The Big Pieces

"Lesbians are People." In, One of the four elevators serving the first ten floors, someone had carefully lettered a message on the inspection certificate. Susan Roth, going down in the elevator with Paul Merlo, of Cousins & Merlo, reached out and touched the little glass door that housed the card. The person, whoever it was, had opened the door and written directly on the certificate, on the line under the most recent inspection signature. Susan, with a glance at Merlo, tried to imagine a woman, in all seriousness, doing that. Merlo, for his part, must have been watching Susan, because when they were outside, walking east on 49th Street, he turned to her and said, "First graffiti—graffito?—I ever saw in a big-office-building elevator."

"Graffito," said Susan, annoyed to learn he had been observing her. They had passed Le Marmiton, a restaurant between Third and Second avenues: For that, at least, she was grateful. Le Marmiton, in Merlo's book, was for entertaining authors or launching affairs, if men like Merlo, recently divorced, still called them that. For his sake, she was relieved when he turned at the corner of 49th and Second and entered the coffee shop there. She went in, noting with added displeasure the two women sitting in the front booth. One was a reader at Random House, the other a secretary at Dial: Both gave her looks as she followed Merlo to a booth in back. In an industry where everybody knew everybody, everybody especially knew Paul Merlo. She might as well be in a high school cafeteria.

"Those girls were smirking at you," Merlo said, sliding into the booth.

"I didn't see any girls. I saw two women."

"They looked about your age," Merlo said.

"When you were twenty-five," said Susan, "did people call you boy?"

"Not always. Sonny, I got called. Kid. Champ. I'll have a chicken salad down and a celery tonic," Merlo said to the waitress. He leaned forward slightly. "There's a novel we're doing I want you to edit."

"Rare cheeseburger and iced coffee. A novel you want me to edit. Does that mean you're making me an editor?" Susan folded her hands on the table.

"That will depend on how you do with the book."

"Why don't you make me an editor and find out?"

"It's fair, I think, to give a trial assignment."

"Fair by whose standards?"

"We'd ask the same of a male reader," he said.

"Would you really?"

"I think you can do a good job with the book," he said.

"You mean it needs a woman's touch," Susan said brightly, reaching into her vest pocket for a cigarette.

"The title of the novel is Placenta Woman. Placenta woman as in, they threw away the baby and brought up the placenta. The title is honorific. A band of women inflict various tortures on their liberal male victims. The tortures are all fairly obscure, on the theory that what does a sadist do to a masochist?"

"Nothing."

"Yes. I think the author got the idea from 'Earl's Pearls.' May I not light your cigarette?"

"You watch Dick Cavett, too," she said and, when the food came, lapsed into silence. Merlo, too, seemed in no hurry to speak. Susan watched his eyes as he ate. No doubt, he had been told a hundred times by women that he had beautiful eyes and by now believed it. They were a peculiar off-green color, his eyes, the pupils strange, with large spokes, ragged in outline, as though some tiny creature had been nibbling at them. And his hair, which looked different every day of the week: Today it hooked back along his forehead in two smooth, water-buffalo waves. Often it was simply curly. Perhaps he had used a hair drier left behind by his wife. There were women, Susan supposed, who found this sort of narcissism irresistible. She looked out the window onto Second Avenue. A small, blonde model walked past, dragging a huge black portfolio: She appeared to glance briefly in at Merlo, then away.

"Separate checks," said Susan to the waitress. After they had paid and were walking back along 49th Street, she said, "Have you cleared this project with your partner?"

"Don't worry about Cousins," said Merlo.

"I don't worry about behind pinchers. I walk the other way."

"I think he feels," Merlo said, "that if it's wrong to apply white standards to black literature, the same goes for a novel like Placenta Woman."

"He's so enlightened."

"For instance, there's quite a lot in the book about the incompetence of men in lovemaking, their sexist sex techniques, and so forth, which only a woman might be able to judge properly. Besides, I have a feeling this book is going to take off, and that wouldn't hurt the editor, either, especially on her first project. Tell me something about that button you're wearing. Does it mean you've sworn off men?"

They were coming to Third Avenue. "The button doesn't mean that, no."

"But you have?"

