Fantastic Metropolis

The search for the missing woman had not yet turned up a single clue. Vera Unruh read the front-page article with mounting fascination. No signs of violent struggle had been discovered in the woman’s apartment. Vera shook her head at the meager imagination of police officials who could think of nothing more original to propose than that she might have been “the victim of foul play.”

Vera felt that she knew that woman. She saw the distraught figure pacing before an unlocked apartment door, listening for an ex-lover’s footsteps, sounds that alone could sustain her very existence…

“Time to leave, Vera.”

“Yes, Harry, I know.” Her boss yanked her back to the cold gaze of the clock on the opposite wall.

“By the way, Bob says you helped him clinch the deal on that old three-decker on Irving Street. Who’da thought there’d be someone stupid enough to go for the full 75K? Anyway, Bob says his clients kept telling him how pleasant you were to deal with over the phone.”

“Thanks, Harry. I try to be helpful.” Five o’clock. She felt the usual nausea. She saw herself after perhaps an hour, maybe even as long as an hour and a half (how long could she put it off?) re-entering her apartment, closing the door behind her. She couldn’t sit here and delay him any longer. He was waiting politely for her to leave so that he could double-lock the door after her. She placed the newspaper back on her desk. She kept the desk super-neat because it was almost smack up against the front window. As long as she sat there she was the broker’s public image. She liked looking up every once in a while and waving at a familiar faces that passed by outside.

“Tomorrow morning you might want to check out the ads I circled, Harry. They’re private owners I spoke to who might be willing to let us list them.”

“Thanks. I’ll look into it. Where do you get time to do that, Vera? Ain’t you busy enough holding the joint together?”

She got up and approached the door, which he was already holding open for her. “I fit it in when it gets a little slow,” she said. “The one thing I hate is to be idle.”

“I know that,” he said.

Glancing to her left, she saw Harry’s wife in the car parked at the curb, waiting for him, eying her with pursed lips. Mentally she draped a sign around the frumpy woman’s neck saying WIFE: ENDANGERED SPECIES. Vera proceeded to the right down the busy street, walking homeward in the soft summer sun, relishing the clamor of rush hour all around her. She felt as if invisible strings ineluctably drew her toward home. Walk as slowly as she might, stop and linger where she would, she could at most merely delay the inevitable. She thought of how again, today, for the umpteenth time, Harry had told her she had too much smarts to remain just a secretary, as she had for the past three years, and that she ought to take the Real Estate Broker course at the community college-a snap for a college grad like her. It flattered her to be so well thought of, of course, but she could already see the hours and hours of enforced isolation it would entail, studying at home night after night, alone with the inanimate printed page. The hours spent in class would hardly be enough to compensate.

The people all about her strode purposefully onward, home to their waiting someones, darting around her relative slowness like water around a rock in a stream. She could already see herself entering her building and taking the elevator where she had been mugged six months before so that she had spent all Christmas Eve, now with police, now with physicians at the Emergency Room, the center of a whirlwind of attention. Her purse had been snatched, and when she realized she didn’t have a piece of ID to her name, she grew terrified. It did not terrify her to contemplate her black eye in the mirror for days thereafter. She would observe the purple swelling on an otherwise cream-skinned perfect oval of a face innumerable times each evening. A kind of compensatory corporeal ID standing in for the paper ID she had lost. It was reassuring.

Vera was approaching the bakery. She always stopped in there after work. In the window she still saw the leaflet Mr. Zimmerman had allowed her to tape up for the local chapter of Amnesty International. It was a reminder of the tragedy of the “disappeared” of Argentina, los desaparecidos, and a call to join AI, as she had done two years earlier after reading in the paper, with mounting horror, stories of the methods that had been used by the regime to cause its critics to disappear. For her it was the awakening of social consciousness. Chapter meetings did not take place often enough and did not last long enough, as far as she was concerned. She soon became the organizational secretary and would think up, on her own, ways to increase membership and raise funds for the group’s various causes. Through AI she met a man who became a lover, too. He left the organization at about the time he left her.

Mr. Zimmerman was politely attending a crabby, wattle-cheeked woman on line before her. Vera patiently scanned the shelves of rolls and pastries under the glass counter, as if making up her mind what to buy. She kept on glancing at the baker, too, almost surprised at the solidity of his presence, the rotundity of his figure, the pleasant, owlish features under a balding, ruddy dome. He once showed her the numbers on his arm. As a boy he had escaped the ovens by a miracle. Now he presided over very different ovens. The very improbability of his existence drew her irresistibly to drop in on him whether she wanted to buy something or not. When he was through with the older woman he greeted her with a big, genuine smile, and they exchanged the usual trivial observations about the weather and the state of the world until she felt the baker growing restive under her chatter.

