The Hideous Summer (Part 1)

Imagine that suddenly, with no expectation of the impending event, you void your bowels on a stalled and packed rush hour subway. Imagine that the ventilating system has shut down and that the lights have remained on at full wattage. Also imagine that, stuck in a tunnel and still a half-dozen stations from your destination, your best choice will be to stay on the train when it starts to move and make normal stops again. Now think of being trapped in such a nightmare circumstance not for twenty minutes or an hour but for nearly two months.

And that’s just a piece of it. Imagine as well that throughout this period you feel as though a butcher knife has been planted in the very center of your heart. If you can imagine these things, you’ll have some inkling of what much of the summer of 1994 was like for me.

That monstrous season of very bad days, sandwiched by days that were worse than very bad, began in early July when Maryellen split. It would have been awful enough had Maryellen left me with only the aforementioned deep and abiding agony in my chest that derived from the loss of a woman I cared about. (And awful enough with only the cluster of physical tribulations that would immediately follow the loss.) But because of what triggered it this breakup was, you could say, beyond devastating.

What happened was that — I’ll state it flat out — Maryellen, who’d been living with me in my apartment for nearly two years, caught me flagrante delicto with Maureen, her Cocker Spaniel.

Coming out of nowhere, with, I swear, nothing in my history to predict it, I didn’t think at first that what I’d done was “depraved and disgusting,” to quote Maryellen, and I was very much at odds with the character judgment implicit in her reaction. It didn’t seem in my case to be either fair or accurate. I mean I’d always had a probing mind, a mind that, forever in search of the deeper truths, often drove me to challenge things that others took for granted. (Although it was a bit outside of what I normally focused on, and while I don’t remember thinking about it specifically, the assumption that boundary lines in nature are fixed and inviolable, would be a decent example.) It was entirely possible, I thought, that my philosophical bent had subliminally impelled me to take the leap from rumination to hands-on inquiry. For another thing, Maureen had been bathed that morning and her shimmering coat smelled a lot like Rive Gauche — a fragrance widely known to be irresistibly seductive. And besides the chance that I’d been a victim of the shampoo industry, there was a strong likelihood that I’d suffered a drug overdose. It was quite conceivable that — strict dosage instructions included for a reason — the extra teaspoon of Nyquil I’d taken for a post-nasal drip had caused me to lose my species bearings for a minute.

What’s more — and who would argue with this? — when you call your dog “Maureen” you’re asking for trouble. And, Jesus, hadn’t Larry Flynt confessed to the serial raping of chickens without incurring one iota of damage to his reputation?

But thoughts like these ended quickly. It was impossible for me to deflect for long the horror in Maryellen’s eyes when, on the evening in question, she came home early. With the stereo blasting, I didn’t pick up on the fact that Maryellen was there until, all at once, she was big in the room. Maureen, I realized afterwards, was aware of Maryellen’s presence before I was. I saw one of her ears rise and I saw what I understood later to be an expression of alarm as she turned her cranium towards me. But probably because her countenance was open to several interpretations at that moment, her heads-up went right by me.

At any rate, I hadn’t seen the rage and revulsion Maryellen’s face presented to me since, standing next to my mother, I barfed into the family “Important Documents” chest when I was five. The abhorrence it conveyed seemed, in its breathtaking proportions, to have issued from the depths of creation itself. No, try as I might I couldn’t deny it. Diddling Maureen had been an egregious act — a crime against all that was sacrosanct. And I didn’t know why I’d done it. I didn’t know what had dispatched me to such a forsaken place. That the act had been, as I’ve indicated, both unpremeditated and unprecedented, only compounded a mystery that would eat at me for quite a while. I mean, I’d always been indifferent to dogs and that included Maureen. If I perfunctorily scratched her head from time to time, and walked her when Maryellen couldn’t, at no point had I bonded with her, not as a pet or otherwise.

Well, what can I tell you? This turn my life had taken was more than I could cope with. I went, I guess, into something like shock. For the next three weeks I never once left my apartment. While I managed to phone my boss, Mr. Mintz, every couple of days to make reports on a virus of some enigmatic, thoroughly debilitating and likely very contagious strain that I’d contracted, all I did besides that — and when I wasn’t pacing furiously from room to room — was intermittently endeavor to lose consciousness for a few hours by consuming tall glasses of scotch mixed with beer.

Now much as I’d like to, I won’t pretend that, though it was not of a similar kind, I’d been without an emotional issue before the incident.

