Paula Sherman and the National Rifle Association
by
Lynn Hoffman
Smashwords Edition
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Published by:
Lynn Hoffmann on Smashwords
Paula Sherman and the National Rifle Association
Copyright © 2010 by Lynn Hoffman
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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* * * * *
The video is grainy and the human figures in the centre of a dark stage have grown fuzzy blue-white edges. They seem incandescent, white hot filaments. They are singing, some dozen of them: boys and girls in white shirts and black slacks. Their song claws its way roughly out of the speakers— a windy roar, like a seashell held up to an ear.
Fiddling with the knobs on the monitor, we clean up the sound and lower the contrast. We can now read the banner on the curtain behind the people. It says “ALL STATE CHORUS”. The stage and its surround may be Carnegie Hall. The song, strained of some of its life, like one of those old-fashioned phonograph recordings, is still astonishingly bright. No raggy imprecision rounds over the edges of their words. Their consonants pop together, all their vowels end with one stoppered breath. The music is Donoff’s American Requiem, the old choral standby.
For the solo, Agnus Dei, a girl, eleven or twelve years old, steps forward to a mark on the stage. She looks down, checks her place, her red hair sweeping forward and back as she does. There is humility in the gesture, a tiny bow, a plea for mercy. Then she looks up with wide stallion eyes, quickly sweeps the room, finds the little video camera that made our tape. and in looking at it, sings to us.
Her voice has layers to it, youth and age, a discernable caressable depth. When she sings the words ‘I will take you to my Holy City and I will give you peace’ we believe her.
Her part ends, the camera jiggles, there is another roar: applause this time. The girl doesn’t acknowledge it. She steps back in line, head turning quickly to dress right dress with the other boys and girls.
The song is over and the applause overwhelms the little microphone in the video camera. They bow. Looking to an off-stage mentor, they bow again. From our left, stage right, a man in a tuxedo walks onstage carrying roses. To the florally hip observer it seems a diva-sized bouquet. He hands them to the girl who just sang for us.
She seems surprised, discomfited by the gift. Her stage smile vanishes, replaced by the slightest hint of worry . She looks around to her fellows. They are applauding too now, pointing their slapping hands at her and smiling.
The red headed girl looks to the camera, then down at the roses. She reaches inside the paper, jiggles, pulls, removes a rose and hands it to a boy beside her in the front row. He head shakes a refusal, she shoves an insistance. He takes the rose and she goes down the line, dividing her trophy among the singers.
When all the flowers are gone, she turns her back to the camera and begins to applaud. We don’t see much of this since she is quickly lost to us in a sea of hugging arms and laid-on hands.
* * * * *
1.
Paula, 24 years old, looks in a full-length mirror on the wall of a restaurant’s cramped changing room. Shoulder-length red hair, freckles, black bow tie, white shirt, black skirt, workaday stockings and flat black shoes. She tickles her red hair out away from her face.
Paula is singing. Her voice is soft and wonderfully pure. The melody is academic: motet, not mo’town. A song that a person sings just because she can. The voice is an enviable, make a deal with the devil to have it voice and there is something sad about it. A disquieting note, if you will. Her styling, her shaping of the words has a slightly pained edge to it, not the utter tragedy of a doomed operatic character, not the mocking self-knowledge of a blues singer, but the dangerously sharp, jaggedy edge of a well nourished disappointment. The words are in a foreign language and no one in the back room of the restaurant recognizes the tune.
She has a little more flesh than usual for a woman her age, not fat, just thick; no sharp curves, just solid gentle undulations. Widest, she reflects, at the hips.
The face looking back at Paula is more delicate than her body. It is a sun-shy, near-pretty face. Freckles and green eyes. An unbudgeably friendly face. The face of a woman who keeps a book of people’s birthdays, sends cards, is sad when her envelopes come back stamped ‘address unknown’.
The muscles around her mouth seem to have lost something, some range of motion, the strength to reach out to hilarity or down to tears. There are the first puffy traces of emotional flabbiness, the beginnings of a permanent cringe.
#
Whatever song she’s singing, what she feels are her feet, stinging, expanding and shrinking from a night’s pile driving into an uncushioned restaurant carpet. Each step fishing for tips, $84.75 in her creel. She thinks it’s a lot because she thinks it’s hers.
There’s a hollow banging on the door behind her. Paula turns and her hair follows her like the swirl of a skirt. We hear a lightly nasal, breathy but not unpleasant voice..
“C’mon for God’s sake, I’m ready to party.”
Paula accepts ‘to party’ as an intransitive verb-one that takes no, needs no object. She even knows what it means. It means for her ‘to be part of’, to be sucked up, absorbed: to merge into the fibers of something: to put salve on the sunburn of separateness that scratches her like a wool sweater on bare skin. That it might mean ‘to part from’ is something she doesn’t think about now.
The voice belongs to Tom, square-jawed but oddly delicate, pale, blue-gray eyes showing violet behind the tinted contact lenses. He is Paula’s best girlfriend and he makes her laugh.
“Okayokayokay” and she flicks the hook that holds the door. Paula wants to party too.
Paula and Tom on the eleven PM October street. The smells are leaves, wet pavement and motor oil. The rain has stopped, granting Paula permission to leave her folding rubber boots behind. Through thin-soled flat shoes, the cool wet of the pavement soothes her feet.
Paula rolls as she walks, Tom bounces. Paula’s black trench coat brushes Tom’s brown leather jacket. She stays well stuck to the earth, he disdains it. Lightly. After a few steps they are in rhythm. Urban army Hup-two. They are talking softly, the brumble-sounds of their voices have a cuddly, intimate tone. Tom is telling Paula a funny story about last weekend, about how he took his little sister to the mall and how she begged him to buy her a bra’ because mom says she doesn’t believe in breasts’. Paula tells him about tomorrow’s audition for a commercial for a car dealer. The producer is going to put a muscle car on the foredeck of a tugboat and he wants someone to sing ‘Cruising Down the River’ with Ella Fitzgerald styling. Tom pats her shoulder as they walk and he half sings, half talks ‘There’s no business like show business.’