 

THE BAKER’S VIEW OF VERA

Mr. Zimmerman looked forward to Vera’s visit each evening. He liked, up to a point, her neighborly tendency to engage him in small talk. He knew that in spite of her pretense to be contemplating the whole array of his goods, she would always end up buying two hard breakfast rolls, but he never made a motion to bag them before she actually said so. Such a move, he somehow knew, would hurt her. He liked her trim figure, her modest, business-like manner of dressing, the silky waves of her dark hair that came down almost to her shoulders, and the beautiful skin of her soft-featured face. Until her divorce a few years back he had called her Mrs. Cameron, but since that time he had not known what to call her and could not bring himself to ask.

What he liked most about her was her generosity. She was the most generous shikse he knew. Once, when a group of snot-nosed kids pressed their faces up against his shop window, she went outside and invited them all in and bought them all any pastry they wanted. She would babysit for neighborhood women for nothing, but few asked, since most married women instinctively distrusted her tendency to reach out toward them in friendliness. Like dragons, they kept jealous watch over their treasures. Some treasures!

She walked out clutching her little white bag of rolls and glanced up the street for familiar faces. Of course she would not go directly home but stop in somewhere to eat, even though she was not particularly hungry. As she considered various places for dinner, her eyes, incessantly scanning, locked in on the pasty gray face and clerical collar of Reverend Peters, who was still half a block away. Ever since her divorce she had plunged into volunteer work for the First Congregational Church, to which both she and her ex-husband had belonged. Ideas she had had for new socials and fundraisers flocked through her mind like noisy birds competing for a scrap of bread. She smiled and waved, they exchanged greetings, and they stepped back against a store window as Vera seized this opportunity to broach ideas she had been developing for a building-fund campaign she knew the Reverend was contemplating.

“Excellent ideas!” he said. “We must talk about them again soon. But I’m afraid it would be a bit premature for you to begin making contact with the local businessmen. You see,” he said confidentially, “there are certain individuals among them I need to ‘tap’ for other purposes.”

“Oh, I quite understand,” said Vera, delighted to be so confided in.

 

THE REVEREND’S VIEW OF VERA

On the personal level Reverend Peters felt nothing but admiration for the energy with which Vera devoted herself to church and social causes. He remembered a book-and-bake sale she had masterminded that had netted a large chunk of the cash needed for roof repairs one year. Another time, under church auspices, she had organized a lecture series on Latin American politics to help Amnesty International raise funds and consciousness in connection with the “disappeared” of Argentina. Members of the congregation still talked about that series. Unfortunately, there were members of the congregation who had come to regard her as aggressive, somewhat pushy, a bit too hungry for the limelight—in spite of the success of her charitable endeavors. Wrong as he felt they were, he could not simply ignore these increasingly audible mutterings. It was his duty as minister to balance the various claims of his constituency. Other members of his flock-muddleheaded and inept though they might be—had nevertheless to be given their chance to shine. Accusations of favoritism had multiplied behind his back, and who could tell what even uglier rumors, lies more powerful than bombs, might have sprouted in the shadows if he had not learned judiciously to “sit on” her. The last thing he would ever wish to do, of course, would be to squelch that priceless enthusiasm of hers. It seemed that her divorce had suddenly released in her a cascade of constructive energy. He had little suspected how ill-matched a couple they were until her husband had confided to him, shortly before the public avowal of their breakup, that Vera was one of those women who never gave a man any room, any “space,” a condition especially asphyxiating to such a bookish man as Cameron.

Vera sauntered down the street again, mildly miffed at being put off, but the minister had been receptive to her ideas, and he did make her feel appreciated. Deciding against the McDonald’s across the street (“fast” food was of no immediate interest to her), and ruling out the Italian restaurant now coming up on her right (there would be almost no one in there at this hour), she settled on Louie’s, the down-home greasy spoon two blocks up ahead, as likely to be full of neighborhood faces and even slower than usual because of rush hour.

A small two-chair table was unoccupied on the left, near the long side of the L-shaped counter. Vera took the chair facing the crowded center of the room. In seconds she spotted her one-time car mechanic (in November she had got rid of her car as an unnecessary expense) sipping coffee at the long side of the counter. His blue overalls bore the traces of countless generations of grease, and she remembered his pudgy fingers as permanently stained with grime. She fixed him with her eyes until he turned and noticed her. She smiled and as if on impulse waved for him to come and join her. Nodding, he picked up his coffee cup and strutted on down to the chair opposite her. There was grease even in his straggly brown beard and a grit-smear on his thick, stubby nose.

