#4
I didn’t see much of her even after she started attending Monroe High. Between classes she was always in the library, never had time to go out, not even for an ice-cream soda. I don’t think she had any friends. I hardly ever saw her except for half-hour German lessons once a week in an empty classroom after three. It wasn’t easy convincing her to do that. She wasn’t stubborn or anything but hard to reach. She never volunteered anything herself. I submitted written stuff in German which she corrected. She also corrected my oral mistakes. She was a very nice and gentle girl but it was a little like working with an intelligent grammar-book. And those lessons were just for a while. The summer holidays rolled around. I spent August as a counselor in a camp in Vermont. I hardly ever saw her at all after those lessons.
(I see her very often at school. She seldom sees me. I know her schedule by heart. Between classes she’s sure to be in the school library. I don’t want to disturb her in her work. She emerges bewildered when you do that. From the stacks I can see how the reference books and papers and pens are laid out neatly on the desk before her like a perfectly done assignment in itself. She isn’t naturally a brilliant student and tries to compensate by grinding work. One of my girl friends angered me by calling her that: “a grind.” Once I saw her staring down at a corrected math paper, a disaster judging by her strained white face. I expected a C. It was a B+. She often wears a long-sleeved white blouse with a little-girl collar beneath a gray jumper. Once she reaches for the dictionary and I see a big white scar on her wrist over a lovely tracing of blue veins. She has very white skin. Maybe a week later I see her make the same movement and see the scar again. It was the same movement but with the other hand.
Once she suddenly looks up from her notebook straight at me, pen poised, for long seconds. Her lips are parted. From where I’m standing in the stacks I smile and raise my hand in greeting but go unrecognized or unseen. She’s looking for something but it’s inside. Now she finds it and goes back to the notebook. I can hear the dry scratch of her pen point.
Once I witness a similar scene through the wired glass insert of a classroom door. It doesn’t change things all that much. When we’re together it’s as though there’s glass between us, she polite and attentive for my benefit but behind it. Behind this real glass I see her up front, divided between her notes and her teacher, casting quick dutiful glances at Mr Walton with his big Adam’s-apple above his bow-tie, her pen pausing when he pauses. He clowns a little. The class relaxes, laughing. Her pen stops, poised over the notebook, patiently waiting. Then he turns to the blackboard and her pen goes back to work.
She gives me reluctant German lessons after school once a week in an empty classroom. I’ve minored in German to understand the lyrics of Schubert, Schumann and Hugo Wolf lieder. German declensions prove unlyrical. I’ve declined from A to C. My enthusiasms are always short-lived. Now I’m remotivated, a thousand times more.
The lessons last exactly half an hour, not a minute less, not a minute more. I have cunning pathetic strategies. For example, during a preposition-drill I choose the phrase, “I think of you too much.” I say: “Ich denke zu viel um dich.” I know the preposition “um” is wrong. It’s to trick her into saying the correct form, “Ich denke zu viel an dich,” to hear her, any way, even tricked into it, say that to me: “I think of you too much.”
Once I touch her bare arm without warning. It jerks back involuntarily as though burned. You can tell she’s distressed at the possible offense her reflex may have caused. Her distress and my offense are so strong that I put my arm around her shoulders in consolation (and revenge?). Seeing it coming, she’s prepared. There’s no reflex this time, just a stiffness with a slight smile. It’s like embracing a statue. She waits in polite distress for it to end.
When you give her little things as I do whenever I can, she exclaims “O” which expresses thanks and appreciation and maybe alarm. Conversation isn’t spontaneous with her. When I say something, she listens with polite intensity and then comments on it, really tries, but it’s a minimum contribution and she withdraws into silence until I jog her on to new contributions.
One day, doing that, I recall a beloved early toy which strangely I remember best from the time of defect. You wound it up, forcing towards the end against the abnormal resistance of the spring, pressed the button and the stamped-tin baby bear jerked forward, silently clashing cymbals. Then stopped. If you pushed it you got a few feeble forward-moving jerks, a weak try at a cymbal clash, then it stopped again. Every time the spring was harder and harder to wind. One day there was a faint metallic scream from inside and quick crazy soundless cymbal clashes and a wild acceleration of movement and the stamped-tin baby bear banged into the wall blindly over and over. Then a snapping sound and it fell over into final immobility. I kept it for years anyhow.
She’s always in a hurry, no time for a Coke after the lesson. She has no way of preventing me from walking her to the bus stop. Sometimes she tells me she’s in a hurry because of a math lesson with Harvey. He helps her with her father’s book when he has time. She’s very grateful. She confides a tiny bit in Mrs Morgenstern. Mainly they talk about Harvey, I guess.
