A Dog for Lorraine

It’s going to be her birthday, we’re out on the deck chairs, the “chaise longues,” as Lorraine calls them, on the balcony overlooking the parkway, she has just told me what she wants, a little dog, not a big dog that slobbers all over you, takes up too much space in a city apartment, frightens old ladies, but small, really tiny, something that will fit in her purse “in case something happens,” her precise words, spoken loudly, distinctly so that I’ll hear over the Sunday afternoon traffic that is starting—stopping—starting at the intersection seventeen floors below.

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F Train

On a slow-moving train clacking softly beneath the city, time itself decelerates to a shuffling idle. Cars creep forward along the rails, heavy with somnolence, barely making headway against some unseen resistance. Pale bulbs float past the windows like buoys. Passengers sprawl from bench seats, absorbed in private reveries and memories of brighter moments. The last station recedes into history toward the time of the pharaohs. The next station is a temporary religion, a prayer for rebirth that might receive no answer from the sky-god, whose presence underground is increasingly doubtful.

At the mid-point of the gently rocking car stands the diminutive Bernadette, sturdy as a medieval warrior. Having surrendered her seat to an elderly Chinese woman laden with red plastic bags full of produce, she surveys her fellow travelers with a calculating eye. Nothing escapes her vigilance. A young Haitian couple with squirming children and a stroller heads further along the line. They will remain firmly on the train, as will the glossy Russian girls, dressed up like super-models, riding home to Brighton Beach. A congregation of nodding fedoras form an irreproachable barricade, nor can relief be expected from an L-shaped block of sleeping Mexicans, for whom another long day of bitter restaurant service is mercifully at an end. Wedged singly among the patchwork of ethnicities, young corporate foot soldiers hide behind newspapers and trade rags, unable to refocus their eyes after so many hours spent poring over bright displays of market data.

From among this fragmented infantry of cubicle jockeys and terrorism survivors, a shining forehead rises abruptly, alerted by the discrete discharge of a hidden gadget. Something in the arching perplexity of his brow and the rapidity with which a tasseled loafer brushes across his knee suggests a potential vacancy, a hole in the dense array of exclusive comfort. But then the loafer settles back into place, the hole seals over. A tiny phone flips open from his pocket as the train emerges into the evening air, its wheels shrieking with the outrage of underground confinement.

Bernadette looks down at her oversized shoes. Minutes pass, and when the doors open at Smith and Ninth, she's on the move.

 

Hamilton and Bernadette

“Before you can understand anything, you have to know whether or not you exist,” Hamilton said in a ringingly penetrating voice, a voice that knew how to make itself heard over the hum of the air conditioner and the background murmur of a small realty office. As he spoke, his long wormlike fingers were in continuous swimming motion, like wriggling clumps of tentacles, across a keyboard that was jammed akimbo into the open pencil drawer of his tiny sales desk. His face was obscured from the view of the others in the room by the large monitor that occupied most of the working surface of his desk, but nobody had difficulty hearing him. “You cannot know anything at all about anything until you are able to prove that you yourself do, in fact, exist,” Hamilton reiterated more emphatically, as if he thought his imaginary opponent could be won over by simple repetition, like hammering a nail into a wooden board, though nobody was arguing with him. He was typing with what appeared to be serious thoughtful engagement with a difficult philosophical problem, possibly directly related to the question of knowledge and existence that he was referring to with his intrusively resonating voice, but in fact he was chatting in an anonymous online forum in which he was identified to the other correspondents by the nickname “hotbuns.”

