EMPATHY

They would call it a murder-suicide, though it was never fully understood. Perhaps it was one, actually—in its way. Or perhaps it wasn’t just that Marie empathized with the things at Blue Flamingos...but they with her.

Blue Flamingos Antiques and Collectibles was the name Edwin, Marie’s husband, had given the three-story brick warehouse, and it was a blue-painted lawn flamingo he had placed in the front window beside the blue lava lamp, though he could have as easily called it Pink Elephants or Flying Aardvarks to get his point across.

There were certainly enough traditional antiques to draw serious collectors, and some of them were willing to part with serious money. The vast ground floor was nearly as neatly laid out as a department store, with tables and counters and shelves, corridors built of merchandise. Clean, well-preserved merchandise; this was no flea market. Edwin had had his name, and the name Blue Flamingos, printed in a magazine article last year in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the jukebox. It was tacked up by the cash register, his brief quote on the restoration of jukeboxes circled.

But it was the collectibles rather than the antiques for which the place was best known. The article could indicate that. Edwin was a collector of ‘50s paraphernalia. Art Deco furniture. Old radios; a whole tall shelf just of those in the darker, quieter, somewhat less neat second story. Primitive futuristic TVs, the sad unlit shells of arcade games, the colorless translucent bones of neon signs. Items so odd and unique that people were willing to drive here from Boston sometimes for the chic junk of yesterday. Art Deco, old radios and jukeboxes were always popular, but also there had been the resurgence of interest in the ‘60s, and Blue Flamingos had done well for that. College kids in abundance, no doubt feeling very hip when they punched up old Roy Orbison songs on the gorgeously gaudy replica Wurlitzer 1015 by the counter where you first came in, drawn to it moth-like, like kids in the ‘40s, mindlessly lured by the green, orange, yellow plastic colors, the water bubbles tumbling corpuscle-like through lurid veins. Lights, movement, noise; a carnival in a futuristic sarcophagus, now a sacred American icon...the predecessor of TV, and MTV. Today’s mall mentality served Edwin well. The allure of things.

Marie’s husband knew what they wanted because he loved these things as they did. He might not have been able to part with any of it, jealous collector that he was, if there wasn’t a constant stream of new things coming in to replace those that left. Flea markets, field auctions. He read obituaries, contacted relatives about the possessions of deceased parents and grandparents. College kids and Bostonians didn’t know where to go, and didn’t want the bother of that anyway. They would pay double, triple, more for their cherished junk, while throwing away the stuff they bought in the malls, the treasure of tomorrow’s scavengers.

“It’s like the ultimate attic!” one woman enthused to him at the counter, paying thirty dollars for a Barbie doll Edwin had acquired for five dollars, along with three others in a box of toys at a yard sale.

From across the room, gently dusting a stuffed baby alligator that reared on its hind legs like some mummified miniature dinosaur, now extinct, Marie watched as Edwin smiled and offered some obligatory banalities. Edwin wasn’t very good with small talk, just with the large talk of his drinking companions. Basically, Marie’s husband preferred things to the human beings that made them. But then, who didn’t?

*     *     *

Marie also cherished the many things collected in her husband’s shop, and often felt more pained than he to see them leave. But hers was not the love of a collector. Marie had never collected anything in her life. As a deaf child, living in a school for deaf children during the week and with her mother in a two-room apartment on weekends, she hadn’t had the room—the private space—to accomodate the luxury of collection. Marie was fond of malls in the way she was fond of museums. She loved to drink it all in, then went home full. She was not materialistic. She loved the collectibles and old things because they were bits and pieces of lives. She could see and smell the life—the love, often—still in them, soaked deeply in their pores from the hands of their owners. Now discarded, orphaned by unsentimental survivors of those gone before. They were sad things. Lonely things. Of course, she should feel happy to see them adopted...but she became attached to them, liked to see them all here together in her home. She felt as one with them. She felt empathy with these dustily alive things.

