Walt and Charlie could not have known this. They were involved in their own affairs, and somewhat agitated themselves. Perhaps Dolores had sensed this and had therefore sent him that little gift. Or perhaps she had had other purposes in mind.
But Hirsch, as we have mentioned, was more attracted to the foreign girl with the bad teeth, and most of all to the fat matron’s assistant. Dolores was really not his type, with or without the missing breast, if such it was, or whatever other ailments afflicted her. And yet he was drawn to her. It was as if surrendering to this attraction might liberate him in some perverse way, set him to soaring into some higher sphere transcending memory and desire, or joining them to one another in a transcendental way.
Hirsch contemplated the kitchen knife, the one Harriet had used to cut her meat, part of the set they had received for their wedding. There were longer knives in the house but none was sharper. He tested it on his finger and almost drew blood. It had been a while since he’d cut himself. A slip of the knife and a finger could be gone, or worse. The dirty dishes were in the sink. Harriet never cleaned up. She must have believed in a dish fairy who dropped in at night to do the housework. He did not begrudge her this slovenliness, or was she just insouciant, if that was the word he was looking for? She also threw her clothes around, which was charming in its way. It was clear she had been back to the house during the day, and changed her clothes. What had she worn? Where had she gone? Hirsch felt she was provoking him. Sometimes he even wondered if she wasn’t just pretending to talk to her author on the phone, that is, talking to no one as you sometimes saw in the movies when the villain pretended to be calling a cab for the heroine or an ambulance for her wounded boyfriend. If that was the case, she too should have been in the movies, for she was quite convincing. The invisible or nonexistent caller often made her laugh or blush. Sometimes she whispered, sometimes she spoke in a businesslike voice. Her bra was on the bed. Her slip was on a chair. The silver slippers with the high square heels were pushed beneath the bed. She had worn perfume. He could smell it now. He looked into her closet, which was full of her simple clothes, many skirts and many blouses, a coat or two, her blazers, the woolen hat she’d worn when they’d frolicked in the snow, and then her drawer with nylon stockings and panty hose, half-slips and full slips, and various brassieres, one with a tiny embroidered flower between the cups, but somewhat off-center, producing another charming effect. She sometimes slept in a slip, sometimes in a nightie that barely covered her hips, sometimes in a longer gown that barely reached her knees, some transparent, some blue or pink. The bed was made. She must have made it after she’d come back.
Hirsch tried to read a book. He called her author’s house but no one answered the phone. He made his supper and ate it standing up. After supper he put on one of Harriet’s nightgowns and lay down in their bed. Then he sat by the open window with the rifle cradled in his arms. He had a clear view of the street. It was always crowded at this time of day, not as much as on the weekends but crowded nevertheless, full of uptown tourists, and a policeman with a nightstick keeping everyone moving along. There was a pizzeria down the street, a bar and grill, and a grocery, and farther on a few arty shops. Though he liked the apartment, Hirsch really didn’t belong in such an environment. Living here had been Harriet’s idea. He had protested, he had reasoned with her, but she had insisted, cajoled him, and even rewarded him when he had agreed. That was her way. Hirsch leaned out the window. It was a warm night. He hesitated to put a cartridge in the breech.
He counted the cartridges in every box: sixty altogether. He divided them into minutes, hours, days. With the gun in his lap he felt self-possessed, invincible. As a child he’d played these games in a cowboy hat and then too he’d felt a certain surge of potency. Or he’d played games with wooden
soldiers or little clay figures armed with toothpicks and punching each other full of holes as he maneuvered them on his chest and between his knees when he lay in bed, sometimes sick and home from school. And thought of girls in an innocent sexual way, the little girls in his class, exposed and vulnerable, and he a hero—an American hero wearing a cape or mask —refusing to take advantage of them but stoically removing splinters or even shrapnel from their naked soft swelling behinds. Beyond this he could not go but played with himself in the bath and shocked her once when she came to soap him up.
