Postcards from Pinsk Read online

  They sat in a sunny window of the Barrister, an otherwise dark bar directly across Cambridge Street from the courthouse. Eli ordered stuffed quahogs, which were served on the sort of large white half-shells that people sometimes use for ash-trays, and a pitcher of pale flat beer. To Orrin it tasted like club soda, but he drank up to be a good boyo, and to inspire the modulations of Marcy Green’s smile.

  “It was not high drama,” he said, “but at least justice was done. Is it usually?”

  “You really never know. If we got McKinnon, the hanging judge, they would all have been on bread and water for the statutory year. It also helps that no one in this bunch has old cross-references in the EB.I. files.”

  “You must be joking.”

  “You heard Epworth. And he’s by far the most decent—he might even approve of the demonstrations. But he will lock up a second offender just the same.”

  “Well, for now anyway, here’s to jurisprudence. And to the victor go the spoils.”

  With his glass, he had indicated Marcy. That smile of hers must surely have launched a few ships in its time, maybe not a thousand but one or two a month anyway, set adrift on the deep blue sea of urban America. Fairly full, well-defined, curving lips—and the teeth. What were the mechanics of a smile, such that a show of teeth could alter relations? Teeth?

  “But I’m the victor,” she said. “This clown here is just my mouthpiece—dime a dozen.”

  “All right, then, to the spoils go the victor. And that comes from a book, though I’m damned if I can remember which one. My wife would know.”

  He did not feel like a third wheel, but rather like an approving elder presence, for whom they could display their youthful beauty and their affection for one another. Strangely, he liked the role.

  “Tell me, Marcy—what do you do, aside from reclining upon the accessway to laboratories?” They smiled at his comical, Boris Karloff enunciation of the word, for no better reason than good nature and the happiness of the moment. Beer love.

  “Currently,” said Marcy, “I am floundering.”

  “In the fishing industry, you say?”

  “A wag! No, I’ll tell you the whole sad story sometime.”

  “Why not now? I love a sad story.”

  “Go ahead, Marce, I’ve got a call to make anyway,” said Paperman. “She just won’t tell it in front of me, in case she needs to change a few details.”

  “Maybe I will tell you. A shrink? You could be just what I need.”

  “Would that it were so!” said Orrin, flirting outrageously under cover of Paperman’s age and ascendancy. All in good fun. “You go use the telephone, Eli. We’ll curl up by the fire with this saddest of stories. Page one, chapter one—”

  “Chapter One, I waste my life. Ten years as a dancer …”

  “Wasted?”

  “Yes. Not good enough to cut it, and not quite bad enough to quit. Or maybe I was bad enough and just loved it too much to know. But I knew I hated teaching it.”

  “That was painful.”

  “Yes. Especially with the good ones and the very bad ones.”

  “You identified with the others? Who were caught in the middle?”

  “If you say so, Siggy. Maybe if I’d done more—even a few of the small prestigious halls—I could have settled into an atelier and grown old gracefully with it. You know, with my hair up in a bun.”

  “Your hair would certainly look lovely in a bun,” Orrin said to her. Silly fool, he said to himself. But she didn’t notice, or mind. “So when did this great waste conclude? Or has it?”

  “A couple of years ago. Since then I’ve just worked at jobs.”

  “Goodness, girl, you make it sound like a dirty word. Jobs, and the people who do them, make the world go around, Marcy.” (Silly silly fool, he thought. Better calm yourself, quickly.) “What sort of jobs, though?”

  “I’ve done desk. I’ve waitressed. Spent six months as an air hostess.”

  “Not really? You must have risqué tales to tell.”

  “Not really. Frankly, I never wanted to sleep with businessmen.”

  “Just never made it a goal of yours.”

  “No.”

  “So why did you fly?”

  “Who knows. Maybe just to get a rise out of people like you and Eli.”

  “Ah. And now you are floundering.”

  “Currently, yes. Waiting for something to turn up, as Micawber would say. I hear the big money now is in escort prostitution, except I—”

  “Never wanted to sleep with businessmen.”

