The Puttermesser Papers (14 page)

But Puttermesser's mother scolded: “In the dark! Again reading in the dark! You'll burn out your eyes! And didn't you
swear
to Miss Kuntz you'll practice every day during vacation? You're not ashamed, she'll come back and you didn't learn it yet? Nose in the book without a light!” In late August a letter arrived. Miss Kuntz was not coming back. She was moving upstate.

I am sorry to desert my post, Ruth, but it can't be helped. As you know, my father has grown rather infirm and I have been obliged to leave him by himself while traveling by subway to reach my pupils. It hasn't been easy. The change from the city will be a considerable relief. Here in Pleasantville we have purchased a modest though charming little house located just behind the Garden Street Elementary School, and I will be able to look after my father while giving lessons in the sunroom.

Let me urge you, Ruth, to keep working at your music. As I have often mentioned, you are intelligent but require
more diligence. Always remember: Every Great Brain Delves Furiously!

By now Puttermesser had put off practicing for so long that her hair was showing signs of whitening. If alive, Miss Kuntz would be one hundred and four. Puttermesser had still not perfected the Tempo di Minuetto section, so how was it possible to consider a questionnaire on Aging?

Do you encounter discrimination on the part of judges? Employers? Clients? Court personnel?

Has your mental acuity or judgment noticeably slackened? If yes, how does this manifest itself?

Have your earlier positions (political, moral, societal) eroded? Are you, in your opinion, capable of new ideas? Flexibility? An open mind?

Have your earnings diminished? Increased? Are you treated with less respect? More? If more, how does your mature appearance contribute to this?

Has the feminist movement eased your professional situation? Are you harried less? More? No difference? How many times per week do you encounter sexist or ageist remarks?

Do you dye your hair? Use henna? Surrender to Mother Nature? If the latter, does this appear to augment or lessen your dignity among male colleagues? The public?

Miss Kuntz was no doubt under the ground in Pleasantville, New York, together with her father. In
Puttermesser's cramped apartment in the East Seventies—a neighborhood of ophthalmologists and dermatologists—there was no room for a piano; the space near her bed could barely accommodate a modest desk. At night she could hear the high-school math teacher on the other side of the wall plunge her red pencils into an electric sharpener. Sometimes the math teacher did exercises on a plastic mat—unfolding, it whacked against the baseboard. A divorcée in her middle thirties who counted out loud with each leg stretch. She was working on her figure in the hope of attracting a lover. An announcement addressed to the math teacher had been thrust into Puttermesser's mailbox.

SINGLES EVENT

ATTENTION, EDUCATED UNUSUAL SINGLES

TEACHERS
'
MIXER EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT
8:30
P.M
.

MEET YOUR PEERS WITHOUT SNEERS OR TEARS

BRONX SCIENCE, HUNTER HIGH, STUYVESANT
,

OTHER TOP SCHOOLS WELL REPRESENTED

$3
DONATION TO COVER PUNCH AND CHEESE

NOTE TO MALE TEACHERS
:
MORE MEN WANTED
!

BRING YOUR
(
PROFESSIONAL
)
FRIENDS

CALL GINNY
(718) 555-3000
FOR DETAILS

Puttermesser contemplated calling Ginny—she too was an educated unusual single. Instead she slid the sheet under the math teacher's door. The building, with its dedication to anonymity (each mysterious soul invisible in its own cubicle), was subject to jitters and multiple confusions.
Mixups, mishaps, misdeliveries, misnamings. To the doorman she was Miss Perlmutter. If you asked the super to send the plumber you would get the exterminator. Without warning the pipes dried up for the day. You could try to run the faucet and nothing would come out. Or the lights would fail; the refrigerator fluttered its grand lung and ceased. All the refrigerators up and down the whole row of apartments on a single corridor expired together, in one extended shudder. You could feel it under your soles right through the carpeting. The building was a nervous organism; its familiar soughings ricocheted from cranny to cranny. Puttermesser could recognize by the pitch of its motor which floor the elevator was stopping on. She knew by the thump in the hall, and by the slap of sneakers heading back to the elevator, and by the rattle of all her locks, the moment when the new telephone book landed on her doormat.

