Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions Page 3

  George led me down four flights of stairs to a large dimly lit room that contained rows of bunk beds, each one covered in an army blanket.

  “Guess where we are,” said George.

  “Summer camp?”

  The friendly stink of old blankets reminded me of being in summer camp, which led immediately back to Jake.

  “ Welcome to the largest privately owned fallout shelter in the free world,” said George.

  He showed me his bunk, which was one of the lower ones.

  “Does Rainbow get one? My roommate, she’s your temporary receptionist.”

  “ You only get a bunk if the FAF thinks you’re a valuable survival resource,” he said. “We’re saving spots for Sinatra and Olivia Newton-John, so we can’t cover clericals.”

  Shrieks of laughter erupted from the other side of the room. I recognized the laugh of the woman director.

  “I told you she was feisty,” George said.

  I saw myself facing Congressional Oversight Committee, all proceedings televised. In the gallery I could see Dr. Freundlicht, my counselors from progressive summer camp, and my mother. The Chairman of the Oversight Committee addressed me with a sneer in his voice. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Jake Meltzer except older, balder, and fat.

  “On the night of June 24, 1981, did you perform an act of sexual intercourse that is illegal in the state of Georgia? “

  What the Hell.

  I had the perfect excuse.

  I would tell them all I’d just stopped smoking.

  Industry & Simple Gratitude

  “Give you a good deal on the bamboo planter, Mrs. Ratner,” says Jack on the phone. To the blonde girl in baggy clothes trying on a tight green tweed jacket he says, “Nice with your hair but the fit’s not right in back.”

  She looks up. A dormouse face, puffy cheeks under fluffy bangs, but when she smiles it all wakes up, and Jack’s hunch is right. No bra under her loose fitting brown jersey. The bonus is no makeup either. Even the Georgetown students who shop here Saturdays wear lipstick and mascara. This one’s no college student, he can tell from the faint lines around her mouth. Long years of sadness, but a girl still. He knows these things. The first naked face he’s seen on an adult woman in Washington, D.C, and he’s made her smile.

  It’s a sign.

  Jack, at 47, has been without wife or girlfriend for over a year, his longest period of abstinence since before college. There are broken teeth in his smile and he can predict rain from the ache in his bones, but he looks dapper in his Harris tweed sport coat and a blue-gray flannel shirt that matches his eyes. The shirt is a gift from his ex-wife. It’s November, so Jack’s bones ache all the time, even on a sunny day like this.

  Insurance money from last year’s car accident will surely put him back on easy street, and maybe he can get a stipend from Georgetown University to finish his long abandoned dissertation but for now he works part-time in Gita’s Deja Vu, a vintage clothing and used furniture store near Friendship Heights. He lives in a basement apartment rented from a diplomat’s widow. There is only enough room for a sleep sofa and a kitchen table plus it’s too dark for plants. Sometimes it gets so cold in his apartment he has to wear gloves indoors, but when he asks his landlady to turn up the heat she screams at him in Hungarian. She’s entitled to scream, being lonely and deaf, and besides, her late husband was a freedom fighter.

  Gita, Jack’s boss, is good for one screaming fit a day, but he thinks she’s inexcusable, thinks she’s a crazy woman. She dresses up like a frontier schoolteacher except for her red dagger fingernails, and she won’t make Jack her partner although he knows plenty about antiques and how to make sales. Gita wouldn’t have thought to call Mrs. Ratner back, for instance.

  In addition to the bamboo planter, she wants the horsehair settee and the pair of pink marble-topped end tables.

  “Would you set them aside for me, hon?” says Mrs. Ratner.

  “Consider it done, Mrs. R.,” he says.

  “Oh, Jack?” Gita calls to him once he’s off the phone, “Would you mind moving the maroon davenport out to the loading dock?”

  She wants him to go back down to the basement and schlepp three hundred pounds of sofa but it comes out like please pass the water cress sandwiches. When you pay a man $8.00 an hour off the books don’t ask for favors. Just give him his orders. Women do not know how to give orders.

