No Lease on Life (3 page)

Hector the super was blocked. He couldn’t do the job he was paid to do.

Hector’s apartment was incomprehensible. He, his wife, their grown children and their kids and an old dog lived in it. It was like the halls and stairs. But it was also cluttered with old newspapers, boxes, broken knickknacks, unrepairable lamps, and bottles for recycling that were never recycled, only stored. The overwrought apartment was stacked with unusable junk from the street. Sometimes, when Elizabeth happened to be walking downstairs or upstairs, and Hector or his wife happened to open their door a crack, she spied a narrow pathway between piles of boxes. She saw years of accumulation, things hanging from the ceiling and everything thrown together, piled up, even several broken-down wooden dressers stacked on top of each other that reached to the ceiling. She couldn’t take it in. The halls and marble stairs in a turn-of-the-century building built for immigrant labor could be kept tidy, even though the building stood shabby and tired in a mongrel neighborhood. It couldn’t if the super’s attitude toward his own apartment challenged and expanded the limits of what was fit for human habitation. His apartment exceeded standards. It was a mental condition, an excessive response to the burden of the physical world on the mental one. There didn’t seem to be a table or chairs. There didn’t seem to be chairs to sit on or beds, but she couldn’t see that far back into the long apartment.

They probably ordered out. She and Roy ordered take-out from Chinese, Thai, and Italian restaurants. On another night, Elizabeth was walking along the street. A foreigner approached her.

—Please, could you ask me, he said.

—Tell you.

—What means no menus?

Buildings have NO MENUS signs in their windows or on their front doors. Thousands of menus for take-out restaurants are thrown into vestibules. It’s the super’s job to get rid of them. Hector never did. He didn’t even save them. Elizabeth picked them up and threw them out. The Big G said it wouldn’t pay to put a notice in the window saying NO MENUS. Restaurants ignored them.

—No menus means the tenants of the building don’t want restaurants to advertise their menus for take-out food…

—Take-out food?

—Take-out food is food you can order over the phone from a restaurant. The restaurant delivers it to your apartment.

—Delivers?

—They send a boy or a man on a bicycle usually. He carries the food you ordered.

—Why take out?

—So you don’t have to cook. So that you don’t have to go out to eat. You can eat in.

—Eat in?

—Eat in your apartment. It’s short for eat in your apartment.

—No menus, thank you, he said.

—You’re welcome, Elizabeth said.

He turned away. He appeared confused. He looked at the sign on the door again. NO MENUS. He was apartment hunting. He turned her way again. He pointed to the sign and, after an exaggerated sigh of relief, mimed for her benefit, he smiled poignantly. He waved good-bye.

Because of Hector, the landlord regularly received health and building violations. The landlord had to pay the City for the misdeeds of its super. Finally Hector was ordered by the City to clean out the basement. It was a fire hazard.

Modern architects denied buildings basements and attics, banished them. Basements were where people had stored the inadmissible and unnecessary. The modern idea was rational, no one should hold on to anything, people should live neatly in a clean place in the present, which was ridiculous, since the present is collecting irrationally as the past, but now, with those disorderly shelters gone, everyone had to get rid of things continuously. There was no breathing room for the wretched, the worthless, the disgusting, the disreputable.

Sometimes Elizabeth understood Hector.

The basement in this premodern tenement was like his apartment, but it was home to the boiler. Hector’s behavior and activity in the irrational basement was an immediate, imminent fire hazard. Oil, rags, and newspapers were stored near the boiler. He left them to combust.

Hector stored junk in the hallway. No one could get past his door. You had to shove cartons out of your way. Your clothes got dirty. There was no path. There’d be no chance in a fire. A News Channel 4 Special reported that a fire engulfs a tenement in seconds, no one gets out alive. Everyone in her building would die, no tenant had a chance to escape, because Hector’s crap was blocking the exit. There were fire escapes. But if you weren’t near them, the front door was the rational exit. There was no rational exit. She didn’t want to be burned to death.

Hector couldn’t contain it, himself. He couldn’t stop it, himself. He couldn’t control himself or what he’d collected. It spread everywhere. The landlord didn’t fire him. The Big G said it was because they were trying to help him. Hector was old, he was an alcoholic, he had worked for them a long time, he was nice. Everyone felt sorry for him. No one wanted him to lose his job. He was just in the wrong job. But they didn’t fire him mostly because Hector worked cheap. He added to his puny salary by collecting bottles, the ones he hardly ever returned. He couldn’t give them in.

