Desperate Characters

“It’s not that you ever agreed on anything—but it all seemed so set.”

“No, we didn’t agree.”

She exclaimed suddenly and held up her hand.

“What is it?” he asked.

“You brushed against it.”

They stopped beneath a light while Otto inspected her hand.

“It’s swollen,” he said. “Looks awful.”

“It’s all right, just sensitive.”

The bleeding had stopped, but a small lump had formed, pushing up the lips of the wound.

“I think you ought to see a doctor. You ought, at least, to get a tetanus shot.”

“What do you mean, ‘at least’?” she cried irritably.

“Don’t be so bad-tempered.”

They turned up Henry Street. Otto noted with satisfaction that there was as much garbage here as in their own neighborhood. He wouldn’t consider buying a house on the Heights … horribly inflated prices, all that real-estate grinning in dusty crumbling rooms—think what you could do with that woodwork!—everyone knowing it was a put-up job, greed, low belly greed, get it while we can, house prices enunciated in refined accents, mortgages like progressive diseases, “I live on the Heights.” Of course, the Bentwoods’ neighborhood was on the same ladder, frantic lest the speculators now eying property were the “wrong” kind. Otto hated realtors, hated dealing with their nasty litigations. It was the only thing he and Charlie still agreed on. He sighed, thinking of the cop who had been checking on voter registration last week, who had said to Otto, “This area is really pulling itself together, doesn’t look like the same place it was two years ago. You people are doing a job!” And Otto had felt a murderous gratification.

“What are you sighing about?” Sophie asked.

“I don’t know.”

The Bentwoods had a high income. They had no children and, since they were both just over forty (Sophie was two months older than Otto), they didn’t anticipate any. They could purchase pretty much what they wanted. They had a Mercedes-Benz sedan and a house on Long Island with a long-term mortgage, which was hardly a burden any more. It sat in a meadow near the village of Flynders. Like their Brooklyn house, it was small, but it was a century older. Otto had paid for repairs out of cash reserves. In the seven years they had owned it, there had been only one disagreeable summer. That was when three homosexual men had rented a neighboring barn and played Judy Garland records all night long every night. They had set their portable record player on a cement birdbath in the old cow pasture. In moonlight or in fog, Judy Garland’s voice rang out across the meadow, driving into Otto’s head like a mailed fist. That September, he bought the barn. Someday he planned to convert it into a guest house. At present it housed the sailboat he shared with Russel.

“I think I’ll just give the boat to Charlie,” he said as they walked up the steps to the Holsteins’ door. “I don’t even remember how much money we each put in.”

“Where’s he going to sail it?” Sophie asked. “In the Bowery?”

The goddamn bite had made her nervous, he thought, and when she was nervous the quality he valued in her most—her equableness—disappeared. She seemed almost to narrow physically. He pressed the bell beneath the severe black plate on which was printed MYRON HOLSTEIN, M.D. Even if he was a psychoanalyst, he ought to know something about animal bites, Otto told her, but Sophie said she didn’t want to make an issue of it. It already felt better. “Please don’t bring it up. Just that I would like to leave early—” Then the door opened.

There were so many people wandering around beneath Flo Holstein’s brilliant wall lights that it looked as if a sale were in progress. Even at a glance, Sophie saw some among the multitude who were strangers to the house. These few were looking covertly at furniture and paintings. There wasn’t a copy of anything on the premises. It was real Miës van der Rohe, real Queen Anne, real Matisse and Gottlieb.

Flo had produced two successful musicals. Mike Holstein’s practice was largely made up of writers and painters. Sophie liked him. Otto said he suffered from culture desperation. “He can’t stand his own trade,” Otto had said. “He’s like one of those movie starlets who announces she’s studying philosophy at U.C.L.A.”

But at that moment Sophie—her face held in Dr. Holstein’s strong square hands—felt the nervous tension of the last two hours draining out of her as though she’d been given a mild soporific.

“Soph, darling! Hello, Otto. Sophie, you look marvelous! Is that dress a Pucci? What a relief that you don’t fiddle with your hair. That style makes you look like some sad lovely girl out of the thirties. Did you know that?” He kissed her in the manner of other people’s husbands, on the cheek, dry-lipped and ritualistic.

