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  She enjoyed the wheelchair more than she thought she would. Obviously the doctors were in cahoots with the wheelchair crowd, but Reginalda hadn’t signed anything and she figured she might as well make the saleslady earn her commission. So they went for a little test drive. It was almost as comfortable as her rocking chair at home, but had the great advantage over that seat of being completely and effortlessly mobile. All she had to do was screech “Left!” or “Right!” or “Straight!” or “Step on it!” or “Slow down!” or “Hold on!” and the wheelchair instantly complied. (And because it complied instantly Reginalda took care to screech her commands at the last possible moment.) She took a ride around the park, up and down the lanes of the shopping district, and even in and out of an elevator in the courthouse downtown, just to prove that it could be done. People got out of your way when you were in a moving vehicle, by God! Then she remembered that she had been going to see her sons. To test the chair’s batteries, as it were, she pointed the saleslady east on Harper Street, told her to keep an eye peeled for Garland Road (several miles distant), and took a little nap.

  June could endure such treatment for just as long as she still believed that Mrs. Drax was suffering. But when Bobby Drax assured her that his mother was always cranky like this (he used a different word, but June preferred “cranky”), her sympathy for the old woman evaporated. She gave Bobby Drax her phone number, address, and email, and then—

  “Hey, where you going, chubalub?”

  —June went home.

  That night, however, she couldn’t sleep. Her dogs sensed it, and couldn’t sleep either. So she put a pot of milk on the stove and they all sat up, thinking. She could not guess what weighed on their little minds; but occasionally, when her own thoughts bubbled over into speech—“That terrible woman!”—the dogs lifted their ears and gazed at her quizzically and compassionately. Then she felt obliged to explain herself and minimize her outburst in a reassuring tone. But as the night wore on, her outbursts became more frequent and her tone less and less reassuring.

  Her first instinct was to turn Mrs. Drax into fiction, to make her a character in a novel. For June’s defense against anything unpleasant was that of the holiday traveller’s: “Oh well—it’ll make a good story when we get home!” (It is this belief, that all nastiness can be transmuted usefully into anecdote or art, that misleads some writers to the converse belief: that all art has its origins in nastiness—that we learn in suffering what we teach in song. This is flattering to the artist, for everyone likes to think he has suffered more than most. But June, who suffered little, did not fall prey to this fallacy. She knew that she wrote best when she was most cheerful.)

  The problem was that Mrs. Drax would not make a good character. She was too unlikeable, too unsympathetic, to be believed. June’s readers would object that no one so selfish, so cranky, so rude had ever existed or could ever exist. And June felt that they would be right. And yet, nevertheless, the woman did exist. It was a problem.

  Perhaps there were some things—some people—who simply did not belong in fiction. But this contradicted June’s faith in the comprehensive inclusiveness of fiction, and of her own fiction in particular. Though she was too modest to put it into words, she felt that one of her great qualities as a novelist was that she featured every kind of person in her novels—or would eventually, or could. As it happened, she did not have to put this thought into words: someone had done it for her. On every edition of every book that she had published since 1990 there appeared the testimony of The Philadelphia Enquirer that June Cottan had a “keenly wide-ranging sympathy.” She did not understand exactly how width of range could be keen, but never mind—the point was that her sympathy was wide-ranging. But now, for the first time, she had begun to doubt her own blurbs. It was a dark night of the soul indeed.

  She was brutal with herself: Had she ever written an unsympathetic character? It seemed to her that she had not. When her characters acted meanly or cruelly they always had a good reason or a good excuse. When they suffered they suffered only from misunderstandings or momentary weaknesses, never from malice or hatred. Where, in all her works, was Evil? For surely Evil existed in the world. How else did one explain war? How did one account for the Holocaust? But then where was June Cottan’s war novel, her Holocaust novel? For a time (because it is easier to write ten books than to change the way we act towards even one little old lady) June lost herself in daydreams of the Holocaust novel she would write. In her vision, all the Nazis had different faces, but they all sneered and screeched like Mrs. Drax.

