Something in the Shadows

by Packer, Vin

  Are you in Europe by any chance? Where are you? And what are you doing? You must be married with children of your own by now.

  Can you send some money, a loan? We haven’t got a cent, and George has no friends outside of Hungary, other than his mother who will soon assume enough of a burden. I’ll give it back to you as soon as I start earning in Venezuela. I hope to teach there.

  I thought of you a lot last week while reading an article on Tom Wolfe in an issue of Life. It was about his correspondence concerning Look Homeward, Angel. I knew you loved Wolfe and his books.

  I think, too, of happy days back at the U. of Missouri, sitting on the steps of Jesse Hall, talking, talking, talking, and of things a happily married mother of two children should have long ago forgotten; but in reflection there is only innocence in youth when now, even in my situation, all is so much more glorious than I had imagined. You would like George, Joseph. He is serious like you, a professor of philosophy.

  It is a grand feeling to be able to meet people again and to write to people freely again. I hope you will answer soon.

  Love,

  Varda

  Joseph put the letter back in the Manila file with the rest.

  After that letter there had been one thanking him for the loan; then one from Venezuela repaying the loan — then, two Christmas cards. On one, a photograph: Varda, the children, the man she had married. Joseph almost had not saved it. He did not like to see the faces of the intruders; what right had they to sit beside her — he, with his arm around her shoulder — claiming her?

  Joseph sighed. He slipped the file back behind his books in the bookcase, where he always kept it, and he slid his stockinged feet into his loafers under the couch. Once during the first month of his marriage to Maggie, she had looked across the dinner table at him, an eyebrow raised, her mouth tipped with that quizzical smile.

  “Were you ever in love?”

  “Yes?”

  “Were you ever in love?”

  “Yes.”

  “With whom?”

  “A Hungarian girl.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you meet her abroad?”

  “No. At the University.”

  “Oh. Puppy love.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Well, did you go to bed with her?”

  It had been the reason for their first fight, the fact that Joseph had not answered her.

  From time to time Maggie would bring up the subject to irritate him. To keep peace, he had told Maggie her name, but he had not elaborated beyond that. It had nothing to do with Maggie and him, had it?

  Joseph tiptoed down the hall outside his study, trying not to disturb Miriam Spencer. He could hear the drone of Maggie’s and Tom’s voices as he made his way down the stairs, and his hand was just reaching for the door separating the downstairs from the upstairs when he realized Maggie was talking about him.

  “… not like other people, but I knew when I married him he wasn’t.”

  “But you are happy, Maggie, aren’t you?”

  “Who’s happy? I’m cheerful, Tom.”

  “I never thought of it that way. Sometimes I could break Miriam’s neck! She’s just not on the qui vive about some things! She doesn’t get some things! I tried to tell her about A. & F., deciding that most people are really nostalgic for the past, you know?”

  “Well, Joseph is. He lives in the past,” Maggie said.

  “You know what Miriam said to me? ‘Tom,’ she said, ‘do you wish you’d married Irene Littlefield?’ Now, honest to God! Irene Littlefield was some dame I was dating way back in second year at Cornell!”

  “Joseph doesn’t talk very much about his past, but I know one thing!”

  “She didn’t even get the point about A. & F. and market research — none of it. She just took it as a personal attack!”

  “There’s this girl — Varnish or something. Joseph was in love with her.”

  “I might just as well be an iceman for all Miriam knows about my work!”

  “Dear old happy days with Varnish! He’s kept all her letters, every last one!”

  “Lots of men are married to women who help them. Chris Planter’s wife goes to the goddam library and does research for him!”

  “I’ve told him everything about my first husband, but do you think Joseph would tell me anything?”

  “Then there’s goddam Amos Fenton. God, do I hate Amos Fenton!”

  “Not Joseph, he wouldn’t — ”

  Joseph Meaker’s hand dropped from the door. He turned around and tiptoed back upstairs.

  Chapter Two

  “Then why aren’t you a vegetarian?” Miriam Spencer wanted to know.

