Shame
by Franz Jørgen Neumann
“Again?”
I ignore Ellie and choose a pair of thick wool socks from my favorite vendor’s cart. Two pairs, since we’re taking the subway.
“They’re supposed to suffer a little,” she says.
“Can we not?” I say. “Anniversary and all?”
We take the C line, car 5. Car 4 has the guy who does things with his feces, which would only give Ellie the upper hand. In contrast, the prisoner behind the Plexi at the end of car 5 is tidy. The name plate outside his clear cell has been defaced, but he looks like a Hank. I look at Hank’s bare feet, a size 10 or so, and feed a pair of socks through the slot. I take a seat at the other end of the car beside Ellie.
“Proud of yourself?” she says.
At our stop we head up and cut across the park. A breeze is walking fallen sycamore leaves across the grass. They make it a few feet then trip. Last year we were still holding hands in places like this.
The BBQ joint is crowded, but I’ve made a reservation. Halfway through our meal, I get up.
“Don’t,” Ellie says, pausing her rib-nibbling.
“Just the bathroom,” I say.
But on the way out of the john, seeing that Ellie has her back to me, I approach the clear cell in the corner and slip the second pair of socks through the slot. A boy comes over from one of the restaurant’s tables and pushes his plate of leftovers into the slot. The prisoner—the name plate reads “Vegan Vernon”—pulls in the donations, but pushes the plate back out, minus a buttermilk biscuit. I feel a warm satisfaction as Vernon puts on the thick gray socks. I’m wearing the same pair.
After dinner, Ellie and I check out an art gallery down the street. The artist is sitting at the entrance looking glum. In the back, in a clear cell, an incarcerated man sings the artist’s praises.
“Look at that kaleidoscope of color! Not since Monet! Look at those bold lines! Not since Picasso! Holy shit what a genius this guy is!”
Ellie and I disagree on whether the man’s excitement is genuine (me) or ironic (Ellie).
“He get a percentage?” Ellie asks the artist as we exit.
“Five percent,” he mutters, then thanks us for coming to his show.
We hit ten years not long ago. Not our anniversary—that’s only been two years—but the prisoner integration anniversary. For the most part, I guess I’m for it? It returns the incarcerated back into society, allowing the rewards of living a law-abiding life to be impressed upon prisoners from their vantage points in restaurants, subway cars, offices, factory floors, college classrooms—you name it. They’re trialing clear cells in private residences. We have a spare room, but I haven’t broached the topic with Ellie yet.
Ellie is laid off the following month. With the loss of her income, I’m emboldened.
“Better than a roommate,” I say. “And the government payments are generous.”
She makes that Teutonic face.
“The clear cell won’t even take up the whole room.” I hold out my arms at ninety degrees, imagining the cell’s contours. “And there’ll still be space for them,” I say, nodding to the bookshelf filled with Ellie’s grandmother’s Hummel figurines. I can see she’s wholly uninterested.
“For how long?” she says, picking up our conversation after several weeks of unsuccessful job hunting. Money is tight; she has begun looking into what the Hummel figurines might fetch.
“Just until we’re back on our feet,” I say.
First there’s Xavier, who cries all the time and brings us down. He lasts a week. Anand is bossy and demands access to our TV. We barely tolerate his weekend-long trial. Finally, Merv. He’s exactly what I envisioned—quiet and polite. He makes such a good impression on Ellie that she agrees we should sign on for the remainder of his sentence.
Merv spends a good deal of his time reading books we push through the slot. He doesn’t make trouble for the weekly custodians, either, who come to empty the pot, do a steam-clean, give him a fresh jumpsuit, and provide the occasional haircut and shave.
I now feel that Ellie and I are growing again as a couple. Merv has noticed that we’re growing as a couple, too—Ellie especially, he’s said. It’s incredibly helpful to have the corroboration of an outsider. He’s like a therapist who pays us. “You both are the nicest,” he often says, which gets me every time. He’s thankful that Ellie has volunteered to launder his jumpsuit and underclothes every couple of days, and thankful that she didn’t take offense when he asked if the Hummel figurines might be turned away from the clear cell. I don’t blame him. They give me the creeps, those plump, rosy-cheeked children in lederhosen and peasant skirts, caps and scarves, living in some Northern European land as cold as the porcelain is to the touch. The Hummels all stare out with parted lips as though in mid-song, which I suppose is a song recognizing their freedom to be experiencing robust, happy childhoods, at least representationally. If, like Merv, your childhood wasn’t anything like that, then those Hummels are a nightmare.
Merv is especially thankful that we’ve included him in our Friday night movie nights—and that he often gets the deciding vote. We bring in the bean bags and the projector and kill the lights. He’s a tender soul. Once I caught him reaching through the slot and holding Ellie’s hand at a particularly scary bit in a movie. He doesn’t like popcorn, though. To each his own.
Given Merv’s exemplary behavior, he could be granted custodian-status parole this year.
