by L. J. Davis
S. Klein’s together and called each other up on the telephone and talked about people with comic-opera names like Marvin and Irving who lived in comic-opera places like Canarsie and Ozone Park—people Lowell had never met but about whom his wife unaccountably seemed to know volumes. It gave their conversations a peculiar, other-dimensional quality that profoundly disturbed him, as though his wife had a second identity that was completely alien to the one Lowell knew and cherished, a whole separate personality dwelling in another ethos that he could occasionally glimpse but never understand.
“How come you never talk to your mother about me?” he asked. “I’m your husband. I’m your mother’s son-in-law. How come you never mention me?”
“It’s not polite to eavesdrop,” said his wife primly. “Anyway, we do talk about you, so there. You just aren’t eavesdropping at the right times.”
“You’re always talking about a bunch of strangers.”
“That’s not true. They’re not either strangers. I’ve known Milly Norinski for years and years. What’s the matter with you? Can’t I talk about my friends with my own mother if I want to? Anyway, I don’t even like Milly Norinski. She’s nothing but an old bag and all she can talk about is money. You’d hate her, believe me. Count yourself lucky that I only talk about her to my mother. Listen, you want me to bore you? Ask me about Milly Norinski one of these times. Boy, would you ever be bored. I only keep up with her because I’ve known her since grade school. She never used to talk about money. People turn out funny sometimes. They surprise you.”
Although over the years Lowell had heard his wife suddenly begin talking like this at odd moments, he’d never gotten used to it. Usually she didn’t talk like that. Strangers talked like that, but not his wife. He just couldn’t understand it. Sometimes he caught her bullying the butcher or fighting with the vegetable
man, and he couldn’t understand that, either. It was as though another person inhabited a little room in his wife’s mind, the Hyde lurking in the Jekyll, marching forth at certain moments to take command of the situation. It always made him worry. Sometimes he felt that he didn’t know his wife at all, or at least not much of her. Sometimes he had the feeling that the person he knew and loved in the evenings and on weekends was nothing but a cunning impersonation, speaking in his dialect, acting out a charade of mildness and happy marriage, and that the occasionally glimpsed person with the news vendor’s voice was the real one. It bothered him how easy it would be to manage it—they were together for only a few hours of their lives, not counting the times one or the other of them was asleep. Was she somebody else the rest of the time, punching computer keys and chewing gum and winking at the office boy with her legs crossed? What really disturbed him more than anything was the feeling he had that the personality he imagined for her, though crude and devious to an incredible degree, was in a strange way more complex and plausible than the one she really seemed to have, at least most of the time.
Actually, Lowell knew that all of this was pretty paranoid and ridiculous, and normally he didn’t give it a second thought once the bad moment was over. Their days went on, one piece of string tied to another, and until Lowell woke up that horrible morning soon after his birthday, it seldom crossed his mind that his little fantasies might be trying to tell him something, and not necessarily about his wife. If it did chance to cross his mind, that is exactly what it did: it came in one side and went out the other, leaving a chill little wake that was soon covered over.
Lowell tried hard to be a dutiful son-in-law, and his mother-in-law tried equally hard never to speak a word to him. If he happened to answer the phone when she called, she asked him if her daughter was there; if she was, she said, “Put her on,” and if she wasn’t, she said, “I’ll call back,” and hung up. Lowell was always very civil to her.
Part of being civil—the major and most difficult part, rather like eating a boiled sheep’s eye with good grace and a tactful smile—consisted of twice-yearly appearances in his in-laws’ living room, although never close to mealtime. He had the idea that he wasn’t kosher or something, and exactly what purpose these dinnerless, tense, and arid visits accomplished was vague. It seemed that once every six months his mother-in-law wanted to look at his fingernails and his father-in-law wanted to talk to him about Negroes, and he dutifully trundled himself out to Flatbush so that they could do it.
