When You Are Engulfed in Flames Page 8

  The word threw me. “‘Pretentious’ is knowing someone who met Pina Bausch, not someone who met Oprah.”

  “It depends on what circles you’re running in,” he said, and I supposed he was right, not that it gave Helen anything to be snippy about. I’d lost count of all the times she’d mentioned her friendship with John Gotti, head of the Gambino crime family. “He’s a very good-looking man,” she’d say. “Pictures don’t do him justice.” After pressing, I learned that by “friend” she meant they had been introduced at a party thirty years earlier and had danced for two minutes before someone cut in. “John is very light on his feet,” she told me. “That’s something most people don’t know about him.”

  “Maybe they’ll bring it up at his murder trial,” I said.

  Helen fell in the tub and sprained her wrist. “That’s it for the cooking,” she told us. “You’re not getting any more free meals out of me.”

  Hugh and I shuffled back across the hall and shut the door behind us. No more “Famous Veal Cutlet”! No more “Famous Sausage Casserole”! No more “Famous Chicken with the Oriental Vegetables”! We could hardly believe our luck.

  While Helen was laid up, I went to the store for her. Hugh took down her trash and delivered her mail. Joe, a widower now, offered to help as well. “Anything that needs doing around the house, you just let me know,” he told her. He meant that he’d change lightbulbs or run a mop across her floor, but Helen took it the wrong way and threw him out of her apartment. “He wants to give me a bath,” she told me. “He wants to see my twat.”

  It was shocking to hear this word from a seventy-three-year-old woman, and in response I winced.

  “What?” she said. “You think I ain’t got one?”

  Three months after Hugh joined the scenic union, the membership voted to go on strike. This is the group that paints backdrops for movies and plays. I wanted to be supportive, and so I tried coming up with slogans that might sound good on a picket sign: “Broadway Gives 829 the Brush-off” was my idea, as was “Scenic Painters Find New Contract Unpaletteable.”

  On the first morning of the strike, Hugh left the house at 7:00 a.m. A short while later, Helen called. I normally wouldn’t pick up at that hour, but her voice on the machine was slurred and frantic, and so I answered. Since I had known her, Helen had, in her words, “taken” three strokes. They were, she’d admit, little ones, but still it worried me that she might have had another, and so I got dressed and headed across the hall to her apartment. The door jerked open before I could knock, and she stood in the frame, her lower jaw sunken, the lip invisible. It seemed that she had been at her window, surveying the scene below, and when the super in the building across the street threw a lit cigarette into our trash can, she yelled at him with such force that she blew her lower plate right out of her mouth. “Itch in da schwubs,” she said. “Go giddit.”

  A minute later I was downstairs searching the planter in front of our building. There I found a beer bottle, a slice of pizza with ants on it, and, finally, the dentures, incredibly unbroken by their five-story fall. It is not unpleasant to hold someone else’s warm teeth in your hand, and before returning upstairs, I paused, studying the damp plastic horseshoe that served as Helen’s gum. What made it all look so fake was its perfection. No single tooth protruded or towered above its neighbor. Even in shape and color, they resembled a row of ceramic tiles.

  Back upstairs, I found Helen waiting on the landing. She slid the dentures, unwashed, back into her mouth, and it was like popping the batteries into a particularly foul toy. “Rat bastard motherfucker could have set our whole building on fire.”

  In the mornings Helen listened to the radio, an oldies station I referred to as “K-WOP.” All the singers seemed to be Italian, and all were backed by swollen string arrangements. Whenever a favorite song came on, she’d crank up the volume, subjecting us to countless versions of “Volare” and “That’s Amore.”

  Radio meant a lot to Helen, but only her station. When I was invited to record a series of commentaries for NPR, she took no interest whatsoever. The morning my first story was broadcast, she pounded on our door. I was in the bedroom with a pillow over my head, so Hugh answered, and gestured to the air around him. “Listen,” he whispered. “David is on the radio.”

