The Wild Palms: [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem]

  He knew that during these hours he was mad and he fought against it sometimes, believing that he had conquered the madness, for in the next succeeding instant the cans, save for a tragic conviction that they did not even matter, were as completely out of his mind as if they had never existed, and he would look about at his familiar surroundings with a sense of profound despair, not even knowing that he was worrying now, worrying so terribly that he did not even know it; he looked about with a kind of aghast amazement at the sunfilled solitude out of which she had walked temporarily yet still remained in and to which she would presently return and reenter her aura which had remained behind exactly as she might re-enter a garment and find him stretched on the cot, not sleeping now and not even reading, who had lost that habit along with the habit of sleep, and said quietly to himself, I am bored. I am bored to extinction. There is nothing here that I am needed for. Not even by her. I have already cut enough wood to last until Christmas and there is nothing else for me to do.

  One day he asked her to divide the colors and pad with him. She did so and found that he was color blind and didn’t even know it. Then each day he would lie on his back in a small sunny clearing he had found, surrounded by the fierce astringent smell of balsam, smoking the cheap pipe (the one provision he had made before leaving Chicago against the day they would exhaust food and money both), his half of the sketch pad and his converted sardine can color-box intact and pristine beside him. Then one day he decided to make a calendar, a notion innocently conceived not by mind, out of a desire for a calendar, but from the sheer boredom of muscles, and put into effect with the pure quiet sensory pleasure of a man carving a basket from a peach stone or the Lord’s Prayer on a pin head; he drew it neatly off on the sketch pad, numbering in the days, planning to use various appropriate colors for Sundays and the holidays. He discovered at once that he had lost count of the days, but this only added to the anticipation, prolonging the work, making more involved the pleasure, the peach basket to be a double one, the prayer to be in code. So he went back to that first morning when he and McCord squatted beside the water, whose name and number he knew, then he counted forward by reconstructing from memory the drowsing demarcations between one dawn and the next, unravelling one by one out of the wine-sharp and honey-still warp of tideless solitude the lost Tuesdays and Fridays and Sundays; when it suddenly occurred to him that he could prove his figures, establish mathematical truth out of the sunny and timeless void into which the individual days had vanished by the dates of and intervals between Charlotte’s menstrual periods, he felt as some old crook-propped contemplator on the ancient sheep-drifted Syrian hills must have felt after stumbling by accident on some Alexandrian formula which proved the starry truths which he had watched nightly all his life and knew to be true but not how nor why.

  That was when the thing happened to him. He sat looking at what he had made in a gleeful and amazed amusement at his own cunning in contriving for God, for Nature the unmathematical, the overfecund, the prime disorderly and illogical and patternless spendthrift, to prove his mathematical problem for him, when he discovered that he had given six weeks to the month of October and that the day in which he now stood was November twelfth. It seemed to him that he could see the actual numeral, incontrovertible and solitary, in the anonymous identical hierarchy of the lost days; he seemed to see the row of cans on the shelf a half mile away, the dynamic torpedolike solid shapes which up to now had merely dropped one by one, silently and without weight, into that stagnant time which did not advance and which would somehow find for its two victims food as it found them breath, now in reverse to time, time now the mover, advancing slow and irresistible, blotting the cans one by one in steady progression as a moving cloud shadow blots. Yes he thought. It’s the Indian summer that did it. I have been seduced to an imbecile’s paradise by an old whore; I have been throttled and sapped of strength and volition by the old weary Lilith of the year.

  He burned the calendar and went back to the cabin. She had not returned yet. He went to the closet and counted the cans. It was two hours to sunset yet; when he looked out toward the lake he saw that there was no sun and that a mass of cloud like dirty cotton had crossed from east to north and west and that the feel and taste of the air too had changed. Yes he thought. The old bitch. She betrayed me and now she doesn’t need to pretend. At last he saw her approaching, circling the lake, in a pair of his trousers and an old sweater they had found in the locker with the blankets. He went to meet her. “Good Lord,” she said. “I never saw you look so happy. Have you painted a picture or have you discovered at last that the human race really doesn’t have to even try to produce art—” He was moving faster than he knew; when he put his arms around her he jolted her to a stop by physical contact; thrust back, she looked at him with actual and not simulated astonishment now.

