The Puttermesser Papers (15 page)

“Leaning tower of pizza,” someone quipped, and from the tight little turn she caught in the tone of it, Puttermesser was certain that she was mistaken after all, that the noise all around was anything but domestic, that except for the children no one here belonged to anybody: no husbands, wives, cousins, aunts. It was the usual collection of the unattached. Roomful of the divorced on a Sunday afternoon in mild middle November. A “singles event”: the math teacher, puffing on her mat three floors below, strained her torso in ignorance of the paradise of opportunity just overhead.

“It's about time we got some real food in here. You can't feed kids indefinitely on peanuts. Pretzels, maybe. Takes a
grownup woman to remember nutrition. Any of these little sons of bitches yours?”

“I'd have to be their grandmother,” Puttermesser said. It was the kind of remark she despised, and this stranger—a bearded man in his fifties, with a surgically squashed nose and oversized naive eyes, gray and on guard, more suitable to a kitten—had forced her to it.

He was pecking at the peanuts in his palm. “Well, you don't look it—they say it's all in the chin line. Twins are mine, but only on alternate weekends. With me it's always a double felony. Not to mention a couple of breakups. Marital. The way you spell that is m-a-r-t-i-a-l.” He put out his hand, greasy from the peanuts. “Freddy Kaplow. How long've you known Harvey?”

The New York patter. Mechanical spew of the middle-aged flirt; he was practiced enough. And too stale for such young sons. Already finished with the second wife, the mother of the twins. No doubt a grown daughter from the first marriage. The daughter and the second wife were, as usual, nearly the same age.

“Tell Mr. Morgenbluth his pizza was delivered to the wrong apartment,” Puttermesser said. “Tell him 3-C corrected the error.”

“3-C corrected the error. No kidding, that's how come you got here? Cute, I like that. Boy-meets-girl cute.”

Puttermesser took hold of her cart and began to wheel it away.

“There goes Mother Courage,” Freddy Kaplow called after her. “Hey! No guts!”

The two young women from the elevator, still curled on the carpet, were being even more hilarious than before; on the sofa the row of tangled legs had become attentive. Three pairs of trousers (two corduroy, one blue denim), two of panty-hose. One of the men on the sofa—not the one in jeans—wore his hair in a ponytail, but was mainly bald in front.

Puttermesser tugged cautiously on the cart handle. “Excuse me, if you wouldn't mind, if I could just slide through here—”

“Hello there, pizza person, when do we eat?”

The balding man with the ponytail said, “I saw a bag lady the other day with one of those. She had it filled up to the top with piles of old shoes. All mixed up, no pairs.”

“What'd she think she was going to do with them?”

“God only knows. Sell 'em.”

“Eat 'em.”

“Boil 'em in the bowels of Grand Central Station,
then
eat 'em.”

“That's not funny,” said a woman on the sofa. “I
work
with the homeless.”

Puttermesser stopped. Pity for the ravaged municipality—reverberations from her days in officialdom—could still beat in her.

“In our program—it's a volunteer thing—what we try to do is get them to keep diaries. We read poetry, we do E. E. Cummings. You have to make them see that we're all the same. They feel it when you're spiritually
with
them.”

Another version of the New York patter. The wisecrack version and the earnest version, and all of it ego and
self-regard. All of it conceit. Where was virtue, where was knowledge? Puttermesser was conscious of inward heavings and longings. She thought of mutuality, of meaning. So many indolent strutters, so much babble battering at the ceiling. That white piano with the crumbs. In no more than a quarter of an hour the windows behind the piano had begun to darken to blue dusk. Harvey Morgenbluth's beige tweed carpet, his paper cups, the hysteria of those hungry half-orphaned children running loose. Oh for a time machine! London in the grave twilight of a hundred years ago, Sunday evenings at the Priory. Cornices, massive draperies in heavy folds, ponderous tables and cupboards with carved gryphons' claws or lions' feet, old enameled landscapes hanging on tasseled cords from high roseate ceilings. A keyboard left open for the sublime and resolute hands. And in a great stuffed armchair in a shadowed corner, away from the lamp, the noble sibyl, receiving. Lives of courtliness, distinction; clarified lives, without tumble or blur. In George Eliot's parlor, a manner, or an idea, was purely itself. Ah, to leave careless New York behind, to be restored to glad golden Victoria, when the electric light was new and poetry unashamed!

