Jim Webb: Poetry, Essays & Fiction

Jim Webb’s Poetry, Essays & Fiction




[Undated essay (probably written early at Columbia, late ‘50s to early ‘60s), with revisions in Jim's hand, on the portrayal of children and childhood in the work of Charles Dickens:]

Charles Dickens devoted more attention than perhaps any of his contemporaries to the social and dramatic qualities of childhood. There is some justification for the cliché, since 'devotion' suggests several characteristics of his attitude towards his created children: love, sympathy, reverence, concern--and sentimentality. And there is much more justification for ascribing to him the priority in attention when we think of the number of imagined children he presented over the years from Oliver Twist to Our Mutual Friend. Oliver and the Artful Dodger, Little Nell, Paul and Florence Dombey, David Copperfield, Jo the crossing-sweeper, Amy Dorrit, Tiny Tim, Pip and Estella, to list only the more important.
And they are important not only for our investigation of attitudes toward children during the period, but also to the novels they appear in, to the fictional world they inhabit. Indeed, one of Dickens's significant influences on English fiction is his demonstration that childhood is a legitimate and worthwhile subject for the novelist.*[marginal note: credit K. Tillotson] His extensive use of children was virtually an innovation, and its effects are still being felt.
The abundance of the material, the number of Dickens’s fictional children, shows in itself his high opinion of their dramatic value, since he had an acute sense of what interested his readers. But the dramatic uses his children served create a certain barrier to our precise understanding of the social value of the child; we cannot assume a precise equivalence between his novelist’s attitude towards fictional children and his ‘real’ attitude towards ‘real’ children. This problem always confronts us when we try to make a critical analysis of the ‘ideas’ or intellectual content of an artist’s work.
But there are valid reasons, in the case of Dickens, for side-stepping the difficulty. Because of the consistency of his novelist’s view, throughout his writing life, and of the suggestive key of the autobiographical fragment published by Forster in the official biography, we can fairly assume that his personal experience and attitude exercised a nearly compulsive effect on his manipulation of his fictional children. And even if there were not a near equivalence between his personal and fictional views, the material would still be of great use for our study—because of the tremendous extent, and approval, of Dickens’s contemporary reading public, and because of his close relationship with that public through the serial publication of his novels.
The determining characteristic of Dickens’s attitude towards children is implicit in the observation above, for when we say that Dickens considered children as legitimate a subject for fiction as adults, we suggest that he considered children to differ from adults only in degree, not in kind. The most important corollary of this view is that childhood is not a separate preparation for adult life, but simply a part of the continuum, worthy of interest and deserving of respect. So if we first explore what Dickens considered the most important differences of degree, we shall see with more clarity the type of interest and the amount of respect childhood deserved.
First there is a difference in the degree of innocence. ‘Original sin’ had no place in Dickens’s theology; his characters were born innocent and were subsequently corrupted, to different degrees by society. This belief in innocence was at least partly responsible for his antipathy towards ‘chapel’ religion, to the Chadbands who shut out the light. The antipathy seems sometimes to extend to all religion, since religion seems incapable of preserving innocence.
Second, there are the obvious differences in physical and mental capacity. The pathos of the child confronted by a Gargantuan society is a recurring theme for Dickens, and the disparity is often exaggerated by poor health, poverty, circumstance.
This brief and generalized account of differences in degree is sufficient to indicate Dickens’s conclusion: the child is as interesting as the adult, often more so, since there is more potential, greater suspense; childhood requires deeper respect, since there is a necessity for help to redress the balance of capacity. The interest Dickens paid in the construction and peopling of his fictional world, and the respect and help he quite overtly sought to elicit from the real world he lived in.
His method, in seeking reform and enlightenment, was the classic one of communicated indignation. The extreme case is the funeral oration for Jo in Bleak House, and if we keep those apostrophes in mind ("Dead, your Majesty. Dead my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends….") we will not entertain excessive expectations for the analysis below of the changes he sought. Great indignation and a lucid programme are seldom hand in hand.
Those evils attributable to an improper ordering of society were, of course, remediable by changes in the social order, and on these points he can be said to have had a programme. Education, child labour and criminality, poverty, sanitation are subject to agitation and legislation. But Dickens’s deepest and constant indignation on behalf of his children concerned failures in human relations and human nature which could be changed only by ‘conversion.’
The concern here is truly reiterative, nearly compulsive. The children in the novels are often orphans in fact or in effect, and questing for substitute parents. Those with parents are pawns in games for adult ends. The patterns are so often repeated that considerations of dramatic necessity are scarcely sufficient explanation unless we add to potent and lasting influence of Dickens’s memories of his own childhood.
David Copperfield and Little Dorrit are the clearest instances of the use of autobiographical material. But in many of the other novels the emotional force of memory is acting without the accompanying remembered detail.




[Undated lecture, Reed College:]

The Ritual of Pleasure and Pain


Pleasure and pain is.

I am tempted to stop here. It is. So the rest is only a game of "what is it?" If you don’t know, maybe you find out; if you do know, you play the game well.
Pleasure and pain is a symmetry. They balance exactly or they destroy the system. Therefore: mutual dependence.

(Blake: "Thus one portion of being is the Prolific, the other the Devouring: to the Devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains; but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole. But the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer, as a sea, received the excess of his delights.)
For pleasure and pain, the physical:psychic dichotomy is irrelevant: they are neither/both.

Pleasure and pain is an answer if to feel is a problem. It is also an answer if the problem is not to feel. (Because of secondary elaboration, in each, in each case?)
Pleasure and pain is a proof of existence (Q.E.D.?) and an internally self-proving system: "painful proofs" and "pleasant proofs"....
Pleasure and pain are complementary: like active and passive, initiating and completing, monster and prey.

Pleasure and pain is communication more accurate, more real, than words: then, perhaps, ultimately, essentially physical? Truth perhaps often but not only in the contact of bodies?
Neither pleasure nor pain is death: death is the boundary of the ritual, can be approached but not consummated; can be ritually counterfeited, since that yields rebirth, and allows consciousness of the processes of derangement: derangement of identity, derangement of time, derangement of the senses. Derangement of consciousness? Yet consciousness of derangement?
Pleasure and pain is a descent into thingness—a night journey—an initiation. Never the same again; ever the same. Externalization of the mind, internalization of the whole universe.
Pleasure and pain are reflexive: i.e., reversible like mathematical signs—the pleasure of giving pain, the pain of receiving pain, the pain in paining, the pleasure in being pained.
Therefore: empathetic. A communion.
Love is destruction. Datum: To be filled with your seed is to subject God to the power of death. Interpretation: this is the utter self-abasement of nightmare. Because deep down I know I am sterile. No creation. Mustard seed on stony ground. Stillborn.
(Notice that I have deliberately chosen data that merges the sexes—after all, I’m talking about love. This implies both a minimal platonist distinction between love and sexuality, and something like Eliot’s use of Tiresias in The Waste Land. But perhaps I should cite a more reputable source: Professor Pock recently observed in the sauna—in one of the sauna seminars where the Socratic dialogues are necessarily brief and to the point—that one aspect of the hippie posture is confusion of sexual roles. And when someone observed that he hadn’t noticed too much confusion, Mr. Pock delivered one of his classic exit lines: "That’s not what the data says.")
Or a simpler dualism that can stand for them all. Two myths (see above for when you can legitimately read "delusions"). I am Christ. I am Satan. (Notice, in passing, the historical identity of the martyr and the rebel: both words are operationally defined by the established order—which may refer either to the social order or the nature of the universe).
I am Christ. Datum: "I" feel my participation in God-head. Interpretation: Come unto me. The atonement I offer is vicarious but real. All you have to do is want it. But if you want it, you have to follow me. This is usually referred to as a "mixed blessing."
I am Satan. Datum: The smallest of pacts with me dooms you to eternal hell. Interpretation: You are right to avoid me. Don’t come around too often. Trust your fears and your diffidence, because they’re true: I will either seduce you or rape you. And I will be glad I did. And so will you. Hell is unending sensual fire. (But then so is Heaven. And in either case.... ramble on for a while here about how both are simply our constructs). So: for God’s sake and yours, keep your distance and your sanity and your innocence.
I am Christ. I am Satan. It’s a nice joke: in either case, in one sense or the other, there is all hell to pay.

Well. Now we must start the process of relaxation, of re-entry. Obviously I made it all up. It’s fantasy. Creation. Imagination. We’ve just been on some kind of intellectual trip—I have, I hope you have.... Nothing I’ve said should disturb your sleep. I am thoroughly convinced that I am neither Satan nor Christ. God, I’m even tired of the words—I’m not the Marquis de Sade. I’m not Socrates. All I want is to be myself.
[Page torn off.]

SOME PERSONAL MYTHS
which the persona ("I") interprets—
i.e., to the extent that I am "I" I can testify to their truth (they are to that extent real "myths"), but to the extent that you ("you"?) are not "I" they are only "myths" (read "delusions"). Thus: any dualism you care to suggest. (definitely not in quotation marks: if the I has separate existence from "I" it is as pure intellect. The suggestion here—pick a dualism, any dualism, don’t show me your card—is a suggestion to pure intellect)
A first dualism: two myths. Love is creative. Love is destructive.
Love is creative. Datum: "I" want to fill you with my seed. ("you"? This could get tiresome....) Interpretation: I want you to be creative? productive? maternal & comforting? to me even? At least—creative. And I want to be—paternal, proud, responsible for but unpained by creation.... (as close as I can come to merging unleashed sensuality and contemplative withdrawal. But am I getting close?)
Love is creative. Datum: "I" want to be filled with your seed. Interpretation: first the easy symmetries. The will to create—and willing to be pained. To be chosen for creation—"God, use me!" is the ultimate prayer. Donne’s "Batter my heart...." But the inversions: not irresponsible, since I want to will it. But unable: since passivity is the datum. And there is the pride in being chosen.
Love is destructive. Datum: To fill you with seed is to be God. Interpretation: For me, in full consciousness, to will your pain with your creation. For me to say "so be it", to assent, to affirm, your pain is necessary.
The basis is: Trust. Recognition.
The process is: Exploration. Displacement. Testing. Revelation.
The result is the gift of self, through loss, through extension.
(The result is love: recognition of essential conflict, mutual victory through mutual submission—in all, release....)
The pleasure, and the pain, of giving up control equal the pleasure, and the pain, of taking control.
The paradigmatic statement of the benevolent/malevolent sadist: "Strange....I want to steal pleasure from you, and make you a gift of complicated pain—to see you make something beautiful out of it."
Reflexive again: I (the "I") must have what I give or the gift is empty gesture. Knowledge and knower are one. Just as you (the "you") must possess pleasure before it can be stolen.
Rousseau was wrong: people say it and mean it. Or mean it better than by saying—"I make with you a convention wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage: I shall keep it as long as I like, and you will keep it as long as I like."
And the "you" makes the convention too....
As in the brain: Pleasure centers. Punishment centers.
Pleasure domes. "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately punishment center decree...."
So the handcuffs, chains, locks, leather straps are real props, to the extent that the play is a real play (i.e., ritual=means something).
Thus the paradigmatic statement of the strong masochist: "I have submitted to the monster and survived. I am not only all I was, but also something other...."



