by Paul Auster
But what about Tom? I could see that he had begun to take notice of her, to talk to her in a less guarded and aggressive way, but what did that mean? It could have been a sign of growing interest, and it also could have been simple good manners.
One small moment from the end of the evening. Whether it answers the question or not, I submit it as a final piece of evidence.
By the time we finished dessert, Lucy was already upstairs in bed, and the four adults were all a bit drunk. Stanley proposed a friendly game of poker, and as he shuffled the cards and talked about his new life in the tropics (sitting under a palm tree with a rum punch in one hand and a Montecristo in the other, watching the surf roll in and out on the white shore at sunset), he quietly proceeded to beat our pants off, winning three out of every four hands we played. After the drubbing he’d given me at Ping-Pong that afternoon, how could I have expected any less? It seemed there was nothing the man didn’t excel at, and both Tom and Honey laughed at their ineptitude, making wilder and wilder bets as Stanley continued to outsmart us all. It was a complicitous sort of laughter, I felt, and I made a conscious effort not to join in, studying the two youngsters from behind the shield of my cards. Then, as the game was breaking up, Tom said something that took me by surprise. “Don’t go back to Brattleboro,” he said to Honey. “It’s after midnight, and you’ve had too much to drink.”
Simple good manners – or a devious ploy to woo her into bed?
“I can drive that road with my eyes shut,” Honey answered. “Don’t worry about me, kiddo.”
She went on to explain that she had to get up especially early the next morning (something to do with a teacher-parent conference), but I could see that Tom’s solicitude had touched her, or at least I imagined it had. Then she kissed everyone good-bye. First her father, next a light peck on the jaw for me, and last of all Tom. Not only did he get his kiss on the lips, but he was the recipient of a hug as well – a big hug, which went on several seconds longer than the situation seemed to call for.
“Night, all,” Honey said, waving to us as she walked to the front door. “See you fellows tomorrow.”
She shows up the next day at four, bearing five lobsters, three bottles of champagne, and two different desserts. Another feast is prepared for us by our extravagantly gifted chef, and now that Lucy is willing to join in on the conversation, the fourth-grade teacher and the fourth-grade student talk shop for a good part of the meal, batting back and forth the titles of their favorite books. Al Junior and Al Senior have yet to show up with my car, but I announce that the Olds has been fixed and should be in our hands by tomorrow. With so much high-spirited talk flying around the table, I neglect to mention the cause of the breakdown, since I don’t want to spoil the mood by bringing up such an unpleasant subject. Tom knows all about it by now, but he too is reluctant to report on the nasty trick that was played on us. Honey and Lucy are singing nonsense songs as they crack open their lobsters, and why interrupt their fun with a disheartening account of class resentments and provincial animosities?
When I take Lucy upstairs to bed, I realize that I’m too worn out to sit up late for a second night in a row, belting back glass after glass of wine with the others. The Chowders can both hold their alcohol, and with his great bulk and prodigious appetites, Tom can match them drink for drink, but I’m a skinny ex-cancer patient with a small capacity, and I dread waking up the next morning with a hangover.
I park myself on the edge of Lucy’s bed and read to her from the Zane Grey novel until she closes her eyes and falls asleep. As I walk to my own room next door, I can hear laughter seeping up from the dining room below. I catch Stanley say something about being “tuckered out,” and then Honey adds something about “the Charlie Chaplin room” and “maybe it’s not such a bad idea.” It’s difficult to know what they’re talking about, but one possibility could be this: Stanley is about to go to bed, and Honey has drunk too much to drive home and plans to spend the night at the inn. If I’m not mistaken, the Charlie Chaplin room is the one immediately next to Tom’s.
I crawl into my own bed and begin reading Italo Svevo’s As a Man Grows Older. It’s my second Svevo novel in less than two weeks, but The Confessions of Zeno made such a strong impression on me, I’ve decided to read everything by the author I can put my hands on. The original title in Italian is Senilità, and I find it a perfect book for an aging fart like me. An older man and his young mistress. The sorrows of love. Dashed hopes. After every paragraph or two, I pause for a moment and think about Marina Gonzalez, aching at the thought that I will never see her again. I’m tempted to masturbate, but I resist the urge because the rusty bedsprings are bound to give me away. Nevertheless, I slip my hand under the covers from time to time and briefly touch my cock. Just to make sure it’s still there, to verify that my ancient friend is still with me.
Half an hour later, I hear footsteps tramping up the stairs. Two pairs of legs, two whispering voices: Tom and Honey. They walk down the hall in the direction of my door, then stop. I strain to catch a few words of their conversation, but they’re talking too low for me to make anything out. Eventually, I hear Tom say “good-night,” and a moment later the door of the Charlie Chaplin room opens and shuts. Three seconds after that, the same thing happens to the door of the Buster Keaton room.
