The Fatigue Artist Read online

“Did he have clothes on?”

  She gives a throaty laugh. “Yes, I’m pretty sure. You have to realize, the whole thing is a metaphor.”

  “I get it, yes.” I can imagine other projects performance artists might try as metaphors: surgery, or at least a prolonged hospital stay. Divorce. Getting fired. It’s a fertile field for anyone with imagination. Everything, seen in the proper light, can become a metaphor. The trick is finding, or being found by, the right ones.

  I dropped my keys on the way in. That’s the latest symptom: things leap from my hands. Mostly small slippery things, bottle caps, paper clips, the pen, as I write this, but often larger things as well—magazines or socks or fruits I’m squeezing at the open-air market. Thoughts, too, slide from my grasp, but that’s another story.

  The very next morning, it was a commonplace glass from Woolworth’s. I had groped my way from bed to the kitchen, cursing the car alarm just below my window, and was about to pour some juice when the glass wantonly escaped, to plummet three feet through the air. The instant it took to reach the floor was time enough, even in my stupor, for me to envision the results. The thud and smash, shattering me awake. I’d reach for the dustpan and brush above the sink and sweep up the chips around my slippered feet. Shuffle into the pantry for the electric broom—I could hear its ominous rumble waiting to be summoned into existence—and let it suck up the shards that elude the brush. Even so, I’d keep from walking around barefoot for a while, to be quite sure. I thought of the man Grace mentioned, who slithered on his belly through broken glass. For art’s sake. Obviously I wasn’t daring enough for the avant-garde.

  I’d have to warn the others in the house not to walk barefoot... wait, there were no others in the house. Ev, my husband, was dead and had been so for more than two years, though when half-awake I tend to forget this, then promptly remember not so much with grief any longer as with astonishment. His children, my stepchildren, Jilly and Tony, don’t visit very often (Tony almost never, to tell the truth), and when they do they naturally wear shoes.

  Days from now I’d be seeing slivers glinting from corners, sharp reminders that if not for the fortuitous slant of light, a misstep might have sent them journeying through my bloodstream to pierce a vital organ. Heart, lungs, liver, spleen and kidneys are the vital organs in Chinese medicine, the Tai Chi teacher says, each corresponding to one of the primal elements—fire, metal, wood, earth, and water, respectively, which came into being out of nothingness through the coupling of yin and yang—and to a primal emotion: joy, sadness, anger, will, fear. I could ill afford that sort of damage.

  All this I foresaw as the glass plummeted to the tile floor where, happily, it didn’t break (cheap and sturdy) but bounced twice, rolled a few feet—the floor in this old apartment building is slightly sloping—and halted at the edge of the refrigerator. At that instant the car alarm abruptly ceased.

  A good omen. I’ve been worried lately about the things dropping, the supernatural exhaustion, the hypersensitivity to noise, not to mention the more mundane signs—sore throats, headaches, stomach cramps. . . . Oh, and not minding the heat. Everyone complains that the weather is tropical, unbearable, but I haven’t noticed except in a mental way—I hear bulletins on the radio, I check the thermometer. It’s because I myself am so hot. Not my skin, especially, but inside. No sudden waves of heat such as my former editor, Gretchen, a case of early menopause, would describe when she phoned to prod me about my books, but a steady heat steaming out from the center with each thump of my heart, clouding me with mist. Feverish people say they’re on fire, but I feel like the cauldron itself, containing a stew—those vital organs—that simmers dully along. Or like a bag of sand left out in the sun. Between the outside weather and the inner is no disparity; the weather is merely my projection. They say illness makes you solipsistic, the world a mere projection or translation. If this is illness. It could be any number of things. I’m not eager to find out.

  Pathetic, to take so unremarkable an incident as a good omen. Superstition is a symptom, too.

  Friends who’ve noticed my symptoms tell me to go to a doctor but I’m reluctant. Not only for the obvious reason, that he or she—but it seems usually to be he, doesn’t it?—might find something really wrong. My previous visits have been a powerful deterrent. “Our private conversations,” as Joel Cairo says in The Maltese Falcon, which I saw last month with Tim, “have not been such that I am anxious to continue them.”

