I am a childish person. I was always jealous of Roy. I used to give away my heart too easily.
I cannot wait to see you. Everyone else bores me. I want to wrap you in cotton to keep you safe.
It was for love of Cracker that he slept with Joan (he told himself): he wanted to make sure he wasn’t making the love up. You had to test things: love, bravery, loyalty, you had to make sure your versions of these things were up to the task. Every time he slept around—and he did, all through their marriage—he thought of it as a test: if after this I see that I am not in love with my wife, I’ll leave her and end her misery. But he was always in love with his wife. She didn’t seem to think this news was as good as he did, but she was entangled, too.
How I Carry On
Broken-ankled Roy Truitt had gone, at last, to New York to look for Minna Sprague. He felt like a delinquent, but people saw his crutches and smiled at him, offered him bottles of Coke and spare sandwiches: they’d been told not to waste food for the sake of soldiers, and here one was, or so they believed. In the listings of The New Yorker he saw Minna Sprague’s name and went to see her sing at a basement club in the West Village. He had never been to a jazz club, he had only ever heard music by himself, in listening booths or his bedroom at home when nobody else was there, had no idea that it was strange, this entirely mixed crowd, or that because Minna Sprague refused to perform in front of segregated audiences, this was the only place in Manhattan she played. She wore a white dress with cutouts under the arms that showed her lovely triceps, the better to swing her drumsticks, though mostly she sang. By then Roy had read the archive of the Salford Bugler, had combed the census, and had come to the conclusion that they were in no way related. Still, he stood in the smoke and listened, and her voice—her ticking, overenunciated consonants, her round vowels full of longing, that hint of fury and foreignness—that belonged to him still. He was startled to discover that she smiled as she sang.
He sat through both sets, getting up the nerve. Then he approached her as she sat at a table with her bass player, a tall dark-skinned man whose glowering face looked as though it had been folded lengthwise and left with a crease. “Here, sit,” he said to Roy, gesturing at his crutches. Roy shook his head. “I’m Roy Truitt,” he said to Minna, and he handed her the packet of letters she’d written to her father, tied with its filthy blue ribbon. He’d brought them because they were hers, and because they were evidence. He’d brought them to make his mother furious. Minna held them by the edges. Then she said, seriously, “Come back to my place.” It was one in the morning. The bass player gave them a ride there in his dark Hudson. Roy sat in the back with his crutches across his lap, and looked through the window at the dark city, dark because of the war.
She lived then in a vast apartment in a vast building in Hamilton Heights. She offered him a hand up the marble steps to the foyer. He turned it down, then regretted it. The walls of her sitting room were a dark green, a shocking color, thought Roy. A dress, an enormous signet ring, a feathered hat: such things were green. Not apartments. One day he’d have a living room this color. She was rich. He saw that now, then reminded himself that she wasn’t actually a relative. Some bit of politeness and impertinence kicked in, and he hobbled over to help her with her coat.
“Thank you,” she said, with a note of pity. He leaned in to catch her perfume but she only smelled like other people’s cigarettes. Her voice was different than when she sang, dispassionate, European. “I have something for you.”
The apartment was jammed with objects, paintings on the walls, books piled on the floor. Perhaps they were related. It was a familial accumulation. What she had for him were his mother’s letters to her, kept in a cigar box, King Edward, five cents. “If you want.”
A box of disappointment. He was done with his mother. Then he said it aloud. “I’m done with my mother.”
“And your father?”
“Gone.” Then, “He said he was your brother. Well, half.”
She looked amused. Her expression was direct, both fond and damning. “You don’t think so? The lawyers did. Shall I call you a cab? Where are you staying, honey?”
To his right there was a glass case, as though in a museum, with five bird nests inside. He said, “I’ve run away from home.”
“No kidding? How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“That’s not running away from home,” she said. “That is reaching your majority. What next? You were in the service, or no?”
He raised his crutches. “I’ve been turned down.”
“College, then.”
“Not sure how,” he said.
“What in?”
“What in what?”
“What would you study?”
