Eighteen
Shopping about for her birthday present in the neighborhood I found myself before her florists’. The name Dave and Tom’s was spelled out in entwined roses and lilies. It was almost the size of a supermarket. Through the plate-glass I could see her next to potted ferns and a palm-tree, wearing a uniform like a waitress. She was joking with the very handsome young man, her guest that evening, the baby she’d consoled. Like the other men he wore a green shirt with a red monogram, D & T. I drew a little closer. It was just to see her, I wasn’t going to go in and bother her. I’d tried phoning every morning and afternoon but she said I shouldn’t, they didn’t like it except in emergency cases. I told her truthfully it was an emergency when she wasn’t there. She took it for lover’s hyperbole. Then I had this idea. I went in.
She looked flustered when she saw me. I called her “Miss” as though I didn’t know her and explained: a big bouquet, it had to have fragrance, so none of their roses. I nodded at whatever she chose. It’s for Hanna’s birthday, I explained in a low voice. From Mr Morgenstern? she asked in an even lower voice. No, from me, I said. I said that Hanna was sensitive to such gestures. “With Love from Jerry,” I wrote on the fancy card.
She took the flowers to the operating-table and worked over them in silence. Asparagus ferns, the cellophane, the silver ribbons, the love-card and finally the expensive gold seal. It cost over forty dollars.
She handed me the rustling bouquet, still frowning a little. I handed it back grandly. “For you.” She reddened then looked around fearfully and said she couldn’t take it here, she couldn’t gos home with it. She wasn’t supposed to waste time making a bouquet for herself. So I had to take the bouquet myself and carry it about ceremoniously in all the shops I visited for her real present, her birthday present.
It bothered me almost as much as it did her that in a few weeks she wouldn’t be thirty-nine any more. For a man my age, being loved by a woman still technically in her thirties was far more ego boosting than being loved by a woman in her forties even though just a few days separated the two states. Anyhow, birthday gift hunting was my main activity when she wasn’t there. Maybe the reason I took so long deciding on the right present was that buying it would have put an end to shopping and in its place what would time have been filled with?
There were other activities, of course, as there had to be, mainly furious weeding and housework again. I hardly ever listened to music. I resisted temptation and avoided the honored guestroom. I had to pretend to her that I spent hours there listening to the expensive pitiful hi-fi system she’d bought me on credit along with the boxed Beethoven symphonies (Karajan, his last unsatisfactory integral, not the great 1950 one, but how could she know?).
When I was tired I sat at the living room table staring down at the road map and at the holiday leaflet with the empty white beach. I’d finally come up with one for us in southern Maine. I had doubts about that beach. The shadows of the dune-grass were very long in the sand-ripples. The photo had been taken with the sun low in very late evening or maybe even in winter. In winter even Jones’ Beach would be empty, not counting washed-up dogs.
One evening I found her in a state of stupor with the stiff face and rambling mumble that abuse of tranquilizers gives. I got out of her that a friend had finally disclosed what everybody else had known for ages: that her husband was living with a girl half his age, had been from the beginning. He’s a dirty hypocrite. Goes on shaving his head. But how about celibacy? How about that? How about carnal temptation? And all the money she’d sent him for the literature and the jewelry. She said she’d denounce him to the leadership of The Golden Galaxy. I was sorry for her but glad for us.
To calm her I suggested it might be a spiritual relationship. “Spiritual, shit. They don’t m-meditate. I know Jack. They f-fuck. All night long. She’s twenty-five.”
It was a shock to hear her say that. I’d never heard her use words like that except for my private delight recently. It cheapened that use.
Now she started crying like a little girl. It aged her badly. Her mouth was square with grief. She tried to bring forth words. “All my life,” I made out. She said it over and over. “All your life what, Beth?” I had to ask as she repeated it for the fifth time.
It came out bit by bit like a hard delivery. Exploited, all my life. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve been exploited. When I got married I thought it’d be different. But they exploit me. Jack and even Ricky. Came out in a rush: “O Jerry you won’t exploit me too will you?” I said of course not and that I was going to give her a wonderful birthday present. I kissed her and stroked her wet face till her mouth came out of squareness. A wonderful present, I soothed.