Hirsch took showers now. He did not like wallowing in his own filth. He liked the hot water searing his flesh and made it hotter and hotter until it was unbearable. Once he had showered with Harriet and that had been good. Now she showered alone and came out in a big white towel with her hair damp and her skin rosy as though the blood had rushed to every pore. Then she threw off the towel and dressed.
Hirsch listened to the music from the street and the voices rising from the crowd, a hum or hubbub and sometimes a single voice distinctly piercing the air like the excited cry of a child by the sea when the ships stand out on the horizon on a hot summer day and the lazy, distant drone of a plane can be heard high overhead in the cloudless sky. He could hear that music now. He could see the couples strolling on the boardwalk, the women in stays and bonnets and the men with cigars as in certain paintings he had seen where the streets ran toward the sea deep in shadow, cut off abruptly in the sand. And the sea air and the salt breeze and the pennants in the air, strung out above the pavilions. And the smell of rotten oranges in a cold, dark lobby and the body in a body bag.
Certain pressures were beginning to build up in him. Hirsch examined them. He was a thinking type. There were days, of course, when he sailed along at an even keel, though not too many. There were also days when things went well and he was even happy. But most often the river raged. It carried him along, toward a precipice. He knew where he was going. He could not stop. He could not say: this far, no farther. He could not exercise his will. He had no will. He had only uninvited thoughts and confused feelings. The will was paralyzed, arrested in its development, calcified. He looked at Harriet’s picture on his desk and fell in love with her again. But she was not there. She had changed. He had not.
Walt and Charlie refused to believe that the girl in the picture was his wife. They knew Harriet. They had interrogated her. They could not see the resemblance between the girl in the bathing suit like a feast waiting to be devoured and the girl in the blazer with the heavy hips telling Walt to fuck off. They pretended she was his sister and wondered if he might introduce them. They made suggestive remarks. Hirsch felt his face turning red. How indeed had he won such a woman, for she was striking and he was nondescript? He was a poet, of course, and she was an artist of sorts, but that was neither here nor there, that was not their bond. Rather it was an idea that bound them together, his idea of her, her idea of him. Unfortunately this idea resided only in their heads. It was insubstantial, like those reflections in the windows of a train through which you saw the pale lights of the passing stations in the night. You were there and you were not there. You were only in yourself.
Sometimes, when he sat with the gun cradled in his arms or laid across his lap, he thought about shooting Harriet’s author. Sometimes, too, he thought about shooting Harriet, and sometimes he thought about shooting himself. He thought about these things while smoking his pipe, as he sat by the open window, high above the street. These thoughts came into his head uninvited. There was nothing he could do about them. He could not turn them off. He could not stem the tide or stop the flow. The river ran on and on. Harriet was there and so much hair. He wanted her. But she just kept on sketching Infusoria. It made him want to scream or shout. The scream was in his throat and in his head but it did not issue from between his lips. It was a silent scream, reverberating in his ears like the pressure beneath the level of the sea. Sometimes it was interrupted by more pleasant thoughts that would come and go like pictures on a screen: Miss Malone with her pointed breasts, the foreign girl with the bad teeth, Harriet in dishabille. But always the shots rang out, in his head, making
the leaves rustle in the trees, and then there was silence for a while.
These thoughts moved along fixed channels in his mind, following prescribed routes, leading always to a still point around which great complexes of feeling had attached themselves like constellations, assuming forms that could sometimes be discerned by the naked eye but most often remained hidden in the deepest recesses of the mind. This was the map of the unconscious.
Hirsch thought about Harriet and his heart began to pound. It was as if the blood was in his mouth. It filled his nostrils and his ears. It pounded in his head. It was spring or winter. The gun was in his hand. The knife was on the table. Her silver slippers were beneath the bed. The blanket was twisted between her legs. Her arm was thrown across her face. Was she asleep? He tried to penetrate the silence of the empty room but it was like a wall.