"I'm detoxifying."

Merlo smiled. "That's very good. I think women are our best hope."

"You and every other liberal male I meet."

He laughed. "You're going to love Placenta Woman. Oh, and lawyers."

"Lawyers?"

"Our second-best hope. The unacknowledged poets of the human race. Lawyers and women. Women lawyers. The author of Placenta Woman, so I understand, was admitted to the bar, and it wasn't McSorley's." He halted suddenly. "Oh, hell, you won't believe this."

"What?" He had stopped in his tracks.

"The manuscript." He was looking at her helplessly. "All this talk and I forgot to take it to the office."

"I see," said Susan.

"Right. Don't say it. If you were a man, I wouldn't have forgotten."

"You said it, I didn't."

"You're probably right, though. It's sitting on my bed, I can see it." He tapped his forehead irritably. Then he shook his head. "All right, it can wait."

"I guess it can."

"Please don't be annoyed. I'm really anxious for you to see this book."

"The unconscious never lies," Susan said.

He stopped again. "All right. You're right. Look, my place is just around the corner. I can run up quick and get the manuscript. You want to wait? Or I'll meet you back at the office."

"Curiouser and curiouser," said Susan.

"What? Oh. Oh, I see what you mean." He blinked. "Or do I?"

She shook her head sadly. "You don't even know when you're being insulting."

"I'll just be a second," he said apologetically. He had stopped in front of a tall apartment building. "You can wait in the lobby."

"Goodbye," said Susan, turning.

"Oh, hell," he said. "What did I say now?"

"It's incredible." She shook her head. "Men's mentality. If I come up to your apartment, you think you have to score with me or you've failed, failed, failed. It's so pathetic. It really is."

"I just thought it would be more convenient if we worked back at the office——"

"Oh, wow. Sure you did. When was the last time you got any work done in that office? Oh, really, what is the big deal?" She went by him into the lobby. "Come on. I won't castrate you. If it's your pride you're worried about, nobody even has to know I was here."

His apartment was on the top floor. Susan felt, upon entering the living room, that she could have identified it as Paul Merlo's out of 100 rooms; that Merlo himself might have picked it out of 100 rooms on display in the furniture department of Macy's. The Lion's Den, it had to have been called, before transplantation from 34th to 49th Street: There was even an antelope skin on the floor, surrounded by chairs of brown leather. Along one dark-paneled wall stood a massive series of shelves enclosing a bar, a tape deck, two stereo speakers of a size suitable for a convention room at the Waldorf and a row of books, all by Paul Merlo's own authors, placed conspicuously at eye level. Books and shelves and floor, and the kitchen, too, Susan noted, were spotless. A maid must come in every day, probably a holdover from his marriage—though, in any case, Merlo would not be one to play the helpless divorcé. In the whole dark, dust-less room, Susan could detect only two discords, two departures from Macy's notion of masculine integrity: a plastic horse, standing on four wheels in one corner, awaiting the next visit from Merlo's children (was it two he had or three?), and a hand-painted water pipe, (continued on page 165)Hi Big Pieces(continued from page 82) decorated with tiny hearts, dividing the row of Merlo authors (so many o£ one's authors smoked). At that, the toy horse was a Black Beauty and the dark liquid in the base of the hashish pipe (brandy, Susan guessed, with that robust Irish name) coordinated the hookah with the clubroom.

"I'm going to have a drink," he said, coming in from the bedroom with the manuscript. It bulked out of two boxes; he set them down on the coffee table. "Will you join me? Just to oil the wheels."

"You don't have to qualify it," Susan responded, with a glance at the hash pipe. "I'll have whatever you're having."

"Pernod," he said, showing the bottle.

"Very macho," she said.

"Really? I wouldn't have thought so."

"Oh, come off it. Men are always quoting that Hemingway thing. 'Good uplift, drops you just as far.' The whole idiot alcohol mystique."

"I think I remember," he said, removing half the manuscript from the boxes. "The Sun Also Rises, wasn't it?"

She swallowed a quantity of milky liquid. "I mean, even granting the mystique, which I don't, men always get things wrong. It has nothing to do with uplift."

"Nothing does," he said.