After an hour or so she said she felt better and thanked me for the present I was going to give her and asked me to show her that leaflet on the beach in southern Maine. It was the first time she’d ever done that. She asked if there was driftwood on it.
One day on my knees, warring on incipient weeds, I saw Harvey through the fence. He was urinating in the rank garden just out of the shadow of the elm-tree. He didn’t travel anymore. Hadn’t stuck that thing on his head for days now, Hanna had told me jubilantly. Didn’t it work any more? He stood pissing in the present, blinking at Beth’s house and at the birds quick in her bright yellow forsythias. He was standing disarmed in the dangerous sunshine of late April. Hanna had gone shopping.
I went over into the other house for the first time in a week and got his umbrella for him. I opened it and placed it in his hand. Urine had dribbled down one leg of his shapeless pants.
As usual I tried to convince him that he should resume the treatment. Fifty thousand dollars? he asked. Would she still say no to that? They were the first words I’d heard from him in days. He was back to that. He wanted another room, another person. Quickly I replied that when I’d mentioned his leasing the corners of her living room I’d spoken of a sum bigger than that and she’d refused, flatly.
It must have been the word “leasing” that gave me the tremendous idea. Thought it was tremendous at the time. I took his bony wrist and rectified the angle of his umbrella so that he was in safe shadow and said that it wasn’t a question of money any more. He’d antagonized her from the start. A gesture on his part might be more effective in the long run. Predictably he asked, what gesture?
This huge once-garden of his where you half expected a tiger to slink out of the man-high weeds, wouldn’t it look better full of flowers like the other side of the fence? My idea was that he should lease a strip of land to her for a nominal fee. What I had in mind was a Hong-Kong style lease, at least the lifetime of a rosebush, but didn’t say so yet. Maybe later she’d reciprocate, tit for tat, lease for lease, I said.
He gave in so easily that I felt a little guilty and asked him over and over if he really wanted to do it, even backed slightly out of my own proposal until he came after me with harassment. The delicate part was when I said that of course the fence would have to be pulled back, say twenty feet. He didn’t react even to that.
I must have had misgivings. That very day I dropped broad hints about my prodigious love-present. Partly it was to cheer her up and take her mind off Jack. I’d picked up garden-center catalogs, another precious new activity, and asked her what she would plant if suddenly she had extra land. The “suddenly” must have given me away. She got it out of me finally. What did he want in return? I whispered it in her ear, adding that he wouldn’t get it, all for me. But it was no joke for her.
She must have realized my disappointment because she sat me down like a child, all but holding my hands, and told me that I couldn’t do such a thing, the land wasn’t mine to give, you couldn’t dispose of other people’s property like that. Her rectitude had the allure of the exotic for me.
A couple of times in the week that followed I surprised her sadly staring through the fence at Harvey’s weeds. But maybe she wasn’t thinking of the garden, not even seeing it.
Three days before we
were to leave I finally told Harvey about it. He was lying shrunken and doll-like on his cot. The long mark of the helmet clamp stood out very red on his papery forehead. You can’t do that, he whispered without moving, without opening his eyes. He needed me for the final work on the storage unit.
Try and stop me, I said and by the way I said it (I thought) he didn’t dare insist. He simply said I wouldn’t be paid for those two weeks, I’d better think it over. He played it wisely, not too much indignation, not too much indifference. In compensation I agreed to help him on the storage unit all day and all night if he liked until we left.
It was his last device. He didn’t have the strength to finish it. He remained on the cot most of the time, working through me. I hammered, soldered connections, screwed with a screwdriver, for two days.
The accumulator was a black cubic-foot box. A temporal sequence recorded by the sensors could be stored in it, supposedly. Like a conventional storage battery its life was limited. In time (he didn’t know how much time) the images disintegrated. He said he hoped he would have time to devise something permanent.
He was bitter that everything came too late. If he’d developed the storage unit and perfected the range of the relay and everything else a few years ago the mechanisms could have been fitted into a truck. He could have traveled all over the country in search of privileged moments. Imagine the charged accumulators hooked up in series with those moments available at the touch of a finger and enlarged at a time ratio of 1:1000, the here-time trip lasting a year. Fifteen lifetimes of straight joy. You’d have to come up sometime for food wouldn’t you? I objected.
