S-4 is undoubtedly my favorite. I had denied to myself for a long while that this was the case. I should not, I argued, allow myself to be swayed toward a liking of one suit at the expense of all the others. I shouldn’t have a scale of preference. Yet I did and eventually came to see that this is the natural order of things. Of any six items, bearing a greater or smaller similarity, one will be the best, one will be the worst, and the other four will somehow arrange themselves in between. So with a litter of rodents, so with a closet of suits. I preferred S-4, not for any reason so obvious as The pockets are cut well or Its length in the back is precisely right, but simply because I felt better when I had it on.
That I had encountered Marta while wearing S-4 was needlessly added proof of the viability of my preference.
I thought then of Marta’s clothing saturated with her essence. Did she wash her clothing in a small stained sink in her flat? Or did she send her clothing out to some establishment in the neighborhood? Did she, I shuddered to consider, have her uniforms cleaned at the place where I took my suits? On automated racks, did her shapeless dresses thrash their hems and sleeves against my trousers and jackets? Had Marta, in this subtle manner, already affected me?
I returned to my closet, stepped inside, and shut the door behind me. I was alone with my suits. I breathed deeply. I did not smell Marta. I closed my eyes and touched the sleeves of all my jackets. My fingers did not touch her.
I emerged from the closet, relieved. But I vowed that I would give my custom to no more cleaning establishments in the immediate neighborhood. I would take my six suits far away, to guard against the possibility of contact and contagion.
I prepared a small dinner for myself, washed up, and estimated the time by the position of the moon. I had yet another two hours before my appointment with Annie.
I wondered at first whether I ought not simply walk around the neighborhood for a while but then remembered how frequently in the immediate past I had been taken unawares. Nothing was to be gained and much might be lost, if I simply wandered the streets in a distracted, receptive mood. I might be attacked by the gang, for instance. I might find a dead man in an alleyway and be forced to give evidence at a police station. On a deserted stretch of street I might come across Marta herself. I determined to remain in my flat. To occupy this interval profitably, I determined that I would do a little cleaning.
There is a method in my manner of cleaning. I could not be satisfied with any superficial dusting, polishing, waxing, rubbing, shining, scraping, slicking, and scouring. After so cursory a regimen, over the five rooms and the numberless corridors every night, a casual visitor might be struck by the overall cleanliness of the place, but I would view it as only a whited sepulchre, bright on the outside and corrupt within. I would know, if I cleaned as others were content to clean, that the real filth lay hidden on surfaces I did not in the normal course of things see. It roped itself longer and longer through the grid of linoleum squares in the kitchen. It secreted itself in the crannies on the undersides of large pieces of furniture, smugly secure and obscenely propagating. The sickly sweet breath of putrescence was exhaled in corners where the casual mop, broom, pan, cloth, towel, trowel, duster, besom, sponge, and Hoover never reached or even thought of.
I work room by room and corridor by corridor. A corridor, depending on its length and width, may take no more than three or four days. A room will require at least seven. If I spend less than seven evenings on a room, I cannot allow myself to believe it really clean.
I am thorough.
A once-around of the whole flat requires, on the average, between nine and ten weeks. I will have to say, however, that I take far greater pleasure in cleaning a room than a corridor. There is a difference not so much in scale as in intrinsic interest. It is only natural, I think, that I should enjoy the greater variety of a living room or a kitchen or a bath or a bedroom or a dining room, more than the scant variations that may be picked out of a simple corridor. Therefore, in recognition of the importance of this period to my life, I might have wished that my schedule had placed me in one of the more interesting rooms—the living room perhaps, or even the bath. But despite my inward elation, I did not alter my schedule. A more indulgent man than I might have said to himself,
These days are special. Your life has taken on a great purpose. Indulge yourself. Clean the living room. A time of such importance as this ought to be marked. The corridor from the bedroom to the dining room is not worthy of your enlarged spirit.
I flew from such a self-indulgence as this. There is great honor in labor, and greater honor in consistent labor. Despite my feeling that these days were special and magical, I kept on with my itinerary of domestic purgation.
I do not change clothes to clean, any more than I change clothes to cook. A man who is careful and methodical in such business will not soil himself. A man who has his wits about him can prepare himself an eight-course meal, consume it, and afterwards comb the dirt from a room-size carpet, all in evening dress. I condemn uniforms and aprons.
The corridor from the bedroom to the dining room is of medium length, with a door at either end opening onto the rooms in question, and a third door just about equidistant—ten centimeters nearer the dining room in point of fact—between them. This door opens onto a linen closet. It was just at the frame of this door that I had left off the night before.
First I oiled the hinges and polished them till they shone. Then, with a solution of ammonia and water, in a mixture precisely measured, I washed the frame of the door with a soft cloth. I stood on a step-ladder and with a second cloth I scrubbed away the grime that had accumulated at the top of the frame. I next washed the door itself, first working on the five rectangular panels inset into it, and then on the articulated mouldings around these insert panels, then on the door itself. I polished the crystal doorknob with a special cloth reserved for only that purpose.
