A SHORT STORY

“It is better to travel alone than with a bad companion.”—African proverb

BREATH, VISIBLE

AT AN UNGODLY HOUR on Christmas Eve morning Dora Bauer waved off the doorman startled from his drowse when she left her building. In the winter dark she hiked to Fifth Avenue and hailed a cab. Dora’s spontaneous friendliness belied her cynical nature but a New York City cabdriver saw through that. Strange men often did. As the driver sped down the deserted avenue past holiday window displays in darkened department stores they talked about President Ford’s message to their bankrupt city. “We got the bail out alright,” he said, “but that guy’s goose is cooked fer shuah.” As native New Yorkers he and his passenger shared a certain laissez-faire attitude and they laughingly agreed that being told to drop dead sort of came with the territory.

Until they swept past the towering illuminated evergreen in Rockefeller Center their chatter remained impersonal. He informed her that usually the lights were off by midnight except for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Then they were kept on for 24 hours. He said she was lucky and she told him of her Atlantic City getaway and the reasons for it. The driver steered through Times Square and let her off on Eighth Avenue amidst the swirling trash and the few vagrants huddled inside the entrance to Port Authority. The famously sordid strip along 42^nd Street looked more ominous in the freezing predawn emptiness. “Take care a yourself,” he admonished. “There’s a lotta lunatics out there.”

Lowering a bulky floral-patterned carpetbag Dora Bauer balanced it on the tips of her Timberland boots and thus avoided contact with an unwashed cement floor scabbed with spent chewing gum and more recent, sadly recognizable, fluids. Quickly she jammed raw-knuckled bare hands back into the deep pockets of her pea coat. She buried her nose into a knitted multicolored scarf—a thrift shop find. The Greyhound bus terminal at that hour, at any hour, was like a tomb. She was waiting for the hound from hell.

Dora had told neither her friends nor a disparate handful of lovers of her plans. She lied to her old aunt and said she had been invited to friends ‘in the country,’ knowing full well she could never be rusticated. The rest would have tried to talk her out of such a gloomy escapade, coax her to their gourmet holiday dinners, or guilt her into joining a lonesome drunken despair in the Village on a barstool in Julius alongside a bereft handful of gay patrons, she even more conspicuous than usual. Worse, some might not have made any overture at all, avoiding the emotional conundrum for casual lovers at Christmas time. She would be poor Dora, newly divorced and alone at the holiday. They would cry: “Oh, such a desolate place! Atlantic City in the winter?” And they would be right. She bought her ticket two weeks ago so as not to change her mind. Dora wanted desolation.

It was well past two in the morning when she left her studio. She had indulged possibly too freely in a bottle of Maker’s Mark as she applied the finishing touches to a canvas. Mindful of a bourbon brume she biked with care up the quieter route of Park Avenue. Back at her apartment there was only time for a shower and a quick change. She’d had to scramble to pack her bag with the essentials: her journal, a thick volume of Proust and a few slimmer ones of poetry; pens, yellow legal pads, extra sweater, woolen socks, bottle of bourbon and a pack of Dunhill Reds. Folded into clean underwear were a couple of freshly rolled joints.

Dora chose a seat nearest to the driver. To move back any further and closer to the lone grizzled passenger hacking into his wilted handkerchief would have been foolish. She had a lot to think about. The bus looped along the exit ramp toward a sliver of light beneath the darkness. It reeked of stale reminders of previous passengers and sweetly synthetic air freshener. She had two-and-a-half hours to think about a recent proposal, and two days of seaside ahead of her. But first she might just allow herself a doze.

The mechanical squeal and then wheezing exhale of brakes woke her when the bus stopped outside the terminal. Dora poked her head into a foul smelling restroom. She thought better of tramping over the grimy waterlogged floor and, hiking the cumbersome bag over her shoulder, hurried to the main drag in Atlantic City.

