Jami Attenberg - Saint Mazie

Daydreamed about the Captain showing up one day at a performance of hers, just stumbling in there, an accident, maybe another girl on his arm. Jeanie and him never even knowing I loved them both.

Mazie’s Diary, July 2, 1922

Saw that dapper Jew down the block today again.

Nobody knows Louis’s business except Louis, not even Rosie I don’t think.

Elio Ferrante

My cousin I was telling you about last week, the one on the force, he took a look and there’s no record at all of any arrest of Louis Gordon, anytime before 1923. Now, if he had any aliases, it might be a different story. And that doesn’t include other states obviously. And to be honest, my cousin says the paperwork system from eighty years ago, maybe it’s not the most reliable in the world. But according to existing records, Louis Gordon was never arrested or convicted of any crime.

Mazie’s Diary, August 3, 1922

In my cage, counting pennies, a smack of hands against my booth. I looked up, and there was the Captain, forehead pressed on the glass.

He said: There she is, the most beautiful lady in the world.

I raced from my cage and embraced him, a girlish fool. I pretended he was mine to keep.

What else can I do but love him?

I don’t care if I’m supposed to care that he’ll never be here when I need him. Fleeting as a fly. I only know that I have a good time when I see him, that he makes me feel like a good-time girl again, back when I knew nothing of the world, back when all I cared about was a laugh. And I need that right now. I need a laugh. Squeezing both my hands. The kisses all over me, and his sweat on my flesh. All the world contained between us. Even that grunt he makes when he’s done that I know has nothing to do with me, it makes me laugh. He’s just him, he’s just a man. Weak and human and all it comes down to is a noise.

Mazie’s Diary, August 5, 1922

Last night, damp in his hotel room. I threw away everything for two days just to lie there sweating with this man. He gave me a dozen dangling gold bracelets and they dripped down my arm. The fan blew overhead, an open window, the breeze coming off the river, and still we were just stuck in each other’s sweat. I couldn’t move away from him, neither he from me.

He said: Come back with me to California.

I laughed at him. Not being cruel, just amused. How funny to think about that. How funny it would be if I left, too. What would my world be like somewhere else? I hadn’t thought about that in so long, being somewhere else, it felt almost like it was never. So I had all those thoughts at once, and his arms were around me and I was covered in his sweat, and so I laughed.

He said: Don’t be mean.

I said: I’m not being mean. It’s a lot to ask.

He said: It seems like nothing to ask. It seems like the simplest thing in the world. Marry me, Mazie.

I said: What would I do in California?

He said: This. Exactly this. Every day. For the rest of our lives.

I said: Life isn’t made of just this.

But I didn’t know what else it was made of either.

He said: This isn’t how I thought it would go, proposing to a lady.

I said: We don’t even know each other.

He put his fingers inside me, two of them, deeply.

He said: I know you.

Rosie would never get the kitchen clean enough if I left, is what I thought. If I’m so special to this man why don’t I see him but once a year, is what I thought. I don’t know how it works, that kind of love, is what I thought. I only know the temporary kind.

He said: The air is cleaner, the sky is bluer, and the trees are as tall as skyscrapers.

I said: That’s not possible.

He said: I’m telling you, Mazie, you don’t need skyscrapers when you have trees like these.

I told him no, but I was gentle and I kissed him and I whispered only that I was too scared to say yes. Which was not a lie, though not the whole truth. I have never been able to tell him the truth about anything though.

I know you, is what he whispered over and over in my ear all night. But this morning he seemed relieved I had said no. Or maybe I was just imagining it. Or maybe I wanted to imagine it. He told me I could change my mind if I liked. He said California would always be there, and so would he. A great big state far away, on the other side of the country. I gathered up my things and returned to my life. He went off on a ship. Tomorrow I’ll explain to everyone in my life where I’ve been. Today I’ll think about California.

Mazie’s Diary, August 6, 1922

I found Rosie on the floor in the kitchen, sobbing, when I came home early this morning. Hysterics. I couldn’t calm her. The sunlight lit up her face, those lines drawn in her forehead, her mustache untended to, eyes bulging and pink. I gave her a glass of water and she pushed it away. I tried to hold her and she shook beneath me. I shushed her, I stroked her hair, and it was no use at all, none of it. Finally I slapped her, and she looked as if she might murder me right there on the kitchen floor, but it was better than her sobbing like that.

She said: You can’t just do that to me. You can’t disappear on me.

I said: Rosie, I didn’t mean it like that. I got caught up on something. It was just a man.

I should have just told her everything then, told her I loved him, told her who he is to me, who he was to me. But he’s my secret goddammit. He’s all mine.

I said: Where’s Louis?

She said: He’s gone, doing whatever it is he does out there.

I said: Who ever knows what Louis does?

She said: I was fine when he left. It’s only when I’m left alone I get like this. I don’t mean to get like this.

I said: You’ve been better lately.

She said: I haven’t. Not truly.

She didn’t know what I was doing all day and I didn’t know what she was doing all day either. She could weep in the mornings and scream in the afternoons for all I knew.

She let me hold her then. Soon enough Louis got home. Maybe he could hear her howling from wherever he was. By then she had calmed. Still, we were slumped on the ground together. He whistled as he entered.

He said: The kitchen’s really sparkling today, wife of mine.

He leaned over her, kissed her on her head. Gave her his hands and she took them, and then she was up, standing. Gave me his, and I was up, too.

I’m in bed now, a flask next to me. There was something I was supposed to be dreaming about but I forgot already what it was.

George Flicker

When I came home I moved right back into the apartment I grew up in on Grand Street. I was a world traveler! I had fought in a war. I had saved people’s lives. I got a Bronze Star; do you see that over there on my mirror? [He points at a dresser.] A Bronze Star! And now I was crammed back into that same damn one-room apartment. It was not pleasant. My parents were older, and they were starting to smell like old people, just like I do now. With Al not being well, everyone’s nerves were frayed, and we were stepping all over each other. My mother swore I was half a foot taller than when I’d left, like I’d had some sort of growth spurt in France.

And I had to start all over finding work, building a career. Girlie, I’m telling you, it’s no fun to start over when you’ve already started over once or twice, and you’re doing it right under the nose of your mother. But in France I had worked for a tie manufacturer, and he had taught me how to make ties, and how to sell them, too. When I moved to New York I got a job at a tie factory for fifteen cents an hour. I started to save enough money to buy my own ties, which I sold on the streets. But what I was really thinking about was real estate. It was not an original thought, of course. I don’t know anyone in New York City who doesn’t think about it. It’s impossible to walk those streets and not think about real estate. Louis Gordon was in it, I remember. He owned a few buildings here and there, along with all his other…investments. You know, he was a dabbler.