A Reunion of Ghosts

Joe Hopper had taken all the tools when he’d moved out—that had been his divorce settlement—so she tried to stick it back into place with Scotch tape. When that didn’t work, she tried ignoring it. That didn’t work either, and the switch plate had come to remind her of someone hanging from a ledge, holding on to its lip with the fingertips of one hand. It was driving her crazy. She needed to get to a hardware store and buy a screwdriver.

The dentist’s office was—maybe still is—in shabby downtown Riverdale, by the elevated train station. On weekdays Lady reverse-commuted there. Daily she clattered down the metal staircase, and, at its landing, propelled herself over a puddle that she swore never evaporated. The weather might be hot and dry; the mayor (little Abe Beame) might have banned residents of all five boroughs from watering their houseplants and flushing their toilets. It didn’t matter. The puddle remained, shrunken perhaps, sometimes a mere muddy outline, but there nonetheless, dead leaves on its surface. In 1976 the puddle lay directly across the street from a dive called the Terminal Bar, a fairly ominous name if you thought about it, and given Lady’s proclivity for both suicide and puns, she did. Accordingly, Lady had named it the Puddle Styx.

On one side of the Terminal Bar was a four-story office building. The dentist’s office was on its second floor. On the other side of the bar was a hardware store owned and run by a pair of aging brothers, two irritable men, short and ovate, with glaring black eyes, bulbous thread-veined noses, and patchy pubic beards. Despite the countless hardware stores on the Upper West Side, it was this hardware store—half an hour from her apartment if there were no delays, but of course there were always delays—that Lady decided to patronize.

She had a reason for traveling that distance when she didn’t really have to: she wasn’t at ease inside hardware stores, and at least she’d been in this one before. Not often, but sometimes the dentist sent her there to pick up some Windex or a three-way plug adaptor or an extension cord. She would feel less unnerved in the somewhat familiar surroundings.

On this summer morning no one in the store paid her any attention or asked if they could help her or gave any indication that they’d seen her before, or, for that matter, were seeing her now. She didn’t care. In stores, as in most places and situations, she preferred to be left to herself. This was particularly true now, consumed as she was with the switch-plate crisis.

Before leaving home, she’d unscrewed the plate completely, using her fingers to turn the bottom screw, which was also on the brink of falling out. She’d put the plate and the screw inside a baggie and put the baggie in her purse. This had turned out to be smart. In an aisle filled with, surely, over a hundred bins of over a million screws, she was able to find the one she needed.

Buoyed, she continued to the next aisle with its multiple bins of screwdrivers, but here she was at a loss. She wasn’t sure how to choose among screwdrivers, didn’t know which characteristics of a screwdriver were determinant. She decided to go by color.

She considered one with a rubbery blue handle, rejected it, picked up another, cherry red, put it back. She walked up and down the aisle, then snatched up a model with a handle of translucent plastic, acid green, a hue she’d once experimented with, borrowing an Indian tunic in that shade from Delph. “It makes you look dead,” Joe Hopper said, and she returned it unworn.

So—fuck you, Joe Hopper—she took the acid-green screwdriver by the shaft and made her way to the register. She imagined him watching all this, frustrated by his inability to criticize a thing she’d done. She fantasized Walter Matthau sidling up to her, asking for local restaurant advice. The two of them would chat a bit, amusing each other, hitting it off; then they’d go to the Terminal Bar for a couple of vodka tonics, some chicken parm and spaghetti, and, after a couple of self-deprecating jokes about expanding waistlines, a shared slice of pie. What Walter Matthau would be doing in a Riverdale hardware store, she’d work out another time.

After she left the store, she put the bag with the screwdriver in her purse. She thought about her dungeon of an apartment. She decided to take a walk. Van Cortlandt Park was right across the street, summer green and lush. She stood on the corner, waiting for the Walk signal.

But as she waited, the idea of crossing the street became overwhelming. It was such a vast street, this section of Broadway, and the thought of traversing it, of sprinting from cement island to cement island as cars and taxis whipped by, discouraged her, depressed her, filled her with a fear that, she immediately registered, would not serve a New Yorker well. But what could she do? The new fear was upon her, and she changed her mind and decided to admit defeat and just go home.

