Thunderstruck & Other Stories Read online

  History is full of the sad stories of foolish women. What’s terrible is that I was not foolish. Ask anyone. Ask Fred Tibbets, who lied and said I could carry a tune.

  We cut a record called Miss Porth Sings! For a long time you could still find it in bins in record shops under Vocals or Other or Novelty. Me on the sleeve, my head tipped back. I wore red lipstick that made my complexion orange, and tiny saw-shaped earrings. My hair was cashew-colored.

  That was a fault of the printing. In real life, in those days, my hair was the color of sandpaper: diamond, garnet, ruby.

  I was on the radio. I was on the Gypsy Rose Lee Show. Miss Porth, the Human Musical Saw! But the whole point was that Gabe’s saw sounded human. Why be a human who only sounds like an inanimate object that sounds human?

  6.

  This is not a story about success. In the world we were what we’d always been. The love story: the saw and the sawish voice. We were two cripplingly shy, witheringly judgmental people who fell in love in private, away from the conversation and caution of other people, and then we left town before anyone could warn us.

  In Philadelphia he began to throw things at me—silly, embarrassing, lighter-than-air things: a bowl full of egg whites I was about to whip for a soufflé, my brother’s birthday card, the entire contents of a newly opened box of powdered sugar. For days I left white fingerprints behind. He said it was an accident, he hadn’t meant to throw it at all. He was only gesturing.

  And then he began to threaten me with the saw.

  I don’t think he could have explained it himself. He didn’t drink, but he would seem drunk. The drunkenness, or whatever it was, moved his limbs. Picked up the saw. Brought it to my throat, and just held it there. He never moved the blade, and spoke of the terrible things he would do to himself.

  “I’m going to commit suicide,” he said. “I will. Don’t leave me. Tell me you won’t.”

  I couldn’t shake my head or speak, and so I tried to look at him with love. I couldn’t stand the way he hated himself. I wanted to kill the person who made him feel this way. Our apartment was bright at the front, by the windows, and black and airless at the back, where the bed was. Where we were now, lying on a quilt that looked like a classroom map, orange, blue, green, yellow.

  “My life is over,” said Gabe. He had the burnt-tomato smell of the whole apartment. “I’m old. I’m old. I’m talentless. I can see it, but you know, at the same time, I listen to the radio all day and I don’t understand. Why will you break everyone’s hearts the way you do? Why do you do it? You’re crazy. Probably you’re not capable of love. You need help. I will kill myself. I’ve thought about it ever since I was a little kid.”

  The saw blade took a bite of me, eight tooth marks per inch. Cheap steel, the kind that bent easily. I had my hands at the dull side of the saw. How did we get here, I wondered, but I’d had the same disoriented thought when I believed I’d fallen in love with him at first sight, lying in the same bed: How did this happen?

  “I could jump,” he said. “What do you think I was doing up that tower when you found me? Windows were too small, I didn’t realize. I’d gotten my nerve up. But then there you were, and you were so little. And your voice. And I guess I changed my mind. Will you say something, Marya? You’ve broken my heart. One of these days I’ll kill myself.”

  I knew everything about him. He weighed exactly twice what I did, to the pound. He was ambitious and doubtful: he wanted to be famous, and he wanted no one to look at him, ever, which is probably the human condition—in him it was merely amplified. That was nearly all I knew about him. Sometimes we still told the story of our life together to each other: Why had I climbed the tower that day? Why had he? He had almost stayed in Philadelphia. I’d almost gone back home for the weekend but then my great-aunt Florence died and my folks went to her funeral. If he’d been five minutes slower he wouldn’t have caught me singing. If I’d been ten minutes later, I would have smiled at him as he left.

  We were lucky, we told each other, blind pure luck.

  7.

  One night we were at our standing gig, at a cabaret called Maxie’s. It hurt to sing, with the pearls sticking to the saw cuts. The owner was named Marco Bell. He loved me. Marco’s face was so wrinkled that when he smoked you could see every line in his face tense and slacken.

  There’s a land beyond the land we know,

  Where time is green and men are slow.

  Follow me and soon you’ll know,

  Blue happiness.

  My green dress was too big and I kept having to hitch it up. It wasn’t too big a month ago. At the break, I sat down next to Marco. “How are you?” I asked.

