A Meaningful Life

by L. J. Davis

  “But I changed my mind,” Lowell explained.

  “That’s exactly what I told your mother. Get in the car and we’ll go talk about it over breakfast. That was a real merry chase.”

  “You aren’t...I mean...mad or anything?” Lowell asked weakly.

  “I admit it put me out some, right there at first. Your mother and I will make up our minds about it when we have the facts. Maybe you’d like to catch some sleep first. Otherwise we could go eat. Your mother’s pretty hungry.”

  Lowell climbed obediently into the back seat of the Kaiser and collapsed against the cushions. All his muscles seemed to have shrunk, although his bones remained the same size, and it was difficult to keep his body from suddenly clenching up in a foetal position. At the same time, he was filled with a strange, wild love for his parents that was unlike anything he’d ever felt for them before, somewhat embarrassing, totally inexpressible, and probably due to nervous reaction. His father was here, and everything was going to be all right. His father would straighten things out. His mother was here too.

  They pulled away from the parking lot and hesitantly found their way off the campus. For the next ten minutes they were passed by every car on the road.

  “You can’t be too careful,” his father said. “All these California drivers.”

  “Yes, Daddy,” said Lowell.

  He explained everything to them, although not very coherently, in a pancake house on El Camino Real. There was something wrong with his receiving mechanism—no sleep was what was the matter with it, compounded by the aftermath of panic and too much fast driving—and although he was aware that his father had forgiven him and his mother was working on it, he was not at all clear about how these good things had been accomplished. Words and phrases came to him in loud, frequently senseless snatches and then seemed to fade away with most of the light in the room, as though someone was turning his eyes and ears up and down with a kind of rheostat. The next thing he knew for sure, he was back in his room and sound asleep.

  “How are you?” Leo asked Mr. Lake that afternoon when they met for the first time, peering anxiously into his face as though in search of fatal symptoms. “Call me Leo,” he added. “I’m a cutter. It isn’t much, but I don’t know anything else and I’m too old to learn another trade.”

  “That’s real interesting,” said Lowell’s father. “What do you cut?”

  “As a mother,” said Leo’s wife, who still hadn’t told anybody what to call her, “how would you say this struck you? Personally, I wash my hands, but that’s only my opinion.”

  Lowell’s mother looked at her expectantly for a moment, as though waiting for her to get on with the joke or story, but when nothing happened she blinked pleasantly and said, “I’m afraid I really haven’t thought about it. I’m glad to meet you.”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” said Leo’s wife. “Mark my words.”

  Lowell’s mother smiled wanly and backed off a little, making an agreeable mooing sound.

  “Dubinsky let them in,” Leo was saying. “It wasn’t the employers, like some people think; it was Dubinsky. One day the war ended, and bam, there they were wherever you looked.”

  “I’ll be darned,” said Mr. Lake.

  “If this keeps up much longer I’ll have to take some kind of a pill,” whispered Lowell.

  “This isn’t the half of it,” said his girl, picking her cuticles. “If you think this is bad, you ought to have to live with them.”

  They all went to a restaurant for supper, where they were treated to a mealful of his future mother-in-law’s theories on the selection and preparation of foodstuffs, some of which didn’t even qualify as edible on any list Lowell had ever heard of.

  “How can you eat that disgusting slop?” she demanded, pointing at Mr. Lake’s Salisbury steak.

  Lowell’s father cut a bite of it and methodically placed it in his mouth. “It’s not so bad,” he remarked after he had thoroughly chewed and swallowed it. “Once you get the hang of it.”

  “You can’t be too careful,” said Leo, nodding amiably at everyone. “No sir, you just can’t be too careful, you know what I mean?”

  “Lowell,” said his father later, when they were saying good night at the motel. “About that little business of running away this morning.”

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “What in God’s name ever put it into your head to come back?”

  Lowell tried to laugh. “Ha, ha,” he said.

