Homesick for Another World(54)

She laid out three rows of three cards each on the bedspread.

“The pattern here is easy. Three of the cards have wiggly lines on them.”

I nodded.

She collected the cards, then laid out three more rows. “This set is a little more mysterious. You see these three?” She pointed to three of the cards. One was an empty blue square. One was a solid red rectangle. The other was a striped green star. “Sometimes the pattern is that they’re all different. Do you see that? These three have nothing in common, and that’s exactly what they have in common. Understand?”

I said I did.

“This is how to succeed as an actor. Point out the hidden pattern. Find meaning in the mess. People will kiss your feet.” I watched her pick up the cards again. I didn’t understand what she meant at the time, but I could tell that what she was saying was true. “Practice, practice, practice. You’ve got the brawn, now work on the brain. You want the big time, don’t you? The big roles?”

“Yes,” I answered, though by then I really didn’t. When she looked up at me, I stared deep into her small, blurry eyes. “Thank you,” I said.

“No need to thank me,” she replied. She shuffled and laid down more cards, pointed to three circles. “Easy,” she said and clucked her tongue.

Then she was quiet. She shuffled the cards. She looked at me and shook her head. I thought maybe she was lost in her own reveries and would tell me a story about her dead husband or something funny that happened when she was young. But instead, she put down the cards, placed one hand on my knee, the other over her tanned, bony sternum. “Your mother is a lucky woman to have such a boy,” she said, exhaling as though it hurt her to admit such a painful truth. She lifted her hand from my knee and caressed my face, lovingly, reverently, and shook her head again.

Nothing ever happened under the covers of Mrs. Honigbaum’s bed, but from then on, each night before I fell asleep, she recited some prayers in Hebrew and put her hands on my face and shoulders. Whatever spells she cast, they didn’t work. Neither of us was very surprised.





DANCING IN THE MOONLIGHT


I met her two days before Christmas at a holiday pop-up market on the Lower East Side. This was 2006, and she was selling refurbished antique furniture, which she’d placed around her taped-off space like someone’s fancy living room. She wore tight red trousers and a black shirt that looked like the top of a ballerina’s leotard. Her hair was frizzy, bleached blond, and she had a lot of makeup on—too much, I’d say. Her face was pinched, as though she’d just smelled someone farting. It was that look of revulsion that awoke something in me. She made me want to be a better man.

While she was busy with customers, I sat on a chaise longue for sale and pretended to be fascinated. I pushed at the springs with the palms of my hands. I lay down like a patient in analysis, then sat up again. The thing was priced at $2,750. I took out my cell phone and pressed some buttons, pretending that I wasn’t staring at the girl. Finally she noticed me and came over.

“King Edward, home on the range” is the first thing I ever heard her say. I had no idea what she meant by this. “It’s all mahogany. Late Edwardian. Only that panel has the inlay missing.” She pointed. I turned around to look at the wood. “The festoon there?” she was saying. “But I like it without the mother-of-pearl. Mother-of-pearl would look chintzy, I think, with this shade of leather.” I could only clear my throat and nod. She told me she had reupholstered the chaise in leather from an old armchair she’d stripped on the side of the road. “It was like skinning a deer,” she said. “This past summer in Abilene.”

I turned back around to face her crotch—a tender triangle swollen and divided by the thick protuberance of her zipper fly, thick thighs pulling at the weave of the red wool. A tiny key hung from a coiled loop of white telephone cord wrapped around her left wrist. She fingered the coils with long, chipped black nails. I had to marry her. If I couldn’t, I would kill myself. I broke out in a sweat as though I were about to vomit.

“Field dressing,” I blurted. And then, “Field dressing?” I looked up at her face for some kind of validation. Her eyes were a dark, watery blue.

“Oh, are you a hunter or something?” Again, her face like someone had farted—fragile and strangely condemning, like a queen’s.

“No,” I answered. I went back to pushing on the springs. “But there’s a new book about hunting by this guy in Montana, I think, who says you should smoke weed when you hunt because it attracts the animals. Apparently they’re attracted to it, to your energy and, like, the vibrations in your brain. I don’t totally remember. Not that I smoke weed. I mean, I did in college. I’m thirty-three,” I added, as if this explained something.

“You’re reading a book about hunting?”

She folded her arms. Her mouth, as she waited for my answer, was a heavy, wilted rose.

“No,” I told her. “I was just reading about the book. Online.”

“Oh, okay.” She scratched her head and started to walk away. “The springs are all new,” she said, not bothering to turn around.

I got up and followed her. I asked if she did custom work. “I have this ottoman,” I lied.

“Any custom work would have to wait until after the New Year,” she told me. But I could e-mail her photos in the meantime and let her know what I had in mind.