  “Full of sorrow,” he answered. He leaned into the hand holding the cigarette. I thought he might light his pomaded hair on fire.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You do it, Miss Porth. With your—” He waved at the spot where I’d been standing.

  I laughed. “They’re not all sad songs.”

  “Yes,” he said. There was not a joke in a five-mile radius of the man. He had a great Russian head with bullying eyebrows. Three years earlier his wife had had a stroke, and sometimes she came into the club in a chevron-patterned dress, sitting in her wheelchair and patting the tabletop, either in time to the music or looking for something she’d put down there. “You’re wrong. They are.”

  I said, “Sometimes I don’t think I’m doing anyone any favors.”

  Then Gabe was behind me. He touched my shoulder lovingly. Listen: don’t tell me otherwise. It was not nice love, it was not good love, but you cannot tell me that it wasn’t love. Love is not oxygen, though many songwriters will tell you that it is; it is not a chemical substance that is either definitively present or absent; it cannot be reduced to its parts. It is not like a flower, or an animal, or anything that you will ever be able to recognize when you see it. Love is food. That’s all. Neither better nor worse. Sometimes very good. Sometimes terrible. But to say—as people will—that wasn’t love. As though that makes you feel better! Well, it might not have been nourishing, but it sustained me for a while. Once I’d left I’d be as bad as any reformed sinner, amazed at my old self, but even with the blade against my neck, I loved him, his worries about the future, his reliable black moods, his reliable affection—that was still there, too, though sullied by remorse.

  I stayed for the saw, too. Not the threat of it. I stayed because of those minutes on stage when I could understand it. Gabe bent it back and it called out, Oh, no, honey, help. It wanted comfort. It wanted to comfort me. We were in trouble together, the two of us: the honey-throated saw, the saw-voiced girl. Help, help, we’re still alive, the saw sang, though mostly its songs were just pronouns all stuck together: I, we, mine, you, you, we, mine.

  Yes, that’s right. I was going to tell you about the saw.

  Gabe touched my shoulder and said, “Marya, let’s go.”

  Marco said, “In a minute. Miss Porth, let’s have a drink.”

  “Marya,” said Gabe.

  “I’d love one,” I said.

  Maxie’s was a popular place—no sign on the front door, a private joke. There was a crowd. Gabe punched me. He punched me in the breast. The right breast. A very strange place to take a punch. Not the worst place. I thought that as it happened: not the worst place to take a punch. The chairs at Maxie’s had backs carved like bamboo. He punched me. I’d never been punched before. He said, “See how it feels, when someone breaks your heart?” and I thought, Yes, as it happens, I think I do.

  I was on my back. Marco had his arms around Gabe’s arms and was whispering things in his ear. A crowd had formed. People were touching me. I wished they wouldn’t.

  Here is what I want to tell you: I knew something was ending, and I was grateful, and I missed it.

  8.

  About five years ago in a restaurant near my apartment someone recognized me. “You’re—are you Miss Porth?” he said. “You’re Miss Porth.” Man about my own age, twee
d blazer, bald with a crinkly snub-nosed puppyish face, the kind that always looks like it’s about to sneeze. “I used to see you at Maxie’s,” he said. “All the time. Well, lots. I was in grad school at Penn. Miss Porth! Good God! I always wondered what happened to you!”

  I was sitting at the bar, waiting for a friend, and I wanted to end the conversation before the friend arrived. The man took a bar stool next to me. We talked for a while about Philadelphia. He still lived there, he was just in town for a conference. He shook the ice from his emptied drink into his mouth, and I knew he was back there—not listening to me, exactly, just remembering who was at his elbow, and did she want another drink, and did he have enough money for another drink for both of them. All the good things he believed about himself then: by now he’d know whether he’d been right, and right or wrong, knowing was dull. I didn’t like being his occasion for nostalgia.

  “I have your album,” he said. “I’m a fan. Seriously. It’s my field, music. I—Some guy hit you,” he said suddenly. His puppy face looked over-sneezeish. “I can’t remember. Was he a drunk? Some guy in love with you? That’s right. A crazy.”

  “Random thing,” I said. “What were you studying?”