I propped open the door and washed its vertical edge. I then scrubbed the top edge. With a cloth wrapped around the edge of a strong tongue of wood, I rubbed along the bottom edge of the door. (Once every other cleaning I remove the door from its hinges entirely and lay it down in the corridor, but this was the off-turn.)
I repeated, for the inside of the door, all that I had done for the outside. It might well be that I would not even open that door again until its time had come around again for cleaning, but I was not going to deny myself the satisfaction of knowing I had performed my task well.
In my vigorous scrubbing I happened to knock a chip of paint from the moulding of the second insert panel from the bottom on the inside of the door. I was not cast down by this accident as some men might have been. I was prepared. In the corridor that runs between the kitchen and the living room is another closet in which I keep cans of all the various paints with which the walls, ceilings, floors, and woodwork of the apartment are painted, each labeled clearly and succinctly. I went immediately to this closet, and on the fourth shelf—the shelf marked Corridors—I took the small can which read in neat lettering on a small gummed label:
BEDROOM—DINING ROOM
CLOSET DOOR
INTERIOR
I picked out a brush, and returned with the can, feeling a real satisfaction in my own care and forethought.
I touched up the chipped paint and returned the can to its proper place. I set a little oscillating fan in front of the open door to speed the drying. Meanwhile, I began work on the interior of the closet itself. Inside, from floor to ceiling are six compartments each with a brass latch, opening downwards. I rubbed all the wood—gumwood, I believe—with a pine-scented oil, employing three different cloths. I polished each of the brass latches until it shone. I opened each of the compartments and removed the few linens I had stored there, placing them along the length of the corridor in the precise ordering I had removed them. Then I polished the inside of each of the six compartments, drying them carefully so that none of the oil would penetrate the linens when I replaced them. This took some ti
me since I was as careful with the first as with the last. That is my way.
From the top of the three drawers in the kitchen where I keep light bulbs, I took a newish one-hundred-fifty watt bulb, sprayed it with the ammonia solution, and carefully wiped it clean and dry. Then I unscrewed the bulb that was already in place at the top of the closet and replaced it with the bulb from the drawer. I readily admit that most men do not see the need of cleaning light bulbs, but I labor under a certain disability. I do not perceive colors as most men do. All the lights in my apartment are as bright as the fixtures will allow. They give off strong, perfectly white light. It is only in this manner that I am able to pick out colors at all. Even at one-hundred-fifty watts, I am at difficulty to distinguish red and purple, say, which to me appear no more than a gray faded from pink and a gray faded from lavender. I wash and polish the light bulbs not in hope that I will thereafter be able to distinguish colors, but only so that my meager skill in that direction may not be further diminished.
By the time I was done with that, the paint on the inside moulding of the door was dry. I didn’t touch it—if I had left a fingerprint in it, I would have felt obligated to scrape it off and begin again. But I felt confident that the paint was indeed dry and rested satisfied with my own inward conviction. I tested the latch of each compartment and found each in working order. I carefully refolded all the linens and replaced them in the proper compartments. I removed the oscillating fan and returned it to its proper place in the closet off the corridor between the living room and the bathroom. Folding a new cloth over the crystal doorknob, I carefully shut the closet door, satisfied that I had accomplished my duty for the evening, despite my fevered brain, which reeled with the significance of its new-found purpose.
Annie’s neighborhood is fashionable with a younger crowd. One rarely hears anything but English spoken there. Rents are high. Rapes are few. A shop specializing in spices is at the corner of Annie’s block, and next to it a little restaurant with four or five tables on the sidewalk. I saw a number of persons sitting out in the warm evening, languidly stirring, with long spoons, tall glasses of iced chocolate.
Annie was one of them.
“I knew you’d come by here,” she said.
I sat down beside her, and when the waiter came, I ordered iced chocolate as well. I’m not actually certain that the restaurant served anything else.
I did not ask Annie about her parents. I wasn’t sure that I believed in them.
“I have some new pictures to show you,” said Annie, meaningfully.
All Annie’s molars were gold. They glinted in the moonlight.
“And I bought you a book today,” she said. “On the way to the train station. When I took my mother.”
The waitress came out with my chocolate.
“Where was your father?” I asked. “Didn’t he go too?”
The persons at the next table rose and departed, having left the money for their bill and a tip on a small rectangular tray provided by the waitress.
“Oh,” said Annie, “I thought I told you. They’re getting a divorce.”
“You did say that,” I concurred. “Some time ago.”
A derelict Negro lurched up the sidewalk, carrying a folded newspaper in his right hand. He wasn’t so familiar a sight here as he would have been in my neighborhood. Annie stared at him. He caught her eye and stumbled. He just managed to steady himself against the table next to ours.
He righted himself and was about to walk on, but Annie looked up and said, “Excuse me, sir.”
When he looked around, Annie deftly raised her arm high and brought it down against his folded newspaper. It fell out of his hand, and so did the tray and the cash he had secreted beneath it.
The Negro staggered off as Annie gathered up the bills and the change and replaced them on the table.
“Mommy’s testifying that Daddy beat her,” said Annie. “Once, she said, he nearly strangled her.”
