The State We're In

MAJOR MAYBE

The red-haired lady was hospitalized after she fell in the street and a taxi almost ran over her. Just before her mad dash (who could account for her actions?) she’d accused a black dog on a leash of being the devil, an opinion that had been strenuously objected to by the dog’s owner. The dog’s name was Major Maybe, and his story was better known than the red-haired lady’s. The breeder had called the dog Major, and the family who got him tried to name him something similar in order to avoid confusing the dog (they’d tried such names as Mark and Mason). However, the dog would not respond to any name beginning with M until the family’s four-year-old daughter, who talked to her dolls a lot and told them that maybe they could go to Barneys and maybe they would go to the park and maybe they would get a cookie if they were good… as you will already understand, little Corey Leavell came up with the only new name the dog would accept. Later, it was thought funny to call him Major Maybe.

My roommate during this time was an acting student named Eagle Soars. His English father had married an American who claimed her great-grandmother had Indian blood. Eagle Soars had been Eddie in school, but his birth certificate really did give his first and middle names as Eagle Soars (his last name, which he later dropped, was Stevens), and by the time he was twenty, he thought the name might be useful if he intended to act. He made extra money by giving Major Maybe his four p.m. walk down to Tenth Avenue, then up either Twenty-first or Twenty-second Street, down Eighth Avenue, then down Twentieth to home.

In those days, Chelsea was more of a mom-and-pop neighborhood. No art galleries, just a few sex clubs way west. There was a nice florist called Howe. I sometimes bought a single flower to take back to the apartment and make part of my little altar to the far left side of the deep windows that overlooked the backyard: a picture of my mother and father on their wedding day, in a little heart-shaped frame; my sister lying on a fur rug, looking dazed, the day they brought her back from the hospital; a badly faded snapshot of my first pet, Doris the cat; the deteriorating wrist corsage I’d worn to the senior prom, inside a Plexiglas box; one of my wisdom teeth dangling from a chain around the casement window handle. These things were grouped together in solidarity with Eagle Soars, whose own display featured a double photo frame showing both his high school graduation picture and a snapshot of the boy he had a crush on in high school, with a big bandage across his face after reconstructive surgery on his nose (bicycle accident); a pencil sharpener with a tutu-skirted hippopotamus in second position; a teaspoon stolen from the Plaza; the framed eviction notice from his previous landlord in Columbus, Ohio. It was a joke that when I had a new flower he’d move it to the right in the middle of the night, and when he was out walking the neighbor’s dog, I’d put it back on my side. We split the weekly wine bill because neither of us drank more than the other. He was more interested in weed, and I was interested in not getting fat. Still, we went through a gallon a week of Italian white wine that the wine seller always said he wasn’t going to have access to for long (but nothing would have made us spend our money on a whole case of wine).

The day of the incident with the dog and the red-haired lady, Soars and I were out on the little chairs that sat inside the iron fence in front of the brownstone, where a large pink hibiscus set out by the guy in the garden apartment added a huge amount of atmosphere. Also, he’d put circular cushions on the chairs, which made them so much easier to sit on. He was a psychologist whose specialty was adolescents. They’d arrive and depart with deep scowls, throwing down cigarettes and crushing them, rarely making eye contact with us. The psychologist had told us that it was better not to greet the clients because there was hardly anything you could say to them that would be correct. We accepted this and ignored their acne eruptions and fanned away their cigarette smoke and basically looked right through them unless they seemed so desperate to be friendly that we said the word “Hello.” Once an ambulance came and got one of the clients from the basement who, we later found out (in spite of doctor-patient confidentiality) had been bleeding and had stuffed washcloths in his pants to come to his weekly appointment. The basement was called the “Garden Apartment.” When the wisteria was in bloom, the psychologist took back his little chairs and added them to others in the yard behind the house and had a real champagne party, to which we were always invited. If he ever sat in the chairs when they were out front, we never once saw it. Then again, we were in them a lot, and he was a pleasant, polite man, so maybe he didn’t have much of a chance.

We were doing acting exercises. Soars read his lines and at some point it was my job to interject something distracting, or to go into a fake coughing spasm, or even to say something hostile, such as “You miserable faggot, you’re no Edward, let alone Lear!” The thought was, anything could happen during a performance and the actor had to squelch his real-life reaction and keep going, without faltering. There was only one script, since it cost money to Xerox, so we sat close together. I tried to act, myself, to the extent that I didn’t want him to be able to anticipate one of my sneezes or outbursts, which I’d learned he could sense because of my breathing slightly altering in advance of speaking, or by my moving in even the smallest way, or by the minuscule noise my lips made when parting. My job was to zing him without warning. One time I actually threw myself off the chair and writhed like someone having a seizure. I’d deliberately worn long sleeves and jeans, so the damage was minor, but a delivery person wheeling seltzer cases into the brownstone next door stopped and ran to my assistance, and it was more than a little embarrassing when we had to explain.

I’m so sentimental. I can hardly believe there was such a time now. (I’m a doctor with a medical group in Portland, Maine; Soars is the divorced father of twins and an avid white-water rafter who leads trips for a tour company out west and writes articles about the outdoors and teaches at a community college.)

Here’s an obvious thing that I never thought about until recently: Soars and I weren’t just well suited to living together, we were so simpatico we morphed into an old married couple, in speeded-up time. For years, we were playacting the daily life of so many marriages, with my sudden, sometimes insane eruptions of temper, our long-standing joke about moving each other’s tchotchkes, with his constantly repeated lines (though his, ideally, came from Shakespeare).

While he was still in New York, he decided that except for his big crush on one guy, he wasn’t gay. He stopped dating men and began to hang out with me and my girlfriends, and then he began dating one of them, whose heart he broke, but that’s another story; even if he’s bi, time proved that he chose to marry women (he also had a second wife).