The wall between me and Tom is thin – the flimsiest of Sheetrock partitions – and every sound he makes is audible to me. I hear him take off his shoes and unbuckle his belt, I hear him brush his teeth at the sink, I hear him sigh, I hear him hum, I hear him crawl under the covers of his creaking bed. I’m about to close my book and turn out the light, but no sooner do I reach for the lamp than I hear a faint knock on Tom’s door. Honey’s voice says, “Are you asleep?” Tom says no, and when Honey asks if she can come in, our boy says yes, and by saying yes the hidden purpose of our turn off the interstate highway onto Route 30 is about to be fulfilled.
The sounds are so clear to me, I have no trouble following every detail of the action that unfolds on the other side of the wall.
“Don’t get any ideas,” Honey says. “It’s not that I do this sort of thing every day.”
“I know,” Tom answers.
“It’s just that it’s been a long time.”
“For me, too. A very long time.”
I hear her slip into bed with him, and I hear everything that happens after that. Sex is such a strange and sloppy business, why bother to recount every slurp and moan that ensued? Tom and Honey deserve their privacy, and for that reason I will end my report of the night’s activities here. If some readers object, I ask them to close their eyes and use their imaginations.
The next morning, Honey is long gone before the rest of the house rolls out of bed. It’s another splendid day, perhaps the most beautiful day of the spring, but it turns out to be a day of surprises as well, and in the end those jolts will overwhelm the perfection of the landscape and the weather, pushing them to the back of my mind. If I remember that day at all, it’s only as an unassembled jigsaw puzzle, a mass of isolated impressions. A patch of blue sky here; a silver birch there, reflecting the light of the sun off its bark. Clouds that look like human faces, like the maps of countries, like ten-legged dream animals. The sudden glimpse of a garter snake wending its way through the grass. The four-note lament of an unseen mockingbird. The thousand leaves of an aspen tree fluttering like wounded moths as the wind slides through the branches. One by one, each element is there, but the whole is lacking, the parts don’t cohere, and I can do no more than search for the remnants of a day that doesn’t fully exist.
It begins with the arrival of Al Junior and Al Senior at nine o’clock. Tom is still upstairs in the Buster Keaton room, comatose after his all-night romp with Honey. Lucy and I have been up since eight, and we’re just leaving the house to go for a walk when the Wilsons show up in their two-vehicle convoy: a red Mustang convertible and my lime-green Cutlass. I let go of Lucy’s hand to shake hands with those stalwart gentlemen. Th
ey tell me my car is as good as new, Al Senior presents me with a bill for their services, and I write them a check on the spot. Then, just when I think the transaction is over, Al Junior drops the first bomb of the day.
“The kicker is, Mr. Glass,” he says, patting the roof of my car, “it’s a good thing that dope messed with your gas tank.”
“What do you mean?” I say, not knowing how to interpret this peculiar statement.
“After we talked yesterday morning, I thought I’d have the job finished in a couple of hours. That’s why I said we’d be able to deliver the car to you last night. Remember?”
“Yes, I remember. But you also said it might not happen until today.”
“Yeah, I did say that, but the reason I gave you then isn’t the reason why we couldn’t get here till now.”
“No? What happened in the meantime?”
“I took your Olds out for a spin. Just to make sure everything was back to normal. It wasn’t.”
“Oh?”
“I pushed the car up to sixty-five, seventy, and then I tried to slow down. Mighty hard to do when the brakes are shot. Lucky I didn’t get myself killed.”
“The brakes … “
“Yeah, the brakes. I got the car back to the garage and had a look. The lining was worn thin, Mr. Glass, just about to go.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that if you hadn’t had that other problem with the gas tank, you never would have found out about this problem with the brakes. If you’d gone on driving much longer, you would have run into some pretty bad trouble. Accident trouble. Death trouble. All kinds of trouble.”
“So the shithead who poured Coke into the gas tank actually saved our lives.”
“That’s what it looks like. Pretty weird, huh?”
* * * * *
After the Wilsons drive off in their red convertible, Lucy begins tugging on my sleeve.
“It wasn’t no S-head that did it, Uncle Nat,” she says.
“S-head?” I answer. “What are you talking about?”
“You said a naughty word. I’m not allowed to talk like that.”
“Oh, I see. S. Short for you-know-what.”
“Yeah. The S-word.”
“You’re right, Lucy. I shouldn’t use that kind of language when you’re around.”
“You shouldn’t use it, period. Whether I’m around or not.”
“You’re probably right. But I was angry, and when a person’s angry, he can’t always control what he says. A bad man tried to wreck our car. For no reason. Just to be cruel, to hurt us. I’m sorry I used that word, but you can’t really blame me for being upset.”
“It wasn’t a bad man. It was a bad girl.”
“A girl? How do you know that? Did you see it happen?”
For a brief moment, she relapses into her old silence, nodding her head in answer to my question. Already, tears have begun to well up in her eyes.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask. “If you saw it happen, you should have told me, Lucy. We could have caught the girl and put her in jail. And if the men at the garage had known what the problem was, they could have fixed the car right away.”
“I was scared,” she says, bowing her head, afraid to look me in the eye. The tears are spilling out of her in earnest now, and I see them land on the dry dirt below – salty ephemera, shining globules that momentarily darken and then vanish into the dust.
“Scared? Why should you be scared?”
