Lynne Tillman - No Lease on Life

Maybe, Elizabeth decided, the point was to hire someone who’s compulsive about dirt, someone who has to clean. Someone who’d be happy to do it for nothing. Some halls and buildings were immaculate. She’d seen them. Some garbage cans were not overflowing. Some buildings had enough garbage cans, and garbage wasn’t all over the street. If they had someone who was obsessed with dirt, who was driven to be clean, someone you wouldn’t want to know, but someone who was essentially harmless, and they hired him or her to help Hector, life would be better.

Roy told Elizabeth she was crazy.

A man goes to Hell and the Devil says, I usually don’t do this, but I’ll give you your choice of room for eternity. So he takes the man to the first room. All the people are ankle deep in shit. In the second room all the people are knee-deep in shit. In the third room all the people are waist-deep in shit, and they’re drinking coffee. The man says, I guess I’ll take the third room. The Devil says, OK. Then he turns to the people in the third room and yells, Coffee break’s over. Back on your heads.

Elizabeth knew the halls could be maintained, even in her degraded neighborhood. It couldn’t be accomplished if the super, whose job was to clean and maintain the building, was a pathological junk collector.

Hector was incapable of throwing anything out. He was attached to garbage. He was like a vampire running a blood bank or a pyromaniac firefighter. The firefighter goes rushing to a fire, he knows what his job is, to put out the fire, but he’s on the fire-red engine, where he’s wanted to be ever since his mouth was snatched away from his mother’s breast, and now he’s racing to a fire, he’s along for the ride, for the thrill of it, and once he’s there, he doesn’t want to extinguish the fire. The flames shoot up around him, they engulf him like a large woman, he’s swallowed up and warm. But he looks around, and he sees his buddies in danger, and they see him. He’s hanging back, or worse, he’s feeding the flames, so he has to pretend to fight the fire he loves. If there aren’t enough fires, he sets them. He’s unfit for his job.

Hector the super.

Sol Wachtler was chief justice of New York State. He stalked and threatened a woman who’d rejected him. You’d think that a judge who jails people for committing stupid, venal acts, who get caught by making asinine mistakes, would not make them himself. He can’t stop himself, can’t help himself. He’s possessed, obsessed. Wachtler threatens her — her name is Joy — over his car phone. Traceable. Stupid.

Hector the super and Gloria.

There was a Mets catcher, Mackey Sasser. He had to quit playing. He developed a block against throwing the ball back to the pitcher on the mound. He couldn’t throw it. He could throw the ball over the pitcher’s head, to the second baseman, but not to the pitcher. The Mets put him in the outfield for a while. It wasn’t his position. His position was behind the batter, squatting. But he was neurotic, blocked. His time in baseball was over.

Hector the super was blocked. He couldn’t do the job he was paid to do.

Hector’s apartment was incomprehensible. He, his wife, their grown children and their kids and an old dog lived in it. It was like the halls and stairs. But it was also cluttered with old newspapers, boxes, broken knickknacks, unrepairable lamps, and bottles for recycling that were never recycled, only stored. The overwrought apartment was stacked with unusable junk from the street. Sometimes, when Elizabeth happened to be walking downstairs or upstairs, and Hector or his wife happened to open their door a crack, she spied a narrow pathway between piles of boxes. She saw years of accumulation, things hanging from the ceiling and everything thrown together, piled up, even several broken-down wooden dressers stacked on top of each other that reached to the ceiling. She couldn’t take it in. The halls and marble stairs in a turn-of-the-century building built for immigrant labor could be kept tidy, even though the building stood shabby and tired in a mongrel neighborhood. It couldn’t if the super’s attitude toward his own apartment challenged and expanded the limits of what was fit for human habitation. His apartment exceeded standards. It was a mental condition, an excessive response to the burden of the physical world on the mental one. There didn’t seem to be a table or chairs. There didn’t seem to be chairs to sit on or beds, but she couldn’t see that far back into the long apartment.

They probably ordered out. She and Roy ordered take-out from Chinese, Thai, and Italian restaurants. On another night, Elizabeth was walking along the street. A foreigner approached her.

— Please, could you ask me, he said.

— Tell you.

— What means no menus?

Buildings have NO MENUS signs in their windows or on their front doors. Thousands of menus for take-out restaurants are thrown into vestibules. It’s the super’s job to get rid of them. Hector never did. He didn’t even save them. Elizabeth picked them up and threw them out. The Big G said it wouldn’t pay to put a notice in the window saying NO MENUS. Restaurants ignored them.

— No menus means the tenants of the building don’t want restaurants to advertise their menus for take-out food…

— Take-out food?

— Take-out food is food you can order over the phone from a restaurant. The restaurant delivers it to your apartment.

— Delivers?

— They send a boy or a man on a bicycle usually. He carries the food you ordered.

— Why take out?

— So you don’t have to cook. So that you don’t have to go out to eat. You can eat in.

— Eat in?

— Eat in your apartment. It’s short for eat in your apartment.

— No menus, thank you, he said.

— You’re welcome, Elizabeth said.

He turned away. He appeared confused. He looked at the sign on the door again. NO MENUS. He was apartment hunting. He turned her way again. He pointed to the sign and, after an exaggerated sigh of relief, mimed for her benefit, he smiled poignantly. He waved good-bye.

Because of Hector, the landlord regularly received health and building violations. The landlord had to pay the City for the misdeeds of its super. Finally Hector was ordered by the City to clean out the basement. It was a fire hazard.

Modern architects denied buildings basements and attics, banished them. Basements were where people had stored the inadmissible and unnecessary. The modern idea was rational, no one should hold on to anything, people should live neatly in a clean place in the present, which was ridiculous, since the present is collecting irrationally as the past, but now, with those disorderly shelters gone, everyone had to get rid of things continuously. There was no breathing room for the wretched, the worthless, the disgusting, the disreputable.

Sometimes Elizabeth understood Hector.

The basement in this premodern tenement was like his apartment, but it was home to the boiler. Hector’s behavior and activity in the irrational basement was an immediate, imminent fire hazard. Oil, rags, and newspapers were stored near the boiler. He left them to combust.

Hector stored junk in the hallway. No one could get past his door. You had to shove cartons out of your way. Your clothes got dirty. There was no path. There’d be no chance in a fire. A News Channel 4 Special reported that a fire engulfs a tenement in seconds, no one gets out alive. Everyone in her building would die, no tenant had a chance to escape, because Hector’s crap was blocking the exit. There were fire escapes. But if you weren’t near them, the front door was the rational exit. There was no rational exit. She didn’t want to be burned to death.

Hector couldn’t contain it, himself. He couldn’t stop it, himself. He couldn’t control himself or what he’d collected. It spread everywhere. The landlord didn’t fire him. The Big G said it was because they were trying to help him. Hector was old, he was an alcoholic, he had worked for them a long time, he was nice. Everyone felt sorry for him. No one wanted him to lose his job. He was just in the wrong job. But they didn’t fire him mostly because Hector worked cheap. He added to his puny salary by collecting bottles, the ones he hardly ever returned. He couldn’t give them in.