Hamilton's repetitive assertions were addressed to Bernadette, who sat ignoring him at the desk perpendicular to his own in the small storefront office, and busily copying customer information from a pile of newly filled-out forms into a notebook lying open in front of her. She was very short in stature, almost vanishing behind the notebooks and folders piled on top of her equally diminutive desk, but apart from that, there was something strikingly childlike about her, though her hair was graying at the temples and her light cotton outfit was formal and business-worthy, with a few bright colors poking out at the edges. Only on a closer inspection of her facial features did one take note of a certain pixie-like element, as if she might have stopped growing prematurely at some point in her childhood, due perhaps to some disease or nutritional deficiency, but most people didn't notice this charming aspect on their first visit. To the contrary, she often seemed almost invisible to new customers arriving through the door, who tended to gravitate more readily toward Hamilton's authoritative presence and welcoming display of brilliant white teeth, even though she would usually be the one they ended up working with to locate an available apartment.

Finally, after Hamilton's third and even more piercing iteration of his declaration about knowledge and existence, to be followed no doubt by some lengthy disquisition on the genius of Descartes or whatever it was he had in mind today, she looked up from her work to regard him with controlled annoyance. “The question of whether or not I exist doesn't concern me so much,” she began, “as the question of why it is that some people around here cannot seem to bring themselves to believe that other people also exist.”

 

Red Dress

She wanted a new dress for the Hanley dinner thing that she had been so eagerly looking forward to and talking about so much, and she had specifically said it should be red. It was very important that the dress be red, a point made clear to Mitchell by the particular way she had laughed after saying it, that it should be red, with her eyes slanting up toward the ceiling, and then she had added that it should also be slinky. She wanted a slinky red dress that would enable her to swish around at the up-market gathering and engage in scintillating conversation with the people she spoke so reverentially about, the current inhabitants of the top level of her social hierarchy, a forbidding structure he pictured as something like the new steel and glass building on the west side in which Martha Stewart had purchased an apartment just before going to jail. So what really mattered on that particular afternoon was that she should get a slinky red dress, because she was the woman he was supposed to be involved with—even though she had dragged him to Atlantic City, a place he’d sworn never to visit again, as recently as last Saturday—and was therefore supposed to indulge, and it was the thing she most wanted, so after a quick dinner of cold leftovers they drove to the mall to look for and to buy it.

Mitch maneuvered the car like an old boat through a sea of other cars while she explained how it was such a great opportunity to have been invited. "They can get you into Palmcrest," she said as they drifted down the entrance ramp, clearly wanting to make sure he would make the most of it and not blow it for her. “You don’t have to make any nasty remarks about golf,” she said. “Movies, you can talk about that.”

"Movies," he repeated bitterly as he guided the enormous car gently into a tight mooring, appalled at her absurd prompting. “Right.” Slamming the driver door, he stood watching her for a moment as she strode purposefully away from him and across the lot toward the big store. He decided to get back in the car and just wait for her, to get back in the car and drive off, to get back in the car, turn on the radio and set it back to the station he liked, but then he turned and ran after her, thrusting the keys into his pants pocket. He caught up with her just inside the entrance, where a group of mannequins was set out to greet them, like fellow shoppers. She made a couple of turns this way and that and then mentioned something about "night shadow" as she vanished into the cosmetics department. Pursuing her through a labyrinth of mirrored aisles, he found himself in an open area with an overhead balcony where the perfumed air was particularly intoxicating. Some male mannequins were set up on the balcony and were looking down over the railing into the cosmetics area where he stood wondering which way to turn. They looked like they were searching for their wives.

 

