Grab Bag Read online

  He took a quick shower, being careful not to waste the soap, put on a pair of faded but exquisitely darned pajamas, and reached for his bathrobe. It was one his mother’s brother Hymie had bought off a pushcart on Blackstone Street back in 1926. Truth to tell, Uncle Hymie had never worn it much, but Max’s mother had artfully frayed the sleeves to impart the proper aura of aristocratic penury. Smiling a bit at the endearing foibles of womankind, his kind of womankind, Max Bittersohn sauntered out to get his breakfast.

  Monique

  ONE OF THE QUESTIONS writers often get asked is, “How long does it take you to finish a story?” The answer seems to be that it takes as long as it takes. Some of them pretty much write themselves in a month or a week or even, sometimes, a day. Others take longer. This one was started in 1966, looked at occasionally and shoved back into the file drawer occasionally during the past 19 years, and at last finished up for this collection in a way that came as a surprise even to the author.

  I never quite understood why I kept on going to Monique. The first time was simple enough. I was desperately tired and in considerable pain, and looking for relief.

  I am one of those thin-skinned, small-boned little women who are almost indestructible, actually, but always well provided with alarming symptoms of one sort or another. Often these vary from day to day, but at this particular period in my life, I’d developed an ache in my back and legs that was sometimes bad and sometimes worse but never let up, day or night. For months I’d dragged around in misery, trying to cope with all the things that never seemed to get finished, no matter how hard I worked. I don’t know what made me think of massage, but anyway I did, one raw January afternoon when the pain was even worse than usual. This was before all the scandals about topless massage parlors, of course.

  Not knowing what else to do, I looked in the yellow pages. There was one name listed under “Massage” that I recognized. Truth to tell, I’d never been inside the shop and had never realized it was anything but a hairdresser’s. However, I’d seen the sign often enough back when I was living in that part of the city, and I suppose the place appealed to me simply because I could find it without effort. I phoned for an appointment and went that night, directly after work.

  From then on, I began to go faithfully every Thursday at half-past five, even though the so-called treatments were costing me more than I could conveniently spare and not really doing me any good. I think I was getting a perverse enjoyment out of wasting money on myself for a change, instead of forking it over into one of the hands that were eternally stretched out toward me.

  It was a tacky little place, I found, strictly a one-woman operation. Monique, she called herself, though I doubt if that was her real name. She came from somewhere in Europe and looked as though she had been modeled out of piecrust dough that had been made with too much shortening and baked until not quite done. She wore elderly white nylon uniforms that strained at the buttonholes and white nurses’ shoes that were clean enough but sadly run over at the heels. She talked nonstop in a mixture of street slang and incongruously erudite expressions that I suppose she picked up from some of the intellectuals who lived around that rarefied neighborhood. She knew what the words meant but pronounced them wrong, with a heavy accent in a loud, insistent voice.

  Monique had a knack of creating a sort of blowsy comfort. First she would lead me to a minuscule back room, hand me a clean sheet, and leave me to take my clothes off. After I’d undressed and was struggling to swathe myself decently in the sheet, she’d come back, whip away the sheet, and settle me into a queer kind of chair that was in fact a steam bath. This had a heavy plastic cover she’d zip up tight around my neck once she’d got me settled to her satisfaction.

  Here was a situation ready-made for claustrophobia. Once zipped in, I was a prisoner. I couldn’t have stood it, I don’t suppose, except that on my very first visit I’d happened to see her open a door behind the chair that was normally kept bolted, and set out a bag of trash in the back alley. Perhaps a back entry was an odd sort of place to pass off as a steam room and perhaps I ought to have had qualms about sitting there naked virtually cheek to jowl with the trash cans, but I was familiar with city ways and knew one didn’t waste expensive space, however dark, cramped, and unattractive.

  Besides, I wasn’t supposed to look at the dingy walls. I was supposed to shut my eyes, relax, and enjoy the steam. The chair would heat up fast and I’d begin to perspire under that heavy plastic. Monique would be doing somebody else’s hair in the next room. Every so often she’d poke her head in to make sure I hadn’t come up to the boil and tell me how much better I was feeling.

