A Single Man

  Yet he is curious, too. Last time, the nurse told him that Doris has been seeing a priest. (She was raised a Catholic.) And, sure enough, here on the table beside the bed is a little paper book, gaudy and cute as a Christmas card: The Stations of the Cross. . . . Ah, but when the road narrows to the width of this bed, when there is nothing in front of you that is known, dare you disdain any guide? Perhaps Doris has learned something already about the journey ahead of her. But, even supposing that she has and that George could bring himself to ask her, she could never tell him what she knows. For that could only be expressed in the language of the place to which she is going. And that language – though some of us gabble it so glibly – has no real meaning in our world; in our mouths, it is just a lot of words.

  Here’s the nurse, smiling in the doorway. ‘I’m punctual today, you see!’ She has a tray with the hypodermic and the ampoules.

  ‘I’ll be going,’ George says, rising at once.

  ‘Oh, you don’t have to do that,’ says the nurse. ‘If you’ll just step outside for a moment. This won’t take any time at all.’

  ‘I have to go anyway,’ George says, feeling guilty as one always does about leaving any sickroom. Not that Doris herself makes him feel guilty. She seems to have lost all interest in him. Her eyes are fixed on the needle in the nurse’s hand.

  ‘She’s been a bad girl,’ the nurse says. ‘We can’t get her to eat her lunch, can we?’

  ‘Well, so long, Doris. See you again in a couple of days.’

  ‘Goodbye, George.’ Doris doesn’t even glance at him, and her tone is utterly indifferent. He is leaving her world and thereby ceasing to exist. He takes her hand and presses it. She doesn’t respond. She watches the bright needle as it moves toward her.

  Did she mean Goodbye? This could be, soon will be. As George leaves the room he looks at her once again over the top of the screen, trying to catch and fix some memory in his mind, to be aware of the occasion or at least its possibility; the last time I saw her alive.

  Nothing. It means nothing. He feels nothing.

  As George pressed Doris’s hand just now, he knew something: that the very last traces of the Doris who tried to take Jim from him have vanished from this shrivelled manikin; and, with them, the last of his hate. As long as one tiny precious drop of hate remained, George could still find something left in her of Jim. For he hated Jim too, nearly as much as her, while they were away together in Mexico. That has been the bond between him and Doris. And now it is broken. And one more bit of Jim is lost to him for ever.

  As George drives down the boulevard, the big unwieldy Christmas decorations – reindeer and jingle-bells slung across the street on cables secured to metal Christmas trees – are swinging in a chill wind. But they are merely advertisements for Christmas, paid for by the local merchants. Shoppers crowd the stores and the sidewalks, their faces somewhat bewildered, their eyes reflecting, like polished buttons, the cynical sparkle of the Yuletide. Hardly more than a month ago, before Khrushchev agreed to pull his rockets out of Cuba, they were cramming the markets, buying the shelves bare of beans, rice and other foodstuffs, utterly useless, most of them, for air-raid-shelter-cookery because they can’t be prepared without pints of water. Well, the shoppers were spared – this time. Do they rejoice? They are too dull for that, poor dears; they never knew what didn’t hit them. No doubt, because of that panic buying, they have less money now for gifts. But they have enough. It will be quite a good Christmas, the merchants predict. Everyone can afford to spend at least something – except, maybe, some of the young hustlers (recognisable at once to experienced eyes like George’s) who stand scowling on the street corners or staring into shops with the maximum of peripheral vision.

  George is very far, right now, from sneering at any of these fellow-creatures. They may be crude and mercenary and dull and low, but he is proud, is glad, is almost indecently gleeful to be able to stand up and be counted in their ranks – the ranks of that marvellous minority, The Living. They don’t know their luck, these people on the sidewalk; but George knows his – for a little while at least – because he is freshly returned from the icy presence of The Majority, which Doris is about to join.

