Elbowing the Seducer Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street, New York, New York 10010, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Limited, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 1B4

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  First published in the United States of America by Random House, Inc., 1984

  Published in Penguin Books 1985

  Copyright © T. Gertler, 1984

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Gertler, T.

  Elbowing the seducer.

  I. Title.

  [PS3557.E74E4 1985] 813′.54 84-26488

  ISBN 0 14 00.7792 8

  Ebook ISBN 9780525510802

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Atheneum Publishers, Inc.: Quotation from “Black Maps,” in Darker by Mark Strand. Copyright © 1970 by Mark Strand. Used with the permission of Atheneum Publishers.

  Cherry Lane Music Publishing Co., Inc.: Lyrics from “I’m Goin’ Away,” by Alan Greene. Copyright © 1964 by Clara Music Publishing Corp. Used by permission.

  Harvard University Press: Excerpts from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College.

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part 2

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Dedication

  About the Author

  You can walk

  believing you cast

  a light around you.

  But how will you know?

  —MARK STRAND

  Accept the premise, you’ll enjoy the bit.

  —DAVID LETTERMAN

  This is fiction. The characters don’t have counterparts in real life. No reference to any person, living or dead, is intended or should be inferred.

  1

  In his sleep his hands, which were small, curled into fists. In the morning he woke and found them that way. He thought he never dreamed, though some nights, turning beneath the blanket, he cried out strings of words. His wife—or, as he thought of her, the mother of his child—lay beside him, nursing a dim tickle of passion. At the sudden twist of terror on his sleeping face, her eyes startled open, searching the ceiling.

  He disliked breakfast, a meal she found comforting. She contented herself with watching him scowl at his coffee, black, no sugar. Scowling made him look as dangerous as he could, which wasn’t very dangerous at all. He looked, and he knew it, reassuring. In his early forties, thin, with fine sharp features and the beginnings of parenthetical lines around his mouth, he had calculating, good-humored brown eyes and an uncombed abundance of curly brown hair whitened at the temples: a professor. But no, his lean body, the spareness of his frame, the nervous abrupt movements he made with his hard slim arms stamped him as someone outside a cloistered life. His ambition, to leave a large mark on the world—a sign, not a scar—made him move restlessly. He might have been a sculptor. Still, the aura of teacher lingered about him. He was a medium for talent, not a possessor of it. His name was Howard Ritchie and he wanted to make it memorable. Suzanne, his wife, ate toast and bright marmalade on carmine red stoneware from France. She had once been lovely in a sweet tight way. At forty she was battling the softness of middle age, counting on good facial structure and a dazed girlishness to see her through. Between bites she wiped her mouth with a blue cloth napkin—he disapproved of paper ones—and watched her smart husband read the Times, which he did in a certain order: first the book review, then the front page, then the editorial pages, then nothing more since he was already, as usual, late for the work he did to support the two of them, their child, his second ex-wife, and his two ex-children. These last, having grown up mostly without him, followed their mother’s example and hated him. Because he paid for part of their home, food, clothing, doctors, and schools, because he sent them reasonably generous checks on holidays and their birthdays, they hated him; it was as simple as that. In turn he disliked them because they weren’t his any longer, could never again be his.

  For his families, he worked at a university as an editor and teacher, jobs he couldn’t finish during the day but continued through the spirited night, which was why he was late in the morning: he didn’t get enough sleep. The perpetual weary edge this gave him attracted certain women. He recognized the effect and exploited it. Courting and chasing after and confessing to these women, he couldn’t finish his work during the day because he was too busy preparing himself for it. He considered his affairs as therapeutic necessities to revitalize him for work, his calling, midwife to literature.

  He told the women: Sex is one thing, my family is another; I will never lose my child, I will never allow that to happen. This child, by Suzanne, had an earnestness Howard defined as artistic temperament. Matty was seven and resembled pictures of her father at that age. She had already written two poems about God with no misspellings. She had pinched a statuette of Charlie Chaplin out of clay. It was clearly Charlie Chaplin because of the hat and the cane. Through her Howard worshiped his own hopes; she would make the world bow down. He wanted to keep her brave, he wanted to protect her memory of him.

  He spent extended lunch hours in strange bedrooms, lying on, under, and beside the women who found him irresistible. Afternoon sun streaked between the slats of blinds onto parquet floors, decent Oriental rugs, the litter of his clothing around unfamiliar beds. Each time he took one of these women in his arms, he believed he was conquering death in himself. Each time he fell back exhausted in a new bed, he wondered what else he could try. A woman’s long hair, black, brown, whatever, hid his wrist. A woman kissed the light-haired hollow under his arm. He thought, Who is she? What did I want to be when I was sixteen? A woman bit tenderly at his fingertip. He thought the women were as implacable as death. He kissed them, he made them murmur, he made them glad. In their arms he relished his privacy; afterward, lighting a cigarette, he inhaled the old dread. He thought, I’m tired, so tired; and he rubbed the inside corners of his eyes.

