I don’t know why I named her Claudia. I knew a few before. I had just taken some acid. Naomi had a sheet of it. I tore at the perforations and put a few squares on my tongue. They were sweet in a way that can’t be described. Nature has no word for it. Naomi left me in bed to lie there. I felt as if I had fever. My eyes burned, or maybe my eyelids did. Through the window, I could see the moon. It was white or looked white. We had put a kind of curtain before the window. It wasn’t technically or officially a curtain. It was a dyed piece of fabric that she got at a head shop. We hung it using a wooden dowel rod. Through this dyed piece of fabric, I could see the white moon. Naomi asked, but what if it’s the sun. Her eyes were practically closed. I nodded, there were no clocks in the room. I looked at my wristwatch, but it wasn’t on my wrist. I touched the skin where it would have been, and there was a pink spot. I tapped at it like a metronome. If Naomi wasn’t there, I would have never stopped tapping. But she asked me to stop. After a few minutes of licking my lips she asked, did I ever tell you about Perlmutter? Who is Perlmutter? He was my uncle. What about this Perlmutter? He was in hospital, she said, a socialist hospital. Where can I find one? She said they don’t exist anymore. I asked if she was talking about a free clinic and she said no. I said, because I’ve gotten my teeth fixed in such a clinic. Yes, she said, I know. I’m the one who took you. Listen, she said, Perlmutter lived in this hospital, it was his home. He was not, as far as anyone could tell, sick, but he liked being in this particular hospital. He liked the gowns, which were orange and green, and the bed, which moved up and down by motor, and the television that hung in the corner. He liked the idea of convalescing, even if it was a fiction. I said, so he liked sleeping and being waited on, and she said, exactly. Smart, I said. His doctor was a Scot named McLaren. McLaren humored Perlmutter with that whole daily routine of putting the stethoscope to his chest and bringing out the tongue depressors, putting the flashlight in his mouth, that sort of thing. I asked, wasn’t he taking up a bed a sick person could have used? It wasn’t that type of hospital, she said. What type of hospital was it then? A socialist one, she repeated. Perlmutter, she said, would lay in his bed with a nurse named Claudia and watch old movies. What, I asked, and she said, just listen. Claudia had three young children, Hannah, Michael, and Florian. Did they lay in the bed too? No, they didn’t come to the hospital. They were prodigies, she said. What kind of prodigies, I asked. Piano or flute, music at any rate. Their father was a Viennese like Mozart, but these three weren’t on that level. Mozart was born in Salzburg, I wanted to say, but she didn’t like to be corrected unnecessarily. In the middle of the night, Perlmutter would scoot over and make room for Claudia, who laid with him, and then they’d watch old movies. Which old movies, I asked. She said, you know, the old ones. I asked, like Dirty Dozen old or more like To Have and Have Not? Or really old, like the French one where the moon has eyes? She said, more like To Have and Have Not. I asked if they watched the Ida Lupino movie, The Hitch-Hiker, and she said she didn’t know. How much hanky-panky went on between your uncle and this nurse? She said none at all, it wasn’t like that. It was purely about cinema. Then why did they need to do it lying in bed together? Intimacy, she said, isn’t always about sex.
Naomi often gave me drugs. Once she brought over a syringe of something and offered its contents to me. What is it, I asked. I won’t shoot you up if you ask me any more questions, and so I let her shoot me up. She could have been trying to kill me, but I would have accepted it. The thing about acid is it makes me want to drink. Same with marijuana. I got up and poured myself a glass of whisky. I picked up the phone and dialed a number. It wasn’t random, but I wasn’t quite sure who I was calling. It was a number that had been circulating in my mind for some reason. Seven digits, no area code. Local. Hello, a voice said. Is Claudia there, I asked. This is she, the voice said. Which Claudia? The voice said Claudia Kauffman or perhaps it was Coffman with a C, I didn’t know. Is this Paul, she asked. Who’s Paul, I replied. Paul’s my ex-husband. What happened between you and Paul? If this isn’t Paul, who is this? I had to think quickly. I said David Letherbee, which was the name of the boy who lived across the street from me when I was growing up. Or one of them. The worst of them. I don’t know why I chose him as my avatar, but I felt liberated acting in his stead. She was quiet on the other end, almost silent. I asked her if she wanted to play a game with me and she said, depends. I said I would read her the names of old movies and she would tell me if she’d seen them. I said I was holding a copy of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, the 1986 edition. She said, you’re not the type of guy that gets his jollies off knowing everything about old movies, are you. I said, absolutely not, I get my jollies in the regular ways. She said, because those kind of guys really annoy me. I said, if I really wanted to annoy you, I’d pepper you with questions about The Dead live in Ithaca, 1977, and then she hung up on me.