I know Merv hasn’t had it easy; he spent the first five years of his sentence in fast food joints, begging at the slot for scraps. Then he was transferred to a 24-hour fitness place, the weight-lifting corner. The lifters adopted him as their mascot and donated protein shakes from the gym bar. They slipped him weightlifting plates and showed him how to gain muscle mass. They started writing his measurements on the outside of the clear cell. It was like nursing a sick animal back to health, they told him. A life-changing experience, Merv has told me, even if he only caught a few hours of sleep each night. But then the gym switched owners and he was moved to the men’s locker room, a hot, rank place where the lifters avoided eye contact with him and he had to suck moisture from used towels to stay hydrated. He began wasting away. Then the gym went out of business, and he went back into the prisoner pool and was sent to us.
I visit Merv most days after coming home from work, while Ellie is preparing dinner. We talk about our day. He tells me how busy Ellie has been with her temp work; she’s on her computer for hours except for her workout. He tells me how grateful he is to be her encouragement, to count off her reps, to relive how it was at the gym when he could give back, just a little bit, to the society he had wronged. He asks about me and I tell him about my meetings, about project delays, the sort of thing he only asks out of politeness, but I appreciate his asking. The man has manners.
I hear Ellie calling me to dinner, so I end our little chat and rise from the bean bag outside the clear cell. As I stand, the light from the hallway hits the Plexi just right, revealing a faint glimmering vision of two hands, arms, breasts, stomach, upper thighs, twin knees. Ellie enters the room and slides Merv’s dinner through the slot.
“Goulash,” she says.
“Yum,” Merv says. “Thank you, kindly.”
I close the door behind us and sit down at the kitchen table to my own serving of goulash. “Have you been taking your clothes off for Merv again?” I ask.
Ellie swallows her mouthful of wine, glares at me, then pulls off her shirt, the collar tight and briefly stretching her face into a woman I don’t recognize. “There,” she says. “Even. Happy now?” She returns to her dinner.
We’ve had the talk before, about Merv being lonely and how Ellie finds it cruel that he only has a few square feet to himself. I admit that having a prisoner of our own has opened her eyes to the plight of the incarcerated. Last week we were back at that BBQ place and this time she was the one to slide her leftover food through the slot. She even gave a pair of rousing middle fingers to the guys at the nearest table who were ragging her for being a goodie. While we were there, a worker came over and squeegeed the day’s thrown food from the clear cell wall. I could see the prisoner squatting inside like a chimp at the zoo, back turned. Maybe the prisoner served some time at the zoo and learned a thing or two about ignoring spectators. I know bringing in clear cells has improved the state of things for zoo animals. The animals like to come up to the Plexi and look at this strange species that incarcerates itself.
I recognize that my mind is avoiding the question, so I spit it out. “What do you do with Merv?”
Ellie takes another slurp of wine, then puts down the glass. “Nothing. I stand there and let him, you know, do his thing.”
After doing the dishes, I enter the spare room and shut the door. From the fact that he hasn’t touched his goulash, I can tell that Merv has overheard our dinner conversation.
“I’m sorry about that,” Merv says.
“Do you ask Ellie to take off her clothes, or does she do it on her own?”
“Oh, I ask,” Merv says. “I beg. On my knees. You’re so blessed, what you have. She’s a goddess.”
In bed that night, after turning off the TV, I ask Ellie the same question.
“Fifty-fifty,” she says.
Her words scoop something out of me. I climb from bed and pull yesterday’s clothes from the hamper, then head into the night. I don’t even stop at my favorite sock vendor before heading underground. Feeling the need to wallow, I take the C line, car 4, but the clear cell with Mr. Poops has been changed out with one holding a large woman. She’s dancing and singing along to a song playing from a stereo at the feet of a guy sitting outside her cell. He might be her cell pimp. She’s butt naked. A few riders pass her things as she dances: half a sandwich, a newspaper, a pair of gloves. The man with the stereo nods politely after each contribution. He motions for the half-sandwich and eats it. The inside of the woman’s cell is packed with donations. She is something of an artist, too. She’s made pastel starburst patterns on the back walls using wrapped tampons as media and chewing gum as adhesive.
Getting away from the apartment doesn’t grant me clarity as to how I’m failing Ellie, or why she’s chosen not to live up to the commitments of our marriage. But it helps me notice what’s missing. Shame. Ellie’s, Merv’s, this prisoner in car 4. There was shame in the beginning—the public ridicule, the dependency on the kindness of others. But clear cells have become normalized. Public ridicule has morphed into exposure. Maybe that’s good and healthy. I don’t know. I’m not a rehabilitation expert. I’m no sociologist. But it feels . . . off.
I return home at dawn, the morning so bright that the leaves look ashen. Merv is asleep on the buckwheat mattress Ellie gave him last week by feeding the fabric through the slot, then sluicing in pounds of loose buckwheat. Ellie is asleep on one of the bean bags. I return to bed and dream of prisons, a vast network throughout the country, a world where you never see the incarcerated at all. I don’t like that I’m beginning to wish that it was still this way.
With possible parole coming up, Merv’s officer stops by the following week and interviews us, then Merv. After she leaves, I hurry after and catch her outside.
“Is it looking favorable for him?” I say.
“Very,” she says.