  He drank much more than he should have, quantities of good Scotch that lifted him to an amber forgetfulness. He became so happy he wept. Once, after six toasts, his own, he passed out in the middle of an important dinner party, also his own, at a restaurant specializing in painless lobster killing. The guests—a sexually ambiguous novelist in rawhide; his underfed groupie deseptumized by cocaine and the sere air of vicarious success; an agent, appropriately walleyed, rumored to have been the lover of a daughter of a lover of Simone de Beauvoir, or was it Colette; another agent, a sober exquisite woman joined at either hip to the two preceding guests, having been wedged between them like an extra book on an already organized shelf; and a literary critic with severe taste and cheekbones, whose new weekly spot on a local TV news show wa
s the reason for the celebration—all observed his right arm sinking into spinach quiche. The critic said, “Unoriginal, but not without style.” The novelist challenged the critic to an arm-wrestling contest, the groupie and the exquisite agent went off to the bathroom to admire each other’s breasts, and the remaining agent contemplated both the fallen editor and the dessert tray while sucking a prime rib. A waiter asked if there was anything he could do. The critic, having declined to arm-wrestle, hauled Howard through fresh snow to the dank backseat of a Checker cab and brought him home.

  Another time, after eight whiskies and six pretzel rods on an April afternoon, he returned to his office and worked on galleys with shivering concentration for fifteen eternal minutes before asking his secretary, Gail, to please turn on the heat, please. “It’s on, Howard,” she said. While two writers and an illustrator waited in the reception area down the hall, he counted seconds on his watch and tried to find his pulse. This took a long time. Finally, one of the writers, who had driven in from Massachusetts two days earlier to begin a new life in the city, knocked on the door, waited a polite beat, then went in. He saw Howard Ritchie, editor, lecturer, author of helpful goading rejection letters, clutching his neck and muttering to himself.

  “You okay?” the writer asked.

  “There’s no pulse anywhere.” This in muted panic.

  The writer had delivered his former lover’s setter bitch of six puppies. He didn’t hesitate to place two fingers on the New York editor’s neck. “There it is, see?” He was rewarded with the rare and beautiful smile Howard usually bestowed on unattainable attractive women.

  “I’m Vincent Bask,” the writer said, holding out his hand.

  “Ah yes, a remarkable novel,” Howard said, and he vomited into Bask’s hand.

  —

  He walked with a slight forward tilt of his right side, lifting the shoulder, leaning into a nonexistent wind. Though strong, he could look fragile. This was effective: people forgave his insults, tardiness, forgetfulness when he offered a suddenly pale childlike face to their expected abuse. “Oh Howard,” they would say and lightly slap his shoulder, “forget it.” Often the problem was that he had forgotten—an appointment, a phone call, a birthday, a promise, a small loan. Not all those slighted were forgiving; some demanded explanations, forcing from him a mumbled charm and part of a repertoire of ethnic jokes he provided complete with accents. “So God answers, ‘Listen, you t’ink you got troubles? I had a son…’ ” His wife, trying to understand him, found he eluded her; for no apparent reason except the joy of change itself, he changed from husband to child to father to monster to lover. And, unfairer still, she believed he understood her completely. She told him so.

  “I’m going to study French,” she said.

  “Good.”

  “Tuesday and Thursday evenings at NYU.”

  “Best of luck.”

  “Is there any reason I shouldn’t?”

  “None, dear heart.”

  She didn’t study French. She knew that he knew that she didn’t want to. What she wanted was to be interesting to him. She took Tuesday-night mythology instead.

  One of his lovers, naked, cross-legged, peeling a tangerine on a flipout foam sofa bed, asked, “What about your wife? Does she have other men?”

  “No,” he said, expelling smoke. “I wish she did. It might perk up her life.”

  “Smug. How can you be so sure about her?”

  Referring to the tangerine: “Put that down.” Then, reaching between the two crossed legs: “Maybe I should introduce her to somebody.”

  —

  Her hips had begun to broaden. Her belly, once a sloped landscape relieved by two prominent pelvic knobs, had softened, dropped; the image he had of it now was that of a suspension bridge strung to the high, newly padded knobs. Ah, to continue the metaphor, he thought, and dipped two fingers into the warm bay of her sex. “Wife,” he whispered, and learned from the utterance that he was drunk. Her head, averted, lay on his pillow. From the middle of the bed, where he sat between her legs, he watched her. He knew that being watched embarrassed her. His fingers disappeared slowly, and he waited.

  A moan triumphed over her embarrassment. She fidgeted, coughed. He kept his fingers inside her. He could do this forever, outwait her; the length of a man’s patience was what determined potency. He hoped he would remember this afterward, to write it down.

  “Do you ever think about another man?” he asked. When she didn’t answer, he persisted. “Do you?”

  “Howard.”

  “Do you?”

  Pinned to the pillow, she said with a sniffle, “Of course not.”

