Amalie in Orbit Read online

  The receptionist was shouting to a friend in the typing pool as Hannelore and Amalie returned to the outer office. “Hey douche bag, what do you want for lunch?”

  “Pay no attention,” Hannelore said. “Discipline is a lost science. Good help is hard to get. Of course we are seeing other applicants. The job is a plum.”

  “I swear to God,” the receptionist was saying as Amalie left the office, “if you sleep on rough sheets, your body ash rubs off.”

  #

  Hannelore walked back to Marshall’s office. Widows, she was thinking, are desirable. (Lucky that she had devised the questionnaire for applicants and included a question about marital status even though it was illegal; most people didn’t know that.) Widows didn’t make trouble. Grief was salutary. It made people easier to live with, like her own mother, meek as a lamb after Papa died—of humiliation, mostly—a defrocked Nazi.

  “Take her,” Marshall said without lifting his eyes from his papers.

  “My thought exactly.”

  “And offer her fifty dollars more a week. She’ll still be a bargain.”

  “Suppose she doesn’t want the job.”

  “What are her choices? She’s no chick and she has very little full-time experience. She’s just heads and shoulders above everyone else out there, but—”

  “—fortunately she doesn’t know it,” Hannelore finished.

  “Precisely.”

  These were moments she cherished, moments of complete concordance with Marshall, better than his couch. “I’ll string her along a little. I’ll say we are considering several others.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. Everyone else who applied was Neanderthal. Just don’t say anything about Vermont, okay?”

  Hannelore got around to phoning Amalie from home at 9:00 that night, putting off the call until she arranged her cleaning woman’s schedule which was noted on a card file, one card per chore, with ruled columns for dates. “I must tell you,” she said to Amalie, “that Mr. Berger made a mistake when he told you the salary. It is actually twenty-five dollars a week less, but I am sure this is secondary for a person with your attitude.”

  Amalie had often heard about her attitude from her father, in a similar accent. “I’d like a couple of days to think about this,” she said.

  “There is no time. I have a Ph.D. in literature who is waiting to hear from us but we will give you the first choice because of your situation.”

  “What situation are you referring to, Ms. Links?” Amalie was poised to bring in the Equal Employment Opportunity Act and any other ammunition.

  “All right,” the other woman giggled nervously. “Why quibble? We will increase the salary by twenty-five dollars. It will be our secret. You must not tell the other girls.”

  Amalie needed a job fast, given Stewart’s imaginative financial records which were mostly based on wishful thinking and loans to friends, magnanimously forgiven. The one tenet of Jewish law that Stewart observed religiously was the one about giving ten percent of your income to charity, broadly defined. Now that Amalie had unraveled the finances, it was clear that freelancing as a porno translator was not going to bring in enough to support her and Charlie much longer, especially if they were going to have to move to another building. At Warwick and Berger she would have a bona fide job, with sick leave, office politics, and the ecstasy of a regular paycheck. She wouldn’t have to hide her translating work from Charlie any more, a boy indoctrinated by his father to do only the kind of work you believe in.

  “So it is settled, yes?” Hannelore prodded. “Good.”

  It was hard for Amalie to keep from dancing around the room. After months of hunting she had finally managed to land a job. No more filling out those asinine application forms: JOB OBJECTIVE: To keep body and soul together. SKILLS: Bed to board. MACHINES YOU CAN OPERATE: VCR, electronic treadmill, processor (food and word). EXPERIENCE: Freelance translation of French soft-core comic strips. And interpreting ads like “Communication Arts/Interface with People.” Or, “Gal/Guy Fri Good with words.” Words of Love? Yes. Words of advice? Frequently. A little shaky on the words of wisdom. That was Stewart’s department.

  Amalie unfolded the French comic strip she had been working on. The captions were already loosely translated. Her job was to put them into intelligible English. It would have saved time if they sent her the French. But no, she had to deal with “The Indian sutures teach us much” and “Your corpse is ripe.” It was enough to turn her off sex forever, which was fine with her. It would be a relief to never again have to make sense of “Let me join you in your tomboy” and “He collated his mouth against hers.” What an irony that she’d spent years studying the medieval courtly love songs of the troubadours in which women were portrayed as unattainable love objects. All for what? French pornographic comic strips which she had translated almost with zest, as though she had an affinity with the subjects.

