After Claude (13 page)

The sage at the cash register had something to say. “Are you entertaining an orphan asylum?”

“Hurry,” I urged him, fighting back tears.

He rang and he rang and he rang up some more. The bill came to $52.28.

“I don’t have enough money.” Sobs broke loose from my tight chest.

“Easy, darling,” the capitalist consoled me. “It’s not the end of the world. How much money do you have?”

“Fifty dollars.” I held a fistful of money up to him.

The lynch mob behind me was growing restless. Was I perhaps their chosen victim?

“So I’ll take off two dollars’ worth of groceries. You can live with only four antipasto, no?”

I could have kissed his hands for that unexpected display of wisdom.

“What don’t you want?”

“It doesn’t matter. Take back anything.” My tears dried up. After all, maybe ten days with Baba would be sufficient?

He did the recount, and this time I won the election. My order filled two cardboard cartons.

“What time should we deliver?” my friend inquired, relieving me of my fifty dollars.

“As soon as possible. You see,” I said, enjoying a flash of inspiration, “it’s for my wedding party, and I’m going to be married in an hour.”

“Mazeltov,” he congratulated me in an unfamiliar tongue.

I raced back to the apartment and up the stairs, for once disregarding Rhoda-Regina’s complexes.

I got to my door and screamed when I realized I didn’t have the keys. I hadn’t even bothered with my Cretan shoulder bag, which generally accompanied me everywhere. I reconstructed the terrible moment when I’d grabbed the money in my hand and locked myself out of the apartment. I could hear the phone ringing; that had to be all the emergency locksmiths in America. I sat down on the top step, put my head in my hands, and my lamentations filled the hall.

I didn’t keep track of how long I cried, but it wasn’t brief. Finally, there was the slow, casual echo of this sadist with a black metal box, slowly mounting the stairs. I wiped my face.

He got to my landing and read off a slip of paper he was holding. “Are you the Mary who called for a locksmith?”

“No. I’m her heir. She was buried this afternoon.”

“You could have waited for me in the apartment.”

“I’m locked out,” I shrieked.

He laboriously reread his idiot sheet.

“It doesn’t say anything about a lockout? We’re going to have to break in?”

“So what? So we’ll break in. We’re getting rid of the old lock anyway.”

His young blond blue-eyed mean face tightened into a frown. I had heard rumors about Ilse Koch giving birth to a son in prison, but I’d never hoped to meet the boy.

“Do you have any proof that this is your apartment?”

My voice rose hysterically. “I called you. My name is Mary. I’m sitting here locked out. You think I’m some sort of lunatic who just goes around changing other people’s locks?”

“I have to have proof. Do you have a driver’s license, a bill, something to identify you?”

“My purse was snatched.”

“Is there a neighbor who can identify you?”

I thought fleetingly of this vengeful deity who pursued me and was now supplying Rhoda-Regina with an airtight opportunity for revenge. No, Officer, I never saw her before in my life.

“I’m a married woman and I live here with my husband.” I sobbed, the tears in my head overflowing for a change.

I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I closed my eyes and prepared to faint.

When I opened them, there was this Puerto Rican delivery boy, balancing my cartons of groceries, doing a full Egyptian slave up the steep pyramid.

“He knows me,” I shouted.

“You know this woman?” Ilse’s boy demanded. How proud she would have been, could she have lived to enjoy his cruelty.

“Sure,” my Puerto Rican savior said.

“Does she live in this apartment?”

“Sure.”

“Is that delivery for her?”

“Sure.”.

God bless him for his mastery of the English language.

“Okay,” the Nazi decided, “I’ll change the lock.”

It took him almost an hour of drilling, hammering, and cursing to get the old lock off, and then almost as long to replace it. He tried the new one a few times with a beautiful, shiny, new key.

“You’re set,” he finally said.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

He helped me carry the cartons into the apartment.

“That’ll be sixty-five dollars.”

“I can’t pay you,” I screamed. “I only have fifty. You told me fifty.”

“But, lady, that didn’t include breaking in.”

Crying was beginning to be my middle name.

“I’ll bring you the other fifteen. I swear on my mother’s grave, you’ll have the rest of the money by tomorrow. But please, I beg of you, leave now. I’m very upset from my mugging. Please, have mercy on me.”

He shrugged. “Give me the fifty.”

I scooped up the money on the coffee table and pressed it into his dirty hands.

“Tomorrow, Mary, no later. We’ve got your name, number, and address. No money and I’ll have to remove the lock. It’s company policy.”