Paula and Tom think they tell each other anything. They have permission to call in the sleeping hours, the intrusion being not so much a prerogative of friendship as its test. Look, I wake you up, you must love me. Tom is impatient with Paula’s loneliness, but he helps it go away. He brings her close to sequins and fancy dancing. Paula reminds Tom of home; mashed potatoes and meat loaf. It’s a deal.
Ahead of them, the edge of a neon sign in the middle of the block pokes finger-thick lines of red, blue and green. The three colors add up to a cone of light that is almost white. Paula thinks of a stage. In the light she sees three men and a woman. Paula knows them. They have common restaurants, lovers, roommates. As Paula and Tom approach, hands raise, faces smile, shoulders are patted. Everybody has tip money, everybody has fun.
Paula likes these people; the ones on the street and the ones in the bar. She inflates their virtues and prays for their hopes. She’s diluted her affections and washed them over the whole tribe. She saves up the warmth that she can’t give herself, gives it to them.
Tom turns sharply to the left, urgent words for the tall man at the edge of the group. They whisper, they laugh. Paula turns her back to them, says hellos again, folds her arms and smiles at the brown-haired woman.
Past the group on the sidewalk, down the street, at the corner, there’s a traffic light on a pole. A man is standing hunched and jerking. He zips up a green satin team jacket, pulls at a soft black cap.
“Hi Paulie, sure is cold out here” the brunette bobs her head and turns toward a wooden door with four glass panes at eye height. Paula turns her face to the neon; it says Skipper’s. The brunette flips her head at the two other men and they follow her. One of them pulls the brass stirrup door handle and the door opens and Paula hears the lonely sounds of bar music, glass crackles and well-mixed conversations. A few seconds later, she smells the warm-air beery smell of close bodies.
The man in the green jacket has left the safety of the traffic light. He’s crossed the street, walking towards Paula, Tom and the tall man. His head is down, hands in his pockets, walking faster.
Paula turns back toward Tom. She takes a step, clumsy inside, closer to Tom. The tall man winks at Tom, smiles at Paula, two steps, opens the door. Bar sounds leak out again. Tom moves to follow him, his arm out to Paula, wrapping her up and moving her with him.
“Hey, um” Paula slows, stops him. Eyes signaling a wait a minute. Tom fingerwiggles see-you-in-a-minute to the tall man, the door closes. She pulls Tom out of the light. She recognizes the flirting, the crotchy attraction between the two men. She’s a little bit jealous-not of the tall man but of the ease with which they seem to have sealed a deal that she’s always bumbled. She doesn’t want to stop him, and she hates to let him go, so she settles for one more minute. Over the zipping of tires on wet pavement, she says “Who was that?”.
The green jacketed man is now fifteen yards away. His knitted black cap has unrolled to a ski mask over his face.
Paula, smiling, teasing, wanting some dish, wanting to hang on to Tom for a minute more. The man with the ski cap is a step away. If Paula were listening, she could hear the sucky smack of his sneakers on the concrete, hear the rhythm of his steps accelerate. “Oh you know him, that’s...Then there’s a grunt, a blow, the slap of clothes and the woof of Tom hitting the concrete.
Paula’s face goes blank, then she opens her mouth to scream, but there’s a gun hard against her face and no sound comes out. A stained beige leather glove holds her hair, pressing her face into the side of the gun. The gun is pointed up, its muzzle half under her left eyebrow. Her upper lip is pressed back, there’s a spot of blood. The metal feels warm on her face and she thinks she tastes sweat. Tom is on the ground, face down, right leg pulled up, toes curled under like a sprinter ready to push off. A patch of bloody red and pink has grown on the back of his head.
The voice is tight, strangled, but the loudest human thing Paula has ever heard “Give me your wallet you little cocksucker or I blow her away.”
She can smell his breath, feel the tooth of the gun against her cheek. “Please, I’m pregnant”. She flicks her eyes toward Tom. She doesn’t know, as she says it, where this came from, this wish-filled plea for mercy.
He pulls the gun away from her face, points it to her belly. She can see the gunman smiling through the slit in his ski mask. Tom is on his right side looking up toward Paula, his left hand is fumbling in his pocket for something. Paula’s confused, expectant. In the movies, this where Tom pulls out his own pistol and surgically finishes the gunman with a bullet to the right eye.
The bar door opens and Paula sees side-lit the face of the tall man, sees him open his mouth. His eyes go from languid to scared. Music and bar sounds burst out on the street from behind him.
Then there’s a scream, the sounds of tavern panic, glasses dropping, the dull ring of falling barstools.
A bright blue-white beacon over the door turns on, bleaching the gunman’s figure in the light. Paula hears electronic yodeling from the bar behind her: an amateur siren, a call for help, not an arrival sign of the help itself.
The people in the bar hear the shot. The brown-haired girl is screaming in siren rhythm. One of the boys with her is lying on the floor, a dark circle already visible in the crotch of his tan pants. It is not a polite movie pop. It crashes into them, bores into their ears. they hear it in their teeth and neck bones. It probes them, discovers things, makes unpopular diagnosis, disappears.
* * * * *
2.
Paula is sitting on the edge of her bed. Her eyes are puffed and red and she does not move. Her upper lip is swollen and scabbed over and there is a bruise, yellow blue black under her left eye. Her stillness fills the room. There is no tension in her stillness, no holding back, only a sense of life lacking. Paula is wearing a pinkish gray nightgown tight around her neck, loose on her body. The nightgown stops at her knees, her legs have crossed themselves at the ankles and her ankles have then wilted toward the floor. All she can feel of her body is its weight and the depression it makes in the mattress.
