Lynne Tillman - No Lease on Life

Elizabeth thought about murder, about dying, throat slashed, blood gushing.

— When you’re old, and your friends start dying all around you, don’t you think that’ll be hard?

— It depends on whether they owe me money or not, Roy said.

If O.J. could do it, anyone could do it. Husbands murder their wives, ex-wives all the time. They murder them in courtroom hearings about protection orders against them.

All the TVs across the street showed the white Bronco and the cop cars in formation, reruns of his run from the cops.

She didn’t want to do time for doing a moron. Murdering someone you loved made more sense. In a flaming instant of furious, senseless passion, she could stab Roy in his heart. Then he’d be dead. It was too final. All she wanted was to hurt him, teach him a lesson. If she could imagine it, it didn’t mean she could do it, it was just within reach, in the realm of possibility, which was important, because as you got older, you felt more limited.

There was a sharp knock at the door.

Roy was in cyberspace.

It was Ernest.

— Hector’s been fired, he said.

— What’d he do? Why was he in disgrace?

— I don’t know. But it must have been really bad, because we have no super.

Ernest came in, and they sat down at the rectangular kitchen table. Elizabeth opened some beers. She wasn’t in love with him anymore. They had a lot in common.

— We have no super. What if something happens? she asked.

— We’ll call the landlord’s office.

— At night?

— I don’t know.

— Are they going to hire a new super?

— They’ll try to rent Hector’s apartment for big bucks.

— They’ll have to get his stuff out.

— That could take a year.

They emptied their glasses. Elizabeth sighed and opened more bottles.

— What if the electricity goes out at midnight? she asked.

— I don’t know.

— What if the boiler explodes at 3 A.M.?

— We’re dead.

— Hector was better than nothing.

— We’ll have to contact the City.

— In the middle of the night?

— If it’s an emergency, we’ll call the fire department or the cops. What else can we do?

I don’t want to be sorry to lose a super like Hector. I want to be free of Hector and the cops, she thought.

— You know, the cops never get right on it, Elizabeth said.

— Yeah, they’re hanging out or practicing cop triage. I saw this rookie at the corner today, and both of us were standing near this crazy, he’s wearing farmer overalls, a tall, skinny loony dude, with a real long gray beard, a white guy, maybe fifty, and he’s talking to himself, and then he starts shouting, over and over, like he’s giving a sermon, somebody’s got to stand up for the character of the girls.

Ernest was really amused by that. He repeated it. People repeat what they like.

— Somebody’s got to stand up for the character of the girls.

Two Greek women are in a field. One of them pulls an enormous carrot out of the ground. She says to the other woman, This reminds me of my husband. The other woman looks at the huge carrot. What, because of the length? No, she says. What, the circumference? she asks. No, the woman says, the dirt.

Elizabeth wanted a quiet night and a relatively good super. People got a little of what they wanted. No one ever got enough.

Across the street Frankie was closing the laundromat, pulling down the great, tired, yawning gate. Ernest and Elizabeth finished the last of the beer.

— I hate calling the cops, she said.

— I hate calling the City. Same difference, he said.

It was past midnight when Elizabeth said good-night to Ernest. Roy was in bed, and she lay down next to him. They watched the end of a Honeymooners episode.

One of these days, Alice, one of these days, POW, right in the kisser.

Ralph Kramden threatened Alice, he never hit her. The morons were carousing in the background.

— Hector’s been fired. We don’t have a super, Elizabeth said.

— We never had a super. I’m going to sleep.

— You are? How can you?

— Easy.

She hated him now.

Elizabeth went to the window. Fatboy trotted over jauntily and stuck his nose through the gate. Elizabeth opened the police-approved window-gate doors, which she’d spent some real money on when they moved in, to prevent break-ins by spidery fifth-story men and to allow her, Roy, and Fatboy to get out fast in case of a fire. She raised the window as high as it would go, then the two of them climbed through and settled on the fire escape. Fatboy was happy. She wished she were him.

The morons were vocalizing, inventing their own brand of superrepellent sounds. Their whole existence was flawed.

Two Polish-Americans go to Poland, to see their ancestral homeland. They sight-see all day and at night go to a bar. One of them says to the other, I think that’s the Pope. He points to a man at the end of the bar. The friend says, What would the Pope be doing here? I don’t know. He could be visiting Poland like us, says the first. He’s Polish. He could have come home, making a visit. I really think that’s him. You’re crazy, says the second. I’m going to ask him, the first one says. So he goes to the far end of the bar, and asks the man, Are you the Pope? The man looks at him and says, Fuck off. He walks back to his friend and tells him, I asked him if he was the Pope and he said, Fuck off. The friend says, So, I guess we’ll never know.

Two of the morons rolled on the sidewalk, holding their sides, shitting themselves with goofy laughter. Three other morons and one veteran crustie looked on, bored.

There is no super. I’ll murder them, one by one, she thought.

The worst person, John Wayne Gacy, who painted clowns and performed sadistic tricks in a clown costume for children in hospitals, then buried thirty-six boys in a tunnel in his basement, or Jeffrey Dahmer, who dissected road-kills when he was a kid, then turned into a cannibal who ate boys because he wanted to keep them from leaving, or the woman who dropped her infant out the window, or the woman who thought her child was possessed by the devil, so she scalded her to death, cleansing her of evil, the worst person is understandable, only human. Some people’s wounds never heal. Cats let sick kittens die or kill them. The game was long over. The street jumpstarted and buzzed with an overflow of Knicks’ victory high. Someone might get lucky.

A couple of the crusties on the church steps roused themselves from their stupor. They started hopping, whooping, and yipping. Elizabeth focused on the loudest moron. He was shrieking, throwing his fat head back and shrieking. She didn’t think they could see her. Suddenly the loudest moron glared defiantly at the windows of people trying to sleep and turned his boombox up, as loud as it would go. He blasted it. It was an act of civil war.

Elizabeth lay down on the fire escape and went rigid. She kept her head low, her body flat, held herself back, and just stayed down.

Drop dead. Stop it. Drop dead. Stop it. Drop dead, stupid. Doing nothing was her civil right, doing nothing was her civic duty. Nothing is hard to do.

When Westley Dodd was little, he used to sit at his window and stare at the kids in the playground across the street. Dodd began exposing himself at thirteen, then he molested one hundred little boys, then he murdered three, took pictures of them. He confessed everything. He’d never been praised, he’d never been touched, he lived in an emotional desert, an emptiness, no one laid a hand on him for love or hate, and growing up as he watched the kids squealing in the school playground, all he could think about was how he wanted to hurt them. When he was arrested, he said he’d hoped to kill many more boys. He said he didn’t think he had any feelings abour anything.