  “Yes,” he said. “How’s for a spot of necking?”

  “Why, certainly, friend,” she said immediately. Then she thrust herself back again to look at him. “What’s this? What’s going on here?”

  “Will you be afraid to stay here alone tonight?” Now she began to free herself.

  “Let me go. I cant see you good.” He released her, though he did manage to meet the unwinking yellow stare which he had never yet been able to lie to. “Tonight?”

  “This is the twelfth of November.”

  “All right. Then what?” She looked at him. “Come on. Let’s go to the house and get to the bottom of this.” They returned to the house; again she paused and faced him. “Now let’s have it.”

  “I just counted the cans. Measured the.……” She stared at him with that hard, almost grim impersonality. “We can eat for about six days more.”

  “All right. Then what?”

  “It was the mild weather. Like time had stopped and us with it, like two chips on a pond. So I didn’t think to worry, to watch. So I’m going to walk to the village. It’s only twelve miles. I could be back by noon tomorrow.” She stared at him. “A letter. From Mac. It will be there.”

  “Did you dream it would be there, or did you find it out in the coffee pot when you were measuring the grub?”

  “It will be there.”

  “All right. But wait till tomorrow to go. You cant walk twelve miles before dark.” They ate and went to bed. This time she came straight and got into the cot with him, as heedless of the hard and painful elbow which jabbed him as she would have been on her own account if the positions had been reversed, as she was of the painful hand which grasped his hair and shook his head with savage impatience. “My God, I never in my life saw anybody try as hard to be a husband as you do. Listen to me, you lug. If it was just a successful husband and food and a bed I wanted, why the hell do you think I am here instead of back there where I had them?”

  “You’ve got to sleep and eat.”

  “Certainly we have. So why worry about it? That’s like worrying about having to bathe just because the water in the bathroom is about to be cut off.” Then she rose, got out of the cot with the same abrupt violence; he watched her cross to the door and open it and look out. He could smell the snow before she spoke. “It’s snowing.”

  “I know it. I knew this afternoon she realised the game was up.”

  “She?” She closed the door. This time she went to the other cot and got into it. “Try to get to sleep. It’ll be a hard walk tomorrow, if it snows much.”

  “It will be there though.”

  “Yes,” she said. She yawned, her back to him. “It’s probably been there a week or two.”

  He left the cabin shortly after daylight. The snow had ceased and it was quite cold. He reached the village in four hours and found the letter from McCord. It contained a check for twenty-five dollars; he had sold one of the puppets, and he had the promise of a job for Charlotte in a department store during the holiday season. It was well after dark when he reached home. “You can put it all in the pot,” he said. “We’ve got twenty-five dollars. And Mac’s got a job for you
. He’s driving up Saturday night.”

  “Saturday night?”

  “I wired him. I waited for an answer. That’s why I’m late.” They ate and this time she got quietly into the narrow cot with him and this time she even crept close to him who had never before known her to do such at any time, to anything.

  “I’ll be sorry to leave here.”

  “Will you?” he said quietly, peacefully, lying on his back, his arms crossed on his chest like a stone effigy on a tenth century sepulchre. “You’ll probably be glad to get back, once you are there though. People to see again, McCord and the others you liked, Christmas and all that. You can get your hair clean again and your nails manicured——” This time she did not move, whose habit it was to assault him with that cold and disregardful savageness, shaking and jerking at him not only for conversion but even for mere emphasis. This time she lay perfectly still, not even breathing, her voice filled not with a suspiration but sheer amazed incredulity:

  “You’ll probably. You are. You can. Harry, what do you mean?”

