“Death,” said Rudy again. “Death by nuclear holocaust. Everyone’s having those dreams. Except for me. I’m having these completely embarrassing nightmares about bad haircuts and not knowing anyone at a party.”
In the morning, sun spilled in through the window by the bed. There was more light in the apartment in winter when there was snow on their overhang and it reflected sunlight inward, making garnet of the rug and striping the bed. A stray tomcat they had befriended, taken in, and fed lounged on the sill. They called him Food Man or Bill of the Baskervilles, and occasionally Rudy was kind to him, lifting the cat up high so that it could check out the bookcases, sniff the ceiling, which it liked to do. Mamie put birdseed out in the snow to attract pigeons, who would amuse the cat through the glass when he was inside. Cat TV. Rudy, she knew, hated pigeons, their lizard feet and pea brains, their strangely bovine meanness. He admired his friend Marco, who had put metal stakes outside on his air conditioner to keep pigeons from landing there.
Ordinarily Mamie was the first one up, the one to make coffee, the one to head cautiously down the makeshift rungs hammered in the side post, the one to pad out to the kitchen area, heat up water, rinse out mugs, brew coffee, get juice, and bring it all back to bed. This was how they had breakfast, the bedclothes a calico of spills.
But today, as on the other days he feared she would leave him, Rudy wormed naked out of the covers before her, jack-knifed at the loft’s edge, descended to the floor with a thump. Mamie watched his body: lanky, big-eared; his back, his arms, his hips. No one ever talked about a man’s hips, the hard twin saddles of them. He put on a pair of boxer shorts. “I like these underwear,” he said. “They make me feel like David Niven.”
He made coffee from water they stored in a plastic garbage barrel. They had it delivered this way, weekly, like seltzer, and they paid twenty dollars for it. They washed dishes in the water that came through the faucets, and they even took quick showers in it, though they risked rashes, said the government doctors. Once Mamie hadn’t heard a special radio warning and had taken a shower, scrubbing hard with an old biscuit of loofah, only to step out with burning welts on her arms and shoulders: There had been a chemical pumped into the water, she learned later, one thought to impede the growth of viruses from river-rat fleas. She had soothed her skin with mayonnaise, which was all they had, and the blisters peeled open to a pink ham flesh beneath.
Except for the pleasure of Rudy bringing her coffee — the gift of it — she hated this place. But you could live with a hate. She had. It was so powerful, it had manners; it moved to one side most of the time to let you pass. It was mere dislike that clouded and nagged and stepped in front of your spirit, like a child wanting something.
Rudy returned with the coffee. Mamie rolled to the bed’s edge and took the poinsettia tray from him, as he climbed back up and over her. “It’s the Coffee Man,” she said, trying to sound cheerful, perhaps even to chirp. Shouldn’t she try? She placed the tray between them, picked up her coffee, and sipped. It was funny: With each swallow she could recast this fetid place, resee it with a caffeinated heart’s eye, make it beautiful even. But it would be the drizzle of affection felt for a hated place before you left it. And she would leave. Again. She would turn the walls and sinks and the turpentined dust to a memory, make it the scene of mild crimes, and think of it with a false, willowy love.
But then you could get to calling everything false and willowy and never know anymore what was true and from the heart.
The cat came and curled up next to her. She massaged the cool, leathery wafer of its ear and plucked dust from its whiskers. He cocked his head and closed his eyes sleepily, content. How sad, she thought, how awful, how fortunate to be an animal and mistake grooming for love.
She placed a hand on Rudy’s arm. He bent his head to kiss it, but then couldn’t bend that far without spilling his coffee, and so straightened up again.
“Are you ever lonely?” Mamie asked him. Every moment of a morning seemed battled for, the past and future both seeking custody. She laid her cheek against his arm.
“Mamie,” he said softly, and that was all.
In the last five years almost all of their friends had died.
The Indians weren’t used to the illnesses that the English brought with them to the new world. Many Indians got sick. When they got chicken pox or mumps, they sometimes died. A very proud Indian might happen to wake up one morning and look in the mirror he’d gotten from an English trader and see red spots polka-dotting his face! The proud Indian would be very upset. He might hurl himself against a tree to maim himself. Or he might throw himself over a cliff or into a fire (picture).
THE AGENT had on a different scarf today — a turquoise jacquard, twisted into a long coil that she wore wrapped around her neck like a collar. “A room,” she said quickly. “Would you settle for a room?”
“I’m not sure,” said Mamie. When she spoke with someone snappy and high-powered like that, she felt depressed and under siege.
“Well, come back when you are,” said the agent, in her chair, trundling toward the files.
Mamie took the train into Manhattan. She would walk around the art galleries in SoHo, after she dropped off a manuscript at the McWilliams Company. Then she would come back home via the clinic. She had her glass jar in her purse.
In the McWilliams bathroom was a secretary named Goz, whom Mamie had spoken to a few times. Goz was standing in front of the mirror, applying eye makeup. “Hey, how ya doin’?” she said, when she saw Mamie.
Mamie stood next to her, washed her face off from the subway, and dug through her purse for a hairbrush. “I’m OK. How are you?”
“All right.” Goz sighed. She had two wax perfume wands, mascara, and several colors of eye shadow spread out on the mirror ledge. She scrutinized her own reflection and sucked in her cheeks. “You know, it’s taken me years to get my eye makeup to look like this.”
Mamie smiled sympathetically. “A lot of practice, huh.”
“No — years of eye makeup. I let it build up.”
Mamie leaned over and brushed her hair upside down.
“Hmmm,” said Goz a little irritably. “What have you been doing these days?”
“Oh, a children’s thing again. It’s the first time I’ve done the pictures and the text.” Mamie straightened and threw her head back. “I’m, um, dropping off a chapter for Seth today.” Her hair fell around her face in a penumbra. She looked insane.
“Oh. Hmmm,” said Goz. She was watching Mamie’s hair with interest. “I like neat hair. I don’t think a woman should look as if sex has already happened.”
Mamie smiled at her. “How about you? You going out a lot, having fun?”
“Yeah,” said Goz a little defensively. Everyone these days was defensive about their lives. Everyone had settled. “I’m going out. I’m going out with this man. And my friends are going out with these men. And sometimes we all go out together. Thetrouble is we’re all about thirty years younger than these guys. We’ll go to a restaurant or something and I’ll look around the table and like every man at our table is thirty years older than his date.”
“A father-daughter banquet,” said Mamie, trying to joke. “We used to have those at our church.”
Goz stared at her. “Yeah,” she said, finally turning to put away all her makeup. “You still with that guy who lives in a beauty parlor?”