Too Much Love

By the time Laura Scheinbaum arrived, Walter Schmidt, known on that stretch of the street as Fix-It Walt, had already identified three things that needed correcting.

Mrs. Rothchild’s geraniums needed to be moved twelve inches to the left to catch the morning sun. He had seen that the moment he rose from his cardboard bed on the upper landing of Number 6.

The second was one he had been timing for days: the crossing signal changed two seconds too soon for Mrs. Schultz, in her eighties, to get across safely with her trolley.

He found the third when a woman walked past him with a terrier pulling at the leash and barking nervously in his direction.

“You should reset it,” he said.

The woman gave him a sideways look and kept going.

“Just unplug it, wait five seconds, then plug it back in.”

She ignored him. She tightened the leash and quickened her pace until she reached the corner.

Few people listened, but he still tried.

Across the street, Laura Scheinbaum slowed. She had seen it too.

Walter Schmidt noticed defects the way other men noticed women: quickly, confidently, always measuring. Laura noticed only a few things, but once she did, she refused to let go.

Laura was finishing her morning walk when water from Mrs. Rothchild’s flowerpot landed on her shoulder. She looked up at once. It wasn’t raining. For a second, she thought of a bird. Her hand came away clean, only wet, but she still wiped it with a tissue in disgust.

Ahead of her, Mrs. Schultz was half pushing, half lifting her trolley along the block. Laura caught up with her in three strides. She had stopped by a yellow fence that blocked half the sidewalk, forcing her down into the street, trolley first.

The fence formed a triangle with two others, and kept pedestrians out of a recently paved section. Laura stared at it, calibrating. It could have been closer to the wall. It wasn’t.

A dog barked nearby.

Laura hung her bag from the corner of one of the fences. It barely held. Leaving it on the ground was unthinkable. Everybody knows that money runs away if you do.

She tried to lift the yellow plastic fence with both hands, but it was linked to the other two and refused to move the way she wanted.

“So you’ve seen it too. It’s just a few inches,” Walt said beside her.

Laura turned toward him and reached for her bag. Instead, it slipped from the fence and dropped to the ground. Keys clinked somewhere inside. She bent to pick it up; her eyes still on Walt.

“She just needs some love,” Walt added.

Laura glanced around. Who was she? Her?

Walt kept studying the barriers, two fingers pressed to his chin. Laura tried to slip away unnoticed. Maybe come back later.

“You grab there and I lift here, okay?”

She turned back. He was already holding one side of the barrier up and pointed at the next one. His eyes never quite met hers.

“Come on, baby,” Walt said as she took hold where he meant. This time Laura knew he wasn’t talking to her.

Walt returned to his side of the street; Laura, to her apartment. Both were lone and silent witnesses when Mrs. Schultz passed the barrier more easily on her way back from the pharmacy. Someone should have done it days ago, she thought.

It became obvious to Laura as soon as she saw it the next morning. That traffic light had been timed for cars, not for the people who lived on the block, most of them retirees or young families with small children. That was not how a street like this ought to work.

The inconvenience had become one of the few things Walt had been pointing out since he woke up. He threw his arms up as soon as a man walked by with a guitar case. Not a word left his lips until the gray case disappeared down the block. He warned everyone he came across about the gray elephant with a handle on its back. He counted one more crack on the balcony above his bed. Four. The man who lived there refused to come out to see it.

Laura stepped in front of Walt, pulling her cardigan closed with both arms.

“You have seen that, haven’t you?”

Walt tilted his head toward the crossing, then let his gaze drop to Laura’s shoes. He nodded again and again, too quickly to be reassuring.

“He’s misbehaving, I know. He’s scared of horns.”

“I see. Well, we can’t just leave it like that. That’s not right,” Laura said, more confident than she actually was.

“Remember, he just needs —”

“Love. Yes, I know. Then help me with it.”

Walt raised his chin to the sky. He looked left, then right. “Silver bandage,” he said. “That’s what he needs.”

Laura said nothing. She walked away shaking her head and kept shaking it all the way up the stairs to her apartment. By the third floor, Walt’s logic kicked in. She came back down with a roll of duct tape in her hand.

“Is this what you need?”

Walt said something she didn’t catch. His eyes lit up as if she was offering him ten grand. She double-checked what she carried, just in case. He chewed something pink, his mouth full of it. As soon as she stepped closer, Laura smelled the watermelon gum in the air. She hated watermelon.

