Past midnight Hank stirred in his sleep and then, opening his eyes and seeing where he was, sat upright. How did I get here? he mumbled, and she said You drove home and we helped you out of the truck and up the stairs. You collapsed onto the couch and I thought it better to let you sleep here than try to move you to the bed. You’re not strong enough, he said, and she said, The boy helped me. Hank and she both looked at the boy and the boy had an expression on his face that was fey and, though asleep, almost happy. It must have done something to Hank, this look, its girlishness, or else hearing that the boy had seen him in the state he’d been in, because he stood up and walked across the room and lifted the boy by the shoulders until he was standing and said You wake up now. The boy flinched as he opened his eyes and tried to pull away from his father but the man’s fingers dug into the child’s bony arms so that he squealed. It was the same crushed kitten sound made by the curly haired girl when the blond man squeezed her in the theater.
What are you, a girl, sleeping in a chair? You can sleep on the floor if there’s nowhere else to sleep. The boy did not reply. Are you soft? said Hank and the boy shook his head and Hank said I think you’re as soft as a girl, and then, before she could think better of what effect it might have, Kay said, He set the vacant lot on fire today, as if that was proof, is what she was thinking, of how tough a boy he really was, but the boy looked at her as if she had betrayed him, and she knew, in a way, that she had. How’s that? Hank asked, and the boy still said nothing, and Hank put his nose almost against the boy’s and bellowed, Explain yourself!, his voice so loud the furniture shook.
It was an accident, the boy whispered, and Kay, again, spoke before she thought about it, and said, He used a match gun, as if that were further proof of his boyish ingenuity, of his very ordinary boyishness, and Hank said, Is that right? and then he turned back to the boy and put his nose once more almost against the boy’s own and hollered, Get the broom, and then he released the boy’s shoulders and the boy stood there, shaking, and his face wet now, but he did not move and Hank yelled again, even louder, his voice tearing itself apart, Get the broom!, and the boy turned and walked to the kitchen, and when he came back with the broom it was shaking in his hands and it was then that Kay herself went into the kitchen and tried to find something to do.
The Bon Ami was under the sink and she got it out and began sifting the scouring powder onto the counters, listening as the broom fell against the boy’s body and the boy whimpering and Hank silent except grunting and she got a cloth from the sink and then remembered the kitchen faucet didn’t work, so she spat into the Bon Ami and began scrubbing the counter with the powder, only it caked because she had used too much and there was not enough moisture, and there were mounds of Bon Ami in little drifts that rose and fell, undulating across the kitchen counter between the stove and the sink, drifting like snow across flat fields. She scrubbed in circles and spirals and straight lines but seemed never to progress from one end to the other. There was always a section she had missed and the thwack of the broomstick against skin was awful in her ears and made her see lightning as it struck above the plains of Oklahoma, each thwack a great white bolt that branched and connected to the next and they came so fast and in such great numbers that the sky above the fields was white and the counter white and her hands white, her palms burning from the scouring agent, and she knew she had done it, too, the beating with a broom, but usually through pants, and this was not through pants, not this time, she could hear it. It seemed that she had been scrubbing the counter for an hour but it could only have been a few minutes, possibly less, when the boy came back into the kitchen, walking so slowly it seemed as if he was not really moving, and he put the broom back in the broom closet and quietly closed the door. Again she heard the rage in his silence, but did not turn to look at him and did not speak when he paused, waiting, standing behind her, his breath uneven. Go to bed now, she said, go to bed, and the boy left the kitchen with a silence she felt would shake the building to its foundations. She wiped the cloth across the counter and did this a dozen more times, shaking the Bon Ami from the cloth into the sink, but still there was a white film of powder and she decided it would have to wait until morning because the light of the single bulb was too dim, and the bathroom on the other side of the living room, and Hank in the bathroom now, his stream thundering into the water and reverberating through the apartment like her father and brothers never did because they had been taught better, and the only working taps the bathroom sink and bathtub itself, was the excuse she gave herself.
The boy’s face was turned into the cushions and a sheet almost covering his head, but the blanket only coming halfway up, so she fretted about him catching cold before morning but did not draw it up higher because that was something he would need to learn for himself. In the bedroom, Hank was sitting on the end of the bed in his underwear, a cigarette between his lips and an ashtray in one hand.
The rent is due at the end of the month, she said, and Hank gave her a look like he thought she was ridiculous and also that he hated her and she wondered why he came back, if that was the case, why he did not stay out with his women, whoever they were. What was it about her or the boy made him keep coming back when it was obvious to anyone that he did not want to be there, not with them, him preferring wilder company than she could provide.
What about your movie star friend? Ask her for the rent.
It isn’t like that. Would you ask your friend Don for the rent? Why should I have to do it with mine?
She could afford it. Don couldn’t. She could buy us a house for Chrissake.
If she bought us a house every other friend who needed a hand would be at her doorstep. That is not what friendship means. It does not mean you ask for handouts from the richest person you know.
