Lynne Tillman - No Lease on Life

Now she could barely squeeze past him. Their bodies touched regrettably. He was fierce and silent. He didn’t bother to look up at her. He was probably the one taking dumps on the roof.

What are the three reasons we know Jesus was Jewish?

Because he lived at home until he was thirty-three.

Because he thought his mother was a virgin.

Because his mother thought he was God.

Roy was home. If she was alone, about to be a prisoner in her apartment, she called the cops. She used to give creeps the benefit of the doubt. They were menacing, she ignored them. They squatted at her door, she played live-and-let-live, and paced back and forth in her apartment until they left.

The last time the cops arrived, the man had vanished. He’d left his greasy gear. The cops put on rubber gloves, bagged it and threw it on the street.

One of the cops was sexy. He looked into her apartment when she opened the door. Roy warned, never let cops inside. She wanted him to come in. She’d never been attracted to a cop before, except on TV. It was inevitable she’d fall in love with one for a minute. She was thrown into contact with them. She’d even had a police escort, because of a murder across the street.

It was balmy that night. The rookie cop lifted the yellow tape for her to walk under. Her building was technically in the crime scene.

— Where’s Dennis Franz? Where’s Detective Sipowicz? Elizabeth asked the cop.

Without missing a beat, the cop motioned across the street to the drug store where the dealer had been murdered.

— That’s our Sipowicz, he said.

The guy he pointed to didn’t look anything like the TV character. It didn’t matter. Thousands of movies, TV shows, and commercials were shot in the neighborhood, it was an inner-city set. NYPD Blue was special, because it used the facade of the local station house. Sipowicz, or Dennis Franz, was a cop with a pockmarked human face. He was the plain face of TV.

Sipowicz once told his fiance, a DA, about a grisly murder, when a dog ate a baby murdered by its mother. Sipowicz had to cut open the dog’s stomach, so he was the one who discovered the baby in pieces. Sipowicz’s pain is in the pauses. He tells his fiance that the priest who’s going to marry them “asked me if I lost my faith.” Long, soulful pause. Then he says, quietly, “I got faith in you .” It doesn’t count that on Hill Street Blues Dennis Franz played a creep. All that’s in the past.

The night of the murder across the street, the yellow tape marking off the perimeter of the crime scene waved in the breeze for hours. Uniforms and detectives hung out drinking coffee until it was light. Elizabeth didn’t leave her window until they tore down the tape and drove away. It was like TV except she couldn’t hear the dialogue.

Everyone was a hostage to something.

She was thrown together with cops. It was inevitable that she’d fall in love with one, that she’d want a cop to invade her space, be her private dick, her space invader, for one New York minute.

Birds do it,

bees do it,

even people with Tourette’s

FUCK

do it

Now Elizabeth set the BBQ chicken down on the stack table near the TV, with plates and forks, and opened the hot aluminum-lined bags. She threw away the plasticware, which could break into pieces as you chewed. Shards of plastic could lodge in your throat. She had a strategy for choking alone. She’d hurl herself against a hardbacked chair and perform a self-Heimlich maneuver.

Roy was watching The Simpsons .

— There’s a man in the hallway, she said.

— Yeah?

— He stinks.

— Who doesn’t.

Elizabeth forgot about Vomithead and Hector. After a while, she forgot about the drunk hulk in the hallway. She knew he could hear every sound in their apartment. He was probably leaning against their wall, listening to the Knicks game.

A ventriloquist’s act is going nowhere. He’s competing with TV and movies, he’s lost his audience. His agent comes to him and says, Listen, I can’t represent you anymore. No one’s booking you. You’re going to have to find a new line of work. So the ventriloquist opens a store. It’s called speak to Your Dead Relatives. The first day a woman comes in and says, I’d like to speak to my dead husband. The ventriloquist says, That’ll be one hundred dollars. Then she says, And I’d like him to speak to me. The ventriloquist says, That’ll be two hundred dollars. And, he adds, if he speaks to you while I’m swallowing a glass of water, that’ll be three hundred dollars.

During a commercial Elizabeth poured a beer and went to the window. A lot of people had the game on. Small windows glowed inside big windows. she looked down. The street was empty.

— Come here, look at this, Roy said.

A white car on a highway crossed the screen. The Knicks game was interrupted by a newsman’s voice. A white car was driving alone on a six-lane highway.

— Weird, Roy said.

The game was being interrupted. Elizabeth knew interruptions were life. Nine black-and-white police cars were following a white car, a Bronco, and they were in formation, keeping their distance. O.J. Simpson’s inside, an announcer said. His ex-wife, Nicole, and her male friend, Ron Goldman, were murdered last week. O.J.’s under arrest for the murders. He’s got a gun to his head. His best friend, A.C. Cowlings, is driving, speaking to the cops on a car phone. O.J.’s going to kill himself.

Roy and Elizabeth watched the game and the car. The Knicks were beating the Rockets. O.J. couldn’t turn himself over to the cops. He wanted to see his mother. Patrick Ewing was sweating, drenched. A.C. kept talking to the cops on the car phone. O.J. wanted to go to his mother, to his home or to the cemetery, to Nicole’s grave. Starks missed a basket. Elizabeth started to cry.

— What’s the matter? Roy asked. The Knicks are winning.

If he did it, anyone could do it. No one was safe from each other or from themselves. He wants to go home to his mother.

— I just saw him in Naked Gun 33½ . He was funny, she said.

— The first Naked Gun was funnier.

Elizabeth walked to the window. The white car was traveling on the highway across most of the green screens.

Helen phoned.

— They’re waving to him, she said.

— The cars are parked on the highway…

— I love live TV.

— Me too.

Helen walked fast and didn’t stand and talk in doorways, which drove Elizabeth crazy. Helen got to the point and didn’t turn life’s puny moments into rites of passage. She didn’t make cruel and unusual demands. Elizabeth hoped it would last. Helen drove a school bus for a private school. Her psychiatrist parents felt they’d raised a failure. Helen told them it was better than dancing naked on top of a bar.

— What’re you going to do? Helen asked.

— Nothing. Are you going anywhere?

— Nowhere fast.

They always said that.

The car turned into O.J.’s driveway. Cowlings parked it at the front door. Cowlings got out, O.J. was hidden, there was confusion, Cowlings talked with some police, finally O.J. emerged. He surrendered.

How do you know when a cop is dead?

The doughnut falls out of his hand.

The Knicks won by seven points. Heavenly screams of basketball joy rang down the block. Some morons had congregated on the church steps. The news kept showing clips of another friend of O.J.’s reading O.J.’s suicide letter. Elizabeth had another beer. She studied the morons. They looked like the ones from last night. Some of the Pick Me Up crusties were with them.

— Get away from the window, Roy said.

— No.

— You’re going to get killed.

— So what.