Instead she pivoted and went into the building where she worked. She climbed the two flights of stairs. She tried to peer through the opaque window set in the office door, the dentist’s name painted on that glass in an arc like a rainbow. She saw nothing, just the wires threaded through the safety glass.

She rummaged through her purse for her keys. She unlocked the door. Inside, she turned off the alarm, turned on the lights.

Everything in the reception area was as she left it. The magazines and brochures were undisturbed, the gray dustcover over her Selectric untouched. Something was off, though, and she figured out what it was when she poked a finger into the soil of the leggy philodendron on the windowsill. Someone had been here and watered the plant—someone had done her job for her.

The door to the dentist’s private office was shut. She crossed the room, put her hand on the round knob. She didn’t turn it, just held it. She put her ear to the hollow wood. Although she heard nothing but the loud ticking of his desk clock, she felt uneasy. She found herself picturing the dentist on the other side of that door, splayed on the floor where she and he had their trysts, his wife standing over him just a little ashamed of herself, holding a bloody Huber probe. It was a premonition, she later realized, not of an actual murder but of something gone terribly wrong in there. Or maybe it was a wish.

She held her breath as she turned the knob, but she didn’t take the next step of pushing open the door. She was annoyed by how jittery she felt. Her reaction was inexplicable, really. Stupid, if she were being honest. She went in and out of that office all the time. True, the door was almost never shut as it was today, but still … Fear of picking up a ringing telephone’s receiver was bad enough. Then there’d been the anxiety over crossing the street. Was her fear generalizing; was she now going to become unable to open doors as well?

But no, she thought. Her hesitancy wasn’t a sign of neuroses—or not only that. She was hesitating because she was not supposed to be there that day. She was feeling like a trespasser, like a vandal. She had to give herself a stern talking-to. Entering that office was allowed. It was part of her job; it was something she did all the time. The dentist went out for lunch, and Lady went in to do the filing or find an invoice or sit in his comfortable chair and work the crossword. She didn’t need to ask permission. “Mi office es su office,” he’d say, and why not? He was lucky to have someone like her, a self-starter, diligent and devoted.

An example of that diligence: she would do the filing right now. She’d straighten up some of the mess that had been left on his desk when they closed in late June. It would be good to get that work done, good to get a jump on things before the office reopened on Tuesday.

Yet even as she opened the door, she couldn’t shake her apprehension. Now she imagined finding not a body on the carpet—still life with slit throat—but two bodies, much alive, naked, sparkling with perspiration. Giddy husband and naughty wife. If this were a TV show, a movie, isn’t that exactly what would happen next? Music swelling, the receptionist gasping, then rushing to the street below, pressing her hand to her heart, the tears welling, as she cries out his name—

Or no. Because the receptionist would be the villain in the movie, wouldn’t she? She’d be the housebreaker, the slut, the brunette. The camera wouldn’t think to follow her once she left. It would be the dentist’s wife the camera would care about, the dentist’s wife who’d be the heroine. That would be the name of the movie, in fact. The Dentist’s Wife.

The door was slightly ajar now, but Lady still didn’t peek inside. She only listened again, listened harder. All she could hear were the clicks of the passing seconds. She took one more of those seconds to inform herself that she was an idiot. Then she pushed the door fully open and flicked on the light.

No swelling music, but she couldn’t help herself—she gasped anyway. It wasn’t just that the soil of the ficus tree inside the dentist’s office had also been watered. It was that the walls, for the past five years the same grayed white as the plaster of paris dentition molds in the prostheses closet, had been painted a feminine mauve. It was that an ornately framed O’Keeffe had been hung by his desk. The flower in the poster was meant, of course, to evoke a receptive vagina, pink and clitoral—Joe’s work and O’Keeffe’s had that in common—but Lady suspected it had been viewed instead as the pink gums and beckoning uvula of the wide-open mouth of the dentist’s dreams.

His desk had been cleared too. Gone, the stack of unfiled insurance forms, the stack of unfiled patient info, even the stack of pink While You Were Out messages, those little notes from her to him. “Mr. Bonfiglio’s temp fell off,” followed by two exclamation points with a caret underneath:

Sad bunny, she called it. (It’s true. She invented the whole emoticon thing.)

