***
Five
I flew back and wound up the little there was to be wound up. I paid Mrs Philips for the two months. She was sad to see me go but happy I’d found a much better teaching position. That’s what I told her. I’d have had to cook up a different version for my ex-colleagues. They wouldn’t have swallowed that. But I didn’t intend notifying my ex-colleagues. I liked clean breaks.
I transferred my few personal belongings into the car. Mainly books, the hi-fi, the CDs and clothing, also the telescopic chinning-bar. I did it with a certain melancholy. It seemed to me that a man my age ought to have accumulated more than what could fit into a compact Ford. Shaking off the melancholy, I tested the tight squeeze of the hi-fi components. Each had been carefully wrapped in a blanket like a fragile baby. You couldn’t find components of that quality on the market nowadays. They were my most precious possession. There was something melancholy in that thought too.
Just as I was going to get in the car and make a clean break Marianne came into sight.
“Leaving already?” she asked in a casual tone of voice.
There are situations where you can disguise an intended clean break as a round-the-corner errand, picking up a pack of cigarettes, for instance. Tens of thousands of men disappear that way every year. That’s how the garden-crazy blonde’s husband had vanished, according to Harvey. But you didn’t pick up cigarettes at the wheel of a car crammed with all your worldly possessions.
Marianne acted very casually about the situation but I’d learned to discount that apparent nonchalance. When she was deeply discontented – not an uncommon condition – she never had outbursts but inbursts, far worse. Her accent was a little more apparent than usual. That was a symptom too.
“I dropped over to recover the book I loaned to you a few months ago,” she said. “I was going to ask for it on Friday but you weren’t there. I waited for an hour. I urgently need it.”
“Oh God, Marianne, I completely forgot Friday!” She always came over at four on Friday afternoons and left at six or seven, more often seven than six. She’d been doing it for months and months. I hoped I looked aghast. “Something big came up at the last moment, a kind of emergency. Had to leave for New York on the spot. I’d have phoned to tell you not to come except we agreed I shouldn’t ever phone.”
“I thought you said you had forgotten because of that big thing. Be consistent at least. I know all about that big thing. I passed by this morning. You were out. Your landlady told me about your so-called new job. I thought she was going to cry, poor woman, to see you go. I need the book. Gilbert Durand, Les structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire.”
It was somewhere in one of the cardboard boxes underneath the CDs, the valises and the hi-fi. I told her this and said I would mail it to her first thing on arriving. She insisted on having it immediately and expected me to empty the contents of the car on the sidewalk, exposing the hi-fi components to shock, all for a book she’d never read and had no intention of reading. I hadn’t read it myself. Had anybody?
The conversation broadened. Soon we reached the point where I was saying that a woman of her age and charm and looks could do better than an old wreck like me, and it ended by my saying that it had been marvelous of course, but a terrible strain. Harry was a colleague, if not exactly a friend at least a very close acquaintance. That was the last thing to have said in such circumstances.
Expressionless, she said that hadn’t bothered me for the past year. Old wreck? Vieux salaud, oui.
I knew what “vieux” meant, was less sure about “salaud” but could guess. Dirty water? Certainly nothing favorable. It was a bad sign when Marianne lapsed into French. I had learned that. She added that everybody knew the real reason for my so-called retirement.
I got into the car rapidly. As I pulled away I said: “I’ll send it to you first thing, also a letter to explain things a little more in detail.” It was no way to say adieu. I gave her a little wave and regretted it. Seen from her point of view, standing there in the middle of the sidewalk, things sort of snatched out from under her, it must have seemed nastily breezy. I hadn’t meant it that way.
I felt terrible about it for half an hour. I would have felt even worse and for longer if the whole scene hadn’t seemed a little unreal like everything else since I’d emerged from Harvey’s cellar the day before. Her voice had seemed distant and distorted. So had Mrs Philips’. In my head I still heard the cellar voices. They seemed far more real. So did all the scenes they’d summoned up, more real than the buildings and crowds at the moment they appeared framed in the windshield of my car. Then they rushed by and dwindled in the mirror. They vanished into the permanence of the past.
I soon discovered that there were lots of strings attached to the job. Practically every week I tripped over new ones radiating out. After a while I began picturing those strings as a spider-web and it’s easy to guess where and what I was in relation to it in my picture.
In the letter he’d promised me $500 a week, then in the night of the old voices $700 and finally $1,000. What I actually collected, in humiliating circumstances, was a measly $350. He assured me “the balance” (he didn’t specify if the balance was $650 or $350 or just $150) would be regularly deposited in a special account in my name and in exactly a year’s time I would get all the money.
