Glass

  Even in the fullness of his power, Clarence was not an imaginative writer. When he became wildly inventive it was usually in a dishonest way, such as the time he wrote a long article about a trip to South Africa that included shooting a rhino (which he later changed to a hippo) that was charging him and that fell dead inches from his toes. It turned out the African guides had already shot the animal, several times, it was staggering out of the bush mortally wounded and didn’t even know Clarence was standing there, probably, when he shot at it. He was with his friend Denis Zimmerman, who told everybody the real story. Or the fake interview he did with himself—conducted in the bush by a South African journalist, supposedly—and tried to sell to Esquire. They saw right through it, of course. When word got out and people asked him about it, he pretended he had meant it as a farce, trying to shift the blame to the magazine for not getting the joke. It was not a joke, though. When Clarence was correcting a typescript he tended to chew the erasers off his pencils. He didn’t eat the erasers, just chewed them and spit the little pieces out on the floor or picked them off his tongue and flicked them there. The pencils were worse than useless after he had done that—useless, I mean, for crosswords or anything where you are not absolutely certain of something the instant you write it down, because once the eraser has been chewed off a pencil it is left with a sharp metal scraper on one end. Failing to notice that some pencil I had happened to pick up was one that Clarence had been gnawing on, I would set out to erase something and end up gouging a hole in my page. I erase vigorously, so it was sometimes a large hole, a gash or rent, actually. So I fell into the habit whenever I came across one of those pencils of immediately tossing it in the trash can, in that way insuring that I would not pick it up by accident later. If Clarence saw me doing that, he would call out, “Hey, that’s a perfectly good pencil.” He would say the same thing every time, shout it, actually, even though he knew how it irritated me to hear him begin a sentence with “hey.” One instance in particular stands out. I had just thrown away the last pencil in the house, because he had eaten the eraser as usual. He had been going over the proofs of one of his stories, and he had to stop in order to dig through the garbage in the kitchen and fish out the eraserless stub he had been using, and he was cursing under his breath while he was doing it. When he found it finally, it was covered with tomato sauce, and he turned on me. Holding the pencil high above his head, as if he thought I might snatch it—it looked like a bloody dagger—he accused me of being envious because I did not have any proofs of my own to correct. I had no proofs to correct, it was true, but I was not envious; I just didn’t want my pages gouged. I had not always been irritated when he began a sentence with “hey”; it once had a different ring. In the first weeks after we met, when we were together constantly and tramping all over the city, if he wanted to call my attention to something, he would say, “Hey, Edna,” and I would turn back and look. In that remark, about me being envious, with its insinuation that correcting proofs is in some way a superior activity to typing, you have Clarence in a nutshell. That he was capable of coming out with an assertion like that, even provoked by someone who had just thrown away his pencil, shows how far he was from grasping the difference between us.

  “At the threshold of art I stand dazzled and amazed”—that is how it was with me once, that was the only way I knew to get beyond the banality of everyday life, which was crushing me. Clarence, because of his background, I always thought, was simply unaware that art could do this; I don’t think it ever happened to him, and like the rest of them he gradually became bored with literature. And now it has stopped happening to me. I can spend hours at the window, watching people on the sidewalk below, watching clouds even, spend them not happily but not sadly either; I open a book and fall instantly asleep. Now the rat’s wheel has developed a squeak, a tiny yeep at the same point in each revolution. For a long time we had talked about moving to the country, where “country” was a negative concept: no bars, restaurants, boozy friends, or parties. Going