The Burg and Other Seattle Scenes Read online

  The worst apartments were the stacks of 28s—128, 228, 328 and so on—and 29s. We could fumigate 128 through 428 and the roaches would flood into 528 through 728. The same with the 29s. When the effects of the chemical wore off, the roaches returned to their original habitations. There was no help for them.

  One-twenty-nine was a kind of bachelor pad. Where every other apartment in the building looked dingy and barren no matter how its occupants furnished it—new paint and tile seemed to attract another coating of dirt within days after application—129 had paneled walls, an orange shag carpet, a wet bar and light dim enough to obscure whatever dirt had been absorbed into its walls. One-twenty-nine had been the residence of a maintenance man whom the university had permitted to renovate the flat according to his tastes. Eventually he went on to a job with Boeing, leaving the orange carpet and fake oak bar to the next tenant.

  The next tenant was a nice enough kid who was enchanted by the unit as soon as he saw it. I could see the fantasies of liquor and women leaping in his eyes as he took in the décor. When he asked what the rent was and I told him and he said he’d take it, I thought: You idiot, can’t you see beyond the color of the carpet? I had finished my work on the roach patrol a week earlier and was now an assistant to the assistant manager and one of my duties was to show apartments. The assistant manager had warned me off mentioning roaches to prospective tenants and so I did not say anything about them to the kid.

  A couple of days later the kid came into the office. I knew before he said anything what it was about. He wanted something done about the roaches. Steve, the assistant manager, told him I would take care of it. When the kid had gone I said I had already caulked the place; there was nothing more I could do. Steve told me to look at it anyway.

  The kid had mentioned roaches in the bathroom. I couldn’t see where they would have come from. I checked the kitchen. One zipped across the floor and into a crack under the cabinet below the sink. I caulked the crack. Then I returned to the office.

  Two days later the kid was back. He wanted to move, the roaches were everywhere, could he get a refund on his rent? Steve explained the university policy against refunding rent money. Then he told me to get a caulking gun and caulk the guy’s bathroom again. I objected, saying there was no place in the bathroom left to caulk. Steve said to do it anyway. I got a caulk gun and walked back with the kid to his apartment. In the bathroom I laid caulk over the caulk I had put down a month before. When I tried to smooth it with my finger it all came off; there were no cracks or abraded surfaces for it to adhere to. I wiped my hand on a paper towel. The kid seemed content.

  Until the next day when he came into the office during the lunch break while Steve was gone. He put his fists together on the counter separating us, then put his forehead on his fists and said: “If I had known it was going to be like this, I never would have rented it.”

  This was too much. This job was supposed to help me get through graduate school. It was supposed to allow me to use the bulk of my time to think through and write my dissertation. That was the plan when I applied for work with Housing. It was only a half-time job, for God’s sake. I wasn’t supposed to go home in the afternoon with a bad conscience from a lousy part-time job. I called the main office, told somebody about the kid and the apartment and asked if they couldn’t make an exception to the rule. The kid was going to move out in any case and needed the money to find another apartment. I told her that the kid was the son of an important political figure in the state.

  The woman I spoke with said she would get back to me, then before I could take the phone from my ear told me to wait, she was going to put me on hold. Two or three minutes later she came back on the line. She said she could prorate the rent and refund what remained. Was that acceptable?

  I asked the kid. He said fine. I said “Fine” into the mouthpiece. The woman said the kid could come over to the office this afternoon and she would write him a check. She asked me if I thought the kid might be willing to move into another unit somewhere else in Housing. I said I doubted it. That ended the conversation.

  I told the kid to give them an hour, then go over to the main office and get his refund. The kid said he hadn’t thought they would give him back his money. I said I hadn’t thought so either.

  The following day the kid came into the office about the same time, having left his suitcases in the hall outside the door. He had come to fill out what paperwork was necessary to put an end to this experience. He had gotten his money yesterday, no problem. Yes, he had found another apartment, definitely not in University Housing. As we talked, my eye caught movement on the kid’s shoulder. There I saw, against the brown and tan check of the shirt, brown of another shape. The kid was talking. I nodded and said uh-huh as though I were paying attention. The cockroach on the kid’s shirt moved again, a fraction of a fraction of an inch, then—I swear this is true—it looked up at me and made a waving motion with its tiny antennae, the one on the right moving forward as the one on the left moved back, then the one on the left moving up while the one on the right moved back, as if it were signaling goodbye.

  I considered swatting it off the kid’s shoulder but I did not do it. I did not think I would be able to rush around the counter to squash it before it found a place to hide, and I did not want it in my office. I didn’t say anything about it, not a word, and the kid walked out with it on his shoulder to his next apartment.

  The Woman Behind the Counter

  I watched her as she talked with the people ahead of me. She spoke so fast it was like listening to a jackhammer breaking up pavement. I could see how her mind worked, rather, I could hear it, and it worked by association, jumping from one subject to another, from taxes to a book she wanted to write to Hollywood celebrities, the direction of its flow determined by the sound of a word, by color, by an intruding memory. It also worked linearly, proceeding from A to B to C, though only in short bursts. And I was delighted because I could follow her thinking exactly, down to the last curve and comma.