Everything in their apartment seemed to be either made of plastic or covered with plastic. Even some of the things that were made of plastic were covered with plastic, such as the vases of plastic flowers that were encased in polyethylene bags and tied with big faded ribbons. There was actually very little furniture, and it was arranged like a kind of exhibit: everything faced in the direction of an imaginary observer and had been placed far apart for better viewing, which made conversation difficult without a lot of swiveling around and loud talking. The transparent plastic slipcovers made this exceedingly difficult to do. They also made it exceedingly difficult to sit still. They were cold in the winter and clammy in the summer and hard to get a purchase on no matter what the weather was like, so that some part of you always felt like it was about to slither off onto the floor, even though your back was glued in place with sweat. Beneath the plastic the upholstery was pale and washed-out, as though it had been under water for a long time. There was a very little color anywhere in the apartment, and the floor was covered with spotless pale linoleum. There were no rugs anywhere. “It’s because they were born on the East Side,” said Lowell’s wife. “That’s why.” Lowell couldn’t have cared less.
“Negroes look different nowadays,” Leo told him. He was sitting on his electric Relaxacizor pad. It was making him vibrate faintly, as though with a mild palsy, especially when he nodded his head. “It’s all this intermarriage.”
“Hmmmm,” said Lowell, muscles tense from the effort of keeping himself in place. He got up and sat down again. It didn’t do any good. Out in the kitchen his mother-in-law’s voice droned on and on like a nasal radio.
“They used to look like monkeys,” said Leo. “I guess that was before your time. You can take it from me, they looked just like monkeys with big white teeth. It isn’t like that anymore. How we used to laugh. They stir them up now.”
There was a long pause. “Who does?” asked Lowell at last. If you watched Leo vibrate long enough, he began to go blurry around the edges, like a picture that was going slowly out of focus.
“The agitators,” said Leo. “The agitators stir them up. Outside agitators. They’re moving in now.”
“The agitators,” said Lowell. “I see.” He wondered how long a man could put up with this sort of conversation before he went out of his mind.
“No, no,” said Leo, leaning forward in his chair. “The agitators are stirring them up. It’s the Negroes who are moving in. The agitators aren’t moving in. You’ve got it backwards.”
Out in the kitchen his mother-in-law suddenly stopped talking, as though her voice had been cut off with a pair of shears. Leo was waiting anxiously for Lowell to say something again, and there was a peculiar moment of silence that was disturbed only by the low muttering of Leo’s machine. Everything, for some mad reason, seemed to focus on Lowell with crushing intensity. It was kind of unnerving. “That’s too bad,” he managed to say.
“Listen, they’re coming in like flies,” whispered Leo, as though you could hear some of them now, making a characteristic noise. Out in the kitchen his mother-in-law began talking again at exactly the same rate and exactly the same tone, as though the arm of a record player, having been raised for a second, had come back down on the same spot.
“It’s been going on for years,” Leo continued in the same hushed, urgent tones, with a look of mingled intimacy and fear. “Years. You know what I mean?”
Lowell agreed that he knew what Leo meant. He always felt a little drunk at his in-law’s place, and afterward he had a funny hung-over feeling, as though they had put something in his coffee. Actually, they n
ever put anything in his coffee, and he was lucky if he got any at all. When he did get some, it came in a different kind of cup from everybody else’s. He wondered if his mother-in-law kept the cup in a special place, wrapped up in a plastic bag. Drunk was not quite the way he felt; he felt like he’d watched too many girders flash past on the subway.
Lowell’s visits always came to a barren end, somewhere near the fulcrum of the afternoon, when out in the real world the real people were clearing the Sunday paper off the floor and getting out the cocktail shaker and others were putting on their hats and going out the door.
“Well, so long, Lowell,” said Leo in a false voice, shaking his hand as though still attached to the Relaxacizor. Lowell wondered if Leo thought he could make Lowell like him by shaking his hand that way. “I certainly enjoy these little visits of ours. I really look forward to them a lot, you can’t imagine. Time sure does fly and it’s too bad you have to go.”