Maybe not where you come from.
I am asking if you have the rent, she said. You are my husband.
And what is the date today, tonight? he asked.
She looked at the electric clock with its glowing blue-green dial on the dresser, the clock that was plastic but painted brown to look like wood and which she had bought without realizing it was not wood, and the realization had made her hopelessly sad because her brothers and sisters would have said that was predictable, Kay making an error like that. The clock said it was long past midnight, almost two in the morning. How had it got so late? How long had Hank been in the bathroom? How long since he had been beating the boy? How long had she been scrubbing the counter? How much time had passed between Hank waking and going after the boy? How long had Hank been asleep on the couch? How long had it taken them to get him up the stairs? When had all of it started? She could not account for time, found it impossible to fill the hours that had passed since he drove up outside with what she knew to have happened, but perhaps she was forgetting, perhaps he had slept for longer than she knew, perhaps she herself had slept while he slept, or they had watched other programs, the wrestling, and then Petticoat Parade, perhaps she and the boy had spoken while Hank slept, or played cards, the boy beating her at rummy as he always did, hand after hand, or counting his cribbage runs with such precision and inventiveness that she was sure he was making up the rules, pretending that some combination counted when it did not, because he was like that, bending the truth to fit what he wanted from the world. It is the fifteenth of the month, this day coming, she said. Hank laughed and the sourness of the sound warped the walls of the room.
Then there’s time, he said. What day is it due?
The last of the month, the last working day. There are thirty days this month, only. Today is Saturday, the fifteenth—
Which means the thirtieth is a Monday. And that means there’s time.
You don’t have the money now.
Maybe I do and maybe I don’t.
If you have it now, you could give it to me and I could put it in the bank.
You’d like that, wouldn’t you?
If we don’t pay on time, this month, Mrs. Smith will
say we have to go.
I’ll get it, he said, but then he stood and started putting on clothes, and he was dressing like he was going to work, wiping out the filth from his shoes and the smell spoiling the air.
Are you leaving already? she asked.
Back to Los Angeles.
What are you doing there?
Working.
But what is your business? You are no longer a farmer as far as I can see.
The men I work for will pay me.
If we don’t have the money—
That’s enough, he said, and he was putting on his suspenders and a brown cotton jacket and she looked at the pile of dirty clothes on the floor and wondered when he would be back but knew not to ask.
We could come to Los Angeles, she said. We could all live there, if that’s where your work takes you.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t, he said. I have to be alone when I work.
Why do you come back to me?
Then again he looked at her like she was stupid and she remembered the invitations for their wedding, how they had been married in her parents’ house and the gifts of china and silver and crystal from her family, the way no one from Hank’s family had even come to the wedding or sent so much as a card, how Vivian had been there as her maid of honor and Hank had no friend to be best man, so one of her brothers had done it even though he hardly knew Hank, and before the ceremony Vivian had taken her hand and said, That Hank is lucky, you know, I’m almost jealous, and she had kissed Kay on the cheek and Kay had blushed and they laughed together and had to stop themselves laughing because the peach chiffon would get stained if she started crying with laughter as so often happened with Vivian, the laughter taking them over, and Vivian now had a shoe store with her husband, and raised hunting dogs, and Kay imagined how she and Vivian might have run a shoe store themselves, Vivian managing the books and the business while Kay met the customers and chose what shoes they would stock and how she could have seen her family every day, and might have been there when her father died, and that would have been a happier life, wouldn’t it?
Hank did not answer her question. He walked past her. Do you have nothing to give me, she asked, to pay for groceries at least?
Hank did not answer.
She heard the door to the apartment open and close and the sound of his shoes going down the stairs and across the street, the truck door open and close and the engine turn over and the clunkclunk-throb as it shifted into gear and took off around the corner in the middle of the night. There was a motel on the other side of town, and she knew they would be there come May, in a single room, the three of them, assuming Hank came back at all, and if he did not, if there was no money, she knew she would have to find work or take the boy back to Oklahoma and swallow the shame of it all.
The boy had slept through it, she supposed, since his head was still turned to the cushions and covered by the sheet and his breaths deep and slow. There were no pictures of Hank as a boy so she could not say whether he took after his father, but the boy, she knew, looked like she had as a girl, skinny and blond, his head cocked to one side in the way of her family. Did he learn the trait from watching her and his aunts and uncles, or was it a habit written into him?
She knelt at his feet and pressed her hands together in a position of prayer without actually praying, because she did not know what to pray or to whom, but was muttering words that came to her, as random as rain on a roof, and her voice rose in pitch and volume until the boy pulled the sheet from his face and cocked his head, looking at Kay as if he could kill her, and his father, and every fresh thing on the earth.