  I am alive, he says to himself, I am alive! And life-energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite. How good to be in a body – even this old beat-up carcase – that still has warm blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh! The scowling youths on the corners see him as a dodderer, no doubt, or at best as a potential score. Yet he still claims a distant kinship with the strength of their young arms and shoulders and loins. For a few bucks, he could get any one of them to climb into the car, ride back with him to his house, strip off butch leather jacket, skin–tight Levis, shirt and cowboy boots and take part, a naked sullen young athlete, in the wrestling–bout of his pleasure. But George doesn’t want the bought unwilling bodies of these boys. He wants to rejoice in his own body; the tough triumphant old body of a survivor. The body that has outlived Jim and is going to outlive Doris.

  He decides to stop by the gym – although this isn’t one of his regular days – on his way home.

  In the locker-room, George takes off his clothes, gets into his sweat–socks, jockstrap and shorts. Shall he put on a tee shirt? He looks at himself in the long mirror. Not too bad. The bulges of flesh over the belt of the shorts are not so noticeable today. The legs are quite good. The chest-muscles, when properly flexed, don’t sag. And, as long as he doesn’t have his spectacles on, he can’t see the little wrinkles inside the elbows, above the kneecaps and around the hollow of the sucked-in belly. The neck is loose and scraggy under all circumstances, in all lights, and would look gruesome even if he were half-blind. He has abandoned the neck altogether, like an untenable military position.

  Yet he looks – and doesn’t he know it! – better than nearly all of his age-mates at this gym. Not because they’re in such bad shape; they are healthy enough specimens. What’s wrong with them is their fatalistic acceptance of middle age, their ignoble resignation to grandfatherhood, impending retirement and golf. George is different from them because, in some sense which can’t quite be defined but which is immediately apparent when you see him naked, he hasn’t given up. He is still a contender; and they aren’t. Maybe it’s nothing more mysterious than vanity which gives him this air of a withered boy? Yes, despite his wrinkles, his slipped flesh, his greying hair, his grim–lipped strutting spryness, you catch occasional glimpses of a ghostly someone else, soft-faced, boyish, pretty. The combination is bizarre, it is older than middle–age itself, but it is there.

  Looking grimly into the mirror, with distaste and humour, George says to himself, you old ass, who are you trying to seduce? And he puts on his tee shirt.

  In the gym there are only three people; it’s still too early for the office workers. A big heavy man named Buck – all that remains at fifty of a football player – is talking to a curly–haired young man named Rick, who aspires to television. Buck is nearly nude; his rolling belly bulges indecently over a kind of bikini, pushing it clear down to the bush-line. He seems quite without shame. Whereas Rick, who has a very well–made muscular body, wears a grey wool sweatshirt and pants, covering all of it from the neck to the wrists and ankles. ‘Hi, George’, they both say, nodding casually at him; and this, George feels, is the most genuinely friendly greeting he has received all day.

  Buck knows all about the history of sport; he is an encyclopaedia of batting averages, handicaps, records and scores. He is in the midst of telling how someone took someone else in the seventh round. He mimes the knockout: ‘Pow! Pow! And, Boy, he’d had it!’ Rick listens, seated astride a bench. There is always an atmosphere of leisureliness in this place. A boy like Rick will take three or four hours to work out, and spend most of the time just yakking about show biz, about sport cars, about football and boxing – very seldom, oddly enough, about sex. Perhaps this is partly out of consideration for the morals of the various young kids and earl
y–teenagers who are usually around. When Rick talks to grown-ups, he is apt to be smart–alecky or actor–sincere; but with the kids he is as unaffected as a village idiot. He clowns for them and does magic tricks and tells them stories, deadpan, about a store in Long Beach (he gives its exact address) where – once in a great while, suddenly and without any previous announcement – they declare a Bargain Day. On such days, every customer who spends more than a dollar gets a Jag or a Porsche or an MG for free. (The rest of the time, the place is an ordinary antique shop.) When Rick is challenged to show the car he got, he takes the kids outside and points to a suitable one on the street. When they look at its registration–slip and find that it belongs to someone else, Rick swears that that’s his real name; he changed it when he started acting. The kids don’t absolutely disbelieve him; but they yell that he’s a liar and crazy and they beat on him with their fists. While they do this, Rick capers grinning around the gym on all fours, like a dog.

