That’s where he always sat during those long evenings too, while she sat in the parlor, in a chair with cracked leather, facing a gilt easel that stood in front of the fireplace. On the canvas it held was a portrait of her father, dark-toned except for the great mane and thick mustache of bright white hair. His coal-black eyes were fixed on where she sat.
Just before turning from the bedside, he sensed something had happened. First he realized he wasn’t feeling her eyes on his face. Then he noticed that her lids had closed.
He didn’t leave. Stood there, leaning on his cane, looking down at her. Now he heard rasping snores with silences between. As he waited, he realized the silences were getting longer as the snores sounded louder.
He never heard it. No flapping of wings, as he’d expected. Just before the last great snore her eyes opened wide. They looked like two holes burned by the red tip of a cigar in the yellowed linen covering a feather pillow.
He laid his hand on her breast. When he didn’t feel it rise, he knew.
Still he let time pass to be sure it had carried her off. After a spell he poked and pushed until he’d nudged the lumps of flesh to the middle of the bed, as she’d told him. Without touching her face, he plumped the pillow so her head was propped. She’d told him not to close her eyes.
Then, as she’d told him, he took the gold watch from the night table and stuffed it into the pocket on his trousers, on top of the key and chain, which like the watch she’d told him he was to keep. He touched nothing else in the room, as she’d said he was not to.
“Afterward you will have no further responsibilities here,” she’d told him yesterday.
Leaving her bedside without a backward look, he traipsed through the house, opening all the jalousies, draperies and blinds, except those in the two rooms it had come into, as she’d told him. Then, dragging himself up to the attic, he stowed his own belongings, none of which he’d ever moved down into the house, in a carped-bag.
Just as he arrived at the bottom of the staircase, he heard them on the porch.
Plodding to the front door, he turned the key, twisted the brass knob, molded to the shape of a rose, and tugged open the massive front door, as she’d told him, so they’d know it was permitted the ladies of the town to enter. Just as years before she’d told him to admit four men dressed in linen suits and pastel neckties, holding palmetto hats over their parts as if covering themselves. They’d come to collect taxes but had never got to take chairs in the parlor before she’d told him to show them out.
And as still longer ago for some years he’d received young ladies of the town, in bright floral dresses with pleats and flounces who’d come to have her teach them to paint flowers on vases and pitchers and creamers and teacups. And as before that time, not long after her father had died and she’d cut her hair short, he’d ushered in the preacher, dressed in his black suit, starched white shirt with a high collar, and shoestring tie, who’d started in on her for buggy-riding on Sunday afternoon, but who’d left right quick, looking like a whipped hound.
Taking the handles of the carpetbag in one hand, wrapping the palm of the other around the crook of his cane, he scuffled past the closed door of the room he’d been sleeping in all those years. Behind him he heard them heading for the staircase.
He shambled through the kitchen. Out through the door he’d opened to see the red tip of a cigar, clamped between teeth behind fat red lips, glowing in the dusk all those years ago.
A TALE TOLD
I do not want to tell this tale. For a number of reasons. Any one of which I consider justification for refusing to go on with it. Because overkill is a self-defeating tactic, I won’t go into all of them. A man who takes his obligations seriously, I try to fulfill them even when I’m inclined not to. Yes, I do try to be true to myself and act honorably and effectively, though sometimes these intentions doget in one another’s way.
Of course it’s up to you to decide what you do or don’t wantto do about the story, should I go on and tell it. You can always say, “Not my cup of tea.” Or, “I’m not going to let him dump this on me.” Or, “Who gives a damn?” Frankly I don’t care one way or another. What you choose to do or not do is your affair. I have the weight of my own decisions to bear, without taking on any of yours.
At any rate, I will give you three among my numerous reasons for not wanting to tell the story. First, I know little about the man who claims it’s his story, except that seemingly he’s familiar with the opening four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—it was also the rhythmic code for victory during World War II. Heroism and triumph, I confess, are not my familiars. And that the man’s persistent, or I should say insistent to the point of rudeness. Oh yes, I can add that he told me his name is Fels, though I’m not sure I believe him.
Second reason. I don’t want to get to know him. If I do try to tell his story, necessarily I’ll have to learn some things about him. Let me assure you it will be as little as possible. I have enough trouble with myself let alone dealing with some kind of nut case. Such a serious reservation in itself is justification enough for not going on.
Reason three. I’m finding myself rather weary these days, and telling a story, anybody’s story, takes one hell of a lot of energy. That might surprise you. When you tell a story, you’re not lifting dumbbells or running, even necessarily standing. Although some story tellers do claim that standing at a lectern circulates the blood more freely, making their brain work more efficiently, most prefer to work sitting down. Either way, you don’t have to push anything heavier than a pen, which is almost light as a feather—an apt comparison in that, as I’m certain you know, feathers are what pens, from the Latin penna, for feather, used to be—across a smooth surface. Which it would seem does not demand much energy. But even if you should have reservations about my character or find me a failure as a storyteller, give me the benefit of your doubt in the matter of energy. Believe that just the little I’ve been doing before the story, if there is to be one, gets started, takes a lot of energy out of someone who’s wrung out to begin with.