It was only later that I began to wonder if getting the contents of that account wasn’t contingent on my sticking it out with him in that decaying house for a year. Or at least till the predictable end which, in all sincerity, I can say I didn’t wish for.
At the beginning I did very little at Harvey’s to justify even the little money I was drawing. I found it hard to cope even with the elementary business of getting settled. I spent a good part of the first week flat on my back on the bed staring up at the dirty cracked ceiling. It was a screen for the images the radio voices had resurrected.
It was strange allowing myself to go back like that. I’d learned long ago to resist that indulgence. Indulgence in the sense of giving way to desire. In a religious sense indulgence also means remission of punishment. No punishment was involved in visiting the past. Not yet it wasn’t. There was no loss of control, no feeling that you couldn’t emerge from past things if you wanted to. I didn’t really want to, as long as the things were early and harmless. The present was a cracked ceiling with nothing much better in the other rooms and in the streets outside.
It was a kind of pleasant paralysis. Then one day the memories stopped coming. I felt loss. That should have been the alarming part only I didn’t realize it at the time. That suddenly blank ceiling was like the screen in long-ago Saturday popcorn matinees when the film broke in the projector. Except that now in my solitary movie-house I couldn’t join in with the rest of them and jeer and whistle the images back.
So I was able to get up and throw myself into the present. I created islets of comparative cleanliness in the house. I scrubbed my bedroom and painted it. I managed to unjam the window. Like a teenager in his first room away from home I even scotched up Van Gogh beach scenes and seascapes. They provided better views than the window did. I sprinkled roach-powder in strategic spots. I screwed the chinning-bar in the bathroom doorframe and had the petty satisfaction one morning of seeing Hanna with a bruised forehead. It was worth the abuse I got.
It took me a whole day just to set up my hi-fi system and find the best positioning for the speakers. I spent as little time as possible in the house when Harvey didn’t need me. I took my meals in town. Twice a week he gave me long lists of components and I would drive out to an electronics place in Long Island City in his old Volvo station wagon with Hanna brooding in the back seat. She was there for the muscle-work of loading and unloading. She didn’t say a word to me. She wasn’t talking to me and Harvey couldn’t, most of the time.
He spent all his time in the cellar working over electronic devices he called “sensors.” Under construction they looked, not surprisingly, like a
cross between the inside of a TV set and a computer. Supposedly they would give his machine mobility and allow it to pull in more than ancient darkness and voices. I nodded gravely. I told myself I didn’t believe for an instant that it was possible to summon up old images despite his exploit with the old radio-voices. Somehow I made a distinction between capturing images from the past and capturing old disincarnated voices. Didn’t my own machine do that to Caruso and Chaliapine? My reasoning wasn’t scientific.
The only constructive work I did in the cellar was a little soldering. He couldn’t stand the acrid fumes. Mostly I deconstructed. I dismantled junked computers and TV sets and stocked the components in a vast stretch of labeled pigeonholes. There were hundreds of them. It looked like a giant honeycomb with metal larvae in the cells.
Clearing out the cellar mess was also part of my duties. Once a week I drove the Volvo to an industrial wasteland and watched Hanna hurl the bulky unburnable stuff onto a junk heap. Twice a week, rain or shine, Havey made me incinerate the inflammable stuff in the back yard near the pylon, probably to spite the neighbors. It made a lot of smoke. I was careful to choose times when the wind didn’t blow it the blonde’s way. Harvey always watched me as I kneeled before the heap of cardboard and wood scraps with a box of kitchen matches. “Good job,” he would croak when it caught. It was the only praise I ever got from him.
Finally, I talked, vaguely, about the old days. Was expected to anyhow but not vaguely. It turned out to be an essential part of the job. I was his paid memory-booster. His memory was riddled with blanks, he said. He blamed the hospital people for it with their ray and chemical treatment. He made it sound as though they were plotting against his brain instead of trying to cure him. He explained that he’d be exploring those old days with the machine eventually and badly needed guidance. He spoke about sightings, agonic lines, spatio-temporal bearings, I don’t know what else.
When I said I didn’t understand he explained that my memories would simplify the task of navigation once the machine became fully operational. He had to know roughly when and where and who.
I answered his questions, more or less, as long as they were limited to the shack days. When he tried to go beyond them I found ways out. I said I couldn’t work and talk at the same time. I was putting the components in the wrong pigeonholes. He told me to stop pigeonholing and to go on talking. So then I had to say, “I don’t remember,” over and over again to those questions about particular people from that time, the way they looked. I didn’t like talking about the dead. “Symptom of age,” I’d say about my faulty memory. So we’d work on in silence.
