Glass

  I woke up this morning feeling lightheaded. Going down the hall I had to put out a hand to steady myself on the bookcase. I went over and sat in the armchair, where I fell asleep again, and woke up with the sun shining on my face. I dropped food into the tray, pushing the pellets through the wire lid one at a time, so as not to have to lift it, and when they hit the tray some of them bounced out into the shavings. The odor in there is terrific. Droppings are piling up along the edges; it seems to prefer the edges. I said, “Sorry, Nigel,” said it out loud, and he looked up as if he understood. It struck me that his eyes are quite intelligent; they have a glittering quality that could be taken for that, though I suppose it would sound odd, in the case of a person, if one were to say, “His eyes glittered with intelligence.” I have made coffee and placed it next to the typewriter. The surface of the coffee vibrates each time I strike a key, and the sunlight, reflecting off the trembling liquid, casts bright rippling circles on the ceiling, like water into which a stone has been tossed. I was still quite young, at boarding school, when I learned how to type, and from the first day everyone could see that I excelled at it. I was quite precocious, really, they said, and they were surprised by that, because I was not athletic otherwise, in ways involving the larger muscle groups. I was clumsy and slow at softball, field hockey, and games of that nature. It was the team aspect of those that did me in and made me slow and clumsy, because I wanted to be elsewhere. I typed right through college, becoming faster every year. Had I been a run-of-the-mill typist, I might never have formed the idea of finishing; it would have seemed preposterous, impossibly out of reach at normal speed. Mama had imposed piano lessons practically from infancy, and a line of governesses had followed suit, and I suppose the lessons contributed to my success at typing, though I failed to become a superior pianist, as my heart was not in that either—willfully failed is what they implied, what Mama implied, when Teacher told her. I could strike the right notes most of the time, but I was plodding and timid, is what Teacher said, looking at me fiercely. Not that I dislike music; on the contrary, in the early days, if I knew Clarence was going to be out of the house for a long while, I liked to play records while I typed, Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra being a favorite at the time, though now, were I to hear it, I suspect I might not much care for it. I don’t have a record player, not one that works, so I can’t find out if that is true, and if I try to recall it in my head, I don’t hear anything there. I hear a great many things there, actually, but not Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.

  Howlings, grindings, and a weird sort of rubberized shuffling, mostly from the traffic outside, along with the throbbing of the compressors, were what I heard just now, when I listened to see if could hear any Bartok, plus the beating of my heart. Back then, when I still liked the Concerto for Orchestra, as soon as Clarence left I would close all the windows and doors, turn up the sound, and go into a frenzy. I would start off in the usual way, smoothly and at a normal pace, but as the tempo quickened with the entrance of the brass and upper strings, I would begin to type faster, and I would close my eyes, and I couldn’t hear the typewriter then, but I could feel it shuddering beneath my fingers, and I would commence to sway in my chair. After a minute or two of that a ribbon of words would sometimes start to stream out of the music onto the page, trickle at first and then stream, and I would let go, let myself fall into the music, and it was like falling from somewhere high with no fear of striking bottom, and I would abandon myself to it, turning slowly head over heals as I tumbled, and I felt as if my fingers were tools the music was using to write what it wanted—the music or the machine, I was not sure which—that the typewriter had become the tongue of my hands, not of my brain, and I was unburdened by reflection. Among the incidents in my early life with Clarence that I find most portentous were the times he contrived to walk in on me in the midst of one of those sessions. I don’t suppose he did it on purpose, he just stumbled in without thinking that it mattered, and I say contrived because that was how it felt at the time. With the music clamoring wildly, the typewriter thundering beneath my fingers, my back turned to the door, and my eyes closed, I would have no inkling he was there until he flicked off the record player—brutally flicked it off, was how that felt. Clarence and I did not have the same taste in music. He just did not have it in him to respond with understanding when I said, “Look, it’s Bartok, it’s all Bartok,” and handed him a dozen pages of gibberish. He just glanced at it and then walked around the house opening windows. Had he paused to think, he might have tiptoed up and touched me gently on the shoulder—that would have been startling enough—or he might have withdrawn discretely, taken a seat on the steps outside, or on the swing under the oak in the place in Connecticut where we had one of those, and waited until he could hear that I had finished. It was gibberish to him, is what I mean.