Edwin had disgustedly given in to her pleadings, for a while, to let her keep a certain old doll or teddy bear or children’s book, bring it up to their apartment on the third floor, which for its decor could very easily have been mistaken for part of the store. But now he told her she had enough things, and he had a business to run. He made her feel guilty for her sensitivity, made her wonder if she really had gone overboard with it. He mocked her, for instance, for no longer accompanying him to field auctions because she couldn’t bear to see the boxes of rain-soggy stuffed animals, once warm with children’s hugs, and the rest of the things left for junk in the field after the bidders had picked what they really wanted from the boxes they bought. A corpse-strewn muddy battle field after.

What Marie didn’t tell her husband, however, was that she mostly didn’t accompany him because she sensed that he didn’t really desire her company. No longer offered to buy her a hotdog under the snack pavillion. No longer talked to her on the way home.

You would think that he didn’t know how to communicate with a deaf woman. He had attended classes for signing when they first met five years ago, knew how to sign perfectly well...but that would require him to show too much of an interest in her. His brusque signs now were more like impatient gestures of dismissal than sign language.

It was a rainy October day today, and in fact Edwin was at an auction, so perfectly scheduled for such weather. Marie wandered throughout the second floor, dusting. The shop was tended by Mrs. Morris, who couldn’t sign a jot and thus moved her mouth with ludicrous exaggeration so Marie could read her lips.

Dangling from the high ceiling were antlers and pop guns, catcher’s mitts and musical instruments. Marie worked her way toward the back, dusting the rows of uglier, less artistic steel and glass jukeboxes of the 50’s and 60’s. She had once been afraid to come up here alone, before she had dared to let herself feel this was her home. Now when she occasionally glanced over her shoulder, it was only because she felt Edwin would be standing there, arms crossed, some complaint ready. The sad deer head, the fluorescent, crumbling papier-maché ghoul from a carnival horror ride didn’t mean her any harm.

At the end window, she gazed down at the rain-blurred street. A young couple were running toward the building, his coat spread over both their heads. They were laughing. Marie smiled. Marie herself was only twenty-five. Edwin was a decade older. She wondered if that was part of his change. Maybe he resented her youth. Maybe subconsciously the discard he saw on days like today ate at him too...reminded him of his mortality, and the fact that he would never be remembered as a Barbie doll or Wurlitzer 1015 is remembered.

As she did every day, now that she accepted the fact that her husband no longer loved her, Marie tried to fathom his change. The rain helped her abstract and liberate her thoughts, and to travel back in time.

He had never been a sunny man. She had made the error, as so many women do, of mistaking surliness for sexiness. And his artistic air had been even easier to interpret as romantic. For Edwin’s true desire had been to be a painter. He hadn’t painted in two years. When she first knew him he would still contribute to the town’s annual art show, and sold the occasional piece. But even before Marie had met him he had given up trying to get backing for his own show. Now he had retreated to his world of things, no longer trying to create new things of his own. Maybe, Marie wondered, he even resented his collections for the preservation and interest he and his art would never know in future times. Or maybe vicariously he sought longevity through association. But it was all connected. Art was things too, and it was with mute things that Edwin best interacted. Because he didn’t seek true interaction. He just wanted to paint himself into an environment worthy of his complex identity. He had boasted to one drinking buddy that he was a cross between Salman Rushdie and Cat Stevens. He was misunderstood, and played that angry song by the Animals on the bogus Wurlitzer frequently.

Marie hurriedly finished up so she could dust downstairs, and steal peeks at the attractive young couple. They didn’t notice her at first, so stealthy was she in her own silence, but the girl gave her a glance. The boy gave her a glance and a second glance with a smile tossed in. Marie was beautiful—dark-haired, full-lipped, the lips ever sealed into a unit, it seemed, though she could speak in her difficult way when she occasionally chose. Large-breasted, small and slender. God, in his wise guy’s wisdom, had given her all but the ability to hear. She would have deflated her breasts for that. But then, would Edwin have married her, had she been less attractive, though hearing? She doubted it, these days. Doubted it severely. Simply because his passion for her body was as strong now as it had been five years ago. He held onto her in his private collection for that reason alone.

Maybe he had collected her for that reason alone in the first place, though now he was better able to cut his motivation down to its reality, uncluttered by pretenses to love and affection. Yes—maybe he had never loved her. Watching the couple leave the store, Marie had tears in her eyes. No, he loved me, part of her countered desperately, almost panicking at the thought. But he’s grown more and more bitter with life. He’s close to me, and that’s why he can take it out on me.