Her first thought as she scoured Atlantic Avenue was that it was too damned early. The big round face of the clock outside of the jewelers shone through a bracing drizzle. It was not yet nine in the morning. Shops that weren’t boarded up offered nothing in the way of breakfast, and besides, nothing was open. There was an old-fashioned hardware store and a dress shop window display of bewigged manikins that had seen better days. Next door was an income tax preparer and then the last resort of the desperate, a pawnbroker. She squeezed between boat-sized cars with tail fins like sharks and crossed an oily tarmac streaked with slush. A blue and gray bubble—a dwarfish bus—pulled off the road toward her but Dora waved the jitney driver on. Her head was throbbing, her face was frozen, and she was desperate for coffee. Starting for the boardwalk her spirit revived. From what she remembered everything could be found there. Her heart was set on getting a room at the grand Marlboro-Blenheim hotel.

Crossing Pacific Avenue, the main thoroughfare parallel to the Atlantic Ocean and at that hour nearly devoid of traffic, she ignored another jitney. Her attention was drawn to the crumbling buildings, vacant lots hemorrhaging sodden debris and shops that may or may not open on an otherwise abandoned strip. The memory of a lively summer crowd carrying their kitschy treasure from souvenir shops was difficult to evoke. It looked like the kind of place rope-necked thugs would shake down cowed shop owners. Dora, rattled, hurried along.

Once on the boardwalk she was buoyed up by the sight of a familiar image on a bright yellow billboard, an unexpected window in a dull winter sky. Shivering in the raw dampness, the incongruity of a half-naked curly blonde moppet with a Coppertone tan and her mischievous puppy was not lost on Dora. “Get more from the sun,” it advertised. She recognized the domed, architecturally ornate Moorish structure ahead—something out of an Arabian dream—rising above the boardwalk, bigger even than she remembered. Another gargantuan hotel nearby loomed like an asylum. But in the freezing mist the chimneys of the Marlborough-Blenheim conjured mystery, maybe even danger, and not the rather more welcoming sun-baked hotel she remembered

Early on in the marriage—nearly seven years ago—Dora was determined to live up to her husband’s single-minded whirlwind courtship of her and she accompanied him on an overnight to Atlantic City. She’d sat raptly attentive in an audience of scientists as he delivered a paper that was incomprehensible to her and which she knew only had something to do with toad bladders. She’d been dazzled by his determination, his education and radical political views and his family’s Park Avenue residence. She hadn’t so much as accepted his marriage proposal as offered little resistance. His parents, as far as she knew, were not aware of her existence until after they were married. Visits to the sprawling art-filled apartment were made sporadically if the doctor and his wife were absent. The young couple’s late-night presence among the Eames chairs and the antique marble and gold leaf, a small but not insignificant collection of Italian master drawings, handmade killims, and the abundant examples of his mother’s cloisonné handiwork was noticed only by the doorman and the live-in housekeeper who noiselessly interrupted amorous fondling to ask if he—not they—needed anything before she retired for the night. Dora should have suspected his insistence on elopement was less a nod to anti-establishment and more of what was to come. She can’t make the rent and he sends bad checks. Stamping her feet on the boardwalk, Dora pulled the knitted scarf over her nose. “Bastard,” she muttered under her breath.

The sign on the door of the luncheonette flipped to “open” and a huddle of matriarchs wrapped in cloth coats not nearly warm enough for the weather pushed their way past the gray-faced gentleman too old to be a soda jerk. He was wearing a not-so-white apron, tiny black bow tie and a white fountain cap with red piping; a weary nod to authenticity. Dora followed close behind and ordered a cup of coffee, steaming hot coffee that the obliging man kept pouring. Oddly, she was not hungry and tapped a cigarette from its red and gold box. Neither she nor the women removed their coats in the unheated shop. The women kept a scarf securely tied around each wooly hat. Dora didn’t have a hat. Seated on a stool at the counter some distance away from them she could make out a cheap-jeweled snowman pinned to a rabbit fur collar, its tiny red nose alight

Later she stood outside the Marlborough-Blenheim hotel and weighed her options. There were really only two. She could head back to the station and board the next bus home or she could take the desk clerk’s suggestion and seek out his cousin’s motel. Hesitancy in the man’s voice was something to consider. He’d told her there were no rooms available in the hotel because it was out-of-season. When Dora pressed he said there were no rooms available in any of the hotels on the boardwalk. She saw evidence, albeit slim, of guests slumped in tatty upholstered wing chairs or slowly wheeling their walkers over the Oriental carpet. An aging bellboy in a dark blue uniform shiny with use, his too short pants exposing white tube socks and black lace up orthopedic shoes, stared dumbly at the quiet bank of elevators. Gift shops she’d passed in the hotel’s lengthy corridor still displayed crystal sailing ships and cast iron statues of baseball players. Sensing her confusion, the clerk admitted that a few residents remained, but the hotel was no longer taking guests. He shrugged and said it would all be torn down soon anyway.