  At last she recollected herself. She was already working on a novel; where were the villains in it? Leora’s parents were not villains, though they forced her to marry rich, old, ugly Mr. Man der Lynn. Poor themselves, they wanted to save their only daughter from poverty; having married for love themselves, they wanted to save her from the disappointments that drudgery and routine bring, as they believed, to all lovers. But they meant well. And Mr. Man der Lynn was not a villain, though he forbade her to see her beloved Alex. He was merely old-fashioned and terrified of scandal; he tried but failed to share her youthful enthusiasms—but he tried; and in the end, when he was made to see her true heart’s desires, he dissolved their marriage readily enough. For he too meant well, and wanted only to do what was right.

  Why? Why did all her characters mean well and do right? Why did none of them mean ill or do wrong? Why, oh why, were all her characters so damn spineless?

  Because they were sympathetic. But what did that mean? It meant that they were someone you could sympathize with. But shouldn’t a nice person be able to sympathize with anyone, no matter how nasty? Wasn’t that the whole point of literature—that it gave you, the reader, practice in feeling sympathy for people who were different from you? Practice in adopting other people’s points of view?

  But if that were so—and June had never questioned it—then it was almost a moral imperative to make one’s characters as different, as alien, as unsympathetic as possible. Otherwise the reader had no gap to cross. June’s characters, it now seemed to her, were wickedly easy to sympathize with; nothing whatsoever prevented the reader from identifying with them. They were generic and inoffensive. They were normal; they were bland. They liked nice things and disliked nasty things. They had only mild quirks and were driven by only the most common motives and desires. They were in fact hollow shells—mere costumes that the reader could comfortably wear, masks through which the reader could comfortably peer. That was what sympathizing with, identifying with, or rooting for a character really was: becoming them! Or rather, making them become you. It was not a way of getting inside another person’s head; it was a way of getting your own head inside another body, and, through that body, of experiencing another world, living another life. Perhaps, after all, literature was not bettering or broadening, but just another means of escape. Perhaps fiction in fact only gave you practice at being yourself in exotic situations. Perhaps, by inviting you to cheer for the good guys and despise the bad guys, fiction only taught you how to better cheer for yourself and despise everyone else. By reinforcing the niceness of nice things and the nastiness of nasty things, perhaps fiction only entrenched you more firmly and inescapably in your own limited self. Perhaps novels were, after all, immoral.

  For a long time June stood rigidly over the stove, stirring and staring into the pot of milk as though trying to make it boil by willpower alone.

  She saw in her mind the startled, shriveled face, and heard again the terrible thud.

  “No!” she cried, and threw down the spoon; the dogs started. “Fiction is not immoral,” she muttered. “I am.”

  And she resolved to revisit Mrs. Drax—poor, lonely, hurting Mrs. Drax—just as soon as she’d finished the chapter she was working on.

