Lech, p.4
Lech, page 4
Once he had ambitions. He’d write a book—true crime of Murmur Lake. But he never got far. His efforts felt canned, melodramatic. Facts eluded him and he had no stomach for fiction. He did his diligence, cut the clippings. “We’re treating it as a suspicious death,” Sheriff Jeff Johnson said. No shit, Sherlock. A dead girl, a naked Hasidic woman—Chaya Bloch, 26—doesn’t just spring forth from the well. Something happened, but what? Her body had been zipped off his property. Bloch, a member of the Satmar Hasidic community, lived in Brooklyn but spent summers in Monticello, some 33 miles from where she was found. No sect was more closed-off than the Satmars. He was no private eye. When life gives lemons, sure, but wasn’t it wrong to lemonade someone else’s tragedy?
Briefly, he’d considered a juicy tell-all of Man’s World magazine, where he’d worked for 25 years, where staffers fancied themselves stars and behaved accordingly, with outrageous tabs at the Chateau Marmont. He’s never even been to the Marmont. Editors lived a vicarious life. Man’s World was parasitic, but it was all he knew. Parasitic symbiosis: I will eat you as you fuck me, the buzz of late capitalism. But no one read anything anymore. Man’s World closed last year to little fanfare. Instead he jots bits, sketches when words fail him, writes letters to his daughters. Dear Heather. Dear Hillary. Occasionally, he mails them. Receives nothing in return. He waits for inspiration to strike. A half-baked poem. An off-color joke. Ira dabbles. The day passes. Days pass. Years. Almost thirteen.
When he dings through Sullivan Sales, Noreen does not look up. Phone to her ear, pen in her lip, puppy mug stuffed with scissors. Her ridge of bangs softens her face though he’s got a good twenty on her. She ought to sit up straight. The wood paneling puckers around the cooling unit. A watermark on the ceiling is shaped like a giant phallus. The entire world was cast in genital signifiers, his daughter Heather said one Thanksgiving, stabbing the patriarchy as yams slid a sweet mash down his throat. Here a cock, there some balls, a graceful cunt in bloom. Ira hadn’t a clue what she’d meant by the hegemony of heterosexism and he wasn’t about to ask. His own college yearbook editor hid a chesty centerfold, Jayne Mansfield type, in their pages as a prank and later became an award-winning cartoonist. Man’s World profiled the guy in 1988, Ira commissioned it, but the subject—his classmate! Class of ‘69!—had no recollection of him, compounding Ira’s shame: how painfully forgettable he was.
He helps himself to a chair. Reenie’s nostrils flare like freshwater gills as she yammers on. He unwraps a mint and flips through the binder. Slim pickings: a mobile home near Roscoe, a 600-acre summer camp, a log cabin in need of a septic system, so he moves on to her mug, drumming a pair of highlighters against the edge of her desk. When it comes to attention, he’s like a toddler—the world does not revolve around you. Viv again.
“How about it, kid?” He rolls out the ventriloquist number on her stapler. “Let’s blow this joint. Are you a cake or pie person?”
Over the receiver, Noreen mouths: I’m working.
“We could catch a minor league game, a movie matinee. Senior passes come with free popcorn and soda.”
She doesn’t answer. He takes the hint. Pushed to the outskirts of another life, no hard feelings, but he doesn’t want to go home, not yet, when there are still so many hours ahead, so he pops upstairs to her apartment where sure enough, Reenie’s kid Paige—not much of a kid anymore—is standing there in the kitchen nook without pants, pudding thighs, Miami Dolphins tee. Cabinets flung wide like they might take flight. She pours him coffee.
“That’s what I call service.”
“I’m not awake. Don’t fucking talk to me.”
There’s a family resemblance, but something not quite formed about her, like maybe it’s congenital. Paige looks like the koalas from the Bronx zoo, heavy-lidded, a vanishing chin.
“Why the hell are you smiling?”
“You remind me of someone.”
