Me and My Manny (5 page)

Reminiscing about the Sea

One night later that week, I awoke to find Harry propped up on his pillow gazing out the window at the starry sky.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Nothing. A little concerned, that’s all.”

I punched my pillow and sat upright against it. “Concerned about what?”

“You and the way you’ll take on, if I’m deployed.”

“You’re being deployed? When? And to where?”

“I’m not. It’s only the usual scuttlebutt. You’ll just have to hack it if so.”

“I can…I do. I’ve learned to cope.”

He lowered his head, turning it once in silent disagreement. “Remember the night I headed back for my last tour of duty?”

“The night I took you down to the Sound?” Having forgotten much about that night, I kept my mouth shut and let him fill me in.

“I was supposed to spend those hours aboard ship,” he began. “Instead we did the town. Hopping from one waterfront bar after the other. You met a lot of old salts who told you a lot of tall tales. Boy did they ever shiver your timbers.”

“Shiver I did. Especially after that contest to see who could eat the most steamed clams.”

“That’s probably what made you sick. That and the half a dozen navy grogs you ordered to wash them down.”

I looked at Harry silhouetted against the stars. “I liked the little paper umbrellas.”

“Grogs don’t come with umbrellas. You got those from a pair of Molotov cocktails disguised as valley virgins.”

“No wonder I was too drunk to drive back home.”

“That’s why we stayed in a motel,” he said. “After you threw up and passed out, I checked to see if you were still breathing. By then it was dawn.”

I had the faint impression of him on the bedside phone, calling a cab and leaving with a duffle bag slung over his back.

“I didn’t mean to ditch you like that,” he went on.

“Ditch me? If you hadn’t shoved off, you’d be facing a court-martial for jumping ship.”

“I ditched you and split. Ever since, you’ve been clinging to that manny like a life raft.” He gestured toward Wolf on the bedroom chair with the mandatory sheet over his head. “It’s like my leaving triggered something. Like you thought I was never coming back.”

“So I woke up with another sailor… make that a wooden sailor.” Embarrassed that he still focused on my attachment to the manny, I tried to make light of his comment. “Full-scale warfare tends to freak me out.”

“All the more so after those old salts started telling you hair-raising stories. Those things can’t happen, Judy. No mutinous crews, no pirate invasions, none of it, no how on your modern high-tech destroyers.”

As he spoke, I recalled a shabby waterfront bar where rumpled old men in pea coats and watch caps sat in the shadows, regaling me with legends about ships under the spell of evil forces, something they described in terms of possession.

“I doubt the supernatural gives a damn about state-of-the-art equipment.”

“C’mon, Judy. There’s no such thing as a bad luck ship.”

Harry’s sudden denial of nautical superstitions gave me pause. He often outshined the best of the old salts in relating tales about spectral ships, creaking and groaning from a veil of thick fog. His negation on the heels of rumors about deployment made me wonder if he was hedging.

“Tell that to the captain of the
Titanic
, the so-called unsinkable that sank.”

Harry raised his hand. “Don’t start.”

“The
Titanic
was on her maiden voyage. Tradition holds that you got a bad luck ship if it encounters a mishap at its outset—its launching or its maiden voyage. The
Titanic
never had a chance. If it hadn’t hit an iceberg, it would have met with some other disaster. Just like the other tragedies that happened involving jinxed ships.”

“It’s not that bad things haven’t happened on the high seas,” Harry said. “Sailors go berserk and jump overboard for no apparent reason. However—”

“Captains, too,” I interrupted. “Captains also have been known to go mad and commit murder.”

“However,” he continued, “most of it can be blamed on the anxiety guys experience when cooped up for long periods of time.”

In silence, as I for a moment permitted Harry to think he’d solved one of the great mysteries of the deep, I pondered another uncanny event I heard of from the old salts.

“Okay, smarty-pants. How do you explain that when possessed ships were destroyed they fought to stay afloat? Set on fire or taken apart, the very timbers of bad ships made bloodcurdling screams of protest before going under.”

At last Harry said, “I’m not going to account for it. Instead, I am going to warn you that if I hear one more word about possessed ships, bloodcurdling screams of protest just might start coming out of you.”