Finn the Conqueror

Finally it’s spring, and she takes the boys out of the small apartment for several hours each morning. “What will it be today Finn, where shall we go, the park, the playground?” Finn wants to go to the playground, to the zoo where he’d seen a snake and hit another child and they’d had to leave, to the botanical garden where the flowers are just now blooming. “Put on your jacket, Finn. Finn? Stop pushing Madsie. Stop right now or you’ll get a timeout.” Now she’s bent down, tying their sneaker laces in double bows, stretching their pullovers down onto their wriggling bodies, preparing treats, making sure there’s no wheat for Finn and that little Madsie has something to chew. “Where’s your green truck Finn? Find your green truck for Mummy.” She carries the bags and toys and extra sweaters and her pocketbook out the door and down the stairs and onto the sidewalk, then runs back to prop open the door and retrieve the double-stroller from under the stairs. She carries it out and unfolds it, smacks the loose wheel back into place so it doesn’t fall off, making sure the boys don’t run into the street—it could happen so fast, just like that, one of them crushed by a passing car, kidnapped by a pederast, they are just the right age and Madsie so cute—then runs in to close the door and back out again. She starts walking toward the park with them strapped in the stroller, checking again for keys, water bottle, blankets, wallet, cell-phone. The green truck falls off the stroller. “Finn, you want to ride the truck? We’re a train! It’s the number six coming into the station at fourteenth street! Stand clear of the closing doors!” Finn pushes the plastic truck furiously forward, rattling fast along the concrete too far ahead. “Finn! Come back Finn! Wait for the train!” Stopping for rice-flour cookies at the Chinese bakery, for coffee at the bodega, for spice at the grocery for the roast chicken, stopping at the video store to return the animated movie that was too violent for kids even though it was made for them. Today she decides to say something, to make a remark, since the man had told her there was no violence and there had been a lot—a huge amount—every scene ended with it, every little problem was resolved with someone getting smashed by a heavy object used as a weapon, any fool could see, and aren’t there any children’s movies without the violence she doesn’t want Finn to see because he already attacks everyone, other kids, passing dogs, even adults? But the man still claims the movie is great for kids, all the other parents go for it and he knows a thing or two about movies, has been in the business for years, used to run a projector in the union, with kids of his own. “Yes sorry, thank you. Finn, we’re going. No movies today. No movie.” Back in the street, she untangles Madsie’s leg that was twisted in the blanket, waits for the light, crosses the street with the stroller, waits for the other light, crosses the other street, enters the park and follows the winding trail.

Now they’re at the playground, where Finn runs to the sand pit, grabbing other kids’ toys from their hands, making them cry out. “Finnn, don’t take the yellow truck. He was playing with it. Where’s your green truck Finn? That’s right. Good boy Finn. You’re such a good boy today!” Positive reinforcement, what the psychologist had said was her only weapon, but she has to intervene forcefully as Finn runs after a little girl to hit her, then grabs his truck and swings it with all his might at a woman’s leg, his face a mask of fury. “Time out Finn! You come over here right now. Sit here! I saw you hit that girl. Sit here for your timeout. You must never hit, not ever.” He starts to obey, then raises his arm to point accusingly at her. “Double timeout for you!” He is yelling. “Triple timeout!”

 

Annals of the Owning Class

During the night there was a noise from the east, a loud reverberating roar that echoed across the sky and rippled back like thunder, but it wasn’t thunder. Nor was it the dreaded airburst that in the murky hollows of our skulls we had been expecting for so long and at first assumed to have finally occurred.

[ And what if it really were the final moment of doing all the things we did—driving cars the size of living rooms, dining on lobsters and clams and plates piled high with cattle flesh, quaffing icy bottles of Pouilly Fuissé and inhaling the caustic fragrance from the refineries that lined the distant shore—who would mourn? ]

What we did was this: we closed our eyes and pulled our puffy quilts across our shoulders to resume the comforting dreams for which we had handsomely paid.

Later, in the cool brightness of morning, with the sun smiling down benignly on our great good fortune, the air fresh and welcoming, our skin tingling at the prospect of driving down to the beach along crushed-shell roads in tangerine convertibles, soaking up the rich radiation that gives vibrant life to the plants and flowers and all the little creatures on God’s green earth, we knew ourselves to be among the joyful few who deserve to occupy this opulent resort, for we were the righteous beneficiaries of a largesse of known origin, and the beautiful day was ripe for our ravishing, all laid out before us like a splendid Disneyland park as its gates open to a busload of lucky children [ or like a dark island woman spreading her knees and yielding to rape. ]

