The Best American Essays 2013 (4 page)

“‘Slipped’?”

“Everything will be fine. We have a good man in office,” she said, referring to then-president Ronald Reagan.

Mrs. Vollstanger rarely left the premises. Her groceries were delivered. She did not own a car. The tenants who curried her favor did her bidding, policed the unit, swept the lobby floors, ran errands, and maintained the laundry room. She spoke often in praise of the building’s owner and of her responsibilities to his property, which, judging by its low rents and the number of liberties she was allowed with tenants, I could only imagine was some sort of tax shelter. Mrs. Vollstanger had raised four children, but I never saw any of them, and given the way she shook with rage without warning and preyed like a trapdoor spider on the weaknesses of those in her confidence, I didn’t wonder why.

From my own experience with tyrants, I had identified her tendencies early on and managed to stay in her good graces by paying my rent on time, keeping my distance, and doing her dirty work when called. Mrs. Vollstanger would’ve enjoyed serving the notices herself, I believe, but she had been attacked on one occasion and threatened on another, so the mission had been passed on to someone more expendable.

I doubted the legal soundness of most of these notices, which usually contained only a thin basis for the eviction, such as suspected pets or, in the case of Annabelle, noise after 10
P.M
. But the job of a henchman is execution, not judgment, and I needed the money. Even when eviction was justified, I always felt bad about ousting people from their homes. I felt especially rotten in this case, since the market had just crashed and I was, for flimsy reasons, turning a young woman out on the street. I don’t think Annabelle was any more than nineteen. She worked at my favorite bakery (the chewy chocolate–macadamia nut cookies had no rival), and I knew from my few conversations with her in the hall that this was the first time she had ever lived on her own.

I knocked and thought I heard a noise inside, but there was no response. I figured she had spied me through the peephole and decided not to answer. Then I looked left and saw Annabelle coming down the hall with two stacked baskets of laundry. She wore shorts, and her lean swimmer’s body was pale. Annabelle was from Montana, and by the drawings of surf and sun on the many letters that I saw posted downstairs for her friends and family back home, I’d deduced that she was proud of having landed on the mythological golden shore of California, even if it was cloudy, rainy, or foggy here in Eureka three hundred days out of the year.

I helped her with her baskets, then presented her with the envelope.

She squinted at it. “What is this?”

“It’s, ah, an eviction notice.”

“Why am I being evicted?”

“It’s written there at the bottom. Noise after ten. It’s in the lease .... You never bothered me,” I hastened to add. In fact, with no social life to speak of, I’d enjoyed the sounds of festivity that had come through her wall: giggling, clinking glasses, lovemaking. I knew it was the men who stayed overnight that had rankled Mrs. Vollstanger. My only complaint about Annabelle would’ve been that I was not one of the men.

She studied the paper without reading it, then shook it at me, her dark eyes so perplexed and hurt I felt like a villain in a Victorian novel. “Where am I supposed to go?”

“You have five days. There are a lot of vacancies downtown.”

“You’re a terrible person,” she said, blowing a strand of hair out of her face.

“It’s nothing personal. I’ll help you move. I’m sorry about all of this.”

“Get lost, and tell your—” Her voice broke, and she wiped at her eyes. “I thought you were nice.”

Well, I was at one time
, I thought, but by then she had slammed the door.

I hiked back up to Mrs. Vollstanger’s and collected my $15 fee. After Annabelle was gone, I would paint her apartment in exchange for a free month’s rent.

Normally in the evenings I worked on my great Rabelaisian satirical novel about greed and voluptuous social dependence in an allegorical lunatic asylum inhabited by evil clowns (which seemed even more appropriate now that we were all going down the tubes), but I was distracted by Annabelle’s distress, the dirtiness of the $15 in my pocket, and the fact that soon millions would be out of work and rioting in the streets.

I picked up a
Paris Review
and thumbed through it. All good art, according to my 1951 Greenwich Village Artist’s Code, came out of tumult, revolution, and hardship. The moths fluttered about as if I were some magnificent symbol of decay. Hungry, I rummaged in my freezer, brought out a chunk of black bear, stared at it for a minute, then unwrapped it and set it in a pan on low heat with onions. The sun set behind the buildings. The bear was tough and greasy, but I finished it, imagining that through some pantheistic hoodoo I might incorporate the bear’s spirit, at the same time pushing out of my mind the possibility that it was Mr. Vollstanger’s liver.