This piece of writing was typed carefully—there are no corrections and perhaps it was typed from a longhand draft—on the backs of four pages of a handbill for a ‘Baker, Webb, & Co.’ presentation called Projection and Fantasy: Notes toward a Manifestation of Psychocinema, the date of which was (to be) May 13, 1969. I have no way of knowing if that date had passed and Jim was using this as scratch paper or if it was coming up and he simply used the paper that was to hand at the moment. The presentation may actually have been a showing of Spider God, perhaps as a work in progress.

Tonight. It seems I fell asleep over my book. For there was someone at the door, which brought me suddenly, all awake.
It was you. You had come back. You came in more strongly than you usually do, and sat down in your place (I saw you wore your strength round the wrist nearest me), and said—I’ve made a decision.
I said—good.
And you—I’m through with hesitation. I want to chain my self to the bed.
And I—Don’t talk about it. Don’t think about it. You know where the chain is. You know where the bed is. Do it.
There followed a period of fifteen or twenty seconds during which I saw your life in your face. Rather, I saw the life grow in your face, for it’s hard to limit it to yours.
We both moved at once. You took off your boots and started up the ladder. I locked the door and began the circle of the house (which you have often made for me) and turned off the lights.
As I made the progress of the house (there are thirteen switches) I heard your progress. Your clothes came off of you and on to the floor. The links of chain clicked against each other. The two successive snaps of the two locks were loud and final, like: One. Two. And brought me to the last light at the base of the ladder.
And the keys fell through the space (I know that fall through that space) and hit the floor. To pick them up I knelt.
Again there was a period of some seconds. I rose and walked up the ladder, at each step aware of each step, and saw you on the bed.
The tawny lion was fully in your eyes and face. Was light. Was clear.
My clothes came off too, and literally I joined you on the bed.
It was a single action. I say: my vision entered in your eyes. Or say: my prick slipped up your ass. But I can not discriminate.
And I heard myself speak in a voice I had never used before, telling us what it meant for me to fuck you.
I knew it was my voice, because my body produced it. It had no words, but was the shaking, the vibration of my body.
Which was meaning we had not heard before. Which was life at last deciphered. The true, original, plain style.
So I woke again. And write this down: a strong, lucid, overt, simplistic dream. So strong I will not be surprized when you say you had it too. Since here it is.
For when you say—I have to go—I know you also have to come back.
With love.

Two
You read it intently, carefully, as always. And you are silent at the end.
Then turn to me and say—Can I have this? Or—Is this for me? (I’m not sure of the words.)
And I—Of course, of course, of course.
There is a period of silence, during which an uncountable number of meanings are exchanged.
We both move at once. You take off your boots and start up the ladder. I lock the door and make the listening circle of the house. I hear, of course, only what I want to hear: your clothes coming off of you and on to the floor, the links of chain clicking against each other, the two successive snaps of the locks loud and final, like: One. Two.
And the keys fall through space. I kneel to pick them up and remain for several seconds. And they say, giving thanks.
But when I turn at the top of the ladder I see what I have chosen not to hear. You clothes are on the floor. You are on the bed. But the chain is not on you. It’s on the door.
And I see that the lock is not one for which I have a key. And I don’t know where it comes from.
I see your prick is stiff. I see your lips are parted. Your tongue is moving and I hear sweet moans. I see the muscles in your thighs tremble.
I do not know whether you are more aware of your reflection in the mirror or of me beyond the bars. But I know you show me what you will not give me. The pain spreads from my eye through my body. The trembling is strongest in my knees and I sink to the floor.
So worship is all that is to be left me? Then I remain kneeling at the railing: full of doubt but waiting. Thinking: you may relent at last. At least thrust you prick through the bars (my mouth is open, the trembling is there now), that sacrament be given to my thirst. In the hot sun.
The beach in August happens all the time.


Three
"Vicarious atonement’s not your line?
The pain I feel is yours, the tears are mine."
But sometimes you cry for me
I see the tears in your eyes
Indeed
for you to see how much I want you
for you to know I cannot have you and
for you to be you
for you to love me and deprive me as you do
is enough for tears


four
The "tawny lion" is not a metaphor or a fantasy, but a physical presence, a being or spirit I have seen six times.
He occupies the space of your flesh without displacing it.
He is thoroughly male. And eternally young. His strongest and longest manifestation was the night you accurately refer to as "the night we were gods."
He has astounding strength. And is a spirit of play.
I cannot say where he comes from. Sometimes it seems from a great distance: a descent in to you. Sometimes from your inner depths: there all the time. But I can say how he comes: it is ecstatic technique, it is with my help, it is by the will of, and in the place of, your usual self. And it is your power, whether a separate self or a reflectional one.
I have felt his nearness several times when he did not get through. Often after a sauna. Several times in Mexico. That he never appeared in Mexico disappointed me deeply, because it showed the magnitude of the ego defenses being used against him.
His repression makes me ache with concern, because his presence, his power, are an integral part of the you I love. (I have had sufficient experience with such beings to say with absolute certitude that he is not simply my projection.)
So I must use those powers I have—slowly, surely, for as long as necessary or for as long as I’m here—to help him through.

And then, in the same stack of handbill sheets, a poem handwritten in red ink in what may or may not be Jim’s hand:
The promise awaits you
At the expected end
Of your assumed journey.
As you draw closer,
The transparent seduction
Becomes more clear:
A sudden draining disappointment
Reveals it as the crystal
Formula of your own mind.
Then you turn around
And your shadow falls
In front of you again.
A promise has to be made
Before it is kept—
You bring your own
With every step you take
Into your growing shadow,
Knowing that darkness will fall
At a foreseeable horizon.



Poem written on a napkin, Mazatlán, Mexico, July 1970:

a ripple fugue of
flap and glide—
but the lead bird
can’t see back—
no language—
but feeling—



June 1994: Reed College reunion:

reunion
the time flows by
we begin to see
we taught each other
more than we knew
the class of 1969

we made this poem on campus june 10th and i wrote it down late that night at a quiet house nearby. i say we wrote it collectively because i heard the four lines from different people in the course of the day. some permutations are also resonant.
jim webb
june 1994