On the good days Hirsch got up on time and had his coffee on time and worked on customer accounts and came home at six o’clock and found Harriet in the kitchen in her domestic mode, making some special dish, or even a cake, and then perhaps a movie and then to bed. She was patient on such days, accommodating. He would kiss her and feel her breasts. They had a special smell, unlike the rest of her, milky and somewhat stale. And he loved her hair.
On the bad days he phoned her again and again and
listened to the phone ringing in the empty house and wondered where she was. Then he looked for her, in the Library, at the Automat, and thought of an endless journey on a train. And it was as if she would have vanished in some undisclosed dimension of the world, as in the silence of an empty room, behind a wall he could not see. He knew what was coming next. It would be good to be free at last. It would be good to let out the final scream like the screams in the long corridors of the sad hospitals of the mind where lakes of blood gathered and beacons did not shine. He felt the pressure in his head. He cradled the rifle in his arms and breathed a little faster.
Harriet’s author had a philosophical frame of mind. He was full of theories, which Harriet occasionally related to him, though somewhat skeptically, for she was not an enthusiast. To Hirsch too they made no sense, though he recognized that their intention was to engage Harriet’s attention and lead her mind in certain directions that had little to do with the lives of Infusoria and other protozoans. Hirsch remembered his provocative African art. It aroused him. It may have aroused Harriet too. He remembered the brown breasts of the women. He remembered their sleek loins. They would look up from the water when the shots rang out among the trees, trying to fathom the meaning of the sound. Harriet sat on the beach with some children behind her playing in the sand and ships standing out on the horizon. She had big breasts and wide hips and smooth, strong thighs and wore a white bathing suit and her dark hair was piled charmingly on her head. She must have been sixteen and any man would want her. Hirsch had wanted her too and he had taken her but it was not as it should have been, it was not as he had imagined it, human voices had intervened, her voice and his voice, destroying the illusion of paradise that he had dreamed. And the gun was heavier than he had expected it to be, firing a big, blunt bullet that was meant to wound and maim and kill. A knife would tear the flesh in a different way. The sheet was twisted between her legs. Her arm was thrown across her face. The gown rode up above her hips.
The summer breeze came through the open window. Darkness filled the air. Another day was ending. It was so peaceful in the street. The silence and the stillness were complete. He sat at the open window with the rifle cradled in his arms. What had she worn? Where had she gone? He felt the pressure in his head. He could hardly breathe. His mouth was full of blood. He could not say what he was waiting for. Where could she be?
Walt and Charlie seemed to know that Hirsch was due for another raise. His rise in the organization had been, to say the least, meteoric. Not surprisingly, they had registered their protest, closeting themselves with Solly for hours at a time. But Solly had reassured him with a wink. A few of the girls in Accounting were due for raises too. A mood of optimism and good will prevailed in the office. You could see it on everyone’s faces. But some faces fell when Payroll handed out the payslips. Hirsch’s face fell too. His time had not yet come. He understood this. He could wait. If not this week, then the next, or the next. The Company was not impulsive. Everything was measured and reviewed by men in dark suits who acted judiciously and soberly. There were principles involved, even if these raises were pittances really, an insult to one’s pride. Pittances, too, added up when hundreds if not thousands of workers were involved, so that the argument that the Company could afford to show a little generosity did not really hold water. Hirsch understood this. Harriet was impatient. “We need the money,” she said. He promised to talk to Solly but did not. He wondered how much Solly made but could only speculate. Certain payslips were classified or unlisted and Payroll in any case guarded them jealously though Hirsch had once seen the treasurer’s and it was a lot. It seemed to him that the senior types were paid by the year while the junior types like himself were paid by the week. It was like the ballplayers and the janitors in a big league organization. That was how he thought of it. Hirsch had never really been a baseball fan. He was not athletic. He was more the intellectual type.
