by Paul Auster
The girl was supposed to be chauffeured up by limousine from Atlantic City. Murks had told them to expect her at around eight o’clock, but it was closer to nine when she finally walked through the door of the trailer. Nashe and Pozzi had polished off a bottle of champagne by then, and Nashe was fussing over the lobster pot in the kitchen, watching the water as it approached the boiling point for the third or fourth time that evening. The three lobsters in the bathtub were barely alive, but Pozzi had chosen to include the girl for dinner (“It makes a better impression that way”), and so there was nothing to do but hang around until she showed up. Neither one of them was used to drinking champagne, and the bubbles had quickly gone to their heads, leaving them both a bit punchy by the time the celebration finally got started.
The girl called herself Tiffany, and she couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen years old. She was one of those pale, skinny blondes with sloped shoulders and a sunken chest, and she tottered around on her three-inch heels as if she were trying to walk on ice skates. Nashe noted the small, yellowing bruise on her left thigh, the overdone makeup, the dismal miniskirt that exposed her thin, shapeless legs. Her face was almost pretty, he felt, but in spite of her pouting, childlike expression, there was a worn-out quality to her, a sullenness that glowed through the smiles and apparent gaiety of her manner. It didn’t matter how young she was. Her eyes were too hard, too cynical, and they bore the look of someone who had already seen too much.
The kid popped open another bottle of champagne, and the three of them sat down for a pre-dinner drink—Pozzi and the girl on the couch, Nashe in a chair several feet away.
“So what’s the story, fellas?” she said, sipping daintily from her glass. “Is this going to be a threesome, or do I take you on one at a time?”
“I’m just the cook,” Nashe said, a little thrown by the girl’s bluntness. “Once dinner is over, I’m finished for the night.”
“Old Jeeves here is a wizard in the kitchen,” Pozzi said, “but he’s scared of the ladies. It’s just one of those things. They make him nervous.”
“Yeah, sure,” the girl said, studying Nashe with a cold, appraising look. “What’s the matter, big guy, not in the mood tonight?”
“It’s not that,” Nashe said. “It’s just that I have a lot of reading to catch up on. I’ve been trying to learn a new recipe, and some of the ingredients are pretty complicated.”
“Well, you can always change your mind,” the girl said. “That fat guy shelled out plenty for this, and I came here thinking I was going to fuck you both. It’s no skin off my back. For that kind of money, I’d fuck a dog if I had to.”
“I understand,” Nashe said. “But I’m sure you’ll have your hands full with Jack anyway. Once he gets started, he can be a real savage.”
“That’s right, babe,” Pozzi said, squeezing the girl’s thigh and pulling her toward him for a kiss. “My appetite’s insatiable.”
It promised to be a sad and lugubrious dinner, but Pozzi’s high spirits turned it into something else—something buoyant and memorable, a free-for-all of slithering lobster shells and drunken laughter. The kid was a whirlwind that night, and neither Nashe nor the girl could resist his happiness, the manic energy that kept pouring out from him and flooding the room. It seemed that he knew exactly what to say to the girl at every moment, how to flatter her and to tease her and to make her laugh, and Nashe was astonished to see how she slowly gave in to the assault of his charms, how her face softened and her eyes grew steadily brighter. Nashe had never had this talent with girls, and he watched Pozzi’s performance with a mounting sense of wonder and envy. It was all a matter of treating everyone the same, he realized, of giving as much care and attention to a sad, unattractive prostitute as you would to the girl of your dreams. Nashe had always been too fussy for that, too self-contained and serious, and he admired the kid for making the girl laugh so hard, for loving life so much at that moment that he was able to draw out what was still alive in her.
The best bit of improvisation came halfway through the meal, when Pozzi suddenly began to talk about their work. He and Nashe were architects, he explained, and they had come to Pennsylvania a couple of weeks ago to oversee the construction of a castle they had designed. They were specialists in the art of “historical reverberation,” and because so few people could afford to hire them, they invariably wound up working for eccentric millionaires. “I don’t know what the fat man in the house told you about us,” he said, “but you can forget it right now. He’s a great kidder, that one, and he’d just as soon wet his pants in public as give you a straight answer about anything.” A crew of thirty-six masons and carpenters came to the meadow every day, but he and Jim were living on the construction site because they always did that. Atmosphere meant everything, and the job always turned out better if they lived the life they’d been hired to create. This job was a “medieval reverberation,” so for the time being they had to live like monks. Their next job would be taking them to Texas, where an oil baron had asked them to build a replica of Buckingham Palace in his backyard. That might sound easy, but once you realized that every stone had to be numbered in advance, you could begin to understand how complicated it was. If the stones weren’t put together in the right order, the whole thing would come tumbling down. Imagine building the Brooklyn Bridge in San Jose, California. Well, they had done that for someone just last year. Think about designing a life-size Eiffel Tower to fit over a ranch house in the New Jersey suburbs. That was on their résumé as well. Sure, there were times when they felt like packing it in and moving to a condo in West Palm Beach, but the work was finally too damned interesting to stop, and what with all the American millionaires who wanted to live in European castles, they didn’t have the heart to turn everyone down.
