Postcards from Pinsk Read online

  “Okay I’ll bite,” said Gail. “What was the one condition?” She was not even trying to hide the playful smile in her voice. Orrin’s heart rose to the bait.

  “The condition? Yes! That you must respond to my next recorded message. No—my next three recorded messages.”

  “No.”

  “All right, all right—just the one, then.”

  “No.”

  And before he could sally back, she slam-dunked on him again.

  Gail was angry, no question. Not about the state of things currently, but angry about the past. Angrier, admittedly, than he could have guessed. (Months now, after all, with zero softening.) But she would ring again shortly, she would never leave him twisting in the wind this way—“I don’t want to hurt you,” she had said, with apparent sincerity—and when she did Orrin would have the Right Words ready to say.

  But what were they? He worked up a quick draft. I still have your Christmas gift here, he would tell her. Gail loved presents, enjoyed suspense. She would say “No” (in keeping with her new style of discourse) and he would simply say, “It’s nice, though, a very nice gift that you are sure to enjoy,” and he would make no mention of The Lost Gain, not a shadow of a syllable, even though the nasty absurdity of it did keep circling back on him as he was drafting The Right Words.

  By now he had rinsed the jellyglass, the one with Elmer Fudd leveling his blunderbuss at an implied wabbit, and had filled it right up to Fudd’s eyeballs with whiskey. He had drained it back down to Fudd’s lederhosen when the phone did in fact ring again.

  “Hello!” he said, jovial as a two-martini nurse. And he was trying to recollect the perfect hook that would get The Right Words rolling, when he perceived the voice was male. Not lovely and not Gail.

  “Hello,” the voice was saying. “It’s about the room you listed—educated male hetero and what all. I’m wondering if the position is still open.”

  6

  Eli Paperman stood before him so tall and young and vital that it made Orrin slightly faint. And Paperman saw this, for his very first words were, “Are you feeling all right, Doctor Summers? You look a little shaky.”

  Orrin’s impulse was naturally to lie, to offer up a touch of the flu or something. It wasn’t Paperman’s imposing physical presence that had shaken him really, or his obvious command; it was simply the fact of him. Below Orrin’s bed (itself a welter of tangled, mismatched linens) were socks, three or four pair he guessed—nine socks, he would later find, or 4.5 pair—and around each sock would have clustered a soft gray nest of dust, magnetically drawn; Had he been in his right mind to conceive of a roomer?

  For here stood a perfect stranger (the very phrase never had meaning until now) yet someone who could be sharing his life, intimately, by tomorrow. You warned your children off strangers, as your parents had done with you, but the actual strangers in your life were generally pleasant and of little significance. And they were people briefly glimpsed, like the retired Army man who had shared a seat with Orrin on the train out to Lexington, or the bespectacled fellow who had slid the ketchup down the counter to him at breakfast. People who remained strangers.

  That was comfortable and gave you a nice feeling, sometimes, about the world community. This was potentially uncomfortable and even risky, in the same way it was risky to take a mail-order bride in the Yukon. Pot luck and yet you had to make it work, you had to live with it. And now here stood this fellow Paperman, the raw fact of him for Orrin to digest.

  For until Orrin pulled the door open and actually saw him there, the whole idea of a room-mate had continued whimsical. It was a whimsy, a joke of displacement and consolation, and maybe a subtle nose-thumbing toward Gail. He had written it off anyway by this time—not a single response to the deadly syntax of his advertisement—and though he had once imagined the benefits of such an arrangement, Orrin had never begun to assess the burdens.

  He could scarcely take the time to conjure them up now, but the most obvious was impressed upon him willynilly: that he had been alone, on his own recognizance, blissfully unconscious of his face, of his posture and grooming habits, freed of any call on attitude or expostulation or reply, and now instead he was arranging his face and preparing to lie to a perfect stranger about his state of mind.

