An American novelist and short story writer 11 страница
That night, when I was washing the dishes, I heard Zena speak to me from the kitchen door. I turned and saw her standing there, holding my straight razor. (I have a heavy beard and shave with a straight-edged razor.) “You’d better not leave things like this lying around,” she shouted. “If you know what’s good for you, you’d better not leave things like this lying around. There are plenty of women in the world who would cut you to ribbons for what I’ve endured…” I wasn’t afraid. What did I feel? I don’t know. Bewilderment, crushing bewilderment, and some strange tenderness for poor Zena.
She went upstairs, and I went on washing the dishes and wondering if scenes like this were common on the street where I live. But God, oh, God, how much then I wanted some kind of loveliness, softness, gentleness, humor, sweetness, and kindness. And when the dishes were done, I went out of the house, out of the back door. In the dusk Mr. Livermore was dyeing the brown spots on his lawn with a squirt gun. Mr. Kovacs was cooking two rock hens. I did not invent this world, with all its paradoxes, but it was never my good fortune to travel, and since yards like these are perhaps the most I will see of life, I looked at the scene – even the DANGER. MEN COOKING sign – with intentness and feeling. There was music in the air – there always is – and it heightened my desire to see a beautiful woman. Then a sudden wind sprang up, a rain wind, and the smell of a deep forest – although there are no forests in my part of the world – mushroomed among the yards. The smell excited me, and I remembered what it was like to feel young and happy, wearing a sweater and clean cotton pants, and walking through the cool halls of the house where I was raised and where, in the summer, the leaves hung beyond all the open doors and windows in a thick curtain of green and gold. I didn’t remember my youth – I seemed to recapture it. Even more – because, given some self-consciousness by retrospect, I esteemed as well as possessed the bold privileges of being young. There was the music of a waltz from the Livermores’ television set. It must have been a commercial for deodorants, girdles, or ladies’ razors, the air was so graceful and so somber. Then, as the music faded – the forest smell was still sharp in the air – I saw her walk up the grass, and she stepped into my arms.
Her name was Olga. I can’t change her name any more than I can change her other attributes. She was nothing, I know, but an idle reverie. I’ve never fooled myself about this. I’ve imagined that I’ve won the daily double, climbed the Matterhorn, and sailed, first-class, for Europe, and I suppose I imagined Olga out of the same need for escape or tenderness, but, unlike any other reverie I’ve ever known, she came with a dossier of facts. She was beautiful, of course. Who, under the circumstances, would invent a shrew, a harridan? Her hair was dark, fragrant, and straight. Her face was oval, her skin was olive-colored, although I could hardly make out her features in the dusk. She had just come from California on the train. She had come not to help me but to ask my help. She needed protection from her husband, who was threatening to follow her. She needed love, strength, and counsel. I held her in my arms, basking in the grace and warmth of her presence. She cried when she spoke of her husband, and I knew what he looked like. I can see him now. He was an Army sergeant. There were scars on his thick neck, left from an attack of boils. His face was red. His hair was yellow. He wore a double row of campaign ribbons on a skin-tight uniform. His breath smelled of rye and toothpaste. I was so delighted by her company, her dependence, that I wondered – not at all seriously – if I wasn’t missing a stitch. Did Mr. Livermore, dyeing his grass, have a friend as beautiful as mine? Did Mr. Kovacs? Did we share our disappointments this intimately? Was there such hidden balance and clemency in the universe that our needs were always requited? Then it began to rain. It was time for her to go, but we took such a long, sweet hour to say goodbye that when I went back into the kitchen I was wet through to the skin.
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On Wednesday night I always take my wife to the Chinese restaurant in the village, and then we go to the movies. We order the family dinner for two, but my wife eats most of it. She’s a big eater. She reaches right across the table and grabs my egg roll, empties the roast duck onto her plate, takes my fortune cookie away from me, and then when she’s done she sighs a deep sigh and says, “Well, you certainly stuffed yourself.” On Wednesdays I always eat a big lunch in town, so I won’t be hungry. I always have the calves’ liver and bacon or something like that, to fill me up.
