Authors: Francine Prose
She pours herself a stiff vodka tonic, then settles down beside Solomon on the couch. He puts one arm around her and they sit staring straight ahead, as if watching TV. Finally he says, “So how’s my little psychic?”
“That’s not funny,” says Vera. “Solomon, are you
sure
you didn’t know those people’s names? And you told me and—I don’t know, maybe we were drunk or something—somehow we both forgot. It’s important. I’m going out there Monday to talk to them.”
Solomon whistles. “Don’t let Shaefer or Esposito get wind of it,” he says. “Or the lawyers. The shit’ll really hit the fan. Anyhow, the truth is I never saw that house before I took the goddamn picture. I was just shooting the little prince and princess selling lemonade. If I’m lying, so help me God”—Solomon taps his good knee—“let this one fall off, too.”
“Then what’s going on here?” says Vera.
“The outer limits,” Solomon says. “The twilight zone. Think of it as unsuspected talent. Like suddenly finding out you can play mental chess or you’re one of those idiot savants who can tell you the weather in 1883. All you can do is get off on it.”
“How can I get off on getting fired?”
“No one’s fired you yet,” says Solomon. “But listen, here’s what I was thinking. If you really want to stay part of our one big
This Week
family, try talking Shaefer and Esposito into giving you Karen Karl’s spot. ‘Vera Perl’s “I Predict!”’ They’d love to stop paying the syndicate. It’s the most popular column we’ve got. The mail-room guys run a numbers game based on how many letters Karen Karl gets a day—”
“Enough,” Vera says. “I know.” When Vera started at
This Week
, her first assignment was answering Karen Karl’s mail. Dan Esposito claimed it would give her a clearer sense of their readership, but Vera refused to believe it. If she’d admitted that’s who her audience was, she’d have quit back then. Nearly every letter went like this:
Dear Karen Karl,
I lead a miserable life. I am very lonely and have no friends. My husband died fifteen years ago. My daughter and her three kids just moved back in but they won’t talk to me either. I have chronic emphysema from smoking too much, though who could blame me? Everyone needs something. The doctors don’t give me much time left though I am only fifty-seven. I know you can see the future so my question is: Can you see one ray of hope in mine or should I just end it right now? Thank you for your trouble.
Mary
The first few of these letters had put Vera into such a state of depression she’d called in sick and stayed home to reread
Miss Lonelyhearts
for its slant on the redemptive possibilities of all this. But West only made her feel worse. The letters Miss Lonelyhearts got were so imaginative, so extravagantly grotesque. What Vera wouldn’t have given to have heard, as Miss Lonelyhearts did, from some reader telling her what it was like to have been born with no nose.
Vera knows it’s flesh and blood out there, souls in pain and in such need of comfort they’ll seek it in
This Week
. But she also knows how important it is to keep reminding herself it’s not her pain. Mary’s problems aren’t hers. They’re just stories, someone else’s mail. Not that Vera doesn’t long to help, to speak for the screamers on the train. But if what she’s dealing in is mostly false comfort, she’d better not take it to heart. Her job, like a doctor’s, demands some degree of professional detachment. Best not to imagine lonely girls mounting telescopes out their windows and searching that distant red star for the King. Best not to think about arthritic hands anointing themselves with sliced cucumber.
Right now the only hand Vera’s aware of is Solomon’s, cradling her shoulder. She wonders if they’ll become lovers again. She’s not sure if she wants to or not. One thing’s certain: she’s not in love with Solomon. If she were, she wouldn’t feel so removed, off somewhere at liberty to consider whether she’s got any diaphragm jelly left. She thinks probably she has, but what troubles her is how long she’s had it.
She remembers buying it before Lowell’s last visit two Christmases ago. She even remembers purchasing it at the Pay-Less on State Street. The reason she remembers is that the checkout clerk—a real teenage horror, his face the color and apparent consistency of cherry vanilla ice cream—picked up the package of diaphragm jelly and looked at her and said, “Great stuff. I use it on my cat every night. Are you part Indian?” Are you part asshole? thought Vera, but didn’t say it for fear of what might happen next. Now she wonders if the stuff in her medicine chest is still good, if there’s an expiration date or if the implications of diaphragm jelly expiring are too depressing for even the FDA to consider. Anyhow, the more she thinks this way, the less likely it seems she’ll need it.