He didn’t know a thing about her, not even after ten years, but she loved the air of knowingness; the flattery that didn’t obligate her. And she liked his somewhat battered face, the close-fitting English suits he bought from a London salesman who stopped at a mid-town hotel each year to take orders, the Italian shoes he said were part of his seducer’s costume. He wasn’t a seducer. He was remote. He was like a man preceded into a room by acrobats.

Despite her resolve to say nothing, she found herself whispering into his neck. “Something awful happened … I’m making too much of it, I know, but it was awful …”

As he led her toward the kitchen, a man grabbed Otto’s arm, shouted something, and dragged him into a group near the fireplace. In the kitchen, Flo kissed her hurriedly and turned to look at a huge orange casserole squatting inside the face-level wall oven. Two men, one of them turning the water tap off and on and staring pensively in the sink, did not look up.

“What happened? Do you want your gin on the rocks?” Mike asked.

“A cat bit me.”

“Let’s see.”

She held up her hand. The slack fingers looked somewhat pitiful, she thought. Since she and Otto had looked at it under the street lamp, the bump appeared to have grown larger. It was tinged with yellow.

“Listen, that ought to be looked at!”

“Oh, it’s nothing. I’ve been bitten before by animals.” But she hadn’t. “It was a shock,” she said, stammering slightly as if she’d tripped over her lie, “because I’d been feeding the damned beast and it turned on me.”

“I don’t think there’s been any rabies around here in years, but—”

“No,” she said. “No, not a chance. That cat was perfectly healthy. You know me. I want to be the saint who tames wild creatures.”

“Mike!” Flo cried. “Get the door, will you? Here, what are you drinking, Sophie?”

“Nothing right now,” Sophie answered. Mike left her with a pat on the back, a nod that said he’d return. One of the young men began to comb his hair. Sophie went into the long living room. A television comedian she had met before at the Holsteins’ was holding forth among a group of seated people, none of whom was paying him much attention. In a voice of maniacal self-confidence, he reported that since he’d grown his beard, he couldn’t eat cooked cereal any more without making a swine of himself. When no one laughed, he caressed the growth at his chin and on his cheeks. “No kidding!” he cried. “These kids nowadays are wunnerful! Hair is for real! I wanna live and love and be myself. That’s the message! Seriously.” He was short and pudgy and his skin glistened like lard.

“A very Gentile party,” someone said over Sophie’s shoulder. She turned and saw a couple in their early twenties. The girl was in a white leather suit; the boy wore an army fatigue jacket, on which were pinned buttons shaped and painted like eyeballs, staring from nothing, at nothing. His frizzy hair shot off in all directions like a pubic St. Catherine’s wheel. The girl was beautiful—young and unmarked. Her amber hair fell to her waist. She wore a heavy bracelet around one of her ankles.

“I saw at least three Jews,” Sophie said.

They didn’t smile. “Your parties are educational,” the girl said.

“It isn’t my party,” Sophie replied.

“Yes, it’s yours,” the boy said judiciously. “Your generation’s thing.”

“Oh, for crissakes!” Sophie said, smiling.

They looked at each other. The boy touched the girl’s hair. “She’s a wicked one, isn’t she?” The girl nodded slowly.

“You must be young Mike’s friends?” asked Sophie. Young Mike was lurching through C.C.N.Y. but each semester’s end brought terror into the Holstein household. Would he go back once more?

“Let’s split,” said the boy. “We’ve got to go see Lonnie up in St. Luke’s.”

“The hospital?” asked Sophie. “It’s too late for visiting hours.”

They looked at her as though they’d never seen her before, then they both padded softly out of the living room, looking neither left nor right. “That’s a beautiful anklet!” Sophie called out. The girl looked back from the hall. For an instant, she seemed about to smile. “It hurts me to wear it,” she shouted. “Every time I move, it hurts.”

Otto was backed up against a wall, looking up at the chin of a powerfully built woman wearing pants and jacket. She was an English playwright, a friend of Flo’s, who wrote exclusively in verse. Otto, Sophie observed as she walked over to them, had one hand behind him pressed against the wooden paneling.

“We are all of us dying of boredom,” the woman was saying. “That is the why of the war, the why of the assassinations, the why of why. Boredom.”

“The younger ones are dying of freedom,” Otto said in a voice flattened by restraint. Sophie caught his eye. He shook his head very slightly.