Boarded Windows (15 page)

Maryanne took walks at more or less the same time every day, in the midafternoon shortly after waking from her day’s sleep. In her unemployment, she had expanded but hadn’t adjusted her sleep schedule, since she was looking exclusively for another graveyard gig and didn’t want to drift back into a more natural circadian rhythm. Twice a week these walks led to her erotic-art class; on other days they led nowhere in particular. But always she crossed a certain footbridge in Loring Park, or at least had crossed it (and from the same direction) on each of the walks she and Wanda had taken together that fall and premature winter. Wanda’s plan—goofy, as was said, but uncomplicated—sought to exploit this regularity. It called on me to wait troll-like under the just-mentioned footbridge, or rather partly under it, keeping an eye out for Maryanne, at whose approach, provided there were no other nearby pedestrians, I would obscure myself more fully under the bridge and slip a cash-fattened envelope between two of its rotting, mouse-fur-colored planks.

“How will I do that?” I said, exhaling. “The planks will be covered with snow.”

“Shit, that’s right,” Wanda said.

“It’s a good thing you have me around to—”

“But it’s important that you push the envelope between two planks. That’s become a real idée fixe for me as I’ve worked this out.”

She looked at the ceiling.

“Maybe you could shovel the bridge in advance,” she said.

“I don’t think you can do that”

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s public property,” I said.

“The sidewalks belong to the city and you can shovel those.”

“But the snow’s gonna be really firmly packed. And we don’t have a shovel.”

“You could clear a gap between two planks,” Wanda said. “Just enough to slide the envelope through. Make a little cunt in the bridge.” She put her feet down and reached over to rub my cock through my cavalry twills. Our sex life had more than less ended, so it was hard to say what this gesture meant. We weren’t fighting, weren’t estranged in a way outsiders would easily recognize, weren’t acknowledging a problem, but it was starting to feel as if we were staying together mostly because it was a hassle to move in winter, and because she needed me to be around Wade and I needed her to be around Maryanne. “You’ll want to make sure the envelope is stop-sign red,” she said.

“Isn’t that just red-red?” I said.

She shrugged.

“What if Maryanne sees and recognizes me when I’m looking out for her?”

“Just tell her you’re waiting on a friend,” Wanda said, and we both laughed.

“Will she be wearing that snowsuit?” I asked.

“No, no. She just wore that as a joke. Probably she’ll be wearing her red leather jacket.”

“Okay, I think I know the one you mean.”

“It has a belt, kind of
Shaft
-y.”

“Right, yeah, I’ve seen it.”

I had the next day off and could discharge the plan straightaway. That morning Wanda furtively slipped me the cash on our way out of the bank (the furtiveness was just for fun, I guess), and ran to catch her bus. After lunch I went to a drugstore and found a greeting-card envelope in stop-sign red. The card itself was for an occasion not pertinent to my life, so I left it on a park bench for someone else, using a rock as a paperweight. I wrote “Razor Ray” on the envelope in block letters with my less serviceable left hand, twice underlining the name:

The epithet was Wanda’s idea as well, an attempt to discourage pangs of conscience from Maryanne, something of a softy. Too farcical a touch, I argued (I’ve just noted my antipathy for the form), but, farcical or not, one that might scare Maryanne into simply leaving the money alone, or make her doubly inclined to turn it into the police. But I didn’t protest for long. At that point I saw my function as strictly executive, understood that Wanda, in addition to helping out a friend, was trying to produce and direct a piece of street theater, and that my job was to help realize her vision.

I got to the basket-handle footbridge in time to unobstruct a gap between two of its planks with a letter opener. The bridge passed over a creek or brook that branched off Loring Lake. The lake probably wasn’t safe to stand on yet, but the brook, creek, or branch seemed solid under the snow. I hung a stick from the gap (the snow held it in place) so I wouldn’t lose track of the spot, then waited on the brook- or branch-bank, peering through the railing, my galoshes filling with snow. I only had to wait about twenty minutes for Maryanne to approach. Unfortunately, a man or tall boy in a baseball cap was walking maybe thirty paces behind her. No one, as far as I know, saw me scurry back under the footbridge, clutching the creased, damp envelope. Maryanne’s footfalls crunched charmingly overhead.

