used. Those tenants received an official letter. Con Ed insisted upon reading their meters.

Elizabeth switched on the radio—we’ll give you the world, 1010 WINS. She turned the volume low. The radio muttered fitfully. She put a pot of water on the stove. A thread dangled from the gas pipe. It hung there petulantly. It’d been there for half a century. It was there because if there was a gas leak, you could put a match to the thread and then explode.

Roy said she used too much toilet paper. She couldn’t accept his leaving the seat up. After years of living with him, she still didn’t understand him. She once had a boyfriend who didn’t use toilet paper when he pissed, like Roy and other men, but his penis leaked. It left a wet spot on his pants. He had an operation on his penis, performed by his surgeon father. Later, he went to a therapist for a long time. Elizabeth broke up with him three years before Roy came along. She saw him on the street every once in a while. He looked insane.

She switched off the news. She turned on Courtney Love who sang morosely, “I make my bed, I lie in it.” She had a right to be miserable. Everyone did.

Elizabeth sat down at the rectangular Formica table in the kitchen. Sunlight or gloom entered through two dirty windows. She wouldn’t clean them. She could lose her balance and fall out. The young super would be ecstatic if she cracked her skull open and her brains bled out. He’d be delighted. All her enemies would.

She’d fall onto the backyard patio. There was a backyard, with a tree. A New York tree, a weed. It was unashamed and hardy for a long time. Unabashed, it grew. Now the tree was dying. The landlord didn’t tend it. It was suffering from a disease that was probably curable. Gloria was a tree killer. Elizabeth had become attached to the once-sturdy weed. In winter, it shed its leaves and withered. It became skeletal and forlorn. There’d been a weeping willow in front of the house she grew up in. The willow’s roots were strong. They made the walkway buckle. Her parents had the willow tree pulled out and thrown away, because it caused trouble. A weeping willow out her bedroom window, a weeping pillow in her bedroom, the tree caused trouble, and she grew up.

A man goes to the pearly gates. St. Peter asks how much he made last year, and he says, $300,000. What’d you do? St. Peter asks. I was a lawyer. Go through, St. Peter says. The next guy comes along, and St. Peter asks him how much he made, and he says, I made $100,000. St. Peter asks, What’d you do? I was a doctor, the guy says. Go through, St. Peter tells him. The next guy arrives, and St. Peter asks him how much he made. I made $7,000, the guy says. St. Peter says, Oh yeah, I think I’ve heard you play.

Elizabeth was on call for the proofroom today. If one of the obese men was still sick, she’d do some time, a few hours. Yesterday she finished a freelance job—a dictionary, small print—in the room. The room called doing freelance doubledipping. The obese men frowned on it, others just didn’t do it, others could care less. As long as you put your freelance away when the pages swished into the basket, you didn’t get in trouble with the supervisors.

There’s always something that needs to be done around the house, her mother often remarked. It was a reason to hate houses and mothers.

Elizabeth stirred the black coffee in the blue cup. Roy stirred in the bed at the other end of the apartment. She didn’t talk to him in the morning. He wasn’t available. It wasn’t his time.

The air wasn’t circulating. It was stolid and stale. When she thought about summer in winter, she didn’t remember how dead the air was. People like the change of seasons. They don’t remember everything about them.

She had to cut Greta, Regreta, out of her life with surgical precision. It was funny. She’d realized the necessity one night after a rainstorm, when she’d come home soaked and frenetic, and there was another Greta phone call, asking for something and denigrating someone else, the person had taken something from her, used her. Greta regretted everything and complained about the conspiracy of people stealing her ideas, her men, her books, jokes, clothes. Greta was always so calm, reasonable, and compassionate, it’d never occurred to Elizabeth that she schemed or that she was part of Greta’s scheme. The revelation came after the thunderstorm.

Elizabeth’s wet clothes were lying in a lump on the floor. She kicked them into the bathroom with her bare foot. She listened to Regreta complain and realized, everything she’s complaining about she is and does. Elizabeth had to end it.

A friendship ends, and there’s no ceremony. There are no tombstones, just marks and wounds that aren’t supposed to be there. People want to think that the things they hate are not in them, that what hurts them isn’t in them to do, that they’re incapable of behavior like that. Almost beyond repair, people did precisely what they complained others did to them. A simple thing was not phoning a friend back and keeping the friend waiting, for days, maybe weeks. Simple sadism. People hated it done to them and did it to other people.

Elizabeth didn’t trust herself. She thought primitively, she thought all thought was in a way primitive or basic, there was no purity in thinking, and people were fools to think they could think their way out of their thoughts.

That revelatory spring thunderstorm was huge. The city collapsed under its weight. The tops of roofs crumbled and one or two people were hit on their heads by bricks falling from great heights. They died an absurd death. You finish work and a brick hits you on your head. First, you’re lied to by a friend, then you finish work, and then a brick hits you on your head and kills you.

Elizabeth had to quit her job and get rid of Regreta. Elizabeth stared at the phone, indifferent emissary to the outside world. She was sleepy and hot. She got into the shower. The guy next door got into his shower. The water stopped running in her shower. He’d made a science of it, timed it. Maybe he wanted to be next to her. Pink tiles separated them. He was scrubbing, she was scrubbing. Maybe he’d heard her turn on the water, and the thought of it seeped through, he remembered he hadn’t showered. The water pressure lowered. It got lower. The water trickled down. Oscar, she yelled, Oscar, wait a second. He turned off his water and waited. She rinsed. OK, she shouted. He started his water. It was a weird intimacy.