  Just as Joseph had anticipated, the burden of entertaining her fell on his shoulders that Sunday morning, while Maggie and Miriam’s husband slept it off. He had squeezed orange juice, and scrambled eggs, and now he was sitting at the breakfast table in the kitchen with her, drinking coffee. It was only quarter-past nine; probably no one else would get up before noon, and what on earth would Joseph Meaker do with Miriam Spencer during all that time? A heavy depression began to come in like a slow, smothering fog. To make matters worse, outside it was pouring; they were imprisoned together in the downstairs part of the house.

  “If someone doesn’t approve of hunting,” Miriam Spencer continued, “how can that someone eat meat?”

  “I suppose,” Joseph said, “because that same someone feels there’s a difference between eating what had been killed, and making a sport of the slaughter. I eat meat, but I don’t go to Abercrombie & Fitch and buy myself a gun and a special costume for the express purpose of killing what I serve for dinner.”

  Miriam Spencer said, “I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

  “I don’t know where you got the idea I’m angry. Do I look angry?”

  “You sound a little angry.”

  “I don’t get angry,” Joseph Meaker said. “It never gets you anywhere, does it?”

  “It certainly doesn’t. I just thought — ”

  “It’s just that next you’ll be asking me about my cat,” he said. “Of course, Ishmael kills, but it’s his nature to hunt.”

  “Honestly, Mr. Meaker, I wasn’t going to say a thing about your cat.”

  “Oh, that always comes next,” Joseph said. “It never fails.”

  “Well, I just didn’t even think about the cat.”

  “After all, the cat doesn’t have any guns or anything. I’d like to see one of these brave hunters catch a rat barehanded! With a rat’s teeth on their bare skin?” Joseph gave a snort, “They’d be in some nice shape.”

  “I like cats myself. I’d even own one, if we didn’t have a dog.”

  “It never fails,” said Joseph Meaker. “First people ask you if you’re a vegetarian, and then they ask you how come you own a cat.”

  “Not me, Mr. Meaker.”

  “Joseph. I don’t know why you call me Mr. Meaker.”

  “Joseph, then — I think Siamese cats are absolutely beautiful, I honestly do. They’re using them in advertisements more and more, you know.”

  “I’ve often wondered what I’d do if one of those hunters killed Ishmael by accident. It could happen, too.”

  “I bet you’d kill him! Wouldn’t that be something!”

  “I don’t belleve in killing.”

  “But I bet you’d be so upset, you’d just — ”

  Joseph he! a I and up. “No. No. I’d never be that upset. No, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “What work you do?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’d try to find out his most vulnerab’e spot. Then I’d work on that. Find a way to hurt him through that.”

  “You could hex him, maybe,” Miriam Spencer giggled. “Maggie told us you’re studying hexerei. You could put a hex on him!”

  Joseph forced a thin smile. “Yes.”

  “I wish you’d tell me about hexes.”

  “Oh,” Joseph said
, “it sounds more exciting than it is.” He knew what Miriam Spencer imagined she would hear: about demons and witches and spells cast and superstitions, the part that had very little to do with what Joseph was researching.

  “Please tell me something about your work,” she said. Joseph glanced again at his watch. Nearly nine-thirty. He would have to drive to Doylestown for the Sunday newspaper, but the stand was not open before eleven. Joseph looked across the table at Miriam Spencer, a good look at her; he had not bothered really to see her before now. He saw what he had fully expected to see: a countenance that spelled out for him the certainty that they had not one single thing in common, save for the insurmountable fact that they were prisoners of the downstairs. He did not even dislike Miriam Spencer, which might have helped; he simply felt trapped by his own indifference, and by a monotony that might continue for another three hours. Slowly, Joseph Meaker looked away from that face, turning his eyes to the window and the fields outside, needled by rain, grey, lonely-looking; and slowly he could bring himself to conjure up a different countenance, familiar, unique; and stirring his coffee in an absent-minded gesture, he began to tell Varda about hexerei.