“Well of all the—” I flipped onto my side and burrowed into my pillow. “If that’s the way you feel, goodnight.”

For several minutes I lay in the dim room, my eyes on the manny slumped under a sheet as Harry insisted. I really wasn’t angry. I was pleased. I felt prosperous because now I had two husbands, in a way.

Taking Over Harry

One afternoon, Harry spent a long time on the living room sofa just peering at the manny reposed on the leather recliner.

“That thing freaks me out. It makes me feel like it’s trying to take me over.”

I suppressed a laugh. “Just because Wolf sort of resembles you, doesn’t mean he wants to become you.”

“How would you know what he does or doesn’t want? He’s my double, my doppelganger. Don’t you know it’s bad luck to meet up with your doppelganger? It’s supposed to mean your death is imminent.”

“Oh, that’s just so much folklore.” Harry’s earlier denials about possessed ships aside, he was as gullible as ever. “You’re not going to die just because I got a dummy.”

“He’s more than a dummy, you said so yourself. I’m telling you,” Harry added with a hint of dread in his voice. “Wolf is out to consume me. He’s already started. He gets all the things I ever wanted, a new recliner, a great set of wheels, and special attention from the girls.”

“I never knew you wanted those things.”

“He succeeds where I fail,” Harry went on. “In the end, he’ll dispose of me.” His voice took on an ominous tone. “That thing intends to suck the life out of me. You’ll see.” He shook his index finger. “Once I start to change, it’ll be too late.”

The way I saw it, Harry had been speaking figuratively. Annoyed that Wolf took up too much of my time, he resorted to hyperbole to make a point. Still, his assertions worried me. I thought about Wolf becoming real; but I hadn’t allowed that Harry would become unreal in the process. Pinocchio just went from a puppet to a person, reasonable since he was an original with no double, no doppelganger, no lookalike of any sort.

That Harry would feel threatened by his wooden replica was something I could not have anticipated. Nor could I have foreseen my growing attachment to Wolf despite the marital strife he might cause.

“You want me to get rid of him?” I said in challenge.

“Wouldn’t hurt,” Harry said.

“It just might, if I’m not careful how I dispose of him.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Since you seem to believe that what happens to the dummy will happen to you, you could burst into flames, if I burned him in the barbeque pit on the balcony. Or you could break apart, if I hacked him up with an ax. You might even die of a wretched disease, if I dumped him in the trash bin out back.”

“Enough. We’ll take this up later,” Harry said, heading for the shower.

Truth be known, I had noticed small changes in Harry. He had become less talkative, his speech more clipped, at times trailing off. He took to sitting around in rigid almost catatonic postures. His skin had taken on a sallow cast, his face often appeared set, his eyes fixed.

Equally disconcerting were the differences I’d noticed in Wolf. In the bright morning light, he looked fresh and well rested; his brown eyes sparkled, and an unnatural glow appeared on his cheeks. As the day wore on, he seemed to slump as if weary, and by nightfall, his eyelids drooped and his puckered lips appeared to lose their pucker.

Now that Wolf and I were alone and giving Harry the benefit of the doubt that something sneaky had been going on, I pressed my ear against Wolf’s chest in search of a heartbeat. Nothing. I then held a mirror to his lips to pick up a breath. Again nothing. Then I thumbed through some old encyclopedias I still had on hand.

Soon after, I looked up from my reading. “Okay,” I said, sitting on the arm of the Laz-E-Boy where Wolf lay stretched out with his feet up. “You ever hear of Carlo Collodi, who wrote
Pinocchio
?” I waited a moment. “I guess eighteen-eighty was before your time. How about Walt Disney?” Again I waited. “Yeah, the nineteen-forty movie was before your time too.”

I took in a deep breath and looked straight into the flecked brown glass of Wolf’s half-opened eyes. “I’d like to see you wriggle out of this one. You ever have any dealings with a certain Emilio Greco? Around nineteen fifty-six, the Italian sculptor completed a semi-abstract monument of—you guessed it—Pinocchio.”

Silence, still.

Convinced that Harry’s demise was not imminent, I dismissed his spiel about his doppelganger and went back to my daily routine. Sometime later that week, it became clear that Harry remained firm in his abhorrence of Wolf.

