I was standing by the bed pissing in the bucket when she banged in through the front door this afternoon, holding the gathered handles of several plastic shopping bags. She didn’t say anything. She glanced in my direction and proceeded to the kitchen and banged around in there awhile. I sat down on the edge of the bed. I pulled the sheet up and wrapped it around me.
She carried the bucket upstairs, grunting, sent back the sound of flushing. I heard her stamping around in the rooms upstairs.
She comes in, walks in out of the blue, and takes over the house, as if she had never left.
She says, “I am not going to let you die like this.”
Ritual guides Moll and Alfie now, the rituals of death and the family. It is a system of morality that I personally consider entirely stupid, but the fact is they have me on their conscience.
She cleans constantly, turning the house upside down, going into crevices and the backs of cupboards to get at the concealed dirt, at the filth that has hardened over time, that has become practically part of the house, and this constant fanatical housework has upended what was in fact a peaceful pigsty. The obvious benefit, when it comes to sanitation, of this work for which I don’t pay a penny, fails to make her presence less burdensome, does not prevent the constant invasion of privacy, which means that I pay for it psychologically, in the discomfort her presence causes. Every minute that she stays in the house, even when I can’t hear or see her, even when she is hidden in the room upstairs, even when she is out shopping, I am conscious of being hindered by her.
I am going to make a statement, and then I will stop. A statement of principles, beginning, “I, Harold Nivenson, wish to make a statement.”
The entire justification for taking up the index-card habit once again was finally to make a statement.
I don’t sleep. I doze at best. I oscillate between a waking state marked by anxiety, foreboding, and remorse, and a twilight state in which consciousness is not lost, but the control of consciousness is lost, when I plunge into a sink of chaotic imagery, a tumbling stream of mental fragments, nothing resembling a dream. Every few minutes I rise to the surface, like coming up for air, and sink again, drowning. I go in and out of this state for most of the night, without actually sleeping. Or else I sleep, and I dream, and the dreams are nightmares.
As long as Moll is here my sister will stay away. That is an advantage of having her here, to prevent my sister from coming as she has threatened to do at several points during the winter. She has been telephoning more frequently in recent months, it seems to me, under the guise of finding out how I am, to ascertain that I am taking care of my health, as she likes to put it, and before hanging up she threatens to come. It is always better for her to stay away. When she is here we invariably end up in a fight, which often begins the moment she steps through the door, with a remark about one of my paintings, and the longer we put it off, the longer we manage to control ourselves, the worse it eventually is, when one or the other of us is pushed to the breaking point and finally snaps. She is here for only a short time, and right away we begin to argue about our parents. She persists in defending them, she wants to force me to accept her completely fanciful view of them as loving, indulgent people, where I vividly recall two monsters. These entirely opposite views of our parents end up spoiling every visit, so by the time she finally leaves we are once again hating each other as we did all through our childhood and adolescence. Moll is an inoculating virus protecting me from the more serious infection represented by my sister. The instant she leaves, my sister will show up. She will make the long trip here in order to put her stamp on the house again, in order to erase Moll from the premises. She will stay a week, two weeks, moving furniture back the way she imagines it is supposed to be, on her knees cleaning, reading to me out of books we both remember from our childhood, as if we were ten years old again. And finally she will once again face the fact that we have absolutely nothing in common, that we were so different growing up we were practically members of separate families, and she will depart in tears.
My brother and sister, the two of them alternating over the years, or even working in consort, I suspect now, personally bear the entire blame for my situation, a situation that amounts to a disability, a genuine incapacity brought on by the treatment I underwent from those two. Brought on directly by them but indirectly—and because of their position, more culpably—by my parents, who did not lift a finger to stop it.
