The Wonders of the Invisible World (15 page)

No kidding,
I want to say.

When I can finally get Tobias out of the Little Finland, I take him around the corner to Biagio’s, where I keep passing him the bread before our food arrives on the stupid theory that bread soaks up alcohol. (He really doesn’t do this very often.) He tells me about five times that we have to eat in a hurry because I have to get him home in time for the news at ten. It’s now like eight o’clock.

But instead of going straight home, he says we have to walk past where he parked the car, all the way over between York and East End, to make sure it’s okay. It’s like, what more could happen to it? Last week we found the driver’s-side door handle wrenched up halfway out of the door and papers from the dash all over the front seat. This pathetic ’81 Honda Civic. Maybe it would be better not to keep locking the thing; this was about the eighty-fifth time. So now the key won’t open Tobias’s
side anymore and his window goes down only partway. Which is especially a drag because one thing he used to actually enjoy was driving in the summertime with his elbow out the window. This is one of the ways you know Tobias isn’t really a New Yorker at heart despite what a New Yorker he is. He always says he’d never have an air-conditioned car for just this reason. (I can see it, right? Tobias Baker, man of principle, turning down the Lexus somebody’s trying to give him because you can only hang your arm out the window of a shitbox car like we have.) Anyhow, there’s Old Betsy up ahead, between a Cherokee (which I personally would love to have) and a something else.

“Looks much the same,” I say. Chain holding down the hood so they don’t get the battery again, and the red thing on the steering wheel—not The Club but this thing Tobias says is just as good as The Club. “Actually, I sort of feel sorry in a way for somebody that would pick this car to break into.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t,” he says. “You know, a lot of the time lately? I visualize coming down the street and I see some son of a bitch fucking around with the car and I would pound their fucking head into the pavement and kick their balls in. I am really fucking sick of fucking crime.”

“I know, I’m sick of it, too,” I say. “What I guess I meant, it’s like it would be somebody so beaten down that they wouldn’t even
presume
to break into a Grand Cherokee or something.”

“Right, they’re animals. They
smell.
I could smell it the other day when they broke in and they were sitting going through the glove compartment. That smell. You know, you start out telling yourself that this is what
you
would be inside of a week if you couldn’t bathe, you didn’t have anyplace to shit—but the brute fucking fact is that you’re
not
that, man, you’re just
not.
I can’t even believe I’m saying this, but you know? I mean, I think back when I first went to work for Bernie, and he even
told me, he said, ‘We’re not going to work miracles here,’ but I—okay, now check
this
out.”

He tosses his head at the car going by: a glossy little Jeep thing with music thudding out of it and two black guys with baseball hats, the rear license plate framed in glowing purple.

“Couple of brain surgeons, probably,” he says. “Mustn’t jump to conclusions, right? You have any idea what a rig like that
costs?
I mean, beaten
down,
who’s beaten down in
this
situation, man? You know, you can completely see how it happened.”

“How what happened?” I say.

“The
thing,
” he says. “No, World War Two. You know, the cops just had
enough
of it. At that minute. And something fuckin’
broke,
you know? I mean it could’ve been me. Easily. Easily.” He snorts. “Hey, confront your racism, right?”

Upstairs at last, he lies back on the futon, breathing through his mouth, eyes rolling. I untie his work boots and tug them off, getting not a lot of cooperation though not a lot of resistance either.

“And another evening bites the dust,” he says. “At least we got away from
that
shit for a couple of hours.”

“Which shit is that?” I say.

“
That.
” He points to the window giving onto the air shaft. “You don’t
hear
that?” Only now am I aware that the music, so-called, from the next building has started up. Boom-badoom, boom-badoom. The air shaft is only about that far across, and they keep it up eighteen hours a day. “I live here,” he says. “
Why
do I live here? Even fucking Bernie Adler couldn’t hack it—Mr. New York. In his fucking co-op in Riverdale.”

“Wasn’t part of it that they were sending Winnie to Horace Mann?” I say. That “I” of his is echoing.

“Fucking Riverdale. I mean, isn’t that what the place was in Nancy Drew? Riverdale?”