Dora, undeterred, had taken a second glance around the circular lobby as if to challenge his news. Little white letters were missing from summer convention schedules still tacked to a ribbed black board: As ury P k, Ca den. There were almost no gaps where room keys hung like skeletal fingers. Dark pigeonholes behind the desk held no mail. The fireplaces were unlit. Walls and curtains had faded to the same aquatic shade; more poorly maintained pool than surging ocean. Another peek at the floor suggested her carpetbag was in better shape than the rug.

The clerk’s parting words rang in her ears: “It’s gonna be the only room you’ll get around here if you insist on staying.” He’d directed her further down the boardwalk, much further. Dora stared ahead at the choppy slate-colored ocean looking for a natural resolution to her dilemma. Naive bravery directed her, the heaving Atlantic Ocean on her right and crumbling dreams on her left, until she found the place. Paint peeled like sunburn from its pink exterior. She knew it was cheap. She also had a vague suspicion that guests booked rooms by the hour.

Dora Bauer stood before the man at the desk who seemed taken aback by her appearance while she explained who had sent her there. Her long honey-blonde hair hung in damp plaits over her shoulders. Her cheeks shone brightly from winter’s vigorous caress. He watched as she unwound the ridiculously long scarf from her neck, unbuttoned her pea coat, and revealed a red plaid flannel shirt. His gaze went first to her snug jeans, and then dropped to the bulging carpetbag alongside her sturdy boots ringed with salt. She was twenty-eight. She assured him she wanted a room for two nights and handed him the cash. When she spotted a manual typewriter atop a pile of damp-cured telephone books and asked if she could borrow it while she was there he was too stunned to say no and hoisted it into her waiting arms.

The room was dark. Impulsively, Dora reached for the drapes. In the rear of the motel were trashcans choked with empty liquor bottles. She dropped her hand and quickly returned to the light switch by the door. A dubious space heater in the bathroom doorway was the first thing she noticed in the stark, dimly lit room. A cautious peek revealed a portable shower she was certain never to set foot in, a stained sink and a toilet covered with a wrinkled paper strap that was supposed to be reassuring. It was not. A utilitarian blonde-wood table and chair reminded her of her own little desk when she was a girl. There was no sign of a television. No mirror in the room. Hanging above the double bed was a dime store seascape.

Music came from somewhere; from a radio or perhaps a cassette recorder in another room: “You got your demons. You got desires. Well, I got a few of my own.” Recognizing the Eagles song, Dora smiled and began emptying the contents of her bag onto the flimsy chenille bedspread. She started to unscrew the bourbon bottle and thought better of it. Suddenly she was very hungry.

Ravenous, Dora ordered from a younger man behind the counter at the luncheonette—a boy really—his hairless face scarred by acne. It was too late for the breakfast special he told her and she, big spender, waved off his concern. Where was she from he asked and she told him New York. “Goin’ back home tonight then?” Dora shook her head. He frowned. “Not goin’ home for Christmas?” On the wall behind him was a decorative serving tray illustrated with an apple-cheeked Santa raising a bottle of Coca Cola. As if she needed to be reminded. Her prospects were dashed when he revealed that the luncheonette would be closed on Christmas Day. He reassured her that she could still get dinner that night if she was back there by five o’clock, maybe later depending on the customers. Head lowered over her plate, avoiding what she thought was a barefaced appraisal of her, Dora wolfed down bacon and eggs. She tipped the young man and said she’d see him later.