  More pages on the floor. They cascade off at the slightest provocation. Maybe the table is slanted, the legs on one side shorter than on the other. I don’t know. I bought it used, it was quite cheap, and that might have been the reason. The people selling it probably assumed I was not going to notice until it was too late, assumed correctly, as it turns out, though I cannot assert in a factual way that I have noticed even now—I am merely guessing it might be slanted, as an explanation for why my pages keep sliding off without being nudged by anything that I can see, even something not at all obvious, a draft from an open window, for example, or the minute breeze I stir up removing a jacket or opening a closet door. I sit in my armchair, scarcely breathing, windows shut tight, no fan running, and still they fall off, striking the floor with a small dry rattle, which, though I really ought to expect it by now, never fails to startle me. That I have not noticed the slant, if there is one, probably means I have astigmatism. Or, equally plausible, the table is as it should be, all four legs are of equal length, I don’t have astigmatism, but the floor is slanted. If I had a marble, I could roll it and see.

  Brodt wore brown trousers, a brown shirt with an American flag on the sleeve and the word “Brodt” in white script on the flap of a breast pocket, and black shoes. The writing on the shirt pocket is the reason I think of him as Brodt, as we were never introduced in the proper way. When I showed up for work the first day he did not glance up from his monitors, and after that of course there was no point. Well, perhaps there was still a point, but the possibility had slipped away. If one has failed to say, “Hello, my name is so and so,” right off the bat, it becomes impossibly awkward to go back and remedy it later. I never learned his first name, unless of course Brodt was his first name. In fact Brodt probably was his first name, since the man who came to empty our wastebaskets had “Larry” on his pocket. Brodt was not a communicative person; “a phlegmatic and awkwardly taciturn man” is how I might begin to describe him, were I writing a story. I never saw him excited or even slightly animated, except once a few years ago at the time of the explosion of the airplanes in New York. They had moved a television into the cafeteria, they were crowding around it, and I could see Brodt standing in front of everyone waving his arms and shouting. He looked like he was shouting at any rate. I saw him on a monitor, gesticulating, and he looked like the angry cop in one of Chaplin’s silent movies. When he left the basement room it was usually to stroll about in the lobby, make the rounds of the offices, go to lunch in the cafeteria on the second floor or the bathroom on the first, or eject someone from an office, if that person had refused to leave for some reason. When he left the room I could turn my chair around and watch his travels on the monitors. To get out of the room he had to open the small door in the partition and walk across my half, behind where I would be sitting or sometimes standing, to the larger door that opened into the garage. Now and then, when he was crossing behind me, I would hear his footsteps slowing, or even stopping, rarely. I could feel him peering over my shoulder, checking on my progress on a puzzle, and I would picture him fighting back a temptation to make a suggestion. He never did make a suggestion, and I never turned
around at those times and never looked at him from anywhere but behind or saw anything but the back of his shoulders and head when he was in his chair. I glimpsed him from the front only when he got in my way, when I was trying to go someplace or other in the building and he was standing in the middle of the hall, obliging me to walk around him, or when his soda can fell and caused us both to swivel, as I mentioned. Now and then, if we were waiting at the bus stop together after work, I looked at him from the side and took the measure of his profile: low, back-sloping forehead, bulbous potato nose, rounded chin, barrel chest, protruding stomach, and so forth. He never talked to me, except occasionally when we were at the bus stop. I am not sure he was talking to me then either, as he did not turn his head in my direction when he talked, and I was careful not to turn mine in his, so as not to seem prying in case he wasn’t talking to me after all, and what with the noise of the crowd and buses and the fact that I was not facing him and often had my muffs on, I seldom caught more than a stray word or two. I had worked there for quite a long time before I went over and typed on his machine. Every morning and every afternoon he left the room to carry out his inspections and patrols. I could see him going from place to place on the upper floors and was not worried that he was going to walk in on me while I was typing. It seems strange that the only place in the whole enormous building where I was sure he was not watching me was in his own office. Though it is not odd if you think about it—the eye, after all, can’t see itself. I was not interested in typing anything protracted and did not sit down to do it. I went over and typed on his machine twice. The first time I wrote, “Why don’t you speak to me?” The second time, a few weeks later, I wrote, “Hello. Hello. Hello.” One day, a few months after that, I bought him a book at Barnes & Noble. I bought Winesburg, Ohio and placed it on his table while he was out. It sat there for weeks, until I went over and took it back. I seem to be making headway. “Edna is inching her way forward at last” is how it feels exactly. I like the word “headway,” one of those nautical terms we use all the time without ever thinking about their actual meaning—headway, movement ahead, as opposed to leeway, drift to the side. Toward the end, when Clarence had developed such a short fuse, I remember sitting at the breakfast table talking to him about something or other and having him suddenly slam a fist down on the table with such force the coffee in our cups sloshed into the saucers and shout, “Will you get to the damn point!” That happened, as I said, toward the end, and that, meaning the end of Clarence, is another item I am going to have to type up at some point, at some point before the end of this. Drift to the side is a problem, obviously.