  They soon developed a routine. June was permitted to write for two hours in the morning, then she would report to the nursing home to take Mrs. Drax on her daily r
ounds. Their first stop was the Salvation Army, where Mrs. Drax bought up all the second-hand sweaters, which she unraveled and made into sweaters; she believed this was cheaper than buying yarn. (It was not.) Then they visited the library, where Mrs. Drax traded one Shakespeare for another hopefully less boring one. (She would not let June read to her from anything but Shakespeare, because Shakespeare was the best there was, and he was bad enough.) Next was the bulk department of the grocery store, where Mrs. Drax bought her day’s supply of caraway seeds, which she liked to chew when she was not doing anything else with her mouth. (Fifteen seeds cost her $0.03.) Then came lunch, or rather the argument over where to go for lunch. Mrs. Drax’s method was to insist that she did not care where they went, then to find fault with every one of June’s suggestions until she hit upon the place that Mrs. Drax had had in mind all along. The afternoon was dedicated to Mrs. Drax’s solicitor, whose job it was to amend her will and to subtract from her estate the cost of his services. Surprisingly, Mrs. Drax’s will was only symbolically vindictive. If one of her sons had treated her badly the day before, she lowered his share of the inheritance to forty-eight percent and boosted the other’s to fifty-two; if they had both treated her badly, they split it down the middle. She occasionally lamented that she could not give the whole amount away to a charity or church; but charities nowadays were nothing but a tax dodge for sleazy corporations, and religion was for dopes. Sometimes she looked pointedly at June and asked the lawyer leading questions which revealed that no one but her sons would ever get any of her money. The bulk of her amendments were not legally significant, but more in the nature of appeals or advice to the living. She asked the management of Green Oaks to commemorate her by removing the meat loaf from their menu; she urged Mrs. McGillicuddy to finish the blue sweater she was knitting, but, NB, to use a garter stitch where the pattern recommended a stockinette; she didn’t care who did it, but would someone please check her Sunday crossword answers—she wasn’t too sure about 32 Down being “shotput.” After the solicitor came visits to Mrs. Drax’s sons, one of whom usually gave them supper, if Mrs. Drax denied stridently enough that they were hungry. Then Mrs. Drax was taken to the first thirty minutes of some movie, which, as she explained loudly and patiently to the audience at large, was about all she could handle, movies these days being too fast, too silly, too violent, or too raunchy for her taste. Then June rolled her back to the nursing home for bridge, knitting, Shakespeare, and, ostensibly, death. It was usually ten o’clock by the time June got home to her poor neglected dogs, who had not been out for a walk since dawn.

  This regimen was hard on the dogs; but it was hard on June too. For one thing, she was not used to walking twenty-odd miles a day. (Mrs. Drax could not explain why the sight of June’s crumpled car filled her with revulsion and panic, and June did not press her.) She could not take the dogs along, either, because Mrs. Drax did not like dogs, and dogs did not like her. When she and June’s dogs were in the same room together the dogs stood on one side and barked at Mrs. Drax while she sat on the other side and yelled right back at them, as though they were all debating some controversial new traffic law in town hall. And though June normally liked walking, since it gave her the opportunity to wave at her neighbors and smile kindly at strangers, she found that no one smiled back when she was with Mrs. Drax, who scowled at everyone: postmen, children, and panhandlers—especially panhandlers, whom she called “dirty bums” or “lazy beggars,” advised to seek employment, and sometimes spat at. June, who was flustered by panhandlers (she found that they made her feel awkward, privileged, and ungenerous whether she gave them spare change or not), was positively mortified by Mrs. Drax’s behavior. She apologized profusely and gave them all ten-dollar bills—so that, in time, the bums on their downtown route came to relish Mrs. Drax’s maltreatment, and even to like her a little; while June, they felt, was a “dumb cluck” and a “three-minute egg.”

  Life with Mrs. Drax was not always so terrible. One day, while they rolled down Harper Street, Mrs. Drax napped in her chair, her head lolling back, and the sight of her puckered face, petulant even in sleep, gave June sentimental daydreams about a daughter who moves back home to nurse her dying mother …

  June no longer wondered why Mrs. Drax was such a nasty person. When Mrs. Drax was awake, the question did not grip the imagination. When Mrs. Drax went rigid with frustration at some perceived wrong, thrusting out her pelvis and kicking her legs, or crumpled into a seething, trembling bomb of resentment, or exploded in a fulminating tantrum, it didn’t seem to matter much whether she acted this way because she had been spoiled as a child or deprived as an adolescent, or because her parents had been disgracefully poor or disgracefully rich, or because she had been forced to marry a man she did not love or had lost the one she did. Anything was possible; and probably at least one explanation was correct. But because Mrs. Drax was not a character in a novel, June could never know the real reasons. The thing to remember, she felt, was that there was some explanation. Nasty people were not born nasty, and did not choose to be nasty just for the fun of it. Something turned them that way; it was not their fault—so one could have sympathy for them. Or so at least June felt while Mrs. Drax slept.

  When Reginalda awoke, she caught June looking at her tenderly.

