by Sam Savage
I seem to be making progress. Yesterday in particular I worked steadily, starting early in the morning, with the sun practically, and not pausing for lunch. When I finally stopped, I took a step back and contemplated the pages, some on the table behind the typewriter, a great many others scattered on the floor, and then I walked to Starbucks. On my way over there, strolling in the warm spring air, I had a sense of “knocking off,” a pleasant feeling of being on my way somewhere to “take a break from work,” as opposed to my usual aimless wandering. I sat by the window, near a table clustered with chattering young people. I had a latte and a croissant. A dirty bearded man came up to the window and stared at me through the glass while I was eating. I turned my back. When I turned around again he was gone. And after that I walked over to the park and sat awhile, and then I walked home. Whenever I think of taking a walk it is something like this that I have in mind—perhaps just circling the ice cream factory, which occupies an entire block, or strolling to the diner or to Starbucks, sometimes just walking over there without going inside, or trudging the three blocks to the little park and back. Passing a store window I sometimes look over and see someone I don’t at first glance recognize; and then I do, suddenly, and think, Mother of God. I don’t actually say those words, even to myself—it is more that I experience a shock of recognition and surprise that I might, if there were someone with me when it happens, express in that way. I have been visiting the park more often since the weather turned warm again, walking over at all hours of the day, when the mood strikes me, it is so close, though never after dark, because of the men who are on the benches then, sullen or juiced up when they are not asleep. As a small child I often took long walks with Nurse through the neighborhood beyond the fence of spears, sometimes up our street and around a curve in the road to a park at the very top of the hill, where I was allowed to climb on the monument to the soldiers who had perished in the war—that would be the First World War—Nurse lifting me onto the pedestal and holding me tightly by the ankles while I looked down through a gauze of yellow-brown haze at the midsized industrial city below—row upon row of nearly identical houses running right up to the base of our hill, to where the trees began, and dimly in the smother beyond the houses gigantic tangles of soot-blackened brick and steel, which were the mills and factories, tall brick chimneys rising out of the heaps, where sometimes I saw a burst of orange flame, indicating, Nurse said, that someone had opened the door to a blast furnace. Our house was on the upper slope of the hill, not entirely on top though, and not quite on the park. Nurse told me Papa had wanted us to live quite on the park, but none of the houses there were suitable, while our house, though not on the park, was suitable, being far bigger than any of the houses up there. The monument to the dead soldiers was a tall granite obelisk in the center of the park, on the very peak of the hill, and was, Nurse said, four times taller than Papa. The names of the battles the soldiers had perished in were inscribed in angular letters on the four sides of the pedestal: Argonne Forest, Marne, Château-Thierry, Meuse, and others I have forgotten, the letters cut deep into the stone. I spent our first visit to the park digging dirt and moss out of the letters with a hairpin, disturbing small white insects that rushed out to be killed with the point of the pin. On other visits we played a game in which I closed my eyes and pretended I was blind, palpating the grooves with eyeless fingers in order to guess the letters, and in that way learned to spell the names of all the battles, though Nurse could not tell me how to pronounce them. Meuse in particular was baffling. Mama told me “château” was how French people say “castle,” and Château-Thierry in the picture in my mind got mixed up with the castle in one of my books, but since the First World War was a thoroughly modern conflict, it was the wrong picture. Château-Thierry in my picture was a castle made of pure white stone, like the castle of Mad King Ludwig, standing on the absolute pinnacle of a perpendicular mountain so high birds soared below it. It had conical red-roofed towers with red and blue ribbon-like banners floating from the finials. It was Papa who told me it was the wrong picture. A cannon stood next to the monument, supported by enormous wood-spoked wheels that I was not to touch because of splinters. The long barrel jutted obliquely skyward, at its lowest point just inches above my head, and one day I jumped up and encircled the barrel with my arms, intending to swing there, and it was hot from the sun. Nurse shouted and I let go. She rushed, grabbed my arms and twisted them wrist-up, hurting. “Now look,” she said, and I looked: my fingers, my palms, and the undersides of my forearms were orange-brown with rust. Clarence was fond of wars and owned a great many books about them. When he was eighteen he had tried to join the army, in order not to get drafted later, he said, but was turned down on medical grounds—he was missing the tip of his right index finger, his father having dropped the hood of a car on it when he was six. It was his trigger finger, is the reason it mattered to them, I suppose, though it did not prevent him from being a perfect shot the rest of his life. Even when his hands shook so badly the ice in his glass rattled, he could still go out in the yard and shoot cans off a tree limb with a pistol. It was a disappointment to him, I think, to be rejected, though he told people it was a lucky break. And once during the period in Philadelphia when we were still undecided about whether we liked each other after all, he threatened to join the Foreign Legion. He meant this metaphorically, of course.
