What He's Poised to Do: Stories

“I’ll write you a letter tomorrow
Tonight I can’t hold a pen.”

—P
AUL
W
ESTERBERG

Epigraph

What He’s Poised to Do
(Boston, 2010)

Hope
(Havana, 1940)

Barn
(Nebraska, 1962)

Against Samantha
(New York City, 1928)

The Hunter and the Hunted
(Chicago, 1988)

From the Front
(North Africa, 1851)

Seventeen Different Ways to Get a Load of That
(Lunar City, 1989)

Down a Pound
(Providence, 1990)

The Govindan Ananthanarayanan Academy for Moral and Ethical Practice and the Treatment of Sadness Resulting from the Misapplication of the Above
(Australindia, 1921)

Country Life Is the Only Life Worth Living; Country Love Is the Only Love Worth Giving
(Virginia, 1937)

A Bunch of Blips
(Paris, 1999)

To Kill the Pink
(Harlem, 1964)

What We Believe but Cannot Praise
(Miami, 2010)

Her Hand
(Atlanta, 2015)

P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by Ben Greenman

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

T
HE MAN IS NOT HAPPY AT HOME
. W
HEN HE SEES HIS WIFE OR
his son, he knows that he should be, but he is not. The man is scheduled to take a trip from the city where he lives to the city where he sometimes does business. He packs a larger suitcase than is necessary. When he arrives in the city where he sometimes does business, he sends his wife a postcard that describes what little he understands of the problem, and how he intends to solve it—or at least begin to solve it—by not returning home right away. He knows he should not feel better after writing such a thing, but he does. He goes downstairs to the hotel bar. The bartender is a young woman. The man strikes up a conversation with this young woman, who has the same name as a woman he once dated. The man drinks until the young woman’s shift is over, and then the young woman joins him for a drink at a corner table. A hand is placed upon a hand, and then upon a knee, and then between a knee and another knee. The young woman, in order not to notice, tells the man about her most recent love affair, and how she ended it by sending a postcard. The man laughs. He tells the young woman that they are the same kind of person. “You mean cowards?” she says. He removes his hand from between her legs. Now the young woman notices, and the man invites her upstairs, and she accepts, and they lean against one another in the elevator, and he undoes her skirt in the hallway, and removes it just inside his room. In the morning, she is not there, but she has left a postcard on his pillow beside him. He pieces together the previous night. He remembers that the woman called out his name, and that he laughed. He remembers that she took the phone off the hook theatrically. He remembers that she recited a series of dates for him: when she was born, when she was first married, when she had her son, who is almost exactly the same age as his son. His heart sinks. He does not like the fact that thinking of his son makes his heart sink. He takes a postcard from the desk and writes to his son. The man takes the postcard and puts it in the outer pocket of his suitcase, aware that he will never mail it. The next day, he does not see the young woman from the bar. He does not see her the day after that, either. He is busy with work, and when he is not working, he is walking up and down the city streets. He looks into the faces of the people he passes and tries to guess if they have ever betrayed someone they loved, or been betrayed by someone they loved. He supposes that most have, and this cheers him a bit, not for any reason other than the fact that it locates him. He returns to the hotel after the second day of working and walking and writes his wife a postcard. This one has a more optimistic message than the first: that, although he is not ready to talk on the telephone, he is ready to think about it, and that this is progress. He ends on a romantic note. He takes that postcard downstairs to mail it. The young woman from the bar is now working at the reservations desk. She pretends not to know him. At first, he is offended, and then he

