After Claude (9 page)

Never taking his fascinated eyes off my charismatic being, Sidney lit Rhoda’s cigarette. Paul Henreid was alive and well in a black body on Morton Street.

“Go on, Harriet.” His voice caressed me. Rhoda-Regina inhaled fiercely.

“Well, when I was living abroad, the relationship between men and women in Rome, in London, Paris, wherever, and you’ll be happy to hear it didn’t matter to anyone if the man was black or white, the women, however, tended to be white. After all,” I laughed in a conspiratorial let’s-ignore-Rhoda-Regina fashion, “if black men were satisfied with black women, they’d have stayed home, which certainly wasn’t Paris, but the point I was making is foreign men don’t feel castrated if a foreign woman happens to know the time of day. Except some of those imported black men, present company excluded. Thank God, I didn’t have them to deal with, because I’m not and never have been a dumb blonde. But me and the other women, the ones not looking for a black bruiser to do them in, and you’d be thrilled at how many of those there are. Offhand, give or take a few, I’d concede the entire female population of Sweden and Germany. Anyway, the normal women didn’t try to achieve with demonstrations what we could demonstrate in bed, if you get what I mean. In a culture, however, such as the one we’re having our discussion in, where sexual differences do not lead to sexual intercourse, which is the general rule in Europe, you of course come to resent not only color distinctions, which are after all a proven fact, but sexual distinctions as well, which in my frank opinion are a blessing.”

Sidney’s rapt attention, his Oriental slanted eyes fixed on me, his dark, well-shaped hands gently stroking his Othello-cropped beard made me lose track of my argument.

“What was I saying?” I pleasantly interrupted myself. Fortunately, I wasn’t on a stage where I had to keep performing, even if it meant making up some gibberish.

“Oh, I think you said it.” Sidney’s white teeth glistened in his dark face.

If I were a sex-starved masochist, he might have made a conquest. That, dear friends, was the extent of my passionate affair with Sidney. Please go try to convince my jealous girl friend, Rhoda-Regina. The truth is, he and I hardly ever exchanged another word. For all I know, his conspicuous avoidance of me made R.-R. suspicious, since Rhoda was no slouch at ferreting out reasons to be miserable.

Back to the famous conflagration. “Goddamn it,” Rhoda exploded, “get your filthy body off that mattress. You lie there like a slug all day and all night. The only time you move is when you crawl into the kitchen and devour every crumb of food in the house. Am I your servant? Your cook? Who the hell do you think you are, lying there like an invalid, complaining, constantly complaining about the service, the disturbances? You’re driving me out of my mind, do you hear? My analyst says if I don’t throw you out, she won’t continue treating me. But I won’t throw you out. I’ll kill you instead.” (Note: It was veritably impossible for Rhoda-Regina to get through a normal discussion without at least one reference to her supposedly infallible analyst, into whose mouth she usually put thoughts and words that sounded emphatically Rhoda-Regina to me. It was as if by tacking “my analyst” over her trivial opinions, they were given the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.)

I felt a small shock, a
frisson
as we say in Paris, when she delivered the extraordinary quote about throwing me out. I knew I was dealing with a disturbed person, but disturbed or not disturbed, until she murdered me and was removed from the bosom of society, the apartment was her private stockade. To enter it was to become subject to her order. No matter how many of her threats I repeated to the local police, until I could deliver my mangled body as proof positive that she was criminally insane, she was entitled to her legal rights.

Crazy but not stupid, Rhoda-Regina knew this and gave full vent to her moods. The honeymoon was over. It was time for some serious reappraisal.

“You’re ruining my life. I hate to come home from work. I can’t invite my friends over without you slandering them. You’re costing me a fortune. No matter how much food I buy, it’s all gone the next morning. You never express the smallest gratitude, never a thank you, never an offer to help.”

It was like being trapped in a room with one of those crazies you frequently see parading down the streets of New York, having loud abusive arguments with themselves. Why hadn’t I realized how sick she was? Why hadn’t I understood the significance of those insane layers of shawls? Poor Rhoda-Regina. What a destitute fate awaited her. I am not a doctor. I don’t carry a hypodermic of tranquilizers. Therefore, I was obliged to wait out her seizure.