Having returned from shopping for a stick of beeswax to lubricate Wolf’s joints, I stepped into the kitchen and nearly dropped my bag. Wolfgang sat at the kitchen table, dressed in a silky yellow kimono with a red dragon on the back. A lit stogie with a long white ash poked from his circular lips, and a curly blond wig topped with a rhinestone tiara was on his head. His spindly bare legs were crossed and fuzzy pink bedroom slippers dangled from his stubby feet.

“Harry, how could you?”

“Easy,” he said, standing in the doorway. “I found that stuff in your closet.”

“I know where you found it.” The kimono was a gift Harry had picked up in a port off the Asian seas. “But why put it on Wolf?”

I snatched the cigar from Wolf’s lips and crushed it in the sink.

“I just wanted to see if I could change his appearance.”

“Well, I hope you’re satisfied. How humiliating for him—the possible psychological damage.”

Harry gestured toward himself. “I’ll tell you who’s got psychological damage around here.”

“That’s no reason to take it out on him.”

As Harry screwed up his eyes as if to puzzle out the remark, I examined Wolf’s anatomy to make sure that Harry had not engaged in any other assaults. Relieved, I stepped back, thinking that under those golden locks with that pencil-line mustache Wolf resembled a thinly built member of the gay culture.

“Why don’t we get a dog?” Harry watched me remove the clothes from Wolf’s frame. “We can talk to it; take it places, and even play dress-up just like we do with the manny.”

I envisioned Spike, growling and snapping in pink ballet shoes and a matching tutu. “It just doesn’t work for me, Harry. If something bites me, I might bite it back. That’s how things were done in my family.”

“You don’t have to repeat old mistakes.”

“It’s encoded in my genes.”

I dropped the matter of Wolf’s feminine attire. I knew what was going on. Wolf had stolen the spotlight from Harry—both in and out of our marital relationship— and Harry was determined to get it back.

The Gigolo

I had just tidied the apartment, a monthly chore I always finished in a single day, and as I’d found in the past when cleaning, mice had invaded the pantry. They must have tired of the Pop Tarts because this time they ate the Velveeta and Goldfish. Both unopened packages had holes bored in one side and out the other.

Twice I had reported such raids to management. On both occasions, I was given sticky traps. The small plastic flat, lined with a layer of strong glue, was to a mouse what the La Brea Tar Pits were to a woolly mammoth.

On this particular day, while heating beans to make burritos, I checked the traps and found a jumbo-sized pair of dead mice.

“Harry,” I called, sickened by the carnage I’d caused. “Can you get rid of these dead rodents? I can’t leave the stove.”

Harry put the pair in a plastic bag and headed for the Dumpster in the alley out back. Almost an hour had passed before he returned, and I was mad because we had planned to eat early to make the matinee before the tickets cost more. I’d already started eating without him.

“Doesn’t matter if I skip lunch,” Harry said, washing his hands at the sink. “I just lost my appetite.” When I asked if he felt sick, he sat at the table across from me and lowered his head. “Not really, just upset over what I just heard from the teller lady who lives downstairs.”

“Heard?” Since the banker was Whitehall’s finest gasbag, my curiosity peaked. “What did you just hear?” Harry was not one to repeat gossip, but I persisted. “Tell me. If you get it off your chest, you’ll feel better.”

“Okay…okay,” Harry began. “I went out back to throw out the mice and old lady Crumble was studying the face of Jesus on a greasy stain down the side of the Dumpster while holding her trash.”

I nodded knowingly. The widow Crumble had been seeing the face of Jesus in food stains and fabric patterns ever since her husband had had a fatal heart attack last year.

“To be neighborly, I asked if she’d like me to toss her trash too. So, I’m separating the recycles she’s mixed with the rest, you know what a ditz she is, when the bank teller shows up. They get to talking, and the teller mentions that one day last week she was working the drive-through window when Ruthie from next door pulls up in her car with this strange-looking fellow in the seat beside her. Ruthie cashes a check for a couple of hundred dollars, places the money on the guy’s lap, and casually mentions she’s in the market for a new appliance. The teller didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but from the fuss Ruthie made over the guy while the teller counted out the money, it looked like something odd was going on between the two of them.”