Anyway, as Soars and I were rehearsing that day, the red-haired lady stood up and cursed our dog friend, screaming, “Lucifer the devil! Luuuuuuucifer!” rushing poor, scared Major Maybe, who’d just lifted a leg to pee against his favorite tree in the tree box and was humiliated when he had to drop it midstream. She stretched out her arms and meant to topple Mr. Leavell, who simply turned sideways and let the wild tornado pass (Major Maybe, a peaceful fellow, had flattened himself on the ground), and so it did, twirling crazily from her little bare feet up her thick legs, her own long, pee-stained skirt tangling in a way that tripped her, so that when she continued her trajectory between parked cars, into Twentieth Street, howling that once the devil appeared there could be no redemption, the fabric was coiled around her like cotton candy. Then she was flung forward as if someone really had not enjoyed their treat. The cab screeched to a halt and the driver jumped out and bent over her like a referee giving the count, his finger scolding: woman down… until up she sprang, toppling a seminarian who, along with Mr. Leavell (who was in his sixties), rushed to pull her off the taxi driver, whom she was attempting to squeeze to death. Major Maybe was so humiliated that his jaw went flaccid, his leash having been tossed over one of the pointy spikes of the iron gate that enclosed the little cement area outside his home. The leash was too short for him to lie down without strangling, so he had to sit and watch the spectacle. He’d had an invigorating walk, lifted his leg for a few pees, and experienced some excellent sniffs — now this: an explosion from a street person sent our way by Fidel Castro, who’d released people from the mental hospitals and put them on ships and sent them here to mingle with our own. On good days she sang hymns in Spanish in a beautiful, clear soprano. She felt the breeze blow through her hair. She ate her saltines and did nothing to anyone. On bad days… well.

Where were the police? Where were the police? This was a time before cell phones. When the police arrived they handled the red-haired lady roughly, so much so that the seminarian took issue (it did no good). Her wrists were cuffed and her head was dunked into the police car like a basketball player sinking a one-handed shot. Easy. Nothing to it. Fast resumption of the game.

Our rehearsals were suspended. Mr. Leavell picked up his dog’s leash and marched up the steps into his house. Soars and I went upstairs and broke out the bottle of Italian white and sat in our director’s chairs for a while — they were cheap, and the only furniture. Neither of us thought about stealing the flower to our side. Which was a rubrum lily that day, dropping its pollen onto the floor beneath the window, a giant’s yellow dandruff. Outside, the wisteria vine was thick and green, curlicues and pointing witches’ fingers of pale green shoots that would continue to quickly unfurl, but it was no longer in bloom. We took a walk. We discussed our futures. We wondered if we were going to fail, just simply fail: if I’d never know what I wanted to do in life (I worked part-time as a waitress and my mother sent a check every month that paid more than my half of the rent). We wondered if AIDS would sweep through the city, if the red-haired lady had enough sanity to be scared at the police station, how long Major Maybe would live. Soars reached for my hand. We never held hands because, of course, we weren’t a couple. We laced our fingers, and I was astonished at how bony his hand felt, and that his palms were sweaty. Then we went back and fucked. We did what so many people do on someone else’s wedding day, or after someone else’s funeral, though in this case it was only on the day some street person got carted off to the police station. We had a good time doing it, but the only thing that changed was that for some reason, afterward, neither of us continued to play the game of Steal the Flower. I soon stopped buying them. I used the money to buy other little luxuries, like mascara. He continued dating my friend.

I met the man I married at a wedding I attended in Cape Neddick, Maine, in December (the bridesmaids carried white rabbit-fur muffs), though it took us eight years to get around to marrying. First I wasn’t sure about leaving New York City. Then I decided on medical school, but I wasn’t accepted anywhere in New York, so the decision about leaving was made for me. If you were in New York in the eighties, you wonder, now, where everybody went, and then you remind yourself that quite a few of them owned their property and dug in their heels, and eventually they — the people who made up a neighborhood — died. Some died of AIDS. Young people moved to Brooklyn. Or to the West, or to Atlanta. After 9/11, quite a lot of young people made an exodus from New York City to Portland, Maine, with its big waterfront buildings already being turned into artists’ studios and condos and ground-floor boutiques. Cool Portland, with its summertime tourists boarding boats and hoping to see a seal as they cruise out to one of the islands. Back on land, its time-warp hippies cross paths with people who live in brownstones and don’t have to think about money. There’s street art, and folding chairs are set up in music clubs. Used bookstores are still in business. If you’re a certain age, Portland more or less exists in ironic quotation marks (though of course no hipster would dare scratch them in the air).

Recently, on Airbnb, I saw my old apartment. There was even a picture taken out the window, where someone had pulled down enough of the vine to allow a view. They’d created a kitchen out of part of the hallway and what used to be the coat closet. It looked like the floor had been painted black, with an Oriental rug placed on it. The photographs were taken with a fish-eye lens because it was only a small apartment under the pitch of the roof, so you couldn’t even stand up beyond where the bed sat in the bedroom. But it’s all deception, right? You understand that the picture shows more space than exists. You fall for the vase of fresh flowers on the nightstand that in real life probably has the circumference of a pie pan. You know the neighborhood’s hip without reading the specifics: Galleries! Bookstores! Chelsea Piers!

A whole vase of flowers in the photograph. So lavish, its extravagance conveying more than a sense of romance or the idea of a luxurious life inside a welcoming apartment. Flowers that will be picked up and whisked away after the shot, as the curtains are pulled together against the daylight that will fade the rug. Close down the set, bring on the travelers, light it up again.

Indelible, the yellow pollen on the floor.