to the country was like opening a new chapter. Clarence did not say he was opening a new chapter then, though, as he did later, when he said it in connection with Lily. He said instead, “I’ve got to turn this thing around,” where by “thing” he meant his life. In the end we did not go to the country, we went to the beach instead, to a little down-at-the-heels resort he had visited once for three days with his family when he was nine years old. That was the first time most of them had left the mountains, and it was Clarence’s first glimpse of the ocean. They could only afford a single room in a motel twenty miles inland from the beach, five of them sleeping in one room and three in the car. Clarence liked to tell this story, adorned with meticulous detail, to show people how impoverished he had been as a child. He would slip into a kind of reverie while he was telling it, staring into the distance as if reciting the events on a film he was watching, but when he had finished, instead of being saddened all a person could think was how happy Clarence had once been for three days when he was nine. The resort was not a rousing place even in summer, I imagine, and it had shut down for winter by the time we got there. We drove down the main street and unloaded our bags at a cottage at the end of it. An hour later Clarence was standing in a phone booth talking to one of his friends in New York, saying, “It’s not a town, it’s a shipwreck.” The place was, I can say now, the perfect mirror of our mood, as if a deep psychic undertow and not just Clarence’s childhood fantasy had drawn us there. In the slanting light of the winter sun the main street had a desolate evacuated look, when we drove down it the first day, long shadows asleep on the pavement and a fine gritty dust blowing across it. Most of the houses were shuttered, only a small restaurant and a filling station still open for business. The beach had been slowly washing away for decades, since before Clarence’s childhood visit, probably, a strong lateral current steadily dragging the sand southward, and it was now just a narrow strip of sand as steeply sloping as a riverbank, whitened stumps of salt-killed cedars jutting from the sand here and there. At high tide the ocean came up under the houses closest to the beach, most of them abandoned, swirling around the pilings. Every year, people told us, one or two houses were swept away by big winter storms. None were swept away the winter we were there, though one burned down and another was demolished on purpose. From our windows we would watch them ripping it down. In an effort to stop the erosion of the sand a series of stone and wood jetties had been constructed perpendicular to the beach and jutting far out into the surf, so that walking down the beach one had to climb every few hundred feet over piles of rock and creosoted timber encrusted with weeds and tiny mussels. Most of the still-inhabited houses were run-down and dilapidated, their owners probably reluctant to sink money into structures tied so firmly to the whims of hurricanes. Our cottage was not big, but it was right up against the ocean: spring tides lapped at the base of the stairs, and the wind whistled in the screens. “It’s a dump,” Clarence judged at the end of our second day. I told him I liked it. It was white with blue shutters, I think, though I might be confusing it with a cottage in Falmouth that we rented for two weeks one summer. Every morning and afternoon, unless the tide was high and we could not walk on the beach at all, we took long, icy windswept promenades by the sea, clambering, as I mentioned, over jetties, and in between the walks Clarence sat in the house and tried to write and not take a drink until supper.

  Rain last night, cooler this morning. I went out after the sky cleared, intending to walk over to the park, and on the way there almost fell down on the sidewalk. I didn’t fall down entirely; I sat down suddenly when I became dizzy, on someone’s front steps, in order not to fall down. This had happened before. My feet and fingers tingled, though, and that does not usually happen, and I thought, Well, this is a bad sign. I wondered if I ought to breathe into a bag. I didn’t have a bag, not expecting something like this to happen when I set out, even though it had, as I mentioned, happened before without the tingling, so I suppose I ought to carry a bag just in case.