The Curt Little Mouth in the Brain
There’s no way of telling whether or not he really had fish scales on his chest. But it doesn’t matter much. The important thing is that he knew they were there, knew not to rub them the wrong way, knew they glowed silver in the dark the way a word will shine in the mirrored halls of a mind straining for sleep. There’s more than one reality.
When he was five his mother took him to a specialist. He stood barefoot by a window, behind one of those folding screens, the translucent white cloth shirred and stretched tight over frames of enamelled tubing, and put on his shirt, his fingers as uncoordinated as a cub’s paws making the agonizing journey from collar to tail, crushing the buttons through their slits, and ending with one button too many. He had to pull them out and start again, more carefully, but he couldn’t put on his shorts until the shirt was done. His mother was talking to the doctor in that limbo beyond the screen.
‘You mean there’s nothing we can do about it?’
‘No cure. I can hold out no false hopes on that. But there is much you can do—help him live with it, help him avoid what situations can be avoided. And help him adjust to those that can’t.’
‘I see. Just do what we always do.’
‘I’m sorry. I mean sorry that I can’t be more specific.’
‘Thank you.’
She called for her son, he was dressed now except for his shoes. He refused her help and forced them on, breaking down the heels in his haste. Perhaps he could see his father striding through the mornings of his small memory, huge and bare-chested, the trousers buttoned at the waist but the belt hanging loose, the smell of shaving cream, a coffee cup in his hand, and a fresh shirt still folded on the bed. See him sitting on the mattress, draining the cup as he stomped into his shoes, reaching for the crisp board of his shirt.
He always had a cold. After athletics he was slow as a clock-hand undressing, kept laces in his sneakers that were many times broken and strung with knots so he could twist and pull and mumble to himself, and had a book in his locker he could open and stare at if he had to. You would have to watch a long while to know for sure whether the long procession of shoes and socks and T-shirt and shorts and jock strap were going on or off. When the room was finally empty except for the twisted towels pasted soaking to the floor and slung over locker doors, he reached the showers to find all the hot water gone, gone with all his classmates, out in the schoolyard dawdling their slow way home. Sometimes at first their was a false shadow of warmth, but the water was always icy by the time he had finished soaping himself off. He could run all the way home, and take the stairs to his room three at a time, but never lose that chill and chatter.
He spent a lot of time in his room, sitting at his desk with his chin on his arms or lying face down on his bed. Sometimes he stood at the window, staring out at the dark and at the ghost of a street-light through the branches of the locust tree, and felt sorry for his parents, all alone downstairs and talking, when they did, with a tone that was hollow and words that were empty by the time they reached him. But there was nothing he could do about it. Sometimes he gave a furious spin to the globe his father had bought him, pulled down his eyelids and poked with a careless finger to stop it. For a while he would make an effort and imagine himself in a hotel room in Dakar or the Y.M.C.A. in Tokyo, or if he hit one of the huge ragged patches of blue, stiff in a deckchair and helpless in the cocoon wrapping of a plaid robe, chilled to the heart. But late at night he gave that up and only kept a running score between the eastern and western hemispheres.
Every spring his mother, with blossoms in her eyes, would knock timidly at the door and step in, rather cautiously, looking with a child’s curiosity at the pattern in the wallpaper, and would ask him why he didn’t take some nice girl to the school dance. He always answered her questions with questions, clearing his throat—‘Whom, mother.’ Of course she had no answer, and every spring he bit blood from his tongue in remorse, watching the flowers wither, pelted by the rain in her helpless stare. She would have liked to run her fingers through his hair, and pat the back of his neck, and he wanted to tell her it was all right. But they never did.
There really wasn’t anyone he could talk to. He had long ago abandoned prayer. He still went to church and to confession, but he knew they did no good, knew his confession was never complete, never full of the thought he was full of, the doubt that all could come of God and got to God, and he felt himself an empty shell, in whatever house, of God.
On his eighteenth birthday he enlisted in the army and went down for his pre-induction physical. There was no decision to join or not, there had never been any question. He filled out the forms with yes and no in all the expected places, and then had to strip and wait in line with the others to be examined. He stood with his arms folded over his chest and side-stepped along with his face to the wall, reading the calendar and the framed pledge of allegiance, and staring at the cracks in the plaster which spread huge to the ceiling like Mercator Greenlands.
‘Look at the shy one. Suppose he’s got any?’
He ignored them, and slid on along the wall. Later he was sent into an office to see one of the doctors. The man was very kind, behind his desk in the little room. He could smell the kindness above the pipesmoke, see it in the horn-rimmed eyes turned down embarrassed to the papers. He sat on the edge of the chair and looked past the man to the wall behind him, with its three diplomas in ascending sizes like the three bears. The doctor had a greying crewcut and cheeks that bulged from smiling.
‘Of course you know we can’t take you.’
‘Yes, I know.’
He looked at the bookcase, saw a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and a thick green text on animal husbandry, then stared at the glass top of the desk, and at the ashtray with a golf ball on a little mountain in its centre. The doctor made sucking noises on his dying pipe.
‘But I don’t think you know how much I wish we could.’
‘I know, because of—Yes, people, we all wish—‘ He didn’t see the had the doctor offered him, and knocked against a typing table as he stumbled to the door. The doctor tapped his pipe on the golf ball.
Well that’s all right, his father argued. Time in service would have been time wasted, and a college education was the important thing. He went up to his room and picked a college out of the list in the back of the dictionary. His mother packed a trunk with sweaters and soap and stationary, some patent trouser-hangers and some needles and thread in an empty aspirin bottle. They stood on the platform at the station until his train had disappeared.
He took a room in a boarding house run by a widowed lady who was afraid to sleep at night with less than a dozen people in the house. She rented to college students because she knew the more young people she had in the house the less likely it was she would die in the night. There was a front yard the size of a mattress, tangled with lilac and forsythia and some honeysuckle that climbed up into his attic window. The front door had a huge oval of plate glass backed with lace. I remember once ringing the bell and thinking, as I waited, that it must have been someone’s pier-glass once, and kept the power of its silver, for I could see myself standing in the hall, peeking nervously through the lace.
He was comfortable in his corner above the last stairs. The landlady let him rummage and take his pick of the accumulation in her basement storeroom, and he covered the walls of his room with brown monochromes, with a few smiling photographs of couples in tennis clothes, a china bas relief of coloured fruit, and a long Belgian tapestry of Arabs playing chess under a palm tree shaped like a stretched S, and waving rifles in the desert air that billowed their robes above the horses’ rumps.
There was no mirror in his room, and when he went into the bath down the hall he shut his eyes as he shut the door, turned on the hot water in the shower for a count of thirty, and opened them to find the mirror covered with a grey mouse fur of steam. He sometimes hummed as he shaved.
He wrote a letter home once a week when there was enough to say, telling about the weather and his study habits, itemizing his expenses and sometimes making colourless little stories about the inmates of the house, putting the word in quotation marks. The letters were tiny milestones through the years, and if he had happened to think he would have known that his mother kept them all, a sprawling bouquet in one of the linen drawers in the dining room. The letters he received from his mother in return went into a cardboard box under his desk with his bills, soap discount coupons, and the grade cards that came twice a year. His father sometimes wrote a few words at the bottom of the monthly bank statement he forwarded.
He did fairly well in his classes. There at least he was anonymous, and even at examination time he was only a name, was only what he chose to put on paper. But at meals in the house it was more difficult—his shyness made him a target for the others, particularly for the blonde and red-nailed girl who slept till noon, worked at a dance studio, and smoked her way through lunch and dinner. She made sly and endless variations on her favorite story, of the tawny cat who crept up to the pram parked outside the supermarket, rolled her eyes to be sure that no one was watching, and with one dreadful snap of her needle teeth got his tongue and scurried away. All the other men returned her winks, and wondered what they should do next. For a while he tried to smile at her taunts, but he gave it up and stared down at his plate, eating slowly and mechanically. The tilt of his neck became habitual, so that he found something on the sidewalk every day, and filled a drawer in his room with keys and coins, with all sizes of paper-clips and pins and an empty silver locket on a chain. The widow felt sorry for him, and always gave him the biggest dessert, which he felt he somehow had to eat.
His senior year there was a new boarder, shyer even than he. She had a vaguely heart-shaped face, a fragile pointed chin, and a symmetrical hair-do like a wig in a mirror. Peering through the combs on his lowered lids he could see that her myopic eyes floated on a sea of wonder. The blonde blew a smoke ring over the coffee pot and started to say something about a brindle cat. He told her to shut up.
He and the girl always stared at the same vacant spot on the table cloth between them. They passed the salt and pepper back and forth several times each meal, and finally began to talk quietly in their corner. At first the others listened surreptitiously, but they decided there was nothing to hear, and talked louder and faster day by day with the frightening momentum of life.
They spent the long winter evenings together. She was taking a secretarial course, and he read off endless lists of spelling words to her, and dictated al the letters to the editor from the evening paper. he paced the floor as well as he could in his crowded room, and she sat in his armchair with her legs curled under her and her notebook in her lap, the effort of concentration emphasizing the flawed line of her jaw, from teeth that would not be reconciled. He was very patient, repeating everything she asked him to, but when he was sure she couldn’t see him he made the smile that curled up half his mouth, pulled on the lobes of his ears and hitched up his trousers nervously. Often he straightened the pictures on the wall, and when he could think of nothing more to do with his hands he took up smoking, would take long choking puffs and hold his breath.
The dirty snow began to melt and bared nasty black patches of earth. There was a sluggish drip of water from the eaves all day. Finally he appeared one afternoon at the door to her room, with a bowl of red tulips in his hands and his helpless smile on his face for her to see. She thanked him, and they spent a long while with their hands tangled together, pushing a pencil into the wet gravel of the pot and tying the broken stem of a bloom to it with a bobby pin. Then they sat on her bed in the grey light and talked about the furniture. He might never have had the courage to touch her but he ran out of cigarettes. For once she was near enough to see him clearly, and she wanted all at once to laugh at the line down his forehead and cry at the pout of his lips and turn down the collar of his jacket. A cold impatient moisture crept out on the palms of his hands, pearled his upper lip like raindrops on the eaves, the zipper on the back of her dress caught the cloth and bit hard. She said no, God, now. He worked the zipper back the forth, back, and it came loose, and the hooks on her bra. She was naked on the bed, crying and wanting it finished quickly. He said he caught cold easily and had better keep his clothes on.
All that May was a fine month for shopping. They were going to be married in June, so they had taken an apartment and went daily to Woolworth’s carrying away armfuls of brown paper bags—china and cutlery, sheets, lampshades, philodendron. She could not resist a Utrillo reproduced so carefully that there seemed to be paint caked on the cardboard, an almost perpetual clock with gold balls that twirled lazily under a glass dome, and a blue parakeet in a wire cage. He bought a tin tool box, hammers and saws, and some paste-on paper to make windows look like stained glass. They used gallons of beige paint, yards of striped denim, and sawed, hammered, and painted so late every night that they were too tired to make love. He wanted to tell her, but it wasn’t easy. Each day he tried, and each day passed, and the words grew hot in his mouth like thirst on a salt beach.
They were married the day after commencement. He cleaned the paint from under his nails as well as he could and brushed down his hair with water. They had forgotten to tell their parents, so when she was dressed in a puffy little girl’s dress, pink and sashed, they invited the people from the house. The widow and the dancing teacher were there, both sobbing a little, and a few strangers prayed to saints in the side aisles, awesome in the thick air with its rippling glint of candle flames. The priest mispronounced his name, and so did he wen he repeated it, but she didn’t.
They walked the long way round the apartment, holding hands, stopped to watch the little boys playing in the river and had a lazy supper. She wasn’t much of a cook anyway, so they had bread and cheese and tuna salad and drank cheap chianti to celebrate. They washed and dried the dishes and brushed the crumbs away, and once when she walked past he snared her with a looped dish towel, but let her go. He walked across the park to buy some milk and cornflakes for their breakfast, struggling back through the lucid air that had not yet surrendered to the late dark.
She had changed into a nylon nightgown and was propped up at the head of the bed, with her feet under the spread, sewing a button on one of his shirts. The pillowcases had been embroidered with her new monogram at no extra charge. He switched off the bedside lamp and unscrewed the bulb a turn before he started to undress. He knew he should tell her he loved her, but he didn’t know how, hoped the knocking of the little man caged in his heart, frantic to be let out, would tell her.
He tried not to hear, but couldn’t shut out the logical voice of that loud curt mouth in his brain, either her moans are pleasure, and this wet slime is sweat, or she cries in pain, I have sliced open her breasts, the mould biting the clay. He tumbled off her sudden as popped corn from the skillet, ran from the room and she was calling for him. No answer. She switched on the lamp to the same sodden darkness, calling, fumbled for her furred slippers, strapping on her robe as she tripped on the foot of the bed, falling and calling and through the door down the hall to the light from the kitchen sprawled on his back on the linoleum squares, arms thrown wide and twitching, silent panting through that gaping mouth, his head twisted, the eyes rolled up and the carving knife beside him calling my god, my god as she saw the blood smooth and lush and unblemished covering his chest like welling deep velvet upholstery.
New York: Time for a Quick One
It didn't seem to make much difference what he was doing or where he was going--to get there he always had to cross through the project. Through the barren land, and usually at night. The slums had been razed, but they left the empty grid of streets. The metal street signs remained at the intersections, rusted, twisted like the vanes of a ruptured windmill, the petals of a withered rose. Fireplugs and mailboxes still on the sidewalks, garbage bins. Curb Your Dog and No Parking This Side Mon., Wed., Fri.
But he usually took the diagonal paths across the vacant blocks, paths that twist like cautious drunkards, rise and hover to fall like the sea, fathoms, farther. Look at him. Shoes polished, his shoulders slumped and his head tilted forward. What would he see? Bricks, rubble, waste paper blowing. Bent bedsprings. Puddles black, with broken panes of ice healing. Shacks half-risen from the ground, made of flattened oil cans and black tar-paper--dark but breathing, shivering and eyed. There was some life. The occasional baby wail and quick shape of a hungry cat. A lost and frightened detective. Wraiths. Waifs. Points of light: a few windows in the surrounding apartment houses, receding like mirages. An occasional unbroken streetlight. The weather beacon flashing red on the southern horizon. A small fire at the corner of the block.
And then he saw the old man, huddled on a sagging Florida orange crate by the fire. A rag or a bandage holding his chin to his head, an enveloping overcoat, the tips of striped pyjama legs. Shoes open like grinning mouths at the toes. 'Watch where you're going,' the words were four separate breaths in the night air, four chuffs of visible vapour.
He walked by without answering.
The path skirted lush mounds of garbage, and tufts of grass brown and frosted. A few snowflakes melted on his face. At the next corner another fire and the old man, still hunched with his fingers splayed to the fire. 'Why do you think--?' but the young man quickened his pace, kicking a beer can out of the path.