I just lay there, my arms crossed over my breasts. A dead queen at final rest in her sarcophagus. Wouldn’t you know it? As if I wasn’t coping with enough of Rhoda-Regina’s problems, there, under my still fingers, big as a pineapple, was an unfamiliar growth. It was too early to know if it was malignant or not. My arms and legs liquefied and the ceiling swam dizzily before my eyes. That was all I needed, my left breast hacked off. My perfect symmetry destroyed. No. If it was malignant, I would beg the surgeons to cut off the oxygen. But would they? Could they let a young and beautiful girl die on the operating table? Butchers that doctors are, they still have families to face.

“When are you getting the hell out of here?” Her distant voice filtered through the blood pounding in my ears.

“As soon as there’s an available bed in a city hospital,” I replied.

“What are you talking about?”

“I didn’t want to tell you, to worry you, before we were sure. Now, I’m sure. Rhoda, I have cancer.”

There was a shocked and welcome silence in the room, and then Rhoda-Regina, who was not entirely devoid of human feelings, emitted a long, low, animal wail and rushed out of the apartment.

Alone at last, I forced my disciplined mind to ignore the cancer and concentrate on Rhoda-Regina’s madness. What was destroying her mind? Could I help her? Was I not delivered to Rhoda-Regina’s door for some purpose? A deeper voice, a cosmic voice, if you will permit me, whispered in my ear.

“Help Rhoda.”

Easier said than done. Where should I start tackling that mammoth job? I meditated. I emptied my over-wrought mind as if I were an usher emptying a packed house. I was soon rewarded. Up from the deep trenches of my unconscious floated an insight. The insight was that Rhoda-Regina had never experienced your average sexual bliss. She was waiting for me to take her by the hand and lead her into the real world. She would never receive the attention and help she needed from her woman’s liberation cover. The only sexual attitude they had liberated her to express was a deep, abiding resentment that she couldn’t join the teamsters’ union. Had I been insensitive when I told her, “Rhoda, I have nothing per se against your karate classes, but rather than pin all your hopes on a rapist, wouldn’t a cruise make more sense?”

Yes, I ruthlessly accused myself. I had been insensitive. Whatever shabby benefit Rhoda drew from the other klutzes in her consciousness-raising group was automatically forfeited when she came home to face me. Clearly I had not achieved my enviable consciousness in a roomful of shrieking malcontents but in the arms of the ultimate taskmaster, an insatiable man.

Just as I was dozing off, the solution came over the public-address system, perfect in its simplicity. Find Rhoda-Regina a lover. Thanks a lot, but where? He’d really have to have an exceptional sense of humor or dedication to take on Mountain Girl. How without Howard Hughes’s checkbook at my disposal could I locate such a rare specimen and then bribe him into Rhoda-Regina’s clutches? Not easy once he’d seen the Iron Maiden clump across the floor. But experience had taught me that the problem sighted means the solution is near. I would find a way. Lucky Rhoda. I should have such a friend.

The rest of my stay with Rhoda-Regina are the dry bones of history. Why dig them up? Suffice it to say she was beyond help. I suffered the classic fate of the Good Samaritan. A vow: if ever I run across Rhoda-Regina lying in the gutter bleeding to death, I’ll carefully step over her broken body and keep on my way. Leave her to heaven, as they say. After all, would I have answered the ad if I had imagined for one second that it meant Bellevue for Rhoda-Regina? I may not be a saint, being an exceptionally earthy woman, but would I intentionally torment Rhoda-Regina, as the lunatic insisted, while tossing my personal effects out the studio window? When I found him, the ideal foreigner, stating his qualifications in one of R.-R.’s precious Communist newspapers, a political bonus I hadn’t hoped for, I offered up hosannas. The advertisement read:

Soul brother, exceptionally endowed, desires sisters, in singles or teams, size, color, age no obstacle; well-versed in French and Greek; photo on request. Write Box 7961.

Forget the photos, number 7961. The position is yours. Everything was falling into place, which I have often found to be the case when I am in touch with my inscrutable powers.

I answered the applicant by return post, racing against the endless refrain of R.-R.’s, “I want you out of here today.” I stalled her with wild tales of a parental check en route from the wastelands of Los Angeles; I pondered aloud whether I should selfishly buy one-way passage back to Paris and my true love, MacDonald, or if my duties lay in the opposite direction, with the culturally and spiritually impoverished golden children of the West. The prospect of great distances opening between us momentarily stunned the beast, and I hypnotized her with speculations about my imminent departure, till I had Rhoda mindless and purring in front of our humble fire. I won’t detour here to describe how stingily the miser rationed the logs, as if we were holed up in the Arctic awaiting the spring thaw. If not for my genuine squirrel greatcoat, Rhoda-Regina would have returned from work one fine day to be greeted by my stiff corpse. I lived, slept, and ate in my coat, which may have been her miserable game, to spare herself the painful confrontation of my innate and modest grace. Between the freezing temperatures, ostensibly maintained to protect her plastic monstrosities, and the scraps of food I was expected to feed on, she managed to keep me immobilized on the mattress, barely alive in my fur-lined grave.