  Extreme heat usually makes me sick, but I have to admit the chair never did. Monique used to put a spoonful of sulphur into the water that made the steam. This may have had some of the beneficial properties she ascribed to it, though I couldn’t understand why it should.

  I would suffer agonies of discomfort in other ways, though, for what seemed like ages but was probably just a few minutes, then gradually adjust to the heat and sink into a pleasant stupor. I suppose the chair reached a certain temperature, then leveled off like an electric iron. Just about the time I was really beginning to enjoy myself, Monique would come to unzip me. She’d help me out of the chair, lead me around a corner into another poky apology for a room, and tell me to get up on the massage table, which she had covered with my sheet. She always emphasized that the sheet was particularly mine. I found this rather appealing and at the same time disturbing, as though my being singled out for this favor was putting an extra strain on her laundry bill.

  It was usually about this time that a man with a young-sounding voice popped into the outer room. Monique would dart out and say something to him, then she’d come back and start washing me bit by bit with a loofah that looked like a piece of tripe and dripped chilly trickles down my sides. I felt these keenly and resented her not stopping to wipe them away, but never had the gumption to tell her so for fear the man outside would come to see what the fuss was about.

  As soon as she’d washed a small portion of me, Monique would massage the area in a halfhearted sort of way. I always wished she’d rub harder but again I didn’t complain because she’d be talking incessantly about how hard she was working and all the good she was doing me.

  There was always a draft around the massage table, no doubt from the ill-fitting back door behind the steam chair. What with being moistened in sections, inadequately dried, then lying there naked while Monique finished off the massage by rubbing me with scented hand lotion and flicking a huge, fuzzy powder puff all over me—she appeared to enjoy this and evidently thought I did, too—I was always shivering by the time she got through and longing to get back into my clothes. However, she would produce a second clean sheet, cover me with it, and instruct me to lie on the table as long as I liked.

  Having been made to feel so guilty over the laundry bills, I felt I had to get as much good as possible out of this fresh sheet, so I stayed. She would suggest a nice nap and tiptoe away to chat with her hairdressing customer or that young man—his name was David, I learned—who was always popping in and out but never stayed.

  In those days I was barely sleeping at all, let alone on a hard table with only a sheet between me and that constant draft, and nothing at all to shield my ears from Monique’s unstoppable voice. I’d be there until I couldn’t stand the discomfort any longer, which didn’t take long, then get up and put on one of the huge terry toweling robes she kept hanging ready to hand.

  I sometimes wondered if the robes got washed along with the sheets and if not, who’d worn them before me, but not to the extent of making a fuss over the matter. The magical sulphur fumes would no doubt have killed anybody’s germs. Besides, I loved those robes. As I mentioned, I am a small woman. The robes came in a size that had to fit all comers, which meant one would envelop me from ears to toes and feel wonderfully snug after all that clamminess and chilling.

  Monique would have let me wear them
forever, I think. She never wanted her customers to leave. She always got annoyed with me because I left the table so soon, and scolded me for rushing the massage. Once properly chastised, I’d be thrust into a wooden chair with my head tilted over a sort of dripping pan that sawed at the back of my neck, and have my hair shampooed. One week, Monique might go through an elaborate routine with scented lathers and creme rinses she claimed she’d got from Paris. Next time, she might grab a cake of brown laundry soap in her doughy fist and rub it all over my head as if she were delousing me. After an inadequate rinsing, she’d pin up my hair without asking how I wanted it done.

  I always accepted these impromptu coiffings meekly since she claimed to be doing them out of the goodness of her heart, even though they’d been rendered necessary by the sulphurous steam from the dryer, not to mention the sloshings from the loofah, and were more than covered by her fees. She might or might not set me under the dryer, depending on her mood and whether she had any other entertainment at hand. As I was apt to be the last customer of the day, she’d often keep me sitting to air-dry while she talked at me in that loud, belligerent voice of hers.

