“Don’t be silly, Laura. It was just a coincidence.”
She didn’t understand. It was my dropping things. Porous Joyce must have absorbed it. Did I also spread loss: husbands, health, work? What would the Tsumati have to say about that?
We kissed good-bye and went in opposite directions. I have no friends, says the Samurai creed. I make my mind my friend.
I follow the witch’s advice about walking. I drag myself out to Riverside Drive, the sinuous, leafy stretch Q. called Lungohudson, after Lungarno in Florence and Lungotévere in Rome, to walk it off the way you might walk off a drunken stupor or an overdose. Or a fit of rage. The way long ago I walked off Q. I used to be a good walker. I urge the muscles on like coaxing out a lost language I once spoke fluently.
Swimming in air. The city heat continues; the viscous air resists my movements. Without the faraway ship to lure me, without the salt air, I can’t go more than a few blocks before I’m felled by weakness and sink onto a bench, like the old people with their visibly bored caretakers.
Thank goodness I don’t need a caretaker, though several friends have volunteered to walk with me. Mona entertained me with tales of last-minute shopping expeditions with her newest Let Me Dress You clients, members of a Czech mime troupe whose bags were lost in transit. She recited several phrases in Czech, such as “How much?” and “When can we eat?”
“I really mean it,” she said. “I’m starved.”
We passed the defunct Café Athena, its windows sealed by a corrugated tin panel on which vandals had spray-painted clumsy scribbles. Sheets were spread on the sidewalk with old shoes, magazines, and kitchen appliances for sale.
“Let’s try the place two blocks down,” said Mona, turning away from the pitiful scene. “Can you walk that far?”
The walls were bare, the floors were dusty, there was no music; the service was as lackadaisical as in the Athena but charmless. “This isn’t going to work. I’ll have to keep looking.” Her only sign of disappointment was the faint heave of her chest as she inhaled, hinting at secret weariness: all those husbands, children, gourmet dinners.
“How’s Evelyn doing?”
“Oh, the same,” she sighed. “Singing a little less, watching more TV” Tim, who was taking a few days off, was always ready to walk. He lives along the Drive, too, half a mile south of me, in a ground-floor apartment. “Ring my bell, or just knock on the window. If I’m there I’ll come out and keep you company.” He walks fast, with long purposeful steps. He likes to have a goal. “We’ll go as far as the flower beds.” Or, “We’ll go down to the Marina. Can you do that?” “Not without stopping. Do you mind stopping every couple of blocks?” “No, I’m used to it. It’s the way I walk with my father, except he’s eighty-one.” It won’t be long now, with Tim and me. He must sense it, too. But we’ve got that weekend coming up.
In the end, it’s better to walk alone. “I have no friends; I make my mind my friend.” I invent little games—how far can I go without stopping? One good day, achy but no fever, I go for five blocks. I pretend this strip of the Drive is my estate and walk through my land as Tolstoy used to do, checking on the serfs, asking about the crops and the families’ health, noting repairs to be made on the hovels. Bringing small items of charity and accepting small items of tribute. I record snatches of talk caught in my ear as I pass, and sometimes unreel the tapes in the data bank, listening until I have them by heart to write down later: Jilly and the suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge. Grace’s projected show of dental equipment. The witch’s success in treating Beaver.
The best my estate has to offer, its centerpiece, is an enormous tree stump, almost four feet in diameter, that stands like an august sculpture guarding a popular sandbox. The tree didn’t topple in a storm but was deliberately cut, for its surface is entirely flat and smooth as a bench, though no one ventures to sit on it. Too high, for one thing, nearly three feet above the ground; too hard to scramble up the sides of rough, tortuous bark coiled like gargantuan innards. And it looks very forbidding, a throne for larger-than-human royalty, elephants or dinosaurs. It must have been the familiar tree men who cut it. For years I’ve seen them on the Drive, ascending into the upper branches in their metal seats to lop and prune, bend and straighten. What happy work, up amidst the leaves doing arboreal housekeeping, seeing from on high the curving Drive and broad river. The Tai Chi teacher told a story once—or the interpreter told it for him—about a friend who worked up in the branches and one day slipped from his seat. Because of his practice of Tai Chi, he didn’t resist the twenty-foot fall but yielded to it, landing soft and unharmed on the waiting earth. But maybe it was more than that. Maybe he had breathed an invulnerability that rides only on the tides of the upper air.
