He wakes up, full of the intuition that his life is a disaster. He is the sort of person other people cite in order to feel that they themselves are well off: they could live the way Harrelson does. They could be Harrelson. They could think Harrelson’s grubby thoughts. He starts the car. Then, a non-Catholic, he makes the sign of the cross. He has not been arrested. His guardian angel is in the car with him, working overtime. Once in a dream the angel identified himself as Matthew and told Harrelson that he, Harrelson, was under his, Matthew’s, protection. Since that dream, Harrelson has been lazier, more slipshod; sometimes he thinks the dream may have been his undoing.
He drives and drives. He is lost. Visibility is poor. He sees no landmarks. He looks at his watch: he has been in the car for twenty minutes. The windshield wipers move slowly, heavily, like Harrelson’s eyes.
And just at the moment when Harrelson thinks that he is Kafka’s K. and will never reach the Mobil station no matter how long or how hard he tries, there it is. First it appears through the curtain of snow as a glowing patch of light without any solid outlines. Then, second by second, he sees the snowy spotlights, the fluorescent lights over the gas pumps, the aquamarine station itself with its closed garage doors, and now he sees a small old man in a black overcoat filling his car with gas at the self-service pump, and now, closer, he sees an attendant gazing in his direction with something like stupefaction, at Harrelson behind the wheel, in his dark car with no headlights.
The attendant walks over to him. Harrelson’s head is bowed and he is muttering. Though the attendant doesn’t know it, Harrelson is thanking his familiars, making concrete spiritual promises. The man, who is covered with snow, knocks on the window. Harrelson looks at him and rolls it down.
“You okay, buddy?” the man asks. He is wearing a blue parka and gazes in at Harrelson with friendly curiosity. His mouth is open, and Harrelson can see the huge gap of his mouth and his bad, crisscrossed teeth.
“Yeah, I’m all right.”
“Reason I asked is, you got no headlights.”
“I know.” Harrelson suddenly remembers. “Is there a woman waiting inside the station? She’s waiting for me.”
“Yeah,” the man says, “she’s here. What happened to your face, buddy?”
“My face is all right.” He looks toward the door and sees Meredith coming out, all smiles, dressed in her warm red winter coat, her brown boots, and black gloves. Harrelson tries to take his hands off the wheel and finds that he is having difficulty uncurling his fingers. Meredith crosses the front of the car and opens the door on the passenger’s side.
“You should put new headlights in,” the man says, but now Harrelson is closing the window.
He turns toward Meredith, who, instead of smiling, looks horror-struck. “John,” she says, “honey, what happened to you?”
He turns to her, his eyes full of gratitude. “Well,” he says, “I drove over here.”
“No,” she says, “I mean this.” She takes off her right glove and raises her hand to his face. When she touches his skin, he feels a dull burning on his left cheek. “There’s a cut here. A gash. It’s been bleeding. What’d you do?”
“I have no idea.”
“Did you have an accident coming over here?”
“Two.” He holds up two fingers. “I had two accidents.”
“You must have hit your head against the window or the … this.” She reaches over and touches the latch for opening the no-draft window. “You may need stitches.”
“No,” he says. “It doesn’t hurt.” He smiles. “It’s good to see you.” Now he feels happy. “I made it! I made it over here!” He looks at her with a private, conspiratorial expression. “The roads were terrible, and I’m not sober.”
“I know.” She looks at him, top to bottom. “Get out and come over on this side,” she says. “I’ll drive back to my place. I don’t want you driving anymore.”
“All right.” He does as he is told. Now, with Meredith behind the wheel, he sits back, and the pain in his cheek flares up. She is driving. Harrelson does not know where they are. He feels sleepy. She is saying something, but he is not quite sure that it makes any sense. Then the car is parked and Meredith has helped him out, and he is sitting in her living room, his face washed lightly with a washcloth, his cut covered with antiseptic cream. Meredith’s radio is on, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is singing.
Habe ja doch nichts begangen
Dass ich Menschen sollte scheu’n—
Welch’ ein törichtes Verlangen
Treibt mich in die Wüstenei’n?
“ ‘I’ve done no wrong,’ ” Harrelson translates, hoping to impress Meredith, “ ‘to shun other men, so what is it that sends me out into the wilderness?’ ”
“That’s the song?”
“That’s it.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s German.”
“I know,” she says. “Isn’t it interesting?”
“I guess so.”
“There.” She is finished cleaning Harrelson’s cheek. “It’s a smaller cut than I thought. Aren’t you going to take off your jacket?” He nods but does nothing. She unzips it and helps him out of it. He is not really looking toward her but toward the stereo radio. “Poor John,” she says. “But listen: thanks for getting me.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I didn’t realize how drunk you were.”
He waves his hand. “That’s all right.”
“Are you cold?” He nods. “Come in and take a warm bath.” She leads him into the bathroom and sits him down while she fills the tub. The warmth in the bathroom makes him sleepy again. He feels her taking his clothes off and helping him into the bathwater. The water’s heat is intensely painful on his chilled feet, like ice picks thrust into the skin. She is still talking. He is bent over in the water, looking at the hair on his legs. “I’ve made a decision,” she is saying. “I’m not going to marry you.”