  “You got it. Shrink, shrank, shrunk.”

  Marcy shrugged and knocked back a long swallow of beer. Orrin admired her way with a glass, her understated if slightly rehearsed cynicism, her smooth arching neck.

  Teeth were a new consideration, but he did know about necks. As a young practitioner, he had interviewed for the state of Rhode Island a multiple strangler who was a sex fetishist of necks. Since you could not properly fuck a neck, the lad attacked his problem otherwise, but, as Judge John Epworth had pointed out in Green et al. v. Baker Laboratories, there are laws.

  Again Orrin’s admiration was aesthetic, not impassioned, deriving as though from a Degas sketch some sense of the power in a line. The connoisseur. But even the connoisseur knew that this was more than a line, it was alive and beautiful. He knew exactly what young James Hinderlie of Woonsocket, Rhode Island would have felt for this neck, and what Hinderlie would have done.

  Orrin next saw his room-mate at six o’clock of the following evening, when Eli burst in the door with both arms full. Buckets of Chinese food, a six-pack of beer, and a white box with ribbon and string-cannoli from Hanover Street.

  “I was all over the map of the city today, so I did a little food-gathering for the tribe. Have you eaten?”

  “Oh no, I’m not even with drink yet. What a lovely idea, Eli. I’ll set the table?”

  “Why bother? Let’s just woof it off our laps like good Americans—news and booze, if that’s what you were planning.”

  “Irish whiskey with The Buddha’s Delight?”

  “Why not. And then let’s watch the worst show on television—something ridiculously mindless and decadent.”

  “You, Eli? Even I don’t need reform there.”

  “Oh but I want to see those catty women swaying under a thirty-pound load of makeup; I want to see Today’s Man, silk-suited and desperate for a sniff of them. In fact, I can hardly wait.”

  Scooping the food off their laps like good Americans, drinking off the arms of their chairs, they relaxed for hours in the same way Clyde and Elspeth might have done in junior high, when they would poke fun at the shows and commercials while gnawing their way through the pantry fare like a pair of giant rats. It sometimes bothered Orrin that they always ate more between meals than they ever did at the carefully laid table, but Gail correctly argued that food was food, with those two as thin as pickets …

  Eli made it to The News At Ten, before announcing he needed a solid eight hours. Orrin could not believe his ears.

  “Sleep too? That lovely gal isn’t wearing you out, is she?”

  “I have these binges. About twice a year—my version of the flu. But I’ll be fine in the morning, don’t worry. The waterfront at five-thirty?”

  “Unlikely, thank you, Eli. I did mean to tell you, she’s a charming girl. Wonderful.”

  “Yeah, Marce has got a little tang to her.”

  “Is that the best you can say? To hold her roughly equal to an old can of Bud?”

  “You said that.”

  “But such indifference, counselor. Are there really so many fish in the sea?”

  “Is that the best you can do? To compare that charming creature to some slimy fish?”

  “Well she did mention she was floundering, but no, I can definitely do better. Let’s say a swan.”

  “Okay, then. And thanks, Orrin, I agree she is a good one. We get on pretty well together too, considering that we’re members of complete
ly opposite sexes. Did he say snow?”

  “Who, Jerry? I didn’t hear him. And you didn’t either, Paperman, you’re just changing the subject.”

  “What I’m really doing is hitting the hay, whatever Jerry said. But I’ll be sure and relay Marce your compliment about her looking like a duck. She’ll like that.”

  “A swan, as you know. But don’t. You might inadvertently omit all the implicit poetry of the remark.”

  “And just give her the bird? Ah, enough of this. Good night, O’Summers.”

  Orrin’s smile outlasted Eli’s exit, softened and stayed as he sat recollecting a thousand college nights, jesting the night away with meaningless good nature. It was a warm time for the heart, that closed society of males. A thousand unselfconscious moments that were memorable precisely because they counted for absolutely nothing.

  When the phone stirred him, half an hour later, he reached for it quickly—not because he thought it might count for something, but simply to guard Eli’s rest. Was it a trick of the mind, though, or a valid extrasensory perception that made him so certain it would be Gail?