  “Hexerei has a tradition that can be traced back to the early Christian arts of the catacombs,” he began. “The four- and six- and fourteen-pointed figures hinge around the lily, even the utilization of the lily seed pod is — ”

  Miriam Spencer leaned forward, practising an expression of absorption.

  2

  The sun came out in the afternoon, a brisk November wind with it. Maggie took one of the folding summer chairs to the backyard, wrapped up in her heavy car coat, carrying her clipboard and several sharp pencils, a Bloody Mary, and the Picks material. She was going to write a commercial.

  Inside the house, Miriam Spencer was spending the afternoon napping over the Times fashion ads in the guest room, and Tom Spencer was in and out of the bathroom, vomiting into the toilet. Joseph worked in his study for a while on material relating to European Seventeenth Century tulip symbolism and its connection with the Trinity. Ishmael sat on the file cabinet watching him and purring, and once in the midst of a paragraph Joseph was writing on sgraffito ware, he put down his pencil and wondered why he had married Maggie. He did not want to deal with the surface reasons this time (that he had been lonely, that he had found her physically attractive, that they had more or less formed the habit of being together a lot, so why not marry her?). This tune he wanted to know, not what was manifest knowledge, but what the motivation was. He had met Maggie the only way a man like Joseph would ever meet a woman like Maggie, by living across the hall from her. Their apartments were the only two on the third floor of the small brownstone on 94th Street, and it was unavoidable that they could meet by the elevator often, ring one another’s doorbells during small crises — fuses blown, heat off, a burglary upstairs and ultimately have a drink together. In those days, Joseph still drank. Her stories of the advertising world had amused him in those days, too. They had laughed together a lot, and the first time Joseph had ever made love to her, he had been rather amazed to discover she was not at all sure of herself, but shy somehow, her confidence returning only afterwards, once she had lit a cigarette, brushed her hair back from her face, and sat up. Then she was normal Maggie. It had always annoyed Joseph how she talked about it afterwards, like a football player or a bridge addict, reliving the game in every detail. Joseph told himself his impatience with her at those times was due to the fact he was no longer a young man, and along with middle-age he had acquired the predictable intolerance of others’ foibles. But neither was Maggie a young woman, and there was that to tell himself, too.

  After Varda, when he had been graduated from the University and gone East to get his doctorate, Joseph had been involved with several women. He had made love with a black-haired girl who had a slight moustache and who never took off her slip — a graduate student studying anthropology. The affair had dragged on for a year; and after her, others. A nurse who roomed near Columbia; a German professor he had met at a faculty party, who always put a stack of marching songs on the phonograph before they took down her Hide-A-Bed; and three or four other women, less easy to distinguish. Suddenly Joseph was thirty-six, and Maggie, across the room from him was saying, “Why don’t we give it a try? Lord, as it is, we practically live together.”

  Had marriage happened to other people in the same random way? Unmarried people at 36, 37, 38, who suddenly leaped headlong into something they somehow had avoided for years, with someone they knew less well than girls they had known ten years ago? Was that moment of their marriage — the moment when it became a fact — the same for them as for Joseph? He had thought of it as being “the hour of lead”; he had read in a poem somewhere about such a moment, “the freezing and the numbness — then the letting go.” He had remembered himself a very young man wondering about such a day far off in the future, about his bride, who she would be and what it would be like, and how on earth it would all be accomplished and then happily ever after, and that young man that he had been, broke his heart to remember. Was everyone disillusioned, whether they had married at 21 or 36? Or was it that, for Joseph, disillusionment itself was an illusion?

  There were no answers that Sunday afternoon, only the facts, and across from him, the eyes of Ishmael watching him. Pitying him, maybe? Ishmael had known Joseph for ten years. Had he always pitied Joseph?

  “You know me,” Joseph said to the cat. “Tell me what I’m like.”

  He reached out and picked up the cat, and held him close to his face. He remembered something Maggie had said once about Joseph caring for no other living creature in the whole world really, but that Siamese cat! To Joseph, it was a fair statement.