comes to understand that it is a game. She calls him sir, stiffly, and he hands her the postcard facedown, suddenly concerned that she might try to read it. She tells him that she would be happy to be of service. She calls him sir again, with no additional warmth. He returns to his room. An hour later, there is a knock at his door. He opens it to find the young woman there. This time, she undoes her skirt herself. The next morning, he remembers that she did not call out his name, but that she looked at him as if she was thinking of doing so. He remembers that she recited a series of names: her father’s name, her husband’s name, her son’s name. He is surprised to find that it is the same as his son’s name. He keeps this information to himself. The next morning, there is another postcard from her next to him on the bed. He hears the shower. He hurries and writes a postcard in response and places it on the pillow next to the one that she has written. She returns to the bed, not completely dry, and the water from her skin smudges the ink of the postcard he has written in response. She speaks to him in the same stiffly formal voice she used downstairs, at the desk. She calls him sir rather than using his name. She lists for him all the things she has done for him, and all the things that she plans to do. She leaves him sleeping, this time, without a postcard. Two more days pass. He does not see the young woman. He speaks to his wife once on the phone. She cries, softly at first and then in gasping sobs. He explains that this is why he didn’t want to talk on the telephone. She asks him when he’s coming home. He says that he has one more day of work and then he will decide. Her tone hardens and she tells him to be sure to let her know. When she hangs up, he is seized by the desire to write her another postcard. Instead, he writes one to his son. This one also goes into the zipper pocket of his suitcase. He goes downstairs to get a drink. The young woman is not in the bar. He asks the bartender, who says that he thinks she’s on the reservations desk. He goes to the reservations desk. There is another woman there, who says that she thinks the young woman is working in the bar. He sits in a chair in the lobby, feeling lost. He reads a newspaper and a magazine, retaining nothing, not even the pictures. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a young boy. The boy looks faintly like his son and then, as he comes closer, more and more like him. The resemblance is uncanny: the face is the same shape, the hair is the same color, the eyes shine the same way. The man hears a woman’s voice calling the young boy. It is the young woman from the bar. The woman sees him and approaches. She introduces her son. The man shakes the boy’s hand with exaggerated formality. The boy laughs. He even laughs like the man’s son. The man does not tell the young woman how much her son resembles his son. Who would that benefit? The young woman tells the man that she will be working reservations later that evening. She says that at the end of her shift, she will be happy to come upstairs to pick up any mail he has to send. Her tone is falsely playful. The man goes for a walk. He looks into the faces of the people he passes, but this time he does not try to guess anything. He returns to his hotel room and undresses. He runs the shower but does not step into it. He stretches out on the bed. He feels his excitement growing as he anticipates the young woman’s visit. He thinks that maybe he should greet her at the door with a postcard that lists all the things he expects her to do for him, or all the things he has done. He also thinks that he owes his wife another call, or at least another postcard. He turns on the television. There is a boy on the television who does not look anything like his son. He sits down at the desk, finds a pen, and holds it over a postcard, uncertain exactly what he’s poised to do.

T
OMAS
T
INTA WAS BORN IN THE CITY OF
C
AMAGÜEY IN
C
UBA
on the ninth day of April in the year 1923. He was the son of a hardworking Spaniard named Antonio Tinta, who was the proprietor of a shoe store in Camagüey. Tomas’s mother, Camilla Garcia, also hailed from Spain, where she had been considered a great beauty. Comfort and love filled the Tintas’ Camagüey home, which was completed by the addition of a baby girl named Sofia in 1926; the Tintas basked in the glow of their mutual love for their children and their success as entrepreneurs, which led them to open three more shoe stores. But then, in 1935, suddenly and without warning, Antonio Tinta was called back to eternity, and all at once things changed. The money that Antonio had earned from his first stores had, the family discovered, gone into opening the later stores, and Camilla, try as she might, could not make sense of the business. Two years after Antonio went into the ground, his beloved wife followed. Sofia went to stay with a cousin in Havana, an elderly devout who believed she could raise girls up into proper women. She did not have the same confidence when it came to boys, and so Tomas was placed in the care of a friend of the family, a country doctor named Ferrer. Dr. Ferrer was of high standing but not of high character. He beat Tomas when he did not listen to him or when he looked at him. Tomas endured a life of great privation and violence. Five years after coming to Dr. Ferrer, Tomas was finally able to rejoice when the doctor followed his dear parents down into the hereafter.

By this time Tomas was old enough to enter a trade school, and so he did. He began training to become a typesetter. As luck would have it, a distant cousin of his mother was a head operator at a company in Havana. The city was a tonic. Work kept his mind sharp, and he was reunited with his sister, Sofia, which brought him much joy. Pleased with his apprenticeship at the printing company, Tomas set his sights on becoming a full type operator, and as the law required an age of sixteen, he falsified documents to that effect. He was a printer, after all. He was awarded his certification.

In the early part of 1940, an event occurred that changed Tomas Tinta’s life forever. It took place on the last day of March, when Tomas, in search of work in Havana’s type shops, met a woman named Yamila Rodriguez. Tomas had a coffee in his hand and spilled it when he saw her. “My hand went limp with fear and hope,” he wrote to her in a letter that was composed on the first day of April. “The apparition had jet-black hair and a ripe little plum of a smile. I could not tell whether she was smiling at me or past me, and then I came to realize that they were one and the same, because I had been expanded by that smile.” This is the first known letter written by Tomas Tinta; it is also the first of more than two thousand letters he wrote to Yamila Rodriguez. In the second letter, written the very next day, Tomas confessed his unconditional love for her. “A man who has discovered love in his heart can pretend to wait before making his declaration,” he wrote. “But that would be like visiting a museum, standing before a masterpiece, and reserving judgment. What would be the point, apart from stubbornness and pride?” According to a letter of April 19, Tomas had revealed his new love for Rodriguez to his sister, who took the news with cautious enthusiasm. “She told me that she had always felt that my heart was a fragile vessel, and as such it should not be filled too quickly for fear of shattering it. I assured her that my feelings have quite the opposite effect, and that they are giving me a strength I could not have imagined. She then asked if she could meet you, and I told her that if she has met me, she has met you, so tightly woven together are our souls. This answer did not satisfy her. Perhaps you can come for dinner one day soon.”