She wriggles out from under Solomon’s arm and goes into the kitchen to check on dinner. She takes out the chicken salad, stirs it, puts it back. The wilted lilies sticking out of the garbage make her think of old men’s scrotums.
Back in the living room, she sits somewhat further down the couch from Solomon; she’s still dancing the same clumsy ballet she did with high-school dates she wasn’t quite sure of. “How far did you drive today?” she asks.
“God knows,” says Solomon. “Northern Rockland County, I guess. It all looks the same to me. Grass and trees. Green and boring. I don’t know where I am unless there’s four signs and a traffic cop and maybe a mugger or two to make me feel at home.”
Vera wishes he wouldn’t talk like this. She likes men who can live in the city and then go out and creep through the woods like the last of the Mohicans. Lowell’s famous for his sense of direction: one winter, traveling with some Portland friends through Mexico, Lowell was fast asleep in the back of the van and the driver woke him up and asked which way to Guadalajara. Lowell said, “Turn right.”
When Solomon says, “It’s always a mistake to think you know what you’re looking for,” it takes her a while to realize he’s talking about photography. “What I had in mind was that feeling you get—or anyway
I
do—that after the Fourth of July the summer’s basically over. I figured I’d go up to Bear Mountain, shoot families having their little picnics, and maybe if I was lucky catch that moment when they let it all hang out and you know they know: This is it. Finished. Might as well be Labor Day.
“So there they were, the American nuclear family burning its Basic Brands hot dogs, drinking its Kool-Aid and beer; and if the summer was over, you could have fooled them. They were having the time of their lives. I shot off two rolls anyway, but I can tell you right now: Every shot is garbage, Polaroid ads except with uglier people. I guess that’s what you get for predicting what you’ll find.”
Vera’s nodding, but what she’s thinking is how different Solomon is from Lowell, whose theory is: always predict, or try. If you need a salad bowl, spend Saturday morning thinking salad bowl, and that afternoon you’ll find one for a quarter at somebody’s garage sale.
“But get this,” says Solomon, “just before I started back I stopped in one of those little cafés with the fly-cemetery screen door and the
IT TAKES FIFTEEN MUSCLES TO FROWN AND ONLY TWO TO SMILE
sign over the register and the waitress grinning like she believes it. I’m sitting at the counter finishing my coffee when this big, fat redneck in a Cat hat sits down beside me. He sees the camera, asks if I’m a photographer, then he says, ‘Jeez, you shoulda been here yesterday.’
“What happened yesterday? His kid’s hamster had babies. And just as I’m thinking about those last scenes on the Roy Rogers show when Pat Butram’s dog’s just had puppies and Roy and Dale are standing there smiling like they’re the biological parents, he says, ‘One of ’em had two heads.’
“I asked him where it is now and he says, ‘Where the fuck do you think? I flushed it down the fucking toilet. All we need is the kid having nightmares, keeping us up all night. But Jesus, that would have made some picture.’
“I said I was sorry I missed it. It
would
have made some picture. It was all I could do not to tell him, Buddy, where I work that would make front-page news.
HUNDRED-HEADED HAMSTER HAUNTS BIG-CITY SEWER.
”
Vera rubs her eyes. Then she says, “Are you getting hungry?”
“Not really,” he says. “I don’t want to spoil my high.”
“Maybe we should smoke a joint,” says Vera.
“That sounds more like it,” he says.
By the time the joint’s half gone, Vera’s feeling better. Crazily, what’s cheering her up is that she’s wondering why Solomon didn’t ask her to go to the country with him. And though she’s annoyed at herself for reacting this way, the fact remains: the possibility that he didn’t want her along is making her want him more. Once she saw Janis Joplin on TV talking about how romance was like driving a mule with a carrot and stick: the woman’s the mule, the carrot’s the promises the guy keeps breaking. Vera suspects that what moves her is the chance that the carrot may have disappeared altogether. Maybe she and Solomon will become lovers again.
“What
would
you do if they fired you?” asks Solomon.
“I don’t know,” Vera says. It’s getting dark, too early for a summer evening except that it’s been so gray all day. Neither gets up to turn on the light. The dimness and the marijuana give their talk the spacey tone of certain scenes in movies: stoned around the campfire.