  “I knew your ring,” he said. “Really I did. Tell me how you are, my dear?”

  “I’m fine, Orrin. Are you well?”

  The phrase slipped past him, with its oddly formal cadence, so that he could only reach out and nudge it ahead, like a slowly floating balloon: “Quite well, thanks, and yourself?”

  “Fine, I already said. Everything all right at the office?”

  “What is this, Gail?” he suddenly snapped. “Have you been hearing rumors I went bricko or something? That I quit working to grow my fingernails? This has a strange sound to it. What’s up?”

  “You’re right, of course, I was in a strange mood to call you. I can’t explain. I was worried, that’s all, and thought I’d better check on you.”

  “You thought I might be planning remarriage?”

  “To be honest, I was afraid you might be dead.”

  “And you sought to inherit?”

  “No need to get nasty, Orrin.”

  “Of course not. I’m sorry for that. You know how happy I am to hear from you, no matter why.”

  “I had a dream about your dying, and it frightened me. As I say, I can’t explain it—it’s irrational. I simply wanted to confirm you were all right.”

  “Well I’m touched, Gail, truly touched. To think you care a bit makes things almost acceptable. Maybe we’ll see each other after all, at the Neffs on Saturday?”

  “Fifty-fifty for me, at this point.”

  For several minutes Orrin could again sit basking in an afterglow, this time from Gail’s newfound concern. Yet a note lingered from her tone, perhaps even more so from her having stuffed him eight months earlier. She had left him dashed, ripped, to recover on his own; now she was calling because she’d had a dream. In a weaker moment he might have taken wild heart from the anomaly, but now it seemed the lingering note was one of false hope, as though in the absence of his hectoring pestering calls she feared the loss of his pained adherence.

  Keeping him on the string—wasn’t that the subtext? Renewing her power over him? In settling the long emotional score, it could be part of her catharsis to see him still twisting.

  The business about Theo’s party—what was the angle there? Did she wish to raise false hopes there too, that she would show up and be congenial, or even loving? She could be setting him up for a harder fall if she arrived at the party under foreign sail in spite of Clyde’s disclaimer. Orrin hated to think she might be plotting against him, or toying with his moods and expectations. But if she really cared about him, why not just come home and resume a proper life?

  Orrin struggled, unsure of his ground here. In fairness to Gail, he had to acknowledge the many times he had begged her message-machine for mercy, assuring it they could at least still be friends. And though it was true she had not been friends when he most had needed her friendship, this was perhaps the way of things, the dance of moon and water, neap tide and spring tide. It was probably inevitable that the ebb and flow between two people be poorly synchronized. Certainly relationships, like everything else under the moon, turned on timing. Not on emotions themselves, but on the timing of them—on when they kicked in. On luck, again.

  “Thank you so much for calling,” he had closed. That way of uttering slightly absurd courtly salutations was a large part of Orrin’s charm, whether deeply heartfelt, purely social, or both at the same time. “I’m so pleased you thought to do so.”

  So many so’s, though! Perhaps what he should have done instead was give her a nice little shot of timesis, a vrai broadside. (Good fucking night, you awful damn shrew!) For she was hitting him, wasn’t she—but softly, so as to make it feel almost good.

  12

  The day after Gail’s call, Orrin had a dream of his own. Gail had sent a note on blue perfumed rice-paper, inviting him to see her new flat in the Back Bay. He went, only to find himself at an address on Thames Street in Providence, not far from the old office in the Commodore Building.

  He saw a silhouette pacing back and forth across a curtained triple-casement, then watched the door fall ajar before he could touch the bell. A cool wind lifted him inside, where he stumbled onto a carpet of astonishing thickness, a silent pile of autumn leaves.

  From his knees, Orrin spotted her, in a yellow negligée so short it did not cover her naked hips and thighs. She was starting up a central staircase, sexually exposed, when he now saw it was not Gail but a much larger woman with glossy black hair and laser-bright green eyes that he could see, or sense, even while watching her back.