Once, after a half-hour’s silence, he said: “Not even her eyes? The color?”
“Age,” I said and we went on working in silence.
I was involved in other ways with his memory problems. Once a week I had to join him in a hunt for his earlier mother. He had a silver-framed photo of her but in her last years. She was shrunken and white-haired on it. He’d had a younger photo of her, dark-haired and smiling, he said, but it had disappeared mysteriously a few years before. Now he couldn’t remember what she’d looked like then. He suspected Hanna had ripped it up and flushed it down the toilet. She’d been insanely jealous, he said. Still was. She’d thought it was the photo of an old girl friend of his. That was typical of her. The dumb bitch even thought he was getting into the neighbor, the blonde. In the days when that had mattered he’d preferred his women more substantially titted and assed, he said. I had trouble imagining Harvey at any age in close involvement with a woman configured that way. Or any way.
So once a week I had to poke about in the dusty chaos of closets with him. After, I had to take a long shower to get rid of the dust and grime. We never found it. I had to tell him I didn’t remember the color of her eyes either. It was true this time.
Another thing about the job that I didn’t appreciate was the crazy payment ceremony. Instead of receiving a check in a discreet envelope, I had to pick up – literally pick up – my “retainer” (I preferred this term to “salary” with its associations of subordination) on Fridays at 5:00 pm in a tiny room where Hanna kept track of the performance of Harvey’s investments. There was a wall-safe and a big filing cabinet. She hulked there at a battered desk over ledgers with steel-rimmed glasses astride her red pug nose, her lipless mouth downcurled. She looked strangely efficient in her official capacity. Harvey was always present, silently looking on. It lent solemnity to the occasion.
They had an idiotic joke. Was it a joke? Fifty of the three hundred and fifty dollars were paid in petty coins: dimes, nickels and even pennies. Yes, pennies, one hundred of them. They weren’t even neatly stacked but sprawled in disorder over the desk. It took minutes to pick up and count all those coins while they both looked on. When I expressed my surprise Harvey croaked something about loose change accumulated over the years. But those coins looked brand-new.
The following Friday Hanna happened to open a drawer for a pen and I saw unbroken rolls of coins fresh from the bank. They went to the trouble of procuring those rolls, breaking them and scattering the small change on the table just to see me rooting for it. That’s the way I interpreted the ritual. They arranged something similar with the bills. These were all new singles and fives heaped up in disorder. It took me a good five minutes to sort them out and count them while they looked on. Then I signed her ledger. Sometimes I forgot the ballpoint pen wasn’t mine, pocketed it and she asked for it back, rudely.
One Friday I revolted. I laboriously collected the small denominations, the dimes and the nickels but told her to keep the change, meaning the hundred pennies. The pennies disappeared after that, replaced by nickels I think it was.
For conversation I had the neighbor on the other side of the hurricane fence. That is, before she soured on me. It was a glorious mellow October, like two-hundred-dollar single-malt. When I wasn’t on duty I fixed up a spot with a deck chair in the high grass near the fence. I’d unclasp the black briefcase that had once contained lecture-notes. I’d remove the bottle, a glass and sometimes a book, for justification. Soaking up sunshine and scotch, I would meditate or try to read. My only expenditure of energy was to move the deck chair when the criss-crossed shadow of the pylon encroached on me. It was like a giant sundial.
I pretended to feel guilty at this ease. Harvey said I was doing just the right thing. A very important part of my work was being accomplished on my back in the deck-chair bullshitting with the blonde. I would understand why pretty soon, he added.
The first time I encountered her again she was back on her knees planting forget-me-nots between twigs that marked the spots where the tulips were buried. Her blouse was buttoned all the way up. Yet it was such a warm day.
She gave a little cry of surprise when she saw me. I invented a reason for my sudden departure and return: business to settle, I said vaguely. She said she was happy I was back. I thought of her son’s poems hanging over my head. She didn’t speak about them immediately.
“I suppose you’ll be leaving any day now for good. I thought university classes had started already.”
“I’m not teaching this year.”
“Oh, a sabbatical leave, I’ve heard of that.”
“More a permanent leave, actually. I’ve retired.”
“At your age?” she said with wondering eyes. Sweet woman.
I said it was a kind of pre-pre-retirement and to change the subject I remarked that each time I saw her she was gardening.
