The Brutal Language of Love (13 page)

“Okay,” she said. He was wearing shorts and sandals and she could tell he had not bathed before coming to see her. She now knew two of the most intimate things she could know about him: he had somewhat jumbled-looking toes and his personal odor was not unpleasant. It had taken months for Fritz to reveal his feet to Penny, deformed as they were from ill-fitting childhood shoes, and he always, always wore deodorant.

Fritz took Penny to the biopsy. He said silly things
in the waiting room about
Reader's Digest
and plastic foliage to try to make her laugh, but it didn't work. Penny was terrified. She would be awake for the procedure, and was not at all comforted by the idea of a shot of Novocain to her breast. She would be given Valium to protect her from the pain of the shot, but understood that tranquilizers only really worked when you knew nothing was coming.

The nurse called her name and Fritz stood up, too. For a moment Penny thought he was going to insist on accompanying her, but then he sat back down again, as adults were expected to do. He looked more distraught than she had ever seen him—jerky and wild-eyed—and she greedily soaked up his concern before leaving the room.

The procedure involved lying prostrate on a table with holes cut into it, so that Penny's face and right breast hung beneath her. Her breast was then immobilized in a sort of vise grip, making it thankfully difficult to discern the pain of the first shot—and all those that followed—from the general ache in her chest. The nurses worked quickly, sympathizing over the discomfort she must be feeling, but aches were of no consequence to Penny. They came on so slowly that the only time you ever really noticed them was if and when they went away.

When her breast was numb, a specialist breezed in, introduced himself, and set to work inserting a sharp little spatula into her lump. He did this several times, and though Penny could not see his face, she did make out the squiggly pieces of flesh he withdrew from beneath the table. This was it, the stuff she was made of, and it struck her that there might indeed be something wrong with it.

Afterward she was left with a small puncture wound. The nurse said her surgeon would call as soon as the results were in, and escorted Penny out into the waiting area. “I was so worried about you,” Fritz said, standing up to meet her. She cried on the way home when he presented her with a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill, saying that, after all, it was his breast, too.

At her garage apartment, he got her settled in bed and took off her shirt and bra to assess the damage. “You can't take off the bandage yet,” she warned him, drowsy from the Valium. “It looks like a snake bite.”

He nodded and backed away. She must have fallen asleep then because when she awoke her shirt was back on and Fritz was gone. Later, before bed, she would discover that her dressing had been expertly changed, an even better job than the nurses had done.

The phone woke Penny the next morning. She sat
up and looked around, momentarily unsure of where she was in the continuum of her life until the ache in her chest reminded her that at least the biopsy was over. A large roach skittered behind one of the movie posters on her wall, and Penny felt a great relief when it never reemerged. She reached for the receiver on the bedside stand and said, “Hello.”

“Penny? It's Leonard.”

“Leonard.” She propped her pillow up behind her head. For a second she couldn't place the name.

“From the interview?”

“Oh right,” she said. “I just had my biopsy.”

“I know. I'm calling to see if you're okay.”

She felt her mind clearing then. “How do you know?”

“You told me the date. Remember?”

“No.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I was wondering if I could come over and film you.”

“Why?”

“For closure,” he said. “So my audience will know you're all right.”

“I don't want to be filmed now.”

“Hmm,” he said.

“I don't even know if I'm all right.”

“When will you know?”

“Soon, I guess.”

“Can I film you then?”

“What does this have to do with projectionists?” Penny asked.

“Well,” Leonard said, “I changed my topic. My new topic is breast cancer.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I was inspired by your interview.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Could I come over now without the camera?”

“I have a boyfriend, Leonard.”

“Really?” he said. “Who?”

“That guy I introduced you to at the theater. Who makes popcorn. Remember him?”

“Vaguely.”

“Fritz. That's my boyfriend.”

“Is he over there now?”

“No.”

“Hmm,” Leonard said again.

“I mean, were you wanting to come over for a date?”

“I hadn't really thought about it,” he said.

“Because I guess you could come over as a friend. If you want.”

He considered this briefly. “Okay then. How about that?”

“Sure,” Penny said, and she gave him her address. After they hung up she considered cleaning her apartment, but couldn't get up the energy. Maybe Leonard would tidy it for her, she thought. Maybe Leonard would bring his camera anyway, and force her to show him her breast. At this Penny suddenly burst into tears, unsure of how she would stop him.

But Leonard brought only flowers—blue ones,
which he cut down and arranged in an old mayonnaise jar, then placed at Penny's bedside. Next, as if he had read her mind, he began straightening magazines and washing dirty dishes. At her request, he tapped all the movie posters on the wall, capturing the roaches that came out from behind them in an old yogurt tub. “Don't kill them,” Penny reminded him, and she watched out her window as he set them free in the front yard. He was polite but firm with her upon his return: “If you don't make a home for roaches, Penny, they won't make a home with you.”

After vacuuming her shag carpet and scrubbing her bathroom sink, Leonard sat down on the floor beside Penny's bed and read to her from her favorite women's magazines. She requested articles about how to increase one's bust size and the allure of animal-print underwear, as well as a love quiz, which Leonard scored in pencil. He read the questions softly, as if they were some kind of lullaby, and Penny dozed off, understanding that while he might stare at her as she slept, he would never touch her.

