I sat in the armchair after supper and watched the light die. Then, later, I sat there again, in the dark, listening to the fading street sounds. I was thinking about how much I have forgotten, how little, out of the enormous scrap-and-litter heap that we call the past, I have managed to carry with me, how few of all the things and people I have known I still remember, how many have left no trace. Of course I can’t actually think about things and people that have left no trace. I can say I am thinking about them, but I am really only thinking about the words “people and things I have forgotten.” The words are there, like placeholders for things and people who have vanished, empty chairs reserved for those who are never going to sit in them again. Sometimes a thing or a person has a name still, but that is all, like a picture of someone that has been rubbed out except for their hat. The hat is there on top of the smudge—the hat is like the name of a person that time has rubbed out; or it is a hat floating down a river, when the person it belonged to has sunk and drowned, the river standing for the flow of time, obviously, and the hat standing for our words, bits of floating trash, anchored to nothing. I cannot think about a lot of Clarence, about, probably, most of the aspects of Clarence. No matter how often I say the name “Clarence” or use phrases like “Clarence was buttoning his denim shirt” or “Clarence had his foot on a lion,” he does not approach; the words don’t bring him closer; they just shovel him further under, bury him beneath a pile of empty chairs. And then I reflected on how easy it is to say things that are not true. For example, thinking about it again, I see that the story I told about the gardener was not entirely true, even though I believed it to be true while I was typing it. He did not actually put the mole in his pocket, as I maintained before; he dropped it down the front of his trousers. He was wearing wide blue suspenders, and he pulled the trousers out at the waist and dropped the mole in. Pulling the trousers out like that made an opening like a pocket, which must be the reason I said pocket before. I said pocket before because that was how I remembered it before, which does not help, that I actually remembered it wrong does not help, and now I remember it a different way. You cannot remember something one way and then remember it another way, different from the first way. You were not, obviously, actually remembering one of those times, maybe both. Clarence used to ask me, in regard to a passage in some piece he was writing, “Is this believable?” He wanted to make the things he imagined seem as real and solid as the floor he was standing on, he used to say. Real for him meant appearing the way we think they are. Everything not strange is invisible. In Avignon with the German boys, we could not smell the oxen. Sitting here now, I cannot smell Nigel, though I am convinced that the odor would knock me off my feet were I to walk through the door for the first time. My comfortable brown armchair over there is as distant as the moon, as distant as Avignon even. It is not that I don’t always notice it: I can never do more than notice it—I cannot actually see it. Even when I make the effort I only manage to stare at it dumbly. What would it take to make it visible again? The same is true of names, I suppose. The word chair is as mute and dead as the chair itself. I wonder which died first. I think they must have perished together, in each other’s arms, stifled by indifference and habit, wrapped in plastic film. If I had shown Clarence some of my typing in those days and asked “Is this visible?” what would he have thought? If I were to turn and see my armchair, suddenly, it would seem as strange and startling as a charging rhino, probably, or whatever it was that charged Clarence once, a hippo maybe. “Edna was struck dumb by a charging armchair” is how it would be. Mentally struck, that is.
I had a great many mice at Potopotawoc, and one day walking to the village I found a hungry cat and took it home. It was just skin and bones, and it ate all the mice, among other things—leftovers I saved from the cafeteria—and grew exceedingly fat. Other cabins had mice as well, and they put poison out for theirs, and my cat, having eaten all my mice, started visiting the other cabins in order to eat their mice, some of which were infected with poison. One day it came home ill, vomiting bile, crawled into my closet, and died. The director came down. He agreed that the cat had died from eating poison mice; it was karma, he said. I told him that was not my understanding of karma, that it would be karma only if he, the director, had died from eating mice, since he and not the cat had put out the poison. We buried the cat in front of my cabin. Several of the residents wrote poems about it and read them at the funeral. They sang “for she was a jolly good yellow” (it was an orange-yellow female cat), and the director gave a speech and read from a typewritten commendation that said the cat had died in the line of duty. The director’s name was Brodt also. I did not type much at Potopotawoc, and I did not read much either, except magazines, as I must have mentioned already. There were always fresh magazines in the Shed. And I had other animals too, raccoons and skunks that would come up onto the steps and even into the cabin if I left the door open, and I would hear them scratching about at night. People said there were wolves, but I didn’t believe them. I am not afraid of animals, if they are animals, though on one occasion it was a man who had become lost from the Shed. Once someone invited me to play in one of their ball games, and when I refused he handed me the ball anyway, shoved it into my hand, but when the play started I didn’t know what to do with the ball and just stood there until someone pushed me down in the mud. Living in Mexico, during the period when we still thought of ourselves as peripatetic—packing up and moving at the drop of a hat, which a lot of people found amazing, and even referring to ourselves as gypsies—it was normal to look out a window at night and see a rat or two. Our house stood on a very narrow street, practically an alley, that became very dark at night, with only a single metal-shaded streetlight every block or two. The light on our block dangled from a cable stretched between our house and the one across the street, and it swayed in the slightest breeze, causing giant