It is not known whether Rodriguez ate dinner with Tomas and Sofia. What is known is that, in early May, she disappeared from Havana entirely. Tomas continued to write letters regularly, and these letters remained passionate and poignant. They were not, of course, mailed, as he did not know her whereabouts. On the first of July, Tomas boarded the ship
Leandro
and sailed for Miami, Florida. “I do believe I know where you are, my Yamila,” he wrote in a letter during the voyage, “or rather, I believe I know where you are in addition to being in my heart. It is said that a man cannot spend his entire life in pursuit of one goal, particularly if that goal is merely a woman. Merely a woman? This strikes me as a terrific affront. Better to say ‘merely a cathedral’ or ‘merely a gold mine.’”

Arriving in Miami, Tomas could not find a station in his given career, so he took work as a clerk in a shoe store, which was a bittersweet reminder of his youth. He continued to write to Rodriguez at a steady rate but did not mail his letters, as her location was still a mystery. The correspondence only occasionally reveals disappointment or frustration in Tomas’s tone. More typical is a February 1941 letter that reads, in part, “Today I spent some time by the water, walking along it, gazing across it, wondering which of these behaviors, each of which a mathematician would correctly call a ‘vector,’ most accurately reflects my position with regard to you. Am I walking alongside you, always, or looking across an expanse to find you?”

In the spring of that year, Tomas was badly injured in an automobile accident. For one month both of his arms were in a cast; this is one of only two sustained gaps in his ongoing correspondence with Rodriguez. When Tomas resumed his letter-writing, in mid-May, he once again did so with a regularity that did not ebb even when, in June, he struck up an intimate relationship with a daughter of the city of Miami named Eileen Ogham. The relationship had no discernible effect on the correspondence; in fact, Tomas even wrote freely to Rodriguez about Ogham. “Eileen and I are traveling up to Sarasota tomorrow, where she has an uncle. I think she expects me to romance her in the most obvious manner.” Tomas did so, evidently, because in July he wrote to Rodriguez that he and Ogham were to be wed. “I love her,” he wrote, “and I will tell you all about it when I see you, my dear Yamila. The two of us, entwined from the start of time and still in that most exalted of states, will sit at the shore and watch the waves recede like all that we have forgotten: I mean not that the waves will go away like the events that we have forgotten, but that they will go away like forgetting itself.”

At the shoe store, Tomas befriended several customers, including some soldiers. One of them had been a newspaper reporter before the war, and when he returned to his position after the war’s end, he recommended Tomas to a position as a typesetting foreman. He began his employ on the sixth of March of 1947. Three months later he and Eileen had their first child, a daughter named Julia. “She was a light to me from her first moments, just as you were,” he wrote in another unmailed letter to Rodriguez. “Do you remember how I felt when I first saw you on that Havana afternoon? Perhaps you cannot, and neither can my daughter. I held her in my arms and felt the rapid beat of my heart.” A second child, a boy, followed. “Thomas is his name,” he wrote to Rodriguez. “He is a scamp compared to Julia, who is something of an angel. I have spent some time imagining how they will look when they are older. Thomas, I think, has Eileen’s features. Julia has, I like to imagine, my sister’s. I imagine that you are curious to learn more about Sofia. In that, again, we are one. She has not written or called me since I left Cuba. I wonder if she is well.”

In 1949 Tomas lost his printing job and was forced to return to the shoe store, and the amount he was able to earn there was not enough to keep food on the table. Then the store suffered a small fire and Tomas was forced to take work as a busboy in a café, where the pay was worse still. “At least I can bring home food at the end of the day for my wife and children,” he wrote to Rodriguez. “Yesterday I was packing up the food, which consisted primarily of burned meatloaf that could not be served, and I found myself thinking of you. Inexplicable, perhaps, but the thought was strong and sudden and brought a blush to my face. I will tell you about it soon. Now, I have limited time. I am going to meet with Eileen’s father. In my time of trouble, her parents have not offered any help and in fact they have turned against us in a surprising way.” The meeting seemed successful. But this was an illusory success; before the end of the year, Eileen had left Tomas to take up with another man. “It is painful,” Tomas wrote to Rodriguez, “to imagine him raising my children as his own.”