"Oh, that's so witty." He had almost winked at her breasts. "Actually, the difference is, with Pernod the room goes around vertically instead of horizontally. That's true, you know. Try smoking grass when you're drinking it sometime and set. Does your wife get reparations?"

"Excuse me?"

"Alimony."

"Yes."

"I'm glad. Was she a good cook?"

"Excellent," he said.

"I'm sure she was. You wouldn't have had it any other way. Wait, please don't say it. A woman gives milk, so there must be a biological urge in women to feed people. That's like saying black people get tuberculosis more than white people, so there must be more black geniuses than white geniuses. To improve on your example before. Except nobody says that. So there you are."

"The book starts here," he said, handing across a stack of pages. "This is all of it."

She glanced through the manuscript. "Was your wife a good housekeeper? Did she pick up after you and everything? Or did you always have a maid?"

"Not always. As you can see, it's a very long novel. You have your work cut out for you. As Cousins remarked the other day, it will be like making a silk purse out of Ma Barker's snatch."

"Did Cousins say that or did you say that? I don't see how you expect me to read all this while you're sitting there——"

"Think especially about the sex in the book. As I say, I don't feel qualified to judge it, but there's quite a bit of sex between women, which, of course, means a large male readership. There's a scene —yes, right near where you're looking—involving a dildo. I think the author is trying to make a comic point, but it's not clear where the dildo straps on, and unless the reader knows that, the point is lost."

He was sitting back in his chair now, running his thumb across his upper lip. Susan flared. "And what makes you think I'd know?"

"I just thought they might have discussed it at the meetings."

He was insufferable. "What meetings did you have in mind?"

"You don't go to meetings?"

"That's none of your business."

"I just thought they might have demonstrated the use of a dildo. You know, ways to do without men."

There was just the faintest, degrading possibility he was sincere. She tested it. "You know, you're really the most smug person."

"I know," he said unhappily.

"And you try to be so knowing and disarming, that's your defense."

"I know."

"It's really an obvious pose," she said.

"My wife used to say that all the time."

"You mean you're like this all the time" She had the feeling he was looking past her now, addressing some invisible person in the kitchen.

"No. Only with women I'm attracted to."

"I'm sure you realize I don't consider that flattering." She was suddenly aware she had been holding her glass of Pernod aloft, several inches in front of her lips, for the past several moments. She set the glass down on the table. It was nearly empty. "Your wife may have, once."

"You're right," he said.

"Is that why you split up? Did she start to dig what you were all about?"

"Like you, she was on to me from the first. Some more Pernod?"

"I'll take more when I feel like more. Did you go out with women while you were married?"

One corner of Merlo's mouth lifted; he blinked, he feinted, he gave a sort of shrug; he picked up the manuscript. "While you're reading it, I think you should also be thinking of a new title. As I say, Placenta Woman as a title is supposed to be ironic, what an uptight liberal male would think of the heroine, but it has a sci-fi ring that we may not want——"

"You didn't answer my question."

He was silent a moment. "Yes, I went out. We both did." He pointed to her glass. "Listen, maybe you'd like some hashish instead? I noticed you looking at the water pipe." He was on his feet, at the shelf.

"You're being evasive," Susan said, refilling her glass. "It's not like you."

He was placing the water pipe on the coffee table, still avoiding her gaze. The screen of the pipe, improvised from tin foil, was black and frayed. A few hard brown fragments nestled in the bowl. "We used to swap," he said.

"Here," said Susan, taking matches from her vest pocket. She opened the matchbook, struck a match, holding it to the bowl while he sucked on the bit at the end of the coiled, twisting stem. The space above the dark liquid slowly filled with smoke. "So. I didn't know that. Your wife was a husband swapper."

He passed her the stem. It was green and segmented, like a novelty-store snake. "Yes," he said, half holding his breath. "With couples, you know, who were moving away, permanently. Is this pipe drawing for you?"

"I can taste the brandy," she said. "Hennessy? Never mind if it isn't, that's a private joke with myself. So what happened?"

"To what?"

"Did you keep on swapping?"

"Well," he paused, "one time one of the couples changed their minds and didn't move away."

"And that put it in focus for you?"