He spoke of people in deep coma fed by tubes, voyagers in blackness though. The idea sounded nightmarish. In his defective time travels, I knew, you were deprived of all senses except sight and guilt. Retrotemporal flowers were scentless, there was no music there and entry into a wave or a woman could only be cerebral. That beach in southern Maine in the immediate but still non-existent future seemed more real and much more desirable than his resurrected mutilated past.
Finally late in the evening of the second day I tightened the last screw on the lid of the storage unit. “Another day another dollar,” I said and started leaving. He beckoned me back to the cot. He whispered:
“Why didn’t you come? To the house?”
“Last week, you mean? Too much to do over at Beth’s.”
“Not this house.”
“Beth’s house?”
“The other house.”
“Which other house?”
“The house before her’s. Before this one. Why didn’t you come? You told my mother. You would.”
I’d been prepared for it from the moment he’d begun asking those questions down in the cellar about the old days and then that questionnaire on her, one thousand blank sheets inviting me to talk about it. I said I accepted a certain very indirect responsibility for what happened that night forty years ago even though I thought it would have happened anyhow some other night if not that night: she’d already tried, remember her wrists and did he really think she’d fainted on the edge of the subway platform that day? It’s what I’d said to his mother a few days later, I told him. She’d accepted the explanation. At least she had nine years later. She’d even invited me over for dinner when we met at the funeral.
“You didn’t go to her. Funeral.”
“Aunt Ruth’s funeral. You weren’t there. She used to bake custard for you. You weren’t at the other funeral either. Your mother told me that.”
“Why did you say. You’d come? Why didn’t you come? I don’t mean to. Her funeral.”
“I was with a girl, I seem to remember.”
“What girl?”
“A girl. Who remembers a girl that long ago? That was a million years ago. It’s late. We’re leaving tomorrow, first thing in the morning. See you in two weeks.”
But it was Beth who left first thing in the morning, by herself. That evening, she told me, her brother-in-law had rung up. Her sister Martha had been hospitalized. So the destination wasn’t Maine for two anymore but Phoenix, Arizona for one. I wanted to go with her anyhow but she said it wasn’t possible. She said she’d phone me every day.
As she packed her things I said, “You can’t leave me here,” as to heartless desertion and she took that too for lover’s hyperbole. She promised to phone faithfully every evening. She also said that if it turned out that Martha wasn’t too bad she’d try to come back as soon as possible. She cried. I tried to tell her that maybe it wasn’t as serious as she thought.
Before she left she gave me instructions concerning her houseplants and goldfish. A small sprinkle from this yellow can for Oscar, once a day. Two waterings a day for the potted hydrangeas, one for the others. I said, no problem. She looked at me for a second and then wrote it down, lots of words underlined three times. I felt a little offended at her lack of confidence, handed the instructions back and said she could trust me, I wouldn’t forget. She gave me the keys to her house.
After having made all that fuss about those two weeks I didn’t rush over and tell Harvey it was all off. I’d have to eventually of course, if only to get paid for the canceled vacation, but didn’t feel like doing it that evening. Early next morning I drove her to the airport. It was no social affair she was going to but she had a new hairdo and a new low-cut dress, also lipstick and bluish eyelids. She was hard to recognize. She refused to let me see her off. She said it would give her the blues. When I asked for her sister’s phone number she said she’d ring me every day. If anyone else phoned I should say I was the neighbor watering her plants. I should say I didn’t know when she’d be back.
After I dropped her off I drove to New York to kill time. I shopped around for her birthday gift, leisurely, as though it were a lifetime activity without deadline and fed squirrels in Central Park. I didn’t want to go back to Forest Hill and sleep alone in that house. I didn’t want to sleep in the other house either. But I couldn’t sleep on a park bench.