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As soon as I stepped into the restaurant that night, I thought I would see Olga. I hadn’t known that she would return – I hadn’t thought about it – but since I’ve seen the summit of the Matterhorn in my dreams much more than once, mightn’t she reappear? I felt happy and expectant. I was glad that I had on my new suit and had remembered to get a haircut. I wanted her to see me at my best, and I wanted to see her in a brighter light than she had appeared in that rainy night. Then I noticed that the Muzak was playing the same somber and graceful waltz that I had heard coming from the Livermores’ television, and I thought that perhaps this was no more than a deception of the music – some simple turn of memory that had fooled me as I had been fooled by the smell of the rain into thinking that I was young.
There was no Olga. I had no consolation. Then I felt desperate, desolate, crushed. I noticed how Zena smacked her lips and gave me a challenging glare, as if she was daring me to touch the shrimp foo-yong. But I wanted Olga, and the force of my need seemed to reestablish her reality. How could anything I desired so ardently be unreal? The music was only a coincidence. I straightened up again and looked around the place cheerfully, expecting her to come in at any minute, but she never did.
I didn’t think she would be at the movies – I knew she didn’t like movies – but I still had the feeling that I would see her that night. I didn’t deceive myself – I want to make this clear; I knew she was unreal, and yet she seemed to have some punctuality, some order, some schedule of engagements, and above all I needed her. After my wife went to bed I sat on the edge of the bathtub reading the newspaper. My wife doesn’t like me to sit in the kitchen or the living room, so I read in the bathroom, where the light is bright. I was reading when Olga came in. There was no waltz music, no rain, nothing that could account for her presence, excepting my loneliness. “Oh, my darling,” I said, “I thought you were going to meet me at the restaurant.” She said something about not wanting to be seen by my wife. Then she sat down beside me on the bathtub, I put my arms around her, and we talked about her plans. She was looking for an apartment. She was then living in a cheap hotel, and she was having trouble finding a job. “It’s too bad you can’t type and take shorthand,” I remember telling her. “It might almost be worthwhile going to school… I’ll look around and see if I can find anything. Sometimes there’s an opening for a receptionist… You could do that, couldn’t you? I won’t let you be a hat-check girl or a restaurant hostess. No, I won’t let you. I’d rather pay your salary until something better comes along…”
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My wife threw open the bathroom door. Women’s hair curlers, like grass dye and funny signs, only seem to me reminders of the fact that we must find more serious and finer things upon which to comment, and I will only say that my wife wears so many and such bellicose hair curlers that anybody trying to romance her would lose an eye. “You’re talking to yourself,” she thundered. “You can be heard all over the neighborhood. They’ll think you’re nuts. And you woke me up. You woke me out of a sound sleep, and you know that if my first sleep is interrupted I can’t ever get to sleep again.” She went to the medicine cabinet and took a sleeping pill. “If you want to talk to yourself,” she said, “go on up to the attic.” She went into her bedroom and locked the door.
A few nights later, when I was cooking some hamburgers in the back yard, I saw what looked to be some rain clouds rising in the south. I thought this was a good sign. I wanted some news of Olga. After I had washed the dishes I went out onto the back porch and waited. It isn’t really a porch – just a little wooden platform with four steps above the garbage pail. Mr. Livermore was on his porch, and Mr. Kovacs was on his, and I wondered were they waiting as I was for a chimera. If I went over, for instance, and asked Mr. Livermore if his was blond or dark-haired, would he understand? For a minute I wanted terribly to confide in someone. Then the waltz began to play, and just as the music faded she ran up the steps.
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Oh, she was very happy that night! She had a job. I knew all about this, because I’d found the job for her. She was working as a receptionist in the same building where I worked. What I didn’t know was that she had found an apartment – not a real apartment but a furnished room with a kitchen and bath of her own. This was just as well, because all her furniture was in California. Would I come and see the apartment? Would I come now? We could take a late train in and spend the night there. I said that I would, but first I had to go into the house and see that the children were all right. I went upstairs to the children’s room. They were asleep. Zena had already locked herself in. I went into the bathroom to wash my hands and found on the basin a note, written by Betty-Ann, my oldest daughter. “Dere Daddy,” she had written, “do not leave us.”