  Monique was earthy as a parsnip. I got the impression, despite her hit-or-miss profundities, that she never thought at all, but lived wholly through her senses. She liked being massaged by a man, she told me. She liked food and riding in taxis, and she liked plants. Her little, sunless rooms were crammed with them: huge, coarse-leaved things in old plastic buckets or anything else that would hold water. No dirt, they all seemed to be amphibians.

  She said when she heard a mounted policeman riding down the street, she’d run and watch out the front window. If the horse relieved itself, she’d go out with one of the plastic buckets and scrape up the manure for her plants. In spite of this amazing solicitude, the plants never looked thrifty. I always found something yellowish and unwholesome about them, like the man-eating jungle plants I used to scare myself by imagining when I was a child.

  During these drying sessions, I got to know the young fellow who popped in and out. David was Monique’s errand boy, I found, though he hardly qualified as a boy, being in his early twenties from the look of him. Monique didn’t like to shop, she told me, even though the grocer was just across the street and the bakery next door, so David did it for her. One night while I was sitting in my robe and hairpins, she sent him out for a barbecued chicken. She spent the entire period of his absence telling me what a lovely boy he was and how much he enjoyed doing her favors. When he got back with the chicken, she tipped him about twice what the chicken had cost. I remember thinking he must get a good deal out of her, one way and another.

  Not chicken, however. She did invite him to share it, but he said he had other plans. She invited me, too, but I pretended I had to rush home and cook dinner for the husband I did not in fact have. So she went upstairs alone—she lived in a flat over her shop—to put the chicken away, leaving me feeling silly in nothing but that toweling robe and a headful of pins, and David trying to look suave and poised.

  “I only do it out of pity,” he blurted when she’d gone. “I’d turn down the money, but I’m too much of a gentleman to hurt her feelings.”

  I made some hypocritical noise and he left quickly because we could hear her coming back. That night I insisted on leaving the shop before my hair was properly dry, but I kept my appointment again the following week.

  After that, I saw David a few more times. He was always neatly, even foppishly dressed, and he always went out of his way to impress me with his gentlemanly manners, managing each time to convey the assurance that he only tolerated the gross, middle-aged masseuse but of pity. I began to wonder why I myself tolerated her, but still I went.

  It was along toward the middle of March I decided I’d had enough. I was in the chair with the sulphur fumes just beginning to rise around me. Monique was out in the other room, puttering around with her plants. David had come in. I could hear her complaining to him that they weren’t looking so good, as if she’d only just noticed what should have been obvious all along.

  Suddenly I felt a blast of cold air on my face. The traffic noises that had been muffled became louder, and over them came the unmistakable clop-clop-clop of shod hooves on asphalt. So it had happened. A mounted policeman was riding down the street. Monique had thrown open a window and stuck out her head to see whether the horse was going to perform.

  It must have. I heard Monique shout, “Here’s de bucket an’ shovel. Go kvick.”

  “Go where?” said David.

  “Out dere. Scrape it up before it gets all skvashed in by de cars.”

  “Are you crazy? You expect a gentleman to—”

  “What shentleman? You nuttin’ but a young punk wit’ pig ideas. My plants is wort’ more dan you.”

  I don’t know what he hit her with. I only heard the thud, and the crash when she must have fallen against the hairdressing table. I only heard him dragging the body through the doorway to the massage table around the corner from where I sat. I only heard him grunting, sobbing, cursing as he boosted his late patroness up on the table. And then I heard a lot more that I wish I could forget.

  I knew what he’d got hold of, a big kitchen cleaver Monique had brought downstairs to show me when I’d rung the bell for my appointment. She’d been using it to cut up meat for a stir-fry, which was her latest culinary enthusiasm. She’d laughed and shouted about how she sliced the meat thin like the chef at Benihana. Quick as lightning. Whack! Whack! Whack! She loved doing that, she’d said. She’d whacked the air viciously a little too close to my nose, to show me how.