"More or less. Really, I think this hash pipe is busted. Are you good with machinery?"

"I'll tell you what I think. What I know. I think your wife left you because you think you're so glib and candid." Susan paused, flashing a woman going out Merlo's front door. Her hair was frizzy, streaked like Elsa Lanchester's in The Bride of Frankenstein, and she was dragging two children after her. Susan blinked. "It's just like I was saying in the meeting."

"The meeting?"

"Just last week. It's a typical male trick. You have this technique, you and a lot of men, this very seductive trick, you think, of pretending that everything you say is for the first time, no matter who you're talking to. The way you're talking to me, you probably talked to your wife the same way, and that's why she left you, not this other reason with the wife swapping."

"Husband swapping."

"Husband swapping. OK, and like that, trying to one-up me. All this macho directness is really just a kind of timidity, fighting what you consider your weak, passive, feminine side." Again she flashed Elsa Lanchester. Was there a picture of his wife in the apartment? "What you really won't admit is that people do things for reasons you don't understand and can never control, that there are women you just can't seduce."

He was nodding. "You're absolutely right."

"See, you're still doing it!"

"Well, I can't help it. You're right. The only woman I get along with lately is the woman who gives the time on the telephone."

"And she's on tape," said Susan.

"Is she? Well, there goes that."

"You mean you didn't know the time was on tape? Oh, wait. Oh, I see. A put-on."

"No, I really didn't know. I guess I should have pretended I knew."

"Yes, that's what men do. They say something stupid and when you correct them, they say they knew it all the time. That's the origin of the put-on, not that thing The New Yorker ran. It's an absolutely sexist phenomenon."

"You should do an article," he said.

"I plan to, when I get the time. What's wrong with this hash pipe, anyway?"

"It won't draw properly."

"Oh, right, you said that before. Well, obviously, it doesn't draw." She placed her palm over the bowl and sucked on the bit. "It's leaking air in about a dozen places." She examined the seams. "Do you have plastic wrap?"

"In here." He was on his feet, walking into the kitchen. "Not the Dow kind."

"Some non-Dow plastic wrap and some masking tape. Where'd you get this hash pipe, anyway? I bet your wife bought it for you."

He looked pleased. "How did you know?"

"I don't know. All these idiot hearts painted on the glass. Where'd she buy it, in some tourist place in Istanbul?"

"Exactly." He was smiling at her. "That's amazing."

"Well, the heart isn't exactly a timeless Middle Eastern symbol."

"What's that you're doing now?"

"Taking the filter out of your tap. It's not really a filter, it just softens the spray. Didn't you ever fix a faucet?"

"Never."

"Well, now you know. There are about three of these things up there, you'll never miss it. There, it fits perfectly."

"That is truly amazing." He carried the hash pipe back to the living room, setting it on the coffee table.

"Want to hear me crack my knuckles?"

"Yes."

"They won't crack now. I can discuss pro football, too, if you're interested."

"Do you think half of every pro-football team should be women?"

"Now you are. putting me on. Oh, now it draws very well. This is pretty good hash. Taste."

"Oh, yes. Very sweet. A sort of tiny, resinous taste."

"That's what it is, a resin. Like one taste bud being tingled."

"Exactly. Wait, it's gone out. OK. if I light it?"

She nodded, sucking on the bit. "Actually," she said, letting out smoke, "that's where I differ from some of my sisters. I think everybody should light everybody else's cigarettes—if only cigarettes weren't cancerous. I mean, lighting a flame is such a great symbolic gesture. It's like people who want to do away with New Year's. A festival of rebirth, and at the last New Year's Eve party I was at, people were so stoned they didn't even bother to kiss each other."

"Nobody kissed you?"

"No."

"I can't believe that."

"Well, I was still in my daddy's-little-girl stage. I don't know if you ever noticed the way I used to put on makeup?"

"I noticed."

"Like a little girl who gets into her momma's make-up kit. I used to hate myself so much I couldn't look at myself in the mirror. So the make-up went on all crooked."

"You were still noticed."

"It's better now, though, isn't it?"

"It's better now."