The room is dead. Paula may be dead too. The only visible force is gravity. Paula looks around- stereotype girl mess; magazine piles on floors, laundry on a dresser, a glass vase half filled with amber water. There’s a thirteen inch TV set, some bottles that may be cologne. Between Paula and the dresser an interior door is half open. Past a wilted brassiere on the door knob, there’s another small dark room and a second, sturdier, door with multiple locks. The room smells of steam heat and stale breath. A small digital clock is showing 12:04 in white numbers. Paula has evidently slept ‘til noon. No phone calls, no urgent knocks on the door, her friends have apparently absorbed the tragedy wthout her.
On the floor by the dresser, there’s an orange cat asleep on a towel. The cat opens her eyes at the creak of bedsprings, follows bare feet across the floor, turns his ears to the sound of running water. A light, hollow-core door closes.
A half hour later Paula, dressed but ill-composed in her black raincoat, pushes her way through a scarred exterior door. She descends the five steps that make up the stoop in front of row houses in northeastern cities and takes a second to look at Pine Street. She loves this neighborhood, she thinks of it sometimes as the place where she really grew up. Ginkgo trees, mostly leafless, line both sides of the three lane street. The scene is reddish-gray and brown; the colors of sparrows and moths, spotted with a handful of small brightly colored signs:
RENTING
FOR RENT
APARTMENT
Paula passes small shops, dogwalkers, a wrinkled man glazed with dirt pushing a grocery cart. She passes a line of brown and bronze little girls, second grade she guesses. There are thirty of them in blue and white tartan skirts waiting at the corner. They are being nudged into some unchildlke line by a short, intense woman in a windbreaker.
Paula’s heart aches for them, for their innocence for fear that they might one day see the man in the windbreaker with the gun. She slows, she stares. One of the girls, a bit taller than the rest, notices Paula. Maybe she divines something in the wounded white girl: she waves her hand side-to-side and smiles at Paula and mouths ‘hello’. Paula smiles back and then makes her fist into a puppet face that mouths hello back. The girl laughs and then a whistle blows and the kids are hurried across the street. The tall girl looks back once at Paula and then the line of blue and white tartan is gone.
On the broom-clean shabby street, there are other pedestrians, all of them in their twenties, all of them walking slowly. Paula’s eyes look up above the two and three story shopfront brick buildings, through some high-rise glass slabs. She sees a thin limestone tower with a bronze statue on top. The figure in bronze is oddly gentle for a municipal sculpture. If she could see it at eye level, the face would seem not to command but to beg. It’s the face of the Quaker, William Penn.
A few minutes later, Paula is staring at another face, one with the shape and something of the color of an unripe beefsteak tomato. He is chanting, “The court will come to order, the court will come to order”. She hears a very young woman’s voice saying ‘tom-tom no, tom-tom noooo...’.
The gunman, green jacket, black ski mask pulled down is sitting at a table framed by the suited arms of men on either side of him. Paula imagines him bleached white, the way she saw him in front of the other bar. Paula hears her self saying ‘ yes that’s him over there’ and her voice seems to echo “him over there him over there over there there there..’ And what she’s seeing is the line of little girls, all in blue and white.
Outside, there’s a TV camera. Two small clusters of people are waiting, framing the doors from the courtroom. On Paula’s right, they rally around a cardboard sign-a pink triangle outlined in red. There’s a drawing of a handgun in the center of the triangle and a red bar through the handgun. On her left, another group is chanting “ARM GAYS! ARM GAYS! ARM GAYS! One TV camera drifts to an upraised fist and then dawdles its way down to the shoulder. Arm gaze.
Paula is twisting her way between the demonstrators. The crowd is turned like a field of sunflowers to the TV cameras. Competing signs joust for position, there’s a scuffle involving a bullhorn battery.
Paula is blocked by a man carrying a TV camera. He is attached by wire to a beautiful olive tan shiny-black haired woman with a microphone. Her beauty arrests Paula. The camera zooms in and heads fill the screen, Paula full faced on the left, the beauty in profile, cafe latte skin all Aztecs and Spaniards on the right.
“Paula, Laura Garcia-Lane from channel 3. In court, you just confronted a man who had a gun to your face. How did that feel”?
Paula’s eyes dart left, out of the frame. She wants to leave, feels commanded to stay. Her eyes focus on the microphone and she remembers the question. Then her eyes go slack and something inside her is visibly untied, drifting loose.
“Oh Tom, poor Tom...he loved courtroom drama...he..”
“What do you have to say to the demonstrators here?”
“I only wish that they had known him.” Paula seems to be gulping air
“What’s your opinion about guns”?
“I don’t know about the guns...I care, I cared about Tom...it wasn’t...the gun. I don’t know, it was that creepy man...oh God”
Paula lowers her head, turns left and half stumbles out of the frame. Laura Garcia-Lane says “Back to you, Ralph”
Paula runs through the crowd, slowing as she reaches its edge. The rhythm of Paula’s steps quickly matches the pedestrians’. Pace-camouflaged, she disappears into the street.
#
Paula’s letter home:
Dear Mom & Dad,
Thank you for coming down to see me—I’ve been very lonely and it was good to see your faces.
I’m feeling better now, but I still think about Tom all the time. I think about his little sister too, the one who looked up to him so much. I keep thinking about how he wanted to make such a big difference in her life and now he won’t get to. She won’t even know what she missed.
I’ve been thinking about what you said, about how Catsbody and I should move back home and about the job in DeWitt. I don’t think I can do it. Please don’t be angry with me-I really appreciate it and I really really miss you a lot, but I just can’t.
I don’t want to disappoint you, but I still think Philadelphia is the right place for me even if I can’t say just why. I know you’re scared for me and I guess I’m scared too. I just feel like maybe it’s time to be brave.
I love you and I miss you. Please say hello to Aunt Mimi and tell Billy I’ll write to him soon.
xxoo,
P.
* * * * *
3.