But when we stepped out onto the decks and patios of our baronial compounds to feel the warmth of the sun and the gentle morning breeze fluffing the fine hairs at our temples, our lazy eyes met the strange sight of a dense black column of smoke twisting out over the sea from a burning supertanker that had grounded at low water during the night. The keel of the enormous vessel had cracked like a stick under the weight of cargo at both ends, and the fore and aft halves angled down from the broken pelvis of the mid-section that hadn’t been engineered as a fulcrum and was now thrust upward by the crumpled steel hull. Huge hot flames from open ruptures were rising high into the sky, creating a secondary source of morning illumination, and already the wide surface of water between the inner and outer shorelines had filmed over with an eddying slick that diffracted the firey light into prismatic spectra and hurried southward with the incoming tide, bringing fresh Saudi crude onto the pristine sands below.

Quick change of plans: Hastily punching numbers on the finger-phones to book flights and cars and reservations for other islands farther down the archipelago where the massive spill will not stain the holiday. But no vacancies exist, even at big hotels in colonial harbors insufficiently exclusive for our requirements only days before. All are filled to the gunwales with pasty, mushroom-skinned northerners, like us in general aspect but whose accounts are not nearly so munificent. The deluxe second-tier suites that had not been adequate for consideration we now considered our due, and staff—servants—are set to the task, since we are the masters of this boat that must float, the great and powerful emissaries from the midland clusters of emerald buildings where minerals finally reduce to limitless oceans of money—the thing we make, the language we speak—and the great events await our arrival.

 

Far Along

Possibly for the first time ever, Milo found himself in the position of being able to remove some of the constraints that had been imposed on him by others. He saw before him a world in which he could do just as he pleased, and this new world of freedom was easily accessible to him in the shadowy space underneath the coffee table in his grandmother’s living room, so into this wonderful place he scrambled with gleeful abandon, his knees and elbows pumping like pistons. When he found himself centrally positioned under the table, his grandparents were no longer visible, which for Milo meant that they did not exist. By the simple but audacious act of crawling underneath the coffee table, he had removed his grandparents from the world, thereby removing the annoyance of their power over him, and upon discovering his delightful free agency in this fresh new world, this world in which he was unrestrained by the commandments imposed on him by his grandparents, Milo experienced a feeling of gratification so intense that he could not resist screaming out with joy. So delighted was he by the discovery of his newfound power to break the restraining bonds of familiar relations that he rushed out and crawled right back under the coffee table to discover it again, and again, and again, each time screaming with the ecstasy of his victorious independence.

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Eating with Others

When you are eating a meal in company, do not be in a hurry. Don’t rush to sit down at the table. Wait for others to sit down before you. Someone will tell you where to sit or will pull out a chair for you. When you choose your own seat without help or direction, you appear eager, selfish, and impulsive. Someone is always likely to feel offended that you didn’t sit down next to them. Just wait patiently. Provide an opportunity for others to offer you their assistance. If someone helps you with your chair, that is preferable. It establishes a small human association that is not soon forgotten.

Once everyone is seated, talk to the person next to you. Don’t talk to the person seated across from you. You can do that later. It doesn’t matter if you speak first to the person on your right or to the person on your left. Speak to them both. Make some little remark that puts them at their ease and doesn’t lead into a big subject. If one of them makes you uncomfortable and you don’t know what to say, just smile. Make pleasant contact with your neighbors. You never know who might take an interest in you. It could be someone you would not have expected, or someone who at first does not appeal to you. You never know.

Don’t eat before the others. Start eating only after everyone else at the table has begun. Start with salad. Eat slowly. Don’t pay too much attention to the food, as if you were hungry. The food is secondary. Remember that. Focus your attention entirely on the people at the table and on what they are saying. Don’t talk about the food. If the person who prepared the meal is at the table, wait until the end of the meal to tell them how much you enjoyed it. Don’t eat too much. Don’t eat too fast. Eat slowly. The food is secondary. Focus on the people.