  Nine or ten years ago, I must have been thirty-one or so, I consulted a doctor, let’s call him Dr A., about some white specks on my tongue. They were disturbing out of all proportion to their size, the tongue being the organ by which we taste and speak, take pleasure and shape language. Moreover, the mouth is the gateway for the breath, which is palpable spirit and is also the place where we live, notwithstanding Freud. A few small specks on the tongue can be as uncomfortable as a grape-sized lump on the hand, with which we write and grope our way through the world, or on the foot, which gives blessed mobility.

  “Stick out your tongue,” said Dr. A., and I became a child again.

  He was very tall and straight, with a military bearing, so although I was in the higher seat, a large leather chair, and he on a small stool, we were face to face. Quite close, our knees nearly touching. He was older than I, with a pink Buddha-like face, a huge bald dome of a head with a fringe of dark hair, and serene gray eyes that seemed too static, trancelike, as he studied my tongue.

  “I’m afraid I must ask you a very odd and perhaps embarrassing question,” he said, and paused to allow me time to retract my tongue and prepare myself. “It is this. Have you sucked any strange penises lately?”

  I was unprepared. I had to control the urge to giggle into the looming pink face. They’re all strange to us girls, was the response that sprang to mind, but that would never do.

  “No,” I said truthfully.

  Not even my husband’s, I might have added, which would have been the least strange in the sense of the word I took him to mean—unfamiliar, illicit—since he’s away covering the conflict in Nicaragua. And Q., short for Quinn, the only other man I occasionally sleep with, Doctor A., since you ask (though one doesn’t do that specific act every time, speaking for myself at any rate—it’s hard to say in general and I for one never trust the answers people give on those sex surveys), is in Minneapolis doing a season of repertory with the Guthrie: All My Sons, I believe, and God, I don’t envy him that; Creon in Antigone; something by Moliére, I forget which; and something very current. Besides, flustered as I am at the moment, Doctor A., I can’t even recall whether Q. and I are in a lovers’ phase or a just-friends phase—it changes so erratically. Immaterial anyway. Come to think of it, I just spoke to my husband, Ev, on the phone two nights ago. It’s hard for him to make personal phone calls so I was pleased that he made the effort and succeeded, and although after telling me a little bit about the situation in Managua—very little, you understand, the phones are bugged—he did say something mildly erotic on the order of how he wished he could hold me in his arms that night, while I on my end was thinking more or less the same thing, nothing as localized as sucking penises was mentioned. I didn’t even entertain the notion, in case the power of suggestion has anything to do with my ailment, nor, I would imagine, did Ev, who was preoccupied with the political ferment around him, the kind of volatile situation I presume could take a man’s mind off his penis for a while, though I couldn’t swear to it. Anyhow, that was two days ago and the specks on my tongue had already erupted.

  Naturally I didn’t say all this. I know how to behave in a doctor’s office.

  “Well.” Dr. A. pushed back from me on his wheeled stool. “I would say it’s probably nothing to worry about. Chances are they’ll disappear as mysteriously as they came.” He stood up and turned to his desk with a slight air, I think, of disappointment.

  Oh, dear, had he been hoping for a good story? Did I let him down? So sorry, try me another day, I might have said.

>   In a few days the specks did go away as mysteriously as they had come and I regretted visiting Dr. A., whose odd question would now have a permanent and unwelcome place in my memory, the data bank, as my friend Mona calls it with disapproval. The visit confirmed my instinct not to consult doctors but rather to wait.

  Years later, just after Ev was killed, I developed a bad sore throat. I waited and waited but it didn’t go away. It got worse. People—my on-and-off lover Q., my stepdaughter Jilly, my cousin Joyce—urged me to see a doctor. It might be strep, it might lead to something worse. I was a brand-new widow and everyone wanted to take care of me. Oh, all right, I agreed. But Dr. A.? After that odd question? For two days, while my throat worsened, I debated whether to return and risk being asked other odd questions (yet how much odder could they be?) or go elsewhere, flying to evils that I knew not of. In the end I decided on Dr. A., unwisely, you may think, but when feeling sick one isn’t wise. He couldn’t possibly remember my tongue, I reasoned. He probably wouldn’t even remember me after eight years—so many patients, so many tongues, who knows how many odd questions. And this was a plain sore throat; innocent children get sore throats all the time.