Susan smoothed her hand down her thigh. "I didn't mean to put down your wife before. I think you probably had a pretty good marriage, as marriages go. I'll bet you didn't swap unless you thought the other man was worthy of your wife. It wasn't just grab-ass. Was your wife very beautiful or what? In the sense that men define beauty. Did she have a nice body? Big breasts or small?"

"She looked a lot like you," said Merlo.

"I mean, you risked a lot. Because what if one of you knew how to make love and the other didn't? And then the one who did found somebody who knew, too. Hey, you know what I flashed before? Elsa Lanchester with frizzy hair. Like an association with your wife. Does that mean I think, you're Frankenstein? The monster, not the doctor. Which is strange, because you know something? This room is really very groovy. I hate that word, but it is. Not like a torture chamber at all. Hey, this is really beautiful hash."

"It's all in who you're with," Merlo said.

"I think you mean that in a beautiful sense. I really think you do. You know, I'm sorry for what I said before about your being timid, because I think you're fairly secure about your masculinity, for a male. You meet so many castrating men who think that's the name of the game. Did that make sense, what I just said?"

"Perfect sense."

"Do you know you have beautiful eyes? I know you've been told that a million times, but it's true. They're not exactly green and they're not exactly hazel, and they've got funny spokes in them that are all different lengths. They're really beautiful."

"Thank you," said Merlo.

"They really are. It's amazing to stare at them this close. Do you get excited, staring into people's eyes?"

"If I do it long enough."

"Oh, now I made you look away. I didn't mean to do that. Some men do that, stare into a woman's eyes, like a pickup trick. That's OK, too, what you're doing now. Staring at my breasts. In fact, I dig it. Did I ask you what sign you are?"

"A billboard on the Belt Parkway," said Merlo, reaching for the Pernod bottle. He picked up the cap and screwed it on.

"What are you doing?"

"Closing the bottle." He was looking at his watch.

"Why are you looking at your watch?"

"Was I?"

"You looked at my breasts and then you closed the bottle and then you checked the time on your watch."

"It's half past three," said Merlo, rising.

"Now you're looking at my breasts again."

"They're very nice breasts," he said, not looking at them. With his thumb, he snuffed out the ember in the bowl of the pipe. He was on his feet, heading for the front door. Susan felt her neck muscles, the muscles directly under her chin, sag and then tighten. Soon he would be at the door. He was going to turn the knob and go out. He was going back to the office. He was smiling politely at her and she heard the smile in her head, a low-grade static, as though a radio were on somewhere in the apartment, tuned to zero volume. He was almost at the door. I'm going deaf, she thought, gulping with fright and, reaching inside her belt, she tugged out her knit top and drew it up. The hem caught her nipples, hard, with a sting like metal, and she yanked the top over her head, feeling her breasts bounce and settle.

"They used to be bigger," she said. "They used to be huge. One of my breasts was as big as my ass. I was like two people inside a transsexual suit. That's what this horrible woman said. This dyke."

"She might have been jealous."

"I have an OK body, right?"

"Yes."

"I remind you of your wife, you said." She winced. "Oh, God. I was so afraid you were going to leave just then. You went over to the front door, and now you're sitting here again." She leaned over, shaking, and put her lips next to his ear. "You won't leave, OK?"

"OK," said Merlo. She was clinging to him. He put his arm around her and they floated to the floor. Pages from Placenta Woman flew in several directions.

"The coffee table," said Susan. She sat up, cradling her breasts. "The manuscript. Oh, God, and the hash pipe. I knew I heard it smash.

"Never mind," said Merlo.

"I'm sorry. Oh, God." She crawled toward the broken glass. "I'll pick up the big pieces."

"Later," he said, stepping in front of her. He helped her to her feet. She was still shaking.

"It's true, isn't it?" She looked up at him. "Doesn't Pernod make the room spin vertically?"

"Yes, it does."

"I knew it did. Hold me, OK?" She gripped his arm as they went into the bedroom. "I feel so awful about the hash pipe."

"Don't."

"We'll buy another one," said Susan. She lay down on the bed. His hand stroked her hair, then went away. She reached for it, finding his fingers as he turned toward the window. "A real one, all right? Not just a tourist item."

"Good idea," said Merlo, lowering the blinds.