Confessions of a Falling Woman Read online

  Confessions of a Falling Woman

  And Other Stories

  Debra Dean

  To Chip and Kim, Cyn and Dan, and always, Cliff.

  Contents

  What the Left Hand Is Saying

  The Queen Mother

  The Afterlife of Lyle Stone

  A Brief History of Us

  Another Little Piece

  Romance Manual

  The Best Man

  The Bodhisattva

  Confessions of a Falling Woman

  Dan in the Gray Flannel Rat Suit

  About the Author

  Other Books by Debra Dean

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Some of these stories have appeared previously in the following magazines and anthologies: “The Afterlife of Lyle Stone” in Writers’ Forum; “What the Left Hand Is Saying” in The Seattle Review; “The Bodhisattva” in The Bellingham Review and the anthology Women’s Struggles, Women’s Visions; “The Queen Mother” in MidAmerican Review; and “Confessions of a Falling Woman” in Calyx, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. My thanks to these publications and their editors.

  Thanks, also, to Chang-rae Lee, Ann Reeder, Garrett Hongo, and Tracy Daugherty.

  Finally, my deep affection and gratitude to Marly Rusoff and Michael Radulescu, who have blessed me with their nurturing and expertise, and to Claire Wachtel, an editor of sensitivity, humor, and savvy. I’m lucky in you all beyond reason.

  WHAT THE LEFT HAND IS SAYING

  Only a mesh of ivy holds this old building upright, ropy veins lashing the fire escape precariously to its side. Wind rattles through the rotting window frames and the tub is in the kitchen, but the building is rent-controlled, so years can go by without a name changing on the buzzers downstairs. Still, before Tim the Puppet Boy arrived, I knew my neighbors in the way New Yorkers do, faces passed on the stairs, voices heard through the walls late at night. In fact, I didn’t know a soul in the city. But I’m an only child and the child of only children, and was accustomed to being alone. I wouldn’t have called myself lonely.

  He arrived in the summer, on a morning already wilting with the heat. I remember I had given up a halfhearted plan to go to a cattle call and instead was soaking in a tub of cold water. He might have been knocking for some time, but I didn’t hear him until I surfaced and reached for another tray of ice cubes out of the freezer. Peering in at the open window was a gangly apparition wearing only striped bikini briefs and ridiculous pink plastic sunglasses. He was sorry to bother me, he said, but could he use my phone?

  Oh, for Pete’s sake. That was my reaction, can’t a person even take a bath in her own kitchen? And then mild astonishment that the fire escape could actually hold the weight of an adult, albeit a pretty scrawny one. A full minute elapsed before it occurred to me to throw a towel over myself. I stood up and tried to shoo him away from the window as though he were a pigeon. He smiled and shrugged but didn’t leave.

  “I was sunbathing up on the roof, and Juan must have locked the window before he left. Philip’s asleep, and it’s like trying to wake the dead. You know, you should repot that dracaena—it needs more room for its roots.” He was pointing to a dead plant on the sill. “So I’ve been pounding out there for ten minutes, but no luck.” He waited, his smile hopeful.

  “Listen, I don’t know any Philip or Juan.”

  “Really?” He seemed disbelieving. “You share a fire escape. I’m staying with them for a few days.” He crouched over to extend his hand through the window. “My name’s Tim.”

  I’d never heard of a burglar in a swimsuit, but more to the point, he was the only person I’d ever seen in New York who looked utterly guileless and sexless. I shook his hand and pushed up the sash, cautioning him to watch his step.

  Tim stayed for a year. I found out some time later that Philip and Juan had met him only a few weeks before I did. “I thought he was trying to pick me up,” Philip said. “Well, my God, he just walked up to me in the park and started talking to me. So I brought him home. Next thing, the little weenie was asleep on the couch.”

  If I can’t remember when Tim moved across the hall into my apartment, it is because he had a disarming lack of boundaries. He’d drop over three times a day—to borrow my iron, to tell me the mail had come, to show me something wonderful he’d found in a Dumpster. In the evenings, he might tap on the door and announce that everyone was watching Dynasty on Philip’s new TV. Gradually our two doors were simply left ajar. Our two apartments fused, with silverware, shampoo, and condiments migrating freely back and forth. I began to find Tim asleep on my couch when I came home late, and chatting with one of our neighbors in the kitchen when I got up the next morning.