Hirsch had written poetry in his earlier years. Some of it rhymed and some did not. Harriet had read it all and had seemed impressed though you really couldn’t know what she was thinking. He had printed a book of poems in Paris and gave the copies away. Someone had had the idea of putting a spider or butterfly on the cover. Or perhaps it was a moth. “Poems by Arthur Hirsch,” the book was called. It had a literary if not too solid look, being thin and printed on bad paper. There was something French about it, he thought, for many of their books had been printed this way. When he got back to the States he had worked in a department store during the Christmas week. Then he had come to work for the Company. He had gotten a ten-dollar raise. He had started in one direction and then switched tracks and went down another path, leaving himself, as it were, in the lurch, with much unfinished business hanging in the air like a branch without a tree, or a tree itself uprooted, transposed to an alien environment and nurtured artificially. But the tree remembers its former life. It seeks the branches that are no longer there. It reaches blindly into the air. It forms a node that is like a spoor or trace of memory forever undisclosed.
This was the path he had chosen and he might have taken another road. It was in him to take that other road, to turn to the right instead of to the left, to turn to the left instead of to the right, and then this other life would not have been lived. It would have been buried in him. What had made him turn? Was it circumstance, or predisposition, or failure of the will?
And then one day, to Hirsch’s surprise and without the slightest warning, Walt and Charlie did not appear at the office. No one seemed to know what had become of them. Had they concluded their investigation, had they been recalled to the head office for some unknown reason, or were they simply sick? Solly, accompanied by Hirsch, in a spirit
that recalled the “lost invoice” affair, though in this case everyone in the office was crowded into the space behind Hirsch’s desk to see what was going on, cautiously entered the storeroom where the two auditors had their office. Hirsch would not have put it past them to have booby-trapped the place and looked up to see whether there might not be a pail of water above the door ingeniously fixed to a cord that would pull it down on their heads when they crossed the threshold of the room. Charlie, of course, was capable of far worse. But they need not have worried. The two auditors had cleaned the place out. Not a paper clip was in sight. Charlie had even removed the locks from his drawers, which were now quite empty. There was no doubt about it, they were gone for good.
Someone said, “They must have drowned in their paperwork,” but Solly gave him one of his stern looks. This was not a time to make jokes. Hirsch too grasped the seriousness of the situation. They had expected that the audit would go
on forever. They had expected that upon its conclusion, if in fact it ever was concluded, there would be some formal announcement from the auditors or their office, even a celebration of sorts, glasses raised, a fond or jocular farewell to the two men who had accompanied them for so long, had become an intimate part of their lives, the subject, even, of their dreams. Hirsch could not deny that he had formed an attachment to them, as problematic as their relations had been. He had been much maligned by the two, of course, he had been the butt of their jokes and the subject of their innuendo, and had had to rise to supreme heights and tax his mind to the limits to outwit them in the affair of the “lost invoice,” but he had also shared egg salad sandwiches with them and an occasional game of pool, and had not Charlie procured for him that hunting rifle now standing upright in his bedroom closet? In truth, their absence hung over the office like a pall. What would their report contain? Would there even be a report? All through the day and the days that followed Hirsch kept glancing back, expecting to find them in the doorway with their Styrofoam coffee cups. Even the girls from the other room came by to have a look, stopping first at Hirsch’s desk to exchange a few words as a pretext for sniffing around, letting their eyes wander and then working their way in what they took to be as inconspicuous a manner as possible toward the storeroom door for a quick look inside. Hirsch was not deceived but made no effort to stop them. He was in fact pleased to have the company, which broke the monotony of the day. He got to talk to the foreign girl with the bad teeth. She had a perfect body and wore tight clothes that accentuated her figure. Dolores came by too, but there was nothing between them now. Hirsch was polite, but she repelled him. He wondered how this subtle alteration in his sexual appetite had come about. He had begun to look at the world with different eyes. And yet nothing had changed in his life, other than the disappearance of Walt and Charlie. The girls of Accounting still exercised their general attraction. He occasionally thought about Miss Malone. He continued to watch Harriet’s big breasts spill out of her brassiere like melons when she went to bed.
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