“Look!” said the girl, pointing at the sausages. “There they are. All our old boyfriends.”
Mary took off her dark glasses. “What grade are you in?” she asked. Could there be a grade for what this girl knew in her bulleted heart? What she knew was the sort of thing that grew in you like a tree, unfurling in your brain, pushing out into your fingers against the nails.
“Grade?” mimicked the girl.
Mary put her glasses back on. “Forget it,” she said. Pork blood limned their shoes. Mary held her stomach more tightly; something was fluttering there, the fruit of a worry. She fumbled for her keys.
“All right,” said the girl, and she turned and loped away, the bones in her back working hard, colors spinning out, exotic as a bird rarely seen unless believed in, wretchedly, like a moonward thought.
Vissi d’Arte
HARRY LIVED near Times Square, above the sex pavilion that advertised 25 CENT GIRLS. He had lived there for five years and had never gone in, a fact of which he was proud. In the land of perversities he had maintained the perversity of refusal.
“You’ve never even stepped in? Just once, during the day?” asked his girlfriend, Breckie. “Just to see? I mean, I have.” Breckie was finishing up her internship at St. Luke’s. She was a surgeon and worked with beating and stabbing victims brought into the emergency room. She liked getting her hands on the insides of a thing. It had to do with her childhood.
“Someday when I’m rich,” said Harry. “It’s not as if it’s free.”
Harry was a playwright, which made it, he felt, appropriate to live in the theater district. Also, the rent was cheap and he could play his Maria Callas records loud without causing a stir. The neighborhood, after all, was already in a stir. It was a living, permanent stir. He felt he felt relaxed there. He did.
He did.
And if once in a while a small rodent washed up into the toilet or dashed out from under the radiator, Breckie’s cat almost always got it.
Harry had started writing plays because he liked them. He liked the idea of an audience: live guests in front of live performers. It was like company at holidays: all those real-life, blood-gorged bodies in one room, those bunches of overdressed grapes; everyone just had to be polite. They had no choice. That, thought Harry, was civilization. Harry had had a play produced once as part of a city competition that had named him one of the three top up-and-coming under-thirty playwrights. His picture had appeared with pictures of the other two in the New York Times, all of them wearing the same tie. The tie had belonged to the photographer, who had made them all wear it, individually, like a jacket in a restaurant, but besides that it had been an exuberant event. The play itself was a bleak, apocalyptic comedy set in the Sheep Meadow at Central Park in the year 2050. A ranger stood stage left for the four-hour duration of the play; other characters had love affairs and conversations. It was called For Hours See a Ranger, and it had run for five days in a church basement in Murray Hill.
Since that time Harry had been working on what he hoped would be his masterpiece. The story of his life. O’Neillian, he called it.
“Sounds like chameleon,” said Breckie. Her work took a lot out of her.
“It’s about the ragtag American family and the lies we all tell ourselves.”
“I know,” she said. “I know.”
Harry had been writing the play for years. Mostly he worked at night, tucked in out of the neighborhood’s gaud and glare, letting what he called “the writing fairies” twinkle down from their night perches to commune with his pen. He was very secretive about his work. He had never shown Breckie more than a page of it, and the two or three times he had taken portions to the photocopier’s it had sent him into the flush and sweat of the shy. It wasn’t that he didn’t have confidence in it. It was simply that the material felt so powerful to him, its arrangement so delicate, that a premature glimpse by the wrong person might curse it forever. He had drawn heavily from his life for this play. He had included the funniest family anecdotes, the most painful details of his adolescence, and the wrenching yet life-affirming death of his great-aunt Flora, Fussbudget Flora, whose dying word had been “Cripes.” He had suffered poverty for this play, and would suffer more, he knew, until its completion, living off the frugally spent prize money and the occasional grant he applied for and received. When his cash was low, he had, in the past, done such things as write articles for magazines and newspapers, but he had taken the work too personally and had had too many run-ins with editors. “Don’t fuck with my prose,” he’d been known to say in a loud voice.
“But, Harry, we need to shorten this to fit in an illustration.”
“You’re asking me to eat my children so you can fit in some dumb picture?”
“If you don’t want a picture, Harry, go publish in the phone book.”
“I have to think about this. I have to think about whether or not I can really eat my children this way.” But once he had nibbled at the limbs, he found it was not such a far cry to the vital organs, and soon Harry got good at eating his children. When his articles appeared, often there were two pictures.
And so Harry stopped writing journalism. He also turned down offers to write for “the movies, those pieces of crap” and had had to resist continually the persistent efforts of a television producer named Glen Scarp, who had telephoned him every six months for the last four years, since Harry had won the prize—“Hey, Harry, how’s it goin’, man?”—trying to get him to write for his television series. “TV,” Scarp kept saying, “it’s a lot like theater. Its roots are in theater.” Harry never watched television. He had an old black-and-white set, but the reception was bad because he and Breckie lived too close to the Empire State Building, the waves shooting out over them and missing the apartment altogether. Once in a while, usually after he got a call from Glen Scarp, Harry would turn the TV on, just to see if things had changed, but it was always a blare of static and police calls from the squad cars that circled the block like birds. “We’re going to have to face it,” he said to Breckie. “This television is just a large, broken radio with abstract art on the front.”
“I can’t live like this anymore,” said Breckie. “Harry, we’ve got to make plans. I can’t stand the whores, the junkies, the cops, the bums, the porno theaters — you know what’s playing at the corner? Succulent Stewardesses and Meat Man. I’m moving. I’m moving to the Upper West Side. Are you coming with me?”
“Um,” said Harry. They had talked once about moving. They had talked once about marriage. They would have children, and Harry would stay home and write and take care of the children during the day. But this had troubled Harry. During the day he liked to go out. He liked to wander down the street to a coffee shop and read the paper, think about his play, order the rice pudding and eat it slowly, his brain aflame with sugar and caffeine, his thoughts heated to a usable caramel. It was a secret life, and it nourished him in a way he couldn’t explain. He was most himself in a coffee shop. He imagined having a family and having to say to his children — tiny squalling children in diapers, children with construction paper and pointed scissors, small children with blunt scissors, mewling, puking children with birdhead scissors or scissors with the ears of a dog—“Now, kids, Daddy’s going to a coffee shop now. Daddy’ll be back in a while.”