“I...” began Lowell as his hand was shaken faster and faster, as though caught in some sort of soft, painless mechanism.
“Don’t think you have to pretend you enjoyed it,” said Leo. “I talk too much. Believe me, I know my limitations like a book. I’m talking too much right now. I bet you can’t wait to get out of here. This is a good time for it. The sun is still up and there’s a lot of light outside. If you stayed any longer I’d run out of things to say and we’d just have to sit there. It’s been good seeing you.”
“Yes,” said Lowell. “Good-bye,” he called out to the kitchen, where his mother-in-law lurked out of sight, motionless and apparently not breathing. Nine years had passed, but she still hadn’t told him what to call her, and neither had anybody else. It would have been awkward if Lowell had been trying to attract her attention in a crowd, but he didn’t think he would ever want to do that. “So long,” he called. “We’re going now.”
“I heard you,” she said.
“Er, heh,” said Leo, trying to shrug, smile, and look over his shoulder at the same time, giving such a look of toothy terror that there might have been an armed fugitive concealed behind the door.
“Good-bye, Poppa,” said Lowell’s wife.
Moving against the grain of the day, they went down the hall and got into the elevator. Out on the street, people were getting out of cars with presents and small children, but Lowell’s evening was already in the wrong place.
Lowell hadn’t planned on his in-laws when he came to New York. In a dim, haphazard way he’d known that Flatbush was somewhere nearby, more or less the same way that he knew there were stockyards in Chicago, but it had never occurred to him that he would actually have to go there. Nor had it ever occurred that going there would, in a curious and disturbing way, constitute by far the largest part of a very, very small social life. A lot of things hadn’t occurred to him. He was paying for them now. Sometimes he wondered if he was even paying for things he didn’t know about.
“I thought we were going to Berkeley,” his wife had said nine years ago, her voice coming to him down the corridor of years as clearly as if she had spoken to him only a moment before. It was the instant when his life had suddenly poised itself on an idle remark, and the hinge of fate had opened—a small moment, an utterly insignificant fragment of time that could have passed as swiftly as turning a page in a book, but instead it had changed his life forever. “Didn’t you say we were going to Berkeley?” she asked anxiously. “That’s where I want to go. All those pretty hills. I guess you’re kidding about New York, right? Berkeley is where we’re really going, isn’t it? We’re really going there, aren’t we? Lowell?”
He could still hear the voice, he could still see the room, he could still smell the old green overstuffed chair he’d been sitting in. “Maybe not,” he said. He was only teasing. Berkeley was definitely the place they were going, and the idea of going to New York instead had just sort of wandered into his mind a moment ago like a stray insect. No doubt it would have perished there at once if he hadn’t spoken it aloud. Now it was out in the open, and God help them all. Even in those days his wife had an almost marvelous tendency to seize upon and circle a vagrant or distasteful idea, trying all the variations until some sort of conclusion could be drawn from it. Occasionally these conclusions took bizarre and astonishing form, such as going to New York when you really intended to go to Berkeley, but in those days Lowell hadn’t had much practice with his wife’s mind and he could never figure out what was afoot until affairs were well advanced, often in the direction of catastrophe. He was simply not prepared to give serious thought to the matter of pulling up his life like a bush and moving it a couple of thousand miles in a strange direction. “Us pioneers think nothing of moving around,” he said with a smile. “We fought the Indians and crossed the plains.”
“You wouldn’t like it there,” said his wife. “It’s a big dirty place, and going back there is not the reason I came out here. I suppose I could stand it for a while if I had to, provided we didn’t have to live in a public-housing project or some slum. I’d rather go to Berkeley. I thought you always wanted to go to Nevada. Let me tell you, New York is no Nevada.”
“I never thought New York was like Nevada,” said Lowell. “I know better than that.”
“You don’t know a thing about it. New York is like nothing you’ve ever seen, take it from me.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Lowell righteously, flipping through his mind for a good example of something he’d seen that was like New York. All he came up with was mountains and dams. “Anyway,” he said crossly, “you’re only trying to put me down because you burned your cake.”