  “Losing one’s bearings” is another interesting phrase of that sort. Clarence and I once had a dispute about that phrase, he thinking it meant losing one’s ball bearings, until I showed him in a dictionary. He thought this, I imagine, because of growing up the way he had, with dismantled cars lying around in the yard. He told me there were always broken cars in the yard, several at a time, because once a car had broken down definitively there was nowhere else to put it, and of course ball bearings would have been falling out everywhere. He told me they used ball bearings as ammunition in slingshots, when they hunted squirrels and rabbits in that way. There was never a question of headway before I started typing again this time, no question of reaching a conclusion or finding a solution or anything of that sort, reaching a point, I mean, where I could stop turning things over; getting someplace was not the aim. If there was an aim in recent years, it was, as I said, just to pass the time until four o’clock, when I could go home, even though when I got there it was to go on doing the same thing, sorting and putting in piles, but doing it in the brown armchair. Maybe “thinking” is not the word for that; “woolgathering” is better. Of course if one keeps at it and continues drifting to the side long enough, or gathers too much wool, one can end up losing one’s bearings, losing them in a fairly agreeable way, possibly, and losing them temporarily, usually, I should emphasize, as opposed to losing one’s mind for good or being tormented by some terrible thought forever, some awful unshakable memory perhaps, or being actually lost at sea. “Willy-nilly” would be another way of describing how my thoughts came and went, wafting this way and that. In a sense I really was lost at sea, had got accustomed to just drifting, blown this way and that by the winds of velleity and memory, making it hard for me to push forward now that I am typing again. With the windows open wide, as they are now, and a rain-freshened breeze blowing in, I could almost be typing on a balcony. I hear sparrows chirping on the sidewalk, even over the noise of the ice cream machinery and the cars. This morning I took some half-stale bread from the kitchen and crumbled it as best I could—it was not quite stale enough to make genuine crumbs—and threw it out the window.

  I have placed a book on top of my pages, the ones I have stacked behind the machine, to stop them from sliding off the table. I chose the first book at hand, just grabbing it from the bookcase in the hall on my way into the living room this morning. It turned out to be Peter Handke’s The Weight of the World, a book I remember liking quite a lot at one time, as it seemed to be saying many of the things I was thinking then, and the title now seems weirdly fitting, considering its new work as a paperweight. I am always startled and thrilled by coincidences like that—startled awake, even though, before they occur, I am not aware of being asleep. For a number of years, when I was much younger, I practiced eliminating causation from my world-view, in favor of coincidence, in order to wake up. The aim was to turn every moment of experience into an amazing accident, in order to break through the film of complacency and habit that I could, even at that young age, feel shutting me out from actual life, or from what I considered actual life at the time, like a glass pane placed between me and the world, something, though on a more spiritual level, rather like the plastic film that makes the things wrapped up in the supermarket appear so remote and dead. I worked at it quite hard for a time, and I reached a point in my practice where preparing coffee in the morning I would tip the kettle and be astonished that water came from the spout and that it poured down into the filter rather than up toward the ceiling—happily astonished, I should say. In fact I was only pretending to be astonished. I knew all along that the water was not going to fly up to the ceiling, even while I was assuring Clarence that it might. I would speak to Clarence, perhaps interrupting him at his work, and he would respond, maybe, and if his response had any bearing at all on what I had just said, I considered it a lucky break. Clarence said, when I was practicing all the time, that no one could live like that systematically. I told him there were no systems, only piles of accidents, that everything that is not strange is invisible. I think Valéry said that, or something like that. I didn’t tell Clarence that Valéry had said it, though, because it annoyed him when I quoted French authors. But after a while I got tired of the whole thing and went back to seeing the world as the same old place, worn by familiarity and habit almost too smooth to feel.