Elizabeth yelled, OK, wait a second. Her nakedness was covered. She opened the door to Con Ed. It was 8:30 A.M.
— You’re late, she said.
He grinned and flashed his light at the meter, punched in the numbers. He appeared sheepish. He bent his head down as he walked out the door. He always lowered his head. He was tall, not as tall as her dead friend. Elizabeth shut the door behind him.
In the hospital her dead friend said to his mother, I’m at peace, then he shut his eyes, went to sleep, and left the world in the early morning of an Independence Day.
The Con Ed man shouted again, CON ED CON ED. Some tenants never opened their doors to him. He probably didn’t take it personally, unless he was paranoid. Some tenants figured that the amount of gas and electricity Con Ed estimated was less than what they actually used. Those tenants received an official letter. Con Ed insisted upon reading their meters.
Elizabeth switched on the radio — we’ll give you the world, 1010 WINS. She turned the volume low. The radio muttered fitfully. She put a pot of water on the stove. A thread dangled from the gas pipe. It hung there petulantly. It’d been there for half a century. It was there because if there was a gas leak, you could put a match to the thread and then explode.
Roy said she used too much toilet paper. She couldn’t accept his leaving the seat up. After years of living with him, she still didn’t understand him. She once had a boyfriend who didn’t use toilet paper when he pissed, like Roy and other men, but his penis leaked. It left a wet spot on his pants. He had an operation on his penis, performed by his surgeon father. Later, he went to a therapist for a long time. Elizabeth broke up with him three years before Roy came along. She saw him on the street every once in a while. He looked insane.
She switched off the news. She turned on Courtney Love who sang morosely, “I make my bed, I lie in it.” She had a right to be miserable. Everyone did.
Elizabeth sat down at the rectangular Formica table in the kitchen. Sunlight or gloom entered through two dirty windows. She wouldn’t clean them. She could lose her balance and fall out. The young super would be ecstatic if she cracked her skull open and her brains bled out. He’d be delighted. All her enemies would.
She’d fall onto the backyard patio. There was a backyard, with a tree. A New York tree, a weed. It was unashamed and hardy for a long time. Unabashed, it grew. Now the tree was dying. The landlord didn’t tend it. It was suffering from a disease that was probably curable. Gloria was a tree killer. Elizabeth had become attached to the once-sturdy weed. In winter, it shed its leaves and withered. It became skeletal and forlorn. There’d been a weeping willow in front of the house she grew up in. The willow’s roots were strong. They made the walkway buckle. Her parents had the willow tree pulled out and thrown away, because it caused trouble. A weeping willow out her bedroom window, a weeping pillow in her bedroom, the tree caused trouble, and she grew up.
A man goes to the pearly gates. St. Peter asks how much he made last year, and he says, $300,000. What’d you do? St. Peter asks. I was a lawyer. Go through, St. Peter says. The next guy comes along, and St. Peter asks him how much he made, and he says, I made $100,000. St. Peter asks, What’d you do? I was a doctor, the guy says. Go through, St. Peter tells him. The next guy arrives, and St. Peter asks him how much he made. I made $7,000, the guy says. St. Peter says, Oh yeah, I think I’ve heard you play.
Elizabeth was on call for the proofroom today. If one of the obese men was still sick, she’d do some time, a few hours. Yesterday she finished a freelance job — a dictionary, small print — in the room. The room called doing freelance doubledipping. The obese men frowned on it, others just didn’t do it, others could care less. As long as you put your freelance away when the pages swished into the basket, you didn’t get in trouble with the supervisors.
There’s always something that needs to be done around the house, her mother often remarked. It was a reason to hate houses and mothers.
Elizabeth stirred the black coffee in the blue cup. Roy stirred in the bed at the other end of the apartment. She didn’t talk to him in the morning. He wasn’t available. It wasn’t his time.
The air wasn’t circulating. It was stolid and stale. When she thought about summer in winter, she didn’t remember how dead the air was. People like the change of seasons. They don’t remember everything about them.
She had to cut Greta, Regreta, out of her life with surgical precision. It was funny. She’d realized the necessity one night after a rainstorm, when she’d come home soaked and frenetic, and there was another Greta phone call, asking for something and denigrating someone else, the person had taken something from her, used her. Greta regretted everything and complained about the conspiracy of people stealing her ideas, her men, her books, jokes, clothes. Greta was always so calm, reasonable, and compassionate, it’d never occurred to Elizabeth that she schemed or that she was part of Greta’s scheme. The revelation came after the thunderstorm.
Elizabeth’s wet clothes were lying in a lump on the floor. She kicked them into the bathroom with her bare foot. She listened to Regreta complain and realized, everything she’s complaining about she is and does. Elizabeth had to end it.
A friendship ends, and there’s no ceremony. There are no tombstones, just marks and wounds that aren’t supposed to be there. People want to think that the things they hate are not in them, that what hurts them isn’t in them to do, that they’re incapable of behavior like that. Almost beyond repair, people did precisely what they complained others did to them. A simple thing was not phoning a friend back and keeping the friend waiting, for days, maybe weeks. Simple sadism. People hated it done to them and did it to other people.
Elizabeth didn’t trust herself. She thought primitively, she thought all thought was in a way primitive or basic, there was no purity in thinking, and people were fools to think they could think their way out of their thoughts.
That revelatory spring thunderstorm was huge. The city collapsed under its weight. The tops of roofs crumbled and one or two people were hit on their heads by bricks falling from great heights. They died an absurd death. You finish work and a brick hits you on your head. First, you’re lied to by a friend, then you finish work, and then a brick hits you on your head and kills you.
Elizabeth had to quit her job and get rid of Regreta. Elizabeth stared at the phone, indifferent emissary to the outside world. She was sleepy and hot. She got into the shower. The guy next door got into his shower. The water stopped running in her shower. He’d made a science of it, timed it. Maybe he wanted to be next to her. Pink tiles separated them. He was scrubbing, she was scrubbing. Maybe he’d heard her turn on the water, and the thought of it seeped through, he remembered he hadn’t showered. The water pressure lowered. It got lower. The water trickled down. Oscar, she yelled, Oscar, wait a second. He turned off his water and waited. She rinsed. OK, she shouted. He started his water. It was a weird intimacy.
Oscar was a wiry Irish guy with a shaved head. He’d been in the States for years. He did odd jobs and had a string of girlfriends. They were all Irish. All the people who visited him or lived with him were Irish, Irish-American, or African-American. Oscar once played his music very loud, in the middle of the night. They’d worked that out. It took a while, but they’d worked it out. He was all right. Except he showered when she did.
Roy and the dog went for a walk, coffee, the newspaper. Fatboy was a mutt. He wasn’t fat, he was solid like Roy. When the two returned, Roy drank his coffee and fed Fatboy. Elizabeth was on the phone, talking to Larry.