Mine is not a vengeful nature. It would never occur to me to empty all the garbage pails on Morton Street outside Rhoda-Regina’s recently barred ground-floor window, any more than I would dream of sending an anonymous letter to the Immigration Department regarding the un-American orgies prevalent in Claude’s illegally occupied apartment. Let bygones be bygones is my motto. I try, wherever possible, to give my persecutors the benefit of the doubt. But this particular escapade of Rhoda-Regina’s, her twisted reaction to my feeble but well-intended efforts to relieve her pitiful frustration would make your leading glutton for punishment bow out. I learned my lesson. If people are determined to be crazy and unhappy and you don’t have it in you to ignore their silent cries of pain, if you happen not to be a Zen Buddhist, whose idea of fun is some posture freak burning himself to a cinder without slouching, get out of the line of fire. The incident itself hardly matters. I now realize that Rhoda-Regina was searching for any excuse to vent her rage at me. I could do no right. The mere fact that I was witness to her wretched existence made me the hated enemy. Like all misshapen people, she had what I call the leper complex.

Since it was apparent to me, if not to her, that no normal man would have the guts, no less the stomach, to crawl into her bed, my idea was to lure him to her side by the psychological ploy known as mystery. Believe me, if not for the brilliant discovery of veils, tents, and ankle bracelets, there would be no Arab population. Number 7961, tantalized by the unknown, would be slipped into Rhoda-Regina’s service without the time-consuming formalities of small talk. After all, the object of the players was not mental compatibility.

In my letter to 7961 I suggested we meet in the studio on R.-R.’s consciousness-raising night on the town. There would be plenty of time when he arrived to explain about Rhoda-Regina’s rape fantasies, her puritanical preference for the sneak attack, her baby-elephant wish to be overwhelmed. Like all great strategies, my plan was simple. Since Rhoda-Regina had taken to avoiding me, I could count on her going directly to her bedroom. Her well-primed seducer could wait with me in the studio till all was quiet. Then he would slip silent as a dream into Rhoda-Regina’s arms. It was perfect. Even I, after five years of repeated liberation in Paris, felt a small twinge of excitement at Rhoda’s prospects.

Agreed, he didn’t turn out to be Sidney Poitier, or, for that matter, Rhoda’s Sidney, but soul he was by any standard. The fact is when I heard his timid knock at the appointed hour and eagerly flung open the door, I couldn’t at first locate him, what with the gloomy hall being a mugger’s paradise. He was a small, shriveled raisin of a man, and whether he knew Greek I cannot say, but his French was nonexistent and his English equally bizarre. He was in no way the individual you’d compose from your fantasy photo file, but was Rhoda-Regina turning down ‘ movie contracts? It was not an easy matter to explain the setup to Lloyd. I believe his name was Lloyd. I never established if that was his name or the self-effacing manner in which he said hello. Details. He cringed at the word rape, so I discarded psychological insights. The truth is he never seemed to comprehend my plan, but the little octopus was as cooperative as he was dense and willingly drank my red domestic wine while listening to this buildup I gave to Rhoda-Regina that her own mother wouldn’t recognize.

Of course, I experienced some nagging doubts, but doesn’t reality always introduce doubts? My imagination had conjured up a dashing Lloyd, but was the real thing any reason to disappoint Rhoda-Regina? Why assume in some adolescent fashion that we had identical tastes? After all, did we agree on anything? Finally, what did R.-R. have to lose? A crippling inferiority complex? A petrified libido? Wasn’t Rhoda-Regina depriving herself of the stuff of which memories are made, and what, if not memories, is it that distinguishes man from the common housefly? I almost felt, and I’m not one of your syndicated bleeding hearts, that I was offering my tragic hostess that most precious of all gifts, a past, ripped as it were from my abundant storehouse. Nothing was sadder than to contemplate a senile Rhoda-Regina looking back with cataracted eyeballs at a life devoid of love. I chose to be optimistic. If there was a crime, that was my crime. I refused to take the coward’s way out, to concede the hopelessness of Rhoda-Regina’s condition. Ask me what I think of her chances now that I’ve regained my objectivity.