Despite everything, my parents were always buying things for me, things they hoped would keep me amused, keep me occupied and out of their hair: puzzles, musical instruments, scientific toys, frequently several at a time, my mother or father stacking a dozen boxes in their closet, taking care always to have one or two in storage as antidotes, as emergency treatment for the episodes of literally paralyzing boredom that would overtake me even at that stage, when I would become insupportable, when I would become fantastically nagging and annoying. I was extremely fond of puzzles as a child, especially jigsaw puzzles. I was pathologically fond of them, some would say. I was in fact a small jigsaw-puzzle fanatic. I took an insane pleasure in them, a childlike, primitive, thoroughly religious pleasure in an activity that was in essence a ritual reenactment of the creation of the universe from chaos, an archetypal resurrection of a shattered world. Though they were blind to most things concerning me, especially to anything that was out of the ordinary or even remotely weird, my parents indulged my jigsaw addiction by showering puzzles upon me.
I was still quite young when my brother or my sister, or the two of them tittering and whispering together, devised their sibling torture regime. They would manage to sequester a single piece from a puzzle, and hide it from me or perhaps even destroy it. They would contrive to do this no matter how carefully I guarded the puzzle, keeping it in my room and never taking my eyes off it while one of them was around. Sometimes it seemed to me they would contrive to do it even before I had opened the box. I would always hope when I began assembling a new puzzle that this time I would possess all the pieces, that it would be possible this time at last to form the complete picture shown on the lid of the box. But even as I worked on the puzzle I could never entirely banish the fear that despite my efforts they had once again made off with a piece—a piece that now for this very reason became the essential piece. The bare possibility that this had occurred would produce in my younger self an anxiety that would thoroughly destroy the pleasure I might otherwise have derived from the puzzle. The slightest problem finding a desired piece would cause me to leap to the fatal conclusion that this was the very piece they had taken, though I had no more evidence of that than a temporary difficulty locating a particular piece among hundreds of similar pieces, a difficulty that is part and parcel of puzzle making. Sometimes, having leaped to this conclusion, having been driven to it by my intense anxiety, I would be overcome by despair, the psychologically inevitable final step in the siblings’ torture sequence, and in that final despairing state I could seldom resist sweeping the entire puzzle off onto the floor, the sound of the cascading pieces drowned by their howls of laughter.
The lure of puzzling was always too great, and eventually, sniffling and tear stained, I would gather up the scattered pieces and resume my work. I would continue working even though I knew with absolute certainty that they would always have succeeded in removing the essential piece. With pigheaded obstinacy, perhaps just to spite them, I would continue to work on something that I knew was impossible to finish. And indeed I always ended up “completing” a puzzle from which a single piece was missing. After a while, constantly working at something impossible to finish, I came to see this as the normal course of events. In place of the impossible goal I put the hopeless project, and this now became the real concealed aim of my actions. A person looking at one of my “completed” puzzles would scarcely notice the pictured scene. That scene, the ostensible goal of the puzzle, would in a sense have disappeared, completely destroyed by the absence of the essential piece, an abse
nce that had now become glaring. All eyes would fly to the hole in the puzzle. In place of a fully completed picture of a busy barnyard or thrilling naval battle, for example, that person would see a fully assembled representation of incompleteness, a perfect picture of failure.
The smallest member of the family, I easily became the most burdensome member. I was accused of driving the others crazy, though in fact they had already driven me crazy. Faced with my robust, competent, one hundred percent healthy brother and sister, a brother and sister who were inevitably, even naturally victorious, I became the awkward, incompetent, sick one, the one who was destined for defeat. I became, in my family and for my family, and ultimately for myself as well, the representation of failure.
She has been shopping and has bought, among other things—mountains of groceries, a new vacuum cleaner—a shade to replace the broken one on the window by my bed. She has found a standing fan at a yard sale. The oscillating mechanism is broken, but she has set it up so it will blow on my chair. It is cooler today. She has not turned it on.
The middle of the night, and she is still awake. I hear the television in the bedroom. She spends a lot of time looking at television. She can’t sleep, or she sleeps with it on.
She spends the money Alfie has given her, money she has extracted, that she has practically extorted from him in exchange for taking me off his hands, I have to assume.