  “Lowell,” said his mother, “is there something you want to tell us?”

  “If it should turn out that something isn’t quite right,” put in his father, “we’ll back you up one hundred percent. Don’t think you have to do anything you don’t want to.”

  “We want to help,” said his mother. “That’s what a family’s for, to help.”

  “Just say the word,” said his father.

  Lowell began to feel as though he was being worked over by the French police. He wanted sleep. He wanted all the voices to stop. He felt as though his head and body were being packed with warm, wet cotton, a handful at a time, and words came to him dully, like blows he had ceased to feel. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Everything is fine.”

  “What your father and I are getting at...”

  “I understand,” said Lowell thickly. “Everything is okay. Nothing is wrong. I mean, nothing is wrong that won’t be okay in a while. I mean, what I mean is...”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” said his father, meaning that they would never talk about it again unless Lowell brought it up first. “I think it’s time we all hit the hay.”

  “There’s never been a Jew in my family,” Lowell heard his mother say as she walked off with his father toward their room. “Has there ever been one in your family?”

  “Never can tell,” said his father, putting his arm around her waist.

  Lowell and his wife were married by a Unitarian minister who blinked a lot and claimed to have known Woody Guthrie. Exactly how well he’d known Woody Guthrie diminished measurably each time Lowell questioned him about it, until he finally began to avoid the subject, glancing apprehensively at Lowell from time to time as though afraid another Woody Guthrie question was in danger of springing from his mouth. The minister’s name was Mr. Hogarth. It was the time of year when a lot of weddings occur at Stanford, and whenever the other ministers wanted somebody to cut a service short, they infallibly went to Mr. Hogarth. He was both weak-willed and a fast talker, and he seemed to suspect secretly that God didn’t pay much attention to anything Unitarians did.

  “I just hope everybody arrives in time,” he told Lowell, blinking, as they waited in the vestibule for the Baptists to finish. “There’s a Presbyterian service right behind us, and we’re kind of pressed for time.” He gave a fatuous smile and waved to somebody over Lowell’s shoulder. Lowell turned and saw a man donning vestments in a little room off to one side. The man frowned at them and closed the door. “That was the Presbyterian minister,” Mr. Hogarth said.

  “I wish the Pope could see this,” whispered Lowell’s best man, the roommate whose tent he’d stolen. “He’d laugh his ass off.” Lowell’s roommate was an easygoing Catholic who crossed himself at table before taking food, drank prodigious quantities of wine at club parties without ever impairing his ability to drive, never got a grade higher than a B, and planned to be elected mayor of San Francisco before he was forty. He was as short and squat as a rain barrel and as strong as a bull, and he deeply loved his father and mother, immigrant Italians who ran a tiny bakery on North Beach, who deeply loved him back with a devotion that was outrageous, embarrassing to onlookers, and quite touching, like something from a maudlin old movie come to life.

  The moment Lowell took his place at the altar, a fog of terror blew into his mind and few things sufficiently penetrated its veil to be remembered with any clarity afterward. He hadn’t been scared a minute ago—just exhausted by events and nervous that his voice would break or that he would
fart loudly—but he was scared now, and scared he remained. He was changing his status in the community of man. He was in the hopper of a great machine and he could no more get them to turn it off than a confessed and proven murderer could change his mind about his trial. It was Donner Pass all over again, only permanent. The law had him and there was no way out, at least not a nice or easy one: it was a matter for judges and courts, his wife testifying about the length of his prick and the dirty things he whispered in her ear when he was drunk on Miller High Life, the judge scolding him, alimony; he could see it all. The only other way out was murder or moving secretly to another town, changing your name, losing all your friends, denying all your accomplishments, a kind of suicide (there was also the other kind). He was really in for it now. Gone forever were the days when he could just stop coming by her dorm. He was going to be a grown-up now, and there was no stopping it.