Easy Rider
, thinks Vera. God help us.
When Solomon asks if she’ll go back to freelancing, Vera remembers the chilly fall day she and Solomon went out to the old cemetery near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway where her grandmother was buried and where, since the funeral, Vera had wanted to take pictures: the crumbling gravestones overgrown with vines, the worn Hebrew letters, and especially the enamelled cameos of the dark-eyed, rakish dead. Before Solomon could focus, an old man ran at them screaming in Yiddish as if Solomon’s lens were the evil eye. But if the evil eye was open that day, it was fixed on Vera and Solomon. After that, something changed. They stopped imagining projects and devoted themselves to complaining about
This Week
. And it wasn’t long until that morning Vera awoke to hear Solomon ranting about having to go into work and airbrush hair onto Five-year-old Werewolf Boy’s face, and he and Vera looked at each other and knew that they couldn’t go on.
She’s thinking of the community garden on her corner, realizing what those squeezed-together little rectangular plots
really
remind her of when she hears Solomon say, “You might have to go back to writing the truth.”
“The last time I wrote what I thought was the truth,” Vera says, “I nearly lost my best friend.
I MARRIED BIGFOOT
seemed safer.”
“Safer than what?” asks Solomon.
“Haven’t I ever told you about my friend Louise joining that ashram?” Vera’s almost sure she has, but Solomon’s shaking his head no.
The real beginning of this story is that Lowell had just left. But Vera doesn’t want to start there. For one thing, Lowell’s name makes Solomon flinch. For another, she fears sounding like those dreadful people one overhears in restaurants, whining about their divorces. So she says, “About five years ago, I got a letter from Louise.”
The thought that Solomon’s never met Louise exhausts her. There’s so much background he needs. Louise dressed as garbage, weeping at the planetarium, her poetry, her wanting to see God. But maybe Vera’s mentioned some of this, and besides, the stories themselves are misleading, make that time in their lives seem cuter, less disturbed and confusing than it was.
“I knew that Louise was living in Berkeley, working some secretarial job and going to yoga classes. I hadn’t heard from her for two months and was starting to get worried. And then she sent me this letter saying she was happier than she’d ever been in her life.”
“That would have scared the hell out of me,” says Solomon.
“It did,” Vera says. “The other scary thing was that she’d moved in with the people she’d been studying yoga with. That and her using the word
community
about three times per paragraph. And
sharing
. I mean, this was
Louise
! A couple of things kept me calm. She’d included this quote about St. Joseph of Cupertino, the one who used to levitate and flap around the monastery and have to be talked down for meals. I thought, Well, if she’s joined a cult at least it’s one that’s let her keep her sense of humor. Also, she wrote, she felt like a TV that’s just had its fine tuning adjusted. Colors were brighter, sounds clearer, when she walked down the street people’s flesh tones were the colors God meant them to be. I thought, Who wouldn’t want that? Finally she said that every time she cast the
I Ching
, she got the same hexagrams, Return and Pushing Upward. The commentary on the first was, “Everything comes of itself in its own time,” and on the second, “Pushing Upward does not fall back.” These were always her favorite hexagrams, she said, though she’d always seen them as contradictory. Until now.”
“The
I Ching
,” says Solomon. “I thought that went out with hula hoops. I would have been on the first plane out there.”
“Well, I was,” says Vera, but this is the part she can’t quite explain: why she couldn’t just rescue Louise without feeling she had to
write
about it. She knows it was connected with Lowell’s leaving, her fears for her own life, of growing old at the
Downtowner
. And maybe she thought she was helping Louise. That’s what she’s not sure of. She has to remind herself that Solomon’s not asking for justification. For now he seems satisfied with simple mechanics, the details of how she parked Rosie with her parents and took time off from work…
“So there I was at the airport,” she says. “I didn’t recognize Louise. When she started to hug me, I ducked. I thought she was trying to sell me one of those twenty-dollar editions of Krishna’s life story. She’d gained thirty pounds and turned white. Moby Dick in a turban. White sneakers, leggings, weird, shiny dress. In college they used to serve these all-white meals—chicken in cream sauce, biscuits, mashed turnips, angel food cake. I thought: If I’d eaten too many of those I’d look like her. Only Louise’s eyes were the same; if she’d been wearing sunglasses I’d never have known her.