She also had a happy bunny and a confused bunny, and then there was the one he’d made up, the one he’d draw on the back of one of those While You Were Out slips and leave on her chair on afternoons he hoped she’d stay late: Playboy bunny, the two exclamation points plus a wiggly come-hither grin.

As she gawked at the pristine desk, the absence of clutter felt like a rebuke. Other than the noisy brass clock, every item on its surface was new: a leather blotter, a set of unimaginative but shiny Cross pens, a deluxe version of Galileo’s Pendulum, blond wood and steel balls.

And there was more. On the wall above his credenza, the diplomas documenting his unadventurous education—NYU undergrad, NYU College of Dentistry—had been framed and hung. On a nearby shelf, photographs, once propped against books, their edges curling, had also been framed and arranged in ascending height order, like a Rockettes kick line.

The smallest of these photos was of the dentist and his golden retriever Beef, a sweet aging dog that Lady had, at various times, taken to the vet’s or groomer’s. Next there was a slightly larger shot of Beef alone, a professional portrait in which Beef’s mouth was open and his pink tongue lolling, so he looked as though he were smiling, although he was probably just panting from the heat of the photographer’s lights.

Next, larger still: the dentist and his wife under a chuppah. Beef was in this one, too, sitting alongside one of the chuppah bearers, both the bearer and Beef in paisley vests and bow ties. Then there were two new additions, each one Beef-free. There was an eight-by-ten, just dentist and wife squinting into the sun on their honeymoon. There was a nine-by-twelve, dentist and wife aboard a sailboat that Lady hadn’t known he owned but could see was named The Tooth Ferry.

And on the credenza itself, a small piece of white card stock tented over like a place card at a dinner party. Surprise!! it said. Lady opened it. Happy Anniversary!! it said. Love!! Patty, it said. And along with the exclamation points—not deliberately silly and facetious exclamation points like Lady’s bunny ears and wide bunny eyes, but conventionally employed and rather hysterical exclamation points—were Patty’s hearts and x’s and o’s.

Lady returned the card to the credenza. She took the professional photo of Beef, the one with the tongue. She held the frame with both hands, looked into the dog’s brown eyes. She dropped it, frame and all, into her purse.

Leaving, she made sure to close the door to the dentist’s office, to punch in the alarm code, to secure the outside locks—to do everything methodically and correctly so nothing would let on she’d been here. Once outside, she hurried past the Terminal Bar, jetéd over the Puddle Styx, trundled up the metal staircase, and caught the Broadway local, which was shimmying on the platform, waiting to take her home.

The blade of the acid-green screwdriver didn’t come close to fitting into the grooves of the screw. Lady looked at the tip of the blade and realized the thing she’d purchased wasn’t a screwdriver at all. Oh, sure, it looked like a screwdriver, but it was something else, a screwdriver’s stepbrother, a bastard screwdriver, the tip shaped like a crucifix.

She was so disappointed in herself, felt so inept, so useless, she couldn’t help it; she, who never cried, began to weep. She had to give herself another little lecture, tell herself that it wasn’t a big deal, that she’d simply return to the store and exchange the screwdriver-like tool for an actual screwdriver. How hard would that be? She knew she could alternatively stick the impostor screwdriver into a drawer, then go out and buy a replacement within blocks of her apartment. It wasn’t as if the aggregate cost of the almost-screwdriver and a genuine screwdriver both was going to break her. But if she did that, then she would have to live with a screwdriver-like device that made her feel stupid. She might as well have invited Joe Hopper back.

She wiped her eyes with a nearby dish towel and got a grip. The truth was, she needed to go back to Riverdale anyway. She not only had to return the goddamn screwdriver, she had to return the photo of Beef. How stupid to give in to the impulse to swipe it. How baffling the impulse itself. Had she imagined that the dentist, when he surveyed his new and improved office, wouldn’t notice its absence?

Of course he’d notice its absence. A professional portrait, scheduled, paid for. He’d ask the wife if she had deaccessioned the photo; the wife would say no. Then one of two things would occur. He’d accuse the wife of lying. He’d tell her he’d always known she didn’t love Beef. He’d say that this, her stealthy elimination of his dog’s portrait, was the first step in removing Beef from his life. He’d add that mauve was no color for a man’s office. A fight, then a divorce, would ensue. He’d tell Lady he’d been a fool.