“You’ll have it, you’ll have it. Do I look like a criminal?”

I locked him out with my new lock and fell on the couch, gasping for breath. I lit a cigarette and, with that automatic act, realized that I had neglected to buy two cartons of cigarettes, the number-one item on my shopping list. I burst into frustrated, enraged, indignant tears.

I couldn’t move from the couch. Not to unload the groceries. Not to lie down. Not to turn on the air conditioner. I was nailed, crucified to the couch. I ignored the ringing telephone.

Claude’s footsteps, when I heard them, were meaningless to me. I listened to his useless key tampering with my new lock.

“Harriet? Harriet, are you in there?”

The slow-witted adulterer continued to struggle with my new lock.

I heard his fists banging on the door.

“Let me in. Open this door, you miserable cunt.”

I sat riveted on the couch, terrified that his adrenaline would give him the strength to break down the door and murder me.

The pounding, this time his shoulder trying to crash through, resumed, and finally, bruised and beaten, he gave up. I listened to his retreating footsteps, and still I sat there, immobilized.

The bottle of Scotch was staring at me, till I got the message and filled Claude’s empty glass. The whiskey helped. After a few minutes I could move, but not from the couch. The telephone was ringing again, and this time I knew it was Claude.

You can imagine how thrilled I was to hear Marine’s war whoop.

“Harriet,” she shrieked, ecstatic with self-importance, “Claude called me and told me about you locking him out. Is it true, Harriet? Have you gone completely mad?”

I didn’t answer.

“Harriet, you can’t do that. It’s against the law. Jerry spoke to Claude, and he told him. Claude has the right to stop any cop on the street, bring him up, and force you off his property.”

It was typical of Maxine to credit Jerry with her own vicious betrayals.

I found my voice. “Fink. Filthy fink, dirty Jew, turning on your own kind.”

“But it’s illegal, Harriet. You’re trespassing. Claude said he gave you money to go to a hotel. What do you want from the poor guy, his blood?”

The phone became welded to my hand. “You and your fat ugly husband should only hang from a tree in Israel, Judas, murderer.” I slammed the receiver down. I clutched my head, wailing and moaning at the conspiracy of hate that surrounded me. Soon I heard them, the entire Gestapo, marching up the steps. I spilled half the Scotch on the table, clumsily trying to refill my glass.

“Are you sure she’s in there?” a gruff voice asked.

“She’s in there.”

“Open up, this is the law.” They must teach them, in the SS academies, how to pound on a door and freeze the will, the hope, the life of the trapped victim.

“Open up, or I’ll break the door in.”

How often had my people heard those savage words? Often enough for me to rise like a doomed automaton, walk to the door, and unlock the new lock.

Three gorillas pushed their way into the room. I counted Claude, Charles, and an unfamiliar thug in dark blue.

“Miss,” the thug said, his light-blue eyes slits of graft and corruption, “you are trespassing on this legal tenant’s property. If you do not leave peaceably, this gentleman is entitled to a court order requiring your appearance before a judge.”

“Gentleman? Where? Who? That one,” I pointed at Claude, “is a sexual pervert, and that one,” I accused Charles, “is a drug addict.”

“Miss, don’t make trouble. I am not empowered to forcibly evict you, but I suggest that you leave quietly. Changing the lock represents violation of private property.”

“Officer,” Claude said to the generously bribed henchman, “I’d like to go in and pack her things.”

“Don’t you dare destroy my belongings.” I followed him into the bedroom.

Claude threw my goatskin sack on the bed and started shoving the contents of the bentwood into its flabby belly. He worked quickly, not talking.

“Claude, wait, what are you doing? Has Charles drugged you? The fiend, the jealous faggot.”

Claude spoke. “Charles has his car here. I won’t just throw you out, in your condition. We’ll drive you to the Chelsea.”

“I have no money.”

“What happened to the hundred dollars?” Charles, hearing Claude’s thundering abuse, came to the bedroom door.

“How should I know? I had a hamburger at Joe’s. I bought a pack of cigarettes. It’s gone.”

“I’m not giving you another cent.”

Charles addressed his lover in French. “What’s the problem?”

“She’s blackmailing me for more money.”

Charles dug a wad of money out of his pocket. “This is no time to worry about money. I’ll give her money. The important thing is to get her out.”

It was a small miracle to discover that there was a way to say money isn’t important in the French language.