  He was so stunned, however, that he had yet to speak at all. And during the ten seconds in which Paperman’s rote solicitude hung in the air, Orrin had time for a hundred decisions and revisions of his opening statement. Oddly enough, he settled upon the truth:

  “Well yes, I am a little shaky. I really wasn’t expecting you.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought we said six o’clock.”

  “Oh I’m sure we did. We did in fact. I mean that I wasn’t expecting …”

  “Go ahead, tell me. I’m not that sensitive. If I’m the wrong category in some way, I do understand we may decide not to go ahead—”

  “It’s not that. It’s that I wasn’t expecting anything, you know. I had placed the ad without contemplating the results, and then for days there were no results. And I somehow forgot there might yet be … I’m not expressing it at all, am I. Let me at least offer you a drink, if I may?”

  “Sure, thanks. Would you have a beer?”

  “I think so, but it would just be some cans of Budweiser that have been in the fridge since last summer. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have a whiskey?”

  “Bud in a can is fine—it’s the tangy taste of can that gives it zest.”

  “Zest, is it? A little alloy leeching into the brew? All right, but let me pour it into a glass for you. Have a seat and we’ll talk things over.”

  Orrin’s panic had subsided in the face of Paperman’s easy demeanor. He was glad to be giving Paperman a drink and sitting him down for a chat: looking-ahead to what Paperman might have to say. Already he had moved from the impulsive, What is this bozo doing at my doorstep? to the slightly defensive, What can this tall fellow make of me?

  But it was just talk about the glass. Orrin’s sink was in such disarray that although there might very well be unbroken glasses down in there (and no reason to suppose otherwise) it would take an archaeologist to get one out intact. The lone vessel on the countertop was Orrin’s own jellyglass, which he now reinstated to Fudd’s Eye level (sometimes he would aim for the very pupil, and hold it up to the light like a thermometer to calibrate his marksmanship) before rejoining his applicant in the living room.

  “Are you sure about the can?” said Orrin.

  Paperman looked to be about thirty-five years old, with uncombed waves of red-brown hair, clean-shaven cheeks, and an expression of clear intelligence. “Believe it or not, I actually prefer the can.”

  “And I’m sure you’re right to. Trouble is you can’t get whiskey in a can, so I have to make do with an occasional F.E.—Fudd’s Eyeball, that is.”

  “I can see that. But then you can never ask for your ‘usual’ in a bar.”

  “Not quite, no. It does save money to drink at home.”

  “You could have some fun making a scene, though. Demand to see the innkeeper. What do you mean you don’t serve F.E., what the hell kind of joint is this?”

  “I’m much too shy to enjoy making any scenes, I’m afraid. I suppose as a courtroom lawyer—isn’t that what you said?—you don’t have that problem.”

  “No, I’m not shy. But I’d guess you’re not either, if you don’t mind my impeaching your witness.”

  “Are you calling me a liar in my own home, Eli?”

  “I am saying you don’t strike me as shy. And it may be my home too, after all. I do need one.”

  “Tell me, where are you staying right now?”

  “I had been staying with friends, a week here and a week there. The last two weeks I’ve been in a room at the Oxford Guest House. In Cambridge?”

  “So you’re not among the heating-grate homeless, anyway. Are you new to the area?”

  “No, I was in a house in J. P. for more than a year. Until quite recently. To b
e frank with you, my lady friend kicked me out into the street.”

  “Is that so? So did mine, as it happens—last summer. I have only had this place since July. But what went wrong with yours, if I may be so ‘bold’?”

  Orrin gave a flourish to the word, both to disarm against any possible offense and to play upon the question of shyness. He had given that round—with pleasure, actually—to Paperman. It was a relief to be forestalled against falsehood by simple unadorned insight.

  “Oh it was a gradual thing. I came into a situation where four people were sharing a large house. Gradually I became involved with one of them and gradually she became a little more involved than I could be. So gradually it got bitter until about a month ago when, suddenly, I felt her foot.”

  “The boot! And nothing gradual about it.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Well it’s all very reasonable, I’m sure. Mine was more painful, you know—a long marriage dismantled unilaterally. It’s the unilateral aspect that pains one, you know. I suppose I should sympathize with your friend the placekicker, on those grounds.”

