Lydia Millet - Love in Infant Monkeys

Women could not tempt Tesla, she said.

One time Pia came in to work after a bad night and Tesla asked if she would go out and feed the pigeons with him. She was limping from a kick to the knee. Marco was handsome and slept with girls he met in bars; sometimes he brought one home and made Pia sleep on the couch while he took the girl into their bedroom. Then Pia would have to listen to them. I was very fond of Pia, but no one would have called her a good-looking woman. Mostly it was the harelip, since otherwise she was fine, warm brown eyes and a nice figure. I think that’s why Marco picked her, because he knew she would feel lucky to have a man at all and he figured he needed someone who would work for her keep and would never leave him.

Tesla seemed to believe her stories, how she fell down the stairs, etc. One time she claimed her nose was broken by a children’s ball that burst through her kitchen window. I heard her tell him this because we were doing his rooms together. He nodded politely. But I happened to know her kitchen had no windows.

Tesla had close women friends, though none were his girlfriends. He believed women were as smart as men and that one day they would be just as educated and maybe even more so. Back then, in 1943, it was rare to hear anyone say such a thing. He also said that one day people would all carry little telephones in their pockets, telephones without wires.

Anyway, the morning Pia was limping, Tesla invited her to go feed the pigeons with him. She said she couldn’t leave work. He said he knew a way she could sneak out if she wanted to meet him in the park. He said, “Please, Mees,” and looked at her solemnly.

I was scrubbing the inside of his windows with balled-up newspaper. I said, “Go, go,” and promised I would cover for her. Pia never got to walk in the park. At least for me, on my way home to my apartment, I could take my time if it was still daylight, I could wait to get on the bus until the park was behind me, with its cool greenness and its shade in the summer, or its sloping fields of light snow in the winter. Then I dreamed as the bus carried me, dreamed as I was carried along in the warmth above the cold road below. I read cheap novels and I dreamed, but Pia did not know how to read.

She and Tesla went out and were gone for a couple of hours. I scrubbed hard, tore around trying to do twice as much as I could so that I seemed like two women. It wasn’t hard to get fired back then and I didn’t want it to happen to Pia.

When they got back she looked happy. At the time I thought it was the fresh air that did it, having the sun on her face when she was almost always inside. I asked her how it had been and she half smiled, which she hardly ever did because it called attention. But she didn’t say much.

It was three days later that I knocked on Tesla’s door with his new bags of birdseed on a handcart. The different seeds had to be mixed according to his recipe. There was a Do Not Disturb sign hanging on the doorknob, and it had been there too long and was alarming me, so when he didn’t come to the door I went in with my key.

He was lying facing the wall, pigeons clucking around him. It was so cold in his room, I could see my breath. A small mourning dove strutted back and forth on his arm and I heard the faint sound of traffic; when he didn’t notice the dove walking on him I knew he had gone away.

He had been gone for two days, they said when the doctor left. He was eighty-six, after all, and chest pains had bothered him. Sometimes he fainted. Before I knew it the body had been removed. Later I found out someone made a death mask of his face. But it looked nothing like him.

When I saw him on the bed, nothing but a slight rise on the sheets, I knew I would leave the hotel behind. An idea of a warmly lit house came to me.

We were shut out of his rooms and from the end of the hallway watched government men come and go. They wore trench coats and didn’t take off their hats. They carted away practically every piece of paper in all of the rooms. There were policemen with them, standing around in the halls and cracking jokes and smoking. They held the elevator forever and dropped their cigarette butts on the floor, left burns on the carpet where they ground out the burning stubs with their shoes. They took a lot of other things too: the heavy safe, the cabinets and bookshelves and every stick of furniture. When we went in later to clean the rooms they were completely bare. Only a few downy puffs in the corners, and long gray droppings down the walls where the cabinets had stood. The wallpaper had to be stripped.

The mayor read a eulogy over the radio, and people came from all over to attend the funeral at St. John the Divine. Over two thousand of them, we heard. Even Mrs. Roosevelt sent a condolence note. Pia and I wanted to go but we couldn’t get off work; she said a prayer and lit a votive candle.

But I think, even then, that she had left it behind. By it I mean the regular world — the Hotel New Yorker and me. She had already gone; she had gone after Tesla. She had no use for a world without him.

And the next time I saw her she was in jail. I went to visit her after she was sent up the river.

She told me the poisoning had been painful and she was sorry for that. She hadn’t wanted Marco to suffer, she said, because suffering wouldn’t have changed him. But all they had in the house was strychnine, to kill the rats that shared the basement with them.

I was so used to getting along with her that I really wanted to nod, to say What can you do? To say that we were still friends. But my mouth was shut. I was almost struck dumb.

When she got home from work the night of Tesla’s funeral, she told me, Marco was in their apartment, a dingy basement in a tenement on the Lower East Side. It was a ten-by-ten living room with a grated window at ground level, a sofa and a table; the bedroom was the size of their bed, and the bathroom was the size of a closet. Marco was drinking and listening to music and getting all revved up to go out and meet women, as he did every Thursday and Fridays too. Saturdays he went to see his old mother in Hoboken, who was still bitter that he’d married a harelip when he could have had anyone.

He yelled at Pia as soon as she stepped over the threshold, because his favorite dress shirt was wrinkled. He threw it at her to iron.

She was glad to iron the shirt, she told me. She had always liked the peace that came with ironing. It was a night like any other night in the routine, but for her it was entirely different. Because Tesla was gone and she was thinking of Tesla and how much she had loved him. She ironed and she remembered: dear Tesla with his gentle voice. She recalled his predictions and smiled to think of them, a world where such predictions came true.

By now the shirt looked perfect. Tesla, it seemed to her, believed in the goodness of everyone. Still, they took all he had from him. They took things only he could give and ran away with them.

And then there was Marco.

She kept on ironing and smiling. At last a flatter shirt had never been.

Marco’s music was floating in from the radio in the bedroom — Tommy Dorsey, she said. Marco was shaving at the bathroom sink; they used straight razors then. She hung the shirt on a padded hanger and tapped some rat poison into his drink. Then she took the drink into the bathroom to him.

Nothing was ever, ever so easy, she told me. As easy as falling.

She looked so calm she reminded me of the small picture of the Virgin glued into her locker, except with a harelip. She’d thought he would die right there, she said, and she would have to watch it, but the poison took longer than she expected. She thought it would be instant but he was out the door not two minutes after she gave it to him, his hair slick with pomade, taking all the money from her paycheck. They told her later that he fell down in a crowded subway car, at the feet of two older ladies from Brooklyn, where he jerked and wriggled until the car was stopped at a station and they loaded him onto a stretcher. When the police came to her door it was only to give her the bad news, she said, but she nodded and went with them right away. She put on her coat, picked up her handbag and walked right over to the morgue and then back to the precinct building.