I came back at half-past ten in the evening and parked my car a long way from the house. I sneaked in shadow to the door like a burglar. When I tried to unlock the door I found it was already unlocked. I had the crazy joyous idea that Beth’s sister had rallied and that somehow she’d returned and that we’d be going to that beach after all. She was in bed waiting for me, reading. The thought was protection as I advanced into the dark living room.
I could see the faint glow of light from her bedroom, reflected by the ceiling above the stairs. I called her name as I went up. The light wasn’t coming from the bedroom but from the guestroom. I groped into the dark bedroom and approached the bed and got it all at once: that smell, those powerful naked arms and that sleepy voice, “Harvey, honey, come on.”
I broke loose and ran into the guestroom. I saw him vague on the other side of the gauzy curtains. He was leaning out of the open window. He had a compass and a folding yellow yardstick in one hand and seemed to be measuring the night with it. The big faded blueprint was unfolded on the windowsill. It rustled in sudden wind like dead leaves. The curtains billowed and the door slammed shut behind me.
“Get out,” he said, not turning around, in the voice he used for Hanna.
“Like hell.”
He turned around slowly and peered at me.
“You’re on vacation,” he said definitively, dismissing my image as something unreal. He turned back to his measurements. I must have looked like a ghost to him as he did to me through the gauzy curtain.
“You didn’t waste time,” I said. “Get out.”
He scribbled on the blueprint. After a while: “This isn’t. Your house.”
“The owner entrusted me with the key. So out.”
He went on measuring with his back to me. After a while:
“I’ll pay.”
“Out. Hanna too.”
“Fifty thousand dollars.”
“She said no. I told you that.”
“Fifty thousand d
ollars. For you.”
“You don’t dispose of other peoples’ property like that. Don’t make me throw you out.”
He turned around, stared at me and passed unsteadily through the veil of the curtain. He leaned against the wall a few inches to the left of the window. Now he slowly let himself down until he was in a sitting position, gaunt knees drawn up. He still had the yellow yardstick in one hand, the compass in the other. The curtains billowed white against the black rectangle of the night. The blueprint on the sill went on rustling. His eyes were closed but he talked, at great expense.
“It’s not property of hers. I want. She won’t know. About it. How can she. Know about it? What I want she doesn’t know. She has. It’s not even hers. Three days only. The house’ll. Be just as. It was. Everything as it was. Except your bank-account.”
“Not that again. You already owe me $14,220 back-salary.”
“Math wizard,” he whispered. “You’d get. That too. The back pay. Right away. I won’t be needing you. Anymore after this. You’ll get the fifty thousand. Plus the back pay. And listen. All the salary to come. To October. How much is that? The salary to come.” He was like a teacher mercilessly quizzing a dull pupil.
“Nineteen thousand two hundred and seventy dollars.”
“Rounding off. You left out. Thirty-five cents. You’ll get that too. Every penny. Like on Friday. Plus the fifty thousand. How much. Is that?”
I wasn’t going to answer. Anyhow he’d already forgotten the back-salary. With the back-salary plus the salary to October plus the fifty thousand it totaled up to $84,000.30. You didn’t have to be a math wizard to figure that out.
Not just all that money, he said. As a bonus he’d let me visit her once she was in the box. It wouldn’t be the first time. This time a social visit in the living room with himself and his mother.
Stop, he warned as I moved toward him. He struggled to his feet. This was the old space, he said, nineteen inches, all along the wall, the space of the other house, his space to stand in and nobody could make him leave. I took another step toward him. He retreated diagonally toward the window and said no, don’t come any closer, I was trespassing on his space. This isn’t your house, he said. Nothing here is. The space here belongs to me. Where I’m standing, nineteen inches into this room. If you trespass again. You bastard I’ll kill you. Have Hanna kill you. Don’t come any closer.
But if I was stepping forward now it wasn’t to intimidate him into leaving the house but to grab him because he was retreating into what was supposedly the continuation of his space but it was the blackness beyond the open window he was backing into, partly shrouded by the curtain. Watch out for the window, I yelled and then grabbed his wrists hard. He was trying to yell himself: Hanna, Hanna, Hanna. It was the first time I’d ever heard him call her in a voice of imploration. How could she possibly hear his hoarse whisper at that distance?