His daughters loved the zoo until they hated it, until they grew wise to its cruelty. Why would you subject us to this, Daddy? World’s a cruel place, kids. Paige marches off. Door slams. The apartment shakes. A calendar of aphorisms swings from a nail. Ira tears a pleat of sugar packets into his mug. Left alone, he tackles the dishes, scraping oatmeal with his thumb. The single traffic light blinks from red to green, but the thoroughfare remains silent. You could bowl though it. There is nobody, no one, a stray cat, an all-terrain Ford.
On TV a panel of women dish celebrity weddings, offer the studio audience a year’s supply of protein bars. At Murmur Lake Ira doesn’t have television, not out of principle but willpower. Everything sucks him in, spots for dish soap and hair replacement. Whatever is put in front of him he can’t look away.
“Party’s over, pops.” Paige’s boyfriend comes out, skinny, littered in Bugs Bunny tattoos like some sad grab at childhood that almost chokes Ira up.
Back home, another day fades across the meadow, sun slipping behind the mountain wall, which isn’t true, of course, Copernicus, Galileo, the sun stubborn and fixed as Ira himself; the earth flirting around it in reassuring repeats. His tenant’s car is there, dinky as a Monopoly pawn. Yesterday he dozed on a bed of clover hoping for a peek, but she never materialized, which filled him with fresh yearning, like water rising into a toilet bowl.
Initially, Viv thought he was kidding. They’d been in their East Side apartment putting out bagels for the upstairs neighbors when he dropped the bomb. Weeks later and still, the death cloud spread north from downtown. Ira felt like a goose being primed for slaughter only it was not grain but ash and soot on which he was choking. He could not sleep, could not eat. He could not endure the machinations of brunch with the Glicks in 6F. The towers had collapsed; New York was burning, and he, Ira Lecher, was dying.
“I should be so lucky.”
“This isn’t a joke.”
“Shall we order up a CT? Scan for self-pity on your MRI?” On a fish-shaped platter Viv plated the salmon, oily and translucent. Lox was the color of Fort Lauderdale. Foreskin at $30 a pound, he’d interject around the buffet at ritual circumcisions; to which Viv would remind him there’s a difference between bad and funny.
“Viv, I’m a goner.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Viv pushed a poppyseed through the slicer. “Company’s coming, but you’d rather go off the deep end than make yourself useful.”
Bagels passed through the guillotine. At work, a thirty-year-old named Redmond was the new top dog. Redmond called everyone “bro,” with a shoulder squeeze for bonus condescension. Last week, Ira got the squeeze in the elevator. The kiss of death.
Why stick around for the inevitable? Ira could no longer feign interest in peaked lapels and custom brogues, could no longer convince himself Man’s World sold anything that made men better. Perhaps if he left, his daughters would talk to him again. So he quit. Stopped shaving. Numbed himself with talking heads on TV, images on perpetual loop, as if the repetition might inure him to the fact that these were not shadows but loved ones spiraling to the ground, lost for eternity, recovered without rescue. Like images from concentration camps, gaunt faces of Buchenwald: exposure became desensitizing. Everyone knew someone or had someone or told a story. Yet, still people dug; still people searched, there were tapestries everywhere, tied to chain link, bled out by rain, pleas for information, prayers of hope, as nights to turned to days and more awful nights of waiting and digging, the black hole smoldering, an infinite pit.
“What are we doing? For what?” They’d done this life; done it to expectation, more or less. Went to school and work and married and cheated and had two kids. Sometimes, he and Viv even loved each other. But those days were over. Hillary and Heather left for college, for field studies and co-ed naked parties. He was demonized in dorm rooms like all the other fathers. The girls carried cell phones and his credit card.
“Not we, you.”
“Are you happy?”
“You expect too much.” Viv picked up seeds with the pad of her finger. Upstairs in 6F the Glicks plodded on parquet floors. Ira once asked them to remove their shoes. “Over my dead body,” Harry Glick said.
Downstairs, the Lecher kitchen screamed white in track lighting. A bowl of overripe figs leaked on the counter. Viv kept her back to him, her jet-black hair cropped at the neck, her Navajo sweater hanging from her like something made for a horse.
“Ira, you’re delusional. You’re deluding yourself.” She popped a tub of cream cheese and stuck a knife in it, arranged an Olympics logo in sliced tomato and onion.