  3

  Maggie had shouted at everyone to come downstairs and hear the commercial. White-faced, trembling while he picked up his cup of coffee from the saucer, Tom Spencer sat in the rocking chair in the living room, his wife on the hassock at his feet. Joseph leaned against the doorway between the living room and the kitchen, and Maggie stood in the centre of the rug.

  “Testing, testing — one! two! three!” she said. “Now, no kidding, I want everyone’s frank opinion on this, and don’t spare the rod. Okay?”

  “Go to it!” Tom Spencer said weakly.

  “I can’t wait,” Miriam Spencer said.

  Acting out both parts, Maggie read her first Pick commercial.

  ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentleman. Pick cigarettes bring you three minutes of uninterrupted silence. (Momentary pause; then:)

  GIRL’S VOICE: (in a whisper) You mean we’re not supposed to talk?

  ANNOUNCER: (whispering back) Not during a Pick commercial.

  GIRL’S VOICE: (whispers all the way through) How can you sell Pick cigarettes if you don’t talk about them?

  ANNOUNCER: (whispering all the way through, too) The public is tired of noisy commercials. They’re irritating. That’s why Pick cigarettes have bought silence. Now, shhhhh!

  GIRL’S VOICE: You mean you’re not going to say anything about Pick cigarettes being unfiltered, and giving the smoker the enjoyment he used to get from cigarettes? Mild, mellow —

  ANNOUNCER: Will you please be quiet? People know all that about Picks. People everywhere are picking Picks. We don’t need to sell Picks! Shhhhh, now. GIRL’S VOICE: Gee, Picks taste so good though. ANNOUNCER: Shhhhh.

  GIRL’S VOICE: I love to talk about Picks! It’s like reminiscing about the past, about the old days when —

  ANNOUNCER: Shhhhh!

  GIRL’S VOICE: When cigarettes used to taste this good. When —

  ANNOUNCER: Please, you’ll irritate the public!

  GIRL’S VOICE: I was just going to say, when there weren’t commercials irritating the public, those old days; that’s what Pick makes me think of!

  ANNOUNCER: Will you be quiet please, Miss?

  GIRL’S VOICE: Can’t I ever say anything? Not even Picks?

  ANNOUNCER: Eventually, but not now. Shhhhh.
>
  GIRL’S VOICE: Well, when, for heaven’s sake?

  ANNOUNCER: Now!

  GIRL’S VOICE: (no longer a whisper) Pick Picks!

  “Maggie, no kidding, you’re colossal!” Tom Spencer was on his feet, rushing across to congratulate Maggie, colour coming back to his face, “Colossal!”

  “That’s the word all right. Colossal!” Miriam Spencer said.

  “Colossal,” Joseph said in a dull voice. He had not meant it to sound dull; he had wanted to go along with everyone’s mood; it had just come out flat.

  Maggie said to him, “Thanks for your vote of confidence, Joseph. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Reaching for her Bloody Mary from the mantle of the fireplace, “On second thought, I know exactly what I’d do without you — I’d soar!”

  “I wish I could think of things like that to say when Tom and I are squabbling,” said Miriam Spencer.

  “You’d better not,” her husband told her. He laughed, crossed over and slapped Joseph on the back. “When I was a serious young fellow in Cornell, I wanted to be an anthropologist one year. Maggie ever tell you that? I wanted to be a scientist, go out in the bush and do research. I bet Maggie never told you that, Joseph.”

  “I might have,” said Maggie, “if we ever talked together about anything.”

  “What changed your mind?” said Joseph.

  “Hmmm?” Tom Spencer looked blank.

  “About being an anthropologist?”

  “Oh that! Well, I guess I just grew up. Hell, I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I just mean — well, I changed my mind. My point was, not everyone in advertising is stupid. In a way, an ad man has to be something of a psychologist. Figure out what gets people, you know, Joseph? Hell, Maggie’s ad is a real gas! People’ll talk about it!”