She wants to follow in her father’s footsteps, at least become a scientist although her father believed that women couldn’t because of the form of their brains. She’d asked Mrs Morgenstern anxiously if she thought it was true. She’s trying to decipher his textbook, keeps at it all the time. That was why Harvey helped her a little when he had time.
“He is a genie,” she says to me one day while waiting for the bus. She seldom makes English mistakes. “He’s a genius,” I correct, glad at the reversal of roles and the brief domination it involved. “Oh yes!” she replies, taking correction for enthusiastic affirmation. Her brown eyes are great with respect. Harvey is the one subject she’s spontaneous with me about, allowing a little give and take between us. I have to praise him to keep the connection intact. I tell her about the shack-days, about his scholastic triumphs.
“Auf Wiedersehen, Rachel,” I always say as her bus swings in. “Goodbye,” she always says.)
I got my paper back the next day. Marginal red ink reminded me that there had been a German lesson in her room one year in July. That was true. It had been his suggestion. Correcting my memory like that was another reversal of roles. So what was the point of my new task?
(The day after the summer vacation has begun I come over with another book order. They’re seated side by side at the living room table over a notebook and her father’s book. He looks bored. Her head is bent over the notebook. Her short hair is shiny and neatly parted. She’s working something out and doesn’t look up. I’ve landed a job as a counselor in a camp in Vermont and won’t be seeing her for a long time, thirty-five days.
When she finishes the problem she looks up and sees me and smiles politely. I say I’m going to miss those German lessons. Harvey suggests she give me the lessons here, upstairs. Why not right now? Maybe it’s to get rid of her.
When we come down an hour later from her room he’s still there, plunged in his own work. “How was he?” he asks her, not looking up. “Very good, Harvey,” she says generously. When she’s gone he asks me: “How did it go?” “OK.” “Like?” “Declensions.” “Yeah?” he says and waits, expectantly, it seems to me. “Masculine,” I say and recite: “Der, Des, Dem, Den.” “Go on,” he says. I don’t know if it’s the “go on” of disbelief or “go on” meaning “continue.” I continue: “Feminine: Die, Der Der Die. Do you want the neuter too?”)
On the Friday of the second week of my regular pedagogic visits to the other house I overheard Harvey wheezing to Hanna:
“Goddam it. You do. What I tell you. To do. Clean it up. Buy good stuff. Don’t forget the tablecloth.” It proved to be in my honor, a little celebration in the kitchen just before the humiliation of the payment ceremony. The dirt and the roaches were still there. But she’d covered the Formica table with a linen tablecloth.
It was yellowed and deeply creased from having been folded away in a closet for maybe thirty years. It smelled that way. Even doubled up it was too big for the table and dragged down onto the filthy floor. There was a jar of sticky salmon-eggs, a box of Ritz crackers with the top ripped off, a big bottle of Cointreau and three turdish chocolate éclairs.
The celebration was for my “breakthrough” with Beth Anderson. He knew our relationship had taken a new turn. That was because he deputized Hanna to keep him informed about my movements. Whenever I went over to Beth’s she was sure to be watching at a window.
The day before the kitchen feast I happened to look out of Beth’s picture window. I saw Hanna behind the attic window with binoculars trained on the two of us. I drew the drapes, telling Beth it was cozier that way.
Harvey misinterpreted that completely. When I told him we engaged in tutorials behind those drawn drapes his lips withdrew from his yellowed teeth in a spectral grin.
As I forced myself to sample the sickening stuff on the table he said it was probably a little too early in our relationship for me to sound her out about the placement of the sensors in her house.
Much too early, I said.
A little too early, he repeated and then returned to that matter of the location of Rachel’s room. It was worth $500 to him if I could manage to get hold of the blueprint of Beth Anderson’s house. Now that I was a regular visitor it shouldn’t be a problem. I replied that a house blueprint wasn’t something you borrowed like a cup of flour. Or was his idea for me to steal it? He didn’t answer that one but came up with a substitute tactic. I should draw a plan of the house to scale from memory. Hadn’t I said she’d shown me everything? He made a try at a leer.
So I became a reluctant unpaid draftsman for him. He wasn’t satisfied with my job. He was sure I’d screwed up the measurements. He produced a steel ribbon tape measure and told me to measure every one of her rooms and the corridors too. I said that you couldn’t do a sneaky crazy thing like that in a house you’d been invited to. He couldn’t tell me that was part of our contract. Maybe not, he said, but it was still worth $500 to him to get the exact measurements of that house.