  “That I wired Mac to come and get you. You’ll have your job; that will keep you until after Christmas all right. I thought I’d just keep half the twenty-five dollars and stay on here. Maybe Mac can find something for me too; if nothing else, maybe a W.P.A. job of some sort. Then I’d come on back to town and then we could——”

  “No!” she cried. “No! No! Jesus God, no! Hold me! Hold me hard, Harry! This is what it’s for, what it all was for, what we were paying for: so we could be together, sleep together every night: not just to eat and evacuate and sleep warm so we can get up and eat and evacuate in order to sleep warm again! Hold me! Hold me hard! Hard!” He held her, his arms rigid, his face still turned upward, his lips lifted away from his rigid teeth.

  God he thought. God help her. God help her.

  They left snow at the lake, though before they reached Chicago they had overtaken the end of the south-moving Indian summer for a little while. But it did not last and now it was winter in Chicago too, the Canadian wind made ice in the Lake and blew in the stone canyons holly-burgeoned with the imminent Christmas, crisping and frosting the faces of policemen and clerks and panhandlers and Red Cross and Salvation Army people costumed as Santa Claus, the defunctive days dying in neon upon the fur-framed petal faces of the wives and daughters of cattle and timber millionaires and the paramours of politicians returned from Europe and the dude ranches to spend the holidays in the air-carved and opulent tenements above the iron lake and the rich sprawling city before departing for Florida, and of the sons of London brokers and Midland shoe-peg knights and South African senators come to look at Chicago because they had read Whitman and Masters and Sandburg in Oxford or Cambridge—members of that race which without tact for exploration and armed with note books and cameras and sponge bags elects to pass the season of Christian holiday in the dark and bitten jungles of savages.

  Charlotte’s job was in a store which had been one of her first customers for the first figurines she had made. It included window- and showcase-dressing, so that her day sometimes began when the store closed in the afternoon and that of the other employees ceased. So Wilbourne and sometimes McCord would wait for her in a bar just around the corner, where they would eat an early dinner. Then McCord would depart to begin his upside down day at the newspaper and Charlotte and Wilbourne would return to the store, which would now take on a sort of bizarre and infernal inverted life—the chromium glass and synthetic marble cavern which for eight hours had been filled with the ruthless voracious murmur of furred shoppers and the fixed regimented grimaces of satin-clad robot-like saleswomen now empty of uproar, glittering and quiet and echoed with cavernous silence, dwarfing, filled now with a grim tense fury like an empty midnight clinic in which a handful of pygmy-like surgeons and nurses battle in low-toned decorum for some obscure and anonymous life, into which Charlotte would vanish too (not disappear: he would see her from time to time, consulting in pantomime with someone over some object which one of them held, or entering or leaving a window) as soon as they entered. He would have an evening paper and now for the next two or three hours he would sit on fragile chairs surrounded by jointless figures with suave organless bodies and serene almost incredible faces, by draped brocade and sequins or the glitter of rhinestones, while charwomen appeared on their knees and pushing pails before them as though they were another species just crawled molelike from some tunnel or orifice leading from the foundations of the earth itself and serving some obscure principle of sanitation not to the hushed glitter which they did not even look at but to the subterranean region which they would crawl back to before light. Then at eleven and midnight and, as Christmas approached, even later they would go home, to the apartment which had no work bench and no skylight now but which was new and neat and in a new neat district near a park (toward which, around ten oclock in the morning while lying in bed between his first and second sleep of the day, he could hear the voices of nursemaid-harried children moving) where Charlotte would go to bed and he would sit again at the typewriter at which he had already spent most of the day, the machine borrowed first from McCord then rented from an agency then purchased outright from among the firing-pinless pistols and guitars and gold-filled teeth in a pawnshop on which he wrote and sold to the confession magazines the stories beginning ‘I had the body and desires of a woman yet in knowledge and experience of the world I was but a child’ or ‘If I had only had a mother’s love to guard me on that fatal day’—stories which he wrote complete from the first capital to the last period in one sustained frenzied agonising rush like the halfback working his way through school who grasps the ball (his Albatross, his Old Man of the Sea, which, not the opposing team, not the blank incontrovertible chalk marks profoundly terrifying and meaningless as an idiot’s nightmare, is his sworn and mortal enemy) and runs until the play is completed—downed or across the goal line, it doesn’t matter which—then to go to bed himself, with dawn sometimes beyond the open window of the chill sleeping cubicle, to get into bed beside Charlotte who without waking would sometimes turn to him, murmuring something damp and indistinguishable out of sleep, and to lie again holding her as on that last night at the lake, himself wide awake, carefully rigid and still, knowing no desire to sleep, waiting for the smell and echo of his last batch of moron’s pap to breathe out of him.