This convergence of reality and unreality was meaningless. The children wouldn’t know anything about my delusion. The back porch, to their clear eyes, would seem empty. The note would only reflect their inescapable knowledge of my unhappiness. But Olga was waiting on the back porch. I seemed to feel her impatience, to see the way she swung her long legs, glanced at her wristwatch (a graduation present), and smoked a cigarette, and yet I also seemed nailed to the house by the children’s plea. I could not move. I remembered a parade in the village I had taken my youngest son to not long ago. It was the annual march of some provincial and fraternal order. There were two costumed bands and half a dozen platoons of the fraternity. The marchers, the brotherhood, seemed mostly to be marginal workmen — post-office clerks and barbers, I guess. The weather couldn’t have accounted for my attitude, because I remembered clearly that it was fair and cool, but the effect of the parade upon me was as somber as if I had stood on some gallows hill. In the ranks I saw faces lined by drink, harried by hard work, wasted by worry, and stamped invariably with disappointment, as if the gala procession was meant to prove that life is a force of crushing compromise. The music was boisterous, but the faces and the bodies were the faces and bodies of compromised men, and I remembered getting to my feet and staring into the last of the ranks, looking for someone with clear features that would dispel my sober feelings. There was no one. Sitting in the bathroom, I seemed to join the marchers. I seemed to experience for the first time in my life what they must all have known – racked and torn with the desire to escape and nailed through the heart by a plea. I ran downstairs, but she had gone. No pretty woman waits very long for anyone. She was a fiction, and yet I couldn’t bring her back, any more than I could change the fact that her wristwatch was a graduation present and that her name was Olga.
She didn’t come back for a week, although Zena was in terrible shape and there seemed to be some ratio, some connection, between her obstreperousness and my ability to produce a phantom. Every night at eight, the Livermores’ television played the somber and graceful waltz, and I was out there every night. Ten days passed before she returned. Mr. Kovacs was cooking. Mr. Livermore was dyeing his grass.
The music had just begun to fade when she appeared. Something had changed. She held her head down. What was wrong? As she came up the steps, I saw that she had been drinking. She was drunk. She began to cry as soon as I took her in my arms. I stroked her soft, dark hair, perfectly happy to support and hold her, whatever had happened. She told me everything. She had gone out with a man from the office. He had got her drunk and seduced her. She had felt too ashamed of herself to go to work in the morning, and had spent some time in a bar. Then, half drunk, she had gone to the office to confront her seducer, and there had been a disorderly scene, during which she was fired. It was I she had betrayed, she told me. She didn’t care about herself. I had given her a chance to lead a new life and she had failed me. I caught myself smiling fatuously at the depth of her dependence, the ardor with which she clung to me. I told her that it would be all right, that I would find her another job and pay her rent in the meantime. I forgave her, and she promised to return the next evening.
I rushed outdoors the next night – I was there long before eight o’clock, but she didn’t come. She wasn’t thoughtless. I knew that. She wouldn’t deliberately disappoint me. She must be in trouble again, but how could I help her? How could I get word to her? I seemed to know the place where she lived. I knew its smells, its lights, the van Gogh reproduction, and the cigarette burns on the end table, but even so, the room didn’t exist, and I couldn’t look there. I thought of looking for her in the neighborhood bars, but I was not yet this insane. I waited for her again on the following night. I was worried but not angry when she didn’t come, since she was, after all, such a defenseless child. The next night, it rained, and I knew she couldn’t come, because she didn’t have a raincoat. She had told me that. The next day was Saturday, and I thought she might put off her return until Monday, the weekend train and bus schedules being so erratic. This seemed sensible to me, but I was so convinced that she would return on Monday that when she failed me I felt terribly disappointed and lost. She came back on Thursday. It was the same hour of the day; I heard the same graceful waltz. Even down the length of the yard, long before she reached the porch, I could see she was staggering. Her hair was disheveled, her dress was torn, her wristwatch was missing. I asked her, for some reason, about the wristwatch, but she couldn’t remember where it was. I took her in my arms, and she told me what had happened. Her seducer had returned. She had let him in; she had let him move in. He stayed three days, and then they gave a party for some friends of his. The party was late and noisy, and the landlady called the police, who raided the place and took Olga off to jail, where she was charged with using the room for immoral purposes. She was in the Women’s House of Detention for three days before her case was heard. A kindly judge gave her a suspended sentence. Now she was going back to California, back to her husband. She was no better than he, she kept insisting; they were two of a kind. He had wired her the money, and she was taking the night train. I tried to persuade her to stay and begin a new life. I was willing to go on helping her; I would take her on any terms. I shook her by the shoulders – I remember that. I remember shouting at her, “You can’t go! You can’t go! You’re all I have. If you go, it will only prove that even the most transparent inventions of my imagination are subject to lust and age. You can’t go! You can’t leave me alone!”