  Of course he remembered me, said Dr. A. genially, and as he sat on his wheeled stool and examined my throat he asked how I had been in the intervening years, to which I could reply only with a gagging noise. No way to tell him my husband had been shot to death in the interim. No inclination either. Dr. A. had the same entranced gray eyes and Buddha-like expression, though unlike Buddha he had visibly aged; his skin was not so pink and babyish any more. As he retrieved some fluid from my throat on a cotton swab, I felt pleased with myself. I would find relief, come away with a prescription like a sensible person. I had not been daunted by a question perhaps posed in the line of duty, however gracelessly.

  He walked across the room to put the fluid on a slide. With his back to me he said, “I not only remember you but I remember that the last time you were here I had occasion to ask you a very odd and possibly embarrassing question. Do you remember?”

  “I certainly do.”

  I might have added that today his odd question would be even less pertinent, since Ev had died two months earlier, killed on a Bronx street in a drug bust. A bystander, more or less. And Q.? Well, yes, Q. had turned up a few weeks later. He walked in with a suitcase and a bag of groceries, all the foods he knew I liked, and stayed for a month. He warmed the bed, but the love we made for that month was of the consoling kind. Q. managed everything, solicitous, treating me like a bereft child; no question of much on my part. I was passive until the last moments when I would erupt in tears as well as pleasure. Q. was magnanimous as only he can be, especially when nothing much is expected of him. Despite the irritation at my marriage he had shown on and off over the years, he was in no hurry to appropriate me now that I was “free,” the way, when a New York City parking space becomes free, the next occupant is already waiting, motor humming, to slide in before it cools off. Long ago, when I was in love with Q. in a less ambiguous way, I had had fantasies that if Ev were to disappear (God knows I never envisioned him shot, I just thought he would tire of me), Q. would rush to my side as the Prince rushed to Sleeping Beauty or Snow White or countless others, sweep me up on his horse and carry me off, even though I was neither sleeping nor held captive. But this didn’t happen, and after a while I stopped imagining or wishing it. I tried to live my divided life.

  In any event, my tongue was fine today and my sore throat, however painful, felt ordinary—unless it was punitive, my own retaliation for sleeping with Q. so soon after my husband’s violent death. But I hadn’t suffered much guilt while he was alive, so it didn’t follow. . . . Well, never mind all that. An antibiotic would do the trick.

  I didn’t say any of the above to Dr. A. Indeed, I spoke not another word, quite as if my once-offending tongue had been cut out. I listened to his instructions about the antibiotic, accepted the prescription from his cool, dry hand, and left. In a week I was better. I resolved never to return to Dr. A. and perhaps not to any doctor ever again.

  WHY NOT GO BACK TO BED FOR A WHILE, I thought after I drank the juice from the sturdy glass. I see the bed as my true home, my home within a home. Whoever invented it deserves as much renown as the inventor of the cotton gin or the steam engine, those inventions taught in school. People have always stretched out spontaneously on anything handy, yes, but I mean the combination of elements forming the bed itself. The raised platform, which makes climbing in a decisive event. The mattress and box spring, inspired notions lovingly wrought. The feather pillow and the quilt are to repose what champagne and chocolate mousse are to diet. Amazing, really, that such luxurious sensuality is available to all strata of society, except of course the homeless who swarm the local streets and sleep God knows where, niches, doorways and sections of Riverside Park they’ve appropriated as campsites. Even so, many of them drag around shopping carts stuffed with puffy bedding.

