The Wonders of the Invisible World (16 page)

He was a
left-wing
romantic. I think he thought of himself as like a John Wayne with good politics. He used to say, “Get your ham and eggs over here.” You know, one wanted to be wanted.

These days I can’t even bear to think about stuff we did in
bed, some of which I got him into doing. What I used to love was him getting his pleasure, which of course I’m sure now was probably just a power thing on my part, bitch that I am. I would watch his face scrunch up and then go blank. He would say, “Oh, this is the only time I ever really and truly relax.” Of course in two minutes he would be like,
Can I get you something? Washcloth? Glass of water? Get you a drink?
We were the best, that’s what’s killing. The best for us. Which is why it’s just so weird that he would turn around and stop. Gee, you don’t think he’s passive-aggressive, do you? I’m ashamed to even remember this, but I actually at one point bought this book on living with the passive-aggressive man. My first and only self-help book, except for one about depression. I hid it under the mattress like pornography: I think the last time Tobias made a bed was when he went to sleep-away camp. But I used to fantasize that he
would
somehow find it and know because I’d hidden it that it must be super-important to me and bingo, we’d begin to talk. I eventually put the thing in the garbage. So it’s now in the Great Kills Landfill, where archaeologists of the future can find it in the same undisintegrated bag with our undisintegrated junk mail. They’ll know our names and what our problem was and be sad that the answer (now found by science) had been so simple all along.

Tobias in those days got his hair cut short at a real barbershop and said that while he once thought drugs were revolutionary (having been stoned, he said, for the entire Nixon administration, 1969–1974) he now considered them decadent. When he did anything at all (which really wasn’t that often), he drank like a tragic proletarian. At the time I met him he was running the local assemblyman’s office, a storefront around the corner from where we live now, which later became a David’s Cookies that went out of business. The assemblyman fired him for wearing a
FREE JOHN HINCKLEY
button in the office (this made the papers at the time), which Tobias claimed
was protected political speech. What was actually happening, he was all set to go to work for Bernie Adler, who had started this thing for the homeless and who everybody thought was a saint because he’d worked for Allard Lowenstein, and Tobias just wanted to—his words—go out in a blaze of glory.

I at the time was just trying to get over my divorce and waiting tables and taking one course a semester at Hunter toward a teaching certificate because it was too late for anything better. (I’m still nine credits short, and will be when I die.) So one day I was complaining to this friendly woman in one of my classes (who turned out to be Margaret) about the rats in my building and she said her husband knew somebody in the assemblyman’s office. Well, I was a woman who knew my rights, so in I marched. The first thing I remember Tobias actually saying beyond, like,
How do you do,
was when I told him who owned the building and he said, “What, are you shitting me?” Apparently this landlord was well known to everybody on the East Side except me for being some judge’s brother-in-law or whatever he was; his buildings had rats and lead paint and drunken supers and no heat for weeks on end, and what your recourse was, Tobias said, was not to live in his buildings.

If you ask Tobias what it’s like working for the homeless, he’ll be a real prick and tell you he works
with
the homeless. But mostly he doesn’t talk like your usual lefty, and that was another thing I thought was great about him. Don’t get him started on the word
empowerment.
He’s even down on
African-American,
though he wouldn’t say so to anybody but me. Movement types were already into this kind of talk when I met Tobias, except you didn’t have the expression PC back then; Tobias called them college pussies. I thought it was cool that his friends were relatively no-bullshit people like Bernie Adler, who actually grew up working-class. It
wasn’t
cool that the worst insult he could come up with was calling someone a
vagina, but I gave him credit for what I thought was the meaning behind it. He would talk about college pussies, and yet just about the only films he would go see were foreign, and his idea of decor was (still is) brick-and-board shelves with every book he ever had in college plus the hundreds he’s picked up since.

But in the past few years he’s stopped going to any movies at all. He wouldn’t even go see
Schindler’s List,
and I worry about him getting out of touch. But he’s still the only man I personally know who wears a beret, which he says is because in the wintertime he can pull it down over his ears, but what I think it is, it’s because he wants to make sure you know he’s an intellectual. So then he has to go around saying fucking this and fucking that to compensate. Growing up in Binghamton and graduating from Penn State, that was how I used to read it all—and of course the usual male thing where if you’re sensitive you have to not seem to be, which is the meaning behind
pussy.
I wonder how he read me back then. I was there and okay-looking, that was probably about the extent of it, why lie. He’s a hard worker, Tobias, but lazy about his life.

Lugging the laundry, I squint against the morning sun. I need to get something in my stomach, but there’s a homeless man with a shopping bag in front of the Koreans’—same guy from last night?—so I decide to put the clothes in first and maybe he’ll be gone. Saturday mornings you can pretty much always get a machine if you come before eight-thirty; after nine o’clock, forget it. If you thought about it in a victimized way you could think of going to the Laundromat as part and parcel of everything else, like having the tub in the kitchen and parking on the street. Tobias absolutely forbids paying someplace to wash and fold, not so much because of the twenty dollars it just about ends up being but for class reasons: paying somebody to
handle and smell your dirty clothes perpetuates the division between the clean and the unclean or something. Which I basically agree with, though I don’t see
him
ever doing the wash. But mostly I don’t mind because at least it gets me up and out. Saturday morning used to be our morning in bed; Sunday morning, we agreed, was a cliché. Plus for me additionally, spending Shabbos in bed was a fuck-you thing. Yet also in some slantwise way reverent. Now I’d just as soon get something accomplished.