shadows to race up and down the façades of the houses. Neither of us slept at all well in Mexico, because of the heat and because of the radios in the other houses, and sometimes one or both of us would get up and go sit by the window, where it was slightly cooler on the nights there was a breeze. Our bedroom was on the second floor and sitting at the window we could see rats creeping on the broken pavement beneath the streetlight; one could not sit there for very long without seeing them. Oddly, we scarcely ever saw one in the daytime, though they had to be hiding just everywhere. Clarence liked to say that rats were going to inherit the world some day—he enjoyed coming out with frightening generalizations of that sort. He carried lots of statistics in his head, most of them distressing, and he could go on a long time about them once he got started. He knew, for example, how many tons of rice are eaten every year by rats in Indonesia. He recited the figure one night while we were sitting at the window watching the rats, though of course I can’t remember now how many tons it was, but it must have been a great many, or else why would he have told me? A fabulous memory for statistics was one of his annoying traits, though it impressed some people—impressed some men, I ought to say, since I don’t suppose many women were impressed by it. I was never able to understand how someone could want to be an artist and also want to know a lot of statistics, though I never said that to Clarence in so many words. His statistical streak made it practically impossible for anyone to win against him in an argument, since just when you had him cornered he would trot out some figure or other, rattle it off the top of his head, that would show how wrong you were. I was never sure he had not made those statistics up for the occasion. He was capable of doing that, of making things up in order to win, a function, I suppose, of his ruthless side. Compromising principle when it came into conflict with getting ahead and not even batting an eye was the way he was ruthless in general, and inventing things was the smallest part of it. I am not making headway. And pages falling on the floor is the least of it. I am struggling to forge ahead, a few days ago I was in fact forging ahead, and here I am bogged down again, in the rats in Mexico. I don’t care ab
out the rats in Mexico.
Potts has fallen from a horse and fractured something, her tibia, I believe he said, the person who called, and a wrist, he being a relative of some sort, though he had what I thought was a thick German accent, and will not return before the end of summer. That might be for the best, though it means putting up with her rat for a while longer. Lately I have scarcely noticed Nigel, except to feed him and slap his tank when he thumps or whirs excessively. I enjoy having the building to myself. It is the first time this has happened for a lengthy period. Potts underneath me now, at this stage, would be disruptive and annoying, not the noise she makes, because she scarcely makes any, but the vapors of her mute presence filtering up through the floor, her silent existence seeping into my life. Imagine going up to someone in the grocery store and saying words like those—they would think I am crazy. If it happened to me, if I were that other person, would I consider it a sign of being crazy? Probably. How bizarre to think of Potts on a horse.
I was working a crossword a few minutes ago when I noticed the bite marks on my new pencil, four wedge-shaped indentations up near the eraser. I had not noticed them until I turned the pencil end to end in order to rub out an entry and in so doing transferred my grip to the upper (now lower) portion of the shaft, where I felt the marks. I am not sure how long I have had this pencil. They have built a new elementary school just a few blocks from here, replacing the boarded-up one that I see from the kitchen window, and the children rushing to class, book bags jouncing on their backs, regularly shed pencils. Practically every week it seems to me I come across two or three lying on the sidewalk, and sometimes I pick one up, because I am feeling in need of a pencil, if I am planning to work a crossword, or because the pencil seems brand new, as this one did until I upended it. In the latter case (seeming brand new) I find these abandoned pencils irresistible, and I nearly always pick up such a one unless I am hurrying to get out of a rainstorm, and then I sometimes go back and fetch it afterwards, though I have not been doing that lately, because of the difficulty bending. The indentations on this pencil, therefore, were probably made by the teeth of a child, and in point of fact they are quite small, smaller than the ones I have just made with my own teeth for comparison. I don’t chew pencils myself, or rather I don’t chew pencils anymore, but when I did, just now, bite the pencil I was using for the crossword, just to see, the memory of the taste of the yellow paint came rushing back. As a child I loved getting new pencils, because I could chew the paint off them—scrape it off, actually, not chew, using my front teeth like chisels, carefully scraping so as not to damage the wood underneath, until no fleck of paint remained except for a very thin yellow line under the brassy metal band that holds the eraser and that you didn’t want to touch with your teeth, because of the unpleasant electric sensation. To scrape away that last bit I would use the point of a thumbtack or, later, when we studied geometry, the sharp tip of my compass. I have pulled the fern away from the wall and with scissors cut off the parts that have turned yellow. There is now a rather large gap on one side, though it is greener overall. It is smaller but greener. I could trim the other side, to even it up, the way Papa used to do the hedges. I won’t try to carve an animal, though. I tore the note about the library books off the window but have not been able to get the remnants of tape off, even after scraping with a kitchen knife. I don’t have a razor blade, which is what the window washers used. I imagine the glue has hardened with age. How old is it, I wonder. Some of the notes have turned yellow and brittle, especially the ones I wrote on scraps I tore out of magazines. Some are in marker, either black or red, while others are in ballpoint or pencil. Those in pencil would be ones that came to me while I was working a crossword, probably, as I don’t use a pencil