Chapter 36

There’s a way to polish chrome with club soda. To clean the ivory or bone handles on cutlery, rub them with lemon juice and salt. To get the shine off a suit, dampen the cloth with a weak mixture of water and ammonia, then iron with a damp pressing cloth.

The secret for making perfect boeuf Bourguignon is to add some orange peel. To remove cherry stains, rub them with a ripe tomato and wash as usual. The key is not to panic. To make pants keep a sharp crease, turn them inside out and rub a bar of soap on the inside of the crease. Turn them right-side out and iron as usual. The trick is to keep busy. Despite the fact the killer called, I’m doing everything as usual. The secret is to not let your imagination get carried away. All night long, I’m cleaning. I can’t sleep. To clean the oven, I’m baking a pan of ammonia. Another way to put a lasting crease in pants is to dampen your pressing cloth with water and vinegar. I dig today’s dirt out from under each fingernail. If I don’t open a window, I’m going to suffocate from the smell of baked ammonia. Here, I have to just spit it out. The caseworker is missing. Every ten minutes, I call the caseworker at her office and all I get is her message. Here’s the first time in ten years I’ve called her, and this is all I hear. “Please leave a message at the beep.” I say, that crazy psycho she told me about, well, he called. All night, I’m phoning her office every ten minutes. Please leave a message at the beep. She needs to get me some protection. And her message machine keeps cutting me off. So I call back. Please leave a message. I need an armed, twenty-four-hour police escort. Please leave a message. Somebody could be in the hallway, and I need to use the bathroom. Please leave a message. The killer she told me about knows who I am. He called. He knows where I live. He has my telephone number. Please leave a message. Call me. Call me. Call me. Please leave a message. If I turn up suicided in the morning, it was murder. Please leave a message. If I end up dead from some murderer holding my head in the oven, it’s because she never checks her messages. Please leave a message. Listen, I tell her machine. This is for real. This is not a paranoid delusion. She cured me of those, remember? Please leave a message. This isn’t a schizoid fantasy. I’m not hallucinating. Take my word for it. Please leave a message. Then her message tape runs out. All night, I’m awake and listening with the refrigerator moved halfway in front of the hall door. I need to use the bathroom but not bad enough to risk my life. People go down the hallway, but nobody stops. Nobody touches my doorknob all night. The phone just rings and rings, and I have to answer it in case it’s the caseworker, but it’s never her. It’s just the regular parade of human misery. Pregnant unweds. Chronic sufferers. Substance abusers. They have to dash off their confessions pretty fast before I hang up. I have to keep the line free. Every phone call I get fills me with joy and terror since this could be the caseworker or the killer. Approach or avoidance. Positive and negative reinforcement for answering the phone. In the middle of my panic, Fertility calls to say, “Hi, me again. I’ve been thinking about you all week. I wanted to ask if it’s against the rules for us to meet. I’d really like to meet you.” Still listening for footsteps, expecting a shadow to fall across the crack of light under the hallway door, I’m lifting the window shade to see if anyone’s on the fire escape. I ask her, what about her friend? Wasn’t she supposed to meet him again today? “Oh, him,” Fertility says. “Yes, I saw him today.” And? “He smells like women’s perfume and hair spray,” Fertility says. “I don’t see what my brother ever saw in him.” The perfume and hair spray were from spraying the roses, but I can’t tell her that. “The other thing is he had chipped red nail polish on his fingernails.” It was red spray paint from me touching up the roses. “And he’s a terrible dancer.” Right now, me getting killed would be redundant. “And his teeth are weird, not rotten, but crooked and little.” You could stab a knife right through my heart and you’d be too late. “And he has these gross little monkey hands.” Right now, getting killed would be a breath of spring. “That’s supposed to mean he has a little wiener dick.” If Fertility keeps talking, my caseworker will have one less client in the morning. “And he’s not obese,” Fertility says, “he’s not a whale, but he’s too fat for me.” In case there’s a sniper outside, I open the blinds and stand my gross obese body in the window. Please, anybody with a rifle and a scope. Shoot me right here. Right in my big fat heart. Right in my little wiener. “He’s not anything like you,” Fertility says. Oh, I think she’d be surprised how much we’re alike. “You’re so mysterious.” I ask, if she could change any one thing about this guy at the mausoleum, what would it be? “Just so he’d quit pestering me,” she says, “I’d kill him.” Well, she’s not alone there. Be my guest. Take a number, and stand in line. “Forget about him,” she says, and her voice is sinking deeper in her throat. “I called because I want to get you off. Tell me what you want me to do. Make me do something terrible.” Opportunity knocks. Here’s the next part of my big plan. This is something I’ll go to Hell for, but I tell her, That guy you don’t like, I want you to go screw his brains out and then tell me what it was like. She says, “No way. No day.” Then I’m hanging up. She says, “Wait. What if I call you and lie? I could just make the whole thing up. You wouldn’t know.” No, I say, I’d know. I could tell. “No way am I going to sleep with that geek.” What if she just kissed him? Fertility says, “No.” What if she just took him out on a date? They could just go out for the afternoon. Get him out of the mortuary and he might look better. Take him on a picnic. Do something fun. Fertility says, “Then will you get together with me?” Definitely.