Harrelson nods. “I know.”
“How did you know? I’ve only just decided.”
“I just knew.” He does not look at her.
“I decided a few days ago. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.” He puts his hand on the surface of the bathtub water and moves it back and forth, creating waves.
“I need more security than you can give me,” she says. “I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”
“Of course.” Now he turns his head toward her. “Please don’t say any more.”
“I won’t.”
“Thank you.” He takes the soap and washes his arms and chest. “You know, I don’t feel very good.”
“Where?” she asks. “Is it your face?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t feel very good anywhere.”
She stands up and turns away. She opens the medicine cabinet and examines the bottles. “Want some aspirin?”
“No.”
He rises to his feet unsteadily in the tub. Meredith turns around, then takes his hand. With her other hand she reaches for a towel and dries him off. “You need some sleep,” she says. “We both need some sleep.” They walk together toward the bedroom, and Harrelson slips between the cold sheets. He hears the radio being turned off. In a moment, Meredith is in her nightgown, next to him. “We can still be friends,” she says.
“Yes.”
She leans over toward him and kisses him lightly. “We can still make love. There’s no harm in that.” His eyes are closed, but he nods. “Do you want to?”
“No,” he whispers. “I don’t.”
“Maybe next time,” she says. “When you haven’t had so much to drink.” He nods, then reaches his arms around her and rests his hands in their accustomed place below her breasts. As he falls asleep, Harrelson realizes that, after all, they are friends. Meredith does not think he will ever be a husband. Probably she is right. He does not have it in him to take care of another human being. It will never happen. As he drifts over, Harrelson has a premonit
ion that he may not live for long. With what resistance he has left, he dismisses the idea as weakness, a bout of self-pity.
As soon as he is asleep, he finds himself in the company of his familiars. The faces that surround him are illuminated from within, and what they say is articulated in the language of angel speech. One of them welcomes him by saying, “What two time fine,” and another replies with “And certainly certainly more sunsets provided than last February.” These angels have no interest whatever in meaning. They say whatever pops into their heads. But it hardly matters because they gather around him, all smiles, and are pleased to be in his company. Some dispense with words and speak in music. Archaic joy washes over him. One angel detaches himself from the rest and says, “John, you are quite a poor sort,” and it is meant as a compliment. Harrelson accepts the compliment. He feels another one of them bend down and kiss him lightly on the head. He is being gathered up.
But no: at once there is a point on the horizon, a point insistent with earthly magnetism, drawing Harrelson away toward the world, the real world that made Plato so unhappy, and he wakes up, hungover, in Meredith’s arms, the sun rising orange over a field of snow. It is daytime, and Meredith is kissing him, and telling him he must go home now.
Surprised by Joy
1
BECAUSE THEIR PSYCHIATRIST had recommended it, they both began to keep journals. Jeremy’s was Woolworth-stationery drab, and Harriet’s was sea-blue with the title “A Blank Book” printed in gold script in the upper right-hand corner. Thinking that pleasant images would relieve the tone of what was to follow, she sketched a wren in flight, a Victorian lamppost, and an ash tree on the first page. Then she changed her mind and blacked the drawings out. There weren’t any drawings in the book Jeremy used. His writing was tiny and defiant. His first sentence, which was undated, read: “Benson told us it would help if we wrote down our thoughts, but I don’t have any thoughts, and besides, the fact is that I don’t feel like writing a goddamn thing.” That was the end of the first entry.
One night Jeremy came home and found all the silverware—knives, forks, spoons, gravy bowls, and ladles—lined up according to type on the living-room carpet in front of the Hide-A-Bed sofa. Harriet said she wanted to do an inventory, to make sure the place settings were all present and accounted for. She threatened to count all the dishes, and all the books. A week later when he arrived home she was standing on her head with her legs crossed and her knees positioned against the wall. He put down his briefcase, hung up his coat, and sat in his chair. “So,” he said. “What’s this?”
“An article I read says it helps.” Upside down, she attempted a smile.
“Standing on your head.”
“Yeah. Think about it: the brain under stress needs more blood, the cerebral cortex especially. The article says that when you stand up you feel an instant of physical exhilaration.” She closed her eyes. “The plumber came out this morning. The faucet’s fixed.”
“Physical exhilaration.” He turned away from her to stare out at the street, where two children were roaring by on their Big Wheels.
“They say you’ll feel better.”
“Right. What article did you say this was?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “It sounds like Parade magazine. How much did the plumber charge? God, I could use a drink. I have the most amazing willpower.” He glanced at her. “Did you cry a lot today?”
“No. Not much. Not like last week. I even did two full baskets of laundry. After lunch, when the plumber was gone, that was hard. For about ten minutes I couldn’t help it and locked myself in the bathroom and then I wrote in the journal. Gretchen called and invited me into her weaving class. Do you think I should? It seems so dull and womanish. How was your day?” She tumbled backward, stood up, and looked at him with an unsteady, experimental smile.
“Do you feel exhilarated?” She shrugged. He said, “I feel the usual. Carrying around the black box.” He rose, went to the kitchen for a beer, and clomped down the stairs to the basement, where he played his clarinet while watching television with the sound off. His music consisted of absentminded riffs in eerie unrelated keys.