Don’t talk about politics. Everyone has some preference. The very last thing you should do is take sides in a heated debate. You must not appear to hold strong opinions on the issues of the day. If you have feelings, keep them to yourself. Listen and show that you are interested. If someone asks your opinion, say that the topic seems complex, and that will be satisfactory. All topics are complex. Nothing is certain. Anything might happen. (You could end up with nothing.)

Don’t make noises with your mouth. Chew discretely, as if you were not eating at all. This takes practice, but it is very important. Everyone likes to eat, but they don’t like to be made aware that others are also eating. Nobody wants to spend the rest of their lives sitting across from someone who eats loudly. Eat as if you are not eating. Practice in front of the mirror. You will see that you can do it.

Don’t accept seconds. It gives the impression that you have an appetite, which is worrisome, and makes you appear self indulgent. Self indulgent people are interested only in themselves, and tend to become fat. There must never be a hint of getting fat. Try not to eat dessert. Ask for coffee instead. If you cannot avoid dessert, make it known that you would prefer a small portion. Very small.

 

Down the Shoreline

I found myself on the wrong bus one cold rainy day last April. It was headed for a place I detest, a place I have now been to three times in my life, a place with a boardwalk that stretches alongside a sandy shoreline where you can buy salt water taffy and where people walk around in a happy trance from the chiming din of slot machines. Sitting on this bus, I was surrounded on three sides by old ladies in lime-green pantsuits and hairless geezers who believed themselves to be clones of Donald Trump but who were really just sad old tenants on fixed incomes blowing their monthly expendable cash on dreams of glitzy wealth and sexual potency. It occurred to me as the bus roared down the shore highway that I myself might become one of these characters, and not in the far-away future after another long slide down the razor blade of years and outrageous fortunes, but immediately, right here on this trip, that somehow when the bus arrived at the casino gates, I would find myself transmogrified into another hairless geezer clutching a tight roll of twenties and patting the girls on their fannies as I ride the escalator up into the clamorous halls of desperation and longing. But when I finally did descend from the bus and ran to the men’s room to check my hairline in the mirror, I was relieved to find it was intact and that I was still my former self, a discovery that left me with a feeling of joyous liberation, as if my life were beginning anew.

Suddenly I saw the whole place in a new light, and started to enjoy myself. For the entire rest of that day, I drank in the sounds and sights of schmaltzy commercialism and reveled in throwing my money away at the tables. I ate a huge steak dinner at the VIP buffet, with all the trimmings, and considered myself the equal of the richest man in town. I hired a rolling chair and glided gently along the length of the boardwalk behind a plastic film that protected me from the rain, and gorged myself on salt water taffy. Later, on the bus back home, I flirted with the girl sitting next to me, a mere child of seventy-six who was dressed in a particularly refreshing shade of green, and felt a faint stirring, a residual memory in the tissues inside my shorts. When I got home I fixed myself a little toddy to extend the day’s exotic sensations and to make up for the dinner that I would not be able to afford until the first of the month, then I put my teeth in the little cup by the bathroom sink, and hit the mattress.

 

Crossing Fifth and Ninth

On or about an otherwise fine Tuesday afternoon, something ghastly occurred near the bustling sidewalk.  A very messy situation, though not really outside the normal run of things down here, where perturbations of the social fabric often crop up around that hour on weekdays.  A camera van arrived to capture the excitement for the six o'clock news, but didn't stay long.  There was no sex, no racial trauma, just a fairly significant “blood problem.”

By early Wednesday it’s disposed of, covered in plastic and removed from the tree-lined avenue along with soda cans, rusty bedrails, broken exercise machines.  It's a fading, though visceral, scene in the minds of random bystanders who witnessed the young protagonist, a familiar kid from the neighborhood, preparing for his role in the drama of crossing the street — twisting his cap around like a catcher as he looks away for an eye-blink, waiting for a hole in the stream of charging rhinos, lost in the surging moment, his inner eyes converge on the blinking bauble that rests now in the space between his cold hands.