In the morning I rose cautiously from my nest of blankets and peeked out the window to note that the world had not visibly changed. The smoke from the mill was still scurrying north. I made coffee and oatmeal with apples and then walked four blocks to the headquarters of the
North Coast View
, where six months earlier I had answered an incredible ad that had read, “Writers Wanted,” and despite never having published a thing in my life, I’d been hired to write book reviews at $25 apiece.

Two Irish-surnamed journalists in their late twenties owned and ran the
North Coast View
, a free, local, ad-heavy arts-and-culture monthly on newsprint that I had once heard referred to as an “innocuous street rag.” I strolled into their office. Though I think it had helped me win the job, they regarded my 1951 Greenwich Village Artist’s Code as quaint. Among writers the career path of quitting your job, selling your car, hustling like an old hooker with a toothache, and then eventually dying of syphilis or tuberculosis or shooting yourself in the stomach in a wheat field after you’d created a number of unrecognized masterpieces had been replaced by taking out a student loan and enrolling in the nearby university.

The joke was on them, however, for the Dark Ages were at hand, and only those who could ride the rails, roll their own cigarettes, and live on hand-sawn fish and black bear would survive.

“Are we still in business?” I asked point-blank as I came round the corner in my Goodwill Pendleton shirt, patched jeans, and wool watch cap.

“Until further notice” was the editor’s complacent reply.

“You’re not worried about the market crash?”

“We’re not listed on the Dow Jones Industrial, last time I checked.”

It was disconcerting to see everyone—Jim, Tarn McVie, Mrs. Vollstanger, the albacore fisherman, my two editors—take so mildly the greatest single-day point decline in Wall Street history.

“I’ll get a book,” I said.

“Take all you want.”

In the back were hundreds of books publishers had sent hoping for reviews, the mass of them the sort of dreck that encouraged me about my own prospects of one day getting my novel published.

I selected a book about a group of oppressed women workers who cracked walnuts with their fists after their hammers had been taken away from them (at which point I personally would have quit cracking walnuts and headed home). As I strolled back to my apartment, the headlines in the newsstands trumpeted ominous declarations—“Bedlam on Wall Street”—though it was reassuring to see that they were still organized enough to turn a profit on calamity. I also noticed that the bakery I liked so much—the one where Annabelle Taft worked and which I would therefore have to avoid from now on—was busier than usual. Since Eureka was so far from the financial centers, I thought, the crash simply had not caught up to us yet, or it had somehow stimulated appetites for
krapfen
pastries and chewy chocolate–macadamia nut cookies.

When I got home, I read the book about women cracking walnuts without hammers, took notes, drank so much cinnamon tea I fogged the windows, got the hiccups, had a sneezing fit so violent I felt like Hitler at the rostrum, passed back and forth through the clouds of moths, longed for a chewy chocolate–macadamia nut cookie, and found that zebra, no matter how it is prepared, is best left on the zebra. My room grew dark, and, lit only by the streetlight, I lay in my nest of blankets and listened to the soft moaning of Annabelle Taft next door.

Annabelle moved out three days later with the help of a dozen friends in army jackets, ripped jeans, and fingerless gloves, who scowled and sniffed at me in the hall whenever possible. She did not collect her security deposit or clean her apartment. She left behind a nasty note, a broken umbrella, a tube of green lipstick, a one-piece bathing suit emblazoned
Bozeman Barracudas
(still wet in the bathtub), and a trash can full of
North Coast View
s.

Annabelle’s apartment looked out over the rooftop, and I remembered how cute she’d been lying out there on her towel, trying to get a tan on rare and usually cool days of sun. I confess that
cute
does not accurately describe the many ways I had thought about her, none of which, because of my overdiscipline and fear of intimacy, would ever amount to more than a fantasy. I also recalled how much fun it had been to talk to her about her California adventure, which brought to mind my first time out on my own: the exhilaration of shopping for groceries, acquiring furniture, preparing your own meals, having friends over, and staying up as late as you liked.