“Stop talking to yourself,” my wife shouted from the television room, and at that moment a thought occurred to me: Since I had invented Olga, couldn’t I invent others – dark-eyed blondes, vivacious redheads with marbly skin, melancholy brunettes, dancers, women who sang, lonely housewives? Tall women, short women, sad women, women whose burnished hair flowed to their waists, sloe-eyed, squint-eyed, violet-eyed beauties of all kinds and ages could be mine. Mightn’t Olga’s going only mean that she was making room for someone else?
THE ANGEL OF THE BRIDGE
You may have seen my mother waltzing on ice skates in Rockefeller Center. She’s seventy-eight years old now but very wiry, and she wears a red velvet costume with a short skirt. Her tights are flesh-colored, and she wears spectacles and a red ribbon in her white hair, and she waltzes with one of the rink attendants. I don’t know why I should find the fact that she waltzes on ice skates so disconcerting, but I do. I avoid that neighborhood whenever I can during the winter months, and I never lunch in the restaurants on the rink. Once when I was passing that way, a total stranger took me by the arm and, pointing to Mother, said, “Look at that crazy old dame.” I was very embarrassed. I suppose I should be grateful for the fact that she amuses herself and is not a burden to me, but I sincerely wish she had hit on some less conspicuous recreation. Whenever I see gracious old ladies arranging chrysanthemums and pouring tea, I think of my own mother, dressed like a hat-check girl, pushing some paid rink attendant around the ice, in the middle of the third-biggest city of the world.
My mother learned to figure-skate in the little New England village of St. Botolphs, where we come from, and her waltzing is an expression of her attachment to the past. The older she grows, the more she longs for the vanishing and provincial world of her youth. She is a hardy woman, as you can imagine, but she does not relish change. I arranged one summer for her to fly to Toledo and visit friends. I drove her to the Newark airport. She seemed troubled by the airport waiting room, with its illuminated advertisements, vaulted ceiling, and touching and painful scenes of separation played out to an uproar of continuous tango music. She did not seem to find it in any way interesting or beautiful, and compared to the railroad station in St. Botolphs it was indeed a strange background against which to take one’s departure. The flight was delayed for an hour, and we sat in the waiting room. Mother looked tired and old. When we had been waiting half an hour, she began to have some noticeable difficulty in breathing. She spread a hand over the front of her dress and began to gasp deeply, as if she was in pain. Her face got mottled and red. I pretended not to notice this. When the plane was announced, she got to her feet and exclaimed, “I want to go home! If I have to die suddenly, I don’t want to die in a flying machine.” I cashed in her ticket and drove her back to her apartment, and I have never mentioned this seizure to her or to anyone, but her capricious, or perhaps neurotic, fear of dying in a plane crash was the first insight I had into how, as she grew older, her way was strewn with invisible rocks and lions and how eccentric were the paths she took, as the world seemed to change its boundaries and become less and less comprehensible.
At the time of which I’m writing, I flew a great deal myself. My business was in Rome, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and I sometimes traveled as often as once a month between these cities. I liked the flying. I liked the incandescence of the sky at high altitudes. I liked all eastward flights where you can see from the ports the edge of night move over the continent and where, when it is four o’clock by your California watch, the housewives of Garden City are washing up the supper dishes and the stewardess in the plane is passing a second round of drinks. Toward the end of the flight, the air is stale. You are tired. The gold thread in the upholstery scratches your cheek, and there is a momentary feeling of forlornness, a sulky and childish sense of estrangement. You find good companions, of course, and bores, but most of the errands we run at such high altitudes are humble and terrestrial. That old lady, flying over the North Pole, is taking a jar of calf’s-foot jelly to her sister in Paris, and the man beside her sells imitation-leather inner soles. Flying westward one dark night – we had crossed the Continental Divide, but we were still an hour out of Los Angeles and had not begun our descent, and were at such an altitude that the sense of houses, cities, and people below us was lost – I saw a formation, a trace of light, like the lights that burn along a shore. There was no shore in that part of the world, and I knew I would never know if the edge of the desert or some bluff or mountain accounted for this hoop of light, but it seemed, in its obscurity – and at that velocity and height – like the emergence of a new world, a gentle hint at my own obsolescence, the lateness of my time of life, and my inability to understand the things I often see. It was a pleasant feeling, completely free of regret, of being caught in some observable mid-passage, the farther reaches of which might be understood by my sons.
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