“Fuss? What’d she do? What, Harry, what?” I asked, giddy with excitement.

“She straightened his hat and fastened his seat belt.”

“You don’t say.”

He nodded. “That’s not all. That ditzy old Crumble then waves her hand and says, ‘Oh everybody knows about Ruthie’s gigolo.’”

“No wonder you lost your appetite.” I felt my own hunger diminish as this was the first I’d heard about Ruthie’s gigolo. I lowered my fork and looked at Harry. “You think the money was payment for services rendered?”

Harry blinked, seeming not to comprehend why any guy would need to be paid for what to him most would gladly do for free, so I reminded him that gigolos don’t come cheap.

I recalled how eager Ruthie was to get her hands on the manny, and I began to guess why. Ruthie intended to use the manny as an alibi to cover up her two-timing ways. Since neither Jason, nor anyone else for that matter, would believe that she actually dated a dummy, and since Wolf himself was worthless as a witness, only I could vouch for her, insofar as I could say, yes, she had rented the manny, but I couldn’t testify as to what happened while he was in her hands.

The duplicity was staggering. Disturbing, too, for it indicated the lengths to which Ruthie would go to get away from her housebound husband.

“It’s best we keep quiet,” I told Harry, who, with lips pinched white, nodded.

I didn’t relish getting caught up in a neighbor’s sexual ploy. So the next time I took my manny out, I made sure he was incognito. That is, clad in Harry’s tan trench coat with the brim of the used Panama hat pulled down over his aviator-style sunglasses.

Later, I had finished parking my car in the garage after returning from picking up Harry’s uniform at the cleaners, when I saw the bank teller, walking away from the storage cabinet in front of her own parking space. Though I pretended not to see her, she started toward me. I quickly moved away from my car, leaving Wolf inside.

We exchanged greetings then I casually said, “Too bad about the Pritchards, they’re such a nice couple. I don’t suppose anyone’s mentioned seeing Lisa out with the same man. A good-looker with a tanned complexion and wetted-down black hair combed to the side.” I wondered myself if Ruthie actually was using Wolf as a decoy or if this was simply a case of mistaken identity.

“Don’t tell me Lisa’s been catting around, too,” the woman said.

“I’m not. It’s just that, you being up on the latest, I thought maybe you’d picked up the buzz.”

The bank teller checked around then spoke in a hushed voice. “What I’ve picked up are strange stories about some pretty weird goings on here in Whitehall.”

“Do tell,” I said, feeling out of the loop.

“I can’t say for sure that Lisa cheats on
her
husband. It’s not like with Ruthie; I haven’t seen
her
with my own eyes. But according to Sarah Crumble, Lisa’s taken a lot more elevator trips to the fourth floor than even the manager’s wife should.”

“Then the two are in cahoots.”

A smug expression settled on the teller’s face. “You can call it cahoots if you want, but in my opinion, they’re sharing.”

I clapped my hand over my mouth.

“I’m not suggesting they’re swingers into those group things, but you never know.”

The news devastated me. It made me feel as if I were suddenly in an unfamiliar building occupied by a cabal of deviants engaged in all sorts of depravities.

“Who is he? Does anyone know?”

The teller looked at me with pity in her eyes. “It’s just rumor.”

“Then you know?”

“I really wouldn’t want to say. There’s nothing gained by spreading rumors. But most always, the wife is the last to know.”

Nodding in agreement, I glanced at Wolf buckled in the passenger seat of my car. Once again I was grateful to have such a loyal companion.

“By the way, who’s the mysterious stranger?” the bank teller asked.

“Stranger?”

“Your passenger. Not very congenial, is he?”

“Not at all.” I stepped closer to her and lowered my voice. “He’s here to see my husband about a secret naval mission.” To imply Harry was some kind of cloak-and-dagger agent, I held up his dress uniform inside the cleaner’s baggie. “He’s with one of those hush-hush undercover alliances, FBI, CIA, UFO—furtive-types who talk into their shoes.” Quieting, I averted my eyes, signaling there would be no further breaches of security.