Or he’d figure out at once that it was Lady who took the picture in what, he’d conclude, was some sort of statement, some sort of expression of Lady’s attachment to him, of her never expressed but clearly out-of-control desire for him, of her persistent if wrongheaded conviction that they had a relationship. Or maybe he’d think it was some kind of threat—admit we have a relationship or you’ll never see your dog again—when all it was, really, was an irresistible urge to screw with the wife’s prissy and predictable sense of interior design, to violate the rigid order of the photographs.

But he’d never get it, would never see the verve, the art, the sly humor in what she’d done, and so, when she went back to the hardware store later that same day to return the acid-green piece of useless crap she’d bought, the photograph was still in her purse so she could return it too.

She should have realized the hardware store would close early on the Saturday of a long Fourth of July weekend, but she hadn’t, which is why, at two o’clock, she found herself standing on the street looking at the half-lowered security gate sprayed with graffiti: gang symbols, swastikas, the names of lovers in hearts.

One of the brothers who owned the place came outside, crouching to avoid hitting his head on the gate. He was wearing dark blue work pants and a malodorous short-sleeved dress shirt. On his head he’d plopped, of all things on this sultry afternoon, a felt homburg. The hat appeared to possess gravity-defying properties, remaining atop his head even as he exited the store in this half-bent position, as if he were dancing the limbo upside down. He was sweating oceans, of course. Each of the large pores of his purple fleshy nose was ringed with gray moisture. He stood, looked briefly at Lady, then turned his back on her.

This was what courage looked like for Lady: she didn’t immediately retreat. Instead she pulled the screwdriver from her purse, explained her problem, told him the whole sad saga.

“Forget it, lady,” he said when she was done. He still hadn’t turned to face her. “I ain’t taking that back.”

She looked around, as if for support, as if there might be some neutral observer stepping up to assist her. But it was the Saturday of the long Fourth of July weekend. It was New York. The street was empty.

She tried explaining again. Right screw, wrong blade.

He spun around. For a moment she thought he might hit her, that’s how angry he seemed. She thought his anger might have something to do with his heavy accent. Perhaps he didn’t understand English all that well, perhaps he’d misunderstood her, thought she’d said something rude or belittling. But it turned out she was the one who didn’t get it.

“It’s a Phillips head, lady,” he said with disgust.

Over the course of her twenty-six years on this earth, Lady had become extremely adroit at distinguishing the proper from the common noun. Still, his repeating her name, even unwittingly, was disquieting.

“But it didn’t work,” she said. “And I only bought it this morning.” She could hear her voice, the high pitch, the way it fluttered with nerves. “And I have the receipt. Look. It says right here your return policy is seven days.”

“We have a no returns policy for people who don’t know their asses from their elbows,” he said, and then he was back to struggling with the gate. It had gone off its tracks, was the problem. He shook it back and forth, jiggled it, jostled it. She saw that her presence was distracting him, exacerbating his struggle. She took a step back.

He mumbled something, but she didn’t try to make sense of it. She was still caught on what he’d said just before, his verbal addenda to the store’s return policy. She wondered if she’d possibly misheard him. His accent was so thick, after all, that she’d had to stare at his lips to make out his words. She’d stared even though his mouth repelled her, surrounded by that beard, all that short wiry hair. Her perverse mind suddenly compelled her to imagine kissing him, his tongue and facial hairs inside her mouth.

Something she tried never to think about came to her then. It was something that happened about a year earlier, on a warm spring night a few days after Vee and Eddie celebrated their first anniversary. This thing, it had been completely the fault of Joe Hopper. He’d whined and sulked for so long that night, she’d finally given in and agreed to have sex with a small group of their friends: three guys, including Joe, and one other woman.