But then I smelled her and my neck was locked in the crook of her arm and I let go of his wrists.
“Tried to kill me, Hanna. Push me out of the window. And trespass. Don’t strangle him. Yet. Promise you won’t. Trespass. And she’ll let you. Go. Promise?”
“Lunatic.” I brought it up distorted past the vise of her arm. Her arm tightened.
“Promise?”
“Maniac.” Tightened more, but she knew better than anyone else they were true, the definitions she was trying to choke off.
If I didn’t promise, she’d snap my neck-vertebras like a rat, he wheezed jubilantly.
“I … promise,” I wheezed as her arm tightened even more. My voice was like his now, a wheeze.
“Promise what?” His voice sounded more bewildered than menacing.
He’d forgotten. I’d forgotten too. Old men.
“I … promise anything … you like.”
Promise I’d never trespass again, he said triumphantly as though it had suddenly come back to him why we were fighting.
I promised I’d never trespass on his space again. Hanna let me go. But I knew I wasn’t free. They’d sequester me here, tie me to a chair for four days, while the sensor lenses worked away and he stored her up exclusively.
At that moment the phone rang.
Before Hanna could head me off I lunged for it and implored: Beth, Beth, as though calling for help, as Harvey had done with Hanna a minute before. I held up my hand in warning for Hanna not to move toward me and stepped back with the phone and Beth’s alarmed voice in it: what was the matter? what had happened?
“You, Beth, your voice, I’m so happy to hear your voice, Beth, you have no idea.”
Why was I yelling? her distant voice wanted to know. Why had I yelled ‘Beth! Beth!’ without knowing who it was? How could I be sure who it was? Suppose it had been someone else? She’d told me not to do that. A neighbor wouldn’t have done that. Remember, I was the neighbor who watered her plants. Had I done that? The plants? Was I sure everything was all right?
I switched the speaker on so that they could hear her answer to the question I was going to ask her. I said I’d watered her plants, the hydrangeas twice, and fed Oscar from the yellow box, and that everything was all right except that, coming back an hour ago, I’d seen the police investigating a house in the neighborhood that had been broken into and I’d thought: what would I do if it happened here and I saw a burglar or two burglars in the house, what would I do, Beth?
You’d run out and call the police, naturally. What a funny question. You sound funny. Was everything really all right?
I switched the speaker off and assured her that everything was fine. How about her? When she said everything was okay, not sounding that way though, I said that if everything was okay then she should fly back tomorrow and we’d leave for Maine right away.
She said that no, everything wasn’t okay, everything was terrible actually. She couldn’t leave Martha. She was calling from the hospital and would have to hang up now. Somebody else wanted to phone.
I asked her to give me her home number.
Her distant voice said that she was at the hospital most of the time. She was scared of getting calls when she was at Martha’s. It might be the hospital. She’d call me every day like she’d promised.
But suppose somebody called here for something urgent? Or an emergency came up? Like burglars breaking in. Or suppose I had a heart attack. She’d want to know that, wouldn’t she?
I was hiding something, her voice said. Was something wrong with my heart?
I assured her that everything was under control here including my heart except when I thought of her. That was as far as I dared go with love talk with those two in the room glowering at me. From her end, though, she could have been a little more loving, it seemed to me. It must have been the hospital atmosphere.
I kept at it until finally she agreed to give me her sister’s home number. She said that it had to be for a real emergency. I burrowed in my pocket for a scrap of paper and came up only with a dollar-bill. I scribbled the number in the soiled margin and whispered that I loved her.
She said she loved me too. I shouldn’t invite that Hanna over.
A click and buzz in my ear.
Cunning, I didn’t hang up immediately. I stared with horrified eyes at the dark window behind them. When they both looked that way I dodged and ran past Hanna then down the stairs and out of the house. In the moonlight I ran to the back of the house and the window.
Harvey stood above me, framed, staring moonward. He was still looking for whatever I’d pretended to have seen in the night. I called out that if they weren’t out of the house in five minutes I’d phone the cops. Beth Anderson, who was the owner of the house, every square inch of it, said I should do that, they’d heard. I had to repeat it much louder before he looked away from the moon and down at me. Then I ran out into the street.