What’s put me into such a state, I’m not going to tell you. To do so would amount to special pleading. Besides, it’s none of your business.
I can only hope you’re fair-minded enough to agree that these three reasons alone are sufficient for my not wanting to tell this story. Yet though I myself find them convincing and compelling, here I am, still moving a pen across the blue-green lines on yellow sheets. Because there’s only one reason for that, I’ll tell you what it is. That bastard Fels. He won’t go away and let me languish in peace. So at this very moment I’m in my study at my desk right after breakfast, sipping a second cup of coffee, as I always do.
But I’m not telling a story, anybody’s story. What I am making myself do is try to balance my checkbook. Doing so is necessary because, I admit, I’m careless and inexact, where I should be scrupulous and precise if I’m to reach an accommodation between my record of the money I’ve spent and have available and the statement of my financial status the bank sends each month. I find this a hateful, perplexing, painful, and finally futile ordeal. Yet I consider submitting to it preferable, infinitely, to having to tell a story.
Thus, lost in gaps, confused by my own notations, and baffled by my own arithmetic, I’m here are my desk, heroically struggling with the lesser of two evils involving paper and pen, when I hear four knocks on the door of my study—three light and quick, followed by one hard and sustained.
“Go away,” I shout, “I’m busy.”
Though I listen intently, turning my head so my left ear is toward the door—my right ear isn’t all it used to be—I can’t pick up the sound of footsteps in the hallway, just as I’d not heard the approach of anyone before I was interrupted. There’s no more knocking.
Next morning, same time, I’m back at my desk with a pen in the fingers of one hand, the handle of a coffee cup between the fingers of the
other. Fagged as I’ve been for months now—or is it already years, my perception of time is that unreliable—the last thing I want to do again this morning is tell a story. So thrusting aside whatever claim storytelling might have on me, I’m on the point, so to speak, of writing a difficult-to-compose letter to someone with whom over a period of time—again I have to be approximate—I was rather intimate. As was the case with balancing my checkbook, I’ve compelled myself to face up to and embark on what ought not be avoided.
The moment that, assuring myself the adjective at the beginning of the salutation in a letter is nothing more than a convention, not necessarily an expression of affection, I get down the word dear, followed by the given name of the addressee and a comma—I’d prefer to use the formal colon but realize that too would be overkill—I hear a loud rap rap rap on the door. Perhaps it’s because I’m concentrating the meager amount of energy I can summon in order to prodeed with the letter I don’t want to write that I fail instantly to connect the rhythm of the knock I’ve just heard with that of the knocking yesterday morning.
“Whoever you are and whatever you want,” I yell, making myself sound as irritable as I feel irritated. “I’m not here.” Then I take a long swig of coffee.
All at once recalling having heard some knocking in the same rhythm twenty-four hours before, I lift my pen and point it at the ceiling. Again I listen for footsteps withdrawing and again no sound reaches my ear. Rather than return to the letter I don’t know how to begin, I wait. Maybe half a minute passes before whoever is on the other side of the door knocks again, same pattern of sound.
Irritation rising to anger, I scream, “Bugger off!” and I jab the point of my pen at the door as if I were throwing a dart. Although I wait to hear either another knock or footsteps in retreat, neither happens.
Irrelevant as it might seem, I must confess that just as I’d failed to balance my checkbook, I never wrote the letter. I might well plead that the unexpected knocking for a second time was a sufficiently distracting interruption to inhibit me. But that’s not the whole story. Why I gave up on the second endeavor I’m not going to tell you.
Now for day three. Nine o’clock sharp—I’m a creature of habit and promptitude—I’m in my study. Against a July sun so bright it’s almost blinding, I draw the curtain on the single small window facing my desk. Already the temperature must be close to ninety. After a long gulp of coffee, I pick up the damnable pen. Incidentally, I’m left-handed, which bit of information might help you to visualize what I’m telling you. In front of me is an accursed blank sheet of paper. Pen point again raised toward the ceiling, which in case you care to know is oyster gray, I’m staring into space. No need to tell you what I’m struggling to mount the energy to do but can’t. As you’ve probably guessed—knocking again, same rhythmic pattern. Connecting it with Beethoven and “V for victory” this time, I conclude whoever the knocker might be, the knock is mocking me. Achievement? victory? God, no.
Rather than howl “Fuck off!” my impulse on the instant, I manage to swallow the words and hold my tongue by taking another gulp of coffee. Deciding to let silence answer for me, I stare at the door and wait. Within seconds another knock of triumph. Again I manage to restrain myself. After no more than ten seconds, a third knock. Before I can decide how to respond, I see the white porcelain doorknob—I’ve converted one of the two rooms in the Victorian house in which I rent an apartment into a study—turn.
