Memories of the Future, page 20
Isadora’s decision to act on her desires for Verbum’s paragon was partly due to a conversation she had with her mother. Although Isadora revealed no details that explained her problem directly, her mother, the Milton expert, had little trouble interpreting her offspring’s circumlocutions. Professor Simon uttered the following truth: “If a boy doesn’t know that a girl is interested in him, he can hardly be blamed for ignoring her.” (Isadora had not mentioned the “Hi, Isadora.”) No more than a half an hour after her mother had spoken, Isadora began composing a note to Kurt. She rejected one as too moony, another as too cold, and a third as too windy. She settled on a careful, dignified inquiry, which she deposited in his locker.
Dear Kurt,
I am writing to you because you have piqued my interest, and I thought we might get together and talk. If this sounds plausible, drop me a line.
Isadora
Isadora regretted both “piqued” and “plausible” as soon as the letter had left her hand, but it was too late. The next day, she received her answer.
Sure. Meet me in Green Boughs Park tonight at eight. Kurt
Exactly how the three other Doras divined that there was “a boy” in the picture can only be guessed at. It may have been Theodora’s glimpse of Isadora’s anxious face in the hallway mirror as she repeatedly checked her watch and pressed her palms together or it may have been the moment Just Plain Dora noticed a thin but precise application of lipstick on her oldest sister’s mouth. Whichever clue had triggered the discovery, by the time Isadora’s watch read 7:50 and she prepared to walk out the door, her three sisters had gathered at the foot of the stairs to send her off with a combination of cheers and jeers. Theodora waved a handkerchief and then mock-sobbed into it. She blew her nose with it in an exaggerated manner and then grimaced in the direction of the departing sister to telegraph her agony. Andora made flourishing gestures with her right arm and quoted one of the Brontë sisters: “Farewell to thee, but not farewell / To all my fondest thoughts of thee.” And the littlest Dora jumped up and down in place singing, “Isadora has a boyfriend! Isadora has a boyfriend!”
The reputed boyfriend had posed himself under a tree, and when Isadora spotted his lean form in the light of the spring evening, she felt the quickening of various biological systems she had spent so much time studying, noting in particular dramatic changes in her respiration. Kurt was wearing that puzzled look she had come to know and love. He grinned and, as she stood before him, he plopped himself abruptly down on the grass. She sat down beside him and stared with admiration at his large sneakers she felt certain were at least a size twelve.
Talk, as everyone knows, is a vehicle of seduction. Well-placed words are often far more effective than well-placed hands, especially when two people have never exchanged more than a “hi” in the past. In the old days, this kind of talk was called “wooing.” Isadora was not so backward as to think that Kurt should do all the wooing. She was perfectly prepared to woo herself. The question on this particular evening, however, was whom was Isadora wooing? In effect, there were two Kurt Linders: the one Isadora had invented and the one who sat beside her on the grass, a person of many gifts, but not eloquence. To be fair to Isadora, she had not created a hero with intellectual prowess. She had created a hero of kindness and feeling, a hero that fit the way his “hi” and his smile had made her feel that day in the hallway. She knew Kurt was conventional, but having grown up in her unconventional family with three other Doras and Roger and Geoffrey and Monk and the Anecdota, Isadora longed for a bit of convention now and then to alleviate her “weirdness.” She had imagined strolling the halls with the lanky Kurt Linder, his arm draped casually around her shoulder. She had admitted to herself that it would be nice for a change to belong to the world around her instead of remaining forever outside it.