He left the tape measure on my desk. I wondered how it could possibly efface the question marks on his sheets and position the red circle of the immeasurable room on a measured one.
I didn’t so much as touch his cold-blooded coiled instrument. It didn’t budge from my desk. I couldn’t accept the image of myself kneeling down to figures in his service. That’s how it had all begun, with the check on the floor of a furnished room. Still, I couldn’t help translating dollars into days. I’d figured out that every fifty dollars meant a day closer to clean break with that house.
One evening Beth Anderson returned from the kitchen too soon and caught me in the middle of my compromise, stalking along her pastel living room wall, counting under my breath. One of my long paces was a yard, give or take an inch. She looked at me queerly.
All things considered I handled the situation pretty well. I went on pacing off, unfazed, excusing myself for the exercise: lumbar rheumatism, a sudden attack. At the onset of pain, long stiff-legged strides were prescribed. She looked relieved at that, maybe even happy I’d finally confided intimate things. While I strode on, she told me all about her own back troubles.
By the end of her symptoms I’d lost count of the paces. I handed the tape measure back to Harvey that very day and told him it was impossible.
A few days later he came up to my room and handed me a compact camera with a 28-70 millimeter focal zoom. He expected me to photograph every room in her house. It was worth $1,000 to him. That meant twenty days to me. But I said he must think I was crazy to think I’d do something like that. I handed it back. He didn’t insist but left the camera on my desk.
By that time I was going down to the machine regularly. Those descents were like appointments with someone who never showed up. My eyes burned constantly and I was nauseous pretty often. But maybe the nausea had nothing to do with that although one night I was half way down the cellar stairs when I heard Hanna’s voice behind me. “You better quit going down there all the time. That’s how it started with him. You better not go down there anymore. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Some days I felt the co-dwellers very strongly, some days not at all. It seemed to be cyclic. Once I thought I was on the verge of sensing my mother in the dead room although I’d never seen her on his screen. The feeling lasted a second and then vanished. I stood there in the middle of the room like a defective fifth sensor for maybe half an hour until I felt too tired to remain standing.
I lay down on the sofa and looked at the overlapping houses on the table. He’d done more of them. Again the gone house with the red-circled room haunted the existent house at different angles and degrees of overlap. There was something new now: a sheet with a big “J” above a long list of numbers. I still recall the first ones: J. #1: 12-23 6.5 h. I gave up trying to make sense of it.
At subconscious levels my brain must have gone on processing it, fitting this and that together. The completed pattern woke me in the middle of an unrelated dream. J. # 1 12-23 6.5 h.: Jerry, Viewing Number One, December 23, six and a half hours. Six and a half hours before the screen.
His careful bookkeeping accounted for all my visits down there and the duration of exposure to the rays.
Bolt upright in bed in the darkness of four-something in the morning I thought I understood, in that moment of insight or paranoia, why he’d labored up the stairs that night with the news that my mother had swum up on the screen for a few flickering seconds.
What else if not to lure me back down there? And when I resumed ghouling night after night and saw nothing and might well give it up again, there had been that further invention of a second capture of her in the striped armchair coinciding neatly with a moment of dozing on my part.
Did he want to radiate me into his image? I saw myself shrunken with a Groucho Marx wig and painted upper lip wisecracking to invisible co-dwellers.
When I woke up to a room filled with rational daylight I remembered that Harvey himself had warned against the effects of the rays. I came up with a sensible explanation of the sheet. He’d spoken of the need for a control of his vision. I was the control. It was simply a control sheet.
I was bringing up in the toilet for the third time that day and must have been noisy about it with nothing on my stomach because she stopped in front of the door.
“I told you not to go down there. Didn’t I tell him not to go down there? You’re gonna get what he got. I’m gonna have two sick men on my hands.”
But couldn’t it have been intestinal flu? People were coming down with it right and left.
(I don’t see how I’ll be able to survive those thirty-five days without her. Four days later I meet a jolly green-eyed freckled redhead called Josie who’s a counselor at the girl’s camp on the other side of the lake. I talk romantically about swimming over at night to see her but actually go the long safe way round through the woods skirting the lake. She lives in Queens so there’s the promise of relative duration. Her photo’s on the top of the public part of my wallet by the end of the week. It would be topmost on the private part except that I’ve begun judging that distinction between public and clandestine as childish. I don’t look at them any more even if I haven’t gotten rid of them. Her breasts too are freckled. Sometimes I think of Rachel and realize that I haven’t done that for a good hour. Then hours. Everything ends up diluted that way.