All this nonsense was accompanied by the noise of cracking lobster shells and the slurping of champagne. When Nashe stood up to clear the table, he stumbled against a leg of his chair and dropped two or three dishes to the floor. They broke with a great clattering din, and because one of them happened to be a bowl containing the remnants of the melted butter, the mess on the linoleum ran riot. Tiffany made a move to help Nashe clean it up, but walking had never been her strong point, and now that the champagne bubbles were percolating in her bloodstream, she could manage no more than two or three steps before she fell into Pozzi’s lap, overcome by a fit of laughter. Or perhaps it was Pozzi who grabbed hold of her before she could get away from him (by then, Nashe could no longer keep track of such nuances), but however it may have happened, by the time Nashe stood up with the shards of broken crockery in his hand, the two young people were sitting on the chair together, locked in a passionate kiss. Pozzi started to rub one of the girl’s breasts, and a moment later Tiffany was reaching out for the bulge in his crotch, but before things could go any further, Nashe (not knowing what else to do) cleared his throat and announced that it was time for dessert.
They had ordered one of those chocolate layer cakes you find in the frozen-food department of the A&P, but Nashe carried it out with all the pomp and ceremony of a lord high chamberlain about to place a crown on the head of a queen. In keeping with the solemnity of the occasion, he suddenly and unexpectedly found himself singing a hymn from his boyhood. It was “Jerusalem,” with words by William Blake, and although he hadn’t sung it in over twenty years, all the verses came back to him, rolling off his tongue as though he had spent the past two months rehearsing for this moment. Hearing the words as he sang them, the burning gold and the mental fight and the dark satanic mills, he understood how beautiful and painful they were, and he sang them as though to express his own longing, all the sadness and joy that had welled up in him since the first day in the meadow. It was a difficult melody, but except for a few false notes in the opening stanza, his voice did not betray him. He sang as he had always dreamed of singing, and he knew that he was not deluding himself from the way Pozzi and the girl looked at him, from the stunned expressions on their
faces when they realized that the sounds were coming from his mouth. They listened in silence to the end, and then, when Nashe sat down and forced an embarrassed smile in their direction, they both began to clap, and they did not stop until he finally agreed to stand up again and take a bow.
They drank the last bottle of champagne with the cake, telling stories about their childhoods, and then Nashe realized it was time to back off. He didn’t want to be in the kid’s way anymore, and now that the food was gone, he had run out of excuses for being there. This time, the girl didn’t ask him to reconsider, but she gave him a big hug anyway and said she hoped they would run into each other again. He thought that was nice of her and said he hoped so too, and then he winked at the kid and stumbled off to bed.
Still, it wasn’t easy lying there in the dark, listening to their laughter and thumping out in the other room. He tried not to imagine what was going on, but the only way he could do that was by thinking about Fiona, and that only seemed to make matters worse. Luckily, he was too drunk to keep his eyes open for very long. Before he could begin to feel truly sorry for himself, he was already dead to the world.
They planned to take the next day off. It seemed only appropriate after working for seven straight weeks, and what with the hangovers that were bound to follow their night of carousing, they had arranged this respite with Murks several days in advance. Nashe awoke shortly past ten, head cracking in both temples, and started off toward the shower. On the way, he glanced into Pozzi’s room and saw that the kid was still asleep, alone in his bed with his arms flung out on both sides. Nashe stood under the water for a good six or seven minutes, then stepped out into the living room with a towel around his waist. A lacy black bra sat tangled on a cushion of the sofa, but the girl herself was gone. The room looked as though a marauding army had camped there for the night, and the floor was a chaos of empty bottles and overturned ashtrays, of fallen streamers and shriveled balloons. Picking his way through the debris, Nashe went into the kitchen and made himself a pot of coffee.
He drank three cups, sitting at the table and smoking cigarettes from a pack the girl had left behind. When he felt sufficiently awake to start moving again, he stood up and began cleaning the trailer, working as quietly as possible so as not to wake the kid. He took care of the living room first, systematically attacking each category of refuse (ashes, balloons, broken glasses), and then headed into the kitchen, where he scraped plates, discarded lobster shells, and washed the dishes and silverware. It took him two hours to put the little house in order, and Pozzi slept through it, never once stirring from his room. Once the cleanup was finished, Nashe made himself a ham and cheese sandwich and a fresh pot of coffee, and then he tiptoed back into his own room to retrieve one of his unread books—Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens. He ate the sandwich, drank another cup of coffee, and then carried one of the kitchen chairs outside, positioning it so as to prop up his legs on the steps of the trailer. It was an unusually warm and sunny day for mid-October, and as Nashe sat there with the book in his lap, lighting up one of the cigars they had ordered for the party, he suddenly felt so tranquil, so profoundly at peace with himself, that he decided not to open the book until he had smoked the cigar to the end.