  Thus he was awake mostly while she slept, and vice versa. She would get up and close the window and dress and make coffee (the breakfast which while they were poor, when they did not know for certain where the next measure of coffee to put into the pot was coming from, they would prepare and eat together, the dishes of which they would wash and dry together side by side at the sink) and be gone and he would not know it. Then he in his turn would wake and listen to the passing children while the stale coffee heated, and drink it and sit down to the typewriter, entering without effort and without especial regret the anesthesia of his monotonous inventing. At first he made a kind of ritual of his solitary lunch, fetching in the cans and slices of meat and such the night before, like a little boy with a new Daniel Boone suit hoarding crackers in the improvised forest of a broom closet. But lately, since he had actually bought the typewriter (he had voluntarily relinquished his amateur standing, he told himself then; he no longer had even to pretend to himself it was a lark) he began to dispense with lunch altogether, with the bother of eating, instead writing steadily on, pausing only to sit while his fingers rested, a cigarette scarring slowly into the edge of the rented table, staring at but not seeing the two or three current visible lines of his latest primer-bald moronic fable, his sexual gum-drop, then remembering the cigarette and raising it to rub uselessly at the new scorch before writing again. Then the hour would arrive and with the ink sometimes scarcely dry on the stamped sealed and self-addressed envelope containing the latest story beginning ‘At sixteen I was an unwed mother’ he would leave the apartment and walk through the crowded streets, the steadily shortening afternoons of the dying yea
r, to the bar where he and Charlotte and McCord met.

  There was Christmas in the bar too, holly sprigs and mistletoe among the gleaming pyramids of glasses, mirror-repeated, the mirror aping the antic jackets of the barmen, the steaming seasonal bowls of hot rum and whiskey for the patrons to look at and recommend to one another while holding in their hands the same iced cocktails and highballs they had been drinking all summer. Then McCord at their usual table, with what he called breakfast—a quart stein of beer and about another quart of pretzels or salted peanuts or whatever was available, and Wilbourne would have the one drink which he allowed himself before Charlotte came (“I can afford abstemiousness now, sobriety,” he told McCord. “I can pay shot for shot and no holds barred with any and all for the privilege of refusing.”) and they would wait for the hour when the stores would empty, the glass doors flashing outward to erupt into the tender icy glare of neon the holly-pinned fur-framed faces, the wind-carved canyons merry and crisp with the bright voices speaking the good wishes and good will into intransigeant vapor, the employees’ chute too discharging presently the regimented black satin, the feet swollen with the long standing, the faces aching with the sustained long rigid grimacing. Then Charlotte would enter; they would stop talking and watch her approach, shifting and sidling past the throng at the bar and among the waiters and the crowded tables, her coat open above the neat uniform, her hat of the current off-the-face mode thrust further back still as if she had pushed it there herself with a sweep of the forearm in the immemorial female gesture out of the immemorial female weariness, approaching the table, her face pale and tired-looking too though she moved as strongly and surely as ever, the eyes as humorlessly and incorrigibly honest as ever above the blunt strong nose, the broad pale unsubtle mouth. “Rum, men,” she would say, then, sinking into the chair which one of them drew for her: “Well, papa.” Then they would eat, at the wrong hour, the hour when the rest of the world was just beginning to prime itself for food (“I feel like three bears in a cage on Sunday afternoon,” she said.), eating the meal which none of them wanted and then disperse, McCord to the paper, Charlotte and Wilbourne back to the store.