  He was doing it now—whack, whack, whack, cursing and sobbing, yelling at her. “My plants wort’ more dan you. Fuckin’ old bitch! I’m a gentleman!” And then a small splash, like something being dropped into a bucket of water. More whacks, more splashes. God in heaven, he was feeding her to the plants!

  And there was I, zipped up to my neck in heavy-duty brown plastic, a helpless prisoner in that accursed chair. There was not one God-blessed thing I could do but sit with the sweat pouring off me, listening to him whack and sob and curse and splash. The smell of blood was overcoming the smell of sulphur. What must that table look like by now?

  Monique had taken away my sheet, the way she always did, to put under me when I’d finished steaming and was supposed to lie on the table and be dripped on with the loofah. He was cutting her up on my sheet.

  I must have been getting feverish by then. I found myself worrying about how the laundry was going to get the bloodstains out. Don’t ask me how long I sat in that scalding trap. One doesn’t think of a nightmare in terms of how long it lasts. I could feel the blood pounding in my head, harder and harder, as if it was going to burst out and mingle with all that other blood. It was either the chair or the cleaver. I started to scream.

  “Monique! Monique, where are you?”

  I heard the cleaver clatter to the floor. Poor David, I thought quite unreasonably. He must have got the shock of his life. Then I thought, “Now he’ll have to come and kill me.”

  But all he did was stammer, “M—Monique isn’t here.”

  “Oh, David!” I put everything I had into hailing my rescuer. “Thank goodness it’s you. Monique left me here and I fainted from the heat. I’ve been unconscious a long time, I think. I can’t remember anything. Where is she?”

  “A horse went down the street.”

  “You mean she ran out with that silly bucket and left me here? Doesn’t she know how to treat a lady?”

  “Sh-she wanted me, to go.” His voice was all to pieces.

  “A gentleman like you?” I cried. “She must be out of her mind. Look, David, could you possibly come in here and unzip me? I know it’s an embarrassing thing to ask a gentleman, but I’ll keep my eyes shut so you won’t be embarrassed. On my word of honor.”

  I’d keep the promise. I had no desire to see the bloodstained cleaver swinging down at me, though in fact I was almost past caring. Anything, anything to g
et out of this ghastly chair. I was in hell already. At least the grave would be cool.

  “I’m a gentleman,” he said.

  “I know you are, or I wouldn’t ask. My eyes are closed. Truly.”

  I heard him dithering around the doorway. Then, incredibly, the zipper was moving.

  “Thank you, David,” I said. “You’ve saved my life.”

  He started laughing, crazily, hysterically. So did I. I suspect he was high on something. I know I was. Finally I got myself under control.

  “I know I don’t have to ask a gentleman like you to please step out into the other room while I get my clothes on. Would you mind just shutting the door as you leave?”

  It worked, feeble as it was. He did exactly what I’d prayed he would, slammed the door and locked it from the other side, forgetting about that back exit to the alleyway. I put on what few clothes I had. The rest were still in the other room, but thank God I’d brought my pocketbook with me into the steam room. One doesn’t leave one’s pocketbook anywhere, not in the city.

  The shock didn’t really hit me until I got outside. Then I had to hold on to the trash cans to keep from collapsing. A bitter wind had come up and perhaps that saved my life. I don’t know. Anyway, it prodded me to grope my way to the curb and flag a taxi.

  Somehow or other, I managed to give the right address and remain conscious until we got there. I believe I grossly overpaid the driver, because he was willing to leave his cab and help me up the stairs. I told him I was just out of the hospital after an operation and must have overdone. He would have come in, but I said my husband would be there to help me, and shut the door in his face. Then I flopped down on the rug in the foyer and passed out.

  After a while, I suppose I must have roused myself enough to crawl into bed. Anyway, there I was and there I stayed. It did occur to me in flashes that I ought to telephone the police, but I couldn’t hold on to the thought long enough to do anything about it. It wasn’t until the following evening that one of my co-workers, disturbed because I hadn’t called the office, stopped by the apartment. He took one look at me and sent for an ambulance.