“That’s pretty typical of you,” said his wife. “The underhanded blow. You’re only trying to strike back because you feel inferior. You always do that. Well, it won’t work this time. I never wanted to make that silly cake in the first place. I was making it for you. I hate cake.”
“I never knew you hated cake,” said Lowell. “I’ll bet that’s not true. I’ll bet you’re just trying to get at me in a new way. What’s the matter, is it your period of something?”
“That was uncalled for,” said his wife, making a thin line of her lips. “That was really uncalled for. Just because you feel like a hick.”
“That’s got nothing to do with it,” said Lowell.
“Aha! See there, you do feel like a hick. I knew it all along, and you just admitted it.”
“Now, wait a minute,” said Lowell. He began to make a helpless gesture but stopped himself in time.
“Boy, would you ever hate it in New York. It’s a good thing you don’t have the nerve to go there. Take it from me, you would really hate it. You’d hate it more than I’m going to love Berkeley. You wouldn’t even know how to ask people for directions.”
“Hey, come on,” said Lowell. He never knew how to react to aggression. He was always kind of stunned by it.
“I hate it when you sit in a chair like that,” said his wife.
“What’s wrong with the way I’m sitting?”
“It’s weak. You’re sitting there in a weak way.”
Lowell looked down at himself, but he seemed to be sitting the same way he always did. Maybe that was what she meant. Through the kitchen door he could see the ant poison in its dish on the counter. It looked like mint jelly and it had never done a thing to stop the ants. He could see them at work now, a thin wavy line like a trail of pepper crossing the floor. A car went past in the street.
“I think maybe we really will go to New York,” he said quietly.
“I wish there were some doors in this stupid place so I could go and slam one behind me,” said his wife.
“There’s the bathroom,” said Lowell, staring at the trail of ants.
“Right,” said his wife. “I hadn’t thought of that. Boy, do I ever despise you.” She strode past him and locked herself in the bathroom.
She remained locked in the bathroom until it was time for Lowell to depart for his job at the library. After a while he stopp
ed staring at the ants and tried to persuade her to come out, but she refused to answer his pleas and gentle inquiries. She made no sound at all. Lowell began to worry. He wondered if people made any noise when they slit their wrists. He knew they didn’t make any noise afterward, and that was exactly what his wife was doing: not making any noise. Was there any lethal substance in the medicine chest? He didn’t think so, unless it was possible to kill yourself with a couple of dozen aspirin, but on the other hand, he’d never really thought about it. He considered going around to the side of the house and looking in the bathroom window, but he was afraid someone would see him; he imagined himself trying to explain to somebody, such as a policeman, that he was only looking in the bathroom window because he wanted to see what his wife was doing. He’d never get it right, and he doubted if anyone would understand him anyway.
She was still in the bathroom when he left the house, but by then he’d worried so much that he’d gotten angry and self-righteous, and he didn’t care. She was in bed when he got home. He didn’t wake her up. The following morning he’d forgotten the whole thing. He hated quarrels and was very good at putting them out of his mind, especially after a good night’s sleep.
“When do we start?” asked his wife tersely as she loaded the ancient toaster that had come with the house. She was wearing her bathrobe. It always made her look old, and Lowell hated it.
“Start what?” he asked. He was afraid she meant their quarrel. It already seemed as though it had happened in a different world.
“For New York,” she said. “We have to make plans.”
“Nonsense,” said Lowell. “We’re going to Berkeley. Let’s forget the whole thing.”
“I thought you said we were going to New York. You did say that, didn’t you?”
“Well, yes, but...”
“Why did you say we were going to New York if we’re not? Don’t let me force you into going to Berkeley. God forbid we should go to Berkeley if your heart is set on New York. Pay no attention to anything I say. You’ll never forgive me if you let me talk you out of it. Eat your breakfast.”