By the third sighting of the massive Convention Center, which was her sign to turn around and head back toward her motel, Dora knew that strip of the boardwalk; Fralinger’s salt water taffy, Planter’s Peanuts, a deserted pier. It was, after all, the longest boardwalk in the country—maybe even the world—and Dora figured though she had not gone the actual full length of it, she had already walked at least that far in her determined circumnavigation. By the fifth go around she was nodding slightly to some of the same people doing the same thing: walking, walking and more walking. The old women walked slowly in pairs, some as a trio, their arms interlocked. Perhaps they feared falling. A newcomer is advised what things she’ll need in the summer. Some of the men, also seniors, strolled in pairs. Some walked alone but a modest show of recognition was made in passing. One couple of indeterminable gender eyed her with curiosity. Dora tried to imagine the place heaving with vacationers, children with broiled shoulders, the smell of suntan lotion hanging heavily on salty breezes sweetened with cotton candy. But the air was frigid and smelled only of churning sea. The auctions were silenced; no sign of a toaster, clock radio, blender, or iron. Street lamps arched over the boardwalk like underweight giants with humps. The gray-green of the sky fell into the sea. Waves broke loudly, a never-ending accompaniment to her footfall. The fire-engine-red facade of Banko Games was a shock to the colorless canvas of winter.

Dora paused on the boardwalk at a row of wooden benches backed by the sea. She decided to sit for a moment and, like a seagull eyeing a scrap of food, let her mind alight on why she’d come here. She was done thinking about her marriage—that sinister lie. She was an artist again, a painter, and it was time to find a way to sustain that reality. Perhaps a recent proposal was the way out for her.

Dr. Jack O’Hanlon. It was not hard to reconcile the Catholic schoolboy—a taut equivocal teenager managed by priests—with the meticulously and expensively dressed man. Jack was her first serious boyfriend. When Dora dumped him after high school he was distraught. She’d moved on. Apparently so did he, right into the psychiatric profession. In a drugstore near the hospital complex where her husband had a lab she’d overheard the pharmacist address a familiar looking red-haired man in front of her as Dr. O’Hanlon. After a discomfited fumble for pat phrases about looking well and not having changed a bit, they exchanged phone numbers. He called. She was already separated. Could he see her? And pretty soon he was in her studio, listening to her as she prattled on about her misconceived marriage, her passionate commitment to her art, her lack of money. He had money. He made an offer. Dora stretched her legs and rose with a start. She had no watch. The sudden dark made her hurry back to the luncheonette.

Inside it was warmer than it had been that morning. Elderly patrons, slouched over the counter, took up all but one of the stools. It was like a meeting of the gnarled victims of osteoporosis replete with the smokers’ cloud. She slid onto the vacant seat. Barely able to suppress his elation the same young man hurried to take her order. He was maybe 15 or 16, a tall drink of water as her uncle would say. His white coat was unbuttoned, revealing a blue and green paisley shirt, top three buttons undone. Around his neck hung a weighty gold chain. A huge medallion shone from his chest. She stared at the balance scales engraved on the medallion. “Libra?” she asked. “Yes!” He said he was really good with people, able to see both sides of a situation. “What about you?” he asked. She told him she was a Leo and without quite knowing why she added, smiling: “It gets me into trouble.” He frowned a little at that. “What’ll you have?” Dora asked for a grilled cheese and a coke. “Just plain?” he asked. “How about some bacon or a tomato?” “Nope, just a plain grilled cheese.” When he returned with her embellished sandwich he placed it before her and said, “It’s Christmas Eve, you should at least have a tomato.” He winked. “On me.”

She’d left with a bagful of snacks: potato chips, pretzels, one of those toy sand pails filled with salt water taffy, and a small carton of milk. Dora was touched that he’d remembered their earlier conversation, such as it was. She felt looked after. Heartened, she decided to call her aunt. She had a pocketful of coins he’d changed for her. There was a pay phone just outside the motel.

“Uncle Frank. It’s me, Dora.” After the first tentative hello from him there was silence at the other end of the line. He was forgetful and prone to staring blankly. It drove her aunt crazy. “Uncle…?” Hey, Dorrie,” he croaked. “How’s my girl. Your aunt is at mass, I think. Where are you hon?” She said she was in Atlantic City and before he could ask she told him she just wanted to be on her own. She was okay. Fine, really. “Hey, Uncle Frank. Listen to this.” She held the receiver in the air. “Can you hear the ocean?” He said he could. Where was she again?