  Through Tim, I discovered that our building was populated entirely by aspiring fill-in-the-blanks. I was going to be a star on Broadway or, barring that, sell out and make a lot of money doing television. Juan was a dancer with a company that disbanded and renamed itself every few months, and he hoped to choreograph someday. Philip’s aspirations were more vague but nonetheless brilliant: he was going to be famous, for what was left open. Meanwhile, he devoted his energy to being in the right place—whatever club was currently in vogue—and sleeping with the right people. Darla, a would-be model, lived on the second floor. She had once met the photographer Scavullo at a party. He told her she had great bones, and she’d been starving them into prominence ever since, endlessly refining her appearance in hopes of finding the look that would propel her onto the cover of Vogue. Her boyfriend, Zak, hung out at the comedy clubs, convinced that he was funny enough to get paid for it. Even Morty the super was taking night classes in real estate. He had big plans to cash in on the co-op boom.

  Tim was the only one among us who didn’t appear to have any ambitions. He occasionally got work from a company that did rich kids’ birthday parties, but there wasn’t much demand for puppeteers. He lived more or less hand-to-mouth. The puppets themselves were his own creations, whimsically detailed creatures that he might have sold for a lot of money. More than once I tried to forward this idea, but Tim couldn’t sustain any interest in profit. He might spend whole days painting over the same eyes or searching for just the right shade of wool yarn. More often, I heard him playing with an unfinished puppet, cackling laughter and different voices interspersed with his own.

  He idolized Jim Henson. Once you knew this about him, it was hard to shake his resemblance to a Muppet. His thin legs and arms moved with floppy abandon, and he tended to dress in childish combinations of color and pattern. But stronger than the physical resemblance, it was the way he moved through the world, as though everyone were his friend. I don’t know that he ever actually said so, but I assumed he was from a small town somewhere in the Midwest, a place where people still knew their neighbors and gossiped with them over pie and coffee in each other’s kitchens. When he moved in here, the tenants in our building gradually began to mingle and kibitz like a large and affectionate family.

  Darla sometimes brought up a six-pack, and Philip would touch up her roots while we drank her beer and listened to her speculate on the infidelities of her boyfriend, Zak.

  “He went to the Knicks last night with this bimbo from work, just the two of them. He says, no big deal, she likes the Knicks and she paid for her own ticket, like right, like I’m some kind of moron, so I tell him no woman likes basketball for real. I wasn’t accusing him of nothing, just pointing out the obvious, you know?”

  Tim nudged me under the table. “You love basketball, don’t you.”

  “For real?” Darla gave me a skeptical look, but you could tell she was hoping it was true.

  “Well, I watch it on TV,” I lied. “All the
time, the Knicks, the Rangers.”

  Juan rolled his eyes at me behind Darla’s back.

  That Thanksgiving, it snowed. We had fifteen people for dinner, neighbors and friends and a mail sorter Tim brought home from the deli when Juan sent him out for cranberries. We cooked a twenty-pound turkey in Juan and Philip’s oven, and cornbread and candied yams in ours. Mrs. Zibintzky from downstairs made pumpkin pies, and Morty brought a grocery sack of canned olives and sweet pickles and Cheez Whiz. Zak lugged up a case of beer and bags of ice for the tub, and Darla arranged her mother’s china on the two kitchen tables. There wasn’t enough room for all of us in any one room, so Tim shuffled food and conversation back and forth across the hall. He was inventing new words to “Over the River and Through the Woods,” and every few minutes we got the latest verse, loud and off-key.

  “Okay, okay, you guys.” Morty stood up and began clanking his fork against a wineglass. “I wanna say a few words on this occasion. I just wanna say that I appreciate you having me into your home. Timmy, I met you, what, two, three months ago and here we are.” Morty’s eyes welled up. “Eating turkey and so on. Anyways, here’s to family, wherever we may find them.”