  “Jack?” says Gita with a lipstick smile, the smile before the scream.

  “Keep your shirt on,” says Jack as he walks towards the stairwell. He looks around to wink at the girl in the baggy clothes, but she’s gone. “On second thought, sweetheart, take it off.”

  He watches Gita work her mouth, unable to figure out whether Jack is insulting her or flirting with her.

  There should be better ways of having fun.

  This has been a lousy year. Smashed up in that car wreck, six weeks in traction, and when he came out of the hospital, his good job gone. He used to be chief fund raiser for the Institute for Strategic Technology, a now defunct think tank, and before that he had a small consulting business. He lived in a Watergate sublet overlooking the Potomac and spent evenings on Embassy Row. Now he spends his time uptown, in chilly basements full of cast off furniture, the hostage of screaming women. Nonetheless, the year has not been a total loss.

  He has been cast into darkness so he might better recognize the light.

  After the maroon davenport is out on the loading dock, Jack red tags Mrs. Ratner’s latest choices: planter, end tables, and horsehair settee. From the back of the basement he sees his dormouse blonde with the naked face. Surrounded by old furniture, she looks bewildered. Something bold yet personal is called for.

  “I think you might need me,” he says.

  She smiles, embarrassed, as though her secret desires have been revealed to a stranger. He didn’t know there were women who still blushed like that.

  “Let me guess,” he continues, encouraged. “You are an international social worker on home leave. The villagers have come to accept you as one of them. You bind the wounds of the elders and teach the little ones to read.”

  He has tickled her fancy and made her laugh. She’s the wooden doll released from enchantment under the kindly touch of the master toymaker.

  “I’m so sorry to disappoint you,” she says finally. “You’re not even close.”

  She’s a tech rep for Boeing Computer Services recently transferred from Seattle. His attention wanders as she describes her job in some detail. Should he tell her about his CIA connections? No, she probably couldn’t handle it, not this early in the relationship.

  “I’m a poet,” he says, knowing this will explain his broken teeth and current menial employment. Women take chances on poets. “I’m looking for a serious relationship with an intelligent woman who will torture me and darn my socks.”

  “What a great line,” she says. “Have you had any luck with it?”

  Her body language reads guarded but her smile tells him everything he needs to know. Like him, a believer in love at first sight. The underground faith, the old religion, the only one left that feels true. Her name turns out to be Shelly, exactly the name he would have picked for her. No rings on her fingers, no salt on her tail.

  When it’s meant to be it’s this simple.

  “I met my last boyfriend like this, only he worked in a record store,” Shelly tells him. “I was looking for John Denver and he made me buy Scarlatti. We were together for eight years—”

  Her voice falls off, and Jack intuits recent abandonment and betrayal by some aging hippie cad.

  “But then he moved into the Ashram?”

  “He had cancer and died,” she says in a flat voice.

  She has turned to go, but he can’t let her get away, not when he needs her so.

  “I can’t believe someone as attractive and intelligent as you isn’t married.”

  Another mistake, he realizes too late; Gita has told him that women find the implications insul
ting, not that he can figure out why.

  Shelly does not take offence. Instead she turns his words over like a serious person.

  “It’s hard to meet men when everyone’s so wrapped up in work. It was different back in grad school.”

  “There’s a Bergman festival at the Student Union. We could catch The Seventh Seal tonight at 8. Then I’ll take you to the Rathskeller. We’ll talk about Existentialism. What do you say?”

  “Right,” says Shelly.

  She must think he’s making fun of her, but he’s never been more sincere in his life.

  “OK, forget the existentialism, but I wasn’t kidding about the Bergman Festival. Be there for me, what do you say?”

  From the abstracted look on her face, a middle distance stare, she could be weighing his soul according to some private algorithm, or else thinking about what to make for dinner.

  “Jack!” Gita screams from upstairs. “What’s taking you so long?”

  “I’ll think about it,” says Shelly.

  .