On my next afternoon off (probably three days later), Maryanne was unfollowed on the path leading to the footbridge, but was with a friend—Wanda in her grandfather’s old camel coat, it seemed from a distance, though that didn’t make sense, and as they got closer I saw that it was the similarly statured Wade in a coat I’d not seen before, a shearling coat that he later said he’d been keeping in his pillowcase. I was taken aback to see Wade and Maryanne together and couldn’t react in time to remove the envelope, which, as it happened, they walked right past. Perhaps they’d instead looked up to admire a flock of blackbirds or a snow-covered linden branch, or were too engrossed in conversation. I eavesdropped hungrily as they approached, crossed, and passed the bridge, but only caught a few unrevealing sentences. Maryanne, it seemed, was asking the supposedly polyglot Wade
if other languages had a better word
to represent the sound of a sneeze than
ahchoo,
or if the word is pretty much the same across languages, since
ahchoo
is about perfect, though only for one type of sneeze—or maybe, Wade broke in, once the word
ahchoo
and its variants were introduced,
people unwittingly began to steer the sound of their sneezes to conform to the word, a tail-wags-the-dog thing, like when …
and then their voices got too faint.

Four days later—Maryanne’s desperation all the more pronounced, overdue notices sliding daily under her door in increasingly perturbed script, her phone soon to be muzzled—I, holding my breath, heard her stop, heard the crinkle of her thigh-length red leather jacket when she leaned over to pick up the bulging stop-sign-red envelope, may have heard one of the belt’s arrowheads graze the packed snow. My heart was pounding even faster than it had during my previous lurkings under the bridge. When Maryanne got the gist of the envelope’s contents, she must have stood still and looked in all directions, because it took her awhile to start walking again, at what sounded like a faster pace than before. I stayed put for a half minute, then slowly emerged from under the bridge. The envelope was still there. She’d taken the money but left the envelope, I thought, but no, it was all there. I next tried with an unmarked envelope (Wanda had yielded to my point re Razor Ray). This time, as far as I could hear, Maryanne didn’t even slow down, nor did she ever mention the strangely enduring/recurring envelope to Wanda, though they certainly talked often enough about less interesting things.

On the afternoon of that fourth unsuccessful attempt to solve Maryanne’s financial trouble, I was in an unpleasant mood, a kind of tired agitation mixed with horniness. That night I told Wanda that after Maryanne had again passed over the money, I’d emerged from the bridge to see a man leaning over to pick up the envelope, an apparently homeless man whom I hadn’t noticed before. There was nothing I could do, I told Wanda; I couldn’t reasonably explain to the man that the money had been entrusted to me, couldn’t tussle for it in good conscience. Wanda of course was dejected by this, regretted having turned a simple kindness into an entertainment. “I’m so fucking selfish,” she said, and cried. When she finished, we sat in defeated, roiling silence for five minutes or so. Finally she blew her nose again (I’d brought her a roll of toilet paper). “At least the money went to someone in need,” she said.

That night I lay in bed thinking about how to give the money back to Wanda, but couldn’t come up with a way to confess that wouldn’t end our relationship, an especially pusillanimous concern seeing as how our relationship was already in a clear lame-duck period. I spent just as much time imagining how I’d spend the money, and didn’t shake these latter thoughts or even feel the need to eat till nearly a full day later, about five minutes after I’d come pathetically on the heavier prostitute’s back, on which there was a disturbing welt.