“Life isn’t a fairy tale.” She spritzed her succulent. “It’s dead up there. Almost winter. You’re going to die.”
“We’re all going to die. It’s dead here. I brush my teeth and spit soot. There I actually might live a little.”
Ira wound his arms around her waist, nuzzled his cheek into her neck. “Come, try with me.”
“Do I look like Little House on the Prairie?” Viv slipped from him. Flipped the lid off the coffee maker and added water. The machine sprang to life. Gurgle, belch, hiss.
“What will you do?”
“It’s not about doing. It’s about being.”
“Christ.”
They already led separate lives. Viv converted the girls’ bedroom into a home office. Ira woke before dawn to hit the pool, tiptoeing around like an intruder. If pressed, they’d agree: they were stuck in roles not meant for them. Leave marriage to other people. Marriage was a garment from the bargain bin, marked “as is,” the collar too tight, the armholes baggy. Nothing fit.
Their apartment had been paid up. The Second Avenue subway would cut through their building sooner or later.
“Ira, will you ever grow up?”
What he had not anticipated: all that he’d miss. Neckties and martini lunches, office girls with their message sheets in curvaceous script, pitches over the transom, skincare samples of bergamot and sandalwood. Those first months of isolation he beat his chest in atonement. What have I done? There was a term for his suffering—skin hunger—and Ira Lecher was starving. Meanwhile, Viv moved on with swift detachment. In this way she was like his own mother, Ruth, who’d evacuated every last pumice stone and pair of suspenders from their apartment on 183rd Street before Ira’s father’s body turned cold, leaving a closet of wire hangers. Oh, Ira. His mother removed her hat, tucked the ends of her sash into her coat pockets. What is stuff? Stuff is only more to carry, more to store, more to keep track of, more to lose.
Viv’s lotions and calendars and grooming scissors and diet sugar cubes and felt-tip pens: that’s what Ira missed most. Objects promised return, radiated a collateral heat, they warmed him right up, like the hot water bottle his mother would tuck at the foot of his bed. Meanwhile, his daughters continued to rebuff him.
“Get a lovey,” Viv said when he complained.
How long must he wait for a glimpse of the gal? Another day gone, Ira retreats to his cabin, assuming his post on the front porch, as darkness cloaks the sky, as clouds meld into one insufferable cloud, each tip of his rocker a metronomic beat, and—listen, wait, there is only ever waiting.
BETH
A change of scenery can’t change everything: It’s still her life. Beth was never cool enough to entertain any option beyond a prefab path. Parenthood had been sold to her like the wedding industry—gussied in ribbons and bows, to disguise the ugly truth: tedium was a killer. Of all the crap found in books: how to swaddle, how to soothe, how to parse the rainbow of poo, manage anaphylaxis, assuage a child’s fear, not one mentioned the monotony. The ordinariness. Or the erasure.
Her older sister Amy eats it up, uses parent as a verb, guzzles the fizzy pop of ballet recitals and bounce houses. The most important thing you’ll ever do. Beth just aborted her most important thing.
As for regret—there are only days.
She and Zach secure wipes to their feet and gloss the floors as if they’re skating; buy glassware from the side of the road, $8 coke bottles because vintage. They snatch up a life sentence of potpourri, a compost bin, a mausoleum of Tupperware, wheel it out behind the house where it’s sitting ominous and ignored, like climate change. Gather pamphlets on rafting, blueberry picking, a Biblical zoo. Beth tries to make french fries but gashes her finger on the mandolin. The blood is delayed, like a baby’s cry: nothing, nothing, then a gush. When she’s staunched the wound and finished frying Zach says, “They’re not the same.”
Belly down, they lie on the dock, Beth fighting the urge to fall in. Zach would follow, then what. It’s too chancy. She doesn’t have enough faith in herself to rescue him.
“What do you see, Zee?”
Fish and stones. Stones and fish. A ladybug on his hand.
“Make a wish,” she says and he blows.
At night, she can’t sleep. Gone is the buzzy comfort of late night taxis, drunken voices laddering up from the street. In the dark all she hears is
Lighten up
Don’t be so hard on yourself
Don’t sweat the small stuff
Why must you make everything a big deal?
Who do you think you are?