“O gardening!” she exclaimed, holding the clump of forget-me-nots against her meager bosom. It looked like spinach. Her eyes were closed and her face ecstatic. I thought it was overdone, a little ridiculous. She didn’t have the build of an Earth Goddess. Or maybe she was trying to isolate that kneeling moment in the sun from everything else before and behind and pretending she’d succeeded.
She opened her eyes. The pink tip of her tongue appeared and moistened her lips a little. “Uh, Professor …”
 
; “Jerry,” I said. I knew what was coming and felt like running.
“Jerry. I’m Beth. Beth Anderson. What I wanted to say, Jerry, about those poems I spoke to you about the other day, my son’s poems, you do want to read them, don’t you? You said you did.”
“Naturally,” I said weakly. “Love to read his poems.”
I have a pathological reaction to unsolicited literary efforts when I suspect there’s too much emotion invested in them. It dates back to my student days in NYU and involvement with a Russian language instructor, an intense Bulgarian woman in her mid-thirties with short black hacked hair. She talked, ceaselessly and obscurely, in a low monotonous murmur. Hours on end she subjected me to a rolling barrage of her poems printed in green ink. They were in English but as unintelligible as if they’d been in Bulgarian. She was one of the first of those uncataloged visitors from far, far outer space that were to periodically graze my orbit with disturbing effect. She never let up with the poems except in bed where her inspiration was spectacular and her discourse intelligible, of astonishing crudity.
Outside of bed it was an ordeal. I had to maintain a tense mask of interest and emit murmurs of appreciation at regular intervals. My face muscles ached hours after. She was so easy to wound, super-sensitive to any relaxation of my mask. Her opaque black eyes would flick up from the green lines. “You don’t like it!” she would accuse, face whitening. Once when I hazarded the most timid of criticisms involving intelligibility she broke down and cried for an hour.
The strain was terrific. I feared infection. The day some of the green lines seemed to be making sense I determined to opt out. But I was afraid rupture would send her into a mental tailspin. That’s what finally happened to her anyhow although I thought I’d maintained my intense appreciative mask to the end. Maybe I hadn’t and what happened was partly my fault.
She once sent me a letter from the place, a very subdued one in black ink with sensible remarks about the weather and the food and the visiting hours. They must have shocked all the poetry out of her. I suppose I should have visited or at least answered her. Whatever happened to her? I can’t remember her name even though my palms still recall her body. She’d be well into her seventies now.
Then twenty years later, ghastly replay with Marty Stein. I won’t think of Marty Stein.
Beth Anderson produced surface scruples.
“I don’t want to impose on you. I’m making a selection of the best poems, the ones I like best, anyhow. I hope you’ll agree. I’ll let you have them as soon as I finish.”
But then the next day she saw me unloading the electronic material from the Volvo with Hanna and now knew that I was involved with the mysterious machine that woke her up in the middle of the night and sabotaged her TV programs. The next afternoon when I strolled over to the deck chair with my scholarly briefcase she was on her knees again in the flowerbed on the other side of the hurricane fence.
She looked up from her plants, gave me a brief pained smile and said, “Hello, Professor,” and went back to the plants for a few seconds. Then she got up, clapped her hands clean and said, “Well, that’s that,” and went into her house.
At least I was saved from the poetry ordeal. But Harvey noticed the coolness or else Hanna had been spying on us and had told him about it. When I was in the garden I often caught her peering down at me through a dirty pane. Harvey wasn’t happy about the coolness. He seemed to take it very seriously. He returned to the matter a number of times, vocally and in writing. In writing it had a legal look, as though I’d committed a breach of contract. Finally I said I’d see what I could do about it.
The next afternoon she was digging when I came. Her back was turned to my deck chair. She hadn’t heard me and went on digging. Or maybe she had heard me but went on digging anyhow. I watched her unhurried efficient movements. She levered up a slab just right for her strength. A twist of the wrist and the slab slipped reversed exactly up against the ruins of the last one. Quick jabs disintegrated the slab into crumbs. Then the operation over and over again, unhurried but quick. The freshly dug area was perfectly neat. She wouldn’t need to rake it.
When she turned around I expected the ecstatic face of the forget-me-nots. Her face was wet with tears.
Seeing me she wiped her eyes with her bare forearm. She was wearing green garden-gloves.
“Migraine,” she said and I wondered if migraine could make you weep. “I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night with that machine of his. Doesn’t the noise bother you? I guess not.”
I said that yes, it did, terribly, I suffered from insomnia and headaches myself. But despite migraine I tried to remember the condition he was in, I said. He was an old, old friend, a childhood friend. He looked much older than he actually was, I added quickly. He’d convinced me to stay with him for a few weeks. I didn’t know how much longer he’d got. It wasn’t a picnic for me either. He wanted me to help him with the … thing. So sometimes – not very often – I give him a hand with his work.
