A Meaningful Life

by L. J. Davis

  They stayed home most evenings and weekends. Partly it was because they had so little money—Lowell’s car brought a fat thirty-five dollars when he sold it to a lot out in Queens somewhere, and the cost of computer school was deducted from his wife’s salary, which was pitiful enough to begin with—but the main reason they didn’t go anywhere was because there didn’t seem to be anywhere to go. Whenever they tried to decide what to do, they almost never came up with anything. Sometimes they went to the New Yorker and saw an old movie. More often, they only talked about going to the New Yorker, bickering back and forth listlessly. No one ever visited them, and they never visited anyone; none of their friends from Stanford had come to New York, and Lowell’s wife was biding her time as far as her friends from Brooklyn were concerned. She never even mentioned them. She never mentioned her mother, either, and since they couldn’t afford a phone, it was possible for Lowell to forget that she existed except as a kind of dim concept. Occasionally he saw the other people in the building—a trim elderly man, a fat Chinese with a bad limp, a prosperous young couple, and a grim-looking middle-aged woman who always wore white gloves and the highest heels Lowell had ever seen anybody seriously attempt to walk on. Lowell sometimes said hello to these people when he met them in the hall, and sometimes they said hello back, but not often.

  Lowell tried writing at various times of the day to see which one suited him best. First he tried writing in the morning, and then he tried the afternoon, but the great drawback of each was that the other was left free, a procession of empty hours like so many bottles into which he was required to pour himself one by one, occupying the space for a while until it was time to pour himself into the next one. If he wrote in the morning, the barren afternoon stared him in the face; and if he wrote in the afternoon, the morning had already bored him so much that he was too benumbed to think. He tried to stimulate himself by taking long walks and observing people. Unfortunately, there were very few good places to walk, and almost no people lived in them. His apartment was on a block that had a Baptist church at one end and the playing field of an Episcopal boys’ school at the other; across the street was the back of a junior high school, and on Lowell’s side of the street were five or six brownstones inhabited by the same kind of people that lived in Lowell’s brownstone. To the north and east everything was being torn down for a vast public-housing project. To the south were endless brown blocks with no people on them, deserted, silent, and heavy, as though everyone had either moved away or died. There was a limit, he found, to the number of times he could go to Central Park; he was trying to find something, not get away from it; he wanted to be stimulated by the city, not soothed by nature, and the park was just so much more boredom, only with leaves. Nothing whatever was happening in it that he was remotely interested in. At the other end of the scale, down on Broadway, the traffic islands were full of old people sitting on benches, the men in odd-colored shabby suits turning their faces to the sun like some kind of wizened, horrible plant life, the women with their voices like aged birds of prey and their stockings held up with bits of string. Lowell could scarcely bear to look at them; it was too much like looking inside his own mind. Sometimes he went down to Riverside Park. It was dull there too. Once he walked up to Grant’s Tomb. Then he walked back home again.

  When autumn came, it was as though another blanket had fallen on the heap that smothered his spirit. It was the husk of a season—darker, colder, the light weakening in the sky in proportion as his brain seemed to dim. The streets got dirtier, and all the leaves seemed to disappear from the trees in the park in a single day; he caught distant glimpses of people hurrying along the paths with their collars turned up, going about their own unfathomable business. Surrounded by millions of people, Lowell began to worry that one day he would simply forget who he was from sheer lack of recognition in the eyes of other men; nobody knew who he was, and they let it show. The boys from the Episcopal school marshaled on the playing field for games of soccer and lacrosse, and Lowell found himself pausing beyond the tall iron fence to watch them, their cries coming to him faintly across the cinder track and grayish grass as they ran this way and that. Every evening his wife would ask him how the writing was coming, and he would tell her it was coming along fine.

  Eventually he began to write at night, principally because it solved the problem of what to do with his day: with a little clever management his day disappeared entirely and he no longer had to worry about it. He started working—or at least started sitting at the table—not long after his wife fell asleep, hooding the light and muting the typewriter until he realized that she slept like a stone and it made no difference what he did. He worked until he got either too tired or bored to continue, and then he went to bed and slept until the middle of the afternoon, waking briefly to kiss his wife good-bye in the morning, with numb lips. The drawbacks of this new arrangement were two. First, he woke up so close to suppertime that there was no point in eating lunch. On the other hand, he got so little exercise that he had almost no appetite. His reserves of energy fell and small tasks tired him, but he spent most of his wakeful time motionless in a chair, and it didn’t really bother him very much unless he had to get up for the bathroom.

  The second drawback was that, for all practical purposes, he might as well have been dead.