  “So what?” Helen said. “A lot of people are on the radio.” Then she handed him an envelope and asked if we’d mail in her stool sample. “It’s not the whole thing, just a smear,” she told him. When the broadcast was over and I finally got out of bed, I noticed that she’d posted her stool sample with Christmas stamps and included the spidery handwritten message “Happy Holidays.”

  Our building was full of people who, for one reason or another, had found their way onto Helen’s shit list. Some were doomed right from the start: she didn’t like their looks or the sounds of their voices. They were stuck up. They were foreign. Our landlord had a small office just off Bleecker Street, and Helen used to call him at least three times a day. She was like the secret police, always watching, always taking notes.

  Then the landlord died, and the building was sold to a real estate conglomerate located somewhere in New Jersey. The new owners didn’t care that the woman on the second floor had found a black boyfriend, or that the super was composing electronic music instead of improving his English. Overnight Helen became powerless, and those who had lived in fear of her grew progressively more defiant. You’d think she would hate being called a tattletale or, even worse, “a nosy old bitch,” but, strangely, such names seemed only to invigorate her.

  “You think I can’t kick your ass?” I’d hear her yell. “Ya mutt, I’ll mop the fucking floor with you.”

  The first few times I heard this, I laughed. Then it was me she was threatening to mop the floor with, and it suddenly didn’t seem so funny. This was another of those arguments that came out of nowhere: a word here, a word there, and the next thing I knew we were at each other’s throats. Ironically, the fight started over a blown fuse. My electricity had gone out, and I needed a key to the basement. Helen had one, and when she refused to loan it to me, I told her she was being an asshole.

  “That’s better than being a drunk,” she said, and she waited a moment for the word to settle in. “That’s right. You think I don’t see you with the empty cans and bottles every morning. You think I can’t see it in your swollen face?”

  Had I not been so loaded that I could barely stand, my denial might have carried a bit more weight. As it was, I sounded pathetic. “You don’ know. Anything about . . . what. Goes on with. Me.”

  We were in her doorway when she put her hands on my chest and pushed. “You think you’re tough? You think I can’t kick your ass?”

  Hugh came up the stairs just then, his ears ringing from all the noise. “You’re like children, the both of you,” he told us.

  Following our little scene, Helen and I didn’t talk for a month. I’d hear her in the hall sometimes, most often in the morning, giving food to Joe. “It’s my Famous Pasta Fagioli, and that one next door, the Greek bastard, would die if he knew I was giving it to you.”

  It was a stranger who brought us back together. In the ten or so years before she retired, Helen cleaned house for a group of priests in Murray Hill. “They were Jesuits,” she told me. “That means they believe in God but not in terlet paper. You should have seen their underwear. Disgusting.”

  In her opinion, a person who hired a housekeeper was a person who thought himself better than everyone else. She loved a story in which a snob got his comeuppance, but the people I worked for were generally pretty thoughtful. I felt like a bore, telling her how unobtrusive and generous everyone was, and so it came as a pleasant surprise when I was sent to clean an apartment near the Museum of Modern Art. The woman who lived there was in her late sixties and had hair the color of a newly hatched chick. Mrs. Oakley, I’ll say her name was. She wore a denim skirt with a matching blouse and had knotted a red bandana around her throat. With some people this m
ight be it, their look, but on her it seemed like a costume, like she was going to a party with a cattle-rustling theme.

  Most often a homeowner would take my jacket, or direct me toward the closet. Mrs. Oakley did neither, and when I made for the brass rack that she herself clearly used, she said, “Not there,” her voice a bark. “You can put your things in the guest bathroom. Not on the countertop, but on the toilet.” She pointed to a door at one end of the foyer. “Put the lid down first,” she told me. “Then put your coat and scarf on top of the lid.”

  I wondered who would be stupid enough not to have understood that, and I imagined a simpleton with a puzzled expression on his face. “Hey,” he might say. “How come my jacket’s all wet? And while we’re at it, who put this turd in my pocket?!”

  “Something amuses you, does it?” Mrs. Oakley asked.