Wrapping myself in a blanket I go over and sit in the wing chair. Lights are still on across the street in the bungalow under the elm. The tall young woman is standing in the illuminated frame of an upstairs window, head bowed, talking to someone I can’t see, who perhaps is stretched out on a rug or a low bed. She makes large sweeping gestures as she talks. She is carrying on, I think, remonstrating with the person lying on the bed. She glances toward the window, and stops abruptly, as if suddenly aware of my presence. Stepping to the window, she opens her arms wide and with a swift embrace draws the curtains shut. Like slamming a door in my face. One by one the lights blink off, room by room, first downstairs, then upstairs where she was standing, and each time a window goes dark I experience a small shock of abandonment.
The tall people are in bed now, in each other’s arms, I think. Their lovemaking, I imagine, will be slow and languorous, giraffes coupling in the hot African night.
Envy begins in the solar plexus, climbs into the chest, the throat, gnaws with razor teeth. The ferret of impossible longing. That they should be young, and not I. Do you understand that?
In bed afterward, in the dense uncomprehending dark, I am conscious of something like a mask being pressed against my face: it is my own face, which I have drawn into a horrible grimace.
In the beginning was the wound. A psychic wound inflicted at a time when the self was still being formed, it is not reachable anymore. It was walled off a long time ago, so it would not be touched. It could not stand being touched.
Untouched, unremembered, unreachable behind the wall of the self, the wound decays, dries up, and shrivels until it is not a wound any longer but a hollow place, a howling emptiness within the brittle shell of the self.
The life struggle—the guiding principle of every thought and action—is to not fall into the hole within. The recurrent nightmare is of a man pitching backwards off a cliff, endlessly falling.
A man without a center. Unbalanced, you will say.
I would have pitched backwards years ago, but I held on to Roy.
In this neighborhood of strivers.
Thinking it over now, I am surprised at how entertaining I found watching the woman in the window, when as a matter of fact there was nothing entertaining about it. As a matter of fact this was just a quite ordinary woman silently carrying on, and I had not the slightest idea what she was saying. Obviously, the entertainment value had nothing to do with the woman or her holding forth and stemmed entirely from the fact that I was spying.
She flicks a roach carcass into the dustpan.
Every morning there are fresh carcasses on the kitchen floor or on the countertop. She sweeps them up or picks them up in a paper towel.
I used to just kick them aside, or knock them under the refrigerator with my stick.
They die in the night, in the middle of the kitchen floor.
They are on their way somewhere when they stop and die, apparently.
Alfie is back this morning. He comes in, leading a woman by the hand, introducing her as “my wife, Janine.” His third wife, she is the first with children—two preadolescent boys, shy, overweight, unappealing, who hang back in the doorway, gaping. She is bland, soft-spoken, pretty, very blonde, has nice teeth, and is much younger than he is. She walks around the room looking at the paintings, pausing in front of each one, trying to look at it like an art connoisseur, the way she imagines an art connoisseur would look at paintings. “I really like this one,” she says a few times. She calls them canvases. One has the feeling that this is a conscious decision on her part, always to call them canvases.
The four of them in a row on the sofa, children in the middle. I take the rocker. It occurs to me, sitting there, that facing me in this way they have become conscious of being a family, it might be the first time this has happened to them. By confronting them in this way, a way they must experience as interrogative, even inquisitory, I have made them conscious of being “all in this together.” The situation is uncomfortable for them, and instead of sitting there in a relaxed manner, they are all, even the children, consciously posing.
The ill woman was outside again yesterday, on the sidewalk several doors down from her own house, closer to my house. She was looking in through the window of a parked car, her face almost touching the glass. Hands up shading her eyes against the glare, she seemed to be looking at something on the backseat, she seemed frozen in that posture. I was watching her, leaning forward in my chair for a better view, when her husband came out on the porch and glanced up and down the street. He is looking for her, I found myself thinking, she has escaped again. He looked down the street and caught sight of her there bent over against the car window in that awkward frozen posture, and he came down the steps, down the sidewalk, walking in a deliberate manner, I thought. It occurred to me that approaching her in this calm, deliberate way was a strategy on his part. He stood next to her and bent over and put his head close to hers, he seemed to be whispering to her, while she continued to stare into the window, forehead pressed against the glass, not looking at him, possibly not even hearing him. Then he took her hand, she let him take her by the hand, and they walked back to the house together. They live in constant fear that she will wander off and do something to herself.