Isadora launched the conversation with a polite question about Kurt’s teams, one she had rehearsed in advance. She asked him about the football team and the basketball team and the baseball team, teams to cover all the seasons of the year, after which she prepared to listen attentively to her beloved’s discourse on homo ludens. She smiled at him and wondered how the lipstick looked from his point of view. Kurt began to talk, and as he talked, she heard “ums” and “you knows” invade his speech like so many unsavory loiterers, but more disturbing to her was the smug but oddly blank look in his eyes, as if he were not speaking to her but to the anonymous crowd he had plucked her from with his “Hi, Isadora.” He seemed not to see her at all. In fact, he did not look directly at her. She began to wonder what he did see. She made an effort to concentrate on his arm with its low-growing field of fine hairs, such a strong, attractive arm, but the proverbial breezes had already begun to blow in another direction and at a lower temperature. Isadora felt cool. She felt so cool that she thought about Ian. She thought about how precise Ian could be when he explained a point, and she recalled with pain how he had collapsed when she had told him to stop the Sherlock nonsense. Poor Ian, she thought.
In the meantime, Kurt Linder droned on about how funny Jack had been at practice and retold a weak joke he attributed to “Coach.” Coach said this and Coach said that. He was apparently devoted to his coach. He then moved on to hijinks various members of “the team” had perpetrated on other members of the same team, uproarious games that involved the manipulation of male underwear, and Isadora found herself staring at the grass. She realized that Kurt Linder was boring, and just as she had pronounced this sad truth to herself, the boring Kurt Linder decided they had talked enough.
Kurt had happily obliged Isadora with some easy words about himself because he knew that girls always wanted to talk until they didn’t, at which moment he could make his move and see how far the whole would and wouldn’t business went. Isadora had sent him a note, hadn’t she? The note was a come-on, wasn’t it? What kind of a girl would send him a note and meet him in the park if she didn’t want some action? He knew that Isadora didn’t neatly conform to the slut category. She was not easy pickings for his “slut slayer,” as Jack liked to call his penis. She was one of those bookish girls, and Kurt knew from experience that the limbs of smart girls sometimes loosened more quickly than those of the dumb ones, although he, of course, had not read Sappho either.
Kurt had no understanding of the fact that Isadora’s definition of getting together to “talk” included her side of the conversation. Who was Isadora to Kurt exactly? Just a girl. And that was the problem. Isadora had imagined saying a few words herself, had, in fact, hoped to tell Kurt about Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, the book she was halfway through, but mention of the Beagle was not to be because Kurt Linder leaned toward Isadora Simon and gripped her inner thigh firmly with his hand. This gesture so startled her that Isadora leapt to her feet, after which he also leapt to his feet, grabbed her in his arms, leaned over her, and began to slobber in the general vicinity of her mouth.
The truth was that it was too late by then for Kurt to administer even a gentle kiss on the lips Isadora had so carefully colored pink because boredom had come between them, and from boredom there is no rescue. But the sudden turn in their relations did not bore our heroine. The sudden turn ignited her fury. She pulled violently away from him, gained several inches of distance in the process, and then, with all the strength she could muster, she kneed him in the groin.
CHAPTER TWELVE
By Sunday, May 12, at one in the afternoon, the news of my Monday night–Tuesday morning misfortune had made a full circle: Whitney had told Fanny, who had told Gus, who had told Jacob, who called me at home to deliver a lecture on the male monsters that roamed New York City looking for female prey. There might be another Son of Sam out there right now, and Jacob strongly recommended that I carry mace in my purse. In fact, he was going to buy it for me. I was too trusting. I had to adopt a defensive attitude. Martial arts classes were an excellent idea. I remember the phone call. I was sitting on my bed, Jacob’s worried voice pressed to my ear, and, as I listened to him, I said yes and then yes again. I said yes even though I didn’t agree with him. I was tormented by own culpability, but his uncynical affection, coupled with his vivid rendering of an innocent, vulnerable waif who had been stalked, tossed about, and nearly ravaged by an urban ogre, a maiden who required armaments and lessons if she was going to brave the roiling seas ahead, touched me deeply, despite the fact that I was not that quaking damsel, and, after I hung up the phone, tears were running down my cheeks, but whether they were for her or for me or for Jacob I couldn’t tell. I have discovered that I weep in the face of goodness and sympathy, but never when confronted with cruelty and coldness. The music of goodness opens me to waves of feeling while the dissonance of cruelty shuts me down flat.
