David Gates - The Wonders of the Invisible World

I went to see Beauty and the Beast when it first came out because I wanted to know what the kids at Helping Hands knew. It’s like if you had a real job you’d read Crain’s New York Business. Anyhow, it blew me away: I was like crying and crying. Of course I asked myself why. I mean, am I not Dinah Keltner? So okay, you got your buttons pushed by really, really expert moviemakers who know that everybody wants perfect love. At least Tobias wasn’t on hand to see me lose it. I think I keep going back and renting the video because I’m into the way it just dependably rips me open. I sort of knew this afternoon, when I was helping Gwendolyn on with her backpack (she’ll get one arm through and just flail with the other), that if I got any time by myself over the weekend I’d probably watch it again.

Back in the apartment, I look in on Tobias — dead to the world — then close the bedroom door. I tear the corner off my M&Ms and zap the TV on, but when I try to push the tape into the thing there’s already something in there. Tobias says one of these days I’m going to wreck it, just shoving something in without checking. I hit EJECT and out pops the tape with KING BEATING hand-lettered on the label. Great, so we’re back to this. I stick Beauty and the Beast in, hit PLAY and go sit on the sofa. The FBI warning comes on and then it really hits me how stupid this is. You’re going to cry when they start to fall in love and cry more when the Beast dies (or maybe it’s supposed to be a near-death experience the way he’s sort of floating up) and then really lose it when all the stuff in the castle goes back to being real. So you have your big cry, and so what. I pick up the zapper and zap the thing off and get a screenful of snow and a snowy roaring. I zap it back on and it picks right up where the FBI warning turns color, and it’s like it was just waiting for me and would have waited and waited. I rattle the first M&Ms into my palm. A yellow, a brown and a brown.

Around four in the morning I wake up when I hear Tobias moving around. The toilet flushes and that line pops into my head, Watch waterfalls of pity roar. Now, that dates you. If I don’t watch it, I’m going to be wide awake. I hear him out in the other room fooling with the VCR, and then he’s walking this way and the door closes. I can’t remember him getting back in bed, but there he is when I wake up in daylight, one foot with a dirtied white sock poking out from the comforter. My first thought of the day is: And we are supposedly good people.

Tobias and I got married in 1981, both of us having had our grand passions: mine a husband, his somebody named Dorothy who he said went crazy. (I actually found out a little more than that, but it was like pulling teeth.) Our first date he took me to Cinema Village to see The Parallax View. “It’s basically a Hollywood piece of shit,” he said, “but you should probably see it.” It turned out this was his fourth time going. Afterward we went to the Little Finland Bar and talked about movies, having agreed that telling life stories was a cliché. Not that movie talk wasn’t. He said his favorite film was Blow-Up, though he said he knew he was supposed to say it was The Searchers or something. I forget what I said mine was: I certainly at that point wasn’t going to admit to The Way We Were. I married him because:

It was charming that he had asked me out to a movie he called a piece of shit. Still more charming that this wasn’t calculated.

He was a romantic.

He was a left-wing romantic. I think he thought of himself as like a John Wayne with good politics. He used to say, “Get your ham and eggs over here.” You know, one wanted to be wanted.

These days I can’t even bear to think about stuff we did in bed, some of which I got him into doing. What I used to love was him getting his pleasure, which of course I’m sure now was probably just a power thing on my part, bitch that I am. I would watch his face scrunch up and then go blank. He would say, “Oh, this is the only time I ever really and truly relax.” Of course in two minutes he would be like, Can I get you something? Washcloth? Glass of water? Get you a drink? We were the best, that’s what’s killing. The best for us. Which is why it’s just so weird that he would turn around and stop. Gee, you don’t think he’s passive-aggressive, do you? I’m ashamed to even remember this, but I actually at one point bought this book on living with the passive-aggressive man. My first and only self-help book, except for one about depression. I hid it under the mattress like pornography: I think the last time Tobias made a bed was when he went to sleep-away camp. But I used to fantasize that he would somehow find it and know because I’d hidden it that it must be super-important to me and bingo, we’d begin to talk. I eventually put the thing in the garbage. So it’s now in the Great Kills Landfill, where archaeologists of the future can find it in the same undisintegrated bag with our undisintegrated junk mail. They’ll know our names and what our problem was and be sad that the answer (now found by science) had been so simple all along.

Tobias in those days got his hair cut short at a real barbershop and said that while he once thought drugs were revolutionary (having been stoned, he said, for the entire Nixon administration, 1969–1974) he now considered them decadent. When he did anything at all (which really wasn’t that often), he drank like a tragic proletarian. At the time I met him he was running the local assemblyman’s office, a storefront around the corner from where we live now, which later became a David’s Cookies that went out of business. The assemblyman fired him for wearing a FREE JOHN HINCKLEY button in the office (this made the papers at the time), which Tobias claimed was protected political speech. What was actually happening, he was all set to go to work for Bernie Adler, who had started this thing for the homeless and who everybody thought was a saint because he’d worked for Allard Lowenstein, and Tobias just wanted to — his words — go out in a blaze of glory.

I at the time was just trying to get over my divorce and waiting tables and taking one course a semester at Hunter toward a teaching certificate because it was too late for anything better. (I’m still nine credits short, and will be when I die.) So one day I was complaining to this friendly woman in one of my classes (who turned out to be Margaret) about the rats in my building and she said her husband knew somebody in the assemblyman’s office. Well, I was a woman who knew my rights, so in I marched. The first thing I remember Tobias actually saying beyond, like, How do you do, was when I told him who owned the building and he said, “What, are you shitting me?” Apparently this landlord was well known to everybody on the East Side except me for being some judge’s brother-in-law or whatever he was; his buildings had rats and lead paint and drunken supers and no heat for weeks on end, and what your recourse was, Tobias said, was not to live in his buildings.

If you ask Tobias what it’s like working for the homeless, he’ll be a real prick and tell you he works with the homeless. But mostly he doesn’t talk like your usual lefty, and that was another thing I thought was great about him. Don’t get him started on the word empowerment. He’s even down on African-American, though he wouldn’t say so to anybody but me. Movement types were already into this kind of talk when I met Tobias, except you didn’t have the expression PC back then; Tobias called them college pussies. I thought it was cool that his friends were relatively no-bullshit people like Bernie Adler, who actually grew up working-class. It wasn’t cool that the worst insult he could come up with was calling someone a vagina, but I gave him credit for what I thought was the meaning behind it. He would talk about college pussies, and yet just about the only films he would go see were foreign, and his idea of decor was (still is) brick-and-board shelves with every book he ever had in college plus the hundreds he’s picked up since.