“Are you sure, are you positive you haven’t heard anything from Anthony Peters? Are you absolutely certain, Marsha?”
When Marsha thrusts up the bar, the row of little muscles that lie between her breasts and her collarbone leap exuberantly under the skin. “Gruunph!” The metal plates clink.
“We had a deal, Marsha,” I remind her. She is lying on a long, narrow padded bench upholstered in black vinyl. Bolted to its head is a chrome-plated rack.
“Whoosh! Whoosh!” goes Marsha, hyperventilating. Her lips are puckered in a crinkled white o. Her face is flushed and sweaty, loose strands of hair adhere damply to her jawline. She tenses, heaves again. “Grrnph!”
“Remember we had a deal, Marsha,” I repeat for emphasis. I am dismayed to find she is producing mildly erotic sensations in me, lying there on her back, legs splayed out on either side of the bench, bare feet planted in the nap of the carpet. She is dressed in a white body-stocking over which she has pulled a blue bikini bottom. When she jerks the bar off her chest her pelvis tilts upward and her buttocks snap off the vinyl, making an unsticking sound like adhesive tape being pulled loose. I can see the vague swirls of darkness on the body-stocking that mark her nipples.
“I think you know where she is,” I say, taking off my parka and slinging it over my arm. Here in the steamy exercise room of Marsha’s apartment building the temperature is kept at a level sufficient to produce heatstroke. I had the misfortune to buzz her just as she was off to her daily work-out. The sacred ritual apparently cannot be postponed, so here I am.
“Whoosh! Whoosh!”
This is the perfect setting for a revival of the myth of Sisyphus. The glum smell of effort that produces little reward pervades it. The sour failed dreams of weight loss, flat tummies, firm thighs, haunt the room. Off in a corner a grey-haired retiree pedalling morosely on a stationary bicycle might be the fabled Greek himself, condemned to the present age’s equivalent of boulder-rolling up mountain slopes. The old boy’s gristly legs are doodled all over with bright blue veins.
Marsha interrupts these thoughts by settling the barbells in the rack above her head with a clank. She sits up, twists her torso to give me a view of her back, tenses her muscles, and forces back her shoulders. “Can you see definition in my back?” she asks.
“Pardon?”
“My muscles, do they stand out? Are they well-defined? I always check for myself in the bathroom mirror but I can’t tell if it’s just shadows or real definition. The light is so poor.”
I study the crescent of fast-fading Arizona tan, the toffee-coloured skin revealed by the low-scooped back of her body-stocking. “Why don’t you answer me?” I demand. “Does Peters know where she is?”
“No he doesn’t. I told you that already.” She wriggles her shoulders. “How are my delts?”
I don’t even know what they are. “Lovely. What did he say to you?”
“He hasn’t heard from her,” says Marsha, uncoiling her body and beginning to pat her arms dry with a towel, “and quite frankly I think he’s come to the end of his patience. He doesn’t care for emotional blackmail. It’s gone too far now. Victoria has badly misjudged Anthony. She ought to have acted like an adult.”
“How does an adult act in these circumstances?”
“Not a surprising question from you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, in your case you might refrain from prowling the streets looking for her. That’d be a start.”
“I have.” I don’t explain that this is not by choice. Rubacek won’t let me have the car because I don’t have a driver’s licence – a piece of criminal sophistry on his part – and I can’t get him to leave his writing. He claims his memoir is on the verge of completion; it’s a question of mere hours. “This is the big push, Ed,” he tells me. “Do or die.”
“I am glad to hear it. And to see you’ve finally crawled out of that grungy apartment. What’s-his-name must be thrilled.”
“Rubacek.”
“Yes. Stanley, isn’t it? Is he still cluttering up the premises?”
“Yes.”
“What interesting little friends you make.”
“He’s no friend of mine. He’s driving me nuts. He drove me out of my apartment. And he’s driving me nuts. When he’s not reminding me not to be depressed he’s asking me how to spell words that don’t belong in the English language.”
“Throw him out.”
“It’s not that easy. I’ve hinted rather strongly a number of times he should get out but he says he couldn’t leave me when I’m depressed like this. If I did anything foolish he’d feel responsible, he says. I can’t make him go.” This is not entirely the truth. I could make anybody go. Let’s face it, I’ve never had any problem driving people away. But just at the moment I can’t summon up the necessary will and energy, and to tell the truth, this heart condition is never out of my mind. I think I’d be afraid to stay alone. Rubacek is better than nothing. I’ve made him memorize the phone numbers of all the ambulance services in town.
“Maybe Stanley is your karma,” says Marsha with a wicked smile. “He who imposes shall be imposed upon.”
“Marsha, I’m constantly amazed at your compassion and depth of understanding.”
“Lighten up, Ed. You keep trying this hard to win some sympathy and you’re going to start believing you’re as badly off as you pretend to be. I’m warning you – it’s a dangerous game you’re playing. I was talking to Benny and he sees you’re developing problems too.”
“Sees what? What does that son of a bitch see? Go on, say it. There’s too many walnuts showing in the fruitcake. Is that what he was getting at?”