  She understood by this time that June was no saleslady for a wheelchair manufacturer, but rather some kind of novelist—in other words, a filthy liar. The woman was obviously a con artist; why else would she be nice? Besides, no one cheerful could be for real. She was so cheerful she was skittish. She spoke in a chipper telemarketer’s voice, as if afraid you’d hang up on her before she could get her hooks in. And Reginalda did not like the way she peered out at you over her fat cheeks, like some cagey woodland rodent peering out of a hollow tree. The kinder and more considerate June was, the more Reginalda distrusted and disliked her.

  “What are you looking at? Eyes on the road, short stack! You trying to break my legs on a telephone pole?”

  June’s sympathetic daydreams fled; she bit her lip and sighed; her exasperation overflowed into speech before she could catch herself. “We’re not even moving, Reginalda. It’s a stop light.”

  Reginalda believed that only weak, fickle people corrected themselves. “I know what a stop light is!” she screeched. Bystanders turned to look censoriously at June. What was she doing to that poor old lady?

  The light changed, but June did not move.

  “What’s the hold up? Get a move on, slowpoke!”

  June gazed sadly into Mrs. Drax’s face. She tried to explain how unnecessary all this nastiness was. “Don’t you— It isn’t— We don’t have to—” She gasped in frustration. If only she could write Mrs. Drax a nice long letter! “Darnit, Reginalda, I’m on your side. You don’t have to be so,”—she shook her arms and stamped her feet to illustrate Mrs. Drax’s character—“all the time, anymore. You know? Okay?”

  A breathless gust of fear passed through Reginalda. She confused it for anger; then it became anger. She could no more identify the cause of this anger than she could have identified the genus of tree burning in a fireplace. Nor was she inclined to introspection. All she knew was that this tubby, meddlesome sneak was lecturing her. She lost her temper.

  She swore and snorted and spat and flailed till the unmended bones in her arms and legs broke again. She bucked the wheelchair into the street and it began to roll downhill. June screamed and ran after it.

  Late that night, after many hours at the hospital, June brought Mrs. Drax home. She put her in her own bedroom and made her as comfortable as possible in her new wheelchair; Mrs. Drax told her to keep her dirty sausage fingers to herself and to mind her own business. Then June went upstairs and locked herself in the attic, so that the dogs would not hear her cry.

  PADDY GERCHESZKY

  THE ELEVATOR DOORS closed, and Gercheszky began to sweat. He was not claustrophobic; he was alone. There was no one in the elevator for h
im to talk to. He needed to talk like a shark needs to swim. His thoughts, given no outlet, grew toxic and turbulent, like thoughts in a fever dream.

  He was on his way to a party, and though he loved parties he worried that this party would be a bad one. He would know no one; worse, no one would know him. No women would be there; worse, no one famous. He would say something foolish and everyone would laugh at him; worse, no one would laugh, no one would pay any attention to him, no one would notice him at all.

  Fretfully he began rehearsing the funny and interesting things he would say—he had a fund of these. What he really needed was a good entrance, something that would draw all eyes to him from the first moment he stepped through the door. He had a fund of these too. Should he do the blind-man shtick? The porno plumber bit? The missing penguin gag? By the time he emerged from the elevator he was drenched.

  He found the apartment, dropped his trousers, and threw open the door like a man entering his own bathroom—an impersonation he had intended to garnish with the cry, “What are all you people doing in my bathroom?” But he did not get the words out, for there was no one there to hear them.

  It was his worst fear: He was too late. The party was over. Great things had been said and done by beautiful and powerful people and Paddy Gercheszky had not been among them.

  A woman in a bathrobe appeared, drying a plate. “You’re bleeding,” she said.

  The sweat had caused a razor cut on his cheek to reopen. He stared at her with wild incomprehension, his pants around his ankles.

  In fact, as usual, Gercheszky was early.

  Gercheszky was a talker, not a writer. His handwriting was atrocious and his spelling notorious. He loved words, but he knew them by sound, not by sight. One time, going over the galleys of a novel, he had crossed out every instance of a strange new word, one which appeared to him to be the sound that a spring makes when it is plucked. He had never encountered the word “doing” in print before.