Two days of drizzling rain. I typed my way through them. And I have moved the rat tank, placing it on top of the bookcase. To clear a space for it I have transferred everything, all the photographs and ribbon boxes, to the sofa until I can think where to put them, and in the process one of the pictures slipped from my grasp, struck the floor, and shattered—the glass covering the picture shattered, not the photograph. The rat watched while I swept it up. It seems interested in what I do. The top of the bookcase is, as I mentioned, layered with dust. I wiped it off with a bath towel, not a proper dust rag but the only thing I could find, before placing the tank there, all my dust rags being dirty, odd as that sounds, and then I sat on the sofa next to the stack of picture frames and carefully wiped each of those. The ribbon boxes, of course, don’t have any dust yet, but I wiped them anyway. No sooner had I finished doing this than I noticed the dust on the lower shelves and a gray fuzz as thick as mouse fur on the tops of the books, obvious from where I was seated on the near end of the sofa, an end of the sofa that I don’t in the normal course of things sit on. I usually sit on the other, far end, because that end is against a wall that serves as a prop for cushions in case I want to recline, as I often do when I sit on the sofa instead of in the armchair. I moistened the towel and wiped the books one at a time, top and bottom and sides, and placed them on the sofa too, and then I wiped the shelves. The mouse fur formed black cylinders when I wiped it. On the floor they look like droppings.
Still raining this morning, a halfhearted, senseless drizzle of the sort that always makes me depressed and cross. “Her small rather dingy apartment is plunged in despondency and gloom” is how it feels, how the light feels, seeping through the dirty rain-streaked panes. After pushing the fern out of the way, I more or less forgot about it until this morning, when it occurred to me that I ought to water it—reminded by the rain, I suppose. I carried water from the kitchen in the tall glass vase that I used to put flowers in when I had visitors, which would have been before I came to this apartment, as I have not had visitors here to speak of—to speak to, I should say, since there have been window washers and plumbers and Potts, of course, and one or two others, briefly, when I was still going to the library, though those petered out rather quickly—I could not find much to say to any of them. I sometimes bring flowers home from the park, but the stems on those are too short for the vase, so it just sits in a kitchen cupboard, good for nothing but pangs. I thought it would make a suitable watering can, but it turned out to have the wrong shape for that: no matter how cautiously I poured a steady trickle ran down the side of the vase and dripped onto the floor. Abandoning c
aution, I tipped it straight up, but that did not work either—the water rushed out in a single gush, ricocheting off the fronds, and most of it splashed onto the floor again. So I decided to mist instead. I pumped until my fingers ached, emptied the bottle, refilled it, and emptied half of it again, until the fronds were fairly dripping, as if they were in a rain jungle, I was thinking at the time. The pot stands in a wide puddle now, and some of the spray has gone on the wall as well. I should have thought of that before pushing the fern against it. Since I was still holding the bottle, I thought I would spray a window, just to see. I chose one that does not have notes stuck all over it, the center one of the three in front, as I think I mentioned. I did not spray the whole pane—after soaking an area about the size of my head, I stopped and rubbed with my sleeve. The result was a roundish spot slightly cleaner than the rest of the window. Looking out through it as through a porthole, I saw that most of the dirt was on the other side of the glass. The dirt on the inside seems to be mainly finger and palm prints, due to my habit of pressing my hands to the glass when I stand there looking out. I write that, and I get a picture of myself from the outside, as I must appear to someone stopped in the street below: an elderly woman standing at a window staring out, arms raised above her head, palms pressed to the glass.