  When it was my turn I ordered a bowl of chili. I wanted soup but somehow I said “Chili” and then it sounded all right so I didn’t say anything, but ordered coffee with it. Handing me my change, she rattled on as though I were the man who had just left, or the woman before him, her words punctuated first by her own laughter, then by mine.

  As we talked I puzzled over who she reminded me of. My eyes kept going back to the small widow’s peak and smoothed her hair as though sight were touch. And then I saw the face of my first love on hers, my high school sweetheart’s, I hadn’t thought of her in so long. But then as she went on—she was talking about misdiagnoses, how ADHD has been confused with bipolar disorder and how drugs affected her the opposite from the way they affected you or me or most people, and how now she was on an anti-seizure med and a couple of others, and she could function though she could not live in Los Angeles any more, its distractions, its horrors, another damaged child she is, but her loneliness up here, and then the depression that follows, so she has this job and then she has this other little job in this odd little shop that has no theme, or has so many you can’t tell one from another, you don’t know what’s a novelty and what’s to be worn seriously, what you can eat and what will break your teeth if you try to bite into it—she began not to look like Erlea but like that crazy woman I knew in Brazil, or was it Venezuela? and I thought, Oh no, not another one.

  And then after awhile she said, “We ought to get together sometime,” and someone in one part of my mind said to someone in another part, Don’t do this, Don’t do this, Don’t do this, and I said, “How about Saturday?”

  That settled, I took my chili and my coffee and scooted into my favorite booth.

  After my second or third cup of coffee I went into the bathroom and peed in the urinal, then went to the sink. I want to be sure you understand I peed in the urinal because once when I was in the army I was working in the motor pool and I went to the latrine and peed in that circular thing like a small
round shower they have where the mechanics scrub their hands. It was a mistake, I had never seen one of those things before, and I wasn’t caught, but I was afraid I would be. I just want you to know that I know enough now not to pee in the sink.

  Anyway, when I was at the sink in the Burgermaster—a regular porcelain sink with a single tap–I happened to look down and I saw a penny on the floor behind where I had my way back to the sink—I hadn’t washed my hands yet; I may not have been clear about that, but I went for the penny before I washed my hands—I spotted another penny near where I had stood by the sink before I spotted the first penny and I picked it up. It was sticky and I washed it and dried it with a paper towel and put it in my pocket and then I washed my hands with soap from the liquid soap dispenser and dried them and left the bathroom and went back to my booth to read more of my newspaper and drink more coffee.

  After a while I had to pee again and I went back to the bathroom and did it in the urinal again. Then I went to the sink. As I turned on the tap, I glanced to my left and saw a quarter almost where I had seen the first penny, but farther back toward the opposite wall. I turned off the tap and went and picked it up and put it in my pocket, wondering if someone was salting the floor with these coins, wondering if someone was watching me as I picked them up. Moving back to the sink, I saw a nickel on the floor by the wall on the other side of the sink. It was not where it would be if it had fallen out of somebody’s pocket, had he been standing at the sink and had he had a hole in his pocket—someone would have had to toss it there. I picked it up and put it in my pocket and washed my hands with soap again. As I lathered my hands, I looked around, at the ceiling, at the walls, at the partition separating the toilet from the urinal and sink, to see if I could locate a camera. I could not and I rinsed the soap off my hands and dried them and went back out to my booth and gathered my jacket and the part of the newspaper I had not read yet and left the restaurant. I walked slowly and with deliberation to my car. I wanted to convey to anybody who might be observing me that I was not someone to be trifled with, and if fact my senses were alert to anything that might happen, especially laughter or sudden movement.

  What I’ve Learned About Men

  I was finishing a manicure when I learned that Martin had died. It was on TV. Taping a commercial, he went into Lake Elsinore; his parachute hadn’t opened and he had not pulled his reserve. That was what most of the witnesses said, though one said he had seen Martin’s reserve inflate. Martin went into the water and then he climbed out of the water onto a sand bar and then he fell back into the water. That was what most of the witnesses said. He drowned. The autopsy proved that.

  Sheryl, who owned the shop I worked at, looked at me and said, “Oh God, Bunny. I didn’t know,” because she hadn’t known it was Martin I was involved with. I was shaking. I thought I was going to throw up. The woman in the chair began to cry. I told Sheryl I had to go home and she said, “Wait, I’ll drive you.” But I didn’t wait and I didn’t go home, at least not yet, because there it would be true, and on the road there was always the possibility of…possibility. So I drove until I stopped, and then I was home and I went inside and waited for Martin to show up.

  The phone rang, I remember that. But I was cooking steaks on the grill and didn’t want to be bothered. I threw up twice but made it to the bathroom each time. Finally there was no light left in the sky that wasn’t reflected off the street, and I knew more than I refused to know that Martin was dead. I cannot tell you the immensity of what was taken from me when I accepted that so-called gift of knowledge.