“That worries me.” I confess my troubles. About Ellie getting naked for Merv, and Merv doing his thing to her, and how, if Merv gets out, maybe she’ll leave me for him.
“That rarely happens,” she says, after looking me up and down.
I explain that Ellie has a photo of Merv that she found online, when he was in the gym’s clear cell at the peak of his buffness, practically bursting from his jumpsuit. A photo of the man he could become again given some weights and protein shakes. I feel pitiful sharing this.
“Ex-cons don’t typically stick around,” she says.
I take some comfort from her words, but not much.
Now, several weeks later, I return home early and find Ellie tossing a big salad in the good bowl with the good tongs, the teak ones you have to wash by hand. She is wearing nothing but a towel. Her hair is wet.
“Um . . .” she says, seeing me.
I hear the shower running and a man singing opera, but what arrests me first is the sight of our spare room. The clear cell is gone. The Hummels look astonished. I knew Merv’s sentence was up any day now, but I’d thought we’d at least receive a notice. I was going to pick up a lemon cake, his favorite, and hand it to him when he stepped from his clear cell. I head to the bathroom door and knock.
“Merv?” I say, then knock harder. “Listen, Merv.”
“Who’s Merv?” comes a man’s voice, not Merv’s.
“Oh,” I say.
I return to the office and spend the night in my cubicle. I tell myself I can leapfrog the dissolution of my marriage and take up another life. The next day I rent a room in an apartment close by.
I have urges of course. I dream of the alternate scenario where I break down the bathroom door and inflict violence on the man singing opera in my shower. There’s the straight razor Ellie bought me for our anniversary, still in its box. Or the strop, which could fit around a neck. But do I want to find myself on the other side of a clear cell? No, I do not. I keep the violence in my head. I sever its route to the rest of my body.
The divorce is quick. Ellie’s infidelity is but a footnote to her longer complaint about incompatibility, my close-mindedness, my uncultured workaholism.
I find Merv at a fulfillment center so large that it’s measured in acres. He’s a custodian to a bank of prisoners in clear cells. He gives me his home address and we meet after work. He rents a room, too. In the room is the buckwheat mattress, a Hummel figurine of a little boy and a duck, and a pile of books. Some of his books were once my books. All of them, really, but I don’t ask for them back. When he apologizes for the state of the room, I tell him I don’t have it much better. He doesn’t believe me. I give him my address and he shows up a few days later and agrees with me. He apologizes that he never told me about the men Ellie brought into the apartment while I was at work. “Water under the bridge,” I tell him. “Let’s go shopping.” I buy a new bed frame and mattress, a small table, and a chair on casters, and have an identical set delivered to Merv’s address. He says it’s too much. He says I’m the nicest. It still gets me.
I would like to see our relationship blossom into true friendship, but the next time I see Merv, months later, he’s in a clear cell on the B line, wearing a dirty T-shirt on which is printed Victim of Recidivism, like it’s the name of a band opening at Coachella. I don’t have anything on me, not even a pair of socks. I dig through my wallet and find a loyalty card from a sandwich place. One more punched hole for a free foot-long. I slide it through the slot when I get to my stop. We don’t even look at each other. I’m vaguely disappointed, but I don’t judge. His latest crime may have been a necessary one, one for which he was brave enough to face the consequences.
I return to my room and prepare dinner on my hotplate. I cook most days and hardly go out after work. I prefer routes and places where I won’t encounter the incarcerated. I don’t like to think about punishment and shame, forgiveness and grace. The words interfere with the living of life and only serve to remind me of how disappointed I am in myself. I was the one who suggested we house a prisoner. I was the one who thought I could be a small force for kindness and reconciliation in the world, when really, I was a goodie. I was trying to tap down the tension in my marriage. I was skirting confrontation and using Merv as a referee, an ally. I was a fearful man in a cell of my own making. It was Ellie who grew, whose compassion took root, who gave of herself, her whole self, to others.
Is a way of looking at it.
Last I heard, Ellie is housing three prisoners in our old apartment. The custodian I paid for this information says Ellie has given all the prisoners synthesizers and together they create and record ambient music. She plays a theremin. Her new husband—news to me, maybe the man singing opera in the shower, maybe someone else?—seems cool with it.
I suppose my fatal flaw in our relationship was that I didn’t possess that degree of acceptance. I should have been cool with it. When Ellie took off her top on goulash night, I should have risen from the table, taken her hand, and pulled her into our spare room, and there made tender, shame-free love to her on the throw rug that was always buckling up against the Plexi wall and the Hummel bookshelf a bit. I should have let Merv watch us and be moved to tears by this demonstration of our generosity to one another and to the world. We could have been proponents of the kind of love that’s both a blessing and a promise, rendered with an intimacy that might then have lasted beyond all strains and tests, just like we vowed on our wedding day. It could have been a moment of such purifying sublimity that Merv might never again have allowed the thoughts in his head to find purchase in his body’s willingness to err. If I had been cool with it and done that, he might, I might, even now, be free.
Franz Jørgen Neumann
Franz Jørgen Neumann’s stories have received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and have appeared in The Southern Review, Colorado Review, and Water~Stone Review. His past published work can be read at www.storiesandnovels.com.