A week after Tom’s funeral, Paula moves heavily through a evening of restaurant noises, soda water bottle conversations and cutlery clankles. As she works, she has little moments of brilliantly clear sensation. She sees the rubies in the bright red veins of a leaf of ruby chard. She jerks away from the prickly smell of saffron and marvels at the order she finds in aspirin- sized chunks of carrot, celery sprikled on the rim of a plate. She sometimes notices a deadness in her gut or an ache along her jawline as if she had to scream but couldn’t. At the end of her shift, she finds herself standing on the street looking at the front window of her restaurant, staring at the ocher drapes and the gold leaf letters that spell out ‘Odetta’. Inside, the lights are turned up and a man in a loose-fitted suit is vacuuming the floor. After a minute or two, she thinks of her cat and, being grateful for a reason to leave, turns away from the restaurant and heads for home.
The night is mild and she’s carrying her coat. The street seems to have inhaled a lung full of servers from a dozen bistros. There is a person waving and talking to the south while walking unsteadily north. They all seem to be drifting, bouncing off each other in Brownian motion. They are ready to be blown home or into places like Skipper’s, which is down the street on the right.
In the cone of light again, the sidewalk is crowded tonight, the warm street sucking customers out of saloons. A woman, small, brunette and perky pops out of the mass and bounces up to Paula. She is wearing a black sweatshirt with the Letters D R E X E L in an arc across her bosom. She remembers just in time to put her smile away. “Hi Paulie, did you hear about Tom?”
Paula starts to speak, starts, perhaps, to explain herself, to claim her rightful share in the tragedy. She is standing a few inches from the pock that the bullet left in the pavement. She sees the tall man with three others around him. His head is down, his eyebrows pressed together to say ‘sensitive man in pain’. He is being touched and stroked in the manner of ants meeting their nest-mates on the trail.
The perky brunette is looking at Paula, she knows that she has done something clumsy, hates the feeling. Only the really dorky girls in college ever did things like that and none of them were in her sorority. She calls this awkward feeling an illegal alien, wants to deport it to Paula, doesn’t dare, could make things worse. Frozen in place. Paula stares at the tall man, no one else is looking at her.
Paula is going black inside, leaving, coming back. Returns to the scene of the crime. Five or six seconds have passed. Looking over the brunette’s shoulder, Paula’s face grows a touch of life, one raised eyebrow even suggests humor. “Yeah, I heard it loud and clear” and she ducks a shoulder as if she were going to crawl under the brunette, says “G’night” and heads down the street with her arms hugging themselves and her coat across her chest.
Until Now , Tom and Paula had all their wounds in common. Every hurt was diluted immediately, reduced by half for being shared, reduced again, almost redeemed by the attention that it earned. This pain though, is not some paradoxical currency that she can trade for love. Paula has been ambushed again in front of Skipper’s.
Paula climbs her stoop. A minute later she’s shuffling through her living room, crossing a pool of pink light that’s come in from the streetlamp. She walks quietly, sneaking in her own apartment. The squeals of the floorboards seem suddenly ominous and for an instant she is afraid of the shadows. She sheds the outdoors with thumps and slaps and the dull music of hangers in a closet. Paula comes in to the bedroom and the bra on the doorknob swings as she pushes the door aside. She tries to sing as she kicks off her shoes, to blow the day out of her throat with a scale or a trill, but something seems to choke her off.
In a minute, Paula in pink chenille is leaning with one hand on the dresser, turning on the TV, spinning a knob with gentle, almost affectionate strokes. She seems to be greeting it, not adjusting it. Television will keep her company she thinks as the picture brightens. Paula has turned on the news, she rubs her hands together and almost smiles. This newscaster, this graying solid man whose face she can barely see on the snowy screen, is her imaginary playmate. They are about to spend some time alone.
Paula joins the news as it opens with the nightly fire. This one’s a minor-leaguer in Kensington, the camera hangs on a smoldering mattress, lingers. Usually she warms her hands by the house fire story, but tonight she fiddles with the knobs, then settles back, two pillows holding her up in bed.
Her friend says he’ll be right back and we cut to Commercial: A man in a dark suit, maybe forty years old is standing in a park. There are trees overhead and cannon on spindly wheels in the background. The man’s voice is earnest and soothing. like a veterinarian telling us our dog needs surgery but everything will be all right.
“Hello I’m Senator Jim Santacci speaking to you from Valley Forge where the privately owned guns of American patriots won us the freedoms that we enjoy today. My opponent in this election wants to take guns away from the citizens of Pennsylvania. He says that being unarmed will protect us from criminals. Maybe we should ask the victims of crime what they think.”
Cut to a black and white still photo of Paula, a frame from this morning’s video tape. The photo floats in the center of the screen surrounded by black. Paula’s voice saying “It wasn’t the gun, it was that man.”
Paula pushes herself out of bed. She snaps off the television, takes two steps towards the window and pulls down the shade. In the almost-total darkness, two more steps and a bed creaking. There’s a sharp, rattling sound like someone shivering and then some croaking hurt-animal noises. Paula is sobbing or gasping for breath in the dark.
* * * * *
4.
Morning. Silence. There’s a round pedestal table next to the head of the bed and a telephone on it. Paula sits on the edge of the bed, nodding and writing something down, dialing, yawning, scratching her left side. She is not freshly awake, but has just decided to give up on sleep. The room is colder than it was last night, its scent fainter. Paula takes two steps to a case on her dresser and runs her fingers down the spines of the cassette tapes. She pulls out a tape marked ‘Christmas Music, School Cor.’ and then slides it back. She hesitates over ‘Scol Cant.: Verdi’ and ‘Gergassingen’, the settles for one marked: ‘DAD-New piano!!’ The music starts in the middle of a piece as she reaches for the phone. She dials and hears the ringing as if she were inside it.
“Re-elect Santacci”
“Hello, I’d like to speak to whoever does your advertising” Choking on exhausted anger, her voice scrapes its way out of her throat.