  “I wouldn’t bother. She has already replaced me with something better. She is a woman who goes after what she wants and generally gets it.”

  “Something better, though?”

  “He’s very well off They go skiing in Aspen for weekends and I had to struggle to provide her one rent-a-wreck trip to Mount Tom last year.”

  “An attorney who is not well off? Isn’t that unheard of, a contradiction in terms?”

  “Are you calling me a liar in my own home?”

  “You know, I think I am, Paperman. Yes, I’m quite certain of it.”

  “Good, then, I’m pleased. But it isn’t a lie. I do a lot of pro bono work, and community work. I’m a liberal or a radical or something. An idealist, let’s say.”

  “But are you so strapped that I should worry about the rent?”

  “Definitely not. Worry can take a real toll on people.”

  “As can rent, however.”

  “Well, as you say, I’m not exactly heating-grate homeless. Though I should ask what the rent is. ‘Moderate’ sounds good, but what does it come to in round numbers?”

  “Three hundred a month, your share. The place costs me eleven but I plan to keep the study, and it’s more like a boarder than a straight split. So three hundred was what I thought.”

  Paperman spread his arms and smiled. “Show me to my room,” he said.

  Orrin’s grocery shopping had lately fallen off to the point where he suspected himself of having skipped some meals entirely; certainly there were several he could not recollect. One night the dinner had been dry toast and whiskey, though more typically he would slide a frozen Pizza-For-One into the toaster-oven during the early Jack-and-Liz. There simply was never much else to choose from, for when he ventured down to DeLuca’s Market to stock up, he found everything priced to the sky and nothing that appealed to him anyway. Occasionally he took home, more from a sense of obligation to his earthly corporeal husk than from appetite, some tiny cut of expensive steak and either cooked it and nibbled a bit or put it straight into the freezer from whence it would never return, but gradually became a gray knob of frozen cellophane the transformation of which into dinner stood well beyond his culinary reach.

  Tonight’s occasion, however, called for a good restaurant meal, he and Eli Paperman readily agreed. (Indeed they had thus far disagreed on only one point: Paperman would move nothing in for a week, yet insisted on paying for the entire month of January.) They settled upon a favorite place of Paperman’s, a Cajun room on Boylston, called the Blue Bayou. Rope nets of nylon drooped to conceal a messy ceiling and large red shells had been mounted on the walls; their very best energies, Paperman reassured him, went into the food.

  “You’re a bit out of shape, it seems, Orrin,” Paperman was grinning as they settled in. Paperman had taken the park in vast, unflagging Olympian strides while Orrin scurried to keep up, falling short of breath in the damp freezing air.

  “I hope you aren’t a reformer, Paperman. I’m not seeking reformation, you know, just a little help with the rent. I should have asked: Are you now, or have you ever been, a jogger?”

  “Not me. I confess to being a reformer, but never of individuals, least of all myself And no, I do not choose to run.”

  “Thank Christ for that much. Here you have conned me into sharing my house with you and I haven’t even done the full Inquisition.”

  Orrin did fear the Runner’s Mentality and the baggage it brought along. During the one year Ted Neff had taken it up, had worn the uniform and spoken the language, he had hardly seemed the same man. It was as though they had lost him to a wacky religious cult, or to serious drugs.

  But Orrin didn’t have to care what Eli Paperman did, that was the whole point, and in any case he didn’t care. He approved of Eli in some odd way; maybe liked him was the truer word. Trusted him? Orrin had somehow gone from shock and recoil to complete habituation, in the space of sixty minutes. “I’d have a bottle of Bud,” said Paperman, “and my friend would like an EE. whiskey, neat. And can we get more rolls?”

  Eli was already working on his second of the sweet airy popovers. Orrin smiled, like a foreign dignitary with great faith but little English, as the waiter confessed the house did not carry EE. Now Paperman was sporting: “Well, just bring him the closest to an EE. you’ve got, and then we’ll order.”