  It was with this sort of nonsense jangling through his head like a burglar alarm in an abandoned grocery store that he turned and beheld his bride coming down the long aisle of the huge, nearly empty church, stepping on the wilted petals left over from a previous ceremony and not swept up. She was wearing a white dress he’d never seen before. With her (and apparently being supported by her arm) was Leo in a swallowtail coat and an immense ascot that was larger than his face, emitting a smell of naphtha and old trunks that seemed to hover almost palpably in the air long after he’d sat down. Once his wife had joined him at the altar, Lowell’s mind refused to photograph anything for his memory’s album until the awful pause that briefly ensued when Mr. Hogarth, blinking up a storm, asked for comments from the audience. Lowell was certain, absolutely certain, that his mother-in-law was going to do something outrageous that would haunt him for the rest of his days. When she failed to do any such thing, he felt himself kind of collapse inside, as if they’d told him they’d decided not to shoot him after all and he could take off the blindfold.

  “I almost embarrassed myself there during that pause,” Leo told him afterward. “That would have been too bad, but I managed to hold it in. In case I forgot to mention it, you can call me Poppa if you want. That’s what Betty calls me, Poppa. Personally, I’d rather you called me Leo, but what I’m trying to bring out to you is that you can take your pick. Call me what you want.”

  “Thanks,” said Lowell dully, gazing almost without recognition at the bloated, stickily tear-streaked face that had risen over his father-in-law’s shoulder like some kind of diseased moon. “This isn’t what I wanted,” he heard it say. “This isn’t anything like what I wanted at all.”

  The reception was held at Lowell’s club. All his fellow members immediately went about getting drunk, especially the sophomores and a senior from Los Angeles that Lowell had never liked. Lowell’s mother and father said something to him in their fond, pleasant way, he couldn’t remember what. At some time or other (he couldn’t remember when) the information came to him that the white dress his wife was wearing had originally been her mother’s, and this little piece of information kept turning up in his thoughts for the rest of the day like the queen of spades in a long game of hearts, but he had the good sense not to talk about it. It occurred to him occasionally in later years.

  They spent their wedding night in a motel on Lombard Street in San Francisco, where they were well known. It was cheap and clean and you didn’t get the feeling that the rooms were bugged with cameras and listening devices like you did at places like the Holiday Inn. Lowell had the presence of mind to stop off first at a car wash in San Mateo and remove the suggestive, obscene, and, above all, informative messages from the hood, trunk, and doors of his car, and the motel keeper was never the wiser.

  First graduated, then married, Lowell finally crossed the two mountains that had loomed in his path for it seemed like years, smack in the way of having a life. Now he was over them, and he could get on with it. And what happened then was, after the bear went over the second mountain, things went downhill for a while, and then they went up a little and got flat, and they stayed that way.

  2

  Lowell and his wife had very few friends and they entertained virtually no one in their apartment except the cleaning woman, who would occasionally be found at the end of the day curled up in Lowell’s Eames chair, sound asleep with the television going full blast and a bottle of Lowell’s gin beside her on the floor. She kept the apartment as neat as a pin, was utterly reliable, and did not ask for much in the way of salary; in view of these virtues, neither Lowell nor his wife considered her drinking a major failing. Once at Christmas they tried to give her a bottle of Hankey Bannister in a gift box, which offended her so much that she almost quit and was sullen for a month. It was very difficult to know how to treat her. From time to time, with every indication of pride, she would present them with some small horror or other that her son had been forced to make at school: a plaster impression of his hand, painted gold; a green ashtray made of some crumbly, flammable compound; a plaster impression of his other hand, painted red. Although Lowell and his wife dutifully displayed every gift that came, they would always return one night to find that the cleaning lady had quietly removed it from its place and thrown it away. Anyway, she didn’t get drunk very often.