  My bed, a modest double, nothing kingly or queenly, has become more than a haven or refuge. It’s a lover. At my most exhausted moments I sense it reaching toward me like the vibrations of the universe, for the Tai Chi teacher says the universe is a great system of vibrations we draw to us by our feelings: fear draws fear, love draws love. I almost hear the bed whispering to me to come, the way you might feel a lover longing for you miles away, and I come readily, falling onto the waiting mattress, firm but yielding as an accomplished lover, the strong coils beneath the stuffing like reliable bones beneath the flesh. I lie down as eagerly as did the princess worn out from her wanderings, except under this mattress is no irritating pea. No, the bed is a perfect and perfectly welcoming lover. The pillow sinks benignly under the weight of my head and rises mildly around my hair. I pull the sheet over me to be utterly surrounded, voluptuously embraced. It folds coolly around my legs as a lover’s skin may be cool at first touch, but it quickly warms up from my body’s heat, creating a tube of warmth. As the bed presses gently along the length of me, I let go. Every cell yields to the embrace which of late I find satisfying like no other. Totally understanding, the bed accepts that I have nothing to offer but warmth, which I have in abundance. I need not respond or embrace in return. The bed seeks nothing for itself—its pleasure is to wrap me in pleasure.

  I WAS ROUSED by the sound of the door opening. Tim. Since I gave him a set of keys last month, I’ve had to get used to that sequence of sounds all over again, the key slipping into the shaft, metal grating against metal, the door thrusting past the wooden frame. His arrival and the light filtering through the drawn shades told me it was early evening. Slept the day away. Just as well—things pick up for me around twilight. My blood stirs and moves a bit faster. I hauled myself up to greet him.

  Standing in the hall, tired and apparently dazed by the heat, his tan suit jacket slung over his shoulder in the manner of middle-aged professionals in summer, Tim held beside him, like a cane or a crutch, a five-foot-high narrow gray object, curved at both ends, with two holes cut out as if for eyes.

  “What is that?”

  “What does it look like, Laura?”

  “It looks like the bumper of a car.”

  “It is the bumper of a car. Your car.”

  “What is it doing here?”

  “I guess you haven’t seen your car lately. I passed it as I was coming up the street, and this had fallen off.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, probably during the daily stampede to park by two o’clock, someone backed into you, and your car being the piece of junk it is, this fell off.”

  I ignored the insult to my car, which I’m fond of, a little white Geo which Tim says resembles, in looks and performance, a golf cart. “When I moved it around one-thirty there was someone in front of me with a few feet to spare. I wonder how this happened. Luke would have let me know if he’d seen anything.”

  The super of the building next door, with whom I’ve had an amiable flirtation for some time, is our block’s d
e facto mayor, of the Fiorello La Guardia type. Luke knows everyone, keeps close track of local developments, sizes up newcomers and acts as public relations and peacekeeping officer. He alerts us to cops or meter maids in their drab brown uniforms—a cut below the blue—writing out parking tickets, and will even ring doorbells to shout a warning through the intercom, at which we race down and drive around the block until the menace has passed.

  “There’s no one in front of you now. But someone must have done this.”

  “Well, put it down, for God’s sake. It must be heavy.”

  “Where do you want it, ma’am?”

  “Anywhere. Leave it over there against the wall. Wait, let me help you drag it.”

  Tim shook his head and raised the bumper high in the air with the slow, triumphant gesture of a weight lifter.

  “What are you doing? It’s a bumper. Put it down.”

  “Here, you try.”

  I was expecting to lift a heavy weight, so I almost dropped it. “My God. Isn’t it metal?”

  “Plastic. On some cars it’s metal, but not on yours.”

  “So what do you think this weighs?” I leaned it against the wall.

  “Maybe four pounds.”

  “Four pounds?”

  “Yes, it’s shocking, isn’t it? When you think that this is what stands between you and an oncoming car. Well, I’ll put it back on in the morning.”

  “Is that all? You mean I don’t have to take it to the garage?”

  “I doubt it. It’s probably some kind of hook-and-eye affair. I just didn’t want to bother right now. So how about a reward? Give us a kiss.”

  I went closer. “Thanks, Tim. I dub you Sir Tim for that deed. It looks sort of nice against the wall, doesn’t it? Like sculpture.”

  He let his jacket slip to the floor and put his arms around me, checking here and there as if to make sure the vital parts were still in place. Maybe finding the bumper detached had unnerved him. “Any chance of getting a cold drink?” he murmured in my ear.