And although I know what he’s saying about the wash-and-fold, I don’t go all the way with Tobias in seeing absolutely everything as being about class. Like we got into this huge thing at the time Margaret asked me if I wanted to come to work at Helping Hands. For me, the class reasons against working at a day-care place that costs like a thousand dollars a month were canceled out by the feminist thing of women getting into the workforce. Except of course that they’re already
in
the workforce because they have to be because the whole economic system is so fucked, which Tobias would say comes right back to the thing of class again, so where did your feminism get you? And at a thousand dollars a month, these are not beaten-down women. Okay, Tobias is right: my politics aren’t all that thought-out. But on the other hand, I get something out of being with the kids, and I don’t really feel like arguing the point.

I told Margaret that Tobias and I didn’t have children because we can’t, which I think was okay to say because I’m pretty sure she would never bring it up with him. The truth is, I always used to think I might someday want to do something and then not be able to do it if I had a kid. That plus Tobias’s political problems about it: too many children already starving globally and so forth and so on. Though since I’m going to be forty in addition to not having sex anymore, I guess you could say that at some point it got decided. One of those hard-to-pinpoint
points, like the thing about when does life begin. As it’s worked out, I get a lot of the good stuff that goes with kids of your own and get spared the worst, like being afraid every minute that they’re going to die. What I end up with is the moderately precious moments. At nap time, Gwendolyn is usually too wired to sleep and, quote, helps me by going around and patting the other children, though I discourage her made-up lullabies, which tend to get loud. Then we go into the big playroom, where I can watch them through the doorway, and we read. But deep down we both know what the deal is. I mean, what childless woman
hasn’t
had her life brightened, temporarily, by some other woman’s child? It’s the oldest, most disgusting story in the world.

I flomp the laundry bag down in front of the row of top-loaders. One thing that’s feminist about doing your husband’s wash plus your own plus the sheets and towels, you have to be strong to carry it all. I untie the knot in the drawstring and start tossing whites into one machine, bright colors into another and dark stuff into a third. Between us, Tobias and I have a lot of black jeans and T-shirts. Lately he’s even been getting on my case about stuff like tying up the laundry bag, supposedly I’m being anal. “You tie the drawstring again every time you put in a pair of socks?” he said the other day. “Christ, it even
looks
like a puckered asshole.” This is the man who used to sing,
Every night/why do I/quake with fright?/’Cause my Dinah might/change her mind about me.
Sometimes I’m afraid there’s something wrong with him, like he has a brain tumor. I mean, not just his moods but the way he sleeps. I just try to bite my tongue when he gets evil, which really probably isn’t as often as I tend to think it is.

I get the stuff going, then head back to the Koreans’ to pick up a
Times
and something to put in my stomach. I’ve quit hovering over the machines waiting to add fabric softener when the rinse light goes on: Dinah’s little protest. The homeless man is
still in front of the door, so I first go over to this sort of diner place to get coffee. One of Tobias’s things is to call the man who runs the place Mr. Mippippippippopolos (not to his face), which does strike me as being not funny. I always say
milk no sugar,
and Mr. Mekos always drops four sugar packets into the bag. I suppose you could take it as not listening; I take it as wishing you more sweetness in life, like a Mediterranean thing. I pick up the
Times
at a little news and candy store that keeps the papers outside so you don’t have to go in and see all the sex magazines. The homeless man is
still
in front of the Koreans’, so I figure okay, fine. I hang back until he turns to this woman in running shorts coming out with a bottle of Evian, and I dart in past him. But when I come back out with my banana I’m the only one around, and he says “Spare
anything
?” in this odd voice, so I give him three quarters and say “Good luck.” My usual.

I walk up to what used to be a block of 91st Street and is now this mall with benches, and sit with my back to the little park we herd the kids into every nice day in the warm weather. It’s great having a job right in your neighborhood, except sometimes it makes you crazy, like you can’t ever get away. Already children are yelling and running through the sprinklers.

I take the lid off the coffee and say “You and me, pal,” to the mostly naked discus thrower on the cup. His crudely drawn muscles look like the squares on a turtle’s shell. I sip gingerly so I won’t burn my mouth. Then I peel the banana partway down and break off a bite.

I always read the
Times
the same way: scan the front page, go to the editorials, then the columns, then see if there’s a letter about anything interesting or from somebody famous. What stops me is Bernie Adler’s name, at the bottom of a letter headed
WE’RE ONE COMMUNITY
.

I’m like,
What?

But I know. I mean I guess I sort of
did
know. But here it is in black and white. Real words in a real newspaper that a million people are reading in the real world. Now I feel my heart start to pound, like it took a few seconds for the idea to get through to my body: that I live with a man whose mind’s gone wrong. Take out the clothes, dry the clothes, fold the clothes—but sooner or later you have to go back to where he’s waiting.

I smell the homeless man before his shadow darkens the page.

“Excuse me for intruding.” I look up, thinking,
Oh, shit.
It’s the same one: white stumblebum, teeth with gaps in between like a syphilitic, carrying a dirty white paper shopping bag. “D’y’know Jim Morrison?” he says. Sort of an Irishy accent: hint of a
d
among the
r
’s.
Mawdison.
“Of The Doors?”

“Yes,” I say, and look back down at the paper. Not streetwise of me to answer at all, but I believe you give each person their dignity until they ask you for something.