“River something,” I say. “I wasn’t all that big into Nancy Drew.”

“The blue roadster,” he says. “Sometimes I just want to fucking scream.”

“I think we’re both sort of burned out,” I say.

“Oh, so sorry, have we been neglecting
your
problems? Nap time and its discontents?”

Fuck you.

He sits up and starts his thing of running fingers through his hair, hard. “I am disgusting,” he says. “I’m so fat now I’m out of breath coming up the stairs.”

I glance over. He’s got just the teensiest little roll, about that big, above his belt, the way anybody gets if they’re sitting. “You’re the same as you were,” I say.

“I smell like a pig, too. Come home and I take a bath and it’s like I can’t get clean.”

“What is
this
about?” I say.

He says, “I can understand why you would lose interest.”

“What?” I say. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but—oh, God, look, it’s late, I’m exhausted—”

“I need to talk to Bernie,” he says.

“Okay, fine,” I say. “Talk. You can pick up a phone.”

He gets the phone and starts jabbing numbers. “I know Bernie, he’ll still be there.” He listens for a long time.

“It’s after nine,” I say.

“He should
be
there. Jesus, if even Bernie is in on this thing.”

“What thing?” I say.

“Dinah. What have we been
talking
about the last three hours? Jesus. I feel like I’m going out of my mind here. I mean, maybe I should be insulted that I’m not
important
enough for them to even try to
get
to. What do
you
think? Should I try to call like Mike McAlary?”

Mr. I-Don’t-Read-the-Tabs. “I don’t know what to say about it,” I say.

He shakes his head. “This is some serious shit going down in this city.”

He’s in bed, asleep, by the time the news comes on. No follow-up about the march: it might as well have happened a year ago.

I zap the thing off when they say sports is next. I get up and go into the kitchen and open the Norhay (I mean, it
is
funny, kind of) and have a good long slug of Tropicana HomeStyle, right from the carton. Then I mosey back out and over to the bookshelves, hands clasped behind my back like Prince Charles or something inspecting the royal guards. Queen of all she surveys. You wouldn’t believe what’s here. I mean,
Journey to the End of the Night?
Chaucer, Chesterton, Dickens, the complete everything of T. S. Eliot, Faulkner Fitzgerald Freud, what looks like all the Hemingway in the world (which would figure), Langland Lawrence Lorca, Melville, Nabokov, O’Connor O’Neill Orwell, Peacock Plato Pinter Poe Pound. If they bombed all of New York but miraculously not us, you could start Western civilization all over again. Though lately Tobias’s intellectual life is mostly turning on the TV and complaining about how stupid it is. Which I guess is better than Rodney King over and over, or when Bernie gave him that tape of
Koyaanisqatsi
and we had that for the next month. But what really pisses me off as somebody who’s Jewish is all this Ezra Pound: the big fat
Cantos of, Literary Essays of,
I mean it goes on. Who but Tobias would have
Jefferson and/or Mussolini?
Plus not one, not two, but three biographies,
plus
two books just on the treason thing that he got locked up for and rightly so. Sometimes when Tobias isn’t here I’ll read around in these books just to give myself a good hit of how totally unbelievable this man was.
I mean, every other word out of his mouth is
kike,
and this is the great poet supposedly, and what Tobias thinks is a good idea to have in what after all is my home, too. I fantasize sometimes about making a big stink and demanding that he at least put Ezra Pound away where I won’t have to see it every day of my life. I’d be like
Hey hey, ho ho, Ezra Pound has got to go.
But I can’t really imagine having the energy to get into a big hoo-ha with Tobias over Ezra Pound, or anything else, like having no sex life. What I think is that he should know not to have books where every other word is
kike
without my having to say anything. So I don’t say anything.

Actually, I don’t know why I’m even bothering to look at the books, because I already know what I’m going to do: I’m going to go rent
Beauty and the Beast
again. When Tobias is out he’s
out,
and RKO Video doesn’t close until eleven. This is truly a stupid obsession, but harmless, I guess. I mean, by comparison. I get my purse and duck my head into the bedroom: Tobias’s shoulder is rising and falling. I’m out the door.