Fanny took another approach, although she, too, thought a weapon was needed: “a sweet little switchblade.” She went so far as to tell me where I could buy that deadly item Sunday night over dinner. To be honest, until I read about our conversation in the notebook, that evening had turned into fog. I didn’t record the name of the restaurant, but it must have been the Kiev on Second Avenue. (Whitney was out on a date with a photographer named George.)
May 12, 1979
Fanny was sparkling tonight, all lit up. For the first twenty minutes, she was so excited about a rat attack on Anne Street, she couldn’t breathe well, and it took me a while to understand what had actually happened. According to Fanny, the incident took place on May 8 downtown. “The species is known as Rattus norvegicus—your relatives, Minnesota.” I protested loudly, and Fanny changed her tune. This is the story: On May 8, a dozen foot-long rats of the species known as Rattus norvegicus raced out of a mountain of garbage on Anne Street that had been simmering for some time at the very bottom of the borough of Manhattan. The accumulation of crap is mainly, but not entirely, due to the tugboat strike. When the boats stopped hauling trash off the island, the debris started to pile up and, as it piled up, it began to putrefy, molder, and stink, and on May 8, twelve monster rats emerged from one of those putrefying heaps with their jaws agape, chased a pedestrian down the street, caught up with her, fastened their teeth into her legs, and began to eat them. According to Fanny’s sources, the victim bravely fought off the rodents with violent swats, kicks, and purse smashes, after which she finally released herself and ran howling down the street with large chunks of flesh missing from her shins and calves and blood gushing from her wounds. Fanny said it was a real-life horror movie. Fanny said everyone is talking about it.
After she had unburdened herself of the repulsive story and vigorously patted her chest to catch her breath, Fanny lit a cigarette and turned ruminative. She puffed on her Camel with one hand and scratched her upper arm with the other hand while we waited for our stuffed cabbage and explained to me that a parallel architecture of waste has sprung up in the city, is growing steadily, and will soon rival the skyline. “We’ve got towers of rot inhabited by millions and millions of rats, way more rats than people. People are leaving town, Minnesota, but the rats are moving in. There are two cities now, and those ugly beasties know how to survive a whole lot better than we do. Before long, they’re going to eat us alive.” In Webster, the only rats I saw were pets—small, white, friendly, and clean. They have nothing to do with the bloated gray rodents that loll on subway rails or scoot along brick walls or appear suddenly out of alleys. The rats brought back an old dream. I told Fanny that when I was still in high school, I dreamed that as I shut the door to my room a rat threw itself into the opening. I slammed the door on it, but its body blocked me from shutting the door completely, and it began to squeeze its way inside, its blubber oozing through the crack.
The real rats led to the dream rat, which led to the crew rat with the birdwatcher mother. “That guy with the pencil dick who tried to rape you,” Fanny said. “That guy’s a rat, a worse rat than the ones on Anne Street. You know what you need, Minnesota? You need a sweet little switchblade to carve up that fucking ratfuck.”
Fanny started carrying a knife in her lap-dancer days in case “things got dicey,” and she swears by it. The men run. She told me about a customer who wouldn’t leave her alone, and she popped out the knife at him, and he kept saying, “Whoa, whoa now, honey. Whoa.” Fanny said he was a bald guy with a fat gut and rings, and he must have been at least sixty. “Now, I ask you, Minnesota, why would that hairless, hideous old fart think he had a chance with a smart, gorgeous kid like me?” We laughed our heads off, Page. It’s not so funny now, but it was then, and right after we left the restaurant she pulled me against a brick wall on the corner and took the knife out of her purse to show me, and after I had seen it, she stood on tiptoe, placed her hand on my neck, pulled my head toward hers, and whispered in my ear: “Systems / Equal Steel / Shaped / Female.” The Baroness. The knife’s thin edge is still shining in my mind. And now, Page, the two are forever linked: the Baroness and the promise of a cut, a stab, a slice. Fanny and I hugged each other hard, and we kissed each other on the lips, and she gave me cab money as part of her dinner treat. I told her it was too much, but she insisted, and I sailed uptown with a friendly driver born in Flatbush, who told me about his son in medical school. I worked up the courage to ask him if he would wait until I was inside the door. He said he would have waited anyway. It made me feel that most people really are kind. I hope I don’t have that dream tonight.