She awoke several hours later to find that instead of leaving, Leonard too had fallen asleep, a copy of
Cosmo
tucked beneath his head. He was a tall man and Penny suspected if she asked any of the female ushers at the theater, they would describe him as cute, with his long blond eyelashes and square-cut jaw.

But Penny resisted him. He was hers for the taking, and this was the problem. Love was never easy, she knew. And if it was, it wasn't love—friendship maybe, but not love. What she felt for Leonard was something limp and slack. It had no charge, no current running through it to hurt her if she wasn't careful. The reality was, you only knew you were loved if you were left and returned to, if you were ignored and then craved. Occasionally you would be seen for slightly less than the sum of your parts, and that was love, too. Love announced itself with a sting, not a pat. If love was love, it was urgent and ripe and carried with it the faint odor of humiliation, so that there was always something to be made up for later, some apology in the works. Love was never clean, never quiet, never polite. Love rarely did what you asked it to, let alone what you dreamed it might do, and it most certainly did not know that your favorite color was blue.

Penny's surgeon called to say her lump was
benign. She called her father to tell him the news but there was no answer. She left messages on his machine but he never called back. “Maybe he's on vacation,” Fritz told her.

“Maybe,” Penny said. But he usually called when he went out of town, giving her his itinerary and joking about how if his plane went down, she would at last have all the money she desired.

“Well, then maybe he's just mad,” Fritz concluded.

“About what?” she said.

He shrugged. It was a Thursday evening and they were trudging out to the edge of the parking lot to change the marquee for the coming week. Penny lugged an old duffel bag filled with big black letters, while Fritz carried the ladder. “I don't know,” he said. “Not following through with the public assistance?”

“But he didn't have to pay anything,” Penny said. “Why should he care?”

Fritz shrugged. “He made you an offer and you never got back to him. Maybe he thought he was doing you some big favor.”

Penny stopped walking and looked at him blankly.

“I'm just trying to think like he does!” Fritz protested, slowing once he realized she was no longer beside him. “Hurry up, will you? This thing's heavy.”

“Coming,” she said, catching up.

“You get so mad,” he grumbled.

They stopped at the base of the marquee. Fritz propped his ladder against the steel post so that it nearly touched a second, attached ladder farther up—the one that would take them to the platform at the top. Penny dropped the duffel bag on the asphalt, loving the rattle of the nearly indestructible plastic letters, and tied a rope around its handles so they could pull it up later. A section of her unruly hair blew wildly in front of her face and Fritz reached over and tucked it behind her ear. Almost instantly it flew back out again, and he pushed it back again, holding it there, stepping in to kiss her bare cheek. “Don't come up here today,” he told her. “It's too windy.”

She followed him anyway, captivated by the spell of his concern.

Unlike Penny's father, Leonard had been calling
her incessantly. She could only conclude there was something wrong with him that he should worry so unduly over someone he hardly knew. When she finally gave him her test results he insisted they go out and celebrate, but she declined. “Fritz doesn't want me to see you anymore,” she said, trying to sound convincing. “He thinks you're after me.”

When she later suggested to Fritz that Leonard might in fact be after her, he agreed this was entirely possible, but took no preventive measures.

At work one afternoon she found an old pornographic reel from the seventies and ran it for Fritz after closing. Her snake bite had finally healed, and she was anxious to present her smooth-skinned self to him—to celebrate with the man who had detected her lump in the first place, though he had not specifically been looking for it. Fritz found the movie mostly humorous—the hairdos, pant legs, et cetera—but stopped laughing when Penny got up out of her seat and attempted to mimic the actresses. Afterward he told her he had an even better idea, and that she should wait in the auditorium while he went upstairs to thread another movie, a skill Penny had taught him. When he returned, Fritz instructed her, she should pretend he was a stranger, remain seated, and it would be clear what he wanted her to do.

They began spending several hours a week like this, unbuttoning themselves in the dark auditoriums and pretending they'd never met. To lend authenticity to their nights, they stopped speaking to each other during the day. The rest of the theater staff thought they had broken up again, though they seemed confused by Penny's lack of sorrow, her dry, unpuffy eyes.

Back in her apartment, Penny dreamt of Leonard, who had begun coming to the theater with a stout blond woman. He had given up on Penny—barely even turned around anymore to watch her start the movies—which at last gave him some kind of appeal. In Penny's dreams, Leonard would drive her to Fritz's apartment, wait for her to have sex with Fritz, then drive her home, smiling as if this were all in the course of a day. “Same time tomorrow night?” he'd ask, and she'd nod, waving as he pulled away. In her waking hours, she began plotting to depose his new girlfriend, though she would never actually do it. If only things could stay exactly this way, Penny thought: Fritz, the stranger who liked to screw her, and Leonard, whose presence was beginning to sting.

It was a Wednesday night and Penny was attaching
new trailers to the movies, while downstairs, Fritz stored the nacho cheese sauce and rinsed grease from the hot dog rotisserie. Though they still weren't speaking, he had found a way to communicate with her through the use of marquee numbers. Earlier that evening, for example, she had arrived at work to find a plastic
2
hanging from her office door. This meant she should report to that particular auditorium after the last shows let out. The friends she didn't have would surely have told her to end all this now, yet night after night she sat alone in the dark, awaiting further instructions from Fritz. For it was her grave concern that if they stopped pretending they were strangers, they would not necessarily resume speaking.