She was leaning with clasped hands on the spade, lips slightly parted, looking at me with a touching expression of trust as I went on.
I tried to convince her that people were unjust about a little midnight noise. If people only knew what he was working on, they’d be more tolerant, I said. I stood there in silence, staring at her solemnly, visibly weighing whether I should divulge the secret or not.
She seemed to have forgotten her pain or grief or whatever it was.
“Oh, I always try to be tolerant,” she said. “Just what is it he’s working on? If I may ask. I don’t mean to be curious. It’s just that I want to be tolerant.”
“It’s pathetic actually,” I said. “He’s working on a machine to cure what he’s got.” I told her what he had.
“The poor man!” she exclaimed with great pitying blue eyes still wet with the tears she’d forgotten. “Like my sister Martha.” She felt guilty for her past cruelty. I felt a little guilty because of her guilt. She was the kind of nice silly woman who’d believe anything you told her. It’s a type. Aunt Ruth and Mrs Morgenstern had been like that. She said I was a good person to have come. She could well imagine it wasn’t a picnic for me.
So we made up. It was Jerry and Beth again.
She asked me about the poems, was it still all right? And when I said of course, she said, “wait” and started trotting, then running, back to the house. She hurried back, out of breath, holding something mercilessly big. But there was the hurricane fence between us so I left Harvey’s place and went over to her neat friendly low gate, white-painted wood, where she was waiting for me with a blue cardboard box closed by a golden clasp and bearing on the side in ornate print: Poems by Richard L. Anderson. (Age: 15-17). There were pounds and pounds of them.
She asked me to come in, have a look at her roses, a cup of coffee if I liked. I thanked her but said I’d better go and see how Harvey was doing. I didn’t like to leave him alone too long. She looked guilty again.
Sometimes when the neighbor wasn’t there Harvey worked his way over to my deck chair, blinking at the light, pushing aside the rank grass with his free hand. He walked about under a black umbrella for protection against the mellow fall sunshine. Because of the treatment at the hospital, sunshine was bad for him, it appeared. Hanna would bring him a chair and soda pop and make sure he was holding the umbrella against the sun.
The day Beth Anderson gave me the poems he came again. I was relaxing in the deck chair with the whisky. There was a blob of shadow on me, too sudden to be the sundial pylon. I looked up into his ravaged face beneath the juvenile blond curls. He noticed the unopened blue box in my lap and said, “Good work. Let me brief you on her,” as though she were a military problem.
He told me (for the second time) that her husband had deserted her two years ago. “No problem there,” he said obscurely. She lived all alone except when her son came for money, four or five times a year and stayed a few days each time. We had to map out the future strategy with
her even if the immediate problem was to test the sensors in our own living room. Then I’d have to convince her to let us set up the sensors in her living room.
Before I could come up with a wisecrack to disarm my disquiet he went on.
Her junky son was a real problem though.
It was a word I didn’t like. The problem was that, then. I knew there were easier ones. Harvey explained the focus of the problem.
“Smashes things when he. Runs out of dope. Suppose he smashed the sensors? Unless he has an overdose. Before we set them up.”
He sounded hopeful. I’d said nothing. He couldn’t know. But it wasn’t a thing to say to anyone. I changed the subject and started talking about his “time machine.” He didn’t like the term. So far he’d discouraged all talk about his apparatus. With his vocal-cord problems it was easy for him to leave unwelcome questions unanswered. He avoided even the general subject of time-travel. He was pathologically suspicious, even of me, I sometimes thought. I tried again.
Was that all it could do? Just give you poor flickering images without sound or color and capture old radio programs? I’d thought a time machine could transport you back and forth. I recalled H. G. Wells’ novel, no theoretical difficulties: a kind of nickel-plated bicycle with strategic crystals and the time-traveler zipped forward and back at will along the “time-continuum,” from dinosaurs to the death of the planet, saving a nubile girl on the way.
He said that chronoportation – what I called “time-travel” – was an impossibility, at least for objects of anything but minimal mass. A microbe maybe but not a man. And even this exception wasn’t sure.
Then you couldn’t go back in the past? He replied, “Mentally it might be possible.” Did he mean memory? I asked. You didn’t need a machine for that. No, not memory, he said, scowling. Something else. He clammed up. “You wouldn’t understand. You haven’t got the mathematical basis,” he said.