Love,
S.H.
I knew that Gus knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew, but when we spoke on the phone, which we did at least a couple of times in the days after my own rat attack, he said nothing about it. Then, on the afternoon of the fifteenth, Gus invited me to the movies. I was happy to go. I liked sitting beside Gus in the darkness of the Thalia at two o’clock in the afternoon. I liked the fact that when there weren’t many people in the theater, I could put my legs over the chair in front of me, and I liked the prospect of losing myself for two hours in somebody else’s drama. The movie was Baby Face, from 1933. During the opening credits, Gus was unusually quiet. He didn’t whisper in my ear about the director of photography or point to a portentous shift in the music or interesting cutaway.
Lily Powers, aka Baby Face, played by Barbara Stanwyck, is a tough, smart-mouthed young woman with languorous, deliberate movements whom I admired from the moment she appeared on the screen. Lily’s father is a soulless brute, a man whose avaricious plans include pimping out his daughter to a politician, Ed Sipple, a “big man” around town, played by Arthur Hohl, a greasy-haired, cigar-chomping creep. Early in the film, a grinning Ed walks in on Lily in her father’s speakeasy, sits down across from her, and starts patting and then fondling her knee. After coldly examining her molester for a few seconds, Lily picks up her coffee cup, pours its contents over the big man’s hand, and says, in a voice thick with irony, “Excuse me, my hand shakes so when I’m around you.” Then she stands up, straightens her skirt, and takes a leisurely stroll across and out of the room. I remember the stony, vindictive happiness that settled over my body as I watched her. I may have smiled. I turned to Gus. His eyes met mine, and he looked at me evenly for maybe three seconds, a long time. That was enough.
* * *
But when Whitney pressed me to describe my “emotional state,” I found I couldn’t say what it was. The silent understanding Gus had conveyed via Barbara Stanwyck was easy for me to accept. Whitney’s searching eyes, on the other hand, were somehow too much to bear. Her compassion threatened to break me. On the fourteenth, I wrote in the notebook, “Whitney says I am punishing myself for no reason, but what does reason mean in my case? I don’t know what I feel now. Sometimes I feel nothing. Blank. One story seems to have bled into another, as if I am mixing up lives. I am checking again, going to the window to look for the body. It must be Lindy’s, but sometimes I think it’s my own. It’s sick. I cleaned the apartment today on my hands and knees with a scrub brush. It felt good. I used bleach. I am battling vermin.”
When I woke up on the morning of the sixteenth, I realized I had slept through the night for the first time since I had drunk Patty’s tea. “No nightmare!” I wrote in Mead that afternoon. “I do believe it’s over, Page. Forgive me for saying it, but I think we have turned over a new leaf!” It happened that I was right—the dream would be in hiatus for years—but I could easily have been mistaken. My unfounded enthusiasm for page-turning has a pathetic quality on hindsight, but it also demonstrates that the blank, corpse-checking, scrubbing-on-all-fours person of the day before had not lapsed into depression. And yet, the bulk of my writing on May 16 is devoted to a visit from Lucy. I never forgot that visit, but I recalled it in broad terms with many of the particulars missing. “Lucy was here. She left just minutes ago. It was so strange. I am going to write down everything I remember word for word if I can.”
In the passage that follows I quote Lucy at length. I use quotation marks. It is true that I had been recording my neighbor with pen and paper for months, that her voice had entered my head, and yet, why did I write it as if I recalled every word? It is impossible to know. There is no ultimate perspective to which I can refer to answer that question. Even if those patriarchal wizards God the Father, Zeus, and the demon of Laplace exist, I am not blessed with their vision. I suspect that I am reading a text that displays my own early ambition to write in another tone, to experiment with another kind of novel, one taken straight from the events of the day.