When I stop to rest on a bench, I study the motley parade of joggers, all panting like dray horses in the service of a pitiless master. I listen to the tinkling tune of the Mister Softee truck, the shrieks of the children, the shouts of people calling their dogs with absurd names, Abelard, Sebastian, Hector.
I find all this very soothing. I trust the walking more than any other remedy. I walked off Q. and it worked, at least long enough for me to marry Ev. Q. couldn’t leave Susan, not just yet. It wasn’t the children any longer—they were finally all right, Jessica attending Wesleyan, Carla doing well in a detox program. But Susan had thrown her back out carrying a carton of old papers down to the basement storage room. She was in pain and couldn’t manage alone. She needed his help.
It’ll just be a few weeks, he said. How can I leave her flat on her back?
Flat on her back, I repeated. Flat on her back.
Yes, what’s so odd about that? It’s the only tolerable position. That or standing up. Sitting is unbearable.
Why didn’t you carry the goddamned carton yourself?
I wasn’t home. If I had seen her lugging it, of course I would have. . . . Why are we even going into all this? It’s not the issue.
That’s just it. If it weren’t this it would be something else. I’d like to see you flat on your back. I swear if I were a man and could knock you out I’d do it.
(That was before I took up Tai Chi. Had I known Tai Chi I would have drawn close to him in a pretended embrace, then stepped aside and let his own erotic energy hurtle him to the floor.)
If you were a man we wouldn’t be in this situation. But go ahead. Swing from the shoulder. I won’t hit back.
Don’t give me any of your lame wit, Q. You’ll never leave her. You’re lying. You’ve always lied, whether you know it or not. At this point it’s fine with me if you don’t leave her. Actually I find it disgusting when men leave their wives for younger women, did I ever tell you? Do you think I like my part in this vile mess? Stay with her, just tell me the truth.
I’m not lying. I—
I hit him on the shoulder, trying out how it felt. I hadn’t hit anyone since I was seven years old and knocked out a boy’s loose baby tooth in the schoolyard; he was hogging the ball. Q. was jolted but didn’t lose his balance. I know now what I did wrong, relied on upper-body strength. Now I could throw him off balance with a touch.
I’m not lying, he repeated, straightening out his shirt. It was gray-and-white-striped. I have many faults, he said, but I’m not a liar. I love you and I want to live with you. You know that.
I don’t know any such thing. What I do know is that you’re a weak overgrown adolescent and I don’t want to see you ever again or hear your name mentioned. I don’t want to feel you touch me or hear your voice or—
You can’t mean that, Laura. I can’t believe you mean it.
It was his steady gaze and tone that incensed me. His coarse hair was brown then. He needed a shave. Did he have the mustache? It came and went.
I do. I want you to get out of my house. Stop looking at me like that. What role are you playing now, Svengali? Cut it out. Just go.
All right. All right. I can’t talk to you when you’re like this. You should have done this onstage. You would h
ave been very successful. Okay, I’m going. I’ll call tomorrow.
Didn’t I made it clear? Don’t call tomorrow or ever. This is ruining me. I don’t want you in my life.
I’ll call in a few days, when you’ve calmed down, said Q.
I thrust his sweater at him and pushed him toward the door, but the touching was a mistake. I turned away and the door opened and closed. So quietly, as if he were afraid to wake someone. A temperate man.