Same as every Friday and Saturday night, crowds of hooting white kids wander this neighborhood because of the bars. I say kids; in their twenties, really. In packs and couples. Barelegged girls, noisily drunk—you can tell they’re going to be sick and sorry—held up by what look like frat boys who probably all work on Wall Street and could buy and sell you by snapping their fingers. And in front of every bar and deli, some homeless man shaking a paper cup. I go into a Koreans’ for my usual thing of M&Ms, pay with a dollar bill and, back on the sidewalk, drop the change into a dirty hand.

RKO Video is bright and empty; except for the clerks I’m the only one here. They’ve got
The Shining
on the overhead TVs, right at the part where Shelley Duvall is looking at the huge stack of pages Jack Nicholson has typed. I go straight to Children’s: sure enough, three copies of
Beauty and the Beast.
You never have a problem renting
Beauty and the Beast,
which I
thought was weird until I realized everybody with kids already has it and who else would want it. Strange feeling, bringing it up to the counter. It seems sicker than something from Adult X.

I went to see
Beauty and the Beast
when it first came out because I wanted to know what the kids at Helping Hands knew. It’s like if you had a real job you’d read
Crain’s New York Business.
Anyhow, it blew me away: I was like crying and crying. Of course I asked myself why. I mean, am I not Dinah Keltner? So okay, you got your buttons pushed by really, really expert moviemakers who know that everybody wants perfect love. At least Tobias wasn’t on hand to see me lose it. I think I keep going back and renting the video because I’m into the way it just dependably rips me open. I sort of knew this afternoon, when I was helping Gwendolyn on with her backpack (she’ll get one arm through and just flail with the other), that if I got any time by myself over the weekend I’d probably watch it again.

Back in the apartment, I look in on Tobias—dead to the world—then close the bedroom door. I tear the corner off my M&Ms and zap the TV on, but when I try to push the tape into the thing there’s already something in there. Tobias says one of these days I’m going to wreck it, just shoving something in without checking. I hit
EJECT
and out pops the tape with
KING BEATING
hand-lettered on the label. Great, so we’re back to this. I stick
Beauty and the Beast
in, hit
PLAY
and go sit on the sofa. The FBI warning comes on and then it really hits me how stupid this is. You’re going to cry when they start to fall in love and cry more when the Beast dies (or maybe it’s supposed to be a near-death experience the way he’s sort of floating up) and then
really
lose it when all the stuff in the castle goes back to being real. So you have your big cry, and so what. I pick up the zapper and zap the thing off and get a screenful of snow and a snowy roaring. I zap it back on and it picks right up where the FBI warning turns color, and it’s like it was just waiting for me
and would have waited and waited. I rattle the first M&Ms into my palm. A yellow, a brown and a brown.

Around four in the morning I wake up when I hear Tobias moving around. The toilet flushes and that line pops into my head,
Watch waterfalls of pity roar.
Now, that dates you. If I don’t watch it, I’m going to be wide awake. I hear him out in the other room fooling with the VCR, and then he’s walking this way and the door closes. I can’t remember him getting back in bed, but there he is when I wake up in daylight, one foot with a dirtied white sock poking out from the comforter. My first thought of the day is:
And we are supposedly good people.

Tobias and I got married in 1981, both of us having had our grand passions: mine a husband, his somebody named Dorothy who he said went crazy. (I actually found out a little more than that, but it was like pulling teeth.) Our first date he took me to Cinema Village to see
The Parallax View.
“It’s basically a Hollywood piece of shit,” he said, “but you should probably see it.” It turned out this was his fourth time going. Afterward we went to the Little Finland Bar and talked about movies, having agreed that telling life stories was a cliché. Not that movie talk wasn’t. He said his favorite film was
Blow-Up,
though he said he knew he was supposed to say it was
The Searchers
or something. I forget what I said mine was: I certainly at that point wasn’t going to admit to
The Way We Were.
I married him because:

It was charming that he had asked me out to a movie he called a piece of shit. Still more charming that this wasn’t calculated.

He was a romantic.