The Hideous Summer (Part 2)

Continued From Part 1

Then, as I made my way, I passed a stall of grilling sausages. The aroma of them took me back to an evening in the third week of our living together when we’d gone to a festival in Little Italy and, tossing softballs at a mechanical monkey and pitching quarters into a glass, I’d won, in rapid succession, a can of Spam Lite and a yellow parakeet. That the very next day the bird, when we released it from its cage, would fly headlong into a closed window and expire, took nothing from my memory of that extraordinary evening. I felt perfectly centered that evening — and fearless. Unencumbered by my chronic engrossment in my body’s eventual disintegration, I was absolutely without inhibition. I could, I felt, have excelled at anything I cared to do.

It was also on that evening, and just after I won the Spam Lite, that Maryellen unexpectedly turned toward me while we were walking to the parakeet stand, pulled me to her, kissed me squarely on the mouth and told me, for the first time, that she loved me.

Arriving at Barbara’s street, I saw her building, took a deep breath, entered the vestibule and found a sign that said the inner door buzzer was broken. Expecting the usual reaction, but with no option other than to go home, I went to a phone booth on the corner.

Presumably Barbara was out because it was Maryellen who picked up.

Too taken aback for any salutations, I went, following a startled pause, directly to the meat of it and said: “I need to tell you something.”

After a long silence she said: “You need to tell me something? I don’t want to hear it. Just the sound of your voice creeps me out.”

Although I would rather have received a warmer reception, that she stayed on the phone made me giddy, so giddy that I lost sight of my purpose in contacting her.

“Maryellen, I love you, but you know only my grandmother’s allowed to say that.”

“This is a mistake,” she said. “I shouldn’t be talking to you. I’m going to get off. I’m cringing right now. You don’t seriously think…? God, I’m so embarrassed for you. I knew you were warped and a slacker…the drinking, that job, the saliva thing, always putting things off, those morbid, convoluted…musings — oh yeah, that reminds me. That thing you said about why people procrastinate. What was it? ‘The longer you put it off the longer you have to live’? What the hell does that mean? Who knows what that means?”

“I told you and you seemed to understand. There’s no such thing as ‘lazy’. It’s about the sense the procrastinator has that he’s suspending time. Did you ask somebody?”

“Why would I ask somebody?”

She’d obviously vetted my intellect with someone who’d been critical of me. I was stung by her need to do that and by the negative verdict, but I did stay giddy.

“I’ve been wanting to explain the hidden genius of the slacker to you,” I went on. “You’re forgetting the benefits. If you don’t stick out too much, don’t achieve too much, the gods might just forget about you. Forget, you know, to kill you.”

“You’re an idiot, too.”

“This attitude you’re taking. It’s really about that driving mishap in Rochester, isn’t it? If you remember, even the judge said I wasn’t entirely to blame. He said that family must have been really stupid to build their house just a hundred yards off the highway.”

She didn’t laugh.

“Look,” she said, “ I know you have serious problems and I don’t want to be insensitive, but I have a major meeting today and I have to go.”

“It’s the weekend, Maryellen.”

“That’s what I told my manager.”

“Listen,” I said. “Please. I can see how what transpired might have tainted my mystique for you, but if you really can’t stand me anymore, maybe we could be best friends.”

“Friends? With you? My God, you’re lucky you were born before they invented amniocentesis!”

She hung up.

I called her right back.

“Can’t you find someone else to call? Like maybe a doctor?”

“Something’s terribly wrong here. I did call someone else. Just this morning I called Jeanne Dixon. She said ‘Reunion with a loved one, today.’ That’s got to be you.”

”Well it’s not. Maybe Lassie’s coming home again.”

She hung up once more and the only thing I could do was wait for her to go to her meeting.

I didn’t have to wait very long. Just a few minutes later I saw her distinctive silhouette behind the shaded glass of the outer door. But when she came out and saw me, she pulled back and the door shut.

I wasn’t sure what my next move should be. Reckoning that she’d returned upstairs, I let a minute pass before calling her again.

“You’re not afraid of me now?”

“What are you doing here? Do you know what you look like?”

“I’m here for the fair. Remember the para…?”

“This is harassment. If you don’t go away, I’m calling the police.”

She hung up still again and, I had to fish in my pocket for my last remaining quarter, I called her right back. I couldn’t help it. “That’s it,” she said and threw the receiver down.

The blood gone from my legs, I just stood there. I was expecting half a dozen screaming squad cars to pull up from every direction. But what I got, some ten minutes later, was a slight and obviously fledgling cop on a motor scooter circling to a stop in front of her door. Seeing him looking around and past me, I have to say that as a taxpayer I was a trifle vexed by his size, his youth, his vehicle and his inability to spot a perp who was standing in front of him. (In fairness, I should note that there were a number of other guys on that corner who, if they weren’t in the process of harassing a woman were for sure considering it.) In any event, when he entered the building on the heels of a resident apparently grasping a key, I knew it was time to leave.

Not that, as my legs recovered, my evacuation meant I was ready to give up on her. No way. If so much had gone wrong, if, and worst of all, I had, in my giddiness, failed to inform her of my mission and was now at a loss as to how to communicate it to her, I was nonetheless encouraged. Why? Because I realized as I made my retreat, that she hadn’t given 911 my description. This was a telling omission that betrayed, at the very least, a lingering conflict about me.

When no police showed up at my door in the ensuing days (meaning that she hadn’t provided my name and address either), her ambivalence was confirmed for me and I decided that to reappear in her life at some point in the near future, stylishly dressed, financially thriving and glowing with mental health, had been the right path, the adult path, to take all along. So, determining that my initial order of business should be to pull myself together appearance-wise, I got a haircut. Preferring not to have my regular hair cutter see me in the plight I was in, I found a barber in the catacombs of the Fourteenth Street subway station. Since I didn’t want my face hanging out too nakedly, I asked him not to take too much off, to just “shape it a little.” Twenty minutes later my hair had a style again. That it was early Ringo Starr was unfortunate, but I reminded myself that at one time at least it had been fashionable.

