He gestured to the street. They both looked at it.
— Are they rogue garbage collectors? Elizabeth asked.
The acerbic super and Elizabeth laughed in the morbid morning air. Morning is for mourning, Elizabeth thought. Another garbage truck rolled along and disgorged the regular guys. They were doing the other side of the street. Elizabeth walked over to the short Italian one.
— Take a look at our block. It looks worse than it did last night. Look at the garbage everywhere, look at the cans all over the sidewalk. How can they do this and call themselves garbage collectors?
The regular garbage collector surveyed the sidewalk. He saw the randomness, the mayhem, the sidewalk littered haphazardly with black plastic and aluminum cans. He saw the Chinese food, milk cartons, dog shit, cat food cans, and diapers scattered contemptuously on the ground. The regular guy hurried. He raced to make things right, to turn the cans right side up. He shouted, as he ran, that he’d take care of it. He didn’t want her to report them. He didn’t want trouble. She didn’t report all the wrong things she saw. It was depressing and time-consuming.
Elizabeth opened the window wide. She didn’t care who saw. The morons were crossing Avenue A. They were dancing. A speeding cop car or an ambulance racing to save someone could hit them. They might be killed or they could all be murdered in the park by a crackhead. Her mother said, Where there’s life, there’s hope. She didn’t want to die, she told Elizabeth, because there’s no future in death.
The third-floor man was still in his window across the street. Even with his lights off, his dark shape filled the window. Elizabeth saw something. It could’ve been his dog. Roy was still sleeping peacefully, and she hated and loved him for it. He was missing the night’s frantic errors. Strident, bizarre noises didn’t wake him.
The third-floor man’s lack of acknowledgment creeped her out. But she didn’t want to wave to him. That demanded a leap across a great chasm, her acknowledging his looking at her. She felt little, belittled. She shrank back.
A series of high-pitched yelps or squeals started. They seemed to come from someplace close. It sounded like someone was being tortured. Roy didn’t move. He was a smooth stone on the bed. He didn’t look alive. Elizabeth couldn’t figure out if the torture noises came from human beings, dogs, or cats. People tortured their animals. They tortured their children. Children tortured animals. Everyone’s a monster, given the opportunity.
She was sure the man was watching her from his window. It was obvious. He was pretending he wasn’t. She didn’t want to hide. She was covered, decent, whatever. He wasn’t hiding. But she wasn’t watching him. He could think she was. It was a dilemma. She wanted to watch the street, not him, but she couldn’t watch the street without the possibility that he would think she was watching him. Even her freedom or opportunity — her liberty to look out a window — was controlled by others. She didn’t want to give in and leave the window.
Acknowledgment could disarm the situation, him, but it could also trigger harm, attack.
He was probably the kind of man who made sucking noises when he ate and slept, when he fucked. He smacked his lips when he chewed and food drool poured from the corners of his thin lips. He opened his mouth wide, and you could see the food inside and the spittle dribbling out of his mouth, and he had a grin on his face like an idiot, but jesus he loved to eat.
She wouldn’t acknowledge him.
Maybe he knew he was a creep. Maybe creeps know they’re condemned for life. Maybe he was the kind of man who shaves close, nicks his skin and wears cheap, cloying aftershave lotion, who slaps it on and thinks it covers his sins. Maybe he hated himself.
Some people who hate themselves wear perfume. Elizabeth liked certain perfumes and others made her sick. She didn’t hate herself all the time. She hated herself less when she liked her own smell. But she didn’t want it to be overpowering. It was hard enough to visit people in their apartments or ride in a taxi driven by a maniac who didn’t know his way around. Some people burned incense day and night or wore sickeningly sweet perfume. Some taxi drivers hung furry green-and-white odor-eaters from rearview mirrors. Elizabeth often became nauseated.
— You smell good, she told Roy yesterday.
— That’ll change, he said.
The morons were gone. The block was a moron-free zone. She was free. Elizabeth liked her block. She felt possessive about it. She liked her apartment.
A horse goes into a bar and sits down.
The bartender asks, Why the long face?
When the landlord was about to raise the rent, Elizabeth received a letter. All the tenants did. The landlord stated that because they’d given the tenants new windows, which weren’t put in right, they’d measured wrong, because they’d replaced the old mailbox, which had been broken since she’d moved in, and because they’d put in a light in the front hallway, which was required by law, the landlord regretfully was raising the rent a certain amount per room for every tenant. The landlord assessed the number of rooms at two more than Elizabeth thought she had.
Elizabeth shoved the letter under a stack of junk mail. She ignored it for a day. Then she took it out. She did the figuring. She added up her rooms and multiplied to find what it would cost monthly. It wasn’t astronomical. She could live with it or die with it. She might do both. She wasn’t going to fight it. Fight the increase. The phrase appealed to her — fight the increase. It was what she should do. But she wasn’t going to, not after Gloria had insulted her. Six dollars more per room for the rest of her life, even for rooms she didn’t have, was better than standing in a poorly ventilated room next to Gloria.
Being reasonable with the Big G was murder.
Roy read the letter. He thought they should do something. He glanced at Elizabeth and shoved the paper over to her side of the table.
— I can’t rouse myself to action, she said.
— Rouse yourself to inaction, he said.
— No.
— Answer the letter. Do something.
— I can’t. You do it. Do something yourself.
— I don’t do that kind of thing.
— Why not?
— It’s beneath me.
— I don’t do floors, either.
Their upstairs neighbor was aroused. Ernest was an actor. He worked in a bookstore. Ernest shoved a letter under their door one night. It was addressed to her. He wanted to discuss the tenant situation, their position. Long sentences covered the unlined paper. He said he wanted Elizabeth’s help in fighting the rent increase. He used the compelling phrase. He followed his letter with a telephone message that took up five minutes on her answering machine. They’d never even talked or seen each other in the hallway. She hadn’t seen him. She’d heard him above her, she’d heard what she thought were his footsteps. He exercised.
Then Ernest showed up, after the note and call. He was likable. He told her that when he read the landlord’s letter, he went berserk. He couldn’t sleep, he was infuriated by the injustice, the lies. He wanted to take the landlord on, with her assistance. He’d do the hard work, the field work, go to City Hall, search for the building plans, for the architectural drawings. He just wanted her assistance.
The same letter that swamped her in lethargy was the key to an ignition switch in Ernest. Indignant, he enlisted Elizabeth. She was inert and apathetic. But he knew, somehow, that she of all the tenants would be open to his plea. He may have heard her walking late at night, heard in her gait some telltale sign of anxiety. Maybe he even discerned in it a desire for a better world, for justice. That was impossible, she supposed. It was probably because she was friendlier than most of the other tenants. Maybe he had seen her in the hallway and she’d smiled, unaware of who he was. Yes, OK, I will, she said finally. He was asking next to nothing of her.