  A few years later my husband died. We had not been married long but had settled into a routine that lent predictability to my life. When Barry died, I thought, “I’ve been through this. I can do it again.” Barry’s sister thought I was not grieving enough and became my mortal enemy. Barry died a hero. Also a jumper, he sacrificed himself to save the others in the plane. Never mind the technical details of what happened and what he did. He did it, that’s all, and he was a true hero. I appreciate that, and in my memories of him I can usually overlook his love for cocaine and what it might have meant if he had lived to use more of it.

  What have I learned about men? I have made my current one promise not to jump out of airplanes unless they are on fire and going down. But that doesn’t mean much. I have learned this: the boring ones aren’t worth my time and the others die fast.

  Constance

  We had lunch at The Continental on the Av. I had not been in there since graduate school, since I had lived with Willy and Bruce. Bruce had gotten married, though not to Willy. Willy had gone into archeology and disappeared. But that was another life, only half remembered.

  Constance said she’d been in New England. She’d spent three years in a Buddhist monastery, which explained why I hadn’t seen her for so long. Then she came back and a month later had just come out of University Book Store here on the Av—right there where we had run into each other again, by the post office—when she collapsed in the midst of a grand mal. She had never had one before, though she had suffered for years from headaches. When she woke up, she was in a hospital and her hair had been shaved off. A tumor, not malignant, had been removed from her brain. It had grown for twenty years, her doctors estimated, without her knowledge, pressing against her brain until her brain was only one third its previous size. Its removal was, she said, quite a load off her mind.

  Dark humor had always been part of her. What was new, what resulted from her surgery, was some loss of memory and the inability to experience some emotions. She could not feel love, though apparently she could experience other emotions. She said she was going to stop confiding in certain people because it upset her to see them cry when she confessed that while she knew they had been close, she just did not love them now. She found it “curious”—that was her word—that people reacted as they did when she told them she no longer loved them, or perhaps did not even remember them. She was comfortable, she said, with the distance she resided at now from old friends and former lovers.

  She looked up from her souvlaki. I could feel the question though I avoided looking at her.

  “Barely acquainted,” I said.

  She laughed, delighted. “Thank you.”

  Icarus

  for Roy McCready

  From the ground I might have seemed

  an angel falling out of orbit

  or a tiny meteor aflame,

  spinning on it lopsided axis,

  arc-ing downward to a terrible rendezvous.

  Inside, beginning to burn, I sat,

  unable to reach an ejection handle,

  anticipating the melt and crackle of my eyeballs.

  My brain, working at light’s speed,

  fastened finally on the solution to my problem:

  I would ride the plane into the sea,

  the sea would douse the fire,

  I would climb out and be saved.

  I held to this desperate idiocy for an

  electric moment’s fraction before my plane exploded,

  loosing me into hot sunlight

  where my parachute snapped, rippled,

  opened and set me down in brine

  that doused my burns. The helicopter

  arrived before the enemy and I was saved,

  though somewhere in the tangle of shouting and harness,

  drumming rotor blades and lathering water,

  and the fearful hammering of cannon

  I lost my Navy-issue .38-caliber

  revolver

  which,

  as I healed in hospital in San Diego,

  the FBI, in a confrontation classic in irony,

  dispassion, and the agency’s determination

  to extinguish evil in all its guises,

  accused me of stealing with the motive of profit,

  or nostalgia,

  or providing aid to the enemy.

  Monday Morning in Early September

  Everything was pink that day; even God’s
own sky looked pink to me, except for the red of that girl’s hood. When I saw her I thought immediately how sad she looked, even though I couldn’t see her face. Now, of course, I understand that it was my own sadness I saw on her.

  She was sitting against the wire fence that surrounds the school where I was taking my granddaughter to enroll her. Her arms opened out away from her body and her palms were up so that I almost expected to see stigmata. Both girls, my granddaughter and the dead girl, were dressed in pink. The dead girl was wearing a pink sweat suit, pants and shirt, a designer suit really, not made for running or gymnastics. Her feet were naked. If she had been wearing shoes, one of the neighborhood children wore them now. A paper bag was over her head. It was not pink but a deep reddish-brown. When I got closer I saw that it was not paper but a cloth handbag, one you could buy in a store that imports from Mexico or South America. Before it became reddish-brown it had been a cottony white. Maybe it was this girl’s. Maybe she had been shot by another girl who had put her own bag over this girl’s head. But probably not. Not that another girl might not have shot her, but she wouldn’t have ruined her own handbag. As I was reaching to pull it off, I suddenly felt overwhelmingly tired, but I wanted to close her eyes. I knew they would be open.

  When I touched the bag it was hard and stiff, so I knew she had been dead for a while. When my granddaughter saw the girl’s face, she screamed and brought her little hands to her own face. I had forgotten she was with me. I told her to go back to the car and I watched her as she ran across the street, her pink skirt bouncing up off her little bottom. I felt so tired I could hardly bear it. And so I drew down the eyelids on that poor, destroyed face, as you would close the blinds in your living room against the bright sun, and they stayed closed, though I was afraid they wouldn’t.