  “Cher Monsieur,” she wrote. “This will be my last bill, so kindly send me a chèque since I have found—” oh, you lecher “—a new position.”

  Chapter 2

  “I’m the Rembrandt of the butcher business,” Ralph Dobrin said. Below his hands a world of raw meat throbbed with neon light. His body itself seemed to be a showcase for the choice cuts, outrageously priced. “Magic fingers. Want to see what I can do to a membrane?” He leered at Amalie.

  “No thanks.” The man was a creep but she had learned to hide her revulsion. It was Saturday morning and Amalie was lingering in the shop just to take her mind off the fact that on Monday morning she would be starting her job.

  Ralph was the son of Amalie’s neighbor, Alex Dobrin. Since father and son could not abide one another, she served as intermediary. A resident of one of Long Island’s growth communities, Ralph could not understand how anyone who was normal could live in this neighborhood. “Look at that guy. He’s always pushing his nose up against my window.” Ralph shook his fist at the dark face peering into the shop window, the old Greek shoemaker from next door. “The guy’s shop is filthy and his machines are totally rusty.”

  “Well, that makes him an old-time craftsman, doesn’t it?” Amalie said pleasantly.

  “Oh yeah? He’s got four cats. He needs them for the mice. And the mice feed on —pardon me, I don’t want to be vulgar— the roaches.”

  “A true ecological paradise, Ralph. Look at the bright side”

  “Oh—” He looked puzzled for a moment. “I get it.” He beamed at her. “Like Rachel Carson.”

  “Exactly. Are you almost through with your dad’s order?” She was eyeing the head cheese and feeling queasy.

  “You’re too nervous, Mrs. Price. You should learn to relax.”

  Sure, and you’re the guy who’s going to help me do it, Amalie thought.

  “You know what you remind me of? One of those trembling ibises you see at the Bronx Zoo.”

  “Trembling? I’m as steady as a rock. And am I really that skinny?” Stewart always said she was perfect.

  “I worry about my dad,” Ralph Dobrin was saying. “Couple of guys were here the other day asking questions about him. Your tenant group, you know? Confidentially, I don’t want him getting mixed up with shady people.”

  “Me? Shady?” Amalie laughed. Would that I were. Add a little spice to my life. “You’re talking about me and my neighbors. We’re just planning a peaceful demonstration at City Hall Plaza next month along with thousands of other people whose homes are threatened. Our committee is meeting in my apartment tomorrow.” Though the neighbors were panicky about the imminent sale of the building, there was a lot of resistance to participating in the rally. Some people in the house were refusing to pay their dues to the tenants committee, let alone appear at a public demonstration.

  “Thing is, I promised my mom I’d take care of him. You’ll drop this off, okay?” He held up a body part. “I don’t have time to leave it in his mailbox like I usually do.”

  Both sides of the entrance to the apartment house were buttressed by tra
sh, courtesy of the Sanitation Department strike. Some of the windows were already painted with bloody white X’s, the anonymous landlord’s way of telling the tenants that the building was doomed. Stewart had foreseen it all. “They can’t just knock the building down,” she said. “There are laws.” How naive she’d been. Now, she was, by acclamation (and by default) the head of the tenants committee. And she wasn’t going to let Stewart down.

  In the lobby she met Charlie who was holding a flyer and some scotch tape. “I just want to put this up,” he said, showing it to her.

  TENANTS UNITE. COME TO THE MEETING ON SUNDAY IN 6C. LEARN ABOUT RENT STRIKES, PASSIVE RESISTANCE, AND TAKING OVER A BUILDING.

  Amalie ripped it out of his hand. “What is this?” she hissed. “Are you trying to frighten people?”