“Let’s just say this business about your heart isn’t healthy. We both agree on that. It’s obvious there’s nothing wrong with your heart. If there was, you wouldn’t have been let out of the hospital.”
“I’ll let you know I have a history of high blood pressure.”
“You’ve got a history of crawling around inside your own head. That’s what you’ve got a history of. Everybody who knows you knows your history.”
“All right, so you’re the expert. Go on, what’s my history?”
“Let’s just leave it at that.”
“You ought to review your own history, Marsha. Studded as it is with successes.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s just leave it at that.”
“Oh, gamesmanship. All right. Okay, Ed. If you have to hear it. You want to know what everybody knows? This is what everybody knows. You’re a fuck-up, an infantile jerk. We’ve always been embarrassed for you, the way you act. What did you need? A telegram informing you Victoria was missing in action? Do you think she was only gone when you separated? She was gone years before that. Believe me, people are losing patience with you.
“And you, did you behave with any kind of dignity, any kind of sense? No way. When she was running around with Harold you spied on them. And what’re you doing now? Running around spying on her again. Phoning people. Hassling Anthony, hassling me. Why do you do this? Because you’re lonely? Because you want a woman? Go find yourself a woman. They’re out there. Haven’t you heard? There’s a selection. You’re allowed more than one a lifetime.”
I sit down beside her. She gives off a mingled scent of baby oil, fabric softener, sweat. It is very pleasant. “What do you call this thing?”
“A bench press.”
We sit silent for a time. The old man is still pedalling. The bicycle tire whines against the resistance roller.
“I don’t want another woman,” I say.
Marsha shakes her head as if she can’t believe what she’s hearing.
“You know where she is, don’t you?” I ask.
“Christ.” Marsha props her elbow on her knee, forehead in her palm. “What is it? What is it you miss so much? She ought to bottle and sell it.”
“Could it be that we were both misfits? Is that how we got together? It’s the only explanation I can see.” This is a genuine question. Such an idea had never occurred to me before. Is Victoria a misfit too?
“I never thought of her that way,” says Marsha. “No, I don’t think so.”
“She must have been a misfit in some way nobody recognized,” I say, unwilling to abandon the notion. “The reason I say this is I’ve never had any success with women. Absolutely none. Then Victoria comes along. I just wouldn’t give up. Finally she went out with me. To hear Dick Gregory.”
“A real fairy-tale,” says Marsha.
“I’ve never really understood my complete lack of success with women. I mean complete. There are guys as fat as me that women like, and guys as opinionated, and guys as neurotic. Granted I’m all three, but the overwhelming abhorrence with which the opposite sex regards me is a bit of a puzzle. It’s not entirely fair. I mean, Benny charms them out of the trees and it’s obvious he’s a moral idiot and sexual criminal. I was a virgin when I got married. Well, not exactly a virgin when I got married, what I mean to say is I was a virgin until I met Victoria.”
“Ed,” whispers Marsha, nudging me, “he’s eavesdropping.”
He is too, the old coot. I stare at him until he guiltily resumes pedalling.
“Wouldn’t you say that was rather remarkable?” I continue. “Finding a male virgin of my advanced age? I mean, when free love was the orthodoxy?”
“Maybe you were fastidious.”
“Wendy offered. Remember her? One of Benny’s. But that was revenge. He’d dumped her. I considered it seriously before refusing.”
“I get a queer feeling when you talk about what happened back then,” says Marsha. “It’s like listening to a documentary or something. It’s as if it never really involved you. It’s as if you Rip Van Winkled out, woke up ten years later, and got all your information from old newspapers. Where the hell were you?”
I shrug.
This seems, unaccountably, to make Marsha angry. “Nobody felt comfortable around you, everybody felt you were judging them, even poor Victoria, who was so patiently and pathetically waiting for you to join the human race. Do you have any idea how good the rest of us felt believing we weren’t going to end up like the walking dead all around us? Do you? And then this messy shlub, this twenty-two-year-old zombie, would shuffle into the room and piss on our parade. Do you know what I remember best about you? There were six of us sitting around talking about Gandhi and passive resistance and all that crap and you piped up and said that Gandhi had advocated, in his early days, that the Hindus slaughter the sacred cows and begin to eat beef. He believed that beef-eating was the source of British strength. That to beat the English you had to out-eat the English. It had nothing to do with what we were talking about.”
“A little-known fact.”
“It had nothing to do with the man he became.”
“Do you have any idea what you all sounded like? You weren’t really talking about Gandhi. You didn’t give a shit what Gandhi thought. You wanted to convince yourself that if he were alive he’d have been sitting in that circle, passing the roach and being self-righteous.”
“Bill had you pegged. Terminal narcissism. He said you’d book yourself into Carnegie Hall some day and buy an audience for your final rant.”
“I’d have had to get in line for a booking behind him.”
“He was an idealist, Ed. Not a cheap cynic.”
“He was the goddamn Ayatollah Khomeini then and he’s the goddamn Ayatollah Khomeini now.”