Instead of responding to my question, she grabs hold of me with her right arm and digs her face into my ribs. I begin stroking her hair, and as I feel her body shudder against mine, I suddenly understand what she’s been trying to tell me. I register a moment of genuine shock, then feel a wave of anger pass through me, but once the wave passes, it is gone. Anger gives way to pity, and I realize that if I begin scolding her now, I might lose her trust forever.
“Why did you do it?” I ask.
“I’m sorry,” she says, tightening her grip on me and blubbering into my shirt. “I’m real, real sorry. I just kind of went crazy, Uncle Nat, and before I knew what I was doing, it was already done. Mama told me about Pamela. She’s a mean person, and I didn’t want to go there.”
“I don’t know if she’s mean or not, but it all turned out for the best, didn’t it? You did a wrong thing, Lucy. A very wrong thing, and I never want you to behave like that again. But this time – this one time – the wrong thing turned out to be the right thing, too.”
“How can a wrong thing be a right thing? That’s like saying a dog’s a cat, or a mouse is an elephant.”
“Don’t you remember what Al Junior told us about the brakes?”
“Yeah, I remember. I saved your life, didn’t I?”
“Not to speak of your own life. And Tom’s life, too.”
At long last, she disengages herself from my shirt, wipes the tears from her eyes, and gives me an intense, thoughtful look. “Don’t tell Uncle Tom I did it, okay?”
“Why not?”
“He won’t like me anymore.”
“Of course he will.”
“No, he won’t. And I want him to like me.”
“I still like you, don’t I?”
“You’re different.”
“In what way?”
“I don’t know. You don’t take things as hard as Uncle Tom. You’re not as serious.”
“That’s because I’m older.”
“Just don’t tell him, okay? Swear to me you won’t tell him.”
“All right, Lucy. I swear.”
She smiles then, and for the first time since she turned up on Sunday morning, I catch a glimpse of her mother as a young girl. Aurora. The absent Aurora, lost somewhere in the mythical land of Carolina Carolina, a shadow-woman beyond the reach of the living. If she is anywhere now, it is only in her daughter’s face, in the little girl’s loyalty to her, in Lucy’s unbroken promise not to tell us where she is.
Tom rises at last. I find it difficult to read his state of mind, which seems to oscillate between somber contentment and a fidgety, awkward self-consciousness. At lunch he says not a word about the previous night’s events, and I refrain from asking any questions, curious though I am to learn his side of the story. Has he fallen for the ebullient Miss C., I wonder, or does he plan to brush her off as a one-night fling? Is it all sex and nothing but sex, or are feelings involved in the equation as well? After we finish our lunch, Lucy trots off with Stanley to ride on the tractor and help him mow the lawn. Tom retires to the porch for his postprandial smoke, and I settle into the chair next to his.
“How did you sleep last night, Nathan?” he asks.
“Pretty well,” I answer. “Considering the thinness of the walls, it could have been a lot worse.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“It’s not your fault. You didn’t build the house.”
“I kept telling her to keep it down, but you know how it is. A person gets carried away, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Not to worry. To tell the truth, I was glad. I felt happy for you.”
“Me too. For one night, I was glad.”
“You’ll have other nights, old man. That was only the beginning.”
“Who knows? She left early this morning, and it’s not as if we did much talking while she was here. I have no idea what she wants.”
“More to the point – what do you want?”
“It’s too early to tell. Everything happened so fast, I haven’t had time to think about it.”
“Not that you’ve asked me, but in my opinion you two are a good match.”
“Yeah. Two fatsos colliding in the night. I’m surprised the bed didn’t collapse.”
“Honey isn’t fat. She’s what they call ‘statuesque.’”
“She’s not my type, Nathan. Too tough. Too confident. Too many opinions. I’ve never been attracted to women like that.”
“That’s why she’d be good for you. She’d kee
p you on your toes.”
Tom shakes his head and sighs. “It would never work. She’d wear me out in less than a month.”
“So you’re ready to give up after one night.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that. One good night, and that’s the end of it.”
“And what happens if she crawls into your bed again? Are you going to kick her out?”
Tom puts a match to a second cigarette, then pauses for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he says at last. “We’ll see.”
* * * * *
Unfortunately, neither Tom nor anyone else gets a chance to see.
A last surprise is waiting for us, and this one proves to be so large, so stinging, so colossal in its ramifications, that we have no choice but to hit the road that very afternoon. Our holiday at the Chowder Inn comes to a sudden and bewildering end.
Good-bye hilltop. Good-bye lawn. Good-bye Honey.
Good-bye to the dream of the Hotel Existence.
Tom utters the words “We’ll see” at approximately one o’clock. After Lucy’s tractor ride with Stanley, I take her to the pond for a swim. When we return to the house forty minutes later, Tom delivers the news. Harry is dead. Rufus has just called from Brooklyn, weeping into the phone, barely able to get a word out of his mouth, to tell us that Harry has died, that Harry is gone. According to Tom, Rufus was too choked up to say any more. We understand nothing. Beyond the fact that we must leave Vermont at once, we understand nothing.