One of the guys had just acquired a new waterbed. He’d right that minute finished filling it, he told Joe over the phone, and could think of no better way to break it in than with an orgy. Not that any of them had ever participated in an orgy or knew anyone who had. And not that Lady had any interest in an orgy. She couldn’t even abide the word, the way it sounded like some sort of obnoxious diminutive. Pudgy. Budgie. Orgy. But Time and Newsweek and Life and Look all reported that young people like Lady and Joe and their friends were constantly having group sex, and then there was Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and also John Updike, and now Joe and some of the others had come to feel ripped off.

As they walked to the waterbed owner’s apartment, Lady was silent. It was more, she realized, than her not being interested. She was actively opposed. And even if she had been into it in theory, the specifics disturbed her. She didn’t like the 3:2 male/female ratio in general or the males and other female involved in particular.

On the other hand, she was always trying to prove that she was the opposite of your typical bourgeois dental receptionist, that, unlike all those women the Beats of the Upper West Side had married—women Lady sometimes recognized pushing carts in Gristedes—she was not the kind of wife whose conventionality could destroy an entire literary movement or even a single evening out. So okay, fine, she decided as she trudged alongside her husband. She would go along. When group sex is inevitable, she told herself, one should just lie back and enjoy it … and enjoy it … and enjoy it. Still, the phrase ad nauseam came to mind.

But in the end all her worried ruminating had turned out to be unnecessary. A bottle of Jack and several joints later, the only one of the three boys who could sustain an erection was the satyrical Joe Hopper, and Lady had consequently wound up having sex with no one besides her own husband. Later, while Joe fucked the other woman, the waterbed’s owner asked Lady to help him out by using her mouth, and when she demurred, he said well, what about her hand, and in the interest of not being a complete wet blanket she said okay, fine. “Obviously I’m not attracted to you,” he said pensively as she worked away with no discernible results. He was speaking more to himself than to Lady. “I always thought I was, but”—and here he looked down at the final arbiter—“you can’t argue with The Bone Dog.”

“Or with the absence of The Bone Dog,” the third guy said. He’d given up almost immediately, had taken himself and his own sad puppy to a mildewed easy chair where, still naked, he was reading a yellowed Columbia Spectator from 1968. The riots. The takeover of Grayson Kirk’s office. The good old days.

“Maybe if you pretend you don’t want it,” the waterbed owner suggested, and Lady said, “To be honest, Barry, I don’t.” She considered this a pretty clever response. She was telling the truth, yet Barry and The Bone Dog were free to interpret what she’d said as the pretense requested. But as it turned out, both were wise to her, and her words hurt their feelings. The Bone Dog turned the color of the sky before a thunderstorm and scuttled into itself. It had been small and retreating before; now it looked inside out.

Lady got up off the bed and put on her underpants. She turned her attention to selecting and stacking records on the turntable—the good hostess, even when it wasn’t her party—while Joe Hopper and the other woman went at it for a second time, moaning and grunting far more than was necessary while the unheated and underfilled waterbed gurgled and sloshed.

On the walk home Joe Hopper blamed the other guys’ failures on her. “You never act like you want it,” he said. “You radiate not wanting it. It’s so clear you don’t want it, you rendered a roomful of men at their sexual peak impotent.”

He kicked a trash can. She found it horrifying: she’d married a man who kicked trash cans. “Well, first of all, the room wasn’t full of men. It was just Barry and Norman. And second of all, Barry asked me to radiate not wanting it.”

Joe Hopper was neither mollified nor distracted. “Sometimes,” he said, “I feel like you tricked me into marrying you by pretending you liked sex.”

“No,” she said. “I tricked you into marrying me by pretending I liked you.”

“I want a divorce,” he said.

Outside the hardware store, this memory, in the way of memories, came and went in an instant. The hardware store owner was still wrestling with the gate. What struck her as she stood there holding the Phillips head was that as offensive as he was to her, it was plain she was equally offensive to him. She was, in his eyes, an ignorant woman, a fool who had gotten this far in life without learning the first thing about screws and screwdrivers, professionalism and dilettantism, asses and elbows.

She stepped forward, tried to place herself in the line of his peripheral vision. She was looking at his profile now. He would not turn his head even ninety degrees to look at her. All he did was shake the gate angrily and ineffectually. He reached up, trying to push it back, trying to start all over. As he did, his sleeves fell back, and—his age, his accent; it was no surprise, really—she saw the numbers.