In contrast to Maryellen, who worked for an investment firm and recently gotten a second promotion in less than a year, I’ve had, since my quite ordinary middle-class childhood, a childhood (if you skip the vomiting episode) free of any noteworthy traumas, some problems with applying and executing. I’m not good at those things. Functioning on an elevated level isn’t my forte. My IQ is high, but I’d barely made it through a year of college. I think this is because the ugly fate of decay and dissolution that awaits everything with a body rattles me too much. I know that the inevitability of death (not to mention the horrors that might follow it) disturbs everyone. But where others find ways to mitigate their fear of dying, I haven’t come up with very much. When the gods were distributing psychic forms of armor against the dread of death, they’d been outrageously skimpy with mine. It isn’t just that being born under a death sentence that could be invoked at any time scares me but that it also makes me feel guilty. I must have done some serious shit to be in so much trouble. And it makes me feel ashamed as well. Unable to alter my situation, to change the given, I’m incompetent where it counts the most. Brooding over my destiny, and persistently cogitating about ways to handle it, perpetually distracts me and results in my tending to lose my concentration in practical matters a lot.

And neither will I attempt to portray my relationship with Maryellen as unfettered by difficulties before the Maureen debacle.

Four years younger than me — at our separation I was twenty-seven and she was twenty-three — Maryellen, whose pleasing face, affable personality and sense of humor had speedily won me over, was from a well-off, straitlaced upstate New York family. Like her older sister, she’d majored in finance at a local college before coming to the city to pursue a career. Unlike her sister, who’d gravitated to the Upper East Side, Maryellen had what she proudly referred to as a “maverick streak” and she wanted to live in Greenwich Village. Planning to get a place in the Village once she’d found a job, she was staying, when we met, in the adjoining neighborhood of Chelsea, with Maureen and her college roommate, Barbara. Charmed by my bathtub-in the-kitchen Village walkup near the Hudson River, visibly enthralled by my pontifications on subjects ontological and titillated by my regular, though moderate use of alcohol, when she discovered I was on a first name basis with the bartenders at the White Horse she and Maureen moved in with me just days later.

And that first year with Maryellen was nothing short of excellent. It was a year in which we had an abundance of sex, took long hand-in-hand walks around the Village, went to scores of cultural events in the area and hung with friends of mine, most of whom were of an artistic persuasion. But after that year and, it doubtless being relevant, a year in which she’d found lucrative employment, her “maverick” thing began to wane. Souring on the Village and our social life, she would talk frequently about us moving to a “normal” apartment and to a neighborhood with different people, maybe somewhere near her sister. She also wanted me to make my drinking less than regular and moderate. When my responses were essentially evasive and transparently intended to delay such changes, she gradually became moody and distant and, after a while, it would sometimes seem that all of my foibles had become sources of irritation to her. My tendency to drool when I slept, which she’d initially been amused by, started to antagonize her. And, unnoticed by her before, the sartorial faux pas of wearing socks that matched the color of my shoes and not my pants, captured her attention one morning and incensed her no end.

It was, however, my job and lack of real money that were the primary and most constant aspects of me to rankle her. A typesetter for a printing company housed in a rundown building on a still only partially gentrified street near the Garment Center, I made just enough to get along, had no opportunities for advancement and didn’t have to wear a suit, all of which grated on her not a little. Referring to me on more than one occasion as a “glorified typist” who worked in a “type factory” she took to calling me a “slacker” and was incessantly after me to connect with a “respectable” profession.

I suspect that having her meet me at work one evening when I had to stay late played a role in much of what I’ve recounted. The last to leave, we were almost out the door before she said she needed to use the bathroom. Having only the men’s room key, it was the men’s room to which I sent her — utterly forgetting that the only person who hadn’t been granted a key to it was the janitor. I’ll spare you a detailed depiction of the men’s room. Suffice it to say that some unspeakable carnage appeared to have taken place there and that upon her emergence Maryellen was weeping.

Still, her disdain for my job, her increasing displeasure with our way of life and, yes, her disaffection with me in general notwithstanding, I remained confident that Maryellen would stick around. I say this because we’d already lasted almost two years, and because she had a conspicuous flaw of her own, a flaw that limited the field for her. You could call it a weight problem, but it wasn’t so much that as a weight displacement problem. Spherical at her bottom and tapering markedly toward her top — and with a stem-like ponytail to complete the resemblance — Maryellen was the very picture of a pear, which is a fine shape for fruit (not to mention pendants and tones) but not that terrific for human bodies. Understanding from the start that this imperfection had contributed to making her available to me I was actually grateful for it. Bottom line: She was a woman whose figure was suitable to my station in life. (And to my own physical composition. I was all of five foot six, more skinny than slim and with a nose you would think must obstruct my vision.)

