She could fall in love with anyone.
He was still holding the front door open so she could get a better shot of the hole. She knew the picture wouldn’t come out. It was close to hopeless, futile. The City might still be impressed by the documentation. They also had to get photographs of loose tiles and grease in the corners. There was a stair that slid out by itself, and anyone could slip off and kill themselves, it just came out, but it was hard to take a picture of that. They moved the stair to show that it was loose, to show it in its improper, dangerous position. Photographing dust on the walls was implausible. She did it anyway and looked at Ernest. He was smiling, reassuringly. He knew it was absurd. He wasn’t deluded, he was optimistic. Ernest was a mystery.
She looked at his mouth. She had never noticed the thin scar on his chin. Maybe he’d been in a duel. He was a swashbuckler for tenants’ rights. She could fall in love with anyone if the timing was right and the place was right, or wrong. If she was in a room long enough with someone, with no other people around, or if she was trapped in a place, she could fall in love with anyone. Like an animal. She liked animals. They were adaptable.
Anyone could fall in love with anyone, under the right circumstances. Maybe it was the survival instinct. Elizabeth wasn’t sure she had one. People wanted to continue themselves, protect themselves, get pleasure. People wanted pleasure all the time, anytime, anyplace, they’d do anything to get it. Everyone was capable of the most hideous behavior and crimes to get it. The pursuit of pleasure wasn’t pretty. It made people cruel during tender moments. If they weren’t really getting what they wanted, they could kill as easily as kiss.
Ernest was driven. Driven was sex to her, sexy. Someone active and alive with desire for anything was sexy. Maybe not driven for a car, or ice cream, or heroin, because it excluded you, the possibility of you. She could kind of tell what somebody was like sexually, what their body might act like if stimulated, from the way they wanted supposedly nonsexual things. Nothing wasn’t sexual.
Ernest and Elizabeth finished for the night. They had done the job. The Polaroids were flat and weird, but they were evidence. They showed something. Maybe the City would appreciate that.
Hillary and Bill Clinton are driving around. They stop at a gas station. Hillary gets out and talks a long time to the gas station attendant. Finally she gets back into the car. Bill says, Who was that? Hillary says, He’s an old boyfriend of mine. Bill says, A gas station attendant? Hillary says, If I’d married him, he would’ve been president.
Now Elizabeth wasn’t exactly seeing as she stared out the window. Things were moving, even imperceptibly. She couldn’t live without windows. She got bored easily. She needed outside stimulation. She even wanted the outside inside her.
The street looked like desolation alley.
A man walks into a bar. He sits down and places a gunnysack on the barstool next to him. It starts to move. The bartender says, What’s that? What’s in there? I don’t want any animals in here. Get it out of here. The guy says, It’s not an animal. Listen, I’ll show it to you if you give me a drink. It’s really amazing. OK, says the bartender, but it better not be an animal. The guy opens the gunnysack and a little man about twelve inches high jumps out. He looks around and sees the piano. He runs to it and begins to play. He plays beautifully. The bartender is astounded. He’s great, says the bartender, I’ve never seen anything like that. The guy says, Well, one day I met a gypsy woman, and she gave me a ring. She said, Rub the ring and make a wish, and I’ll give you whatever you ask for. But you have to be very careful about your pronunciation, because I didn’t ask for a twelve-inch pianist.
The moon was fading. The sun was starting to rise. It showed the top of its fierce face. It rose resolutely. Daily Elizabeth negotiated with nature. Anything natural was a problem.
Elizabeth did contact other tenants, she did what Ernest asked her to do. One of the tenants was hard of hearing. Before she knew he was deaf, she tried phoning him. She raised her voice higher and higher and then she shouted into the phone and then hung up. She met him briefly on the street. She realized he couldn’t hear a word she was saying unless she stood in front of him so he could see her mouth move, and in addition she shouted. He was stone deaf. She didn’t know why he had a phone. Then she sent him a letter.
Dear Herbert,
I would like to talk to you about our protest against the rent hike the landlord is proposing.
We are filing our objections to the Major Capital Improvements and would like to know your objections. We know that a former tenant in your apartment did file a PAR, Petition for Administrative Review, a while ago, but we do not know what the specific protest was — windows? a hallway problem? Do you know? Did you file anything? Do you have any evidence or documents about the building’s condition?
Others in your building have also filed. If you could be of any help contacting them and finding out their objections, please let us know as soon as you can.
You and I say hello on the street. Because you are hard of hearing, the phone is not the best way to communicate. Let’s meet in front of the building when it’s convenient. Please contact me or Ernest — he’s in in the mornings. We both have answering machines or actually you could drop a line, just send me a letter. Please contact us any way you wish. If you can’t reach people in your building, Ernest and I will write letters. But are the people who filed still living there? I couldn’t find any of them listed in the phone book.
Many thanks.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Hall
Elizabeth worried that mentioning his deafness would offend him. She wasn’t going to pretend that screaming into the phone was easy or adequate. They had to communicate. Herbert responded. Maybe he wasn’t sensitive or maybe she hadn’t offended him. He was accustomed to being deaf. He was used to the stupidities of the nondeaf. He was happy to help, he said, when they met, face to face, in front of the building. She thought he said that, or that’s what she heard, because he didn’t pronounce words clearly. She had to interpret. She may have confused his complaints for others he didn’t have. She shouted her thanks, and they shook hands. He helped Ernest and her contact some other tenants in his building.
Ernest and Elizabeth went to see one of them. He lived in the alleged same building as theirs. Architecturally it had been the same — Roy said she was going to see how the other half lived. The other half had been a mirror image, but the landlord recently halved all the apartments. Then reconditioned them. The ceilings were lower and made of a porous material. The apartments smelled bad. They lacked proportion. They were hopeless, shapeless.
His apartment had no outside or available light. It was probably illegal to have just one window looking out on a wall. Elizabeth could hardly breathe. The place was a hole, in a desperate condition. The guy was cute, even handsome. Elizabeth knew that no one would expect the condition he lived in from the way he looked. It was like the super Hector’s apartment, though she’d never had the chance to enter Hector’s. It was smaller than Hector’s and the cute guy was the only person in it. All the shit was his.
To him, it meant nothing. She could see that. His surroundings meant nothing to him. There could have been decades of vomit caked on the walls and floors, he wouldn’t have noticed. He didn’t see it or smell it. He must have also been like Hector in that way, except he was a rock musician, not a super. The decals on his guitar case announced his seat in the theater of life. Lobster of Hate was the decal she liked best. She’d heard them play.