  Jack waits for Shelly in the lobby of the Library between a series of posters extolling the virtues of South Korea. The posters, which have the cheerful dowdiness of in-house industrial graphics, feature a stubby smiling tiger wearing a hard hat. Jack feels great fondness for the small but plucky tiger, official mascot of Korea, with its broad shoulders and positive mental outlook. Why do liberals hate Koreans? What’s wrong with industry and simple gratitude? To work hard is good. To smile is also good, even with broken teeth. A hardworking man is waiting for his girl to show up so he can take her to the movies. What’s wrong with that? And here she comes now, here comes little Shelly, all bundled up in a pinkish down jacket. Waves of happiness hit him.

  “Hi,” she says. “Sorry I’m late.”

  But she’s right on time.

  “You have this distinctive smell,” she says as they walk to the movie. “Sort of salty and metallic?”

  There is no shower in Jack’s apartment, just a small claw footed bathtub and never enough hot water.

  “It’s sort of like plant food and trail mix,” Shelly says.

  Midway through Seventh Seal Jack leans over towards Shelly so their shoulders touch. She shifts her weight towards him, leans into him. When it’s meant to be, it’s easy.

  .

  The red tile floor of the Rathskeller is slick with spilled beer and the juke box is pitched too loud for conversation, but Jack finds a nook in the back. He feels expansive and favored.

  “Do you think it’s merely coincidence that the first woman in space was named Sally Ride?”he says.

  “Now you’re being silly,” she says.

  He has begun to sense that Shelly subscribes to the Things Just Happen theory of the universe. It seems to be an article of faith among women these days that the chains of cause and effect are so attenuated as not to be worth thinking about.

  “God doesn’t play dice with the Universe,” he says.

  “That’s Einstein, right?”

  “Correct that. God doesn’t play dice with the universe and expect to lose.”

  She looks alarmed. He realizes his voice is too loud.

  “Forgive me, Shelly. I’ve been spending too much time in my own head.”

  .

  The boarded up drug store they pass on Wisconsin Avenue is a perfect terrorist stakeout. The van with the diplomat plates is the tip off. He doesn’t want to alarm her.

  “Come on, Shelly” he says “We’re crossing over.”

  “The light’s at Calvert,” she says. “Besides it’s creepy on the other side. There’s the graveyard.”

  “Suppose I told you that we’re about to walk past a nest of Palestinians with Uzis and I don’t believe in taking foolish chances?” Jack says.

  “You can’t really believe that,” she says.

  “You’re an intelligent woman, Shelly. Quick, tell me which has greater likelihood of existence: ghosts or Palestinian guerrillas?”

  “Muggers,” she says. “Hiding behind the tombstones, ready to jump us this very minute.”

  There’s a liberal for you, could be raped at knife point before she’d use the N-word, so he’d better humor her.

  “Muggers never hang out in graveyards,” he says. “They’re all scared of ghosts.”

  Her laugh rewards him, and she lets him take her hand for the mad dash across Wisconsin Avenue; but the narrow sidewalk past the graveyard forces them into single file, and she sprints ahead. He catches up with her at the next corner waiting for him under the street lamp.

  “Do you walk around pretending to be in spy movies all the time?” she says.

  “The Greatest Story Never Told, Part II,” says Jack. “In the final reel the Children of Light get to match wits with the Prince of Darkness. If you want to pretend you’re not in this movie be my guest, but you’ll miss the whole point.”

  .

  Shelly’s condo is half the size of Jack’s lost Watergate sublet, but it is two stories up and gets southern exposure. Cascades of spider plants and swedish ivy hang in the windows. He could grow his plants here. Shelly’s living room, full of mismatched furniture and rag rugs, reminds him of his Aunt May’s summer house, except for the computer off in a corner and the home entertainment unit that takes up a wall. Top of the line, state of the art sound system; legacy, no doubt, of the Man from the Record Store.

  “Could you stand it if I put on some Sinatra?” Shelly says.

  Her glance slides away when he tries to meet her eyes.