Then, fantasizing that Maryellen was watching me and to demonstrate to her that I could be a responsible citizen with a social and political consciousness, I kept the TV on and tuned to cable news. And I expanded my range of concerns. To my personal worries I appended Bosnia and Rwanda and the Chinese withdrawal from the nuclear moratorium, among other things.

I didn’t go to the dentist though. This was because (and I thought about it long and hard) relinquishing my physical suffering before I’d completed my reformation was too dicey. It would have been like cheating and might have made the gods madder at me than they were already. (That the tooth pain, which by now was snaking along my jaw line from my chin up into my ear needed to be suppressed by outdated Percodan from a years ago root canal if I was to carry out my project was something I hoped they’d cut me some slack on.)

Nor, for the same reason, did I alter my eating habits very much. I was buying basic groceries now, but I continued to eat sparsely and to watch that I wasn’t getting too many nutrients. Under the current circumstances gauntness was good, gauntness made me feel less likely to provoke more wrath from the gods.

And inasmuch as a palpable contempt exuded from literally every person I passed on the street — was I projecting my self-hatred or was it true? — I didn’t call my optometrist either. I didn’t want to see too clearly people seeing me.

But my sick leave days having long since expired, I did go back to my job where, curiously, the posture of Mr. Mintz constituted an exception to the scorn I was experiencing.

Mintz, pushing seventy and who, with his squat body, putty cheeks and bulbous nose, could have passed for a road company W. C. Fields, was an old-time typographer — one of the last of a breed that knew the difference between a dash and a hyphen. I respected him for this, but his impatience with errors and his fixation on refinements that no one seemed to care about anymore, made working for him less than agreeable — and particularly when you added his wearying sense of humor to his perfectionism. Upon being approached, for instance, he would invariably feel it necessary to ask, “Was it something I set? (I remember that when I introduced them on that men’s room day, Maryellen found this line hilarious. “What a cute old man,” she’d said.) And once a week, at a minimum, he would tell me to inquire how he’d gotten to be where he was in this business.

“How did you get to be where you are in this business, Mr. Mintz?”

“Well, if you must know, I took the type-casting couch route. Okay? I won’t apologize for it. I saw what I wanted and I decided to go after it by any means necessary.”

Another thing I didn’t appreciate was his sarcasm. When, in one of my calls to him, I’d settled on mononucleosis as my reason for being out so long, his response had been, “Poor guy, I didn’t think they still had that disease. I haven’t heard of anyone getting it since my son took a semester off from college.”

I’d supposed from early on that it wasn’t going to pan out with Mintz, that I would have to fire him from his position as my employer. But the shortage of bosses that the advent of desktop publishing was creating made replacing him problematic. Now, as it turned out, I was glad that I’d kept him.

When I returned to work, he could not have been more considerate. I could only assume that my weight loss, swollen face and cadaverous pallor had persuaded him of the authenticity and severity of my illness and made him feel sorry for me. I mean, I made no contribution to the country’s GNP; if anything, considering the quantity of typos I managed to squeeze into the briefest of paragraphs, I probably lost us a few points. (I was, I remind you, still seeing out of one defective eye.) But Mintz never got angry or threatening about it. In fact, he went out of his way to give me only simple assignments that were without urgent deadlines.

It was a strange thing.

Within just days however, I felt myself slipping back to virtually where I’d been the night Maryellen decamped. Though working had restored a measure of normalcy to my life, Maryellen’s opinion of my job, joined with my inability to think of anything else to do and the fact that I’d never advised her of my plan to reform myself — that I’d failed to put her on hold — added panic to my litany of miseries.

So not making progress in mustering ideas that would result in a meaningful difference, I paced compulsively when I was home and drank myself to sleep each night (so much for moderation). It was while I was engaged in the former activity that I wondered what I was really up to, why I’d been ignoring anything I could claim of common sense. It occurred to me that, besides being a sicko, I was also in the grip of an obsession that was blinding me to the reality of Maryellen’s alienation. But upon thinking that, and in no more than a beat behind simultaneously, the parakeet/Spam Lite night came rushing to the fore of my mind and I knew what I was doing. My obsession was rooted in the feelings we’d exchanged that night. Brief as the moment may have been, those feelings had transformed my body from my enemy to a source of enormous pleasure and, by my standards anyway, an instrument of supernatural powers. They’d made me, and more so after the sheer ecstasy of the sex we had that night, happy to have a body. Had romantic love been invented to serve precisely this purpose? No. I could hardly let common sense divert me from my attempts to repossess the woman who had stirred those feelings.

The day on which matters came to a head, was the day Maryellen and I would have been together for exactly two years.

I got up that morning in even more physical distress than had become my lot. Along with an inability to properly breathe through my nose and a burning pain in my throat when I swallowed, the ache in my face was deep and sharp and my mirror now reflected a chipmunk bringing home an acorn for the winter. On top of that I had a vicious hangover. The night before I’d doubled up on my scotch, beer and Percodans. But at 4 AM I’d been rudely restored to wakefulness by a fierce banging that was followed by a nasty grinding and a barely audible, human-like groan — the death rattle of my air conditioner. Incapable of returning to sleep in the godawful heat, and too nauseated for more alcohol, I could only lie there for the rest of the night, on my back with my folded arms pressed rigidly against my chest, against the torment inside it.

Continued in Part 3 https://www.abctales.com/story/robert-levin/hideous-summer-part-3