I called in sick the next morning—I was teaching at a private school while I worked on the novel, as Q. had urged. He was the guardian of the novel, he liked to joke. (The muse, I thought but never said aloud, maybe because I knew I’d have to finish it without him.) The late September day was warm and bright. I put on a pair of new sandals and started up Sixth Avenue—I was living in the Village then. I walked to Fourteenth Street, turned west and went up Eighth Avenue until I got to the sleazy section in the Forties, then turned west again and up Ninth. I walked for a couple of miles, not seeing much around me except that I’d reached Riverside Park. Soon my eyes focused. I watched a barge make its way downstream. I passed the Marina with its houseboats bobbing in the water. A few bicycles skimmed by, a few mothers wheeled strollers, but mostly I was alone. Everyone was at work or school, keeping the city’s life going. My legs and feet ached but I forced them on as if guards in shiny boots were prodding me with rifles: Into the woods! Hand over your valuables! Onto the train! After a while I stopped to sit on a bench, but only briefly. It was wonderful how my brain was numbed; I had almost forgotten why I was walking. At some point I went over to Broadway and stopped at a hot dog stand, eating as I headed back to the river.
I passed the high towers of Riverside Church and followed the river up to the George Washington Bridge, where I thought of crossing over to New Jersey—not jumping, only crossing—but didn’t. I wanted pavements and wasn’t sure I’d find them there. It was six-twenty when I got back home. Just as I unlocked the door the strap on my right sandal broke. How lucky, I thought, it waited till this minute. The sandals had been brand-new in the morning. Now the heels were worn down and there was a small hole in each sole, precisely in that place behind the ball of the foot where (the Tai Chi teacher would explain years later) we take root in the earth from which our strength rises. The rushing spring, it’s called, because the earth’s energy bubbles up through it to diffuse through the body. But you have to allow it in, make way for it and welcome it.
I tossed out the shoes and looked at my streaked, sweaty face in the mirror and said, Good, I’ve walked him off. I’ve thrown him away like an old shoe. I didn’t see him again for three years.
I’m not asking for forever. Only for the way things are and must be. If I can walk this thing off and get my strength back for three years, I’ll take it gladly.
13
After the noisy, foul-smelling highways, Tim and I drove through prettified towns bustling with shops and framed by commercial strips and billboards. Between the towns stretched acres of potato fields; farm stands along the road displayed robust fruits and vegetables. At last we turned off toward the ocean, its salt smell wafting through the car windows, and passed through flat, empty land barely graced by a tree. New gray-shingled frame houses sprang up haphazardly, as if someone had scattered a handful of Monopoly houses on a board. This strange pattern, or nonpattern, arose, Tim explained, when real estate was in its palmier days. People bought up sections of the potato fields one by one to build summer homes.
He swung the car easily around a few bends—Tim drives with grace, the way some men dance—and onto a dead-end street. We pulled into the driveway to find ourselves secluded by high dark hedges suggesting a sanitarium or an expensive boarding school. The house and its surroundings felt isolated, and then a couple appeared to greet us.
The first thing they did, laughing wryly, was show us the pool, which was about half an acre down a slope of sunny, manicured lawn. The pool was empty, or nearly empty. A little past its center, toward the deep end, lay a green hose from which a thin stream of water trickled.
“What happened, you’re wondering, right?” said Celia.
“What happened,” said Hal, “is that the pool people were supposed to clean and refill the pool last week while we were away but they obviously forgot to finish the job.”
“They didn’t forget,” said Celia. “They’ve got a lot of pools to do and they neglected this one. Like triage. Or it might be that you forgot to pay them.”
“Well, whatever,” Hal said mildly, untouched by the sharpness of her tongue, even smiling with a kind of familial pride. “The point is, this is where we are with it. But it’s okay, there’s always the ocean.”
“Yes, I hope they remembered to fill it,” Celia said.
The pool was long, elliptical, and walled in slate, not the usual blue-green that suggests a Walt Disney movie where fabulous sea creatures might suddenly cavort onto the scene.
“When it’s filled,” said Tim, “it’s very beautiful. Have you ever seen a slate pool? It’s dark, like a pond in the forest. Sort of mysterious.”
I looked at him with surprise. That was very poetic, for Tim.
The four of us stood at the edge of the pool as on the lip of a canyon, contemplating its emptiness. There was nothing mysterious or forest-like about the sloping lawn and handsome low house up the hill with its deck and tubular furniture, or about the navy blue webbed reclining chairs on the concrete border of the pool, affably waiting to receive idlers. On a small Lucite table were newspapers, glasses, an ashtray. Evidently before we arrived, Hal and Celia had been enjoying their summer retreat, watching the pool fill.