In September I come over to Harvey’s with books. It’s no pretext now. Rachel’s in the living room by herself, carpet-sweeping. She produces her predictable shy smile and “O”. Why does she always wear the same unbecoming dresses? I shake hands with her. That contact confirms my recovery. I sit down at my ease opposite her, waiting for Harvey. I don’t go on talking and talking, as I used to do with her in what I look upon as the humiliating old days the month before. I let her silenc
es go on and on. Sometimes I look at my watch. When she starts in on Harvey I even yawn. Not to her face of course. Behind my hand. It’s an ostentatious gesture anyhow. I could have stifled that yawn.
When she asks me about my summer camp I show her Josie’s black-and-white photo with a certain residual rancor. Rachel finds her “very pretty.” Did I want her to say or betray something else? I feel almost tempted to say impossible things about Josie, the sort of thing Harvey used to pay to hear. Instead, I say something about Josie’s green eyes and the association with jealousy. Rachel doesn’t understand “green-eyed monster.”
She comes out with her usual exotic “Please?” I suddenly find it irritating. I tell her “please” in that context isn’t colloquial at all, isn’t correct English and that she does it all the time, particularly with Harvey who purposefully says things he knows she can’t possibly understand just for the satisfaction of hearing her say “please” as though begging for something. The correct expression is “Excuse me?” said in a self-possessed non-begging way. I don’t remember if I said all that but I thought it for sure.
I get up and put the books on the table and say, in English this time: “Goodbye.” As I reach the door, she says with tremendous intimacy: “Jerry, why do you steal books?” So she knows that and for the first time shows interest in me. I don’t bother explaining or denying. I say “goodbye” again, as if I haven’t heard, and leave.)
One night in late January at about a quarter to midnight a muffled banging woke me up. The wind was howling and buffeting the house. It was practically a hurricane. You could hear things toppling, ash-can lids noisily driven across the street. I wished it would blow all the houses into the sea. The muffled banging came again, from outside. I looked out of the window.
A branch of the elm tree planted too close to the house was knocking against the side of the house, just above my window. It was like a long black arm. It would have to be lopped off. The tree had an unbalanced shape from all of those house-side branches that had already been sawn off. The job had been botched. From having watched professionals I knew that a branch had to be removed flush with the trunk in order not to leave an ugly dead snag. It had to be undercut first so that it would break off cleanly and not wrench off part of the trunk itself. Then the wound had to be tarred. In the rips of the trunk and the jagged snags I recognized Hanna’s signature. Tomorrow I’d ask Harvey to get her to deal with that branch too.
With the howling and banging I couldn’t sleep. I had to leave the house. I dressed and went outside, staggering against the force of the wind. I saw Beth Anderson in front of her house, blown about by the wind, trying to chase her ash-can cover. The wind was driving it like a noisy wobbly hoop down the street. I intercepted it for her. She said that she couldn’t sleep either and invited me in for a drink. While she went into the kitchen I stood again in the middle of her living room without moving. Bringing in the tray she said behind me: “What’s the matter, Jerry? Why don’t you sit down?”
We had more than one drink and spoke of insomnia remedies, mostly things to be taken in from outside and not things to be suppressed inside. I told her of an old method in my younger days, a recurrent fantasy. I gave it to her for whatever it was worth. She listened to me, her glass immobile halfway to her lips. It wasn’t worth that much attention.
I’d been to Florida with my parents when I was about seven. In the mid-forties, I added for the sake of rejuvenation in her eyes. It had actually been a decade earlier. I hadn’t forgotten the beach, I said. It represented something like paradise to me for a long time, I didn’t know why. The fantasy to combat sleeplessness was that I was a solitary and indefatigable runner, breasting state-line after state-line like 200-yard finish-tapes except this was a 1500-mile run, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, the cotton-pickers of Georgia applauding me, then the Everglades, racing over the backs of slumbering alligators, and finally I reached the vast white empty beach, unless I’d already fallen asleep.
“There were empty beaches in Florida then?”
“Perfectly empty and white. It was early morning. I ran into the sea, a great big green wave. Let’s go to Florida.”
“Excuse me?”
“Let’s go to Florida.”
“You and me?”
She smiled. She took it for one of our games.
“When do you want us to go?”
“Now.”
“Yes, January’s a good time for Florida.”
“No, now. Right away. Time to pack, say a quarter of an hour and we’ll be out of the house, out of the houses, and in Florida in a couple of hours. Someone told me they have round-the-clock flights to Florida. We’d be there before dawn.”
She smiled again and sipped her port. She was enjoying her end of the game. The wind buffeted the picture window.
“But I have my job here.”