Another corner, and the old man shouting to him as he approached. He picked up a brick and swung at the bandaged head, at the pools of shadow around the eyes, at the huge ears. One stuttered cough as the old man toppled over, and bubbles of blood on his lips, violet and oily under the yellow streetlight.
Now the policemen's torches, flickering like sluggish fireflies as they spread across the fields. Shouts. The baying of bloodhounds. Now the young man stumbling across an empty intersection.
It's getting worse now--the night watchman. Lately he's taken to tying rags around his shoes to deaden the sound of his feet on the stairs, and I have to be even more alert than usual. But at least the stairs still creak, with a different sound from that the wind makes, and the keys rattle on the leather ring at his hip. So I have several seconds to fold the sheet, hide it under the mattress, put on my raincoat, and crawl out onto the ledge.
Sometimes he doesn't even come into the room, but I have to take all the precautions every time, because I've given up trying to discover any pattern in his actions. For a long time I kept a minute record, and studied it every day, but I couldn't establish anything. I still have it here in my coat pocket.
January 14th. 10.34 Flashed light in corners of rooms. 1.12. Sat on bed and made shadow animals on the ceiling for several minutes. 3.29. Stood outside door for 20 minutes, trying to suppress breathing, but didn't enter. January 15th. 11.48. Thorough inspection of closet, peering through laths where plaster is broken. Perhaps looking for rats or notes. Found nothing. 4.18. Light in corners of room and under bed. January 16th. 3.31. Knocked on door rather ceremoniously, wrote some initials or a name in dust on table but rubbed them out.
And so forth. So I never really sleep--a part of my mind is always tense in bed, always sitting on the edge of its chair, listening for that creak on the stairs. I keep everything in my raincoat--toothbrush, razor, letters, library book, everything--and keep the coat spread out on the chair by the bed. I used to hide them under the mattress, but then I realised: a sheet is one thing. If he found it some night, he might think someone had forgotten it years ago, but if he found a damp toothbrush or a letter with my name on it, he would know. So when I hear him, I hide the sheet, throw the coat over my shoulders, and crawl out the window.
It's not even really a ledge. The window opens on an airshaft of dirty brick, about four feet square. There's a blank wall opposite and on the left, but on the right there was once a window, and when they bricked it in, they left a little shelf, maybe three inches. If I stand very straight I'm safe enough.
I used to hold my breath as long as I could, and then take tiny gulps until he went away. But then I noticed he never flashed his light out the window, so I became a bit braver. There's a rusty hook just the size of my index finger in the wall opposite the window. Someone must have had a little clothesline for drying socks and underwear. And if I hold to that I can lean forward enough to see in the window. That's how I know what he does in the room.
Sometimes he talks to himself, but it isn't very clear. I don't know whether it's a foreign language or if year by year his words have had all their corners rubbed off in his echoing mind, but I never understand what he's saying. Sometimes I think I hear a word--dusty, empty, why. But they're like the night landscape in a thunderstorm. I can never be sure I didn't put them there myself.
My ears play other tricks too--some nights I hear him in every breath and twitch of the building. Then sleep is impossible, and I explore the apartment. There's a window in the kitchen facing a wall or the orthodox church--when I try very hard I can imagine incense. And if I stand very still among the broken chairs and the piles of blackened pans and skillets, the dark comes alive with a sound of crinkled paper. I strike a match, and mice and roaches scatter, like spilt mercury. From the living room, is I lean out, I can see an edge of the garden next door, the branch of a dead tree, and a bit of the cross-street behind. Taxis, and perhaps a fire truck at the hidden blaze of a cloudy sunrise.
When I can, I take a nap during the day, but that's not very often because I have so much to do. I have to buy soap and kleenex and ask for money at the bank, see if I have any mail at the post office. And at least once a day I have to eat. That usually takes a lot of time, because I go to the delicatessen at the corner of Amsterdam and 105th and I have to wait until the owner is out for a coffee or a drink. The sandwiches he makes don't have enough meat to live on.
But both his clerks are very good about sandwiches. They put more meat than bread and sometimes give me a pickle or a little potato salad. The thin one with the pointed chin always talks to me while I eat, even if there's someone waiting. He usually has something to sell--a set of tyres or some pearls or a suitcase. And he's always wanting to borrow my room, just for an hour or two, with a wink towards one of the negro women shopping. But I tell him it wouldn't be safe.
So I stand around eating my sandwich and sometimes have some ice cream for desert, and watch the people walking by outside the front windows. But around dark I have to get back.
The front door and all the windows facing the street are boarded over, so to get in I have to climb a fence into the garden next door. It's a home for the aged and infirm, and except for little muddy circles around the trees the whole garden is paved with cement. When I go out in the morning they're sitting there in wheelchairs if it isn't raining. I think some of them can still see me, but they don't seem very interested: their eyes unmoving in their heads and the pupils swirled with an interior smoke. And when I come back at night they've all been wheeled in.
I go in through the cellar door, by the garbage cans. I think it must be the same door he uses, because I haven't found any other way in or out. Then I climb up in the dark to the fourth floor, striking matches so I won't trip over the trash outside each door. At first I thought I was the only one in the house because all the doors are locked, but the garbage must come from somewhere, and I notice lettuce leaves, and potato peelings, and tomato soup still wet and sticky in the cans. But I never hear them or see them.
They may be the ones who drop bottles down my airshaft, but I suspect it's the night watchman, because in all this time I've never heard one breaking while he's in my room. The bottom must be covered with broken glass, and I'm afraid someday I may slip when there's ice on the ledge, or the hook may pull out of the wall.
But there may not be time for that. This morning I found an eviction notice on the floor by my bed. At first I thought it was real, but then I noticed it didn't have any name on it, and that the seal was drawn in in ink. So it's easy to see who did that.
I often think everything would be all right if I could meet him on the street sometime. We could have a beer and talk things over. Perhaps if he knew I have nowhere else he wouldn't mind. But maybe I have seen him, perhaps he's even asked the sleepy time of day, leaning against the railings in the sun in front of the church, or standing by the frozen food in the delicatessen. He's careful with his flashlight, and in all these years I've never seen his face.
A flat meadow in the Bronx. You'd think it a field for growing subway cars stretched out on their parallel rows, watered and tended. Pale lights inside, and the wheels cold and still in the long hours between the closing of the bars and the delivery of the milk. The cleaning women are at work with pails of detergent and mops, turkey-feather dusters and dust cloths--old jockey briefs saturated in red furniture polish, dust pans and big Kraft paper bags for the candy wrappers, tabloids and ticket stubs. Their heads are all partly grey from age or dust, tied in faded souvenir kerchiefs. Some in overalls, some in aprons.
One woman sings a wordless song, another talks. But Annabelle thinks of food. Steak, fried chicken, peaches and cream, jelly beans. French fries. How many years thinking of food. Bending to scrape up chewing gum with a blunt knife. A dime under the seat. Someone's hair oil smudged on a window.
Forward to the next car, scrubbing, polishing. Post Toasties, hot pastrami sandwiches. A lost umbrella. Forty minutes, then the next car. She would have to bring a lunch. She had been planning to for years.
Finally the front car. Another forty minutes, then only the motorman's compartment to finish. Polishing the window, sweeping up the illicit cigarette butts, then only dusting to finish when she saw it in the far corner of the window ledge, her eyes focusing, like snapped elastic, on the apple, and her had as suddenly reaching for it, hitting the switch, the brass throttle, whatever they have. Thus began the triumph, slow and so easy, south and down: the apple stuffed to her mouth, juice on her chin. Accelerating, across the bridge and onto Manhattan: soon underground. In the echoing tunnel, the cold earth air blowing past, a whistle above the roar, the punctuating light bulbs blurring to a dotted line. Plummeting through startled stations, the cellar world of tile and girders, dirt and chipped enamel, advertisements to sightless eyes. Annabelle mindless at the window, her forehead pressed to the glass, eyes bulged lidless, the thick apple paste dribbling from the open mouth, quick-worn nails scrubbing at her cheek, her throat vibrating with the lost screams. Through the dark-faced stations of west Harlem, a sweeper leaning on his broom, the click of merging tracks and 92nd Street, the decaying west side. The black stain spreading back from her spilt bucket. Her progress, acceleration--Columbus Circle, Times Square, lovers and hustlers on the platform, their lives in their eyes. A work crew in that punctuated gloom, trackmen writhing in the knife of light, the dumb bleating to the deaf before the wheels grind and cut. Ambulance sirens fast and lost on the streets above, piercing alarm bells in control rooms and frantic men cutting the wrong switches. Nearly the length of the island now, only the core in her hand and the chill to her bleeding head through the broken window, dropping now to the deeper tunnel burrowed between boroughs, the train a long serpent in the East River slime. Hurtling on to rise again in Brooklyn near the dawn.
Coda: The Morning Trials of Mrs. Fayerweather
Friday mornings Professor Fayerweather was always unconsciously relaxed. His wife wanted to be out to the house in Connecticut by noon, and they never were. Not that there was often much news in the paper, but with no seminar to prepare for, and safe behind the careful barricade that kept his neurotic graduate students at bay from dinner on Thursday until his 10 o'clock lecture on Monday, he felt he could read it all. Even, with the third cup of coffee, the local news that was lost, the rest of the week, in the quick and crinkling flurry of the turning pages. It was the Times, of course; documentary coverage, and a predictable bias automatically discounted. Mrs. Fayerweather would have felt much safer with the Trib. But then her mother had warned her, many years ago in the garden at Greenwich. She had worn a floppy leghorn hat firmly anchored by a scarf of silk chiffon, and had pruned the roses somewhat more severely than the experts advise, saying there are some things you simply have to put up with if you want to be married at all.
The breakfast room faced south and had an oblique view of Riverside Drive, of the Hudson and the Jersey shore. At least the sun was shining. She pushed the ashtray under his descending cigarette and poured the last of the coffee.
"Did you see this, Prue?"
She couldn't have, of course. He had brought the paper in with the milk, and had had it in his hands ever since. It was merely one of those ritual forms. She knew she needn't answer; he would insist upon showing it to her anyway.
There was a three-column picture, under the heading "Mayor in New Ceremony at Rockefeller Center." She had time to see that Wagner was mildly pleased about something before the professor jerked the paper back and began to read in the ironic tone that served so many purposes in his life.
"Rather rich. 'Under blue skies, and before some two hundred city officials, Mayor Wagner inaugurated today the new monthly memorial services announced at last week's press conference.' You remember? I read you the embarrassing questions the Post man asked?"
Prue nodded anxiously. She had left the percolator plugged in, and the element was beginning to smoke now that the pot was empty. But she didn’t want him to see that she had forgotten.
"I was sure I had. 'Relatives of fourteen city employees killed on duty during the past month shared the platform with the Mayor. They were presented engraved certificates communicating the city's official gratitude (reproduced below).'
"Oh God, just look at it!" And this time he spread the paper on the table so she could really see. The photograph was rather small, but quite clear. A wide black band surrounded the certificate, and several remarkably detailed drawings--predominantly black and red, according to the caption--occupied all the space left by the gothic text. An ambulance and a police car, both with red lights flashing, were shown colliding across the top. On the left a brick tenement collapsed in a garish holocaust, tumbling three firemen down the broken ladder. On the right a uniformed policewoman was being pushed back on a garbage can by a crowd of Puerto Rican teenagers. One, standing behind, had an arm around her neck and his hand clapped over her mouth. And a dark and noxious sewer flowed across the bottom, below the mayor's signature, dragging under a struggling inspector while two huge rats watched.
She tried not to look too closely. "Not very nice, is it?"
"Not very? Why it's perverse, sadistic." He had the paper on his side of the coffee cups again. "And listen to the text! 'The City of New York, as by law and by custom constituted, hereby recognizes, with the greatest corporate gratitude, the noble sacrifice of blank, loyal employee of the city and member of Local No. blank of the blank Union. RIP. Under my hand and seal this blank day of blank, A.D. 196 blank. Robert Wagner.' It's grotesque."
Prue nodded. She was thinking of the engraving of "The Shipwrecked Family" above her grandmother's fireplace. Saddest of all was the dog. Terrier? Pug?
"'Mayor Wagner, when presenting the certificates, shook the hands of all the present survivors of the dead employees. Among those honored were four policemen, three firemen, a Central Park Zoo guard, a Health Department inspector rumored to have died of typhus, four subway track repairmen, and a subway car cleaner, the only woman in the group.
"'The latter, Miss Annabelle Brist, had no surviving relatives, and Mayor Wagner accepted the certificate on her behalf (see related news story, page 42).' Well at least that explains the picture."
Once more he showed his wife the photograph of the mayor. He had been caught in a rather awkward pose, trying to shake hands with himself after accepting Miss Brist's certificate, his arms and the clasped hands above his head forming an asymmetrical Moorish arch.
Mrs. Fayerweather was uncomfortable; death always made her think of the trays of liver at the butcher's, and she didn't like that. But her husband didn't see her shiver; he was already hot in pursuit of page forty-two and the related story.
"Really it's too much you know. Tasteless. Every week there's some new--some worse--"
She wasn't listening. They would be late again, would have to eat at one of those Howard Johnson' s on the road. And Willard would insist upon fried clams and then he would indigestion and then--
But parts of the story filtered through. Familiar as she was with her husband's reading voice--the practiced rise and fall in tone, the almost loving indolence with which he lingered on the particularly inappropriate words and inept phrases that would once have made him angry--she could not totally ignore it.
Miss Brist had been a subway duster for thirty-seven years. She worked from midnight until 8 a.m. at the end of an IRT line. Her tools were the regulation mop and turkey feather brush. She was not popular with the other women.
"Just imagine that. 'Her associates complained that Miss Brist read too much.' You would suppose she drank or didn't use deodorant." It always amazed her that he knew what the next sentence would say before he read it. But of course he read a great deal.
"What they really meant, you’ll see, is that she read the wrong things." And he was right. Miss Brist read the advertizements in the cars as she worked, each asking for a generous donation, by cash or check, to encourage education, conquer various diseases, prevent broken homes and mistreated animals.
She was generous, they said, to a fault, and they avoided her. All her earnings went to charities, and she couldn’t afford to eat properly. The other dusters didn’t intend to share their lunches every night, or to look at the sunken eyes, the cavernous cheeks. Consequently she must have been quite lonely; Mrs. Fayerweather could understand that.
"’Thursday morning Miss Brist was cleaning car 1880. George Worsham, who finished his shift at midnight, remembered leaving some fruit in the motorman’s compartment.’
"Trust the Times for the details. ‘His wife always packed an apple and a banana with the sandwiches. Worsham usually saved one "for later," but was unable to remember whether he had eaten the apple or the banana on Wednesday evening. The sandwiches, however, were pastrami, and disagreed violently with Worsham, who then neglected his late snack.
"’It is supposed that Miss Brist, in reaching for the fruit, came into contact with the drive switch, thus setting into motion the train and the nightmare progression beneath the streets of Manhattan which would lead to her own death and those of the four track repairmen.’"
It was positively hallucinatory. Mrs. Fayerweather was sure she smelt onions frying.
"So there you have it." Professor Fayerweather took off his glasses, an infallible sign that one of his labored academic jokes was imminent. "You pay your money and you take your choice: daughter of Adam or child of Freud."
His wife was not at all sure she understood. But she knew they had to get started. And perhaps an apple would help the growing queasiness she felt. They had some in the cellar in Connecticut.
Missy Justinian Makes Some Arrangements