Thump, slap, rattle. Something had landed there now; the sneakers were in flight. The chain-lock was still swinging and tinkling. Puttermesser laboriously fiddled with it, and then with the other two locks. Each required one turn followed by a quarter-turn. She worked as fast as she could. What if there were a fire? Robbery and rape or be burned alive: the New York predicament. All her neighbors had just as many locks; the math teacher had installed a steel pole that dropped into a hole in the floor.

The locks were undone. Puttermesser stuck her head out in time to see the flash of a yellow shirt at the end of the corridor. At her feet a chimney of huge flat cardboard boxes rose up. There was a smell of noisome cheese.

“Hey!” Puttermesser yelled. “Get back here! I didn't order this stuff.”

“6-C, right?” the yellow shirt yelled back. “Pizza!”

“3-C. You want the sixth floor. I didn't order any pizza,” Puttermesser yelled.

“You Morgenbluth?”

“You've got the wrong apartment.”

“Listen,” the yellow shirt called, “bike's in the street. Boss's bike. They take my bike I'm finished. Half-dozen veggie pizzas for Morgenbluth, O.K.?”

“I don't know any Morgenbluth!”

Like a piece of stage machinery, the elevator hummed the yellow shirt out of sight.

Fecal trail of stable—that cheese; some unfathomable sauce. Puttermesser kept her distance from ethnic foods. She had never tasted souvlaki; she had never tasted sushi. With the exception of chocolate fudge and Tootsie Rolls (her molars were ruined and crowned), gastronomy did not draw her. What she was concentrating on was marriage: the marriage of true minds. Reciprocal transcendence—she was not thinking of sinew, synapse, hormone-fired spasm. Those couples who saunter by with arms like serpents wrapped around each other, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to plug mouth on mouth: biological robots, twitches powered by pitiless instinct. Puttermesser, despite everything, was not beyond idealism; she believed (admittedly the proposition wouldn't stand up under rigorous questioning) she had a soul. She dreamed—why not dream?—of a wedding of like souls.

Only the day before yesterday Puttermesser had taken out of the Society Library on East Seventy-ninth Street—an amiable walk from her apartment—a biography of George Eliot. A woman with a soul, born Mary Ann Evans, who had named herself George in sympathy with her sympathetic mate. George Eliot and George Lewes, penmen both, sat side by side every evening reading aloud to each other. They read science, philosophy, history, poetry. Once they traveled up to Oxford to see a brain dissected. Another time they invited Charles Dickens to lunch; he enthralled them with an eerie anecdote about Lincoln's death. They undertook feverishly cultural journeys to Spain and Italy and Germany, sightseeing with earnest thoroughness, visiting cathedrals and museums, going diligently night after night to the theater and opera. On steamers, for relaxation, they read Walter Scott. They were strenuous naturalists, pursuing riverbanks and hillsides for shells and fungi. Their house was called the Priory; nothing not high-minded or morally or artistically serious ever happened there. The people who came on Sunday afternoons—George Eliot presided over a salon—were almost all uniformly distinguished, the cream of English intellectual life: they were learned in Chaldaic, Aramaic, Amharic, Phoenician, or Sanskrit; or else they were orators, or else had invented the clinical thermometer; or were aristocrats, or Americans. The young Henry James made a pilgrimage to George Eliot's footstool, and so did Virginia Woolf's father. George Lewes was always present, small, thin, blond, quick, an impresario steering an awed room around the long-nosed sibyl in her chair. She depended on him; he protected
her from slights, hurts, cruelty, shame, and from the critical doubts of John Blackwood, her publisher, who took her at first for a clergyman. It was a marriage of brain with brain, weightiness with weightiness. Dignity with dignity. And of course there was no marriage at all—not legally or officially. Lewes's wife, Agnes, was an adulteress who went on giving birth to another man's children; but it was an age of no divorce. George Lewes and George Eliot, husband and wife, a marriage of true minds admitting no impediment, were, perforce, a scandal.