“I’m sorry, no one from media is here right now, can I take a message?”
“Well, not really, I wanted to find out about that ad you ran last night, the one about the guns.”
“I didn’t see that, why don’t I switch you over to voice mail?”
“No, I don’t want...”
“Hello, you’ve reached the office of the Campaign Coordinator for Senator Santacci. To use your credit card to make a contribution to the Senator’s campaign, press one now. To volunteer for the campaign, press two. For help with voter registration, press three. To speak to campaign staff, press four and to leave a message for the Senator, press five. To return to this menu at any time, press the star key.”
Paula’s right index finger advances to the dial and hesitates between 4 and 5. The finger looks chewed or torn around the cuticle and in the putrid cold light, the wounds look monstrous. She touches 4.
Paula’s fingers work the handset, choking it, arousing it, begging it. She feels her breath between each ring. Two rings, four rings. Paula listens, then following cues, pokes the dial again. The star key and then the five. The tones in sequence remind her of something and she presses them again. The interval between them is a minor third and it reminds her of a lullaby. She shifts herself backwards on her bed, covers her mouth with her right hand in a polite throat clearing gesture, but the only sound in the morning room is the ringing.
“Hello, this Senator Jim Santacci. I’m sorry that I can’t answer your call right now, but I really want to hear from you and from every Pennsylvanian. Please leave a message at the sound of the tone and I’ll see that someone gets back to you to address your concern. Leave your name, address and telephone number and we’ll get back to you and that’s a promise. This is Jim Santacci and I listen to you.”
Paula’s face has softened, her grip is relaxed on the handset. Exactly 76 words of the Senator’s voice, the right dose, patriotic too.
“Senator Santacci, my name is Paula Sherman. I’m the woman whose picture you used...in your ad? the one about the guns?” Paula is losing herself in rising inflections. Outraged virtue doesn’t have question marks. She shakes her head ‘no’.
“I just want you to know that I didn’t say what you made it sound like I said. and I think it’s really horrible of you to..to do that and” Her voice is failing her. “and I want you to stop. If you don’t I’m going to tell everybody what you did.” Then remembering her instructions: “This is Paula Sherman and my address is 1706 Pine Street, Philadelphia one nine one four six.”
Then remembering other instructions from her mother about giving out her phone number, Paula hangs up. She is a perfectly swirled frozen dessert, layers of creamy fatigue and ice-crystal anger wrapping around each other. Awash in mutual antidotes, she pounds her fist weakly on the round table. The sound is thin, almost hollow in the chilly bedroom.
* * * * *
5.
Several days have passed. Paula, in the changing room, is reading from a sheet of paper.
“I thank you for your interest in my campaign for re-election, if there’s anything else I can do...” One woman- lean, small-eyed, ski jump nose giggle to please, guess at her own misreading, blush, look down and away. The other, thirtyish and thick, hears the hurt and hugs Paula, kisses her on the cheek. Paula’s head draws back, takes aim, eyes half close. Their lips stretch toward a common center and they hear the shuffle of feet and a boisterous “god what a night” from somewhere and the faces turn to buddy smiles. Look to their hands, skin stretched tight in squeezing.
Later, in her bedroom, Paula, glistening hair wet and brushed comes out of the bathroom door. She goes, naked, to her cassette case and finds a tape marked ‘EDWARD’ It’s violin music and it promises in the first few bars, something edgy and weird. She pulls a pale tee shirt down over her belly, then steps into loosely fitting underpants. She climbs forward, crawls over the bed toward the window and then turns to the left. She settles with a groan on her back. Her hands and feet push the covers from underneath her and she rolls her shoulders into the pillows. She makes a tiny moan, so strained that it is almost spoken.
Paula’s hands, which had been supporting her arched back, come to attention at the hem of the tee shirt. She gathers a handful of hem and saws it leftright across her thighs. Another handful, hemwad thicker, she fiddles on her pubis, rapid grabbing motions, stretching tension. Paula is controlling a thick hardened rod of cotton just underneath her breasts. Stretching it, she presses it down into her ribs and then up toward her chin. The roll of cloth compresses her breasts in to her chest and draws them up to her chin. It snaps roughly over her nipples, slightly mismatched promontories on half dollar sized aureoles. Then Paula pushes the roll back toward her knees with a sawing motion that first flattens her breasts and then stretches her nipples downward. When she lets the hemroll snap over the rise of her nipples, she reverses direction. She bowsaws her breasts, popslapping them with the shirt and rocking her torso against the motion of her hands.
The movement ends, tee shirt thrown up like a used rag, Paula’s hands go to her breasts thumb on top, index finger below the nipple, squeeze, stretch down toward her crotch her hands slipping and digging at the insides of her thighs forcing the flesh and the cloth of her crotch into a pressed mound. Her fingers slide under the cloth, a tiny wet squawk of Paula finding her self and then she is alone in the dark and some thumping strings playing. Pizzicato.
* * * * *
6.
December. Paula is leaving Odetta. There is a dusting of snow on the ground and a few flakes are sawing their way softly through the air. Paula is wearing a black beret to go with her trenchcoat. Her red hair is a shocking display on the almost-monochrome street. Someone leaving with her has handed her a magazine with a yellow cover.
Paula flips the pages, and as she walks, she finds it. It’s a two page spread in black and white. On the right-hand page is the same shot of Paula that she saw on the TV screen. Paula closes the magazine and rolls it and tapping against her thigh, walks home.
Between the windows in her sitting room, there’s a sofa covered in leeridescent pink and green. The coat, the magazine and Paula all end up there in one lumpy letgo gesture. She unrolls the magazine: TELESCOPIC SIGHT DIGEST (sub titled) The Magazine of Death from a Distance. The cover illustration is a long-barreled pistol. Except for a black checkered grip, the pistol is all stainless steel. In case we miss the luster, there are several starbursts drawn in on the barrel and trigger guard. The weapon is pointed safely at a spot above the reader’s left shoulder. Mounted on top like a panther on a wildebeest is a green contraption with lots of slots and screws. She expects to see the stainless bleed from the claw marks. On top of the green thing is a black tube with a ruby coated lens. Paula’s fingers reach out to the picture then pull back.