  Lowell’s best friend was the heroically moustached art director of a tobacco magazine that published in the same building where Lowell worked at plumbing. His name was Harry Balmer, and despite the evidence of his moustache he was nervous, compulsive, and wracked with small fears. He looked his best from across a wide room; the closer you got to him, the more he seemed to fall apart into a mass of twitches and gnawed fingernails and the clearer it became that his big, smart-looking moustache was a kind of bush he was trying to hide behind. Every once in a while he and Lowell would go down to McSorley’s after work and get drunk together on ale. Lowell didn’t really know if he liked Harry Balmer or not—his feelings about him were vaguely mingled and not very strong, one way or the other; he never spent much time with him except at McSorley’s, and afterward he could never remember very clearly what they’d talked about.

  “I’ve got it figured out,” he told Balmer one night as they sat with their mugs near the old cast-iron stove.

  “Good idea,” said Balmer. A group of students were making a lot of noise and falling down in the next room.

  “It came to me one morning,” said Lowell. “I’m not having a meaningful life. It came to me just like that.”

  “Bachelorhood,” said Balmer. “The only answer. Who needs a wife? Take it from me. Firmly committed. Firmly.”

  Lowell shook his head from side to side in an effort to clear it. He was certain that they’d already had Balmer’s half of this conversation before, perhaps several times, and he had the queer feeling that he wasn’t getting through. It was like trying to have a conversation with a tape recording.

  “Marry late, live long, see life,” said Balmer. “Marrying late does a lot for you. Take me, for example. Free as a bird. How come you’re looking at your watch? You’re worried about the time, aren’t you? Got to be on time. The old wife. Not me. Did you say something?”

  “I said, I’m not looking at my watch,” said Lowell.

  “Some fucker filled this ashtray with beer,” said Balmer, picking up his hopelessly sodden, half-smoked cigarette and examining it as a nerve fluttered madly in one corner of his eye.

  From time to time Lowell also went out to lunch with members of the staff, but he never drank enough to tell them anything important about himself.

  Lowell and his wife had a good time living with each other, and they seldom quarreled. Their apartment was spacious and basically comfortable despite being strangely designed, and except on weekends they were never in it during the day, when you could see the place in the living-room ceiling where the plaster was badly patched and it became evident that pale green was not the color for the bathroom. Lowell generally returned home from work about half an hour before his wife, who had to take the shuttle and might dec
ide to stop off first at Bloomingdale’s. Once a week he paid the cleaning lady before he filled the ice bucket. The other four days he went straight to

  the refrigerator first thing after hanging up his coat. In the summertime he made his wife a whiskey sour and prepared a gin and tonic for himself. In the winter he drank whiskey and soda and set aside a glass of sherry for his wife. Then he turned on the television and watched while he waited for her to get home. For the first year after they bought the set, he was in time to watch Gigantor, the Space Age Robot. Then Gigantor moved to a new time period and he watched Speed Racer. He’d seen all the episodes twice. When his wife came home he turned off the set and they made supper together while they had their drinks. Occasionally Lowell would bring in a pizza or some little paper buckets of Chinese food or, very rarely and only as a special treat, a complete Pakistani meal from a restaurant down on Broadway. They took such quiet pleasure in cooking supper together that they almost never went out, and Lowell tended to become uneasy if his routine was disturbed. Whenever he brought food in, he regretted it. No sooner did he place his order than he knew he wouldn’t like it, and he never did.

  Once every month or so, his wife would smile apologetically and a little defensively, put on her longest skirt, and pack herself over to see her mother in Flatbush like some kind of installment-plan Eurydice. Her mother still had a nice spare bedroom ready in case her daughter came to her senses, and while there was no danger of this ever occurring—at least, not that way—the knowledge that his mother-in-law continued to nourish hope was a source of considerable irritation to Lowell, especially because he suspected that she was doing it at least partly to get his goat. As he conceived it, his mother-in-law’s mind was a place of dim shadows and brooding malice, and he could find nothing in it to recommend her, but curiously his wife had made friends with her mother almost immediately after they came to New York, and they were now fast friends. They went to