All this Puttermesser knew inside out: it was her third or fourth, or perhaps fifth or sixth, George Eliot biography. She had, moreover, arrived at that season of life—its “autumn,” in the language of one of these respectful old volumes—when rereading gratifies more than discovery, and there were certain habituated passages that she had assimilated word for word. “And yet brilliance conquered impropriety” gave her a shiver whenever she came on it; and also “Consider how a homely female intellectual, no longer young, falls into a happy fate.” O happy fate! Somewhere on the East Side of New York, from, say, Fifty-third to Eighty-ninth, or possibly on West End Avenue between Sixty-sixth and Ninety-eighth, a latter-day George Lewes lurked: Puttermesser's own, sans scandal. It was now, after all, an age of divorce.

The shopping cart was squeezed between the refrigerator and the sink, folded up to fit into the little valley where the roaches frolicked. Wrestling it out, Puttermesser recalled her mother's phrase for a divorced man: used goods. Yet what else was there for her in the world but
used goods? Puttermesser was used goods herself, in her mother's manner of speaking: she had once had a lover. But lovers are transients; they have a way of moving on—they are subject to panicked reconsiderations, sudden depressions, cold feet. Lovers are notorious for cowardice, for returning to their wives.

Puttermesser wedged the cart against the door jamb and bent to heave into it each big flat box. When all the pizzas were piled up inside the wire frame, she double-locked her top lock and triple-locked her bottom lock and trundled the cart down the corridor to the elevator. It was like pushing a wheelbarrow filled with slag. The elevator smelled partly of urine and partly of pine-scented disinfectant; with the cart in it there was barely enough room to stand. She poked the button marked “6,” but instead of grinding her upward, the thing headed for the lobby, now and then scraping against the shaft.

Two very tall young women were waiting down there. One of them was carrying a bottle of wine without a wrapper.

“You getting out?”

“I was on my way up,” Puttermesser said. “You brought me down.”

“Well, we can't all fit,” said the tall young woman with the wine.

“Just
try
,” said the other tall young woman. “If you could just move your laundry—”

The tall young woman with the wine looked into the cart. “It isn't laundry. Smells like throw-up.”

Puttermesser's spine pressed against the back wall of the elevator. The buttons were beyond her reach. A large black
plastic triangle—an earring—swung into her face; the bottle of wine drove into her side.

“What floor?”

“Six,” Puttermesser said.

“How about that. Is this stuff for Harvey's party? You going where we're going, Harvey's party?”

“No,” Puttermesser said.

“Harvey Morgenbluth? On the sixth floor?”

“That's where I'm going,” Puttermesser said.

The door to 6-C was propped open; all its chains were dangling free. A row of spidery plants in tiger-striped pots lined the foyer—a tropical motif. It was the sort of party, Puttermesser saw, where children run through shrieking, and no one complains. Ducks in police uniforms were shooting at evil-visaged porcupines in burglars' caps on a big color television in a corner of the living room, next to a white piano, but the children were paying no attention at all. A mob of them were chasing three little boys in overalls, two of whom seemed, as they sped by, to be identical twins. They raced through the living room and out into what Puttermesser knew had to be the kitchen (6-C's layout was the same as 3-C's) and back again. “No we don't, no we don't,” all three were yowling. The two very tall young women from the elevator instantly made a place for themselves on the beige tweed carpet in front of the sofa, kneeling at the coffee table and pouring wine into paper cups, instantly hilarious; it was as if they had been dawdling there for hours. The sofa itself held a tangle of five or six human forms, each with its legs in one extraordinary position or another, and each devoted to a paper cup.
Behind the children's screeches, a steady sea-noise burbled: the sound of a party that has been long underway, and has already secretly been defined, by the earliest arrivals, as a success or a failure.

This one was a failure: all ruined parties are alike. They pump themselves up, they are too boisterous, too frenetic, they pretend raucous pleasure. And this is true even of cousins and young aunts, of families. The Morgenbluth apartment looked to be all family—husbands, wives, untamed offspring. Sisters-in-law, like the pair from the elevator. A birthday for one of the little boys, probably—but there was too much wine, and no balloons; besides, the children were being ignored. Puttermesser wheeled the cart straight toward the white piano and began lifting the boxes out onto the top of it. Cracker crumbs were scattered over the keys; a cigarette, with its snout still burning, lay directly on middle C. The boxes climbed upward in precarious steps.