“No,” I protested in English. “I don’t want your blood money. The nickels and dimes you’ve cadged out of addicted schoolchildren.”

The cop crowded into the bedroom. “What’s the problem?”

“Listen to their funny accents. What are they saying? They’re two foreign spies. Do they have the legal right to throw an American citizen into the gutter?”

“Are those all her things?” the hood politely asked his boss.

“No. I absolutely refuse to leave without my tuna fish. And I’ll take the electric can opener,” I said defiantly.

Claude had the audacity to roll his eyes at Charles, and then he forced the roll of bills into my jeans pocket.

“Don’t lose it,” he said with his revolting French caution. And then: “Ready?”

“One more tiny detail, Claude. Just for the record, I want you to know you’re not throwing me out. In the last six months I’ve done everything humanly possible to save you. I give up. I want it absolutely clear, I’ve tried, but now I’m leaving you.”

I
DON’T
know how long I slept, because when I awoke in my solitary cell, of the many things I did not see, most conspicuously absent was a digital-clock radio. Go tell the time, in a sunless room, from shadows on the wall. For all I knew, I was Rudolf Hess rising and shining in Spandau, because if he’s as crazy and subject to persecution manias as his attorneys purport, what worse thing could he wish on himself than to wake up as me? I lay in my narrow, lumpy bed, calmly aware that the thin, tufted mattress had crippled me for life. A dancer could have an airtight damage suit, but a non-professional such as myself, who simply preferred a healthy spinal column for personal reasons, had no case. I couldn’t find the energy to turn my head. Had anyone, I wondered, ever been this tired? There was a recent collection of pictures in my head, vivid and meaningless. Claude throwing my bags into the rear of Charles’s car. A hotel lobby ugly with paintings, hanging metal objects, and fluorescent light fixtures. A skinny, balding night clerk ignoring me and handing Claude a key. Claude unlocking a door and dumping my worldly goods on a green, blue, and yellow linoleum floor worn brown in spots.

All through the room, cracks and burns exposed an underlayer of barren brown that was spreading as though blight had struck the skimpy surfaces. A yellowish lampshade next to the bed had succumbed to a half century of forty-watt bulbs and displayed its diseased patches of brown. There was no question in my mind that whatever had afflicted the room was contagious and would get to me next.

There was something going on in my stomach that could have been hunger, except its path swerved off when it reached my chest and I knew it wasn’t hunger. My dry mouth and closed throat guaranteed my feeling had nothing to do with food. It was about being alone at a new front, and my cowardly stomach was trying to desert to a neutral corner. It could pull and crawl and slip around all it wanted, but it wasn’t going any place without the rest of me.

Questions and arguments began to form in my head and dwindled off after a few timid words. There are times when I’d rather converse with a crazed mugger than reason with myself. Anyway, what good are questions when you can’t use the answers? One of the most unfair things in life is how quickly the present slinks into the past and, once there, becomes part of ancient history. Yesterday was gone, as surely as if it had been mine or Cleopatra’s. What difference did it make to anyone, with the possible exception of M-G-M, if I was thrown into this cell, because I’d lost Egypt or lost Claude? No one had ever been more alone than I. Prisoners were waking up with other prisoners, attentive guards rattling their bars, their days blissfully arranged. Cancer patients were waking up in cancer wards, surrounded by the intimate groans of the dying, nurses and doctors busy helping them to die clean. Blacks in their ghettos were waking up in crowded beds, pushing arms and feet out of each other’s faces, fighting for space. Only I was left out, alone, suspended between sleep and emptiness with nothing to fight and nowhere to be. Had anyone ever been more irrelevant, more excluded from the human celebration?

I sat at the edge of the bed with my feet planted in a dusty green rose. I touched a tuna-fish can with my toes. Hi. I took inventory. In one corner of the room was a sink, chipped and freckled brown. Above it was a square, framed mirror, the glass as polluted as the Hudson River. I expected to see a poisoned fish float across its seltzer surface. A dark green, half-raised window shade was reflected in the bubbles. Next to the sink was a waist-high, ptomaine-infested refrigerator, the door hanging on rusted hinges. On the wall facing the bed was a long, narrow, recklessly carved table, circa Bronx Bavarian. At either end of the table, pushed against the wall, was a straight-backed wooden kitchen chair with a yellow-plastic seat. It occurred to me that the room was excessively suicide-proof. No bathtub to slash your wrists in. No beams to hang from. The windows were painted shut to discourage impulsive leaps. A gun could do the job, but that was a man’s way.