Typing or just sitting, I often have the radio on, but I don’t always hear it. I have it on because it blocks some of the unpleasant noises coming from the outside. But this morning while standing at the porthole, peering across at the ice cream factory, at the concrete walls darkened by rain, I suddenly heard a woman’s voice saying, “That was John Coltrane’s ‘Lush Life.’ Next up, the Modern Jazz Quartet and ‘Cortege.’” I waited at the window until it started: a vibraphone, pianissimo, alone at first, then joined by the faint tintinnabulation of a triangle—like harness bells, I thought—and, as the pace quickened, by the whispers of brushes on a cymbal, all of it muted, restrained, and melancholy, like the rain, I thought. Clarence owned several jazz recordings, including that one, which we carried with us from place to place, though I don’t think he actually cared much for the music and never put a jazz record on unless we had guests. I think he enjoyed the atmosphere of the music and the idea of himself sitting there listening to it and smoking and talking about literature and baseball with people he admired, most of whom I suppose were genuinely fond of that kind of music. I am going to want to say at the outset that Clarence was a sincerely affable person, embarrassingly affable, it seemed to me, when we went to parties and he made a spectacle of himself. In the presence of certain types of people—those with superior intelligence or talent or a great deal of money, the kind of people he could not stop himself from thinking were successful—he would feel intimidated, because of his background, and because he was, even at his pinnacle, only partially successful, and then he would become obnoxious after a few drinks, despite having started out being incredibly affable, where by “incredibly” I mean back-slappingly so. He would do that because even while trying to be affable in that way he was also trying to defend himself, and more often than not he would end up making the kind of loud, incoherent speech that people found so irritating. Oddly enough, as he became more of an American Outdoor Writer he became more British, despite having never really lived in Britain, except, as I think I mentioned, for a few weeks one summer—British in his manner of dress, his pronunciation, even his vocabulary—and the more he drank, the more imperially British he became, until he was slurringly drunk, at which point it was just North Carolina all over again. Clarence, slightly drunk and beginning to hold forth, would notice my disapproving silence and say something like, “You seem thoroughly steamed, old girl.” I hated that old girl stuff. Of course he would regret it all afterwards. At times, after a night of showing off, once he had become sober again and I had explained to him what had happened, he would curl up and shudder with remorse—on the floor sometimes or the damp ground, leaves and grass stains all over his jacket when he got up—and whimper with mortification and chagrin. The actual physical hangovers must have been terrific as well.