  I said, “No. Not at all.” Then I jotted down the time in my portable notebook.

  She saw me writing and put her hands on her hips. “I am not paying you to practice your English,” she told me.

  “Excuse me?”

  She pointed to my notebook. “This is not a language institute. You are here to work, not to learn new words.”

  “But I’m an American,” I told her. “I spoke English before I got here. Like at home, growing up and stuff.”

  Mrs. Oakley sniffed but did not apologize. I think she wanted a foreigner so badly that she heard an accent where there was none. How else to explain it? Being a desperate, godforsaken immigrant, it went without saying that I coveted everything before me: the white wall-to-wall carpet, the framed reproduction of Renoir’s Brat with Watering Can, the gold-plated towel rack in the marble master bathroom.

  “I have very nice things,” she announced. “And I expect to still have them after you’ve left.”

  Was this the moment I decided to make up with Helen, or was it later, when Mrs. Oakley screamed at me for opening the medicine cabinet? “When I told you to clean the master bathroom, I meant everything but that. What are you, an idiot?”

  At the end of the day I caught the subway home. Helen was staring down from her window as I approached our building, and when I waved at her, she waved back. Three minutes later I was sitting at her kitchen table. “So then she told me, ‘I have very nice things and I expect to still have them after you’ve left.’”

  “Oh, she was asking for it, that one,” Helen said. “What did she say when you slapped her?”

  “I didn’t slap her.”

  She looked disappointed. “OK, then, what did you break on your way out?”

  “Nothing. I mean, I didn’t walk out.”

  “Are you telling me you stayed and took that shit?”

  “Well . . . sure.”

  “Then what the fuck?” She lit a fresh cigarette and tucked her disposable lighter back into her pack. “What the fuck are you good for?”

  The first time I went to Normandy I stayed for three weeks. After returning, I went straight to Helen’s, but she refused to hear about it. “The French are faggots,” she said. As evidence, she brought up Bernard, who was born in Nice and lived on the fourth floor.

  “Bernard’s not a homosexual,” I told her.

  “Maybe not, but he’s filthy. Did you ever see his apartment?”

  “No.”

  “OK then, so shut up.” This was her way of saying that the argument was over and that she had won. “I bet you’re glad to be back, though. You couldn’t pay me to go overseas. I like it where’s it’s civilized and you can drink the water without running to the terlet every five minutes.”

  While in France, I’d bought Helen some presents, nothing big or expensive, just little things a person could use and then throw away. I placed the bag of gifts on her kitchen table and she halfheartedly pawed through it, holding the objects upside down and sideways, the way a monkey might. A miniature roll of paper towels, disposable napkins with H’s printed on them, kitchen sponges tailored to fit the shape of the hand: “I don’t have any use for this crap,” she said. “Take it away. I don’t want it.”

  I put the gifts back into the bag, ashamed at how deeply my feelings were hurt. “Most people, most humans, receive a present and say thank you,” I told her.

  “Not when they get garbage like that, they don’t,” she said.

  In fact these things were perfect for her, but Helen wouldn’t accept them for the same reason she wouldn’t accept anything: the other person had to owe and be beholden. Forever.

  I picked up the bag and headed for the door. “You know what you have?” I said. “You have a gift disorder.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s like an eating disorder, only with presents.”

  “Take that back,” she said.

  “My point exactly.” And then I left, slamming the door behind me.

  Helen knocked on January 1, just as I was leaving for a cleaning job. “Work on New Year’s Day, and you’ll work every day of the year,” she told me. “It’s the truth. You can ask anybody.”

  I wondered for a moment if she was right, and then I considered the last little truism she had passed my way: you won’t get a hangover if you sleep with the TV on. She also claimed you could prevent crib death by making the sign of the cross three times with a steak knife.

  “If you’re camping, could you use a Swiss Army knife instead?” I asked.

  She looked at me and shook her head. “Who the fuck goes camping with a baby?”