  “You don’t understand,” Charlie said. “You want to motivate people to come to the meeting, don’t you?”

  “What—” she spluttered, “—what is this ‘taking over a building’ nonsense? This is just a tenants association meeting.”

  “People are not going to participate if you don’t jolt them into action. You want them to be prepared. I know about these things. I was trying to help you.”

  “Yes, I appreciate it.” How dare he talk to her as though she were an idiot. “Why didn’t you check with me first?”

  “You don’t appreciate it. Any time I try to do something to help you, you get all critical.” Charlie’s eyes were tearing up. “I can’t do anything right, can I? You have no idea what goes on in the world out there, with innocent people getting beaten up. Dad would have known what I was talking about.”

  “That’s low,” Amalie said, frostily. Yes, Dad was the hero. Charlie had a great nostalgia for the student upheavals of the sixties in which his father starred. “Tell me again what it was like,” he frequently asked Stewart, as other children say, “Tell me a story.” He never tired of hearing how his father defended Columbia University against the Establishment in 1968, shielding Fayerwether Hall with his body for three days and nights. At home, Amalie had waited in terror, listening to news reports and praying that her young husband hadn’t been beaten or trampled by police horses. How she raged against him over the years for imbuing his son with a love of action or revolution. Living—or as Amalie called it—dying—through your children.

  “You just don’t want to face reality,” Charlie said, crumpling the flyer and throwing it on the floor. “I could tell you all kinds of stories but you never listen. You wouldn’t believe the call I got before from some kid who’s been living in a box behind the freight entrance of Macy’s. You’ve got this nice group of tenants and you’re the madame president, and you’ll just give in to the shitty landlord.”

  “I can’t talk to you,” Amalie said. “Wait a minute—Where are you going?”

  “This conversation is over,” her son said. “And maybe all other conversations too. I’m going out. Don’t expect me for a while.”

  Don’t fall for this, Amalie told herself as he went out, slamming the lobby door. Stop visualizing him lying in an alley outside a head shop in the East Village. Focus, focus…on the Housing Code, on getting a permit to demonstrate, on not wearing black any more. And getting this dripping meat up to Alex. Already it was leaving a trail of blood on the old terrazzo floor.

  #

  Alex Dobrin had had an altercation a little while earlier with the superintendent—or custodial engineer as he preferred to be known. Elisha had called Amalie Price a communist rabble-rouser for stirring up trouble among the tenants. This baboon who practically salivated whenever he saw her wasn’t fit to mop the ground she walked on, Alex thought.

  Waiting for the young widow to light up his apartment, Alex noted that his fever had gone down. He had calculated that for every inch of garbage rising, his fever declined by a degree. Today he read in the Times that the ground under New York was buckling and that a geological fault ran down Amsterdam Avenue. It was logical for the fault from the west to have moved to the West Side. Manhole covers blew off in the dead of night on Broadway, the fault of the fault in the west. Everything crazy came from there, from Los Angeles.

  Alex refused to see a doctor. He suspected that his illness, manifested only in a revulsion toward poultry and a desire to laugh, was caused by space organisms brought down by the last astronaut crew and housed at Columbia University’s geological institute only five blocks away. He believed that if no one else was infected it was because he offered a sympathetic environment. Charlie Price, the widow’s brilliant kid, agreed and had counseled him to give up meat. Thinking of doctors, Alex shuddered. The little booths in the clinic were like those in a beauty parlor, except that in each pseudo barber chair there was a bleeding patient. For his next visit, Alex anticipated a great incision in his stomach, the insides to be removed, gift-wrapped and sent to his son the butcher. Knowing Ralph, Alex figured he would put them on special sale.

  He dialed his son’s number, intending to tell him to forget about the meat but heard only a recorded message informing him of weather conditions from Block Island to Cape Hatteras. He tried dialing in three-quarter time but now the line was dead. Good, he thought. This way he’d get to see Amalie who would be delivering the order. How he missed Amalie’s husband, the professor. What good talks they’d had about music.