  At the end of four months he’d finished half a novel, vaguely concerning the foundation and early settlement of Boise, Idaho. The act of writing brought him neither transport nor release; it was like slogging through acres of deep mud and had the same effect when you read it. It read like mud. Totally by accident he had contrived to fashion a style that was both limp and dense at the same time, writing page upon page of flaccid, impenetrable description, pierced here and there by sudden, rather startling interludes of fustian and vainglory that neither adorned, advanced, nor illuminated the plot, although they did give the reader a keen insight on the kind of movies Lowell had seen as a child. Characters as insubstantial and suffocating as smoke rode huge, oddly misshapen steeds over landscapes the color of lead, occasionally bursting into song or shooting one another down for reasons best known to themselves. The only reason Lowell figured he was halfway through was that the number of pages he’d accumulated amounted to about half the length of an average novel; there was certainly no way to tell from the plot, which had mostly to do with property rights and Indian raids, complicated by the free-silver question. Nine years later Lowell was astounded that he’d ever written such a thing, much less with a straight face and purity of purpose, but at the time he drove himself onward with the fixated desperation of a man trying to dig his way out of a grave. It had ceased to matter—if, in fact, it had ever mattered to begin with—whether the novel was good or bad, marketable or a hopeless bomb; he was totally focused on the act of writing it, totally obsessed with his role as the writer of it, and there existed the possibility, given optimum conditions, that he might have gone on writing it forever, or until his wife divorced him.

  At the end of six months his wife systematically began to throw away his clothes. True, his clothes were showing a few signs of wear; Lowell had never been particularly interested in clothing, bought it as seldom as possible, and wore it as long as he could, often developing a stubborn affection for certain items. It was also true that his underwear was a disgrace, his Jockey shorts hanging in soft tatters and his undershirts so full of holes that wearing them was nothing but a formality; on the other hand, it was kind of startling to go to the suitcase that served him in lieu of a bureau and find that his possessions had been weeded again, the supply growing shorter and shorter as the days wore on, the time fast approaching when he would go to his suitcase and it would be empty. Worse than that, it was kind of sinister to have laid out your shirt and pants before going to bed and then wake up to find one or the other of them gone, the contents of its pockets heaped up on the table beside the typewriter. He always intended to buy replacements, but he never got around to it, and meanwhile no amount of grumbli
ng would make his wife stop. She had a case and he didn’t, and that was that; his clothes were really wearing out—perhaps not quite as fast as they were being thrown out, but that was purely conjectural and largely in the eye of the beholder, especially when it came to arguing about it—and he really did forget to buy new ones, so when you came right down to it, he had no one to blame for his impending nudity but himself. If a kinder fate had not intervened, it was altogether possible that Lowell would soon have been totally naked, hovering thin and birdlike and obsessed above the typewriter like some kind of crackpot anchorite. Although this state of affairs would have precluded ever leaving the apartment again, at least alive, that would have been all right too. A change had gradually come over him as winter approached, and instead of a desperate craving for the smallest personal contact, he had begun to fear it. He could no longer look tradesmen in the eye, and it was an ordeal to encounter another person on an empty street; he couldn’t figure out what to do with his eyes, and he began to walk funny, like a person doing a bad but well-meaning imitation of the real thing. Eventually he became more afraid that he would behave peculiarly than he was embarrassed by being noticed while doing it, and he stuck more closely to the room than ever.

  One day, in going over his papers, he discovered that his wife had thrown out his birth certificate. There was no proof that she had done so, but the damn thing was gone, and he knew instinctively what had happened to it. It was a blue piece of crackly paper with all of Lowell’s statistics arranged in graceful script above a gold medallion and the signatures of the delivering physician, the resident, and the director of the hospital, just like a diploma. It not only proved that he had been born, but the fact that he possessed it proved that he was a grown-up. His mother had sent it to him, along with all his vaccination certificates, when she returned home after the wedding. Now it was gone. He rifled the shoebox where these things were kept, he scoured the room, searched the wastebasket and then the garbage cans outside, but it was nowhere to be found. His wife had thrown it away, just as she occasionally threw away scraps of paper on which he’d scribbled some important thought. It was gone. Lowell was overwhelmed with anger, dizzy with rage. For so many months his mental state had been a constant, curiously placid amalgam of boredom and despair—a graph of it would have shown a flat, straight line with a slight downward tilt. He wasn’t used to strong emotions anymore; he was out of practice; he was assaulted by his own anger. It was as though a powerful dynamo had suddenly been switched on inside a frail shed. He couldn’t cope. He had to lie down. After a while he threw up, and then he just lay on the bed inertly, smitten down, exhausted, drained, and kind of surprised, like a teen-ager who had beaten off to climax for the first time in his life. Not even the spectacle of his wife coming in the door at her usual time could rouse him from his torpor: his psyche was in limp tatters, like an old Kleenex dredged up from the bottom of a purse. He looked at her dully.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “You look like your best friend just died.” She took off her coat and shoes and prepared to sweep the floor.

  “I can’t find my birth certificate,” said Lowell. “It’s not in the shoebox or anywhere.”

  “What on earth did you want your birth certificate for? Are you sure it can’t be found?”