“He was an idealist, Ed.”
I don’t answer. She can have that much. After a bit she offers, “What he is now I can’t say.”
I can see Bill Sadler walking down 3rd Avenue, clasping the sheet of plywood tightly to his chest. He should look crazy. The disturbing thing is that he looks perfectly sane and probably is. Clinically speaking.
“Yeah, well …”
Marsha stands. “I don’t want to talk about Bill any more,” she says. “I don’t like marching over old ground. Let’s go upstairs and have a drink to the realists.”
There it is, that peculiar tension, awkwardness, that can surprise two people who had never intended such a thing to happen.
I run my hands down my pants creases. “I won’t bother you any longer.”
“Come along,” she says, “I’ll take a quick shower and you can make us some drinks. I’ve got those powdered mixes. You can have whatever you like.”
“No, I’d better go.”
“You can have whatever you like, Ed.”
“No.”
That’s the end of it. Her face displays neither anger nor disappointment. I have, with a twist of perspective, become once again a fat man of limited qualities. “Suit yourself,” she says.
I show the taxi driver the money and the map with its numbered quadrants, o’s, red lines. “I’ve got thirty-five dollars,” I explain. My finger runs up 22nd Street on the map. “I want you to pull into every motel along here until the meter hits thirty-five bucks. When it hits thirty-five bucks, stop the cab and let me out. Okay?”
“Just let you out wherever?”
“That’s right.”
“You don’t know where you’re going?”
“That’s right.”
“You mind if I ask for the money first?”
Returning to my apartment exhausted, I find all the lights are burning but the place has an air of vacancy. While hanging up my parka I call out to Stanley and get no answer. I walk through empty rooms that have been cleaned, tidied. The dishes have been done. My bed is made. My dirty clothes have been picked off the floor and stowed in the laundry hamper.
In the living room I spy a stale package of cigarettes I’d left on the top of the TV days ago. Lighting one, I break another of my recent resolutions to preserve the tenuous health of my heart.
I sit down and close my eyes. The tobacco, very dry and strongly flavoured by the plastic-tasting heat of the TV, snaps and sizzles faintly. The cigarette burns between my lips like a fuse. I think of the afternoon spent looking for Victoria. Images twitch behind my eyelids. Lamp standards jerk by, snow drifts, men in neutral-coloured clothing stand in the windows of motel offices, hands in their pants pockets, shoulders rounded. Thirty-five dollars spent and a bus ride home. Another resolution broken.
I wonder where Stanley’s gone. I have a feeling he mightn’t be back. That would explain his putting the place right. The lights would have been left on as a welcome. He knows how I hate an empty, dark apartment.
If Rubacek had moved in with anything more than the shirt on his back I could confirm my suspicions by checking to see if anything is missing, by checking to see what he’s taken with him, but he came with nothing.
I remember the manuscript of Society’s Revenge: The Stanley Rubacek Story. Surely he wouldn’t leave that behind.
It isn’t on the kitchen table where he worked. The table has been cleared and cleaned. I can make out the wipe marks that have dried in dull, soapy streaks on its Arborite top. I search all the rooms, even going so far as to rummage in a linen closet, to go down on my hands and knees to peer under a bed. No manuscript. Stanley is definitely gone. What if I have another heart attack? I could die alone here and nobody would know.
It’s in the fridge. With a bottle of ketchup resting on it like a paperweight. There’s a note.
“I knew you couldn’t miss it here!!! But seriously Ed don’t leave this on ice to long, okay??!! I’m dying to hear the verdict. (Bet you never expected to hear that one from an excon. Ha. Ha.).”
Cold has made the pages feel slippery and damp to the touch. He is coming back. I set the manuscript on the table, pour myself a drink, read the first page, reread it.
I finished the book in six hours. It is clear from this creaky melodrama that Stanley has never been a convict, likely never even committed a crime. However, it is equally clear that he has read a good many books about crime and criminals.
Yet he is not simply a liar. I once knew a girl like Stanley. She attended my junior high school. When she was twelve she suddenly announced she was Adolf Hitler’s daughter, smuggled out of Germany at the end of the war. Her parents, her teachers, nobody could dissuade her from making her bizarre claims. She suffered for them. Teasing made her life hell; she lost her one friend, a girl almost as strange as herself. Unclever, plain, nearly ugly, she was still somebody, the daughter of modern Europe’s greatest madman. She was Adolf Hitler’s daughter. Even when somebody pointed out in 1962 that she was too young to have been born in 1945 she merely said, “I’m not thirteen, I’m seventeen.”
She was taken to a psychiatrist. From that moment on she ceased saying she was Adolf Hitler’s daughter. She began to say, very calmly, “My name is Eva Hitler.” She began to sign test papers, essays, and letters with that name. When tormented past endurance she would cry: “I’m not responsible for what my father did! I was only a baby!”
After two years of this her family moved away. A report reached us in a couple of months that in her new home Eva Hitler was once more Doris Wright.
And so with Stanley, I suspect.