Annie stretched her legs in the warm spring moonlight. The stripes of her cotton trousers converged on her thin ankles. Her tiny, delicate feet were encased in polished white pumps with black silk bows.
Would I confide in her, I wondered? Would I tell her of my plan to help Marta to die?
10
When Annie and I had finished our chocolate we walked back toward her flat. I had already decided to tell her about Marta. Annie is a sensible girl, and she would have been convinced, immediately and with all the irrefutable force that had weighed me down in the beginning, that Marta must be helped to die.
Perhaps if I had spoken to Annie about it all, I wouldn’t be writing this now.
No, that’s wrong, when I think of all that came after.
At any rate, as we neared the stoop of Number TWENTY-NINE, I was on the very point of speaking, of opening my mouth and forming my words,
Yesterday, I needed a particular spice . . .
Yet I said nothing. My mouth clamped shut in surprise. I halted and stared down at the ground.
Annie stopped, too, and looked at me puzzled.
I hurried on, not wanting her—I’m not certain why—to see what I had seen.
On the sidewalk, carefully drawn in chalk, was a winged hourglass and the scrawled legend
TEMPUS FUGIT
I was disturbed to find the Fuggits’ logo outside my own neighborhood, where gangs, after all, were not unknown. I was even more distressed to discover it so near Annie’s flat. I remembered how surprised I was that Howard knew anything of them, that, indeed, my question regarding them had constituted the password that had opened Howard’s mouth. Howard even knew their names: Shade and Shadow, Clay, Dust, and Ashes. I was uncomfortable to find that they had preceded me to this spot, that one of them, stooping with a stick of chalk, had drawn the sign and perhaps said to the others, He’ll know we were thinking of him. Yet how had they known of my decision to visit Annie on this particular night? And who, for that matter, had informed them of Annie’s existence and Annie’s address?
For the moment, and merely because of the chalked scrawl, I said nothing to Annie about my plan.
Annie’s building has a high stoop, but once inside the front doors, she has to descend two flights to her flat in the sub-basement. Her apartment is long and narrow, with a kitchen, a dining room, a bedroom, and a living room, arranged in a line from the front of the building to the back. However, because the whole apartment is quite below the level of the ground, she has but a single window, and that right up against the ceiling in her living room at the very back. The building furnace is just behind the wall of her bedroom, and when it is on, the apartment is stifling hot. The walls, plunged into the earth, sweat and bleed. Yet because of the fashionableness of the neighborhood, she pays more than I for this Tarturus of flats.
Her furniture was bought new and fashionably, but all the fabrics are stained from the hot damp, all the wood is warped from the cold dew. Even the glass coffee table seems to sweat. When the plaster sheered off the walls in great sheets, Annie left the walls bare stone and bare brick.
On the walls are large photographs made from negatives that have come through the machines in her shop. They are kept on the walls until discolored and rotten by the damp, then replaced with others. Annie examines every picture that comes in to her. The photographs in the living room are inoffensively pretty: pictures of mountain picnics, or of gulls and terns feeding on an empty beach, or of some frightened animal on the African veldt. Those in the bathroom are humorous: pouting infants, gambolling kittens, bewildered pedestrians. The photographs in the bedroom are shockingly rude.
Whenever I surreptitiously open drawers in Annie’s flat, I always find stacks of photographic prints inside, neatly arranged and categorized, secured with elastic bands.
Up the stoop, down the hall, down the stairs, around the furnace, into Annie’s flat.
“Here are your gifts,” she said, picking them off a shaky table. The glue had melted away in the joints, leaving the legs rickety.
THINGS CALLED BY THEIR RIGHT NAME
“Did you read the one I gave you last week?” she asked. “The Morals of Pleasure?”
I kissed her and opened her blouse. “I threw it away.”
She gave me two shirts, so highly colored that even I, with my impaired visual sense, could make out that one was red and one was yellow.
“Did you wear the shirts I gave you two weeks ago?” she asked, as I pressed the palms of my hands over her breasts. “The one that was blue and the one that was purple?”
“I used them as dust wipes,” I replied.
She removed my hands and closed her blouse. We sat down on the couch. The furnace came on with a grating roar. The room was instantly suffused with heat. The brick walls began to bleed.
“Mommy brought me a photo album from my childhood,” said Annie. “Let’s look at it together.”
The album was brand-new. It still bore the price sticker on the lower left-hand corner of the cover. Annie and I sat next to one another. I put my arm around her shoulder, and she opened the album across our laps.
“That’s Mommy and Daddy before they were married,” she said, pointing at the first picture. “He didn’t beat her then.”
The young man and woman in the photograph wore modern, faintly fashionable clothes. The photograph was obviously recent.
Annie turned the pages, pointing out and naming various members of her family and telling brief stories about each.
“That’s Bobby, my only boy cousin. He used to show me his prick and make me touch it.”
She continued to turn the pages. None of the persons in the album looked alike. All the photographs were very recent. Aunt Judy was a Negress. I did not let on to Annie that I knew she had taken photographs from her shop and pasted them in this album.
Toplin Page 8