Her mother, Mrs. Justinian. The long May afternoons she sat on the screened porch and painted her toe-nails petal pink. She wore striped cotton shorts, and between coats she would drink iced tea and stick her feet out full length before her, staring at the toes. She had time to do a thorough job. Except on Fridays when she washed her hair, using a blue rinse and brushing it into waves as it dried. And she kept the radio going beside her—not that she listened, but it was good company. From her deck chair she could spy on the street, on the world, through the wall of Virginia creeper, but there was nothing interesting to see.
She always intended to have dinner ready when Missy got home from work, and she always felt a little guilty when the screen door opened and her daughter came in.
‘Sit down and rest, dear. I’ll open a can of tuna or something.’
‘No, mother. I’ll fix dinner. You finish your toes.’ And she would bring her mother another glass of tea, with mint leaves and lime juice and saccharine, before she cooked the broccoli.
They didn’t talk much after dinner, either. Missy had the ironing and sweeping to do, and the beds to make, while her mother dozed before the television set. She slept quite a bit—she was never up in the mornings until after Missy had left. Then she would drink coffee in the kitchen.
So the only time they really saw much of each other was Sunday, when Uncle George was there. The three of them read the Sunday paper, passing the sections around, and had a big meal of steak or fried chicken or roast rib at noon, talking and joking, and played three-handed bridge until six o’clock when they turned on the television and ate peanuts. Then Missy knew she had done all she had to, all that could be expected of her, and would read in the corner under the lamp. It was the only chance she had, so it took two or three weeks to finish a book.
They had spent every Sunday together since before she could remember. And even now she still called him Uncle George. On her twelfth birthday her mother had given her a book called Mother and Daughter—Little Lectures on Life, saying there are some things you ought to know. She turned her head to the window as she spoke. There was a hummingbird suspended among the flame blossoms of the trumpet vine.
‘And your Uncle George. You see your mother, we—it didn’t work very well all the time. Divorce, you see, but of course you were—legally speaking—his, too, so of course he likes to see—‘
And it was one Sunday evening that it happened. It must have been spring, for there was the smell of lilac in the room. She heard the voice very distinctly, the words clear and separate, like raindrops on a clothes-line, but she was reading and they had to filter through: As John stood beside her on the terrace she was conscious only of his lips, blue in the moonlight, and the silver of his voice as he said Missy will have a baby.
She looked across at her mother and Uncle George, but they were both slumped in their chairs, intent, asleep. There were dogs dressed in caps and tutus dancing on the television screen, and jumping through hoops.
‘I do not intend to have hallucinations.’ And the sound of her own voice startled her more than the other. She tried to read on: Blue in the moonlight, and you just wait and see, then.
‘Well, at least that part is sensible.’ She said goodnight to her mother, kissed Uncle George on the cheek, and took the sewing basket up to her room.
And so she waited. Cross that bridge when we come to it. Sitting at the office desk, her hands motionless on the typewriter keys. Time enough for that. Standing in the back yard with clothes-pins in her mouth, looking at the sunset. I don’t know yet. Perhaps just late this time. A few more days.
The next Monday she went to the clinic during her lunch hour. And then waiting again for whatever that happens to the rabbit to happen. Waiting for Sunday to tell them.
Uncle George was shuffling the blue deck, and her mother dealing the red, slapping each fourth card to the table.
‘You know, I’m going to have a baby.’
Her mother dropped the cards and pulled her out of her chair, trying to waltz her round the room.
‘Oh Missy, oh Missy, when, oh lovely!’
And Uncle George still shuffling, saying, ‘I don’t believe it. I didn’t think you knew anybody.’
‘That’s just it, I don’t.’
‘Now, now, never mind, oh Missy, lovely.’
So there was that done, she had told them. Now she would see what to do next. One thing at a time. Her mother started learning to knit, making little shapeless rags the colour of a Wedgwood sky. Uncle George brought a pint of strawberry ice cream every Sunday and she had to eat it.
She was slower walking home in the evenings, stopped at empty intersections, turning her toes inward to project a point in space before her. An occasional dog strolled past.
‘It’s not me personally. I wouldn’t mind. But just anyone. Not chosen people. No lottery tickets or bathing suit parades. No 5-part question, no furrowed brow in splendoured isolation.’
And later: I will speak no valedictory.
She grilled the lamb chop for her mother and made a salad of avocado and grapefruit sections with a frame of rye-crisps. Then standing by the kitchen sink, brushing her damp hair back from her forehead, eyes watering in the smoke from a limp cigarette. She had practically stopped eating and weighed herself daily. 103. 104.
‘Hundred and five today, mother.’
‘Yes. Looks like a long hot summer, Uncle George says.’
There was no point in answering. She spread the dishtowel to dry. If I thought. But that’s really not enough. If I knew. Could had long ago settled in, adjusted itself to the furniture of her mind, waiting for should to arrive.
She made no appointment, just sat in his waiting room late one afternoon. And he didn’t put any questions until the consulting room door had defined his square.
‘So you’re a virgin.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re now—how shall we say—enceinte.’
‘Yes. Pregnant.’
‘Oh, it’s not so uncommon. Many women—‘
‘Call the clinic and ask them.’
‘That won’t be necessary. I’ve dealt with cases like yours many—‘
‘Call the clinic and ask them.’
‘Well, if you’re sure you want me to.’
The confirmation was no surprise. He cradled the phone and matched the tips of his fingers, an accomplishment of sorts.
‘It would certainly appear that you haven’t—‘
‘Of course not.’
‘But I mean, you needn’t have. There are many cases where—that is, penetration is not strictly speaking necessary for—‘
‘I’ve never been near a man.’
Then the excitement was there, all at once, as he cracked his knuckles.
‘The thing is to have an international panel, specialists, to observe and—‘
‘No.’
His wife often told him that he knew very little about women, but there were some things he did know, that if a woman lies back as she says no, and relaxes her hands and says it again longer, that if [sic] a woman.
‘So, I was all right, wasn’t I?’
‘You were marvelous.’
‘And I satisfied you.’
‘Yes. Yes.’
‘And I was satisfied.’
‘Yes.’
She pushed him aside and stood up.
‘Then you listen to me. If I have this baby I’ll never satisfy anybody again. I mean it.’
So Missy got her certificate—detrimental and dangerous to the well-being, physiological and psychological, of the mother-to-be. And she told them at the office that she had to change her vacation assignment for family reasons. Then, at home, she packed a blue over-night case with Kleenex and lipstick, her unfinished book and a quilted satin bed-jacket.
She knew a mid-wife would have been enough, but it’s hard to argue with science, and three surgeons bent over her in the operating room. One wanted a general anaesthetic, but she threatened to leave, so only her eyes furred, and a trickle of sweat down the two lines of her forehead. Steam from sterilizing cabinets. Nurses. Staring up at the enormous pan and pain of light that gripped her. Her fists clenched, and the surgeons chattering—rapt and lost in the school-boy moment, prodding at their discovered jewel, the spongy mass of a large flesh pea—Missy’s voice lost in theirs as she whispered I will not. I will not be used. Not even by you, not by anybody. I will not as they sealed the specimen jar.
And later Mrs. Justinian trying to construct a nourishing tray for Missy, from dirty dishes and Vienna sausages, canned soup burnt on the stove-top and the knitting needles forgotten in her hair.