Walt talked softly to the traffic light before telling her what to do. Laura handed him the duct tape when he reached for it. When he took it, she felt something warm in her hand. She shook her hand quickly, and only then did she feel the sticky residue on her skin.

“He’s going to need that too. That’s the poultice.”

Laura raised her head to the sky, as if she could find an escape to that situation. From above, Mrs. Rothchild, just retired from her office job, watched them from her window, with the look of someone very much minding her own business and plainly disapproving of what she saw.

Laura lowered her gaze to the ground. The gum had stuck to her shoe and looked like a disgusting pink pompom. Laura considered asking him to remove it, but Walt was already holding the roll of duct tape against the pedestrian button. She looked at her hand again and then bent over to pick up the gum, with the very same part of her hand that had touched it before. She spared herself the sight, but the feel of it revolted her. Walt took half of the gum and fixed it to the button with the duct tape, then repeated the solution with the button across the street.

They didn’t get to test it; Mrs. Schultz was the perfect involuntary tester, and she had already pushed the button when Laura and Walt raised their heads.

Walt counted. Laura waited. Ten extra seconds were the exact delay they needed. It gave them nine. Good enough.

They didn’t say anything; each returned to their own place without looking back. Laura washed her hands thoughtfully, then watched the crossing from her kitchen and saw it was good. Walt kept counting, though.

After twenty minutes, the improvement was already visible: neighbors, old and young, crossed the street without hurry. Laura made herself a cup of tea and sat with a magazine. Walt noted that one of the buttons seemed to hold for an extra five seconds.

“That was too much love,” he said to a cat on a windowsill.

After forty minutes, rush hour started. People got into their cars after leaving their jobs for the weekend, anxious to get home. The traffic lights held almost two extra minutes. Traffic jammed the street, some leaning on their horns. Laura could hear them. Nothing much to worry about yet.

“See?” Walt asked the cat.

Five minutes later, Laura looked through the window. Mrs. Rothchild was pretending to water her geraniums while watching the situation, until a moment later she looked straight at Laura, clearly not on her side. Walt was down there, talking to the drivers, gesturing for them to calm down.

“I told you he was scared of horns,” he said to her when she joined him.

Laura sighed. “You need—”

Two drivers got out of their cars and started yelling at each other. She could tell by their bald heads and the walking canes that it wouldn’t go any further.

“I know what you two did,” said Mrs. Rothchild beside her.

Laura turned to her, already regretting she had even reacted. Horns filled the street, some honking in rhythm, others just not.

“They were just helping,” said Mrs. Schultz as she arrived pushing her trolley.

Mrs. Rothchild was not about to let the matter drop: “What they did is illegal, and I am going to call the police.”

Mrs. Schultz maneuvered her trolley into place and left her no way out, gesturing to Laura that she would take care of it.

A sudden squeak down the block ended with a small bump. That was when Laura decided to act.

When Laura looked for Walt, she found him hugging the traffic light. She couldn’t hear a word over the noise around them, but his lips were moving.

“This needs fixing now,” she said to him, “and you’re going to help me.”

He nodded, looking past her shoulder.

“But no chewing gum,” Laura added.

“No poultice,” he said.

Walt produced a small knife out of nowhere and cut through the duct tape, moving the blade back and forth. Laura kept the ends tight to help the process. Mrs. Rothchild and Mrs. Schultz both lifted their arms for the phone, but between them only succeeded in keeping it briefly airborne.

Free of duct tape, the button stayed pressed; the gum had dried and hardened. Walt froze. “He’s too tired,” he said. Laura considered who was “he” for a moment. Then she took the knife out of his hands and bent over. She scratched and pinched; she pulled and brushed, until the button came free.

The smell of burnt oil reached her then. She looked at the cars. Walt looked at the button casing across the street. “Fever,” he murmured. A sudden hollow bang, a hiss, and fireworks spread from the traffic light with a chorus of surprised voices.

Laura realized how late it was only when the whole block went dark. Only car headlights in that island of darkness. That, and the sirens and flashing lights of a police car pulling into the intersection. She still held the knife in her hand. A man walked past with a gray guitar case.

A policeman approached.

“Ma’am. Ma’am, please drop the knife.”

Laura let the knife drop to the ground.

“Step away from the signal. Now.”

Laura grabbed Walt by the hand and pulled him sideways, toward the center of the crossing.

“What’s wrong with you two?” the policeman asked.

For the first time since they met, Walt looked straight at Laura, his eyes watering.

“The elephant came back,” he said softly.