Seeing me glance around, Celia waved at the chairs. “Yes, we were watching the pool fill up. It’s going to be our weekend activity.”
I smiled, though I didn’t wish to be seen as partaking in her amiable scorn—for her husband, the pool, the world? She was compact and athletic-looking, with auburn hair tied back in a pony tail. She seemed forever on the verge of moving or speaking, every cell alert, a step ahead of the moment. She wouldn’t be shocked by my wishing all the drivers on Broadway dead. She’d probably wished much worse.
“How long will it take to fill up?” I asked. “A few hours?”
“Oh, no, much longer,” said Hal, his mustache dancing as he spoke. He was tall and fat, his round genial face shrouded in a dark beard, a cigar stuck between his lips. He wore a blue short-sleeved shirt and powder blue shorts that reached nearly to his knees and swelled alarmingly at his middle. “The water has been running like this since last night, that’s Friday. Let’s see, the pool is sixty feet long by twenty feet at its widest, that would be twelve hundred square feet. To get the volume you’d have to make allowances for the gradation in depth. ...”
The two men calculated, with mathematical precision, the volume of the pool, taking into account its elliptical shape and the gradation in depth, then factored in the rate of the water trickling from the hose, which they deduced by dividing the volume of the pool which was already filled by the number of hours the hose had been trickling.
“The pool will be filled,” concluded Tim, “by Monday morning.”
“No, Sunday morning,” Hal corrected. “In practical terms, that is, because it doesn’t have to be completely filled in order for us to swim in it.”
Celia laughed her sharp laugh and tossed her head disdainfully. “Not before Tuesday, I’m willing to bet.”
It appeared that Hal and Celia were performing a teasing script in which Tim and I were required to speak our lines without knowing the larger themes and references of the play, just as some choreographers, Q. once told me, prefer that their dancers be ignorant of the mythic sense of the work and simply execute the steps. As always, when Q. came to mind lately, a little blob of elation and despair thumped around my solar plexus but I paid it no attention.
“Not Tuesday, sweetheart. How can you say that?” Again, her taunting didn’t seem to bother Hal. Nothing seemed to bo
ther him except, I later discovered, the state of the real estate market. “It’s much more full than you imagine. It’s up to six feet at the deep end. In fact you could probably swim at the deep end right now. It’s very deceptive, an optical illusion.”
This struck me as highly unlikely, little as I knew about pools or optical illusions. From where we stood it looked as though roughly two feet of water covered the deep end, while the shallow end was not yet wet.
“No, Hal,” said Tim in his judicious way. “I doubt if that’s six feet deep.”
“I’ll give you a demonstration.” With his lit cigar in his teeth at a jaunty angle, Hal strode to the shallow end of the pool and stepped suavely down the stairs. He walked across more than half the length of the pool before his feet got wet. As he advanced further, water enveloped his legs at a surprising rate. Water is deceptive. And the angle of the pool floor at the deep end was evidently steeper than it seemed from the rim. Hal walked until the edges of his blue Bermuda shorts were wet, then glanced our way for acknowledgment. The day was very fine. The leaves of the shrubberies glistened, the flowers in the flower beds stirred softly in the breeze, the sky was blue, the light radiant. Not so hot yet. Not hot enough to swim.
“Six feet, ha,” said Celia.
Ignorant or not, I would enjoy this performance. Too bad Q. wasn’t here to watch—he would appreciate Hal and Celia as much as I did. They played their roles well, like Pinter characters.
Hal kept advancing. When the water reached the crotch of his shorts a shiver rippled through his vast body and he glanced up again and chuckled. Ungainly, no question about it, yet not unattractive. I wouldn’t mind at all, despite the weight, I mean I wouldn’t mind aesthetically. Certainly Celia wouldn’t have taunted were she indifferent. Probably quite the contrary. He kept walking, holding aloft the lit cigar, until the water reached the breast pocket of his shirt, which contained two ballpoint pens, and still he was not at the deepest point, where the drain was.
The Fatigue Artist Page 25