  “Folklore,” he said absentmindedly. “I always wondered something about you. Can I ask? Do you mind?”

  Oh, I thought, slide down that rabbit hole if you have to, just let go of my hem, don’t take me with you.

  “I loved to hear you,” he said. Puppy tilt to his head, too. “You were like nothing else. But I always wondered—I mean, you seem like an intelligent woman. I never spoke to you back then.” One piece of ice clung to the bottom of his glass and he fished it out with his fingers. “Did you realize that people were laughing at you?”

  Then he said, “Oh, my God.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Not me,” he said. “I swear, you were wonderful.”

  I turned to him. “Of course I knew,” I said. “How could I miss it?”

  The line between pride and a lack of it is thin and brittle and thrilling as new ice. Only when you’re young are you able to skate out onto it, to not care which side you end up on. That was me. I was innocent. Later, when you’re old, when you know things, well, it takes all sorts of effort, and ropes, and pulleys, and all kinds of tricks, to keep you from crashing through, if you’re even willing to risk it.

  Though maybe I did know back then that some people didn’t take me seriously. But still: the first time they came to laugh. Not the second. I could hear the audience. I could hear how still they were when I sang with my eyes closed. Sure, some of them had thought, Who does she think she’s fooling? Who does she think she is, with that old green gown, with those made-up songs? But then they’d listen. It was those people, I think, the ones who thought at first they were above me, who got the wind knocked out of them. Who brought their friends the next week. Who bought my record. Who thought: Me. No more, no less, she’s fooling me.

  Later I got a letter asking for the right to put two songs from Miss Porth Sings! on a record called Songs from Mars: Eccentrics and their Music. The note said, Do you know what happened to G. Macon? I need his permission, too, of course.

  9.

  The night of the punch, I went home with Gabe for the last time. Of course, don’t call the police, I told Marco. He was exhausted, repentant. I led him to the bed, to the faded quilt, and he fell asleep. From the kitchen phone I called his sister in Paterson, whom I’d never met, and I told her Gabe Macon was in trouble and alone and needed help. Then I climbed into bed next to him. Gabe had an archipelago of moles on his neck I’d never noticed, and a few faint acne scars on his nose. His eyebrows were knit in dreamy thought. I loved that nose. He hated it. “Do I really look like that?” he’d ask, seeing a picture of himself. He’d cover his nose with his hand.

  I didn’t know what would become of him. I had to quit caring. It wasn’t love and it wasn’t the saw and it wasn’t a fear of being alone that kept me there: it was wanting to know the end of the story, and wanting the end to be happy.

  At five A.M. I left with a bag, the saw, bamboo-patterned bruises on my back, and a fist-shaped bruise on my right breast. Soon enough I was amazed at how little I cared for him. Maybe that was worse than anything.

  10.

  Still, no matter what, I can’t shake my first impression. Even now, miles and years away, the saw in my living room to remind me, when I think of Gabe, I see a 1930s animated character: the black pie-cut eyes, white gloved hands held flat against the background, dark long limbs without elbows and knees that do not bend but undulate. The cheap jazzy glorious music that, despite your better self, puts you in a good mood. Fills you with cheap jazzy hope. And it seems you’re making big strides across the country on your spring-operated limbs, in your spring-loaded open car, in your jazzy pneumatic existence. You don’t even notice that behind you, over and over in the same order, is the same tree, shack, street corner, mouse hole, table set for dinner, blown-back curtains.

  Juliet

  We called the bunny that lived in the children’s room Kaspar, as in Kaspar Hauser, but the children who came to torment and visit it thought we meant the friendly ghost. That might have made sense had the rabbit been white, but it was dun-colored. It cowered in the corner of its cage while children stuck their fingers through the wire; they sang, Bunny, bunny, bunny rabbit; they cried when their mothers informed them it was time to go, they’d see Bunny next time. Bunny, we suspected, prayed nightly to become a ghost. It never got out, never saw sunlight; it was never given a carrot or a chance to hop; it indulged in no lapine pleasures at all. Mostly, it shook or slept, was careless about its hygiene. Mornings, it ripped its newsprint bedding in strips and drew them into its mouth in damp pleats, chewing and swallowing by inches. The children’s librarian said this was normal, but we thought the bunny was trying to overdose, using the materials nearby.