I could carry a bag of bird food, which I ought to do anyway, and dump the food out on the sidewalk if it happened before I reached the park. Sparrows would take care of it, I am sure, even if none were present at that moment. I wonder if they smell food, like a dog, or do they recognize it by sight. A grain of millet, I think, would appear extremely small from up where they are. Perhaps they land on the sidewalk randomly, just to hop around, and then they see it. If it happened in a store they would not want me dumping bird seed on their floor. On the other hand, being a store, they would have plenty of bags, and they could just give me one. I have never personally breathed into a bag. I was thinking about it then only because I have heard that dizzy people need to do that, because they have too much oxygen. On the other hand, I thought, maybe I was dizzy from too little oxygen, which can also happen, I believe, in which case breathing into a bag would be a mistake. So I sat there, feeling helpless and agitated, until it passed, whatever it was, what people in the old days would have called a spell, probably. I could almost hear someone saying, “Edna is having another one of her spells,” the implication being that I was just putting on. Nigel seems to be spending more time in his tube. I think he does not enjoy being constantly looked at. I hardly ever look at him, but he might not know that, my eyes from a distance probably appearing quite small to him. Or he is afraid that I will throw something at him. If I were Nigel I would not like living in a glass house like that. Never get away from Edna’s eyes, the way Edna could never get away from Brodt’s eye. I wonder if he even knows that those things are my eyes. The glass-paneled building I worked in might just as well have been made of glass all the way through, a five-story aquarium. I am tempted to say that when Nigel sees me, sees my big eye peering at him through the glass, I remind him of Brodt, though of course that makes no sense at all. Clarence began work on a new novel. For the first three or four weeks, after he started, he would sometimes cut our walks short in order to rush back to the house, practically bounding over the jetties, scrambling actually, cursing the sharp barnacles and mussels, and I would hear the sound of the typewriter when I climbed the steps from the beach. He did not show it to me this time, but one day when he was out shopping for groceries I went into the room and read it, and I saw that it was not good. Each time I looked in the weeks that followed the increment of progress had grown smaller, and I could tell that he was giving up. Listening at the door I could hear him giving up, hear him moving about in the room, opening books and slamming them shut, opening and closing a window, getting up and sitting down, the chair creaking, a sigh, a rat-a-tat from the typewriter and a long silence, another rat-a-tat, and it was time for lunch. This was the epoch I mentioned earlier, when he ate pistachios so as not to drink and ended up having pistachios with his highballs. And that was when we threw out the deer head, pitched it into the surf, where it floated, only the muzzle and antlers out of the water, a terrible image of drowning, before flipping over and becoming just a plank bobbing on the waves. We stayed on until the weather was warm again. After Clarence had given up he passed a few weeks fishing practically from dawn to dusk, standing at the edge of the surf, holding the rod and looking out to sea, and once when I went out and stood beside him he pointed and said, “Over there is Africa.” Of course he was not fishing in the sense of caring whether he caught anything—watching his future vanish, I imagine, hull down on the horizon, is what he was really doing. I can see him in my mind’s eye, from above, as seen by someone standing on a high bluff, in an icy wind, and the words that come to mind are “bereaved” and “bullheaded.” He cooked everything he caught—drum, flounder, whiting, ray, shark, toadfish, croaker, catfish, eel—and ate them with bitter gusto. I ate rice and tiny pale Le Sueur peas from a can, and we faced each other across the table in the neon-lit kitchen. I don’t remember what we talked about. I had once said to him, soon after we first met, that it was the nature of artists to fail, that if they did not fail it was because they were not any good. But that did not help now, because he knew that their failure was not the sort of failure that was happening to him now. I moved my typewriter into the room he had vacated, because it looked out on the ocean and I could be at my station when the sun rose from the Atlantic, the same as today, except the ocean today is an ice cream factory. Clarence had been putting on weight for years; I gradually had grown accustomed to thinking of him as a heavyset person. His physical presence was dominating, chairs and floors creaking beneath him. One morning while we were out walking the wind snatched the straw hat I was wearing and sent it cartwheeling down the beach, and Clarence set off in pursuit, lumbering to catch it before it bounded into the waves. He reached it just in time and was walking back toward me, when he placed the hat on his head, as a joke, and I saw, suddenly, that he was positively fat. This was, coincidentally, the same day he announced out of the blue that he was becoming a pharmacist again. That was why I suddenly saw him fat, probably, because I was prepared to look at him differently. Meanwhile I was growing thinner, the flesh melting from my thighs and hips, my breasts vanishing. When we walked together on the beach I thought we were like Body and Spirit. Clarence was Body. I was Spirit.

  Of course Poole might not have picked up his typewriter from the store at all; he might, in his distress, have forgotten he had left it there. How would I feel, if one day I decided to commit suicide and could not find my typewriter? Desperate, I suppose. I cannot imagine a situation in which I would forget where I had left my typewriter. The squeak is worse. I hear it even with my muffs on: yeep, whir, yeep, whir, yeep, whir.