Hunched over the typewriter, Dora peeled a sheet of yellow legal paper from the machine and added it to the jumble beside her. She’d dragged the little table to the edge of the bed. Proust had been abandoned because she could not ignore the rather less refined drama outside her door. Rimbaud and Baudelaire met the same fate. The unread paperbacks lay among the contents of her bag strewn on the bed. She took another swig of bourbon, left the bottle uncapped and lit up a Dunhill. Warmed by the alcohol she was finally able to discard the woolen scarf.

The noise outside her room was getting louder. Doors slammed. Shouting that sounded like argument or joviality—she couldn’t tell half the time—was ceaseless. Sometimes it seemed like voices changed sooner than hourly. Barry White’s deep bass oozed through the thin walls. Earlier there had been vigorous banging on her door. A man’s voice hollered to let him in. She ignored it and carefully wedged the only chair under the doorknob. “Sheila!” he yelled, “You ain’t changed your mind?” Dora shouted at the top of her lungs: “Wrong room!” He was instantly pacified and mumbled an apology. A few seconds later she heard him further down the corridor, banging on another door looking for Sheila.

Dora was getting nowhere with the letter to her potential benefactor. Myriad versions had rolled through the typewriter. She argued with herself over the letter’s tone; should she be warmly appreciative or coolly nonchalant? He could be playing with her, all that history. And how to make perfectly clear this would be strictly a business arrangement. Jack had taken her to dinner a few times to a few different places; all expensively intimate venues. He enjoyed her surprise when waiters deferred to him and he quietly boasted that he owned those restaurants in addition to a thriving practice. But evening’s end brought a rebuff from her when he suggested something more. She told him she wasn’t ready yet. The divorce. It was too soon.

But, in fact, Dora had been game the moment she’d decided her marriage was over.

In the freezing bathroom she inhaled on a joint. Not that she imagined anyone on the other side of her door would notice. The pungent aroma had been hanging around all night. She was only adding to it. Stoned, she settled on the bed against an impossibly underweight pillow, reluctant to discover what lurked between the sheets. She remained dressed, bundled in a thick sweater and removed only her shoes. She’d added a second pair of socks and draped her coat across her lap. Oh, she had lovers; made up for lost time all right. She debated retrieving the bourbon bottle. Popping a pretzel into her mouth she rolled the salty nugget with her tongue.

Maybe that was the problem. Despite his offer to bankroll her artistic pursuit Jack did not seem to get the work. He even admitted to it, finding it odd that she, a self-professed painter, had used only graphite on primed linen canvas. He thought the draughtsmanship—was that the word—superb, but why no color he asked? He was only a little less bemused when she’d explained the point of the series. It was called “Tagasode.” Some 16^th century Japanese panels exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum had inspired Dora. Paintings of lavish kimonos heedlessly left behind evoked a stronger image of the person than the owner’s actual presence. Tagasode literally meant “Whose sleeves?”

He asked her to describe each canvas. What, or more specifically whom, the articles of clothing represented but she put him off. “That would be undermining the point of the series,” she retorted. “Well,” Jack quipped, “it’s certainly a departure from your dead flowers.”

When he first viewed her work he asked bluntly what she was afraid of. At the time, off putting as his question was, she attributed the remark to his role as a psychiatrist. He probably couldn’t help himself. But the question came back to her. Was she afraid? And what was she afraid of? She was on her own in Atlantic City wasn’t she? Her list of lovers was long and varied, some might even say indiscriminate. Perhaps the monochromatic drawings of dead flowers—blown up images on canvases as large as 6-foot-square—were a bit on the gothic side. Thorny roses with titles like “Misgivings” and “Things Past.”