Tomas passed through a period of extreme exhaustion, though he was still a young man. “I am passing through a period of extreme exhaustion, though I am still a young man,” he wrote to Rodriguez. He took as a girlfriend the daughter of a man who owned a diner. For a year, insensible to all but the most basic needs, he lived with this new woman, Anna, as man and wife. “Even though she is only nineteen,” he wrote to Rodriguez, “she is wise, and she has recently been telling me that I need to try to have my family again. I think she has no other reason to say so except her goodness, which was an idea I had stopped believing in, and was on the verge of killing in myself. I have even been thinking of stronger evils like robbery.”

“Yes, robbery,” he wrote to Rodriguez the next evening. “I know when the office is left unattended and where the keys are kept. I will never act upon it, because I am an honest man, and in my honesty I grow more and more certain of nothing except my sadness. And yet, there are glimmers of hope in this bleakness. I should have mentioned them yesterday. One night, in the dim days before Anna told me that I had to get back to my family, I slept outside in the street, dizzy and miserable, and I considered ending my life. Instead, I started to talk to a man who came to the restaurant who owned a cigar store. He knew a man who owned a cigar factory, and when I told him I was from Camagüey, I was hired immediately. There was a job that required setting type for the labels for the cigar boxes, and here my Spanish was useful. My boss at the factory is a terrible man named James Hooper who reminds me in every way of Dr. Ferrer, and I turn my head when I go by him for fear of being hit. Still, it is work, and work gives a man pride and money, and money is only dirty when you do not have any of it at all, and the little bit I am making these days is cleansing me somewhat, to the point where I can once again recognize myself in the mirror.”

He continued the following day. “My next step is to make contact with Eileen. I will let you know how it goes, my Yamila.” Three days later he resumed: “I made contact last night. It was raining. I stood under an awning. When I saw her coming, I stepped out into the rain, partly so that she would not pass by and partly so that she would not see the tears on my face. She cried, too. She told me that my daughter was missing me every day and that the man who had been with them was gone now. She said that she loved me still, but she also said that she did not have trust for me any longer. She asked me to go away.”

Another month passed over the planet, during which time Tomas did not write to Rodriguez. This is the second and last known gap in the correspondence. Among Tomas’s papers, there are a number of false starts: “Dear Yamila, I have long wondered,” began one. “It is morning,” read another. “It is evening,” another. Then, one day, he took up pen and composed another letter. “I will tell you, Yamila, that when I finally saw Eileen again it was a sunny day,” he wrote. “I asked her to go with me to sit in the park. She agreed. It was almost sundown and we sat there next to one another. Between us there was an invisible wire and I followed it first with my eyes and then with my hand, which I placed gently on her knee. She laughed. I took back my hand. She said that no, a hand on her knee in the grass was exactly what she dreamed about. She took my hand in hers then. We sat in the grass. I placed my head on her bosom as if I were a child and she were the earth, and I clung to her for my safety as I often dream of clinging to you.”

The next letter was dated two days later. “My dearest Yamila, I make it a practice to eat once each week at the diner that Anna’s father owns. I see her there sometimes, and though she is with another man now, though she is carrying his child, she is still close to me in ways I cannot explain to my satisfaction. When I went there last week, she asked me why I seemed happy and I told her, as best as I am able; the words fill my heart but cannot always make the journey to my mouth. ‘You have hope,’ she said, and I agreed, saying ‘yes’ and then saying nothing. I have hope, but I am unsure whether I am to act on it or not. If I act, there is the possibility of gain but a greater possibility of loss. The sweetness of hope will last only until I take action, at which point it will vanish. I force my mind to realize this. Is hope a spiritual state? I carry out this petition in hope’s name. And so I remain in the grass with Eileen, sitting there, touching her hand. I remain with you in the café in Havana, watching your hand round off a sentence in the air. I remain with my sister, reunited for the first time. I remain with my poor dear mother, at her bedside. That is a continual paradise. And yet, I am still rooted to the earth. I am still a poor man. I am still the son of two parents who are in the ground. I am still at the cigar factory, still a slave of James Hooper, whom I turn away from each time I pass him by. Yamila, my darling, my love, I will write you tomorrow, and the day after that, and every day on into eternity.” He did.