  I have taped the lion photograph back up on the window. If one bears in mind that it was taken in nineteen sixty-four, it says something else about Clarence, different from what I suggested earlier, when I observed how true to life it was, being a picture of him with a drink in his hand. In nineteen sixty-four Hemingway had been dead for years and nobody but Clarence was still shooting lions, and that, I think, was the tragedy of his life, that he was, in a sense, left to shoot lions alone, having made his appearance onstage at the moment they were closing the theater. I say tragedy, but it was also comedy: the lights have come up, the audience has left the building, women in kerchiefs are vacuuming the aisles, and someone is still up there on the stage. He is wearing laced boots and a cartridge vest and is earnestly performing a role that he learned in school, though with increasing weariness as time passes. He pauses now and then to nip from a flask. The tragedy was that his position in life had become comical, I mean, and he had failed to notice. Shooting Lions Alone, I think, would make a good title for a book. For a biography of Clarence, of course—it could not be the title of a book Clarence himself might have written, because he could not be ironic about himself, and he did not like it either when I became ironic about things that he took seriously. Oddly, the one thing I was never ironic about, which was my typing, he was ironic about, calling it “Edna’s remembrance of everything past.” Despite his consuming desire to be the next new thing, there was something old-fashioned about Clarence, even quaint—I say that, knowing how it would have piqued him. And to make matters worse, it is impossible to consider someone like Clarence quaint without being ironic. Perhaps old-fashioned is not the word—I mean conventional: the B-movies he worked on, and the outdoor stories that people said were wonderful when they appeared but rapidly forgot about, and the stuff he published in the little literary magazines. He was not always proud of being the sort of writer he had become, and now and then he would still send something off to places like Esquire and the New Yorker, though he always got preprinted slips in return, as I had warned him was bound to happen. In my opinion, when they reissue The Forest at Night no one will even notice. Shooting lions alone: because after a while I was not, speaking metaphorically, able to shoot lions with him anymore, or I was not willing to. I was unable to be willing after a point is how it was, a psychological spring or some such thing having become broken. I used to say to Clarence, when he was expatiating on something, with statistics, or reporting conv
ersations from one of his literary drinking parties, that we were witnessing the end of civilization, and of course I meant our civilization, the one that has a place for people like us, like me and like Clarence some of the time. After typing the previous sentence I happened to glance over at the tank: Nigel’s eyes were bulging. If I were to write a children’s story, I might begin, “When the rat saw what she had written, its eyes bulged with astonishment.” Can one write a children’s story if one doesn’t care much for children? I suppose I could make it frightening, it being easier, probably, to frighten things one doesn’t care much about.

  Sunday morning, and I don’t hear the Connector, though the windows are wide open, or I barely hear it if I strain, when I hear the compressors also, and birds as well, and the voices of people on the sidewalk. One of the birds, which must be a robin, I hear even over the keystrokes, it is so loud, or a wren, maybe. It is the first time I have heard a wren here, if it is a wren. People passing in the street below can hear me typing, I am sure, and that makes me think of Capote’s remark about Kerouac’s book: “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” He would say the same about this, presumably, if he were still alive and had a chance to read it. I suppose he meant that Kerouac’s writing went on and on aimlessly. As if there were some other way in which one possibly could go on and on. This morning I became dizzy again, carrying my coffee from the kitchen. It seems to have become a habit. “Chronic” is the medical word for that kind of habit. I grabbed on to the bookcase and in the process spilled most of the coffee. I sat in the armchair awhile and then made another cup, which I have now allowed to get cold, sitting here sorting through the items I intend to type today; sorting in my head, as I said earlier. It is instant coffee, which I became accustomed to drinking when I had to save time, when I was still going to work—I was chronically drinking it—and I would also brush my hair on the bus, because I was always running late no matter how early I got up; did I explain about that? When I was late Brodt would write on a scrap of paper and then fold the paper up and slip it in his shirt pocket. I have an urge to toss things overboard, superfluous things and things that strike me as burdens and things that are not sanitary, like books. I have already mentioned mold, probably, but in case I have not, that is what I am referring to, as making books unsanitary. Of course, there is a sense in which this actually is a children’s story, being all about what happened to Clarence and me as a consequence, in part at least, of having been the sort of creatures we were as children, of the lives we lived before we became ourselves, when it was too late to do anything about it. I am going to lie down now.