I felt the old inferiority. To prove I knew a little of what was involved I trotted out the scraps I’d picked up from Wells and the gaudy-covered SF pulp magazines of the 40s. I said that in a sense whatever we see is the past and cited the example of the galaxy Andromeda. To see the two of us chatting here in this ex-garden right now, inhabitants of Andromeda would have to wait a million years.
“Two point two million,” he corrected. “Andromeda is roughly. Two point two million. Light years away.”
With the correction I remembered that he was the one who had told me the Andromeda business in the first place, long, long ago. To cover my confusion I gulped down the whisky in my glass and poured out more. At an advanced age I was parroting what he had said at the age of thirteen and was getting it wrong.
Forgetting he’d just told me that chronoportation was impossible I asked him about travel to the future rather than to the past. Did we really want to go back and live that sinister mess, collective and personal, all over again, without the power to change the course of things? Did we really want even to witness it? The history of mankind had its ups and downs. Couldn’t he, Harvey, pinpoint one of the heights in the future, something pastoral but hygienic, and whisk us there, to a golden green time where people got on together, where they could heal what was ailing us in soul and body, no alimony, no time erosions, where you lived hale to the age of Methuselah or beyond? Or forever, why not forever? Something like a walking-over-God’s-heaven time, gonna meet my mother there, ain’t gonna study war no more, except it would be on earth. Couldn’t that be done?
He shook his head. He said the future was purely conceptual. It had no reality. “That’s your pulp-magazines again. The future doesn’t exist.”
I didn’t put up much of a struggle. He didn’t have to knock himself out to convince me. For decades I’d been believing in no future and now I had scientific confirmation.
A week later in the middle of the night a smashing of glass and cries woke me up. I thought it came from downstairs. I shoved my bare feet into my shoes, grabbed my bathrobe and struggled into it while pounding down the stairs into the living room. Hanna was still in front of the TV watching a low-cut girl in a crypt full of coffins. “What is it?” I yelled above the loud scary music. “What’s what?” she said, not taking her eyes off the screen. I imagined that with the TV screams she hadn’t heard the real ones. “That, for Christ’s sake!” I repeated as another cry came: “Ohhh…”
“Oh that. That’s the junky again. The Anderson kid. Nobody pays attention to that any more.”
There were more cries, clearer now. It wasn’t “Ohhh” but a long denial: ‘Nooo…” I ran out of the house holding the front of my pajama-bottoms bunched up. The waistband elastic had lost its tight embrace. The gate was locked. I had to pound up the stairs again and get the key and pound down again. Hanna didn’t even look at me. I slammed the front door shut on the end of the trailing bathrobe belt and lost it.
None of the other neighboring houses had budged out of their cowardly darkness. The only light came from the Anderson living-room picture window. It was still intact. It illuminated them both on the driveway. Her son was tall and thin, blond like his mother. He was wearing high-heeled cowboy boots, ragged blue jeans and a sweatshirt. With an abstracted expression he was smashing holes in the windshield of her old Chevrolet with a hammer that must have weighed five pounds. The door-windows were already gone. The glass-crumbs glittered on the driveway gravel like diamonds.
She was sitting hunched and swaying in the middle of the driveway, head lowered, knees drawn up. She was in her nightgown with a lumber jacket thrown over her shoulders. Puffing badly I edged up to her.
“Have you called the police? Do you want me to call the police?”
She didn’t respond. She went on swaying. Her eyes were squeezed shut and her expression was intense, almost ecstatic. It was crazy, given the circumstances.
Now he lost interest in the car. All of the glass was gone by now. He moved unsteadily toward her. I retreated. He stood over her with the hammer dangling by his side and asked over and over if she was going to give him the money. She didn’t respond to him either, went on swaying with shut eyes. I think he kicked her or tried to and almost flopped on his face. I just stood there looking on in my bathrobe and defective pajamas. For some reason he started for the long strip of garden where she’d planted the tulips.
Without raising a finger I’d watched him demolishing the car and threatening his mother. Now I was moving forward with the spade I found leaning against the house, yelling at him, heading him off from the flowerbed. Keith hadn’t been that way. He’d never done violence to us or to things, only, finally, to himself.
Beth Anderson’s son stopped in his tracks and stared at me in stupor. He raised the hammer. I thought he was going to hurl it at my head. He moved forward. I backed off, jabbing at him with the spade, not touching him at all, just to keep him away from me. I needed both hands for the job and in the wind my beltless bathrobe yawned wide and the pajama-bottoms with the tired elastic began slipping.