Sun again. I was at my table to greet it when it rose. I was eating cornflakes, chewing and thinking and staring out the window at the lightening sky above the factory, not seeing it, though, my vision clouded by memory. I suppose one could say that I was staring into the mists of time. I personally would never say that, though Clarence might have. After breakfast I trotted from room to room throwing open windows, and now the breeze—there is a small breeze—can come in the front windows and leave by the back. I am tempted to say that I have created a crosscurrent, but that is not what crosscurrent means, and I really ought not to have said that I was throwing open the windows, as that gives a picture of someone just flinging up the sashes with a flick of her wrist. It was a struggle to get some of them open, and I had to push up the storm windows as well, which have not been taken off yet. Ditto for the idea that I was trotting from room to room. I don’t trot. I put it that way because it seemed to convey the cheerfulness with which I went about it, which would not have come through had I talked about hobbling from room to room and wrestling with the sashes. “She walked with a springing step that belied her advanced years” is more or less how it felt, though maybe that should be “advancing years.” With the windows open, there is a lot of noise coming in from the street, and I have put on my muffs. I don’t know what possessed me to say that it sounds like the ocean—it never sounds like the ocean. I used to throw breadcrumbs out the window for the sparrows and pigeons but had to stop because of Potts and her husband, who complained about crumbs blowing into their living room. Sometimes I carry crumbs down to the sidewalk in a bag, if I am going down anyway, though I don’t usually remember until I am already in the street and happen to notice the birds. The bay windows are the reason I took this apartment in the first place—those and its being on the third floor, facing east, and not seeming expensive at the time, in relation to the money I had then. It is important that I see sunrises if I am going to keep my spirits up, as I believe I have explained already, so it matters what floor I am on. The apartment is in an old brick building that must have been posh at one time. Being just two blocks from the Connector is what made it not expensive, I suppose, because of the traffic noise and the frightening people who live under the overpass, and because of the compressors, and also, I think, because the building is not being kept up, was already not being kept up when I moved here, and that has only gotten worse. The windows have not been washed thoroughly since the young man I gave the TV to was here to clean them. He took the storm windows off and washed them along with the others, and in the fall of that year the same young man returned and put them in again, and I gave him the television. I called Giamatti about the windows again last fall, about how dirty they have become, and he said window washing was a tenant’s responsibility, even though it apparently was not my responsibility for the first five or six years I lived here, when someone came every spring and fall to wash them. They would even scrape all my old notes off with a razor blade and never complain. Window washing in those days was treated as such a matter of course that I was not even warned that they would be coming. They just came, in the fullness of time, like the seasons. I would look up, and there peering in a window would be some man on a ladder; I would notice the squeegee and think, “Oh, it must be spring.” Now the windows have become so filthy it is a wonder I can keep my spirits up at all. The table I use for eating and now also for typing stands in the center of the bay, as I think I mentioned as well. Or maybe not. With most of my pages on the floor I cannot go back and look and find out what things I have actually mentioned, as opposed to the things I merely considered mentioning, considered in passing, so to speak, and then didn’t. Cannot easily go back, I mean, as I probably could do it if I really wanted to. I don’t bend easily at the knees (I think I have mentioned my knees also), or at the waist either for that matter, so I don’t immediately pick the pages up when they fall off and now I have been walkin
g on them. I generally neglect putting numbers on my pages, don’t forget so much as find it too tedious to bother, since I seldom remember to stop typing until I am so close to the bottom of the page it is about to fall out of the machine, and then I am usually in the middle of a sentence or in an agony of thought and in no mood to fuss with numbers. If I picked a page up from the floor now, I would not right off the bat know if it was page ten or page thirty. I used to think that one advantage typing had over ordinary unrecorded thinking was that one could go back over a pile of typed stuff and see what was in it. One cannot go over a pile of thought stuff in that way, because there is no pile, just thoughts falling endlessly down a hole, and even when you have managed to haul something up out of the hole you cannot know for sure whether it was down there all along or was something you had merely imagined being down there and had in fact invented while you were hauling. I sometimes wonder, for example, how much I actually remember about Clarence. And now, with all my pages on the floor and there being so many of them and none of them numbered, I can’t go back and look in the typed pile either. And it is not even a pile of pages, more like a slither or slew—they are spread out all across the floor, as if I had flung them there. Broadcast, I think, is the word for that kind of flinging. Contemplating the sheets of paper broadcast across the floor, I think, Well, I am going to have to do something about that, but then I don’t do anything about it. Strewn across the floor like that, the pages remind me of my typing days with Clarence, when I used to send one sheet after another to the floor on purpose, as a sign of indifference and disdain, while he was busy numbering his (at center bottom, the numeral bracketed by hyphens) and stacking them neatly next to his machine. When a stack had attained a certain thickness, he would pick it up and heft it, the same way he hefted pistols at a gun show, and sigh. Like Papa, Clarence had faith in accumulation.