In the spring, summer, and fall, Hector and his wife set up a table in front of the building to sell some of the stuff he found on the street, couldn’t keep, or couldn’t throw out. Elizabeth despaired of the table in front of the building. Elizabeth discarded shoes or clothes in garbage bags. She set them on the sidewalk. Her throwaways landed on the table outside the building. She’d see a pair of her torn underpants or a ripped sweater hours later. Homeless people had no chance to rummage through the garbage bags and find something to wear. Even if she no longer owned it, after throwing it away, she was frustrated to see it lying forlorn on Hector’s table. Mrs. Hector usually sat behind the table, grinning. In the heat of summer, Mrs. Hector relaxed under an umbrella. She watched TV too. They had an extension cord that ran from their apartment to the street.

No one on the street could have anything for nothing. Even the most useless object. It happened everywhere, shoplifted books, furniture off the back of a truck, the worn and the used, peoples’ lives on the ground, bargains on blankets.

Everyone wanted a bargain. Even if it was stolen.

There was a man on Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue at Christmas selling answering machines in their boxes for twenty dollars. Elizabeth was with her friend Helen. The guy hawked hard and fast. A crowd gathered around him.

—With a remote, twenty dollars. A bargain.

—Can I see one?

—Factory sealed.

The hawker held up a box.

—Why’s a piece of tape there? It was opened.

—Factory rejects, lady, you want it or you don’t. Twenty dollars. A bargain. Remote.

All the while he’s talking to her, he’s selling them briskly to people rushing by, people listening for thirty seconds, people convinced quickly. They take twenties out of their bags or pockets, then move on. A bargain. Elizabeth wanted a new answering machine. She hesitated. Helen said, If you want it, get it. Elizabeth handed the hawker a twenty, took the answering machine. She and Helen went for coffee. Elizabeth opened the box and pulled out a brick.

That was a while ago.

It was weird to see your torn underpants, your former underpants, with a fifty cents sign pinned to them. Elizabeth would glance at the table, her rejects, and smile at Hector’s wife.

Mrs. Hector was friendly. The Hectors were good people. Mrs. Hector always said hello. She lifted her head up and down. She patted the dog. Their dog was big and slow, an old dog with a human name. Elizabeth would shake her head up and down in return or say hello. Then she’d go upstairs. She’d go inside. Elizabeth had no place inside for Mrs. Hector’s table outside, though it was there. She didn’t mention it to anyone.

—He’s the one who’s supposed to keep the halls clean, Roy.

—Drop it.

—It’s insane.

—So what.

—Why do we have to live like this?

—Forget it.

Sometimes Elizabeth had the urge to sneak in and view Hector’s apartment, the way she viewed dead bodies in coffins at funerals. From a distance, tentatively.

Now Frankie walked out to the street. He usually opened up the laundromat. That’s strange, Elizabeth thought, staring at Frankie, who didn’t notice her at the window, at least she didn’t think he did, because if he did, he would say Hey or Yo, they went back years together, it was too early for the laundromat to open. Frankie probably couldn’t sleep either.

Elizabeth’s chin rested on her hand. The night air was becoming lighter and thinner, distended.

Frankie lived in the Lopez apartment two floors below Roy and her. His mother had died not long ago. Elizabeth had known Frankie since he was five. Now he was an adult, he played basketball, he was strong, a regular guy. He was trying to stay away from girls, he told her. He already had two kids, and he was only nineteen. He’d grown up in a way she couldn’t understand. He knew that.

People with some money can bury their dead or cremate them. The Lopezes were poor in grief. When Frankie’s mother, Emilia, died, the funeral parlor wouldn’t bury her until all the money came from social services. You can expire waiting for social services. Gay Men’s Health crisis gave the family some of the money, Emilia had died of AIDS, but her embalmed body was kept over the weekend in a dismal funeral parlor on Second Avenue. The Lopezes had come to the parlor on a Friday, to take the body away, to bury Emilia, but the parlor wouldn’t let them remove the body. The entire family was there, and they couldn’t bury her. People with money can bury their dead. The funeral parlor charged them over four thousand dollars for a bare room and some miserly solicitousness.