California Here

The summer after the war. And the heat. Here in the valley of the Rio Grande, that wide and twisted furrow in a desert land. What can you do. Fields of cotton that seem to twitch, to dance and shiver in the haze of heat. In the towns, in the city, the asphalt pavements go soft and tacky—pitted by the heels of listless women moving from store to store. When you drive fast along the roads of the valley the air is still hot, but at least it seems to move. And you can stop at a filling station and drink iced coca colas, standing in front of an oscillating fan and talking to the attendant about the weather. Then drive about at night when you can’t sleep.
But when you come to August nothing will help. Tyres explode like gun-shots. Gasoline credit cards grow black from sweat and crumble in your hands. Priests faint from the scented heat and the churches are closed, indefinitely, extinguishing the candles and altar lights. Nuns give up their black wool habits and lie naked on their beds, cologned towels on their foreheads that go dry in a minute.
The birds are silent. Leaves turn yellow. There’s little talk anywhere, throats dry in the oven rooms.
* * *
Katherine had the window shades pulled down and sat at the kitchen table in the hot yellow light. She was wearing only her slip and had her hair knotted on top of her head. In the dry heat her sweat evaporated immediately, except for the tiny drops on her upper lip which she licked off. Her children and her mother sat motionless in their rooms, and the few flies settled on her pink paper wouldn’t move until the pen touched them, then would walk slowly to one side, blurring the ink. The letters they ruined she shoved aside with a slow and cautious sigh. Twice she started again, finished finally when the flies each had letters of their own and let hers dry unsmeared.
Her mother called from the next room, ‘Have you done what I told you?’
‘Yes, momma.’ She folded the letter and addressed it, Texas State Employment Bureau, El Paso, Texas.
‘Well, aren’t you going to mail it?’
‘Tonight, momma. I can’t go out now, you know how hot it is.’
‘Send Frank, he’s young. You know you’ve got to do it, they’re stealing us blind.’
Katherine went into the children’s room. Anna and Amy were sitting in their corners crying, the dry salt of tears on their cheeks. Frank was standing in the clothes closet, dozing with a book in his hand.
‘All right, mother, I’ll try.’ He put on his grandfather’s pith helmet and shuffled to the door. She gave him a dime for ice-cream at the post office, if they had any. He stepped on the dog’s tail, but she only growled, didn’t lift her head to snap. The screen door creaked open, then slammed shut, the steel spring vibrating, purring.
* * *
August 21st
To Whom Soever May Be Concern:
Dear Sir, I do not really know to whom to write, but I suppose you will be able to tell me who can help me if you can’t help me. You see I am a widow. My husband and I were married ten years, but he went to the war and they killed him. He didn’t have to go, because he was a farmer and we have three children, but he went anyway. So we were thinking it’s a shame one of our boys isn’t sharing my farm with me. It’s a good farm, forty-six acres under cultivation with full water rights besides the house. So if you know of someone who might be a good father to the children you tem to come and talk to me. The farm is just outside San Elizario, just ask anyone for the Frietze farm. I remain as ever
Sincerely yours,
(Mrs.) Katherine Frietze Welcomb.
P.S. I am thirty-four, if they should ask you.
* * *
Leroy Watson standing by Highway 80 in Big Springs, just past the last filling station. Sometimes he lifts his thumb, sometimes he just stares. Cars on their way to California. Big semi-trucks full of ice and canteloupes with ‘No Riders’ signs on the windshield.
Got his discharge papers and headed home to East Texas. But his mother had died, and his sister disappeared. Figured he’d go out to California. Nothing to keep him and nothing to take. His sleeves rolled up nearly to the elbow, showing a blue tattoo of an eagle with a snake in its beak. A wrist watch on a chromium band.
A Ford coupe pulled up, sample cases in the back and the man in a Panama hat.
‘Going to El Paso. Imagine that’ll help.’
‘Reckon.’ He got in and they went on west. Desert, bare mountains, a clear hot sky bleached white at the horizons.
‘Army?’
‘Yeah. Out now.’
‘Married?’
‘Naw.’ Thinking, one of those. But looking at the soft hands on the wheel, the fat chin, thinking he’s weak, he’ll give me a ride even if I don’t. ‘Naw. Not yet.’ He rolled his sleeves on up as far as they would go and propped his elbow on the window ledge.
* * *
No one hiring casual labour just now, but a few men on the sidewalk outside, not talking, just leaning against the wall and smoking, thumbs in their front pockets and the fingers out.
Leroy, still in his Levi’s and that faded khaki shirt, smelling of sweat and waiting by crossroads, young but with those wrinkles from sun at the edges of his eyes and the back of his neck, looking at the scented letter, walking from the notice-board to the desk and asking ‘Where’s San Elizario?’ An East Texas drawl. The man at the desk paring his nails with a bone-handled pocket knife.
‘Down the valley.’
‘You mean down the river?’
‘Yeah, down the valley.
‘How do I get there?’
‘Same way you got here, expect.’
‘Yeah, expect.’ And then, from habit, ‘Much oblige.’
* * *
Late that night at the farm. The air is full of the sound of crickets. There’s a pitcher of lemonade with the ice all melted. A pale light in the kitchen, where the grandmother sits in her wheelchair sipping buttermilk. Several bugs and a small white moth attack the light. Katherine is washing the dishes. No one is listening to the gospel singers on the radio. The twins are in bed and Frank is standing outside the kitchen door, tense and listening, his back to the house and his eyes shut.
The grandmother’s arthritic hands throb, she rubs her fingers and also listens. Leroy sits on a straight chair, leaning his neck on the back, his legs spread wide and the toes pointed up. He watches Katherine and rolls a cigarette, pulling the strings of the bag closed with his teeth.
Katherine’s lips are shut very tight. When she does speak the words explode from a tense mouth, but they seem no louder than the crickets or the hymns. Leroy and the grandmother and Frank all listened.
‘You see how we live.’
She has finished with the dishes. Now she wipes the stove with the wet dish cloth.
‘It might be good for the children.’
Frank is cracking his knuckles, slow and careful. ‘Just a closer walk with Thee’ now on the radio.
‘I just don’t know.’
Katherine scratches her nose and hangs the tea towel on the hook by the window. Leroy drops his cigarette on the floor and steps on it. The grandmother watches her daughter.
Katherine leans back against the sink. Everyone breathes, perspires. Their eyes blink. Crickets call and answer. Leroy’s watch ticks. Katherine bends her neck back slowly and looks at the beaverboard ceiling. There is a mole under her chin.
And now she moves. Her shoes slap on the linoleum. She turns off the radio.
‘I’m going to bed. Frank, you take care of him.’
She goes out, and they still listen. Then Frank walks through the kitchen. The door spring purrs. He says nothing. Leroy follows him out, and the grandmother’s eyes also follow but she still sits, twisting her fingers.
* * *
The grandmother rolled her wheelchair to the table, though dinner wouldn’t be ready for an hour. ‘I’m glad it’s a little cooler, we have some appetite now.’ Katherine went on kneading the biscuit dough. ‘I think I’ll have a little bowl of milk and cornbread while we wait.’ Katherine brought her the pan half full of cold bread from breakfast and a crock of milk. ‘Where’s Roy?’
‘He’ll be back in a minute, momma. I sent him to the gin.’
The twins played under the table, untied their mother’s shoestrings and retreated giggling. Frank came in and stood behind her. ‘Mother? Mother? Do we have to call that man father?’ She turned and slapped him, leaving smears of sticky dough on his cheek.
‘Well, do we mother? He’s not our father.’ He wiped the dough off with the back of his hand and went to the sink where he ran water over his matted yellow hair and combed it down, in front at least.
* * *
Going on to California. Never should have stopped here anyway. Twenty dollars stolen from Katherine’s purse now in his pocket. But first a little fun. Bout time.
Leroy crossed the bridge to Juarez. He ignored the pimping taxi-drivers, the smells of a border town. Through the dance music and bright lights of the main street. He turned right and walked down to the next corner.
‘Fausto’s.’ He stood at the oval bar and had two beers first because he was thirsty, and then started on the whisky. The women smiled—their dark hair long on their shoulders, red lips, tight low dresses. Asked him to buy a drink. An argument about the price with the bartender, so he threw his glass at him and went to another bar.
* * *
He lay sprawled on the river bank, his face nuzzled to earth, until the sun reached him and he woke. There was a brown blood stain on the sand under his mouth, and frost in his hair and on his denim jacket. He rose to his knees and looked at the red sun over the junked railroad cars on the river bank, and sank back to the sand, spitting out a tooth, reaching in with his fingers to dislodge the soft cake of clotted blood that filled his mouth. Then he began to cry quietly. He rose unsteadily to his feet and started south down the levee road. There was a white stripe around his wrist where the watch had been.
For several miles he walked beside the debris of the city, the wrecked cars and twisted bedsprings, the mangled dress forms, the mountains of broken glass and empty tins and rotting food, with empty bulldozers on the slopes, sinking slowly into the smelly sponge of the city dead. The stagnant pools in the river on the other side of the levee smelled of sewage. Wads of floating pulp.
Scavenger birds rose screaming, settling back to work as soon as he passed. Before and behind him they were raking the city’s compost, or diving in the thick yellow scum of the water. He stopped once to bathe his face, to drink and vomit, then started down the road again. Soon he began to run, trying to keep his feet above the gravel now beginning to bake in the sunlight and blister the soles of his feet through the worn leather. Beyond the city now. On his left was the yellow bosky, pale cottonwoods and the stringy salt cedars, fading nightly with the light frost and now quite asleep from last night’s killing freeze. There were no longer even stagnant pools in the river, oh Rio Grande, only the pale dry sand rippled into ribs by the wind and last spring’s ghostly waters. He tripped over his shoelaces, or some pebble, and rose with bloody face and palms, picked the sharp stones out as he ran, then fell again and could not rise. But he kept his way, his knees and hands leaving a red trail on the road. His neck grew crimson from the sun, his hair bleached like the silent foliage, and his hands were cooked by the gravel and clay of the roadbed. He head sank lower, and he began to weave from side to side of the raised bank, leaving, now, a drunken trail behind him, and collided finally with the post of a U.S. Government No Trespassing sign. He rolled down the slope, came to rest against the trunk of a cottonwood, snared by the thorns of the berry bushes at its base. His eyes had been closed for an hour, he lay still.
The Border Patrol drove by on the levee, their machine guns trained indifferently on the river and the bosky, disappeared, leaving a curtain of white dust the length of the road and the height of the tallest tree. Seconds later the aliens began to creep through the cloud and started inland. One saw him in the thicket, crawled to him and explored each pocket. There was nothing, of course, they had seen to that last night. Her pink eyes narrowed there in the shade. She stabbed him once with her dagger, wiped the blood off his trouser legs and concealed it again in her hair. Her man called her. She spat on him and left.
Later running, stumbling down the road, his back bleeding, one eye swollen shut.
* * *
The grandmother nodded in her chair. Katherine had pinto beans spread on the table, picking out the gravel before putting them to soak. The screen door slammed and she said, ‘Frank.’
But then she turned and saw him. ‘Get out. My twenty dollars.’ And saw the blood, the swollen eye. The grandmother was awake.
He grabbed her around the waist, was pulling her out of the room. She scratched his face, tried to kick with her knees, saying, ‘God damn you. God damn you. Momma.’
They were out of the room now. The grandmother heard a chair knocked over in the next room. Then a door closing. Then her own breathing.
Then Frank ran in.
‘He’s back. Where’s mother. He’s—‘ He started for the other door. The grandmother rose from the wheelchair, catching his shirt in both hands as he passed.
‘No. It’s all right. No now.’ She held on to his shirt, the swollen joints red in her white hands, her knees buckling, ‘It’s all right now.’
If It Comes to That