He had been at it for nearly twenty minutes when he heard a sound of thrashing leaves off in the woods. He rose from his chair, turned in the direction of the sound, and saw Murks walking toward him, emerging from the foliage with the holster cinched around his blue jacket. Nashe was so accustomed to the gun by then that he failed to notice it, but he was surprised to see Murks, and since there was no question of doing any work that day, he wondered what this unexpected visit could mean. They made small talk for the first three or four minutes, referring vaguely to the party and the mild weather. Murks told him that the chauffeur had driven off with the girl at five thirty, and from the way the kid was sleeping in there, he said, it looked like he’d had a busy night. Yes, Nashe said, he hadn’t been disappointed, the whole thing had worked out well.
There was a long pause after that, and for the next fifteen or twenty seconds, Murks looked at the ground, poking the dirt with the tip of his shoe. “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you,” he said at last, still not daring to look Nashe in the eye.
“I know that,” Nashe said. “You wouldn’t have come out here today unless you did.”
“Well, I’m awful sorry,” Murks said, taking a sealed envelope from his pocket and handing it to Nashe. “It kind of confused me when they told me about it, but I suppose they’re within their rights. It all depends on how you look at it, I guess.”
Seeing the envelope, Nashe automatically assumed it was a letter from Donna. No one else would bother to write to him, he thought, and the moment this thought entered his consciousness, he was overwhelmed by a sudden attack of nausea and shame. He had forgotten Juliette’s birthday. The twelfth had come and gone five days ago, and he hadn’t even noticed.
Then he looked at the envelope and saw that it was blank. It couldn’t have come from Donna without stamps, he told himself, and when he finally tore it open, he found a single sheet of typed paper inside—words and numbers arranged in perfect columns with a heading that read, NASHE AND POZZI: EXPENSES.
“What’s this supposed to be?” he asked.
“The bosses’ figures,” Murks said. “Credits and debits, the balance sheet of money spent and money earned.”
When Nashe examined the page more closely, he saw that it was precisely that. It was an accountant’s statement, the meticulous work of a bookkeeper, and if nothing else it proved that Flower had not forgotten his old profession since striking it rich seven years ago. The pluses were itemized in the left-hand column, all duly noted according to Nashe and Pozzi’s calculations, with no quibbles or discrepancies: 1000 hours of work at $10 per hour = $10,000. But then there were the minuses in the right-hand column, a list of sums that amounted to an inventory of everything that had happened to them in the past fifty days:
Food $1628.41
Beer, liquor 217.36
Books, newspapers, magazines 72.15
Tobacco 87.48
Radio 59.86
Broken window 66.50
Entertainment (10/16) 900.00
—hostess $400
—car $500
Miscellaneous 41.14
($3072.90)
“What’s this,” Nashe said, “some kind of prank?”
“I’m afraid not,” Murks said.
“But all these things were supposed to be included.”
“I thought so, too. But I guess we were wrong.”
“What do you mean, wrong? We all shook hands on it. You know that as well as I do.”
“Maybe so. But if you look at the contract, you’ll see there’s no mention of food. Lodging, yes. Work clothes, yes. But there’s not a word in there about food.”
“This is a dark and dirty thing, Calvin. I hope you understand that.”
“It’s not for me to say. The bosses have always treated me fair, and I’ve never had any reason to complain. The way they figure it, a job means earning money for the work you do, but how you spend that money is your own business. That’s how it is with me. They give me my salary and a house to live in, but I buy my own food. It’s a nice arrangement as far as I’m concerned. Nine-tenths of the folks that work ain’t half so lucky. They got to pay for everything. Not just food, but lodging as well. That’s the way it is the world over.”
“But these are special circumstances.”
“Well, maybe they’re not so special, after all. When you come right down to it, you should be glad they didn’t charge you for rent and utilities.”
Nashe saw that the cigar he was smoking had gone out. He studied it for a moment without really seeing it, then tossed it to the ground and crushed it underfoot. “I think it’s time I went over to the main house and had a talk with your bosses,” he said.
“Can’t do that now,” Murks said. “They’re gone.”
“That’s right, they’re gone. They left for Paris, France, about three hours ago, and they won’t be back until after Christmas.”
“It’s hard to believe they’d just take off like that—without bothering to look at the wall. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Oh, they saw it all right. I took them out here early this morning when you and the kid were still asleep. They thought it was coming along real nice. Good job, they said, keep up the good work. They couldn’t have been happier.”
“Shit,” Nashe said. “Shit on them and their goddamned wall.”
“No sense in getting angry, friend. It’s only another two or three weeks. If you cut out the parties and such, you’ll be out of here before you know it.”
“Three weeks from now, it will be November.”
“That’s all right. You’re a tough one, Nashe, you can handle it.”
“Sure, I can handle it. But what about Jack? Once he sees this paper, it’s going to kill him.”
Ten minutes after Nashe went back into the trailer, Pozzi woke up. The kid looked so tousled and swollen-eyed that Nashe didn’t have the heart to spring the news on him, and for the next half hour he allowed the conversation to drift along with aimless, inconsequential remarks, listening to Pozzi’s blow-by-blow description of what he and the girl had done to each other after Nashe had gone to bed. It seemed wrong to interrupt such a story and spoil the kid’s pleasure in telling it, but once a decent interval had elapsed, Nashe finally changed the subject and pulled out the envelope that Murks had given him.