The magazine opens itself to Paula’s picture. It is three and a half inches tall and two and a half inches wide, just above center. The size of a playing card. Queen of what? The rest of the page is black except for some feminine handwriting in white that reads
“It wasn’t the gun, it was that man.”
On the facing page, also reversed against the black is bold type:
Crime Victims Speak Out
There’s more, there’s text, there’s an 800 number, there’s the logo of the American Rifle Association, but Paula closes the magazine. And then she opens it again, turning the cover back to the double page truck ad, then to the Table of Contents and the ad for the limited edition titanium Colt .44. “...it’s critical feature, incredible hardness!”
Paula has been had. Suckered. Used. Frattyboy prank, guess who’s got the red ass? She knows that mixture of shame and centrality. Goon show star makes ‘em laugh. She wants to puke with hatred of her stupid self and she wants to call home to say she got her picture in a magazine.
She flips a few more pages. The president of the American Rifle Association died. It doesn’t say how he died, but he looks fat and young and shiny in the photo. Maybe he was blown away like Tom, pieces of his lung bouncing up from the pavement back into his chest. Or maybe not. Paula is slowed and sad. Right below the obit is the news that Sagittarius Arms has resurrected the model 85. Paula is pleased. She likes the sound of the word ‘resurrect’.
Another flip. A model-gorgeous Teutonic blonde with ear protectors and safety glasses is firing a pistol off to our left. No need to duck. Below her are photos of strange machines with levers and model numbers all their own. Paula turns the page past What’s New, past an ad for the Warrior Swords of the Samurai. A Column called Second Amendment mentions Paula by name. It praises her for ‘cutting to the nitty-gritty of the guns and crime thing’
Paula feels a buzz as she reads the piece and flips the page. Her motion is waxy and automatic, she is too numb to cringe as the pages smack her, tickle her, touch her. The magazine is reading Paula. The next column is called Line of Fire. Its author is Rachel Sam Hicock and her photo is there by her byline. Another blonde; commanding, black clad and sporting an enormous handgun in a holster that starts at her waist and ends just below her breast.
Paula is stirred and reassured; if Rachel had been in front of Skipper’s that night if Paula were Rachel if Rachel were here now she would make Paula feel better. Better feel.
Paula has seen enough movies about English women in India to know what it means to swoon. She closes the magazine before she does, spirals her way up from the couch and walks it in front of her into her bedroom. She sets TELESCOPIC SIGHT DIGEST on her night table using both hands.
In spite of her near-faint, it will be a long time before Paula sleeps. In bed, lights out, the room will spin like a pot of briskly stirred soup. In the dark, little bits of ideas and images will pop out of Paula and coagulate. Images of Tom twice-killed; her father, short and pot bellied throwing himself between her and a neighbor’s vicious dog; a scene from a movie where the heroine is beaten by her boyfriend. Ideas. They can’t do that to me. They did. An egg drop nebula of teeth-grinding rage. It will keep Paula company through the night, light her up, make her glow. She would sing to it if she could, but she can’t. Voiceless since Tom died.
Just before dawn, she howls once. She doesn’t even wonder if the neighbors heard. She squeezes grunts and moans out against clenched teeth, locked jaw. Her fists pound the bed. She thinks she’s dying and quite the opposite will be true.
* * * * *
7.
“Good Morning, Channel Three, the People’s Choice, How may I direct your call?”
“Newsroom please.” The second voice is Paula’s, her words are precise and rehearsed.
“Newsroom” This voice is male, abrupt.
“Laura Garcia Lane, please”
Clickbeep
“Production.”
“Laura Garcia Lane, please”
“Yeah, wait a minute...”
“This is Laura Garcia Lane.”
Paula is sitting on the edge of her bed, her eyes turned toward the window light. She is wearing jeans, a white buttondown collar shirt and horizontally striped socks of blue and gold. Her feet slide and tap their way around the faded green carpet as she talks.
“Miss Garcia Lane? Hi. My name is Paula Sherman, I’m sure you don’t remember me, but you interviewed me outside City Hall last month. My friend was killed in a mugging and I was a witness and I had to...”
“Paula. Yes, Paula, I do remember you. I remember thinking that I’d kill to have that fabulous red hair. .umm...but that’s not why I remember you. God, that was a shitty thing that happened. How are you?”
Paula is put off, spun around, her whole identifiction speech short circuited.
“I’m fine...no, not fine. . “She sees, in half-hallucination, Laura interviewing her, then the Santacci commercial, then the magazine spread.
Laura is sitting in a swivel chair inside a green-walled box. She turns herself from side to side, moving papers on her walls as she goes, nodding as she listens. The cubicle is small and she can touch opposite walls without leaving her chair.
Over Laura’s shoulder on the green wall is a picture of Ste. Clare, the patron saint of television. Like Paula, Ste. Clare is in bed with her face turned to a glowing light. Laura speaks.
“Those fucking sons-of-bitches!” She pronounces the ‘g’. She is not screaming, her voice is a breathy roar, high intensity, low volume, passion-in-a-cubicle whisper . “They can’t fucking do that to you! Ohmigod, we’ll stop them. We’ll. . umm... The station owns the copyright on that tape...we’ve got lawyers, we’ll sue their balls off.”
Paula freezes, speechless with joy, in love with Laura’s fury even more than she prizes her agreement.
“Listen Paula, I can’t really talk now, can you meet me for a drink after work? Good. No, not around here...Eponymous Doc’s?
About two thirty, OK?