You can look at him now and see all you need to know: young, rumpled, and elbows fraying. Perplexed and decorated with packages, pleased with something or other. Inspecting the back of the envelope a last time. Liquor. Cigarettes. Peanuts. Olives. Fruit: grapes oranges bananas apples. Everything. Waiting to cross the street. Making the final addition.
He had forgotten he had to pass the antique shop until it was too late to turn, too late for resolutions. Indian bells giggled at his entrance. The old woman stood by the door, one hand clawed to her throat, twitching.
‘I’ve been watching you, days, months.’ Her voice laughed too, but was cracked, much mended, old. ‘But I knew, know. You want the candlesticks, have to have them.’
The floor was lost in newsprint, roiled and rolling, grey-foamed. She twisted the candlesticks into a paper, screwing the ends like frizzed wicks, and forced him out the door. Giant crackers.
It was faster walking home, obtusely bent at the waist, and inside something singing, somewhere, something life at the moment, in the moment, something yes. He saw no one, nothing, but was moving fast and weighted, inertial. Contained and alive.
Everything spread on the landing to unlock the door, and a rhythm in the emptying—folding and hiding the paper bags. He put candles in the sockets, drew the curtains over the cometing sun, squinting his eye to judge. He saw that it was good and laughed at himself. Echoes. Accidents.
He arranged the fruit on a tray, distributed ashtrays, and brushed his teeth once more. He saw the hollow host, waiting, the evening starched on the bed, black-studded. He could think of nothing to do. The crumpled paper would have to be burnt, but he stopped to read it first. Births and deaths and engagements with both signatures. Personal. And there it was, half-way down the column.
more brass for your little Georgia room? A few years older than you are, but that doesn’t make the world last. The pulse of death is blumping in your ears, you can’t stop that with candles and parties. The drum, flowers, the worm, nothing. Nothing!
He sat down on the floor, dizzy, fighting the nausea. I didn’t really want them, not really, not really. Seems it rich to. Hands clasped and a rapid shallow breathing. Here’s the steeple, open the door and. The drum, flowers. Objects in the darkened room: the clock rasping, a cup, a pin. Solid, lasting, seering, there, now.
Always a terrible temptation to rush about when you know there’s so much to be done, but his experiences had taught him a little. He lit a cigarette and began sorting the lists in his handkerchief drawer. Shopping. Letters Unanswered. Guests. Books I Will Read. A very elaborate one called The Good Life.
Stop smoking. Less starch. Arbeiten und lieben (check German). Freud’s motto. Regular hours. More exercise. no daydreams no anxiety no hysteria no shame. ‘For proving of our patience, without which our merits are but little to be pondered.’ Thomas a Kempis. Crypto-defeatism. ‘By and by I shall be kind and only kind.’ Hawthorne. Smile. Walk erect, shoulders back, toes straight ahead. Speak French while shaving. ‘Chastity and continence, but not yet.’ Augustine. Ha.
Then one that would do:
Bank: cash cheque. X
Sort laundry.
Pack case: shirt X
underwear X
socks X
toilet articles X
papers X
Leave note. X
Check watch and schedules.
For a moment ‘papers’ bothered him, but then he thought of shaking some of the books piled in the corner. There was an old postcard from a friend at school saying ‘The trouble with you is you’re altogether too damned self-conscious for your own good. As ever, L.’ and a newspaper clipping listing the pallbearers at his grandfather’s funeral. He tore out a section of the personal column, drew a double circle around this item, and then slipped them all in under the shirt.
He pinned a note on the door and propped it open.
à I can’t in all honesty say I didn’t know this would happen, but we have to make an effort to forget, don’t we, or we can’t go on living. Whoever arrives first, light the fire and the candles, and serve the punch. burn this note! And whenever anyone asks where I am, wink or laugh or something and say ‘He won’t be long.’
‘A ticket to the last town on the next train, please.’ He had forgotten his raincoat. It should have been on the list.
‘But you can’t buy that at this window.’ The face framed, gold-rimmed glasses, eight hours’ stubble peppered on the upper lip. He moved to the next window. The face came in, took his money. Soiled collar. A hair on the coat sleeve. Onetwothrfingernails.
I should have told someone I was going? Who I was I should have told whom, the train living, breathing, but the compartments littered, all strewn with. He took the last, kicked them all it all out onto the platform.
I will not. I’ll sleep. Count the rails. Count the dark. Sound of the train chasing itself. I’ll sleep. Lamps, watercolour reproductions, life in the surface of the window. Count the rails.
Stopping. A flurry. Starting. Then failing to start, so he walked through the station silence, across to a commercial hotel. The voice, the words from somewhere, but not his, neither seemed his. Yes rather tired. Travelling several days. An important engagement in the morning. Yes now thank you. And he switched off the light.
The appointed time is past I know, but such dreadful consequences so I must hurry, if my watch is fast or the time misunderstood or all late. Always late, someone, no wedding without the groom. Which street. Green lawn, fountain, brick mortuary clock over the door tell the time to die please ring.
Wax figure. Grey wig. Putty fingers. Manicure. ‘Are you—‘
‘Oh no. My brother Will. Must find.’ Descent tight passage down exposed electric, clutch the wall along down, billboards, posters, names and addresses, colours, the vibration, sound, of distant subway trains, the wind cold and nobody at the time of, row of white girders, Hershey wrapper, falling, Will from behind a pillar.
By the arm, we must hurry. Sunshine, black carriages, coachmen, odour of lilies. ‘No I won’t.’ An unpaved alley, garages, open sheds, crumbling brick wall, cold shadow of the mountain. Horns, fireworks, somewhere. Pulse like a snaredrum, cadence for a parade, never the starting signal: the paunchy man opening a steel firedoor.
‘Come along please. We’ve been waiting.’
‘He’s right, Will, mother and father, the newspapers—‘
‘I know all that but I’ll tell you it’s not easy it’s a hell of a thing to be young and hopeful and have to crawl in a coffin and know that that’s the end of it not even know anything not even nothing anymore all the flowers and the organ and the plush and soft lights and this unctuous bastard with his pink carnation and his hands in his hands don’t help a damn bit.’
‘Yes yes. Hell I know it I don’t want it either but we have to hurry.’
Hands in his hands, a pin-striped suit, smoked mirror shoes—‘It would be so much simpler if you come in the back door, they’re already here.’
Crush him out, not think of that. To find a church, the church, up a steep street, friends in the pews, mothers of the bride and groom corsaged, priest and acolytes surpliced and posed, champagne with the bubbles gone, the plaster cake the funeral baked he or I tears no not even never.
‘Cup of tea.’ She left it on the floor by the door.
He looked out the window—at least the sky was still black, there was still some time left. Only a few squares of lace-curtained light where the landladies sipped, reading their bills and mending sheets.
Then he saw the letter on the chair by his bed, under his cigarettes. It was from his mother.
We know you would have done it if they had given you time. They should realize you’re not lazy, not even really slow. You decide what’s best, and let us know. I know you’ll make the right decision. We’re all well, but a little tired from the waiting. Love, Mom.
And at the bottom a note from his father—
We’re betting on you. Keep in there. If you’re in any trouble and would rather your mother didn’t know, write me at the office. Let us know if you need money, we can always find it somehow. And send us your itinerary as soon as you know, in case of an emergency.
Quickly dressed down the stairs, fighting his breakfast down and losing. Still the black night. A long bus waited at the kerb, unlighted and empty but the doors open. He crept in and sat down, clutching his case in his lap. At once the ratcheting sound of the motor waking, and they were moving. He told the conductor ‘all the way,’ squirmed as he searched through the fare book. Then bent over the case and slept.
The bus had stopped. Sunlight cut the air, parked by a pleasure garden, in sound and smell of the sea. The conductor and driver were gone. He stepped down to tulips, azaleas, rustic benches, leashed dogs, photographers. A newsboy called, and he fled across the street.
It was a huge shop, plateglass, double-doored. w.h. smith & son—advertising agents for all newspapers. There was a girl behind the counter adding up words on her fingers aloud. ‘I’m young. I don’t mind. If it really comes to that.’ He couldn’t wait and interrupted.
‘I want to place a notice in the personal column.’
‘Yes, sir. What paper?’
‘I don’t care. Any one will do. Just take this down. You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you, your name legion and your power unlimited, but I’ll be damned if I’ll—‘
‘Oh sir, they won’t print that!’
‘Well spell it with two ems—that’s a nice word isn’t it?—if I’ll go on toadying to an ignorant, snooty, cowardly, politicking—If I want to have a party that’s my business, and I’ll do it my way. I’ve got a passport, I can go any time I please, but I’m not—‘
‘It’s getting very long, sir. And very expensive, you know.’
‘That’s all right, you just listen and let me worry about the money. I can go any time I please but I’m not going to. It’s my own business what I do and you can’t chase me away. You don’t need to send me any more messages, because I won’t read them. If you want to see me you know where to find me. All right? Because I’m not going to run around looking for you—the next move’s up to you, and as far as I’m concerned I don’t care if you never make it. Publish and be damned! Spell that any way you want. And as for agents, delegates, messengers, envoys, plenipotentiaries and underlings in general you keep them, I won’t see them. I think we’d better have this out once and for all, so if you don’t have the decency to come and see me, I have a pretty good idea where to find you, and I—‘
His Castle