I had what I’d call an insatiable curiosity about this Claudia, so I redialed her number. When she picked up, she said what in a very curt way. I said, Claudia, please don’t hang up. She said why not and then I asked how she met Paul and she said they met at the House of Nanking. Was it a blind date? No, she said, they were each on separate dates and the next day each, on a whim, went back at the same time to see if the other was there and lo and behold they each were, but they couldn’t get a table. Romantic, I said, meant to be. They got married in Reno the next week. Wow, I said, and then asked, was he at least good to you, and she said fuck no. I told her that Naomi dated a Paul something or other. Paul Oldman or Oldham, I couldn’t remember exactly. Who’s Naomi, she asked. I told her that Naomi was, for a while, my common-law wife. Now she’s staying with some friends in Albany. She doesn’t allow me over. I think there’s a new man. She never used to be promiscuous like this, but we’re working through some troubles. Where do you live, she asked. Berkeley, I said, by the Marina. I live on a soldier’s pension. And then she asked where I met Naomi. Just then I couldn’t quite remember. My memory had been failing lately. I could see a smock with cartoon pigs’ faces on it, and then I said to Claudia that Naomi euthanized my dog Alma. This was in the summer of 1984. After a pregnant pause, Claudia asked if I’d been drinking. She said I’d been slurring my speech. She didn’t like men who drank to excess. They were unreliable. As I looked at my glass of whisky that was more or less untouched, I said, it’s most likely the acid. Anyway, I told her, I’m going blind. That’s when I heard that Naomi was back. She was doing the dishes. I told Claudia I had to go, and she said something that I didn’t catch. I could tell it was mean and meant to hurt me, but I didn’t care because I missed Naomi and besides, I was used to it.
She was a blessing and a curse, Naomi. What are all these dishes, I asked, and she said, they’re yours. What did I make? She said, looks like Hoppin’ John. Hoppin’ John, I repeated. Looks like it. I went back to the bedroom and got into the bed, pulling the covers up to my chin. The moon was still white but bigger now. Naomi was scraping the dishes, and the sound of water running was pleasant in my ears. I yelled from the bed, what happened to Perlmutter, and she said he died in the hospital. From what, I asked. She said from plague. They all died, all the children and the nurses, the doctors, everyone. She said the hospital was a ship, and en route to the ends of the earth it failed and it sunk and everyone died. Even the dogs, even the horses. It was a failure of imagination, she said. She had dark eyelashes and thick eyebrows. No makeup ever, but a very red mouth. When I was really feeling in love with her, I’d smell and then kiss her eyelids. When I’d go to lick them, she’d push me away but with a smile on her face. Her hirsuteness made her look young. Gave her a certain youthful beauty that she maintained for far longer than I thought possible. It sounded as if she was taking a shower, and I imagined her warm wet body next to mine. I said to her, I need your hand on my heart as I pass from this world to the next. And then there was a long silence. I fell asleep and dreamed of Perlmutter. I saw the hospital, which wasn’t a ship at all but an old gray building made of enormous stones, like an ancient church. Inside it was cold and the rooms were large and open and drafty. The nurses wore bonnets and red crosses and their shoes, for whatever reason, had gold buckles on them. I am, I thought, in a dream. I looked at Perlmutter and said, you’re much younger than I thought, and he touched his nose as if to emphasize how right I was. I didn’t see any television or mechanized beds. He beckoned me over, though, and when I got close enough he said, Fichte died here, and I nodded knowingly. Typhus. Claudia’s coming, he said, she’s bringing currywurst and Linzer Torte and bottles of beer the size of which you’ve never seen before and the kind of cigarillos that Warren Oates smoked in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. And then he made with his hands the universal gesture for large breasts. He smiled and I could see his teeth, which gleamed like the sun. They were so perfect it made me want to cry.
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Rumpus original art by Peter Witte