Did she believe that? She certainly wanted to. But in recent months, she had come to feel that she had always been just another blue flamingo in Edwin’s collection. A glorified, extra realistic blow-up doll you didn’t need to talk to, who couldn’t voice complaint. A beautiful mannequin, to be put away with the rest of the attic treasures when not in use.

Deaf friends Marie had known in school, but now lost track of, had been feisty, taught to be independent and bold. But in others, the world crushed that, like a tank over a foot soldier. Friday, for instance, Marie had driven to the market to do the weekly grocery shopping. On the way to and from, impatient drivers cut her off, road her tail, swore at her and thumped their wheels in frustration at her careful driving. In the store, she had to ask the man at the deli counter a question three times in order to read his lips, and she had read at last, “What are you, stupid?” A woman banged her hip with her cart without apology. Another, whose cart blocked the way, wouldn’t move it when Marie asked, forcing her to move the woman’s cart herself, in a rare act of strength. Another woman had glared and actually pulled her child away when Marie patted its head. It was all just little things. But so many, and every day. This was common life. They could do this, though they would hate to have it done to them. They simply did not empathize with one another, so obsessed were they with their own destinations and needs and desires.

And handicaps didn’t bring out the best in people, she knew...but the worst. They activated the pecking order syndrome. The abolition of the weak, the mutant. They couldn’t empathize with that, because they didn’t want to see themselves as that. Acknowledge their frailty and mortality. So it was now also with the handicap of age. Old things were hip, but old people weren’t. The mutely strutting models on MTV were desirable objects, but not the silent reality. Edwin had once told Marie, when drunk and lofty-mouthed, that Renoir nudes didn’t sweat, didn’t have periods. Marie remembered that now and cemented her conviction once and for all.

Which hurt, because, either out of programmed masochism or simply the need to feel important to at least one person in this world, Marie still loved him.

*     *     *

It had taken Marie a while to figure out why she had such empathy for the stuffed alligator. Her feelings for the toys and knick-knacks made more sense. Maybe because it had once been truly alive. And a baby, too. But there was a stuffed iquana, gray, its mouth filled with red-painted plaster, and some trophy heads of higher animals. It had to be that the thing was so shocking to see, its condition so cruelly unnatural and humiliating. The alligator was positioned so as to stand on its hind legs and tail, a foot tall that way. In its out-stretched arms, like Oliver Twist, it proffered a wooden bowl, presumably as a change holder. Maybe candy, depending on its artist’s perversity. Its hands were fastened to the bowl with crucifying nails. In its fanged grin it clamped the end of a red light bulb. It was a table lamp. It was the bizarre and grotesque lengths someone had gone to that so disgusted Marie, and made her hurt for the thing. Like a shrunken head, or a lamp shade made from a Jew. A blasphemous work of art.

With the ball of her thumb she lightly wiped the dust from its black, unblinking eyes. She fantasized about burying it. Looking up, she was startled to see Edwin there smiling at her derisively. He was late back from the auction, and he’d been drinking already. “I’ll cry the day I have to part with that beauty,” he told her, though not in sign language. “I should just take it upstairs.”

“It’s horrible and sick,” Marie signed to him. She hadn’t wanted to use the intimate awkwardness of her voice with him for weeks now.

“I saw you mooning over it. Don’t get disgusted at me; I didn’t kill the thing.” Edwin joined Mrs. Morris behind the counter. “I’ve loved that thing since I saw it,” he told the older woman. “Freaky.”

“You like the freaky, Ed,” she replied distractedly, otherwise occupied. Though she didn’t exaggerate her mouth’s movements, Marie could read her lips.

“When I was young you could still go to a carnival and see those deformed babies in bottles they called pickled punks, before somebody made a stink about transporting dead bodies over state lines. If I could find any of them today, I’d buy them and put them upstairs for sure. How’s that for freaky?”

“Yuck.”

“Marie.” He looked up at her. “I’m wet; go make me a cup of coffee, will ya?” He was good-naturedly ugly from drinking and from coming back empty-handed from the hunt.