They had brought their child home to a plain three-bedroom brick bungalow of the type referred to as a “starter house” for young married couples. Its distinguishing characteristics were those left by the previous owners. Jeremy and Harriet had never had time to redecorate it; as a result, their bedroom was covered with flocked jungle-orange wallpaper, the paint in Harriet’s sewing room was oyster-gray, and the child’s room had been painted blue, with two planets and four constellations mapped out on the ceiling with phosphorus dots and circles. At the time, their child was too little to notice such things: she gurgled at the trees outside and at the birds that sang in the shrubbery below her windowsill.
This child, Ellen, had been born after many difficulties. Harriet had had a series of ovarian cysts. She ovulated irregularly and only when provoked by certain powerful hormonal medications that left her so forgetful that she had to draw up hourly schedules for the day’s tasks. She had the scars to prove that surgical procedures had been used to remove her enlarged ovaries piece by piece. The baby had been in a troublesome position, and Harriet had endured sixteen hours of labor, during which time she thrashed and groaned. Jeremy watched her lying in the hospital gown, his hands pressed against her lower back, while her breathing grew louder, hoarse and rhythmical. Their Lamaze lessons proved to be useless. The lights glared overhead in the prep room and could not be dimmed. In its labors her body heaved as if her reproductive system were choking in its efforts to expel the child. Her obstetrician was out of town on vacation in Puerto Vallarta, so the delivery was finally performed by a resident, a young woman who had a short hairdo and whose purple fingernail polish was visible through her surgical gloves.
The oyster-gray paint and the phosphorus planets in the house suited Ellen, who, when she was old enough to toddle, would point at the stars on the ceiling and wave at them. At this time she could not pronounce her own name and referred to herself as “Ebbo” or, mysteriously, as “Purl.” On a spring morning she climbed from the crib onto the windowsill in pursuit of a chickadee singing outside. Cheered by the sun, Harriet had left the window open to let the breeze in. Ellen pushed herself past the sill and managed to tumble out, breaking the screen. She landed on a soft newly tilled flower bed next to a bush. When Harriet found her, she was tugging at flower shoots and looking pleased with herself. She said, “Purl drop.” She shrugged her right shoulder and smiled.
They latched the screen onto a stronger frame and rushed around the house looking for hazards. They installed a lock on the basement door so she wouldn’t tumble downstairs, and fastened shut the kitchen sink’s lower cabinet so she wouldn’t eat the dishwasher detergent. She lived one day past her third Christmas, when for the first time she knew what a Christmas tree was and could look forward to it with dazed anticipation. On Christmas Day she was buried up to her waist in presents: a knee-high table complete with cups and saucers, finger puppets, a plastic phonograph, a stuffed brown bear that made wheezing sounds, a Swiss music box, a windup train that went around in a small circle, a yellow toy police car with a lady cop inside, and, in her stocking, pieces of candy, gum, a comb, and a red rubber ball her mother had bought at Kiddie Land for twenty-five cents.
On December 26, Jeremy and Harriet were slumped in the basement, watching Edmund Gwenn in Miracle on 34th Street for the eighth or ninth time, while Ellen played upstairs in her room. They went through three commercial breaks before Harriet decided to check on her. She hadn’t been worried because she could hear the phonograph playing a Sesame Street record. Harriet went down the hallway and turned the corner into Ellen’s room. Her daughter was lying on the floor, on her side, her skin blue. She wasn’t breathing. On her forehead was blood next to a bright cut. Harriet’s first thought was that Ellen had somehow been knocked unconscious by an intruder. Then she was shouting for Jeremy, and crying, and touching Ellen’
s face with her fingers. She picked her up, pounded her back, and then felt the lump of the red rubber ball that Ellen had put in her mouth and that had lodged in her throat. She squeezed her chest and the ball came up into the child’s mouth.
Jeremy rushed in behind her. He took Ellen away from Harriet and carried her into the living room, her arms hanging down, swinging. He shouted instructions at Harriet. Some made sense; others didn’t. He gave Ellen mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and kept putting his hand against her heart, waiting for a pulse.
Later they understood that Ellen had panicked and had run into the edge of the open closet door. What with the movie and the new phonograph, they hadn’t heard her. The edge of the door wasn’t sharp, but she had run into it so blindly that the collision had dazed her. She had fallen and reached up to her forehead: a small amount of blood had dried on her hands. She had then reached for her stuffed raccoon; her left hand was gripping its leg. She was wearing, for all time, her yellow pajamas. In the living room, waiting for the ambulance, Harriet clutched her own hands. Then she was drinking glass after glass of water in a white waiting room.
Their parents said, oh, they could have another, a child as beautiful as Ellen. Her doctors disagreed. Harriet’s ovaries had been cut away until only a part of one of them remained. In any case, they didn’t want replacements. The idea made no sense. What they thought of day and night was what had happened upstairs while they were watching television. Their imaginations put the scene on a film loop. Guiltily, they watched it until their mental screens began to wash the rest of the past away.
Gryphon Page 8