If someone had happened upon the scene at just that moment and seen the two of them walking back to the house hand in hand like that, that person might have thought they were a couple who had just met, perhaps a couple who, in full middle age, had managed to fall in love again.
I felt unwell and had earlier abandoned the idea of going outside or to the park, but now I took my stick and went into the street, as if stepping out for a breath of air, in my slippers. I crossed the street to the car and leaned against the window in just the way she had. But nothing was there, just a plaid lumber jacket lying on the backseat, an ordinary red-and-black wool jacket someone had tossed there carelessly, sleeve hanging off the edge, folding onto the floorboards, bent at the elbow, making the jacket seem almost human, and I could picture the ill woman’s horror-stricken face looking in through the window and discovering the mutilated arm.
Even the most banal events and objects are steeped in mystery. I look out at a world that, if I think about it for more than a second, looks back at me with an expression that is completely unreadable. Did the husband accompany her back to the house? Did he guide her home? Did he drive her back to the house? Did he persuade her to go back inside? The fissure between an act and its description, between the facts and the story, is unbridgeable. There is no necessary connection between the events of a life and the lies that rec
ount them.
Peter Meininger was a typical case. He belongs with me in the museum of typical cases. I saw the moment we met that he was on his way to becoming a failure. He was thoroughly set on becoming a failure and his entire struggle for success had just that in mind, to struggle for success in order to fail. He arrived from Munich, having abandoned his young wife and two small children, ruthlessly abandoning them without a penny, forcing her to rely on the support of her parents, whom she had always hated, parents who, I thought, were the reason she had married Peter in the first place. He let everyone know that he had come to America to make a clean break, in order to devote himself absolutely to his painting. Two days after landing, jet-lagged and exhausted, but also exhilarated, excited by his own ruthlessness and daring, he sat with me in my kitchen. We were drinking the Irish whiskey he had bought at the airport and playing chess, while he talked nonstop in a way that struck me as feverish. In the midst of our game the phone rang. Meininger’s wife was calling from Munich. She was calling to say things that would make him feel awful, that would make him ashamed and make him hate himself, to paint a picture for him of the terrible conditions in which his wife and children now found themselves, whose lives he had ruined. I could hear the voice in the phone, tiny and shrill, going on and on relentlessly, while Peter listened and said scarcely a word. And then he began to cry. He didn’t make a sound, while the tears rolled down his cheeks and fell on his shirt, and he didn’t try to wipe them, and I am sure his wife had no idea that he was crying.
Meininger’s discipline, the ruthlessness with which he swept obstacles from his path, the self-abnegation implicit in that ruthlessness and discipline marked him as an art hero, I thought at the time.
I thought at the time that he was in it for the long haul, that he was an absolutist of the spirit. It took California to turn him into an art-trend phenomenon, a kind of middlebrow, culture-magazine centerfold. Whatever his merits as a painter, he was an art-business genius, who became filthy rich with his supposedly shocking paintings. Of course I would have done the same, though not with painting, with something else. If I had not had a small independent fortune, I would have used my talents to become a shocking failure like Peter Meininger, who was forced by material circumstances to make a name for himself, a shocking literary failure in my case, a mass producer of best-selling literary waste products, for example. Meininger was forced by circumstances to fail privately as a great artist while succeeding publicly as a minor artist, a minor producer of painterly waste products that one sees everywhere in magazines and waiting rooms these days, while I was permitted by circumstances, by the fortuitous accident of a small fortune, to turn my back on the whole business, failing privately as a great artist and succeeding publicly as a minor dilettante, a man locally famous as an art appreciator and utterly unknown as a literary failure.