  Alex had run a second-hand music store selling instruments and transcriptions of transcriptions, mostly written by himself. Stewart had seemed so interested. Secretly Alex hoped that Stewart might write his biography. Didn’t these English professors have to publish or perish? Alex was leaving nothing to the world except for a few variations on other composers’ themes. “Alex the Obscure,” the biography might be called.

  He shaved and changed his socks. The darling girl, Amalie. How she had cheered him over the years. He wished he could console her, offer her optimism which he himself lacked. She had no idea how appealing she was. Her eyes were set far apart as though she were being pulled in two directions at once—which she often was. And that red hair like a thicket, a blaze of autumn. The first time they met, it was Mother’s Day and she was wearing a Venus flytrap corsage, her personal protest against the day. A fighter in her fashion.

  There she was, the Scheherazade from 6C.

  “I see that my son has sent me a message.” Alex took the bloodstained bag from Amalie. “Did I ever tell you my idea for a concerto based on the vein structure of a delmonico steak? Yes, good. I’m happy to see you smiling. Sit, sit. Listen, you’ll appreciate this.” He took the bag into the kitchen while continuing to talk. “Today’s paper—it’s right there on the chair—the paper has a headline about a million-dollar grant to an old army buddy of mine who became a famous sociologist. Get this—” Alex returned to the living room and showed her the article. “He figured out, after years of research, that the response to a compliment is always a smile. This is what passes for science these days.”

  “Sounds like my dad,” Amalie said. “Let’s see.” Yes, Herbert Marcus had made the news again. His field was the sociology of the family but because of his eminence, he managed to engage in all kinds of peripheral studies. If Amalie didn’t read about him from time to time she’d never know what he was doing.

  “You mean—?” Alex took the newspaper back “—Herbert Marcus, the sociologist? He’s your dad and I’m only finding this out now? We were in the war together. That’s World War II, in Italy.” Alex was hopping with excitement. “This is amazing. When does he visit you?”

  “He doesn’t. He’s not that kind of relative.” Amalie’s father surfaced from time to time, always accompanied by a new young woman. He once conducted a study showing that men lived longer, healthier lives when they had younger partners, and Herb Marcus liked to live his sociology. Amalie hadn’t seen him since Stewart’s funeral.

  “It’s not easy to be a good parent,” Alex said. “Look at me. But imagine Herbie Marcus getting a million for something anyone could have told him. Now, my son, him of the psy
chedelic carcass charts—you see how unkind I am—when my son was a kid he would always have an asthma attack whenever he heard a chromatic scale. When he was ten he used the inside of my balalaika to hatch some turtle eggs. But he’s really a good boy. He thinks that when this building goes down I’m going to move to Fernmeadow Estates, a resort for the walking dead. Can you see me there? A place with no streets. I would rather be chewed up by the wrecker.”

  A curious thing was happening to Amalie while Alex was talking. Only half listening, she was watching his hands move, observed with pleasure the flaring nostrils and wavy grey-white hair dipping over one fierce eye, the dark moustache. This man knows counterpoint,” she thought. What would it be like with an older man, an old friend, a friend of her father’s? Suddenly aware of how she was lounging on his couch, she stood up. “Where’s that response to the landlord about his request for a retroactive increase?” she asked sternly. “I need it in triplicate.”

  Alex smiled slyly. “If you count the syllables of the landlord’s statement, especially after the part that says ‘Challenge,’ you have a perfect basis for an aleatoric piece of music. Listen.” He struck a chord on the piano.

  “I haven’t got time for this, Alex. I have to prepare for tomorrow’s tenant meeting.” Her heart gave a lurch. This would be an important meeting, a test of her leadership. If only Charlie hadn’t stormed out. She needed all the support she could get. “If you don’t want to end up in Zombie Estates you’d better fill out that form and bring it to the meeting.” Amalie’s neighbor and deputy Rosetta had evidently failed to extract the necessary information even though her job was to compile every tenant’s rent history. This was crucial since the landlord seemed to have concocted his own figures. “I know that Rosetta reminded you about this a number of times.”