  The man withdrew, abashed, and was seen in conference with the bartender, after which he reappeared with Eli’s beer and a shot of VO.

  “The two letters, I guess,” said Paperman, as Orrin choked down a swallow. “The low common denominator.”

  “Fire in a bottle! They have caught it for sure. But I like the place, Paperman, the rolls are excellent. Will this be authentic Cajun food?”

  “Absolutely. They keep an authentic Cajun in a cage back there, and he blesses every dish before they bring it out. But look, how’s about a toast now—to my landlord!”

  “Room-mate,” Orrin corrected him democratically.

  “Well let’s say landlord when you’re pissed off at me and room-mate when you’re pleased. That’s how it usually goes. But now I’m ready for the Inquisition. Shall I make a preliminary statement to the court?”

  “Oh I would.”

  “I am thirty-eight years of age, raised in Palo Alto, California, graduated U.C. Berkeley and ten years thereafter from a small law school in Philadelphia that you never heard of And I have never served in the Armed Forces. Your witness.”

  “Your statement raises two good questions right off the bat, doesn’t it?”

  “If you say so.”

  “It does. One: what did you do in the ten years between college and the anonymous law school? Other than not serve in the Armed Forces, that is.”

  “I don’t know, really. Nothing I can pin down. All kinds of work, travelled. Almost chose a path in life two or three times, almost chose a wife once …”

  “But?”

  “But I wasn’t up to any such choosing and for some reason I was lucky enough to know it. I decided at one point that life was like poker—the longer you could stay in the game without paying out, the better chance you had of winning in the end.”

  “It takes courage to sit tight, though.”

  “It takes something. Immaturity, strength, paralysis. Sort of a combination of virtues and defects. Anyway, what was the second question raised?”

  “Just that I understood people went to California, never the other way round. By the way, did you know that Dreiser and Tom Mix are buried alongside one another in Hollywood?”

  “I should have guessed. I did know they were buried. Or at least that they were dead.”

  “All right it’s a little obscure. But it is a good example.”

  “Of what, though?”

  “It’s an example of California.”

  They ordered dinner. Two green salads, two beers, something called a blackened redfish for P
aperman and for Orrin the seafood gumbo. Paperman urged Orrin to be extravagant, as this would be his treat, while Orrin protested he should be the host. It was therefore resolved that each would pay for the other’s bill of fare, so that each could reap the benefits of both guest and host. Orrin took a second popover and declared he had not been so hungry in months.

  “And I’m half Jewish,” said Paperman, resuming and concluding the thumbnail autobiography.

  “Which half?”

  “That’s a tough call, since the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and vice-versa.”

  “Your father, obviously. Is he a professor in Palo Alto?”

  “No, he writes insurance, as he likes to put it. He doesn’t ever sell any insurance, you understand, he writes it. As though he were Tolstoy or something.”

  “And your mother? Do forgive my natural curiosity and feel free to take the Fifth Amendment if you’d rather talk about the Celtics.”

  “My mother has done some part-time book-keeping, on and off But her main work was four kids, plus of course my father the writer, who is also my father the eater.”

  “Siblings?”

  “No thanks.” They both smiled. It was true that Orrin’s office manner, spare and inviting, could sound in the restaurant setting like an offer to pass the appetizers, or some unlikely condiment in a monkey-dish. “My sister is married, with two kids, in Redwood City. Her husband works for the state of California. He’s a planner. You won’t really remember any of this junk, will you?”

  “Every word, Eli. What does he plan?”

  “As near as I can tell, he plans plans. But they pay him very well.”

  “And the two brothers?” said Orrin, after a brief spate of subtraction.

  “Both younger. Bill played baseball, one year of minor league, and got himself killed in Vietnam. Norm is dying a slower death in L.A., waiting to be Paul Newman the Second.”

  “Looks like Newman?”

  “A little bit. You might have seen him in Caribou Summer, under the name of Tad Randall.”