He wanted to impress her; he thought of the Latin and Greek in her letters to her father. “Classics,” he said.
“Well, Roy Truitt!” she said to him. Minna Sprague, too, felt the odd hum of relation, despite his porridgey freckledness. She could sense in him a little interesting temper. “Perhaps I can help you.”
“You’d pay for it?” He thought of how many hours he’d devoted to her, in listening booths, alone in the apartment. Surely she owed him something—
But Minna Sprague was acquainted with men, and boys, and even some women who thought she owed them something. “Ah, no,” she said, laughing. “But I can help you get in, and I can help you get a job, and then your education will pay for itself. Have you heard of Englert College?”
“Wow,” he said. “Yes.” It was in western Massachusetts, the farthest western edge, a little liberal arts college that was coeducational and integrated, neither of which Roy had ever given much thought to but both of which seemed, in Minna Sprague’s apartment, essential. “I do. You know the president?”
“I know the locksmith,” she said.
He’d thought this was a joke—she knew the locksmith, who would pick the enormous academic lock on the front of Englert College—but she meant the actual locksmith, a man named George originally from Cypress who’d gotten his own degree at Englert.
“For Minna, anything,” George said, and hired him immediately.
George imparted to Roy the romance of the lock. Locks were puzzles to which the solution was a key. Sometimes the key was the puzzle and the lock it fit into was the solution. The university had hundreds of locks, thousands: on dorm rooms and classrooms, faculty offices and buildings and laboratories, filing cabinets and gun storage. Locks were the school’s lingua franca. Roy made keys till his ankle healed, and then the college was open to him. Once, working on an anonymous call, Roy had found a thin pale man handcuffed to a showerhead in a woman’s locker room, wearing nothing but a black rubber swim cap and an overburdened ladies’ girdle. Why did they even make girdles so small? What could you be girding? “You couldn’t get rubber during the war,” the man said apologetically to Roy, and then, with a dazzling smile, “I am Professor Hackert, of Calculus.”
“You could have remained nameless,” Roy had said, but Professor Hackert, like most people, could not quite sort out humiliation from pride.
Roy got his bachelor’s, and then his master’s, and then his first visiting job, at Englert. All those years ago, he’d been right. To change his life, all he needed was to talk to Minna Sprague.
Roy Truitt, visiting lecturer, took great bodily pleasure in his campus office, the enormous desk, the little typewriter stand, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the window that looked onto someone else’s window. He enjoyed dominating his leather ottoman with his leather brogues, flinging books to the ground, letting the ashtray fill. His students saw his disorder as a sign of genius. Professor Truitt has read more books than anyone, they said, though this wasn’t true, and he wasn’t a professor, not yet. He was twenty-three. He had inherited his predecessor’s office as it was, with the books and the ottoman, the manual typewriter that reminded him of a skeleton in a natural history museum—a small dinosaur, one so unfortunately shaped it exis
ted mostly as food for larger dinosaurs. An aquatic animal, probably, with an alphabetic spine.
The bowling alley in the basement of the student building was candlepin. Only the students bowled there. Roy Truitt didn’t bowl. Once his ankle had healed, he was left with a ginger step. He had a sofa in his office upon which he napped; he took his meals at a diner a block away. The campus at night was his favorite place. His office was in a small brick building called Archibald Hall, named for the founder of the college, or for his wife, or for their children who had raised the money for Archibald Hall. The Archibalds. There was a painting of Mr. and Mrs. in the entryway, with green-tinged skin and tiny eyes, signed Mary Archibald. Somebody fancied herself an artist.
He had a key to Archibald Hall, issued by the key department. He had a master key left over from his time in the key department, and a series of lock picks if the master key failed him.
Just because you escaped your old life didn’t mean you were all the way into the next: you still had to burgle, slink, steal. What was the first thing civilized man did? Figure out a way to keep others from what he loves. And what did uncivilized man do? Figure out a way to pick the lock.
His brother was not Archibald but Archer, he reminded himself every morning.