I was badly frightened. I could imagine my forehead shattering like the windshield. I heard Beth Anderson crying out, “No! No!” and heard the fast crunch of the gravel. She’d snapped out of it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her running to my rescue and then I was slammed breathless and found myself flying. The ground came up and hit me and I sprawled full-length belly-down in the flowerbed, the wind knocked out of me, my pajama-bottoms around my ankles.
She’d done it.
To me.
Done it deliberately, to me, shoved me all her might. I had the taste and grit of cold muddy earth in my mouth. Muddy because that evening she’d watered her forget-me-nots, oh I would not forget. Maybe he was hovering over me, the hammer uplifted. But I was stunned and couldn’t move. Maybe what really paralyzed me was outrage.
“Ricky, are you all right, Ricky?” she was gasping when I was able to get up, adjust my pajama-bottoms and run. I’d just cleared her open gate when I heard a long wail: “Oh my
God, Jerry, Professor, Professor Weizman!” I ran faster.
Hanna was still looking at the horror picture when I staggered back in. She grinned a malicious slovenly grin when she saw me. I stammered out of earthen lips that she’d done it, she’d attacked me, the two of them ganging up on me. I must have been mentally unsettled to have unburdened myself to her. Hanna stared at me and her cheeks started puffing. She burst out laughing. The laughter built up in volume like Harvey’s machine. I’d never heard such howls, such shrieks of laughter.
“Shut your face, you fat bitch,” I yelled out of my immense humiliation. It was language I’d never used to a woman at whatever provocation and some of these had been great. I thumped upstairs, tracking additional dirt behind me on Hanna’s runner.
She must have immediately reported the event to Harvey down in his cellar. He came up, panting, just as I emerged from the shower. He made a playful sub-navel grab and congratulated me pointedly on my physical shape. He thought it would be a good idea if I gave her a ring and offered to drive her to work tomorrow morning. She worked part-time at a florists’. In her own car she wouldn’t be able to.
“Buy me a chauffeur’s cap,” I said. “I was trying to protect her, her car at least, no, her tulips it was I was trying to protect, not even up yet, when he comes after me with a hammer to brain me and she attacks me. Me she attacks. Oh yes, I’ll drive her to work. And back too. Call me James.”
“Women,” he croaked idiotically in consolation. Why “women”? What did that explain? It was the first time a woman had ever done such a thing to me, knocked me down and me in a posture of succor. Metaphorically, plenty of times, but never in the flesh.
At nine-thirty next morning the phone rang. Hanna said it was for me. Harvey was standing by expectantly as if he knew who was calling. Later I wondered if she hadn’t already phoned while I was sleeping. Harvey switched on the speaker. It came out non-stop with just quick gasps for breath:
“Oh, Professor Weizman, you are all right, aren’t you? I can’t tell you how ashamed I am for last night. I didn’t recognize you. I was trying the Golden Galaxy technique, trying to blank out everything, and all of a sudden I was back and I saw somebody in a bathrobe in my tulip bed with a spade trying to kill my defenseless Ricky was what I thought. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, not even in self-defense. I know you were doing it for me. I know that now and I thank you, I thank you. But I didn’t know that then. I didn’t recognize you until after that awful, awful thing I did. Oh Professor Weizman, I’m so ashamed, I thought of you all night long. I beg of you to forgive me.”
She had these quaint lacy expressions like, “If I may” and “I beg of you”, but a powerful shove for such a dainty woman.
I said: nothing to forgive, it was all my fault, interfering in a family quarrel. I had got what I deserved. Actually it was quite funny, I said (thinking of the collapsing pajama-bottoms) if you regarded the incident from another angle, as I would probably be trying to do in a week or two.
“Oh sir, it’s not funny, oh it’s anything but funny, not funny, not funny at all.”
She started crying. I got it in both ears, in the receiver and over the speaker. Harvey jabbed me in the ribs and mimed an expression of infinite pity.
So I, treacherously laid low in earth like a tulip-bulb at 2:30 am, found myself a few hours later turning the other mud-stained cheek, comforting my attacker, perfunctorily, OK, but comforting her. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not basically a weak person, as my first wife used to say, with increasing frequency in the final years.
That wasn’t the end to it.
“Flowers for you, Perfessor,” said Hanna, a few hours later, with her slovenly grin, shoving a bouquet of red roses at me. It wasn’t her offering even though her attitude toward me had improved greatly following the night’s excitement when I’d twice descended from my professorial heights, first by coming back a mud statue and second by calling her a bitch.
They were rigid long-stemmed scentless roses, like frigid countesses. They must have come from her florist-shop. With, I guessed, a 40% discount for employees. A nasty rancorous thought. There was a card with Mrs Beth Anderson embossed in lower middle-class gothic script and a single sentence in violet ink:
To Professor Weizman with the humblest and sincerest of apologies.