  Helen was shaking out her pills: the ones for her heart and her high blood pressure, the pain in her side and the new one in her right leg. Trips to the doctor were her only ticket out of the apartment, and after each visit she’d spend hours on the phone, haranguing the people at Medicare. When that got old, she’d phone McKay’s drugstore and have a go at the pharmacist. “I’d like to cut his balls off and stuff them down his throat,” she told me.

  Now there were new pills she needed to take. I offered to pick them up for her, and along with the prescription she handed me a receipt. It seemed her enemy at McKay’s had overcharged her for her last order, so after getting this new one I was to tell the hook-nosed Jew bastard that he owed my neighbor four cents. I was then to suggest that he shove his delivery charge up his fat ass.

  “Got that?” Helen asked.

  I was happy to pick up the medicine, but when it came to the disputed bill — and toward the end there was always a dispute — I’d make it up out of my own pocket and lie when she prodded me for details. “The pharmacist said he was very sorry and that it won’t happen again,” I’d tell her.

  “Did you tell him what he can do with his delivery charge?”

  “I sure did.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Pardon?”

  “When you told him to shove it up his ass, what did he say?”

  “He said, um, ‘I bet that’s going to hurt.’”

  “You’re damn right it will,” she’d say.

  Back when she could still get up and down the stairs, Helen had all the run-ins she could handle: on the bus, at the post office, wherever peace reigned, she shattered it. Now she had to import her prey, deliverymen, most of them. The ones from the Grand Union, the supermarket we favored, tended to be African, recent immigrants from Chad and Ghana. “You black bastards,” I’d hear her yell. “You think I don’t know what you’re up to?”

  She hit bottom when she physically attacked a deaf-mute. This was a boy of fourteen, a beloved neighborhood figure who delivered for the nearby deli. “How could you?” Hugh scolded.

  “What do you expect me to do when somebody’s stealing my things?” she asked. “What, am I just supposed to stand there and do nothing?” It eventually came out that by “stealing” she meant that he had borrowed her pen. After using it to tally the bill, he stuck it in his shirt pocket, absentmindedly, most likely. Helen reacted by pulling his hair and digging her nails into his neck. “But not hard,” she said. “There was barely any blood at all.”

 
When asked why the boy would steal a thirty-cent pen, a pen he could surely get for free at his father’s store, Helen sighed, exhausted at having to explain the obvious. “He’s Portuguese,” she said. “You know what those bastards are like. You’ve seen them.” But there was a hint of desperation in her voice, the fear that maybe this time she had gone too far.

  The following morning she called our apartment and asked, almost sheepishly, if I’d rub in some Tiger Balm for her. I crossed the hall and, after letting me in, she took a seat and pointed out her sore shoulder. “I think I sprained it smacking that little freak,” she said.

  It was February 14, Valentine’s Day, and after a few more words about the delivery boy, Helen’s thoughts turned to love, or, more specifically, to my father. He’d visited me the previous autumn, and she’d been talking about him ever since. “That Lou is a very good-looking man. Too bad you didn’t get any of his genes.”

  “Well, I’m sure I got some of them,” I told her.

  “No, you didn’t. You must take after your mother. And she’s dead, right?”

  “Yes, she’s dead.”

  “You know we’re the same age, me and Lou. Is he dating anybody?”

  The thought of my father and Helen together made the bottoms of my feet sweat. “No, he’s not dating anyone, and he’s not going to, either.”

  “No need to get so sensitive,” she said. “Jesus, I was only asking.” And then she lowered her shirt a little and asked me to do her back.

  I’d just returned from another trip to the pharmacy when Helen asked me to dab some white shoe polish on her kitchen ceiling. A slight stain had formed, and she insisted that it was dog urine, leaking down from the apartment above her. “The sons of bitches, they think that if they ruin my ceiling, it’ll drive me into a nursing home.”

  I don’t remember why I didn’t do it. Maybe I had someone waiting for me, or perhaps I’d just had enough for one day. “I’ll do it tomorrow,” I told her, and as I shut the door, I heard her say, “Right. You and your ‘tomorrows.’”