She could never deny she saw them, and she could never deny she knew what they were. Our father, Natan Frankl, had come to the States from a displaced persons camp too. Though most of Lady’s recollections of him were faded or shadowed, some remained vivid.

But her own arm was already in motion. And maybe she didn’t care. Maybe the fact of those numbers didn’t make a damned bit of difference to her. Surely, along with the good and the innocent, plenty of assholes had been carted off to those camps: men who would someday abandon their daughters or insult their well-meaning customers or blithely do unto others as they wish hadn’t been done unto them. She had a theory. About 95 percent of all people populating this sad planet are assholes, she believed, regardless of race, religion, or creed. Accordingly, whenever you meet any member of any demographic, you have a 95 percent chance of meeting an asshole. Which, if you don’t know enough other members of the group, leads you to extrapolate your negative impression to the whole lot of them. This was why Lady believed in integration, mixed marriages, busing, anything that would increase the chances of people encountering and huddling together with the nonassholian 5 percent of humanity.

At this moment, though, she wasn’t reviewing her asshole theory. She was too busy feeling attacked and dismissed, abused and ignored. She was feeling, feeling, feeling, and so, untended and ungoverned, her arm did what it wanted to do, and what her arm wanted to do was throw the acid-green screwdriver at the hardware store owner’s head.

She never had much upper body strength, she never played sports of any kind—back in sixth grade, when she’d been forced to participate in the Presidential Physical Fitness Test, she’d scored in the lowest percentile for throwing—and so she hadn’t expected the screwdriver to go very far. She’d imagined it would fall and hit the sidewalk before it reached the head her arm had been aiming for. Instead the screwdriver did an elegant somersault, and as if assisted by an indiscernible breeze, its cruciform blade struck the man on the side of his cratered nose. He cried out—more in surprise than in pain, Lady felt certain—and covered his nose with both hands.

Now he was looking at her. Now he’d taken note. And now she was ignoring him. She squatted and darted under the half-closed gate. She knew exactly where to go, what to do. She didn’t run, just walked purposefully, to the aisle she wanted, to the right bin, and she took the one thing she was entitled to. Then she strode back to the door and upside-down-limbo’d into the slash of sunlight beyond it, where the stunned store owner stood, Phillips head at his feet, hands at his nose, blood seeping between his fingers.

She held up the screwdriver she’d taken, the rubbery blue. A couple of dollars less than the acid green; he was making money on the exchange. He didn’t care, though. “Oy, mein shnoyts,” he bleated from behind his hands. He dropped his arms, showed her the damage. It was nothing. A lot of blood, yes, but just from a single cut on the side of his left nostril. Nothing deep, nothing dangerous, although it did seem a fragile nose, all that excess purple flesh. It seemed as though it might hurt were someone even to touch it gently. Certainly it had made her wince to look at it.

The only way to avoid looking at it now was to leave. He was yelling about calling a policeman. There was something ridiculous in that—not a cop, not the police, but a policeman, like a small child with great faith in all public servants.

“Go ahead,” she said. “We’ll see whose side he takes,” and she turned and flounced off. She did—she flounced. Entitled and superior. A mean, spoiled brat. She who was none of those things, not ever.

Over the Puddle Styx, up the stairs, onto the train. Even now she wants to say that this was when she first began to grasp the enormity of what she’d done, but that would be a lie. She’d known what she was doing as she was doing it. Stop it, she’d thought as she raised her arm. Walk away, she’d thought as she threw the green tool. What the fuck are you doing? she inquired of herself as she slithered under the gate.

She hadn’t stopped, though. Hadn’t walked away. Thoughts versus feelings, and the winner had been feelings. A huge upset. No one would have predicted it.

But as the euphoria of her fury wore off, Lady became aware of a terrible pain inside her, sharp and systemic, as if she’d swallowed the millions of screws in the store and they were now scraping her organs as they tumbled through her bloodstream. She knew the reason for the pain. The entire encounter had been a test, and she’d failed, and she was hurting inside over that failure—because no matter what that man had done, no matter how badly he’d behaved, no matter how much of an asshole he’d been, she should have been kind. She’d seen the numbers. She’d known his life. Our family had played a part in that life, that living death.