Normally I painted an apartment the size of Annabelle’s in about four hours. The color, without exception, was oyster white, no trim. The apartments were painted so often that usually only one coat was needed. While I painted and moved my ladder about, I thought about women cracking walnuts with their fists and America coming down. I also thought about God, whom I had never believed in before, but now that I was trying to create flesh-and-blood characters so that my reader would feel something when I killed them off, I had begun to imagine that a higher being might have been doing this very thing on a much larger scale all along.

When I was done, I cleaned my brushes and rollers and put away the ladder, paint, and drop cloths. Tomorrow I would give Annabelle’s keys back to Mrs. Vollstanger and get my receipt for one month’s rent. I returned to my room and stood in the darkness for a while, looking out at the lights of ships on the bay. And I caught myself listening for the voice of Annabelle.

The next morning Jim was standing down the hall beside the open door of 214, an apartment I had painted six days before that had belonged to a woman who’d been evicted for having cats. Jim’s wife, Hye, a school secretary, stood next to him, looking like someone who spent all her waking hours defusing bombs.

Jim called my name and strode over with a smile to shake my hand. He had a tremendous handshake, his forearm bulging.

“Howdy, neighbor,” he said. “Guess you heard they voted me out.” He explained that without his studio, he needed an apartment with better light so he could paint at home. This place had great light, he said. “And it’s half the price of our place down on the waterfront. Hye likes it too,” he added.

Hye was gone. The door downstairs was propped open, and she came trudging back up the steps with a boxful of books. In the dozens of times I had seen Hye with Jim, she had spoken a total of six words to me—cultural diffidence, I thought (she was Korean), or, more likely, she associated me with her husband’s self-destruction.

Jim took a deep breath. “I’ve quit drinking.”

Hye passed us, head down, as if we were strangers. I wondered how many times she’d heard Jim say this.

“Great news, Jim,” I said. “Do you need any help moving?”

“Got most everything up,” he said. “Now I need to lay some tarps. Come by later and check out my new studio.”

“I’ll bring you a pound of black-eyed peas for luck,” I said.

Mrs. Vollstanger leaned over the rail above, pearls dangling, and smiled down at us in that chilly, maternal way of hers. “Do you have everything you need, Jim?” she asked sweetly.

On afternoons when the weather was tolerable, I liked to hang out in the park across the street from my apartment among the winos, unemployed lumberjacks, and a bearded man who sat cross-legged by the statue and offered to let you touch the “real Jesus” for only a quarter. Mrs. Vollstanger would be up there on the third floor doing telescope surveillance, and a few windows over and down Jim would be crouched before his easel, wool beret dipped over one eye, furiously trying to catch up on lost time.

I was trying to catch up on lost time too. My brain, floating in its amniotic chamber of inebriation for all those years, had gone to sludge. It was an effort to perceive things as they actually were and harder yet to render them clearly, which likely was the reason I clung to ready-made theories of art instead of developing my own. Following the example of my painter friends, I made daily “sketches” in my notebook: descriptions of my surroundings and the people as they passed, trying to retrain my eye in the hope that one day I would find my way to the book reviewers’ pile, preferably in hardcover.

One afternoon the broad-shouldered Annabelle came along and sat down just a few feet from me. She wore pinstriped pants, knee-high rubber boots, and a windbreaker. A white band on her wrist read, “Love is time.” She opened her notebook and began to write.

Before I’d handed Annabelle her eviction notice, I had seen her outside the building no more than seven or eight times, but now I ran into her everywhere: in the galleries (where I could too often be found depicted in various unflattering attitudes), at the library and the co-op, coming out of that restaurant that sold spinach pies, or gabbing in the coffee shop with her friends. At each encounter, if she did not ignore me altogether, she pretended to have stumbled upon some large species of cockroach. It pickled my stomach to be so loathed (for I didn’t need an artist’s vision to see my role as a jerk in all of this), and it made me want to quit serving evictions, even if that meant the end of my free rent at the Totalitarian Hotel. Apology seemed a thin gesture, and so I fantasized about asking her out instead: I’d walk her through my situation so that she could understand the sacrifices one had to make for art, and then maybe we’d go to her place afterward, where a pastel nude of me with darts in my ass would hang from her wall.