The first time Roy let himself into a colleague’s office it was (he told himself) because he knew that the man had a copy of the Loeb Library translation of City of God—there was a sentence he wanted to verify. He’d taken Reggie Clayton’s “Basics of Attic Greek” his freshman year; Clayton was a thin nervous man in his forties whose entire soul lit up when he read Greek. Standing on Reggie Clayton’s Oriental rug, Roy felt he understood Reggie Clayton better. He convinced himself that this was why he’d done it, why he continued to do it, let himself into a different office every night, first in Archibald Hall and then across the quad into Butler. He’d collected his master’s in classics, he’d get a Ph.D. next, but his education was incomplete. For instance, how did people who were brought up in houses live? They hung up their coats and displayed pictures of their families, they knew how to arrange furniture in a room, floor lamp, footstool. How else would he learn? He had invented himself but he couldn’t civilize himself.
In the offices of his colleagues—his former teachers—he indulged in minor mischief of the shipshape sort, straightening framed diplomas, alphabetizing books, tamping down piles of papers. He felt first like a thief and then superior. No, he hadn’t impersonated a ghost at Truitt’s, but here he was, a poltergeist, a revenant. Perhaps he’d leave a message flapping in their typewriters. Boo. I love you. You’re out of athlete’s foot ointment.
Am I even human? Roy Truitt wondered as he chewed a sticky licorice cough drop he’d found in a colleague’s middle desk drawer. On the white cough drop box, the two bearded Smith Brothers, Trade and Mark. He sat at the desk and stuck his knees in the kneehole. These days he let himself into offices without looking at the name on the door, to make himself a detective. He examined the impressions left behind in a leather desk chair, breadth and depth of a colleague’s bottom. He preferred breaking into the offices of male colleagues, who outnumbered the women anyhow. It felt less personal.
During the day he sat in his armchair and listened through the doors to his colleagues letting themselves into their offices. He waited to be caught. Every time somebody knocked on his door, he thought, Here it is. But it was only ever his students. Maybe he would find a wife among them. They were not so much younger than he was, after all. Melora Chalfen. Rose Pearlman. Any one of them might do.
Then one day the knock on the door was not a student, not a colleague who’d tracked him down, but Arch.
Arch sat down, like the students, on the uncomfortable chair on the other side of the desk. He wiggled his hips and nodded, as though he had never sat in a chair but found the experience satisfactory and Roy remembered this particular quality of Arch’s: he always seemed to have just landed, amused and stymied by the customs of this new world. Was it a habit? A running joke? Arch pointed at the shelves. “Books,” he observed.
“Yes. Well, Arch.”
Arch smiled, and it unlocked both of them. “Well, Roy.” He put his hand on the desk. “So, I’ve come to invite you to the wedding.”
“Oh? Whose.”
“You know whose,” said Arch.
“Do I. I didn’t know things had progressed.”
“They’ve progressed,” said Arch, sadly.
He didn’t look like a man who should get married. He wore a dingy short-sleeved shirt with a pattern that looked like canceled stamps and a dirty necktie with a pattern that looked like tarnished coins. Maybe his fiancée was waiting for them to get married before she started to look after him. Interfere. Whatever it was that made husbands comb their hair. Now, as though they were getting ready for the ceremony, Roy tsked and reached across the desk to fix Arch’s tie.
“I thought it might be a tie place,” said Arch. Roy could feel his voice buzz through the botched Windsor knot. “Your job.”
“It is. What’s wrong with you, Arch?”
“Why do people always ask?” said Arch in a mild voice. “Like I know.”
“If you don’t know, who does?”
“Seems like whoever asks the question has a pretty good idea what’s wrong with me. At least they’d like to take a guess. Go on.”
Roy sat back in his chair and looked out the window. Across the courtyard, the neighboring professor sat at her desk and unwrapped what looked like a present but turned out to be a sandwich. He had been in that office. She kept clean underwear in her center drawer. Without looking at his brother, he said, “You had a different girlfriend every week of your life, but you’re marrying Betty.”
“Nobody calls her Betty.”
“I do,” said Roy. “You can’t take that.”