  “The way I see it,” says Jack, “I have to make you feel secure, but obliquely, so you don’t see me doing it.”

  “Are you making fun of me?” she says.

  “I’m laying out for you a newly virgin heart. I don’t think you appreciate the significance of what that means.”

  “It’s been a long time without for me too,” she says.

  Her voice is small and bleak and matter of fact. Winter in Korea. Lonely to the bones. But her lips are still soft, still responsive.

  Love oh love remember me.

  .

  A sky blue comforter and fresh, clean sheets welcome him. Naked Shelly, Shelly with her hands on her hips, stands in her bedroom doorway, hesitant as though waiting for a cue. He wonders if this is some kind of last minute tease.

  “Come here, you,” he says from her bed.

  “Aren’t we forgetting something?” she says. “You know, rubbers?”

  That forced perkiness, so inappropriate for the occasion!

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  They will move to Pennsylvania and make babies. She will have a garden and he will raise malamutes.

  “I’ve got some in the medicine cabinet if you didn’t bring any.”

  “We’ll get married. If it’s a boy, we’ll name it for your father.”

  “You don’t get it,” she says, earnest and implacable as a health careprofessional. “You know, AIDS?”

  “Trust me a little on this one; do I look like a fruit?” He means his words to sound gentle, teasing, while his eyes register hurt, injured pride but no self-pity. “Take a chance, Shelly. Don’t make me sleep in the cold.”

  A grave, almost dutiful look comes over her face, and she climbs into bed. His needs are stronger than her resolve.

  And later, her naked face under his. Child still. Peony in the rain. So much he can teach her. That expansive feeling again, but softer.

  “I’m-older-than-you is going to define this relationship,” he says, drifting towards sleep.

  Her laugh sounds wide awake and almost mirthless.

  “What’s so funny, you?” he says.

  The appraiser’s look she gives him makes him catch his breath, makes him wonder for the first time if he’s reached her at all.

  .

  In the morning he wakes first. Through Shelly’s bedroom window he can see the Cathedral.

  “Hey,” he whispers in her ear, “I like you.”

 
; Just in case she’s awake but doesn’t want to make a commitment. A glance at her book shelves tells him the dimensions of the problem. All the required reading for the Woman’s Studies seminar but no Tolkein. He will make her read Chesterton and D.H. Lawrence. He will feed her vitamins and bring her bottled water from mountain springs. He will start by fixing her breakfast in bed.

  The pickings in Shelly’s refrigerator are slim: half a carton of orange juice, some English muffins, and a small tub of margarine. Browsing through her cupboards he discovers a small jar of champagne marmalade. What a nice touch, champagne marmalade for his first breakfast with Shelly.

  She stands in the kitchen doorway all dressed for work, navy blazer jacket over dress and pearls, pumps and red lipstick.

  “Excuse me, but I was saving that for a special occasion,” she says.

  She needs reassurance, that’s all. Reassurance and a good cup of coffee.

  “And what could be more special than our first breakfast? If you run to the store like a good girl and pick us up a dozen eggs, some ham, a hunk of Guyere cheese, and some fresh ground coffee, I’ll fix a breakfast that will knock your socks off.”

  “I get it. You want to move in with me,” she says.

  In this damp gray voice. She knows what she wants but it scares her. He’s been there before.

  “Admit it, little one. You can’t get along without me. Why fight it?”

  He waits for that little topple of laughter that will turn her back into his Shelly again.

  “I’m real late for work, and I still have to empty the garbage,” she says.

  Posters have gone up overnight, he thinks, and the students take to the streets. Expel the foreign invader, they chant. Yankee go home.

  He blocks the doorway.

  “You owe me an explanation, little one,” he says, not minding the note of menace creeping into his voice.

  Her eyes are cool and sad.

  “I figured you were a little crazy after you made me cross Wisconsin Avenue in the middle of the block to avoid the Palestinian guerrillas, but I felt sorry for you. Only I shouldn’t have let you stay when you wouldn’t use a condom. That was me being stupid.”