Your problem is
You should be grateful
You think you’re the only one
Bitch
Once a mother always a mother
Quiet brings a new hell. The fridge whirs, floor creaks, the ceiling arranged in post and beam, a tightrope she’d have walked had she actually dated and not merely fucked that contortionist in college who joined the circus dressed in her favorite leotard. She rolls onto her stomach, seesaws her hips, grinding her sheets with the verve of a teenage boy, as if she might fuck her way out of another misery, as if that’s ever worked. She’s a mother who wants to be fucked by a stranger. Her wants are not allowed. Her son is beside her. In the haze she traces the bow of Zach’s lips, a symmetrical pink dip, like Ryan’s. Sometimes, it takes her breath away how much he looks like Ryan.
Why had she shown up at Ryan’s memorial? Maybe she wanted to feel outside of herself. To feel, period. The scale of public terror afforded her a certain thrill where she could partake in the collective mourning without risking herself. Doug saw her and believed his brother had loved her, believed she was more than the booby prize of a dumb dare. He looked at her like she was worth keeping, so she let herself be kept.
How easily her life—Ryan’s life!—might have gone another way. It was miraculous. Well, it was physics. In school she never paid attention to the laws of the universe, random selection, cell biology, how insignificant we all are. Everything born from an irreparable shattering. One prom night and boom: her son’s damp head on the pillow, slick as a newly hatched bird.
That September morning she sat glued to the television. The more she watched the realer it became and the more unreal it felt, horror washing over her, but a voyeuristic, disassociated horror. She ate Cheerios by the fistful only it was not her fist, not her mouth tongue throat, ate the whole box, the wheat paste muffling sound. Did Ryan have time to be afraid? She tries to conjure his smell, the contours of his body (athletic, hairless, pancake brown) but bodies run together. What, then, is memory? Before Zach, love was a word reserved for songs and movies. She considered herself impervious, incapable, like that part of her, the loving part, the lovable part, was missing or stunted or had suffered frostbite, blunting her nerves.
She curls herself around Zach, his skin tender and thin as an animal’s underbelly. Exhilarating, to watch a person sleeping, at their most vulnerable. It gives her a sick sort of power. Watching now touching and breathing him in, there’s no greater clarity. What she feels is primal: love, driven by hunger and pure need.
She deals his body a tight squeeze. “Morning, starshine.”
Zach blinks. Fishbowls. Ryan, Ryan.
“Mommy.” His arms reach for her. “I’m awaked.”
Today is a wash. The sky opens, angry sheets, and Zach clambers onto her reading This one has a little star. This one has a little car until her thighs fall asleep. Rain scolds the roof. You whore, it beats, scaling higher, lighter, becoming tinny, like laughter, spattering against metal, dropping softly into the muck. The principal from her last job cornered her against his desk before firing her, which was almost laughable, bet your bottom dollar, how expendable she was, how scripted everything is, sitting and snuggling, the celibate sound of rain.
“No sleeping on the job!” A pair of plastic people creeps up her thigh, one in a hard hat, the other with snap-on hair. “Want the good guy or the bad guy?”
“Whichever,” Beth says.
After the rain, a rainbow.
“Fake,” Zach says gravely, “illusion,” and her heart sinks. He’s not yet in kindergarten.
“How do you know?”
“Everyone knows. It’s the light playing tricks.”
“Well, it’s real to me. And do you see that, a double—that’s practically magic.” She stands in the window, but he’s already ceded his interest to toileting, a new independence. She calls after him, “Do you know how lucky we are?”
“Can we com-pose now?” He returns, shorts bunched at his ankles.
The compost bin is where they left it, next to the cooling system, beneath her bedroom window like a peeping Tom. Beth clips the instruction booklet and Zach takes it, sounding out microbe, optimal, aeration. When her mom died, they didn’t wait for nature to take course but hastened the deal, from dust to dust, scattering her remains along the shoulder of Route 66 by Flagstaff, russet and ash turning to paste on Beth’s fingers, the occasional chip of bone.
The demonstration at Hand’s Hardware had won Zach over. “We eat greens bred on yesterday’s garbage,” an employee in a tangerine polo explained. “Nothing truly dies.”