“You’ll find work in Florida. Don’t they have florists there? Or do flowers grow everywhere, free for the picking? You’ll find something else to do. I’ll dye my hair and find a teaching job. Anyhow with what I’ve been earning at Harvey’s I’ve saved up nearly eight thousand dollars.”
I was half hoping she would say that my hair wasn’t all that gray (which was true). Instead she frowned a little and blinked twice. I think she was on the point of saying something else but remembered that the game wasn’t over yet. The rules had to be abided by. She mechanically objected, trying to smile a little again:
“But I’m a married woman.”
I was tempted to say that she was only technically a married woman and add that after two years and more of unilateral rupture there must be something like automatic annulment. She should learn to break free of the past. Instead, I said:
“You could say I’m your grandfather.”
“Nobody’d believe that.”
“Your father, then.”
She must have thought that was a credible relationship for she went on to something else, but still frowning a little.
“There are no empty beaches in Florida anymore. It’s all built up. Why, you’d have to go back fifty years to find an empty beach in Florida.”
So we were back to my feared starting-point. I didn’t know what to say. She didn’t say anything either. She was frowning again and rubbing the rim of her glass with her finger trying to coax music from it.
“I didn’t know you were working for Mr Morgenstern,” she said finally.
It was a confession that had slipped out. It was the alcohol. I took another drink. Was it fair of her to take something from a game and use it outside the game? I realized that my status in her eyes had suffered a damaging blow, that the persona I’d constructed mainly through omission but also through misrepresentation had now collapsed. I’d explained my presence in that other house as an act of altruism, appealing to her from those flattering heights for comprehension of poor Harvey, setting an example of self-sacrifice. Now it turned out I was a salaried employee rather than a “good person.” I realized the misrepresentation could be repaired only through further confession, voluntary this time. Instead, I tried to return to what she’d defined, from the beginning, as the game:
“So no empty beach, no Florida for you?”
“No,” she said absently, still looking down into her glass.
“Let’s go to a desert, then.”
Reluctantly, without looking up, she played.
“Death Valley?”
“Too many whitened bones there. Pioneers lying in wait. Even the Sahara was inhabited once. The Gobi desert, maybe? It was always uninhabited. Except way back by dinosaurs, a hundred million years ago. That’s out of range. Not all the dynamos on earth. Who’s afraid of dinosaurs anyhow?”
She frowned and said:
“I don’t understand what you’re doing in that awful house, a person like you. Why don’t you go back?”
I had an instant of fright when she said that and almost replied that I’d been going back too often and was losing my g
rip because of it, couldn’t she see that? It was stupid, the alcohol and the track I’d been on. Then I realized she was talking in terms of space. In the confessional mode to make amends I said:
“Back to what? The last two years I was living in a furnished room. That sounds seedy. Furnished rooms I should have said. The plural changes things considerably. I never did get used to the purple flowers on the wallpaper, though. My wife got the house. You didn’t know I was married, did you?”
“Of course I did. You can see where the ring was.”
I looked down at my finger and didn’t see any telltale mark of former mutual possession. Women are supernaturally keen-eyed about such things. After the failure of soap and then glycerin (she’d fed me too well all those years and I’d put on weight) I’d nearly amputated that finger with a hacksaw.
She wanted to know if men did that often when they broke up with a woman, take off the wedding ring?
I said that I didn’t know. In this particular case it was the man who had been broken up with, I said ungrammatically.
The wind buffeted the picture window again. Ash-can covers rattled again.
“Well,” she said after a while, yawning and stretching. “Time for bed.” She got up and started for the front door. Before, I’d always been the one to initiate endings. It was a shift in the balance of power. I joined her at the door. I didn’t want to go back to bed. I didn’t want to go back to the house.
I tried again, already on the wrong side of her door.
“Then you don’t want to go to Florida with me?”
“Not really,” she said and wished me a good night.
I smiled at her standing in the narrow gap, stifling a yawn.
“Just a joke. While waiting for InGathering, what would we have talked about during those long semi-tropical evenings?”
When I passed through her gate, I turned my back on the two houses and walked in that opposite direction. It was hard going against the wind which was trying to shove me back. The wind was even wilder now. The trees were hysterical about it. There were flights of paper, like night birds, skittering cans, a flailing of twigs. Once a ripped-off branch nearly struck me. I thought of the other branch. It would be banging against the house non-stop.
After a while I turned back. I didn’t have to struggle anymore. Now the wind was shoving me in that direction.
I returned to the other house and went to bed. I counted the irregular banging of the branch for hours. I was up to eighty-something when I finally fell asleep.
***