  “I didn’t ask if you had another man, I asked if you thought about it.”

  She twisted under his double probing. “Is that Matty calling?”

  “She’s asleep.”

  “No, her tummy hurt all day. I think she’s up.” She sat up, edging away from him.

  “Not this time.” With his free hand he gently pushed her down. Courtly dominance, he thought. He smelled a tangerine.

  “Her tummy,” she protested, and sat up again.

  He slammed her back down on the bed. She gave a small surprised cry of “Oh!” as she landed. Like a bloodhound who has followed an escaped convict’s footprints through meadow and swamp, only to lose the scent at a mud bank along a river, he lifted his head and sniffed the air, his nostrils quivering, his forehead furrowed in a houndlike droop. He saw, curved over the scent-devouring river, a gray steel bridge across which, with puffs of white steam, a train ate its way into the distance. He wanted to shout, “Come back, come back,” but he knew what would emerge would be a wordless mournful howl.

  He withdrew his fingers from her with an abruptness that made her cry “Oh!” again and clamp her legs together. He covered her body with his own, kicked her legs apart with his knee. “Damn it,” he said as her thighs closed on his knee. He grabbed a stiff leg and yanked it up to his shoulder, a boy snapping a wishbone. He wanted her to kiss him. She pushed at his shoulders to unbalance him, and he had to release her leg to capture her hands. He pulled them to rest above her head, holding both her wrists in one of his hands while the other returned for the fugitive leg. When he finally had her accessible to him, he pressed his mouth on hers and met with lips that seemed soldered together. He could feel her clenched teeth through her lips. Grimly, silently, he tried to enter her. In high school algebra he could never make the equation balance; one half, bloated, unfactored, indecipherable, always dragged the other down. Since then he believed he was forever excluded from understanding something essential. He was halted at the curled edges of a mystery as homely as an omelet. He heard the plaints of bedsprings and the deadly anger of breathing. Her resistance astonished him. Each time he drove into her and was repelled, he trusted that he must go on. He had slung her updrawn leg on his shoulder; her foot dangled at his back. She pounded his back with her heel. A great baritone, he was being pelted with flowers—whole bushes, in fact. He ignored the first blows and continued his siege of her. He would have to decide what to sing for an encore. The blows intensified, and at last one, a vital assault above his kidney, provided a passage of pain through which he glimpsed the spectacle of himself, a man raping his wife. Stunned, he let her go.

  “I hate you,” she whispered even before she covered herself. A long strand of reddish hair lay glued along her forehead.

  He collapsed beside her. A parade of women he had never known performed splendid high kicks on a large red-curtained stage. He thought he saw flashes of brown pubic hair from one on the end, a short woman with a tear in her black fishnet stockings. He applauded, and since he was the only spectator in the large red theater, his two hands made lonely sounds like hiccups.

  “Are you all right?” she asked him, and he shook his head no.

  “I’m sorry, sweet Susannah,” he murmured to her shoulder before he fell sadly, drunkenly asleep.

  —

  The price of infidelity, he li
ked to say, is eternal vigilance. He was always looking for women, and he was always looking to avoid them too. He wanted deliverance, not entrapment; salvation, not religion.

  “How do you manage it?” he asked Newman Sykes, the critic with high cheekbones, whose souvenir for taking Howard home on the night of the dinner party had been a permanent spinach-green stain on his ancient prized Burberry.

  “Never eat veal at a restaurant that also serves jazz,” Newman said. He consigned his tortured plate to a corner of the table and studied his glass of Heineken’s. “Despite its alcoholic content, beer deserves a clean glass, wouldn’t you think?” he asked. The candle on the table burned in a lidless crystal inkwell.

  “Waiter,” Howard said as the waiter passed by without stopping.

  Newman drank, and disapproval accentuated the slashed contours of his face. “Manage what?” he asked.

  “How’re your kids?”

  “Fine. Yours?”

  “Okay.”

  “Now what? Wives?”

  “Mine’s fine.”

  “Mine too.”

  “And other people’s wives?”

  Newman asked, “Are you taking a survey?”

  “What’m I drinking?”

  “Chivas.”

  “Waiter,” Howard said to no one, “another Heineken’s, another Chivas.”

  A thin young black woman in a red tank top and tight blue satin skirt reclaimed the microphone on a raised platform in a corner of the room. Her accompanist, a rabbity white man trying to raise a beard, refitted himself to the piano, his neck bent, track shoes yearning for the pedals. The black woman bared her teeth in song. “All I can say is, he’s gone, gone, Lord, gone and gone again, sweet Lord, he’s gone.” Her voice glided like a gull’s gray-tipped wing through the air.

  “Women under forty-seven shouldn’t be permitted to sing the blues,” Newman said. His black eyebrows, which arched in gentle surprise away from each other toward the baby skin at his temples, gave him a look of constant bemusement. “And on no account should the blues be electronically assisted.”