Marie didn’t doubt at this moment that Edwin would also buy a shrunken head or a lamp shade of human skin if he could find them. She set aside her feather duster to go upstairs.

Freaky, her mind echoed.

*     *     *

The smell of sex always seemed to repulse Edwin afterwards, so he went to take one of his long, languid baths with a paperback and a Scotch Marie brought him. She left him to go down into the store, to sit by the shelf of old books and read in her own manner...maybe to fill the void of emptiness inside her with something at least dustily alive.

She chose a book she had browsed through repeatedly recently, a volume of poetry by Thomas Hardy. There was a poem there she had read last time, and she looked for it again. As she flipped through, she glanced up at the alligator standing on the glass counter beside her. She felt the strange desire to change the red bulb to a normal one, and have the creature light her reading for her. An intimacy rather than an exploitation. She didn’t do it. She had found the poem: “The Mongrel.”

The rain droned on still outside as Marie read, Mrs. Morris long gone home, to discover the bodies tomorrow upon her return.

The poem told the story of a man who could no longer afford to keep his dog, and so threw a stick into the ocean to trick it into drowning itself. The dog’s naive trust and love showed in its eyes as it bravely tried to paddle back to shore, the stick in its mouth. Finally it succumbed, however, sucked under by a strong current...but in dying, and realizing the treachery of its master in the face of its own unswerving loyalty, a look of contempt for the whole human race came into its eyes. Like a curse, wrote Hardy.

Marie empathized with the dog.

She shut the book. The salt in her tears burned the vulnerable surfaces of her eyes. She was moments from being swept under. Now she allowed herself to feel the hatred she had been repressing. It felt like a curse.

Marie rested a hand on her thigh.  In Maine, as a child, when she was still considered retarded rather than deaf, a babysitter had purposely ground her heel into the top of that hand while Marie was playing on the floor.

And the thigh under her hand—Edwin even now would still kiss it, run his tongue along it.  But he had also crushed that thigh in his hand recently while they were in the car, so enraged had he become at her driving.  He hadn’t hit her—yet.  Marie felt that first blow moving toward her through time.  The bruises from his grip had taken days to fade.

Marie closed the book, slid it back into the shelf. At a table close by, she stood and gazed down at the unique items spread there. A tarnished pocket watch. Costume jewelry. Several ivory-handled straight razors, the blades old and brittle but still frighteningly sharp...

She sat back down beside the glass counter where the alligator stood, an array of African tribal masks hanging above it like an audience of spirits. Marie didn’t mind their company. They were a comfort, in fact. They could lead her away, if they wanted. She rolled up the sleeves of her bathrobe, hating the smell of sex on her now also, and anxious to escape it. She wanted to drown like the dog, in salt tears. In blood. She cursed the frail impermanence of humankind, which caused so much greedy fear. She would have plenty of time to let this happen; Edwin would remain in the tub for two hours or more, soaking himself outside and in. She reached out to the alligator...somewhat guiltily...and flicked on its bulb for the first time.  Red pupils of light were reflected in the animal’s ebon eyes, and the dark glow would hopefully wash out her own vivid color when it came...but it was intimacy, not exploitation.

*     *     *

Mrs. Morris found Marie, and the horror of it made her scream. Pale as she was, Marie looked like a mannequin propped in her chair. Mrs. Morris called out for Edwin, and bolted upstairs to wake him...where she screamed a second time.

It was a perverse way to kill a man, the police said when they came. As perverse in imagination as the creation of that lamp in the first place. First they found a wooden bowl in the threshold of the bathroom. Then in the tub they observed the male corpse. He had died by electrocution, the cord of the lamp plugged into an outlet close at hand. But rather than simply toss the alligator lamp in there with him, the woman had gone to the trouble of stabbing the nails which protruded from the creature’s palms into the sides of her husband’s neck, so that it seemed to be strangling him.

But the sequence of all this was confusing. There was no great splashing of blood in the bathroom, so she had had to have slit her wrists after the electrocution. How, then, or when, had the woman managed that other bizarre flourish...that of wetting the hind feet of the alligator in her blood, and tracking its prints up two flights of stairs and on into the bathroom?

“Freaky,” the policemen said, in disgust of her.

—For Rose