Roy and Elizabeth paid their respects. The children wanted her to touch their mother’s stiff body. She tried to slip a rose under the swollen hand, but she couldn’t. The children, some grown, smiled at Elizabeth. Then they smiled at their young, dead mother. Emilia. She was a tenderhearted woman. Often she lived in the building, when Roy and Elizabeth had just moved in, Emilia restrained her kids from stealing their mail. They did it once or twice, but Emilia made them return it to Elizabeth. The kids liked to bust open mailboxes. Emilia stopped them. Elizabeth rented a post office box anyway.

Elizabeth stared at Emilia’s body. She didn’t want to go up to the coffin. She didn’t want to see vivid makeup on a dead face. She was afraid of the hand of death, its long reach. She went forward with Roy. Frankie and two of his sisters—Carmen and Susanna—wanted her there, closer to the coffin.

Frankie took Elizabeth by the hand and escorted her to it.

—Don’t worry. She looks nice. Doesn’t she look good?

Elizabeth thought, Death’s ugly.

Frankie surveyed the mess on the sidewalk. He shook his head. He didn’t become insane about the garbage and the damage. Frankie was cool. He didn’t approach the morons on the church steps, he checked them out, registered who they were, for the future. He stood there, his arms folded over his chest. Then he went back inside. Frankie kept an eye on the street. He was vigilant.

Elizabeth had been inside the Lopez apartment. It was clean, it was poor, it was livable. Nothing was like Hector’s apartment. Except for the apartment that was covered in talcum powder. It was in another building. Elizabeth saw it one night when the man who lived in it, a stingy man with a trust fund who drove a cab at night, wasn’t in. The people who rented him the room showed it to Elizabeth. The apartment was covered in talcum powder. The floors, the bed, the dresser, the bathroom—sink, bathtub, not the toilet—were under a thick layer of white powder, piled under a carpet of talcum powder. It was hard to breathe. That apartment was worse than Hector’s.

Sometimes she knocked on Hector’s door. Mrs. Hector opened it a crack. Elizabeth had to pick up a package that UPS left with them. Or sometimes Elizabeth brought Mrs. Hector a blouse, if it was in good enough shape, if it was something she didn’t wear anymore or never had. She’d do that rather than see it land as a reject on Hector’s table.

The old dog with a human name behind Mrs. Hector growled. Mrs. Hector positioned her body to block the dog from barging out. Elizabeth could see a sliver of the apartment.

—It makes me sick.

—He’s a collector, Roy said.

—Collectors are sick.

Hector collected everything, because he had nothing. People never really had what they wanted, because they wanted everything. People who could afford to buy everything were miserable about something. There’s always something missing.

Things were missing in Elizabeth’s life. They weren’t misplaced. In any time or under any regime, it would be the same. Elizabeth couldn’t replace what was lost, and what wasn’t lost may never have existed to begin with. Everyone was dissatisfied, even if they didn’t have much to complain about. Once deprived, always deprived.

Three men are in a nursing home. One of the men says, How old do you think I am? The two men say, Eighty-five. Everyone thinks I look eighty-five, he says proudly. But actually I’m ninety-five. He walks over to an old woman. How old do you think I am? he asks. Drop your pants, she says, and I’ll tell you. He drops his pants and she grasps his penis. She fondles his penis for a while. Well, how old do you think I am? he asks. Ninety-five, she says, her hand still on his penis. How’d you know? he asks. I heard you tell the two men, she says.

When Elizabeth complained to the Big G about the state of the building, she was mindful of Hector. She didn’t criticize him directly or use his name unless compelled. She tempered any criticism of Hector. She didn’t want him fired, she wanted him helped or assisted. The building could be turned around. By any means possible, Roy said.

For Elizabeth’s pains, the landlord and Gloria hated her. They had valid, landlord reasons. Elizabeth was white, mostly employed, though underemployed, and educated. She’d had opportunities. She was the worst kind of tenant. She wasn’t as easy to push around and intimidate as people on welfare, or disadvantaged and handicapped people, or people depressed and frightened by a system that employs people to treat them with disdain while assisting them inadequately.