  Outside, the lights of the city had receded behind a gauzy curtain of flakes, and the sounds of traffic were muffled and far away. I had the heady sensation that the rooms had somehow come unmoored and we were floating high above the city. Our little group laughed and drank and sang, snug in a cocoon of yellow light, as galaxies of snow whirled past the windows.

  Whatever we might later say against him, Tim made us feel like we belonged somewhere.

  Zak used to try out his new routines on Tim, who chuckled appreciatively at just about anything. When Zak got on the roster for amateur night at Catch a Rising Star, Tim went along as his fan. One night, they came back and announced that Tim had signed up for a slot the following week.

  “Oh, for Chrissake, Zak,” Darla whispered furiously when Tim left the room. “Like it’s not bad enough you have to suffer like that? You have to drag Tim into it? They’ll eat him for breakfast. Does he even have any material?”

  “He does those jokes with the puppets.”

  “Oh, sure, yeah right, they’re gonna love that. Live at the Tropicana, Shari and Lamb Chop. You are such a dimwit sometimes.”

  She had a point. Each of us privately imagined Tim, our gentle Tim, being savagely humiliated, thrown to the lions. Still, we all went as a show of support, even Mrs. Zibintzky, who never went anywhere. This is what friends do. The group had once endured four hours of Shakespeare when I played Ophelia at the Little Theatre Under the Bridge. We’d been to a garage in Brooklyn to watch Juan dance with people dressed in Hefty bags. Now, we were going to pay our admissions, buy our watery drinks, and writhe through an evening of bad comedy. Afterward, we intended to lie with enthusiasm and to point out the shortcomings of the audience.

  By the time Tim was introduced near the end of the evening, I had downed four or five gin and tonics, which were proving to be less diluted than I’d imagined. The room looked precariously unstable. Through the smoky haze, I watched Tim meander onto the stage and then stand blinking in the glare of the spotlight.

  “Hi, my name’s Tim.” He waited expectantly, with the glazed smile of an actor who has forgotten his next line. The silence stiffened. Finally, Darla sighed and said, “Hi, Tim.”

  “Well, hi, Darla.” He smiled at her gratefully. “That’s my friend Darla. Actually, I brought several friends with me tonight.” Tim reached into the paper sack at his feet and brought out a skinny puppet with a wide grin. He talked as he fitted the puppet over his hand.

  “This nightclub thing is kind of new to me. Usually I do children’s parties. You know how kids love puppets. But I think we’re all really just kids. My mother thinks so, too. For my birthday, she bought me an extra-large sweater. ‘You’ll grow into it,’ she said.”

  Our little table responded on cue. We sounded like opera singers laughing, ha ha ha ha.

  “Now, this puppet is Rocky. I named him after my mother. I’m just kidding. Actually, Mom’s name is Rambo. Rocky, say hi to all the nice folks out there.”

  The puppet’s vacant gaze rested on Tim. “You’re dying out here, Tim, you know that?”

  “Well, I…”

  Then the puppet did the bit that’s become his trademark. The punchline where he lifts up his hand and all but the middle finger falls over. I still don’t think it’s funny, but I yelped with laughter at the incongruity of Tim telling a dirty joke. The audience was laughing now, too, and I could feel the tension ease around our table.

  Up on the stage, Tim looked genuinely puzzled.

  “Please excuse Rocky,” Tim said. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him.”

  “Your friend Philip, that’s what got into me. I’m talking sodomy, Tim. Didn’t you notice it’s a little sticky in there?” Tim froze, his eyes moving slowly toward his left hand. The room sniggered and squealed.

  “Puppet fucker.” The puppet leered directly at Philip.

  “Rocky, now hush.”

  “Once you’ve had a puppet, you never go back. Right, Phil baby?” I looked over at Philip, who smiled good-naturedly at the stage.

  Mrs. Zibintzky said, “I may be too old for this.”

  Tim and Rocky started this riff on plastic surgery. Pretty funny stuff and I was laughing, and then he said something very specific about a neighbor and a botched breast job, and I realized he was talking about Darla. No one was supposed to know. I mean, it was a ridiculous secret, but when you come right down to it, most of our secrets are. I stole a glance at Darla, who was staring rigidly into some middle distance.