For the first time, that day, the sun died quietly on the autumn leaves, seemed reconciled finally to its winter’s isolation in the southern sky and beneath the horizon that would soon engulf it. he drove the mg along the wooded road, half suburb, half country, talking to the woman beside him and scarcely needing to watch the familiar pavement. He neither slowed the car or stopped talking, just turned suddenly across a lawn and headed straight for the shingled side of the house. Stealthily, quickly he touched the button on the dashboard, the sloping cellar doors popped open, the car dropped in and the doors fell shut. She screamed once, thrown forward in the darkness, and fell back against the seat sobbing. He kept on talking with his usual composure, and pulled the cord of an overhead light. The old stone walls and packed dirt floor of the rootcellar appeared, reassured her, but the convulsive sobbing continued.
‘You see, I push this little button and the doors open all by themselves. Would you like a drink?’ He helped her from the car and up the steep stairs.
As usual he refilled the drink, once, twice. She began to laugh uncomfortably at her fright. Best of all, she had to prove she could forgive the prank, even in bed she had to choke back the nervous laugh.
His plan always worked very well, of almost always. Once his electricity went off during a storm. He pushed the button twice, but nothing happened, and he had to repaint the cellar doors because the tread marks wouldn’t come off. That one wouldn’t even come in for a drink, she wouldn’t let him drive her home either, started walking up the road. About half of them fainted, and a month before he had had trouble reviving a frail little schoolteacher. He rubbed her hands, held whisky to her lips, begged her to stop teasing him, to open her eyes, but she refused, so he buried her near the rear wall of the cellar garage.
Late that waning autumn night he lay back musing, was almost asleep. Her laughter had long ago succumbed. Then he felt her touch him on the shoulder—she had her clothes on, said he’d better drive her home now. He let her out at her house, uncomfortable with his usual lie, I’ll see you soon, and drove home, slowly now. He never felt quite satisfied any more.
A few days later as he was reading the classified telephone directory he noticed the downtown address of a specialist, so he put down the book and began to spend his days in the halls and lobby of the medical center. Many days went by before one of his new acquaintances would accept his invitation for a ride. Gingerly, he said to himself, they all walk even more gingerly coming out that door than going in. Not one of them disappointed him. He carefully observed the ritual, rubbed their hands, and kept a bottle of whisky and some smelling salts in the cellar.
Soon he had three, and then four. He measured the floor with a ruler and found he could accommodate nine without any crowding. But the supply at the doctor’s had run out, most of the patients were middle-aged or older, so he began to go to the movies every afternoon and evening. He wore a putty nose and a false beard, because he thought someone might notice how many women were disappearing.
The women were captivated by what they considered his shyness, or his chivalry. After starting a conversation he was very tactful, would let his fingers fall lightly, unconsciously even, it seemed, on their wrists. Some were disappointed when, soon after, he excused himself and pretended to leave the theatre. But none of the others complained when his fingers moved down triumphantly to clasp their own.
Five and then six. Sometimes his diagnosis was confirmed by his every observation: her speech, too, had fluttered along unevenly, and her eyes, when she looked up at his face in the glare from the headlights, had seemed to flicker and die out.
‘Why do you wear such a funny beard?’
‘I can’t seem to remember to buy razor blades.’
‘I’ll give you a whole carton for Christmas.’
‘You shouldn’t make such rash promises.’ He turned hard on the steering wheel and pushed the button. As they fell the darkness hit them and the doors flopped shut.
‘My what a surprise. You’re a real joker. Is this where you live?’
Yes, sometimes he misjudged. He knew he was obligated, in spite of his disappointment, to offer them drinks, to let them sleep in his bed. That night, after she fell asleep, he thought for a moment of striking her blond head with his shovel and carrying her back downstairs, but her resisted the temptation.
One night on his way to the theatre a motorcycle policeman motioned him to the side of the road.
‘Sorry to bother you. Are you the Bearded Rapist?’
‘Why yes, I’m on my way to a masquerade.’ He took off the beard.
‘Huh? Oh, good of you to take it that way, we all make mistakes you know.’
‘Oh that’s all right, can’t be too careful.’ They laughed and shook hands.
When they came out into the lighted lobby that evening he was a little worried, she had a club foot and was much fatter than he had realized. But she was the quietest of all, he had grown used to shrieks and laughs and sighs, but with her there was not even the single frustrated inhalation as the body tense so uselessly. The problem was getting her out of the seat, he had to pry with the shovel from the other side of the car. Stretched on the floor she seemed even larger, perhaps because she was no longer embarrassed by her size. Unfortunately she required two of his three spaces. He hadn’t finished when he heard a knock on the door, so he took the shovel upstairs with him.
‘I want to get this settled. Did you have an accident?’
‘What kind of accident?’
‘My wife says, well she says she saw a car run into your house, and I argued with her ten miles before I saw I’d have to turn around.’
‘No, no accident.’
‘Well would you come tell my wife that?’
‘I’d be delighted to meet your wife.’
Gradually, he had learned to accept his disappointments philosophically. One night he was sure his labor was over, and just in time too, he was thoroughly bored with movies and his beard was becoming frayed.
‘How long?’
‘A few minutes. I thought you weren’t ever going to come to.’
‘No, how long have you been pulling this little stunt?’
‘I don’t remember, a year or two.’
‘And you still enjoy it?’
‘No, I almost have enough.’
‘Have had enough.’
‘Yes.’ She told him later that she had taken psychology and English at the university.
At last he was finished. She was a little waitress who liked rollercoasters, and she kept begging him to try it again. It finally worked. He whistled to himself while he covered her.
‘Well, that’s done.’
About a month later the last frost was out of the ground and his first bulbs blooming. As he was spading up his garden he realized how restless he had become and backed out the car. He drove aimlessly about downtown, stopping suddenly at the Oldsmobile dealer’s because he saw the new models were out. The salesman didn’t offer him a very large trade-in allowance, but he didn’t quibble, had decided to buy a black convertible anyway. He told the salesman he would drive it home, and sat down to write the check.
‘You picked a good car there.’
‘Yes, I think I’ll like it.’
‘And the pick-up is very good.’ The salesman winked as he said it.
‘Fine.’ He started the engine and backed out onto the street. The salesman waved him to a stop.
‘Say, I’ll bet you need a bigger garage for this one.’