Later Harvey came up for air and saw the flowers.
“She sends you flowers? That’s good. That’s very good.”
Some time after we looked out of the window and saw her standing by the hurricane fence, busy in her strip of flowerbed despite the drizzle. She was wearing a gleaming yellow raincoat and fisherman’s hat. Aren’t you going to thank her? he wanted to know, meaning for the roses. He kept pestering me.
What could I do, with the woman pulling and Harvey pushing? It was still drizzling and the deck chair was dripping but leaving the house I instinctively grabbed the bottle and the book as though going out in the rain wasn’t for her. I apprehended more tears but she came up to the fence, looking terrible but self-composed, and spoke of the weather. I spoke of New York winters. She spoke of a book she was reading. The rain started coming down harder. I sneezed twice. She said I was catching cold in the rain. I agreed and ran back to the house with the book and the bottle. I hadn’t mentioned her roses. She hadn’t mentioned her son.
Then steady cold rain set in so I had the best of reasons for not going out into the garden except to burn the rubbish, with Harvey looking on. Anyhow I had plenty to do inside.
Harvey had just about finished with the sensors. I varnished them, three coats, careful to avoid the big zoom lens. Now there were the unavoidable preliminaries to setting them up in the living room. He didn’t want any of the local people to do the job. He saw spies everywhere. So he had me ring up a man twenty miles away. I was in charge of the negotiations too. Harvey was too dumb for that in the vocal sense and Hanna in the other sense. Anyhow she didn’t know what was involved. When she learned, said Harvey, she’d have a shit-hemorrhage.
I remember the slow incredulous look on the big Irishman’s face when I explained what we wanted. Out of some half-assed sense of professional pride he said, “I can’t do that.” As though I were asking him to contract-kill a nun instead of just knocking four good-size holes in the living room floor. I invented a reason: a new kind of central heating system. It turned out the man was an expert on central heating systems. “Mister, you don’t run pipes up in four holes.” For what Harvey intended you did. He’d explained that the tubes had to be separate, couldn’t be run together in a single hole because of the induction fields. I couldn’t tell the man this.
Finally he did the job, grim-faced. He didn’t even say good-bye when he finished.
Hanna went wild. The filthy mess everywhere, mummified meat in the refrigerator, armies of cockroaches, where was the problem? But not this. She had a thing about the machine in the cellar. She must have regarded it as a rival. Also I think she was scared of it. As things turned out she had good reason to be.
So far at least it had been kept down in the cellar where she seldom went. But now it was metastasizing in the living room. From the cellar four flexible tubes with the girth of an adult boa constrictor emerged in each corner and snaked, each one, into a big oblong black box with a protruding lens. When the apparatus in the cellar operated, the housing of the lens was disquietingly mobile. With a whirring sound the Cyclops eye would slowly move vertically and horizontally. Sometimes it would slowly zoom out, like a robot’s erection. You’d have sworn it was tracking you instead of long-dead people whose space you were occupying. Remembering this didn’t make the whirring sound less disquieting.
That was later. For the moment each eye was staring blind and immobile in its corner.
The day we tested it out Harvey edicted a celebration. Strangely: before, not after. He was so sure of himself. He’d never heard of hubris (“overweening God-defiant pride,” I’d defined the concept to my students). Suddenly after months and months he
noticed the mess. He made Hanna clean up the living room, a very little bit. She banged all the furniture viciously with the vacuum cleaner. The dust-bag must have been full or the dirt encrusted because the machine’s passage made no impression on the carpet. She did get rid of the dish with Rice Krispies glued to the sides, actually took it into the kitchen. I’d seen it there on the table the first day I came. Now there was a wreath of dried milk as a memorial.
He had her bring out a bottle of sweet white wine (Lord’s Vineyards: the grower’s name was Philip Lord) and three red cut-glass goblets. I vaguely remembered the goblets from thirty years back. They were dusty and chipped now. The white wine looked like coagulated blood in them. As I was sipping the sickening stuff he told me to smile. “Maybe you’ll be seeing yourself. As you were now. In half an hour.” The thought made me feel self-conscious in my movements. I smiled slightly. I wanted to be worthy of resurrection.
Then we went down into the dim red light of the cellar.
“Here we go,” he whispered solemnly and the sound built up unbearably. “Look!” he commanded and pressed buttons.
Tensely I stared and stared at the dark screen in the darkness.
Time went by.
Nothing came.
Nothing at all.
Hubris.
I began to relax.