In the foyer several of the tiger-striped pots had been overturned into puddles of wine; Puttermesser drew her cart through a patch of country mud. The spidery plants sprawled. A child's shoe lay flattened under one of the pots. A child's sock had become a glove for the doorknob.

And there, at the littered entrance of 6-C, stood a Victorian gentleman. He was not very tall; his cheeks and wrists looked thin. He was distractingly young, with
a blond mustache, and he was actually wearing a hat—a formal hat, not exactly a fedora, but something more stately than a mere cap. He had on a cape-like raincoat—partially unfurled at each shoulder, cola-brown, and grandly punctuated by big varnished metal buttons as shockingly bright as cymbals. Sherlock Holmes? Oscar Wilde? A dandy, in any case, self-consciously on display. One arm was held high, the other low, and in between rode a large flat rectangle wrapped in pale yellow paper and tied with a white string.

Puttermesser humbly backed her cart into mud to let the dandy pass. He slipped by her without taking any notice. She saw how she was invisible to him, of less moment than the tiger-striped pots displaced in his path.
She
had given way; the pots demanded his circumspection, and obliged him to go around them. It was worse than the Women Attorneys could imagine: the humiliating equation of a counselor of mature appearance with the walls and ceiling of 6-C's desolated vestibule. A doorknob is more engaging than a woman of fifty-plus. The man's face hurt Puttermesser; its youth hurt her. For an instant his head was perilously near hers—picking through the uprooted greenery, he tilted so close that she caught sight of the separate tender hairs of his mustache. His eyes were small and serious. Puttermesser thought with a pang how such a head, with such a dignified hat, and such snubbing colorless irises, and such an unfamiliar gravity of intent, would be out of place in Harvey Morgenbluth's living room, among the New York flirts. And that big flat package: a map? A map of the city, the world? An astronomical map. Andromeda. Ursa Major and Minor. Or a graph. A business
graph. He was only a salesman, so never mind. Anyhow it was an illicit hurt: youth is for youth. An aesthetic error, a thin-skinned moral grotesquerie, to yearn after such a head, hat, cape; that nose, that mouth, those intimate hairs.

In her own apartment Puttermesser collapsed the cart and shoved it back into the alleyway between the refrigerator and the sink. There had been, she observed, a hatching: a crowd of baby roaches milled under the ray of her flashlight, then fled with purposeful intelligence. In God's littlest, the urge toward being and enduring; a soulless mite wills its continuity with the force and fury of our own mammoth human longing. O life, O philosophy!

All the same, Puttermesser sprayed.

In the morning she heard the brush of something in flight under her door:

Dear 3-C:

Just a note of thanx for yesterday's delivery—Freddy Kaplow (your pal and mine) gave me the dope on this. Sorry for the trouble and sorry I missed you! I'd love to return the favor, so if you ever need a passport photo in a hurry (no charge) or anything else in that line call on me. (I'm in the phototography business, by the way.) I specialize in commercial reducing and enlarging but also in children's portraits. If you're interested in having a portrait done of the kids I can offer you a 25% studio discount in honor of your Good Deed!

Yours hastily (on my way to work)

Harvey Morgenbluth

6-C

P.S. Hate to mention it, but your insecticide smells all the way out here in the hall! This means the little visitors get to climb the riser pipe up to yours truly! Thanx a lot, neighbor!

A page out of the
National Geographic
: a pair of civilizations adverse in temperament can live juxtaposed in identical environments. Archaeologists report, for instance, that Israelite and Canaanites inhabited the same kinds of dwellings furnished with the same kinds of artifacts, and yet history testifies to intensely disparate cultures. 6-C's floor plan, Puttermesser reflected, was no different from 3-C's—she had seen that with her own eyes—but Harvey Morgenbluth had room for a piano and she did not. Harvey Morgenbluth gave parties and she did not. 6-C, the palace of exuberance. Harvey Morgenbluth had a business and Puttermesser currently had nothing.

Or, to reformulate it: despite exactly congruent apartment layouts, Harvey Morgenbluth belonged to the present decade and Puttermesser belonged to selected phantom literary flashbacks.