“Roy, for God’s sake. She wasn’t ever really your girl. You dropped her the minute you broke your foot.”
“I know that,” he said irritatedly. “Very clear on that. But didn’t you think—”
“—what?”
“That I might not like it? I might not like making conversation at family events. And I didn’t break my foot.”
Arch scratched his head with all of his fingers. It made him look like the dog he was at heart. “We don’t have family events. This is the first one.”
“Somebody’s bound to die eventually,” said Roy.
“I’m sorry!” Arch cried. “I just—oh God, Roy, really, I knew it was a bad idea. I did. I knew better, but my heart—”
“—who do you think your heart is?”
“Well—”
“You think your heart is separate from you?”
“Yes!” said Arch, as though asked at knifepoint his belief in God.
“You think there’s some intelligence making demands? Demands that must be obeyed? Arch, that’s just you. Not your heart wants. It’s you. You want.”
Arch put his hands on himself, at his clavicle, his lungs, his waist. Even from the outside, he could feel the way longing and love radiated from his torso. His heart pumped. It desired things. It moved those desires to his brain, where they displaced thought, duty, plans. “I can feel it,” he said. He stood up, to display his whole body, its regions and faults.
“It’s a fiction,” said Roy. “Something the medievals made up to get out of things, and it caught on. Your heart is a brute organ. It traffics in blood. That’s all.”
“Not only,” Arch insisted.
“Only. You’re your head. Or your whole body. You come in one piece, anyhow. Do me a favor. Every time you want to say my heart, just tell the truth. My heart wanted? No. I wanted. I longed. I broke, to be honest, you can say that, too. That is what I say to you now. I am in front of you, and I am breaking. I can feel myself break.”
At the end of the semester, the Friday of his brother’s wedding at Salford City Hall, Roy Truitt, visiting lecturer, was found on the other side of the state, stuck in the trench coat of the ti
ny French professor, she of the at-the-ready clean underpants, the beautifully wrapped sandwiches. When she found him thrashing on the floor of her office, Roy looked like he was wearing some sort of psychiatric restraint. Caught in the act. He would be fired. He wanted to say “I’m not here.” He wanted to say “I’m elsewhere.” He wished he were at the wedding after all.
“Mais qu’est-ce se passe?” said the French professor.
“Lady,” he said staring up at her, he an out-of-shape incompetent Houdini, no escape, no next semester. Had she really spoken French at him? She was from Secaucus, New Jersey. He should call her mademoiselle. Still, he liked the toughness of the word in his mouth, so he said it again. “Lady, lady. All sorts of things happen in this world. This is only one of them.”
He Went Up
Arch Truitt came home from the war; got married; was given, for his troubles, Truitt’s. “It’s yours now,” said Margaret, though she wouldn’t give up her stool behind the wooden counter, nor neaten her stacks of dime magazines, nor sign over the deed. “Make any changes you like.”
“All right,” said Arch. The first thing he did was to order a new sign, light up letters that said BOWLAWAY.
“You can’t just rename the place,” said Margaret. “Surely. It’s a sad name, don’t you think? Bowlaway. Bowl away what?”
“Troubles,” said Arch. “Sorrow. Hours. Whatever you don’t want, bowl it away.”
He hauled the mannequin up from the basement where he’d stored her, and wired her again to one of the iron columns. He put her high enough that people couldn’t rub her cloth face. One of her eyes had nearly been worn away already; she seemed to wink. But visitors could reach her feet. The right one grew burnished, the left one stayed fine and dark: people always reach for the brighter spot, where other hands have been.
“Jesus Mary and Joseph,” said Margaret. “Where did you find her?”
“Around,” said Arch. “I love her.”
She would be the one piece of history: Arch would modernize the Bowlaway. The first thing to go was the oak counter in the front, which had given the place the feel of a train station, or post office, or public library, where you might present yourself for official stamping. You could not enter without passing by whoever stood or sat there; whoever stood or sat there felt, variously, like a prisoner, a priest, a jailer, a mannequin in a shop window, a bird in a birdhouse. Arch had it ripped out.
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