otherwise. One on a yellowed index card says Write Lily. It has been a great many years since I thought of writing Lily. In order to reach a place where I could stand and scrape the window I had to walk on my pages, and twice there was a crunching sound when I stepped. It was not snails, of course, though that was my first thought also. Some of the glass from the shattered picture frames must have shot underneath. Clarence loved pistachios and was constantly dropping the shells on the floor to be stepped on. I suggested he put them in his pocket, if it was too much trouble to throw them in the trash can. He said he was not going to walk around town with a lot of shells in his pockets. Of course I was not suggesting that—I thought he could empty them in the garbage can in the kitchen before he went out. And it was scarcely a town at that point—the place we had ended up in at that point was scarcely a town, just a diner, a filling station, and a lot of shut-up houses in three rows on a strip of sand between a marsh and the ocean. He ate a lot of pistachios there while he worked, so as not to drink. I bring up the pistachios now, even as I try to forge ahead, because when I crunched the glass I got a pang. And now there are footprints on my pages, entailing more pangs. I could, I suppose, make this into nothing but a list of pangs and the items that cause them. That would be too short for a book, of course, though it could be most of an introduction, in case the Grossman woman is still interested. I can write and ask, I suppose. If I carve an animal, it will have to be a small one, without too many protuberances. During one of our best times, when Clarence and I were both frantically writing—not frantically, really, smoothly and rapidly—when we were staying in the Berkshires, in a kind of glorified cabin that friends had lent us, the floor was absolutely covered with discarded pages. One afternoon Clarence came back from shopping in town, in a hurry, I suppose, I don’t recall the reason, and was rushing with his habitual long strides across the living room, when he slipped on the paper, just like stepping on ice, and fell flat on his back, groceries sailing off in every direction. He looked like someone is a slapstick movie, legs and arms in four directions and groceries flying up and raining down just everywhere. He did not find it funny, of course. He flew into a fury and refused to respond when I asked if he was all right. He gathered up all my pages—there were dozens and dozens—without a word, just shoveled them up with his hands by the armload and threw them out the front door, where the wind carried them across the meadow and into the trees. I stood at the window of the bedroom and watched them blowing across the field and into the orchard on the other side of the road. It rained that night, and the next day, when I went out to look, there were soggy pages everywhere, even in the trees. They were still there when we left two weeks later. The people who had lent us the cabin, and who were outdoor friends of Clarence’s, went up the following weekend, and they did not say anything about the pages, though they could not have failed to see them. I could carve a beaver.
I was not always bothered by Clarence’s whistling while he typed. I am not sure when it began to bother me. I have a clear mental picture of him typing in our kitchen on Jane Street, standing at the counter tapping away and whistling, and I don’t get the sense that I minded then. He always typed standing in the early days, and later, after we left Jane Street for Philadelphia, he designed a special stand for holding the typewriter at the perfect height and angle, constructing it himself in the studio of a sculptor he knew who lived in a barn in New Jersey. It was held together with wing nuts, so we were able to take it apart and carry it with us each time we moved. It was the only piece of furniture that we kept from one place to another, unless one considers things like tripods, guns, and typewriters to be furniture; I would classify those as equipment. Much later, when he had become the heavy rather bullish man of his middle years, he sat down to type. I think it fair to say that his writing sat down also. He would hand a piece to me and I would notice how leaden it was, and I would make suggestions and offer encouragement. “Allegro,” I might say, as encouragement, “allegro con brio, Clarence,” and I once suggested he cross out every other sentence. It was in a fit of pique that I suggested that, I think. After the first three or four moves, it dawned on me that we were never going to stay anywhere for long, and I fell into the habit of throwing away my typed pages. There were always
boxes of them, I had no interest in them anymore, and they were constantly in the way. I suppose they were furniture rather than equipment, especially considering that when the boxes had become a stack we would often keep things on top of them; and since they were furniture, we left them behind when we moved. Clarence had a great deal of equipment, which he called gear, most of it having to do with hunting or fishing. I hunted and fished too but did not have equipment of my own; I used whatever Clarence handed me. He would have liked to possess a house full of heads, plus spears and guns and so forth, all up on the walls, as in the hunting lodges he saw when he went on hunts with wealthy people, when he was reporting for magazines. We had just one head, of a huge deer he shot in Wisconsin and paid somebody to stuff. We lugged the head about with us for years, and one of the first things he would do on moving into a new place was nail it up. He liked to sit in a chair, stare up at the head, and talk to it. Unless he was drunk, he would be joking when he talked to it. He pretended the head was his factotum. If we were about to go out somewhere, he might look up at the head and say, “Porter, fetch my jacket.” What he meant, of course, was for me to fetch his jacket. In Mexico something began to eat the head, and eventually it became so mangy and moth-eaten we dumped it out at the beach house. That was the year Clarence decided to become a pharmacist again. The only equipment I still have, if you don’t count kitchen equipment, is this typewriter, unless you count the radio. Speaking of which, it is sixteen past nine, the radio has just announced, and in a few moments we will hear Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. Sixteen past nine p.m., that is.