  “Positive. It must have gotten thrown out. There’s no other explanation.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody would have done a thing like that. You probably overlooked it. Here, give me the box.”

  Lowell gave her the box, and she made a great show of looking through it, arranging the various documents on the table like a hand of solitaire, then scooping them up again. “That’s funny,” she said. “You’re right, it isn’t here. Maybe you left it out and it fell in the wastebasket. Anyway, it’s no big disaster. If you ever need it, you can always send for a photostat.”

  Lowell agreed that he could always send for a photostat. He didn’t want a photostat. Photostats were dead-looking. He lay back on the bed and decided to forget the whole thing. His wife’s bluff had not convinced him, but on the other hand, he could all too easily imagine the kind of scene that would ensue if he tried to accuse her of guilt. It was a scene in which he would sound like a nut.

  When he woke up the next afternoon, his wife was sitting in the chair across the room, wearing Levis and reading a book.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, the words cutting their way with difficulty through the thickets of sleep that clogged his brain. Waking up and seeing his wife there was as unsettling as if he’d woken up in a strange room. “What time is it? Should I be asleep? I mean, did I oversleep or did I wake up too soon? That’s what I mean.”

  “It’s Saturday,” said his wife. “I don’t work on Saturday, and I never have. You sure are mixed up.”

  “I’m not mixed up,” said Lowell, feeling a cold little feather of panic brush the back of his neck. “It was Saturday a couple of days ago. It can’t be Saturday again. It must be Tuesday or something. Where’s yesterday’s paper?”

  Lowell always bought the late edition of the Times first thing when he woke up in the afternoon. He searched for it high and low, his pajama fly gaping foolishly. “It’s gone,” he said a little wildly. What would disappear next?

  “I don’t remember any paper,” said his wife. “I don’t think you’ve bought a paper since last Sunday, and I bought that one. No, wait; I remember, you bought one on Wednesday. I used part of it to line the garbage can and threw the rest out.”

  “Wednesday,” said Lowell. Putting his mind to it, he realized that he could not, in fact, remember buying a paper yesterday; that is, he couldn’t remember the act itself in the specific context of yesterday. He could remember the act well enough, but when he tried to recall doing it yesterday, he discovered that he couldn’t even remember if he’d left the room except to hunt in the garbage for his birth certificate. Yet he always bought a newspaper; along with eating, going to the bathroom, and writing his book, it was one of the few things he did every day. He tried to remember if he’d gone to the bathroom yesterday. He was pretty sure he’d eaten. His wife would have seen to that. “Saturday,” he said. “Yes, of course. It slipped my mind. I mean, I was sleepy. I’m okay now.”

  “Good,” said his wife. “Why don’t we take a walk before it gets dark?”

  Lowell numbly put on what clothes he could find, and his wife more or less led him outside. Undoubtedly because of his earlier confusion, he had the absurd impression that several buildings had been put up in the urban-renewal area since the last time he’d looked in that direction, but he put the thought right out of his mind.

  That night, nothing he wrote made any sense. It didn’t make any sense at all. The forms of words had overwhelmed their functions, and his head was filled with meaningless babble. It was like pronouncing “Ethiopia” too many times, until it became an intricate but purely arbitrary arrangement of sound. It happened to every word that came into his head. Hammer away as he would, all he could get down on paper was a kind of impervious nonsense; he couldn’t even decide whether to use a conjunction, a semicolon, or start a new sentence, not that it mattered much. Every new sentence was as meaningless as the last. He erased holes in his paper, he inserted fresh sheets and began again, but it was as though his mind had gotten itself plugged into some kind of shortwave band where all you could get were interminable propaganda broadcasts in obscure Central European languages, alternately faint and loud, incessant. After a couple of hours of struggle, exhausted, Lowell climbed into bed with his clothes on and fell instantly asleep. He dreamed of rocks and cold oatmeal and woke up far earlier than usual, although without the clean sensation of stepping from sleep into consciousness. It was as though his shortwave had been turned down during the night, drumming away just on the threshold of audibility while he dreamed, and now it had been turned up again. It was a horrible, swarming feeling.

  His wife was in the kitchen, wearing odd bits of clothes and underwear
as she went about preparing her breakfast. Lowell tried to remember the last time he’d made love to her. It seemed like months, but it was hard to be sure.

  “The least you could do,” she said, regarding him without pleasure or surprise, “would be to take off your shoes before you come to bed. I’m just about kicked black and blue.”

  Lowell looked down. It was true. He was wearing his shoes in bed. His feet felt enormously heavy as he swung them to the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said, trying to tuck in his shirt while sitting down, not having much luck at it.

  “You should be,” said his wife. “What a stupid thing to do. How did the writing go?”

  “It’s coming along,” said Lowell. He stood up, small change and keys falling to the floor from various folds of his clothing. He felt heavy. “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Eight o’clock,” said his wife. “You finally kicked me out of bed about a quarter of an hour ago. The one morning I really get to sleep. You want some breakfast?”