  George lies down on one of the inclined boards, in order to do situps. This is always something you have to think yourself into; the body dislikes them more than any other exercise. While he is getting into the mood, Webster comes over and lies down on the board next to his. Webster is maybe twelve or thirteen, slender and graceful and tall for his age, with long smooth golden boy–legs. He is gentle and shy, and he moves about the gym in a kind of dream; but he keeps steadily on with his workout. No doubt he thinks he looks scrawny and has vowed to become a huge wide awkward overloaded muscle-man. George says, ‘Hi, Web’ and Webster answers, ‘Hi, George’ in a shy secretive whisper.

  Now Webster begins doing his situps, and George, peeling off his tee shirt on a sudden impulse, follows his example. As they continue, George feels an empathy growing between them. They are not competing with each other; but Webster’s youth and litheness seem to possess George, and this borrowed energy is terrific. Withdrawing his attention from his own protesting muscles and concentrating it upon Webster’s flexing and relaxing body, George draws the strength from it to go on beyond his normal forty situps, to fifty, to sixty, to seventy, to eighty. Shall he try for a hundred? Then, all at once, he is aware that Webster has stopped. The strength leaves him instantly. He stops too, panting hard; though not any harder than Webster himself. They lie there panting, side by side. Webster turns his head and looks at George, obviously rather impressed.

  ‘How many do you do?’ he asks.

  ‘Oh – it depends.’

  ‘These things just kill me! Man!’

  How delightful it is, to be here! If only one could spend one’s entire life in this state of easy–going physical democracy! Nobody is bitchy, here, or ill–tempered, or inquisitive. Vanity, including the most outrageous posings in front of the mirrors, is taken for granted. The godlike young baseball player confides to all his anxiety about the smallness of his ankles. The plump banker, rubbing his face with skincream, says simply, ‘I can’t afford to get old.’ No one is perfect and no one pretends to be. Even the half–dozen quite wellknown actors put on no airs. The youngest kids sit beside sixty- and seventy–year–olds, innocently naked, in the steam room, and they call each other by their first names. Nobody is too hideous or too handsome to be accepted as an equal. Surely everyone is nicer in this place than he is outside it?

  Today, George feels more than usually unwilling to leave the gym. He does his exercises twice as many times as he is supposed to; he spends a long while in the steam room; he washes his hair.

  When he comes out on to the street again, it is already getting toward sunset. And now he makes another impulsive decision: instead of driving directly back to the beach, he will take a long detour through the hills.

  Why? Partly because he wants to enjoy the uncomplicated relaxed happy mood which is nearly always produced by a workout at the gym. It is so good to feel the body’s satisfaction and gratitude; no matter how much it may protest, it likes being forced to perform these tasks. Now, for a while at least, the vagus nerve won’t twitch, the pylorus will be quiet, the arthritic thumbs and knee won’t assert themselves. And how restful, now that there’s no need for stimulants, not to have to hate anyone at all! George hopes to be able to stay in this mood as long as he keeps on driving.

  Also, he wants to take a look at the hills again; he hasn’t been up there in a long time. Years ago, before Jim even, when George first came to California, he used to go into the hills often. It was the wildness of this range, largely uninhabited yet rising right up out of the city, that fascinated him. He felt the thrill of being a foreigner, a trespasser there, of venturing into the midst of a primitive alien nature. He would drive up at sunset or very early in the morning, park his car, and wander off along the firebreak trails; catching glimpses of deer moving deep in the chaparral of a canyon, stopping to watch a hawk circling overhead, stepping carefully among hairy tarantulas crawling across his path, following twisty tracks in the sand until he came upon a coiled dozing rattler. Sometimes, in the half–light of dawn, he would meet a pack of coyotes trotting toward him, tails down, in single file. The first time this happened, he took them for dogs; and then, suddenly, without uttering a sound, they broke formation and went bounding away downhill, with great uncanny jumps.