  “Man, I’ve got more real parts than she does.” The puppet cackled viciously. “It must be hard on that boyfriend of hers.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He can’t tell for sure when he’s two-timing her. ‘Did you have your ass done, honey, or am I having another affair?’”

  “The little shit,” Zak croaked. Darla rose and I started to say something—I don’t know what. Zak was already reaching toward her, but her look stopped all of us cold. She left.

  My name crackled over the mike.

  Tim was looking quizzically at his puppet. “I thought you liked her, Rocky.”

  “She’s a loser, Tim. I went to see her in that Shakespeare play. Man, that was painful.”

  “Well, it was a tragedy, Rocky.”

  “You’re telling me. She was so bad, the Surgeon General had warnings posted in the program. I ignored that, I’m tough, but Tim, there’s a limit to what a human being can endure. Halfway through her mad scene, the audience started chanting ‘Jump, Jump, Jump.’ First play in New York closed by the Board of Health.”

  There was more, but the words began to run together, blurring into a howl of laughter. I kept staring at Tim, transfixed by his placid smile. His lips were slightly parted, and I couldn’t tell whether they moved when the puppet spoke.

  Afterward, we congratulated Tim, not warmly, but he didn’t seem to notice. He hugged me and then giddily introduced a man in a slouchy silk suit named Graham. I held out my hand, but Graham had already turned back to Tim.

  “Tim, first rule: you don’t use real names. You don’t want your roommate suing you for libel, now do you?” Graham laughed like someone who gets paid to, which, as it turns out, he does. He works for the cable company where Tim got his first break.

  When we left the club, Tim was chatting it up amiably with a bartender and a few others who acted like he was their best and oldest friend. He waved to us happily and said he’d be along later, but he never came back. I heard later he was living in a loft downtown that belongs to some LA muckety-muck.

  The apartment building was dark when we returned to it that night, every window a blank. We let ourselves in and I suppose we said good night or something to that effect, but all I recall was the buzzing of the fluorescent tubes in the vestibule and, as I climbed the stairs, the so
und of doors shutting quietly below me, one by one, the click of deadbolts turning.

  I turn on the television sometimes when I see Tim’s name listed in the cable guide. So do Philip and Juan; I can hear the nasty cackle of that puppet on the other side of the wall. The others probably watch him, too, though when I see them on the stairs, we don’t mention Tim. We comment on the weather or complain about the boiler going out again. We say we should really get together, but you know how these things go. Time flies.

  THE QUEEN MOTHER

  When my baby sister called and asked me to fly down from New York, my first thought was that the entire family had finally gone off their rockers.

  The idea, as Lizann explained it, was to get the Queen Mother when she was sober and her defenses were down. Everyone would go to a few training sessions beforehand, and then on Saturday meet up at Daddy’s office. He’d bring her over there on some pretext and then, well, then I suppose you have to imagine a really horrendous surprise party. Surprise! Your whole family and your best friend are here because we all love you. But (and this is the kicker) this drinking thing is out of hand, and we’ve made an appointment for you to check in at the local rehab clinic.

  “It’d just mean so much to her if you were there, Torrie.”

  “That’s plain craziness. She’s hardly going to appreciate my presence at a lynching.” I could hear my voice sliding into its old curves, matching the drawl on the other end of the line.

  “She’ll probably be angry at first.” Lizann is truly sweet, so it’s hard for her to allow that anyone she loves might behave badly.

  “At first? She’ll have your butt in a sling for the next ten years.” “Well, something’s gotta be done before she kills herself. Doctor Jackson tried to talk to her about going to a clinic after she jitterbugged through the French doors at Christmas. He says if she’d been sober she would’ve broken half the bones in her body. Course, she put on a big show. Told him that she was absolutely horrified at his insinuations, that she never had more than a glass of sherry before dinner. She kept insisting that Tootie had simply put too much wax on the floor before the party. She even tried to fire Tootie.” Lizann’s laughter tinkled over the wires.