So when, after a call to her sister — who had a car and who would wait in the hall to help her — Maryellen hurriedly packed her things and, with Maureen clutched under one arm, fled the apartment, I loathed myself all the more for having dismissed the signs that our union was in jeopardy to begin with. And in those first three weeks I just wasted away. Indeed, I lost twelve pounds I didn’t need to lose. This was mostly due to the lack of an appetite. But it was also because Maryellen had, without my catching it in the state I was in, emptied the kitchen cabinets and refrigerator of the groceries she’d purchased, leaving me to survive on an economy-size jar of Marshmallow Fluff and a dozen frozen waffles (along with my booze stash which was untouched).

If that wasn’t enough, my wretched condition was soon exacerbated by a number of physical ailments and handicaps. For one thing, thick clots of mucous were continually sliding from the back of my nose down into my throat. For another, a tooth with a chronic abscess was acting up again. Although the pain it caused was only occasional, I knew it was on its way to meaning business this time.

I had, moreover, a substantial eye crisis. Already living with one frayed contact lens, which clouded my sight and made it feel like dirt was enmeshed inside it when I blinked, the other one blew off my fingertip one night and vanished down the sink drain. And just minutes after that happened, I proceeded, while I was pacing, to step on my backup glasses. These misfortunes forced me to view my surroundings and myself with what amounted to one crippled eye. But even with this impediment I could still perceive, when I looked in the mirror, a growing bump in my jaw and, already in need of a barber for weeks, that my head was now crowned by a wild man’s hair. But leaving my apartment for any reason at this point was out of the question. I couldn’t even summon the will to shower with regularity, or to shave at all.

It might have helped to talk to a friend about what was going on. But reaching out would have involved a discussion of my transgression, a transgression I had no stomach to reveal to anyone who was ignorant of it. The few times someone called me, and knowing it would not be Maryellen, I didn’t answer and disregarded any messages that were left.

To cap it off, I was enduring my loss, humiliation and bodily maladies with only a semi-functioning air conditioner to combat the onset of a hellish heat and a level of humidity that would have suffocated a rainforest.

I did consider suicide. Craving eternal oblivion, dying to that end would have been a blessing now. But, as I’ve said, I’m scared of dying. And absent the assurance of oblivion, or the guarantee that my grievous Maureen offense wouldn’t lead the gods to punish me with an afterlife that was even more gruesome than the one I was living, I rejected it.

With suicide off the table as a means with which to escape my forlorn straits, I concluded that to feel any better there was really only one recourse. It was to get Maryellen to forgive and return to me. Accomplishing this objective, once it occurred to me, became an all-consuming goal. And the way to go about it, I reasoned, was to reconstitute myself. I would rebuild myself into a healthy-minded man of purpose and ambition. This notion got me fired up. But as eager to begin as I was, my enthusiasm was soon dampened by a disconcerting thought. An undertaking of such dimensions would require time to complete. (Especially when I was clueless as to how to begin.) Unaware of it, Maryellen would only drift further away from me and one day, it was bound to happen, take up with someone else. Prudence dictated that I tell her of my plan and the new me it promised.

So, impersonating an old college friend, I rang her parents and learned that she’d gone to stay with Barbara again until she could get a place of her own. And that evening I called her there. Actually, prodded by the significance of my news, I called her there every few minutes because each time Barbara would answer and hang up when she heard my voice.

With that, I knew I had no alternative but to tell her in person, and the size and urgency of my mission overrode my reluctance to face the outside world.

Assuming that Maryellen would be home, I picked a Saturday and set out for Barbara’s apartment with a dangerously racing heart to accompany the now throbbing bump in my jaw and the commencement of a sharp soreness in my throat from my post nasal drip. The headlines on the newsstands I passed announced “ANOTHER SCORCHER,” and at only ten in the morning my shoulders were already burning under my shirt when I came upon a major street fair replete with merchants of every category, live and loud music and some seriously teeming humanity. Worse, an upward slope on the main avenue made it clear that this thing went on for blocks, smack to the border of Chelsea.

Barbara’s building was just on the far side of the fair. But the fair also stretched down intersecting streets and this made circumventing it more daunting than advancing directly. So arms tight at my sides, I walked right into it. As it turned out, the disaster that had befallen my appearance worked to my advantage here. Instead of being bumped and jostled, or repeatedly forced to stop and wait behind ambling fools who, unlike myself, had no important business this day, spaces were opened up for me. So fast were people to move aside it was like stepping through a series of automatic doors.

Continued in Part 2 https://www.abctales.com/story/robert-levin/hideous-summer-part-2