The day was secretly bright behind a gray fisherman's net about to dissolve into a full autumn rain. The coursing sidewalks, still dry, had the spotted look of rapid dark rivers clogged with fish: all those young women in sneakers, clutching Channel Thirteen totes containing their office pumps and speeding toward desks, corridors, switchboards, computers, bosses, underlings. New York—Harvey Morgenbluth included—was going to work. And Puttermesser was idle. She was not idle: it was, instead, a meditative hiatus. She had stopped in
her tracks to listen, to detect; to learn something; to study. She was holding still, waiting for life to begin to happen, why not? Venturing out for air, she was compelled to invent daily destinations—most often it was the supermarket over on Third, if only for an extra package of potato chips; she hated to run out. Or she fell in with the aerobic walkers among the more populated paths of Central Park, close to the protective rim of Fifth Avenue. Or she went mooning through the Morgan Library, the Cooper-Hewitt, the Guggenheim, the Frick; or kept up with the special exhibits at the Jewish Museum—the pitiable history of poor hollow Captain Dreyfus (hair-raising posters, Europe convulsed), shadowy old chronicles of the Prague Golem. New York, crazed by mental plenitude. The brain could not take in so much as a morsel of it, even at the rate of a museum a day. Paintings, jars, ornaments, armor, manuscripts, tapestries, pillars, flutes, violas, harps, the rare, the sublime, the celestial! Forms and illuminations, how was it possible to swallow it all down?

Hand in hand. The parallel gaze. No one knows lonely sorrow who has not arrived at fifty-plus without George Lewes.

From the express line in the supermarket (salty chips, cheese-flavored) Puttermesser headed for the Society Library, where she picked up the Yale
Selections from George Eliot's Letters
(pleasantly thick but portable, as against the nine-volume complete), then gravitated—why not?—to the Metropolitan Museum: the rain had started anyhow. Among the Roman portrait busts on the main floor Puttermesser ate a clandestine potato chip. A female
sculpture in a niche—hallowed serenity wearing a head shawl—who certainly ought to have been the Virgin Mary turned out to be nothing more than a regular first-century woman, non-theological. She was what the Romans had instead of Kodak; yet Puttermesser resisted this pleasing notion. She was unwilling, just now, to marvel at the objects and hangings and statuary glimmering all around—the rare, the sublime, the celestial—in this exalted castle of masterworks. Her mind was on the
Letters
. George Eliot's own voice against Puttermesser's heart. She was tired of 3-C, of reading in bed or at the kitchen table. What she wanted was a public bench; why not?

From Rome she passed through Egypt (the little sphinx of Sesostris III, the granary official Nykure, with his tiny wife no higher than his knee and his tiny daughter, King Sahure in his headdress and beard, Queen Hatshepsut in
her
headdress and beard, and the great god Amun, and powerful horses, and perfect gazelles), and through polished Africa (Nigeria, Gabon, Mali), and through southern Europe, and through Flanders and Holland, and straight through the Impressionists. Immensity opened into immensity; there were benches in all those grand halls, and streams of worshipful pale tourists ascending and descending the high marble stair, but she did not come to the recognizable right bench until Socrates beckoned.

At least his forefinger was up in the air. The ceiling lights of that place—it was French Neoclassical painting of the eighteenth century—seemed wan and overused. The room was unpopular and mostly empty—who cares about French Neoclassical? Puttermesser's bench faced Socrates
on his death bed. Even from a distance away she could see him reaching for the bowl of hemlock with a bare muscular right arm. Socrates was stocky, healthy, in his prime. Part of a toga was slung over the other arm; and there was the forefinger sticking up. He was exhorting his disciples—a whole lamenting crowd of disciples, of all ages, in various grief-struck poses, like draped Greek statues. A curly-haired boy, an anguished graybeard, a bowed figure in a clerical cap, a man in a red cloak gripping Socrates' leg, a man weeping against a wall. Socrates himself was naked right down to below his navel. He had little red nipples and a ruddy face and a round blunt nose and a strawberry-blond beard. He looked a lot like Santa Claus, if you could imagine Santa Claus with armpit hair.

Puttermesser settled in. It was a good bench, exactly right. There were not too many passersby, and the guard at the other end of the long hall was as indifferent as a cardboard cutout. Now and then she stole a potato chip; the cellophane bag rattled and the guard did not stir.