  The six finches, on the other hand, seemed happy in their communal cage; and if the fish were unhappy, we couldn’t tell. Maybe they wept in the terrible privacy of their tank. The occasional dog would slip in through the exit, wanting to find its owner, and one woman brought her cat, left it crying like a baby in the vestibule while she returned a video. “I am in a hurry,” she told the circulation desk. “My cat is waiting for me.” Also, once, a man found a wounded bird outside the library and brought it to the reference desk for identification. When he opened his hand to indicate the peculiarities of its markings, the bird took a notion to live after all and flew to the highest corner of the balcony, up by the replica Parthenon frieze that girdled the reading room. The bird stayed there for days, setting off the motion detectors at night. It never got close enough to the reference desk to identify.

  That was it for wildlife, unless you counted the children themselves, often wild: not the toddlers, who couldn’t bear to leave the bunny’s side, but the ten- and eleven-year-olds who threw books off the balcony or slung their skinny legs on the tables or slipped whatever they wished, like a bad joke, into the book drop. The book drop was a door set in the library façade that opened like an oven and dropped its contents into a closet in the circulation office. Snow in the winter, firecrackers in the summer, uncapped bottles of Coke year-round. One weekend, a passing man employed the book drop for a public urinal, and several books were destroyed. “Urine is sterile,” the head of circulation explained to her staff as she dropped a sodden Garfield Rounds Out into a wastebasket, but it was clear nobody believed this perfectly scientific fact, including her.

  It was on this day, a Monday, that we first saw Juliet.

  She was a young woman, late twenties we thought, with long, loose dark hair. Her clothes were white, and at first we thought she was in uniform, a nurse, perhaps—she had a sort of nursey look to her, sweet and determined and recently divorced. Or maybe she was from an unfamiliar order of nuns, because in our library we did get the occasional Sister. But it turned out she just wore white that day. Maybe she wasn’
t wearing white, maybe we just remember that now because in the picture we saw so often, later, she wore white. At any rate, there was something forsaken and hopeful about her. She stood patiently at the front desk, waiting for assistance. In front of her, a man filled out an application for a card. On the line marked OCCUPATION, he filled in EMPLOYEE.

  She clutched a book in her hand in such a way that it looked like a knife she was prepared to use on herself, which was one of the reasons we ended up calling her Juliet. That, and her habit of leaning on the rail of the balcony that ran around the reading room, looking up instead of down, into the cloudy green of the skylight. Her book had that pebbly leatherette navy-blue grain usually found on diaries and giveaway Bibles. Are you returning that? somebody asked her.

  “No,” she said. “No. It’s mine. I just was never in here before, and I was wondering what you could tell me.”

  The departments were pointed out to her—audiovisual this way, children’s the other, adult library upstairs. She was offered a brochure.

  “May I get a card?”

  Was she a resident of the town? Yes. Had she had a card with us before? No. Did she have proof of address and a photo ID?

  “Not with me,” she said. “Next time, then. For now, I’ll just look around.”

  We had regulars, of course, and they were demanding. People wanted not just books but attention and advice and, in the case of one widower, the occasional rear end to pat affectionately. We got teenagers who came daily to read or nap or use the Internet away from their parents; mothers and their toddlers and their tiny trails of cheese crackers. We had two transgendered patrons that we knew of, one now a radical lesbian who came in with her girlfriend and wore a T-shirt that said, BECAUSE I’M THE TOP, THAT’S WHY, who liked to gab and gossip; the other the shy and girlish and bangled Janice, whom we’d first known as Jonathan, winner three years in a row of the junior high science fair, under both names one of our most regular regulars. There was a woman with no eyebrows who never said a word and a pleasant, paranoid old lady who occasionally, sweetly, accused us of poisoning her. There were the screamers, mostly businessmen who believed they could threaten our jobs and could not understand why we humble city employees weren’t frightened. One blond man—his face as ruddy and pitted as a basketball—screamed, “Where’s the guy who wouldn’t let my son take out books?” The guy in question was outside, obliviously smoking a cigarette, and though the matter was resolved, clearly what the man really wanted was to punch someone.