  But, this afternoon, George can feel nothing of that long–ago excitement and awe; something is wrong, from the start. The steep winding road, which used to seem romantic, is merely awkward, now, and dangerous. He keeps meeting other cars on blind corners and having to swerve sharply; by the time he has reached the top, he has lost all sense of relaxation. Even up here, they are building dozens of new houses; the area is getting suburban. True, there are still a few uninhabited canyons, but George can’t rejoice in them; he is oppressed by awareness of the city below. On both sides of the hills, to the north and to the south, it has spawned and spread itself over the entire plain. It has eaten up the wide pastures and ranchlands, and the last stretches of orange grove; it has sucked out the surrounding lakes and sapped the forests of the high mountains. Soon it will be drinking converted sea water. And yet it will die. No need for rockets to wreck it, or another ice age to freeze it, or a huge earthquake to crack it off and dump it in the Pacific. It will die of over-extension. It will die because its taproots have dried up; the brashness and greed which have been its only strength. And the desert, which is the natural condition of this country, will return.

  Alas, how sadly, how certainly George knows this! He stops the car and stands at the road’s rough yellow dirt edge, beside a manzanita bush, and looks out over Los Angeles like a sad Jewish prophet of doom, as he takes a leak. Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city. But this city is not great, was never great, and has nearly no distance to fall.

  Now he zips up his pants and gets into the car and drives on, thoroughly depressed. The clouds close in low upon the hills, making them seem northern and sad like Wales; and the day wanes, and the lights snap on in their sham jewel colours all over the plain, as the road winds down again on to Sunset Boulevard and he nears the ocean.

  The supermarket is still open; it won’t close till midnight. It is brilliantly bright. Its brightness offers sanctuary from loneliness and the dark. You could spend hours of your life here, in a state of suspended insecurity, meditating on the multiplicity of things to eat. Oh dear, there is so much! So many brands in shiny boxes, all of them promising you good appetite. Every article on the shelves cries out to you, take me, take me; and the mere competition of their appeals can make you imagine yourself wanted, even loved. But beware – when you get back to your empty room, you’ll find that the false flattering elf of the advertisement has eluded you; what remains is only cardboard, cellophane and food. And you have lost the heart to be hungry.

  This bright place isn’t really a sanctuary. For, ambushed among its bottles and cartons and cans, are shockingly vivid memories of meals shopped for, cooked, eaten with Jim. They stab out at George as he passes, pushing his shopping-cart. Should we ever feel truly lonely if we never at
e alone?

  But to say, I won’t eat alone tonight; isn’t that deadly dangerous? Isn’t it the start of a long landslide – from eating at counters and drinking at bars to drinking at home without eating, to despair and sleeping-pills and the inevitable final overdose? But who says I have to be brave? George asks. Who depends on me, now? Who cares?

  We’re getting maudlin, he says, trying to make his will choose between halibut, sea bass, chopped sirloin, steaks. He feels a nausea of distaste for them all; then sudden rage. Damn all food. Damn all life. He would like to abandon his shopping-cart, although it’s already full of provisions. But that would make extra work for the clerks, and one of them is cute. The alternative, to put the whole lot back in the proper places himself, seems like a labour of Hercules; for the overpowering sloth of sadness is upon him. The sloth that ends in going to bed and staying there until you develop some disease.

  So he wheels the cart to the cash-desk, pays, stops on the way out to the car-lot, enters the phone-booth, dials.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, Charley.’

  ‘Geo —!’

  ‘Look – is it too late to change my mind? About tonight? You see – when you called this morning – I thought I had this date – But I just heard from them that —’

  ‘Of course it isn’t too late!’ She doesn’t even bother to listen to his lying excuses. Her gladness flashes its instantaneous way to him, even faster than her words, across the zigzag of the wires. And at once Geo and Charley are linked, are yet another of this evening’s lucky pairs, amidst all of its lonely wanderers. If any of the clerks were watching, they would see his face inside the glass box brighten, flush with joy like a lover’s.

  ‘Can I bring you anything? I’m at the market —’

  ‘Oh no – no thank you, Geo dear! I have loads of food. I always seem to get too much, nowadays. I suppose it’s because —’