  His outcries echoed to no result and when he attempted to stand, invisible bands of steel locked the backs of his legs like terrible cramps. Pleading for help, he crawled forward to the bottom stair, but the gargantuan woman, with powerfully sculpted buttocks like a Rodin bronze, neither turned nor spoke as she kept ascending a now endless flight of wide white-carpeted stairs.

  “You invited me here!” Orrin insisted. “You must help me.”

  “I invited you to Marlborough Street,” she said, the voice sounding from far off (from inside a telephone, possibly), “not here.”

  Orrin awoke with a deep soreness in his neck and both legs tensely constricted, bound up in the twisted bedding. His chest was soaked inside the pajama jacket and his long moribund member was now a shaft of irreducible granite, having siphoned off the blood from the rest of his body. It took some time, and some slow steady breathing, before the effects of the dream released him.

  It was old Homer who observed that many a dream is mere confusion, “a cobweb of no consequence at all.” But not this one. And Orrin knew enough about dreamwork to ignore the woman’s superficial appearance, for here it was Proust who had pointed out that in dreams “The person whom we love is to be recognized only by the intensity of the pain we suffer.”

  To come upon a dream so purely clinical was nothing new to Orrin Summers, but the intense sexuality, this rare sweat of arousal was something else again. It was annoying, no question, to know that he had dreamed of her sex, where she had dreamed of his death. That told the story! No amount of fiddling with faces, facts, or somatic stimuli could redirect such raw data as that.

  He thought of Paperman’s girl, in the tavern booth with that smile, and for a second wondered … But no. As his pulses receded, he knew it was Gail, Gail’s arms and legs he could image encircling him. He could scarcely recall their last time together—two years, at least. And two years without sex (which it had been for him, no sweet substitutes) could cause a man to wonder much. Hereby apprised that both the need and the power to attend it persisted in him, he had to question the meaning of his long celibacy.

  His colleague Beekman maintained that seven days without an orgasm rendered the mind at best semi-operational. And what about the Farnums—Ginny going off at sixty with a much younger man and Eliot, jilted at sixty-two only to ricochet into the bed of Wilma Robillard the very next night? Was he,
Orrin, simply an oldfashioned fool? His celibacy had seemed tolerable and sane, but was it?

  Maybe it was. He loved Gail after all, she was the one he wanted; should it be so easy to transfer that? His only date since the separation had been the enchiladas verdes with Amy Sugar, a sexual dead-end so to speak, and that had seemed appropriate. Yes, Orrin thought, I am denying my sexuality. And then, timetically, Big Fucking Deal. I’ll stop denying it when I want to stop.

  Some people could fool Orrin Summers and Orrin Summers could surely fool some people. He was convinced, however, that not for one minute could he ever fool himself.

  Next day, the night of the Neff’s house party, Orrin was torn between the desire to see Gail there and the wish to hit her with a pre-emptive strike.

  Possibly he could accomplish both goals, Eli suggested, when Orrin broached the topic over breakfast at The Paramount.

  “Oh no, Gail is much stronger. If I do see her, I’m the one who will feel it.”

  “You should go. These are your friends—your network of support. Isn’t that a psychological term?”

  “It’s the old sucker play, and I refuse to play the old sucker.”

  “Well but if it’s gamesmanship, O’Summers, you could go her one better. Take along a lovely. Who’s the prettiest woman you know?”

  “Gail’s friend Kate Walter. A real stunner. But she loathes me, unfortunately, always has. No idea why.”

  “Someone new, then. Flaunt your friendship with some new mystery woman to get Gail’s goat.”

  “I have no mystery woman to flaunt, Paperman, lovely or otherwise.”

  “You could flaunt Marcy! She’d do it in a flash. She loves to ham it up, you saw that.”

  “Eli, I’m surprised at you. The rusty knife?”

  “Gail shouldn’t care. If she does care, we’ll have helped matters. And if she really doesn’t, at least you’ll have learned something.”

  “Oh good. Who wants to learn that?”

  “Come on you chickenshit, flaunt Marcy Green.”

  “Maybe some other time. But thanks anyway—for the network of support. The truth is I don’t like my friends all that much.”