From the safe end of the street I saw them leaving the house. Harvey was leaning on her. He was holding the compass, the blueprint and the yardstick.
I returned
and locked the front and back doors. I wedged chairs under the knobs. I had the feeling that I was barricading myself in rather than barricading intruders out. I went upstairs and without looking inside I closed the guestroom door. I changed the sheets of the cama de matrimonia in Beth’s bedroom. To get rid of the last of Hanna I opened the window wide. Like the guestroom window it gave on the west. It too was in the nineteen-inch zone and me with it. For a moment there I believed him, didn’t have time to reason that he had no landmarks to be able to determine the exact degree of coincidence between the old house and the new, certainly not to the inch.
I pulled back fast and went downstairs. I took the half-empty bottle of whisky and a glass and sat in the big armchair in front of the TV. I didn’t dare turn it on. They could come that way too, I knew, like insects on the screen. I was invested everywhere. When most of the whisky was gone I tried to sleep on the living room sofa, dressed except for my shoes, as for a solitary tenderness session.
Lying there on her sofa I couldn’t help thinking that Harvey must also be lying, collapsed, on his sofa in the dead room. He’d be imagining his strategically positioned machines in the space of this house with their time-prying lenses, pumping in old scenes for reactivating. The scenes ended by coming to me that way, imagining what he was imagining.
I tried to keep a bit of my mind lucid. By now I knew the price of complete surrender, the reverse-ratio of time involved in pathological dedication to memory, machine-assisted or not, cheated out of my impoverished stock of future. Time-travail was like hard-drug addiction. The dose increased endlessly in the desire for something more authentic, maybe blotched and flickering, untouchable and dumb at first but at the end couldn’t your blown mind supply those missing elements too as Harvey’s had with color and dimension and joy and the jackpot time-ratio, lifetimes there, time practically conquered? At the end imagine joyous recognition on their part, response to touch and words and you babbled insanities and explored the night with a yardstick and a compass, ready to sequestrate maybe even to murder to return integrally to all that?
Finally I struggled out of it at half-past three in the morning. Wasn’t this an emergency? I searched for the dollar-bill with the number Beth had given me. I must have left it in the guestroom. I labored upstairs and forced that door open against the pressure of the wind. The doorknob trembled in my hand as I stood on the threshold watching the curtains pouring into the room like smoke or concentrate of moonlight. The room was stark with moonlight and opaque shadow. I went in.
The door slammed shut behind me. At a safe distance from the window I saw through the fence the shadow of the elm in Harvey’s rank garden, branches and twigs alive in the blowing high dead weeds. The wind launched inky clouds against the full moon. The sky reminded me of the time on the beach with the dead dog.
As I picked up the dollar-bill from the floor where the wind had blown it I saw a watch lying just beneath the window. He must have lost it when I’d grabbed his wrists hard to prevent him from toppling out of the window. I hesitated and then went over there. I bent down to pick it up and felt dizzy as though I were going to pitch forward and down into a black chasm, the forbidden space the maniac had invented, a trap, I was able to think (a saving crazy thought), baited by his Taiwanese watch with its merciless non-volatile memory, constructed as I wasn’t for deep descents.
I got out of the room, clutching the dollar-bill, and escaped downstairs. I sat down in front of the phone in the living room and looked at my watch. It was almost four in the morning. I also saw the date and realized with a sinking feeling that it was finally Beth’s birthday. I looked at the other watch, Harvey’s, almost expecting an earlier time, an ancient date, but got confirmation of now-time. Almost four, her birthday, and I had no gift, not even one to announce. She’d told me not to ring her anyhow. I went back to the whisky.
After a while I felt there wasn’t enough light in the room. I got up and fiddled with the wall-switches. By accident I turned on the electric fireplace. I remembered what she’d said about it. Sometimes when she had the blues she sat in the dark and stared at it. It was very calming. I switched off the other lights. The room rocked with flames. I extinguished them instantaneously. I switched the lights back on and stared at the soiled margin of the dollar-bill.