“Long time no see,” he said predictably. “Ain’t you gettin’ yourself another car?”

“A car makes no sense since I live only a half mile away from my job. How’re things?”

“Good, good.”

“How’s your partner Jimmy doing these days?” She was surprised to hear herself asking about her most recent ex-lover.

“Jimmy’s working at another garage now. How’s things by you, Vera?”

“Oh, I’m fine.”

“That’s good.”

“You off work now?” she asked. She saw his eyes flicker furtively over her white blouse, licking at her breasts.

“In a little while.”

“Come on over to my place. I’ve got some beer and you can watch TV.” She looked steadily into his eyes, not permitting a single blink to reveal her own amazement at what she had just heard herself say.

He stammered something unintelligible. His sweat-smell was overpowering. “Look at me,” he said, smiling weakly.

“Shower at my place,” she answered, her grip on his eyes unwavering. “You remember my building, right?... Apartment 4-B.”

“I’ll see. I don’t know. I have to finish up-”

“Six-thirty. That gives you plenty of time to finish up.” She knew she could dawdle at Louie’s over dinner and be home shortly before he arrived. “Six-thirty. Promise?”

“I don’t know. I guess… I’ll try.”

“Promise!” she insisted.

“I’ll try. I promise. See you real soon. I better get back to work.”

He left behind him a pungent, rancid odor of grease, sweat, and tobacco.

 

THE MECHANIC’S VIEW OF VERA

He had often been envious of Jimmy’s luck in getting to hump a great looker like Vera. It was the kind of thing that made him hate being married. But what could he do? Put the arm on a customer? Everybody in the neighborhood knew him, and they knew his wife too. Charlene would hear about it in twenty-four hours. Jimmy, of course, would talk about it as if it was nothing. He even pretended to be disgusted at how noisy she got when excited, but he knew he’d get his friend’s tongue hanging out even more at such descriptions. Jimmy, the lucky bastard, even moved in with her! He said she wanted it that way. But he stayed with her only a couple months and split! Voluntarily left paradise, the asshole. Said she didn’t let him breathe. Bullshit. With that kind of babe who’d ever want to come up for air?

So here he was, this golden opportunity he used to cream over sitting right in his lap. But when push came to shove, all he could do was chicken out. He’d tell her something came up. Next time he saw her he’d have an excuse ready. Maybe it still could work out. Maybe some other time…

At six o’clock Vera was home. She took a long, languid shower, doused herself with her most flowery perfumes, and slipped into a lacy, translucent-white negligee of the sort she knew men had fantasies about. She checked the refrigerator for beer, puffed out the pillows on the crewel-embroidered sofa in front of the TV, arranged her own bed to look a little carelessly rumpled, and then closed all the curtains to keep as much daylight out of the apartment as possible.

In the few minutes remaining before six-thirty she wandered around aimlessly, then remembered she had forgotten to look at the mail she had tossed on the kitchen table on coming in from the hall. It was just the usual advertising. Full-color supermarket and department store brochures as big as small-town newspapers. A telephone bill. And that little card with the black-and-white photo of a child on it, and the blaring words beneath the lost angelic face: HAVE YOU SEEN ME? Her breath stopped in her throat and she clutched her left breast to still the pounding of her heart. Crumpling the card in her hand, she tossed it into the trashcan next to the refrigerator.

Six-thirty-two. Still no knock on the door. Now she knew what else she had smelled on him at Louie’s besides tobacco, grease, and sweat. Fear! She smelled it on herself, seeping up from her armpits, from her groin, not to be vanquished by all the rose gardens of Persia.

Twenty to seven and she turned up the sound of the TV in the living room. A man spoke loud and clear, phrase after earnest phrase, but his patter meant nothing to her. They were not words spoken to her.

A quarter to seven. Suddenly she remembered that she had neglected to set the alarm. She always set the alarm-for seven a.m., to be sure to be up for work the next day-as soon as she got home. She rushed into the bedroom and flicked up the alarm switch on the digital clock next to the artfully mussed up bed. She thought of daubing herself with a little more perfume but then shuddered convulsively. She would not dare glance at herself in the bathroom mirror before she felt she absolutely had to. Mindlessly, she tossed her little bag of rolls into the refrigerator. A moment later she pulled them out again, muttering “Stupid!” to herself. Talking to herself didn’t work, however, because she knew she was only playing a game.