You might be interested to know that after rising in the morning I keep the door of my flat unlocked until I retire for the night. The neighborhood I’m living in at the present is perfectly safe and I have no acquaintances who might pay me a surprise visit. I confess I have a touch of agoraphilia. For some reason I feel more comfortable, actually more secure behind an unlocked door. A corollary to this sense, irrational as it might seem, is that being located inside, the real threat ought not be contained, that is, locked in, but should be provided the readiest egress. Whenever I go into my study, I do close the unlocked door, however, in order to separate the self in there from the self that eats, sleeps, urinates, defecates, what have you.
Hearing the screech of the doorknob, I swivel the seat of my desk chair around to see the door swing creakingly open. Posted just outside the frame is a short, stoop-shouldered, barrel-chested, bowlegged man, with an orange-white, tobacco-stained mustache, which droops on the same parabola as his shoulders. His bald head, the size and shape of a large honeydew melon, mottled like an overripe cantaloupe, is fringed with wads of cotton. The small thick lenses of his wire-frame glasses are oval. Sunny and hot as the day is—it’s the twenty- fourth of July—he’s wearing a raincoat, black. A couple of sizes too long for his short-legged, dumpy body, it almost touches the floor. Without causing his elbows to bend, his hands are plunged into the pockets. He doesn’t come in or go away.
“Well?” I snap, after taking a swallow of coffee, “what is it?”
Disregarding my question, legitimate if one ever was, he slowly crosses the threshold. As he shuffles toward me, he leans so far forward it seems he might trip on the front hem of the raincoat and pitch forward onto the oak floor, smashing his parrot-beak nose. When he’s close enough for me to smell his foul breath, also to punch him in the mouth as I’ve a mind to, he stops, stands swaying, as if about to flop onto the yellow pad on my desk top. He doesn’t utter a word of explanation for his appearance.
“Can’t you see I’m at work?” I demand to be told.
“Not true, governor,” he shoots back. His gravelly voice seems to be coming from the depths of a cave. “You’re caught doing nothing.”
“Impudent fellow!” I shout, when he’s just inches from my face. “Whatever your business is, don’t presume to tell me mine. To come barging in on me like this. …”
“I’ve come knocking twice before, and you told me to scram.” Beneath his mustache his fleshy lips are purple, as are his cheeks and nose. Ah ha, I say to myself, he’s an alchie. “When I knocked again this morning, you didn’t’ respond.”
“How did you know I wasn’t out…somewhere?”
“Because I was sure you were here.”
Below shaggy white eyebrows and behind the thick lenses of his glasses, his eyeballs look like those of a trout that swims in whiskey.
“Isn’t your logic rather circular,” I sneer. “Anyhow, when you’ve entered my premises uninvited, I could have you arrested for trespass, you know. Breaking and entering would put you in the slammer for a spell.”
“The door to your apartment and this door were unlocked. What did I break, governor?”
“Look here, I’m not going to argue with you. Just get out. Decamp. Vamoose. Before I call the police.”
“Do you no good. You don’t have a leg to stand on, legally.”
“It is my dwelling. A man’s home is his castle.”
“But you summoned me.”
“What! Are you out of your mind, man? I don’t even know your name.”
“The name is Fels.”
“As in ‘I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.’ And the fact is I don’t.
“Just change the second l to an s and you’ve got it, governor.”
“You say I’ve invited…what was the word you used?”
“Summoned.”
“Nonsense. I’ve never laid eyes on you before.”
“Before what?”
“Before you entered my apartment uninvited and opened the door of my study. Why it was literally a tour de force!”
“Be that as it may. I received a summons and I’ve answered it.”
“A summons, huh? Summons for what?”
“I shouldn’t have to tell you, because deep down, governor, you know as well as I do. You summoned me so you can do what you have to do. Namely, me.”
“What in the name of God does that mean? I must do you?”
“You’ve said it. You must tell my story.”
“Well, it j
ust so happens I know your story as little as I know you. Which is not at all.”
“Sorry, that won’t wash. Matter of fact, it’s the reason you must. To prove you’re wrong, to prove you do know my story.”
“Now listen to what I’m telling you. Listen carefully, digest what I’m saying and end all this poppycock. Even if I did know your story, which I don’t, I don’t want to tell it. I don’t want to tell any story. Yours or anybody else’s. Not even my own.”
“Of course you don’t, governor. And I can’t blame you. But what you want to do and what you must do are two different things. That’s the way it is. Want to or not, you have to tell my story.”
“Do you mind telling me why I must tell your story?”
“Because you’re a storyteller, governor. At least that’s how you present yourself.”
“Look here, there are lots of storytellers. Far too many, if you ask me. Find yourself on the Ross Ice Shelf or on one of the Svalbard islands and you’re sure to run into a storyteller.”
“But they didn’t summon me. You did.”
“Good heavens, man, must I tell you again—I’ve never even heard of you and I haven’t the faintest idea what your story is about. What’s more, I don’t want to know. You or your story.”
“Forget about me. But the story…well, the story is about the book.”
“The book?”
“That’s right, the book. Is there anything wrong or extraordinary about a person’s having a connection with a book”
“Well, no. But what book are you referring to?”
“Revealing that now, governor, would be taking the heart out of the story before it gets told.”
“Even if I were to agree, for some insane reason, I wouldn’t have the least idea where to start.”