Now I’m thinking of part of a poem by Gary Snyder, whom both Wade and my mother Marleen read in the seventies:

The brook or branch that runs under that footbridge in Loring Park seems to run down the above passage, which describes how I feel today, though there’s no long beach here and the
you
I miss is plural, the
y’all
form.
Here,
in fact, is Loring Park itself. There’s a flower garden nearby, full of bumblebees and helpful identifying signs. I’m trying to build my floral knowledge, but I can feel the names slipping away like a dream even as I mumble them to myself. I’m writing on a park bench. That makes me sound like a vandal—I mean I’m writing in a yellow notebook while sitting on a park bench. I’m also eating a package of oily sliced ham and a stringy, arid orange, eating hastily though not like the caffeinated wolf I was on the night described in short just above, when I ate two slices of heat-lamp pizza on the bus ride home from the thinner prostitute’s humble but not seedy apartment. I see that the wooden footbridge has been replaced with one of concrete and steel, a less attractive bridge, though the steel railing has already taken on a handsome patina that makes it look considerably older than its no-more-than eighteen years. Under the bridge now are some clothes, the upended lid of a Weber grill, a sleeping bag, some bottles, some other things, not my things (there but for the grace …), though just now the idea isn’t emphatically unimaginable, is even perversely attractive.

O
NE LATE AFTERNOON ABOUT A WEEK AFTER THE envelope interlude, Wade, Maryanne, and I were on the living room couch surrounded by five or six collections of erotic art (“porno art” in Wade’s constant designation), having just returned from the U of M’s main library, where Wanda had stayed behind in the video room to take notes on episodes of
Your Show of Shows.
Using a TV tray as a desk, I was slowly annotating a stack of Wanda’s promotional postcards with the words “I go on at 8,” but would frequently look up from my work to watch Wade and Maryanne discuss ideas for her erotic-art term paper, he playing the questionably solicitous blue-jeaned professor at some undistinguished college. He shared his incompletely coherent ideas about George Grosz’s desolate bacchanals and Otto Dix’s S&M watercolors, took
Erotische Kunst, Gestern und Heute
from her lap so he could better spot favorite features of a skimpily reproduced Egon Schiele nude or point out a detail in one of Eric Gill’s woodcut romps, picked up another book and explicated Achille Devéria’s fantastically explicit depictions of orgies, voyeurism, and bestiality. He kept flipping pages, switching books. As a rule he drew the “long sensual line” at adolescent nudes, he told Maryanne, and opposed academic porno art; thus Ingres’s
The
Source
was his quintessential guilty pleasure (Cabanel’s similarly tacky and arousing
The Birth of Venus,
with the goddess’s right eye open a classically pornographic sliver, was another). Perhaps to evidence his bisexuality, of which he seemed proud, he praised the “glistening carnality” of William Etty’s
The Wrestlers,
but he seemed more sincerely aroused by Philip Wilson Steer’s
Seated Nude: The Black Hat.
The pornodelic fantasies of Ernst Fuchs and Mati Klarwein, he said, were “exalted kitsch.” He was a big fan of Degas’s rainy, snapshot bathers, and of Goya’s
The Naked Maja,
Manet’s
Olympia,
Bonnard’s
Blue Nude,
and Frenhofer’s
Study No. 3;
all were “impossibly sad.” He was more attracted to the kneeling background maid in Titian’s
The Venus of Urbino
than to the Venus herself. He’d once had a postcard, he said, of the Félicien Rops aquatint in which a zaftig, blindfolded brunette, naked save for stockings, gloves, ribbons, flowers, bows, and other accessories, walks a pig under cherubic oversight. He liked shunga, but only from a distance, he said, because he wasn’t “into Oriental women.” (“That’s kind of lame,” Maryanne said.)

A moment later Wade turned a page, and I could hardly believe Courbet’s
The Origin of the World,
a close-up of a woman’s nude torso, the subject-object lying in bed with her left leg spread, her right angled slightly out. “Jesus, when was this painted?” I said.