Ten to seven. She peeked down the hall. Closing the door, she nevertheless left it unlocked. Was there someone she could call? Someone to visit? She raced frantically through names and faces. It was what she always did when finally she had nowhere else to be but at home, by herself, alone. There was no one she could think of whom she had the slightest excuse to call. She could, of course, pick up the receiver and begin dialing someone out of the blue. But what if at that very moment someone else was trying to call her? Wasn’t there someone, somewhere, at this very moment, thinking of her? Projecting her living image onto the screen of his/her mind?

Five to seven. That man whose desire for her had shriveled in the smell of his fear, in the thing they exuded in common-she knew he would not be coming. Was her flesh beginning to sag? So soon?... Had she set the alarm? Yes, yes. That was definite. At seven a.m. she would be up and have coffee and a roll.

But what if the alarm failed to ring? What if a heavy night rain momentarily knocked out the power? That was something she had never thought of before. How extremely careless of her. First chance she got after awakening in the morning she would go out and buy herself a wind-up alarm clock.

Vera stalked rapidly from room to room, around and around again, as if chasing herself. She stopped before the bathroom door and clutched both her breasts and squeezed. Were they already beginning to go spongy? She dug her fingers into them, lunging after their fading firmness. Fool! she screamed in her mind at that stinking coward at Louie’s. He could be here now making them firm, the press of his solid body ensuring the answering resistance of her flesh.

That far too early sagging… surely it was her fear-riddled imagination. Making her anticipate. There still had to be plenty of time. It seemed far too soon to feel like a balloon losing its air, like a sponge, like a dissipating cloud. She would check. Only the mirror could reassure. She pushed at the bathroom door and it responded slowly to the weakness of her thrust. The clock, though, she remembered quite clearly, was set for 7 a.m. sharp.

Vera stared at her face in the mirror. She dared not blink. What was important, first, was to keep the pale, pinched oval of her face in focus. Whenever she allowed the image to blur, even for a moment, it was already too late. Second, she must dredge up the thought of someone who might now be thinking of her—like that stinking mechanic—and picture him in the mirror of her mind stealing up behind her, enfolding her in his smudgy tattooed arms, testing in his cupped hands the solidity of her breasts…

Again she scurried desperately around the apartment, straining to prolong the vivid lie that the hands on her breasts were another ’s. But the image of that other was immensely hard to sustain. How long, she wondered, had her image persisted in his mind after he left Louie’s? Five minutes? Ten?

Her fingers probed more urgently to keep in contact with the solid surfaces of her flesh. Her breasts, her hips, her thighs, puckered back and dimpled away from the insistent, ceaseless thrusting of her thumbs. Under the press and slide of her hands—hands she could no longer pretend were coated with reassuring grime—her body quickly grew pitted with wells like the surface of a batch of boiling rice.

Someone please think of me! Think me! she cried out without uttering a sound. Already she felt the remembered currents of air again beginning to course through her head.

If only the telephone would now just ring! she shouted soundlessly. A voice trying to sell her another credit card, a trunkful of magic food supplements, anything...

There was that feeling in her head now that her brain was turning into a Swiss cheese. An army of mice was now tunneling through the labyrinth of wormholes that perforated her body, enlarging the tunnel walls, and the holes widened out till barely a thin skin was left to keep them separate. And then, one by one, down went the fragile remaining partitions under the quiet, busy gnaw of mouse-teeth.

Vera rushed again into the bathroom in a final attempt to arrest the avalanching process. She had nothing to lose. When she had the strength, she knew how to stare it to a halt. Strength? Disappointments like this evening’s, when she had allowed herself to hope for reprieve through companionship of a sort, managed to devastate her meager reserves, leaving her so much more vulnerable.

Vera faced the mirror with clenched teeth and eyes narrowed into a defiant, imperious stare. Pride and despair blinked back at her out of the expanding blur. And she herself was that blur in the mirror, beckoning to the blur beyond. Vera felt a sudden snap, like the lid of a jewel-box closing. And then nothing.

Nor was there even the blur where her face had just floated.

As to Vera Unruh’s body…

The only images that the bathroom mirror reflected were the white shower curtain and the edge of the tub that a moment ago had stood hidden behind her.

The fact that Vera had been standing there, however, was confirmed by the crumpled fluff of negligee spread out like a cloud on the sky-blue floor tiles just below the sink.

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This story was first published in Puck #10 (June 1993). It was republished in Dan Pearlman’s collection The Best-Known Man in the World & Other Misfits (2001).