Paula and Laura at a cocktail table, their necks bent forward, heads a hand’s distance apart. On the tiny white tiles of the floor, shadow letters read . . us Doc’s...Paula does the talking, gesturing with her palm up. Her hand is wonderously white against the brown table top. Laura is nodding, writing.
Paula pays for drinks, they leave. Their unbuttoned coats flap in the wind. A few minutes later, in Paula’s front room. Paula, eyes wet, is showing Laura her momentos of Tom, pointing to magazine spreads. Even with the light coming over their shoulders and flaring on the lens, we recognize the black and white ARA ads.
Laura picks up, then puts down one of Paula’s gun magazines. Her voice is nasal and thin, like someone who’s about to vomit. “Boys” she says. “Boys and their stupid little bang-bangs.”
Ten A.M. The morning story conference at KYJ-TV is meeting around a U-shaped table. The open end faces a video screen. When the station was remodeled, this room was described as a State-of-the-Art News Communication and Decision-Making Facility. Story ideas were to be made up on a computerized story board program and projected on the screen. But the news director couldn’t figure out how to use the system and nobody wanted to embarass him. So Laura is waiting her turn, down at the screen end of the table with a flip pad pasted up with images and text.
Her story flips by. It’s called “A Stolen Life” and it looks a little like the montaged version that Paula runs in her head. Paula is described as ‘an aspiring concert singer’ Tom becomes simply ‘the man she loved’. There’s footage from the trial, a flash of a campaign ad. Laura’s voice sounds urgent, sentimental. It’s a story to cry for, a story to forget.
We hear a man’s voice, tired and impatient. “All right, you get two minutes: Next Tuesday on the six o’clock.”
Back to Doc’s, girls at the bar, Paula and Laura laughing. Paula throws a bill on the bar, finger-signals the barkeep for ‘two’. Hands are squeezed. Laura is talking, hands and lips moving quickly, Paula is nodding to every fourth beat as her smile fades slowly, her eyes focus on something off in the distance and we go to black.
* * * * *
8.
Paula’s brain has become a flip book full of gun images. Paula, who had never really noticed guns before, now sees them everywhere. They are her magnetic north, her allergy. She dowses them like a water witch, quivering as she comes near them. She senses guns behind closed doors, through bank vault walls. Her eyes linger on the holsters of cops. She watches a Brink’s truck moving cash into a hamburger joint and studies the small pistol worn high above the belt of the guard who pushes the hand truck full of pennies. The magazine rack at Border’s bookstore flashes the words at her -BAM! POP! ZOW! The jackets of mysteries, the poster for a movie comedy, a toy display in a dusted-over antique store window.
She finds herself searching the bumpers and back windows of parked cars. She finds herself finding. American Rifle Association decals remind her of Masonic emblems in lapels. Hey, whattya packin’, Hiram?
If only she had a gun that night, if only she had one now.
It is the ARA decals floating on the glass over the dark interiors of suburban military utility vehicles that bother her the most; ugly insect eyes searching for victims, black and gold windshield rectums pouring guns on her street. Why are these cars in the city? What could a four wheel drive station wagon land roving wermacht mobile be doing in the city except carrying guns and death and Tom oh Tom.
When Tom was alive, he teased her, poked her, pecked at all her illusions. And he loved her singing, went to church to hear her solos, dragged out of bed to sit with her before auditions. In Tom’s world, she was a diva, a voice. If nothing else was very good, no excitement, no sex, no money, no fun, there was always Tom and the dream of the music. And now she’s alone. There is no Tom, and in his place there’s a swarm of stinging, biting guns.
A nightmare, Paula thinks, is when your reality gets flayed off of you and another reality is dabbed on with insect precision and dries and hardens and encases you like a Thompson’s turkey. So every walk to work, every trip to the grocery store is her little nightmare. She would like to shove the nightmare to the sidewalk, shoot it once in the chest, watch it die.
Paula has her consolations too. She will have her moment on the six o’clock news. She asked for Tuesday night off. She’s told her friends, Tom’s friends, everybody.
At night, in her flannies, with her cat, she pages, back to front through TELESCOPIC SIGHT DIGEST. She has added a few titles to her collection, picking up copies of magazines that ran the ad with her face. She opens one or two of them a night, turns each pages slowly, deliberating on the hidden meanings. The articles about guns make her dizzy, she patches together some meaning from the strange words and reads them anyway. She submerges herself in the articles about shooting, imagining herself ‘blasting away at the 25 yard bench with this brand spankin’ new smoke wagon’. Her groups, she knows, are tight and in the black.
She listens to a tape whose case bears the single word ‘Leider’. The voice on it is her own and some of the songs sound pitiful and some of the songs sound heroic. She sometimes finds herself touching the speakers on the small black one-piece stereo. In the steam on her bathroom mirror she has finger painted:
THE STRONG BELONG
and her nights are much much easier than her days.
* * * * *
9.
There is a two-top just inside the window at Odetta. The maitre d’ tries to keep that table filled so that the restaurant looks busy from the street. If he can seat an attractive pair there, he’s pleased. If they are desperately fashionable, he is happy. Someday he hopes to find a milk-white pair of androgynes dressed in skin tight metallic jump-suits, each stroking their own shoulder-mounted iguanas and drinking something blue from martini glasses.
Tonight, just after opening, he doesn’t know how he feels. The Center Stage twotop is occupied by two men, a pair, not a couple. Looking from inside the restaurant, the man on the right is engaging in a dark and dangly sort of way: six feet tall with an excess of arms and legs, curly black hair and lightly olive skin on a broad open face. His black suit and turtle neck are clerical sensual. Clothes for an ascetic tap dancer. He seems to be completely free from guile and artifice; a monk, a rabbi, a man just emerged from a six year coma, a jesuit, a simpleton, an assassin.