An artist works through the pain. The articles of clothing she immortalized, left behind freely or mistakenly, which became subjects for the series, were proof that she had triumphed over romanticized love. She was in control, free of the messy color of relationships. Each was titled with a single initial: “D” graced her with his Burberry raincoat, explaining to his long-term girlfriend that he had left it in a bar somewhere, so enthralled was he that Dora wanted to portray their “secret” affair. Fragile and aristocratic, he was drawn to Dora’s streetwise nature, her humble origins. “K” was his unsuspecting roommate who, while never imagining Dora was monogamous, would have been crushed to learn of her affair with D. He loaned her a tattered sweater, which he felt represented his life as a penurious philosopher. The leather bomber jacket came from “T.” Irish, journalist, bisexual, he was mad about Dora. She rivaled his passion, energy, and devotion to craft. She could also hold her own in any topical argument and match him drink for drink. “C” was another painter in her group of friends, a handsome Black man, obscenely talented and given to elegant dress. They’d let things go too far. He was married to a woman Dora adored. He’d left her with a white linen handkerchief. “A” she met in St. Marks Books, in the poetry section. After some hours of marvelously convoluted conversation at the bar in the Lion’s Head they spent one drunken night together. The Argentine student left his paisley scarf behind. “J”—a woman—was probably not speaking to her. Dora would heal that breach at some point but meanwhile J had left her brown sweater behind and that would do. “P” was her ex-husband’s best friend. Dora’s cross-country getaway happened in the unraveling year before their separation. At her husband’s suggestion she stayed with P. in Laguna Beach. He thought the trip would be good for her. By then she knew her absence would be good for him. More out of some kind of revenge, she’d slept with P. His tagasode was the only departure; a roach clip she filched from an ashtray. Another “C” was a comedy writer. He was the only cynic among her lovers and he’d fallen in love with the unattainable Dora. She had just finished his prized Chicago Cubs t-shirt.

Dora woke with a start. Her limbs were stiff, her mouth a dank cave of dry patches. Dazed, she looked around, gauging her surroundings. A chink of light split the drapes. She had no idea what time it was. The last thing she remembered was that the hallway ruckus had quieted down and she closed her eyes to Elton John singing “Someone saved my life tonight…”

Dora stood at the edge of the ocean, where the tide lapped the tips of her boots. She’d left the mess in her room, doubting the motel had room service. The sleepy stranger at the desk only nodded when she said she’d be back in a bit. Just going for a walk, she sang and waved her key at him.

A low, blustery sky behind the pier in the distance, a scene not airy enough to be a Turner, reminded her more of the Dutch Masters; dense, low, sardonic clouds. The gritty beach was the same color as the squealing dirty gulls reprimanding her for coming empty-handed. The sun was already quite low in the sky. Dora dragged her shoe in the hard sand, forming Jack’s initials, the natural resolution she was always looking for when all else failed.

She caught a last glimpse of the sun as it shed a roseate glow over the blackened pier. Maybe it was time for color. Her friend Greg had begged her to make a subject of his red jacket. They were not lovers, Dora and Greg. He was gay. But their close friendship had allowed him to finally come out. Maybe it was time for oil paints and turpentine again. Maybe it was time for color.

The rough bluster of the incoming tide caused her to jump back. The initials had been washed away. It was fucking freezing and Dora laughed out loud. Her breath hung before her like an illusory curtain to be parted.

On the boardwalk she stopped to call her aunt again. “Where are you?” her aunt demanded. “I’m in Atlantic City! Didn’t Uncle Frank tell you?” “Oh, my Lord,” she moaned, “Frankie did tell me. I thought he was crazy and I yelled at him for that.” Dora laughed and soon they were both laughing. “When are coming home, hon?” “Soon Aunt Fran,” she replied, “I’ll see you soon.” “Wait,” her aunt cried, “I want to hear the ocean too.”

The milk carton was gone from the windowsill where she had left it to keep cold. Dora still had an unopened bag of chips. That would do until she got home. She left the unfinished bottle of bourbon on the table. The pail of taffy she would give to her aunt. She dropped the typewriter on the counter before the bewildered clerk. Adjusting a much lighter bag on her shoulder, Dora Bauer waved good-bye. She’d wait at the bus station for the next bus home. She had plenty to read. One would be leaving soon enough.

BREATH, VISIBLE is an original short story by Linda Danz.

STORIES ON THE AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business organizations, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The use of names of actual persons, places, and events is incidental to the plot, and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. ©December 2009.