May 30, 1950
13
My eyes open in the dark, and I cannot tell whether it was the nightmare that woke me or Alessio getting back from his evening with friends. In the dream I was driving a car in Los Angeles, but everything about the situation was confusing. The car was moving in reverse, driving at considerable speed, and at first I did not realize this was the case, perhaps because I was driving with the flow of traffic, but I alone was going in reverse, looking where I was headed in the rearview mirror, and it only gradually became apparent to me that I was running stop signs, one after another, and every time I approached a stop sign by the time I had noticed it I was already in the middle of the intersection, and the car would not slow down, I could not reach the brake pedal for some reason, and I feared that a collision was both imminent and unavoidable, it was only a matter of time before another car rammed into the side of my own, and when I took my eyes off the rearview mirror, exhausted by this always inadequate vigilance, I looked at the streets that were in some sense behind me, because I had left them, but also in front of me, because I was still facing them, facing the past I had just come from, unable to change gear, and borne backwards into my catastrophic future.
After a dream like that I cannot go back to sleep. I pull off the duvet, put my feet on the floor, and sit up on the bed until the dizziness stops so that I feel able to stand. My cane leans in the corner of the room and with it I walk down the hall to the kitchen where I find Alessio standing at the open refrigerator. Desmond, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you, he says, tenderly touching my shoulder. I assure him he didn’t. It was my own bad conscience, my fatalistic mind, no fault of yours. I can make you some warm milk, he says. Yes, that would be nice. I will be in my study, I say. But you cannot read now, he says, like a nurse to a child. Tell me, my dear, what else can an old man do when he finds himself awake after midnight? If I return to bed right away I will toss and turn. I have to read myself back into sleep.
The dream bothers me because I know it is not original. Or, rather, the dream might be original but it is obviously marked by my recent reading, by Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, and in particular by his ninth thesis, in which he writes about Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. For Benjamin this figure, the new angel, became an angel of history, ‘face turned toward the past’, viewing the past not as a sequence of events (as the ordinary person might view it), but instead as ‘one single catastrophe’ that piles its rubble, its ‘wreckage’, before him. This angel is motivated by an impulse to restoration, to pause and pick up those chunks of rubble, even to ‘awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed’. But despite such a desire, he cannot do this, for a ‘storm…blowing from Paradise’ throws him forward, hurtling him ‘into the future, to which his back is turned’, making it impossible ever to pause long enough to reconstruct what would always resist reconstruction.
Is it hubristic to think I might be like that angel, or is it merely realistic? I wish to take the ruins of my particular past and make them whole once more, to revive my own personal dead and remake what is shattered, while recognizing the impossibility of this task and knowing I am always driving forward in reverse, incapable of braking at each potentially calamitous intersection of time and space, destined to gaze at what I can no longer touch, this pile of wreckage, these fragments at my feet, fated always to fly backwards to my own irreversible shattering.
Or have I simply read too much and slept too little these weeks that I have been writing to you, Myles?
Alessio brings me the warm milk with a spoonful of honey, a piece of the sweet colomba pasquale I should not be eating, everything presented with such care on a tray with a cloth, a grating of nutmeg on the surface of the milk. His thoughtfulness moves me, touches me. Was it such an awful dream he asks, that it makes you cry? Yes, it was that awful, what it makes me feel on waking is awful. Have you finished the letter to Myles? he asks, coming behind me, massaging my shoulders, draping his arms around my neck and nestling his cheek against my own. I breathe to see if I can catch the scent of our Spanish novelist friend but smell only Alessio himself. No, I tell him, not yet – almost. There is not much left to confess. I don’t know why you can’t just phone him, he says, if you have so much to say.
Maybe it is because so much time has passed.
I feel the roughness of his stubble against my
cheek, a prickliness that reminds me of my father, so that I am flung backwards in time and find myself a boy again, crying in my bedroom, stubbornly staring out the window when my father comes up behind me and takes me in his arms, resting his unshaven face against mine. Who knows what might have made me cry so long ago. So many years, Alessio says. I know that he means it is because I am so very old and no longer think clearly, or because I am so very old and people of my generation still believe that a letter has a certain value or power, particularly when it is a matter of defending what one has done, even and especially if that action might be indefensible.
Go to bed, my dear, I tell him, and Alessio turns my chair on its casters, drops to his knees, kisses me on the mouth, this beautiful man, with an intensity that is not only the mark of affection but the symptom of desire, if desire be sickness. How could he desire me when there are handsome men his own age to entice him? Or, perhaps the better question is, how can his heart be so great that he can be enticed by those other men, muscular and lean and smooth, unblemished and bronzed, quick with passion, and yet still desire me as well? I do not write this to you, Myles, to inspire jealousy or aggrandize myself, this old man still attractive to the beautiful young, but to suggest in my maladroit way that you and I, given the chance, might discover our desire for each other still alive if we were able to find a way beyond the decades of silence and at last stand together once more in the same bright room. I would kiss your scars to heal them, I would kiss your mouth with desire as Alessio kisses my own. I would be penitent and patient. Even in these last weeks or months or years, whatever may remain to me by the grace of the universe, I would strive to undo the wreckage of more than half a century.
Night for Day Page 45