I got a hotel desk. I thought it was a wrong number and checked. It was the right number. I asked for Mrs Beth Anderson. Her room phone rang and rang. Finally I got her blurred voice. I said, Beth, Beth, like the last time.
After a while she mumbled: “You woke me up. Why are you phoning? What’s the emergency?”
“It’s your birthday. I almost forgot. Happy birthday, Beth.”
But I still had no gift.
Silence. She had trouble focussing mentally, because of the barbiturates, probably. She mumbled again: “That’s no emergency. Not for you. Why wake me up to remind me of that? Why are you phoning me at … at ten past midnight, Jerry?”
Panic at that. I’d just seen the time and knew it was ten past four, even by his watch. Was I getting her voice from four hours in the past? Was she there too? The infection was spreading. Then I said:
“I forgot about the time-zone. What are you doing in a hotel, Beth? I thought you were staying at your sister’s.”
Another long silence. Had she fallen asleep? “Beth?”
“Long story. Too tired. It’s … four in the morning where you are. Why are you phoning me at four in the morning, Jerry?”
I’d told her. But her question was like a challenge. It had to be more than words of congratulation, more than the vague promise of a gift to justify breaking into her sleep at midnight with something she didn’t want to hear anyhow. It had to be something tremendous, better even than Harvey’s garden which she’d rejected.
Suddenly the answer came like a sunburst, triumphant, something she couldn’t possibly reject. How can you reject the rising sun?
“It’s about your present, Beth. I couldn’t wait to tell you. A tremendous present, Beth.”
“You’re yelling again. Aren’t you feeling well, Jerry? God, I feel so awful too.”
“Not well at all, Beth. Till I had this great idea. It’ll make you feel like yelling too. First tell me when you’ll be back.”
“I don’t know. Maybe in a week. Maybe more.”
That long? I thought. It wasn’t possible to stay in this house another day, no more than in the other house. Did she remember, I said, how once I’d asked her as a game what she’d do with $200,000? I’d forgotten what she’d said but whatever, it wasn’t the right answer. What she should have said and I should have said too was a house near the sea for both of us. Not for a two-week vacation, paying rent to strangers, but ours, for as long as we lived. You didn’t need $200,000, half that amount was enough and I had it, I said. Practically: almost one hundred thousand, with maybe more later.
Which was her birthday present: a house far away from here and just for the two of us, near an empty beach, there must be a few left. I tried to create it all for her distant ear, that lovely pink seashell. An acre or two of land for all the flowers and vegetables she liked, why not a small farm for self-sufficiency while we were at it? Couldn’t she just picture it? Great skies and surf. Pink seashells. Driftwood fires on the beach. Driftwood for lamps too, maybe open a driftwood-lamp shop, I’d do the wiring-job and she’d do the varnishing. We’d lie down each evening, our minds busy with tomorrow’s projects in common.
I went on and on. It was an act of creation. He’d said the future didn’t exist but he was wrong for once. It had color, dimension, sound, smell, everything. I was creating and fortifying it with every word. What I held in focus now was integral reality. Facing in that right direction I could practically feel the sand trickling out through my funneled hands, smell washed-up seaweed in the sun, hear wheeling gulls. You weren’t in blur and silence as when you faced in the wrong direction. Embracing was possible and reciprocated.
It was so real that
at one point I thought: I’m there on that beach in reality and this, standing in this room at 4:00 am talking about it far from her in this nightmare of a room is another time-trap I’m going to have to struggle up out of. But then I told myself that on that beach – those firm shining sands – there’d be an end to time-traps.
A sunburst inside. The night was behind me. She must be feeling the same. I wanted her to participate in the creation, authenticating it by give and take, collaboration, making it a shared vision, it was for the two of us, inconceivable otherwise.
“Beth, that’s your present. What do say, Beth?”
I waited for participation but nothing came. She wasn’t saying anything.
I said her name again. Again, louder. Yelling again?
She came back, saying that she’d dozed off, she’d had a long day and that I should go to bed now.
I tried to generate the lyricism for a repeat performance but was too tired. I’d had a long day too, a long night. It would be better as a total surprise anyhow.
I said I loved her. Did she love me?
She said, yes of course she loved me and hung up.
***