The other’s feet have to point to touch the carpet. He is not exactly a trophy dwarf, but he has an earthen solidity about him. You could imagine him swinging, in a few compact movements, down a manhole to his home beneath the streets. Maybe he was in a fairy tale that the maitre d’ heard once. He is wearing a dark blue pin-striped suit. His white french cuffs are held in place by a subtle turk’s head knot of gold.
They have their salads, there’s a bottle of Penfold’s Bin 707 on the table. The dwarf is talking between bites of radicchio and star fruit and his companion, who hasn’t picked up a fork, is making notes on a green spiral bound steno pad. He is not, we see immediately, taking dictation. In fact he is only formally aware of the small man. He is taking notes on something else, yes, on something that no one else sees.
Paula knows him, he is her neighbor, 1700 Pine 4th Floor. She has seen him sitting on the stoop holding his cat and drinking exotic beer from the bottle. The beer, she thinks, is a pose. The cat is not. That is love. She could tell from the rolling motion of his thumb and forefinger on the cat’s loose fur and the intensely present look in his eyes as he stroked her.
What Paula doesn’t know is that his name is Emanuel Cardoso, he is a food writer for a weekly giveaway newspaper and a sometime wine teacher. He is 37 years old. The short man is Harvey Lichtmann, 51 years old, assistant counselor to the City Council. Hobby: malicious gossip, low-stakes blackmail. Lichtmann’s ears are tiny and the skin at the top seems to fold into a point. Paula thinks she has seen him on a fresco somewhere.
Paula is bringing Cardoso a pair of cruets, oil and vinegar. As she lowers the vinegar cruet, she has a vision.
Cardoso in his chair is naked. Paula removes the stopper from the oil cruet and pours the oil slowly on his head. Cardoso tilts his chin up, and as the oil runs down his back, Paula massages it into his skin. His skin absorbs the oil completely, graciously, thankfully.
She recognizes the vision as the return of her favorite romantic fantasy—the one about the perfect gift accepted perfectly.
There is a main course, Paula lays down a plate of lobster medallions in an orange vinegar sauce and another with a pylon of tuna, rare with lacy thin fried potatoes whirled in to a nest on top. Streaks of wasabi and mustard cream criss-cross the plate underneath the tuna. As she turns away from the table, Lichtmann is slicing off a piece of his tuna and handing it, on a bread plate, to Cardoso. His gesture recalls a surgeon passing a length of artery. They are trading information, not nourishment.
Paula outside stealthy-walking in the shadows, looking up and down the street before she unlocks her door. A few minutes later, she’s in bed with her magazine. Her eyes are sharp, squeezed like someone squinting for distance. She pulls each page across from right to left, keeping her grip low and close to the book. She will surprise something in there. Her cat is standing at Paula’s shoulder, eyes focused on the page just where Paula’s are. Her tail is twitching, tapping out the meter of excitement.
She sees a small ad with the headline:
SILENT, LEGAL, LETHAL.
Paula’s eyes widen and then narrow again. Her right hand goes to the bed table, paper, penclick, tiniest perceptible smile, write, fold, envelope, stamp and darkness. The cat sitting in the light from the window has focused on something outside, her tail still twitching the predator beat.
* * * * *
10.
Nobody could get away to join her for the news, and Paula and Catsbody are alone. She ejects a tape from her stereo and carefully puts it in a box marked: ‘State Chorus’. The tape is back in its case as she switches on the TV set.
“Good evening and welcome to the six o’clock edition of Phillynews, I’m Rod Vaigh. Tonight’s lead story takes us to the town of Milton in Berks County, Pennsylvania where four students are dead and eleven injured after two high school students staged a wild west style gun fight in a crowded cafeteria. We’ll be showing you an exclusive animated reenactment of today’s tragedy right after these messages.”
After commercial, Rod narrates the cartoon version of today’s top shooting. Inside a sketchily drawn low ceilinged room, he pans along lines of tables packed with kids. There is no sound track, but the children seem quiet, heads bobbing over their lunches like the hungry little animated figures they are. At one end of the room, three boys in long, black duster coats are talking. They are pulled up tight to each other: a huddle of three. The tallest boy breaks the huddle and steps towards the middle of the room. He seems to be shouting. A cut to the other side shows four younger boys slouching in loose fitting denims. Rod tells us that they are a school gang; the Erps. The older three are the Glands. All are members of the school gun club.
The shout seems to have galvanized the Erps. One of the boys shrugs off his jacket, unsnaps the clip on his overalls and lets them fall to the ground. Beneath the blues, he is wearing track shorts and a short barrelled carbine. He fiddles with a catch, raises the stock to his shoulder and with the coveralls still around his ankles, begins firing across the room in the general direction of the Erps.
The animator backs off and we see the whole cafeteria at once. The Erps return the fire, one of them using two pistols at once. Each bullet’s flight is traced in red on the screen, Rod counts off the hits on human flesh. Onetwothree, four, five, sixseveneight. Nine, ten. Eleven.
Paula eyes are as red as the bullet traces. She is shuddering to no particular rhythm, little seismic jerks and spasms rocking her as the announcers voice goes on.
“The gunfight was apparently pre-arranged between the two rival groups. Originally scheduled for Monday, it was postponed for a day because one of the boys had band practice.
Paula continues to flinch as if she is herself being hit by tiny bullets. A new announcer is interviewing Roscoe ‘Bepp’ Baxter, congressman from Alabama. “...solution is for teachers themselves to be armed. Over one hundred unanswered shots were fired in that cafeteria, and a single armed teacher could have stopped that fight. In fact just knowing that there were armed, law-abiding citizens would have been enough to prevent this tragedy.”
Paula’s grief is turning, fermenting, case hardening. Her breaths are longer and slower. Her lower lip, that quivered through the story of the shootout, is pulled back. She is trembling from her chest out to her clenched fists.
She almost doesn’t care that her story didn’t run and she turns off the set and her vision is erased as the TV screen turns to a Rothko rectangle of red and black. It’s a shape and a color that reminds her of rage.