A Meaningful Life

by L. J. Davis

  “Well, I’m kind of looking around for a job. I mean, Betty said maybe you could sort of give me some advice. I would have called, but nobody knew your number, so I just came over. If I came at the wrong time or something, I sure am sorry. I don’t like to barge in like this. What I mean is...”

  “What did you do before?”

  “I was writing a novel.”

  Some slight readjustment of Uncle Lester’s features told Lowell that this last piece of information had finally certified him as a member of the family. He needed a job, and he’d been writing a novel. His credentials were complete: he was another dead-beat relative.

  “Can you do paste-ups and mechanicals?” Uncle Lester asked.

  “What’s a paste-up?” asked Lowell.

  “That’s too bad,” said Uncle Lester. He wrote something on a pad, tore it off, and held it out. “Try this one. If it don’t work out, come back and see me next Wednesday about eleven o’clock in the morning. It ought to work out.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” said Lowell. He wondered if he ought to shake hands, but Uncle Lester had put his hands back into his overcoat pockets, and Lowell didn’t think he’d better risk it.

  “It ought to work out,” Uncle Lester repeated. He took a step toward the door and nodded toward it curtly. “After you.”

  Lowell thought it was strange that Uncle Lester was preparing to leave his office when he’d only just entered it. Maybe the office was only some kind of dummy, its doors and windows watched with mirrors and covered with guns, while Uncle Lester monitored his callers from a real office around the corner. Come to think of it, the place didn’t look much like an office; there was no rug on the floor, the filing cabinet had all the earmarks of a prop, and there wasn’t a piece of paper in sight. Wisely keeping his own counsel about these things, Lowell allowed himself to be herded into the hall. Uncle Lester carefully locked the door and turned to face him. “You got enough money for the subway?” he asked.

  Lowell said he did, and before he could start in again with expressions of gratitude and humility, Uncle Lester turned and walked down the hall and around the corner without looking back. Lowell took the piece of paper to the address that was written on it and was immediately given a job writing copy about the doings of plumbers. His wife settled down almost as if a wand had been waved over her, bought a black garter belt, and never chewed gum again.

  Having settled in his mind that his job was only temporary, Lowell was not ambitious and took things much as they came. It was easy work, and he went about it day after day rather in the same way that he sometimes wore a single suit for weeks on end. At first he and his wife had a few fitful discussions about children, but they kept putting it off, and soon their life had organized itself so comfortably that the idea just kind of petered out from lack of interest. Lowell’s mother-in-law brought up the subject once or twice, driving it further back into the recesses of his mind, but eventually even she gave up.

  Nine years: an endless chain of days, a rosary of months, each as smooth and round as the one before, flowing evenly through his mind. You could count on the fingers of one hand the events and pauses of all that time: two promotions; two changes of apartment (each time nearer the river); a trip to Maine, where he realized that his wife’s legs had gotten kind of fat—five memories in nine years, each no more than a shallow design scratched on a featureless bead. It was life turned inside out; somewhere the world’s work was being done and men were laboring in the vineyards of the Lord, Khrushchev was being faced down on the high seas, and Negroes were being blown up and going to jail, but all Lowell did was change his apartment twice, tell his wife to put on some pants, and get promoted faster than anybody else on the paper—a tiny, dim meteor in an empty matchbox. Nobody up at Life or on the staff of the Paris Review was sleeping badly and trembling for their job because of redhot Lowell Lake; he couldn’t even remember the layout of his own apartment, and the doorman kept confusing him with someone named Mr. Stone who lived on the top floor. One day Lowell saw Mr. Stone. He was about fifty years old, almost bald, and had a furtive, terrified, scurrying air about him, as though momentarily expecting the pounce of an enormous cat. There was no similarity between them whatever except for the moustache, and Mr. Stone’s was black, not blond, and probably dyed. The doorman was a notorious dimwit and about as useful as a potted fern, but Lowell brooded about it for weeks, and the next time Povachik called him “Mr. Stone” it was all he could do to keep from screaming in the man’s face.

  Seated at his desk with a sick feeling of dread in his stomach, Lowell stared at the ceiling and tried to think of something smart and meaningful that would impart a sense of purpose to his life and clothe his actions with nobility. Novel-writing was out. He’d reread his old manuscript two nights ago while drunk and last night while sober, but the perspective of years had not dimmed its overwhelming livid awfulness, and his relative condition while reading it did not alter his perception of it in the least; it read exactly the same when he was drunk as when he was sober. Over the years he’d developed a serviceable hack style that enabled him to say anything he had a mind to, provided it had to do with meetings, banquets, simple objects, and building codes; it was a style that tended to tire quickly, and something odd seemed to happen to it over distances longer than a couple of standard columns. It didn’t get dull, exactly, but it started to look distinctly funny, like a man who had held his breath for too long. No doubt he could have done something about it, whipped it into some kind of shape, were it not for the fact that he had nothing whatever to write about. Every so often—although with steadily diminishing frequency—a weak urge, a kind of feeble longing, would afflict him, and he would feel the old need to get something down on paper, start another novel, work up a story, something. His ambition would burn palely for a while and then gutter out with nothing to show for itself. The truth was, he realized now, he had no subject matter. Nothing had ever happened to him. He’d grown up, gone to school, tried and failed to write a novel, and become the managing editor of a plumbers’ newspaper. Written down with a straight face, his life would sound like one of those pointless Victorian morality tales, usually found in books entitled something like Food for Thought that his Sunday-school teacher had been so fond of reading aloud to the class. Once he’d almost been felled by a copy of The New York Times, and his doorman couldn’t tell him apart from a fifty-year-old man. It was true that his parents ran a whorehouse, but he couldn’t very well write about that; everyone in town would recognize them, and their feelings would be hurt. Anyway, except for the bald recital of the facts, he couldn’t for the life of him think of how to turn his parents’ occupation into a story. He was forced to conclude that the writing of fiction was definitely not his bag.

  It was surprisingly easy for him to imagine what the rest of life held in store for him, short of Negro rebellion or atomic war. It did not hold much, and he would go through it sort of standing around mutely in tense attitudes reminiscent of Montgomery Clift, not particularly liking what was happening to him but totally unable to think of a single thing to do about it. He wasn’t talented. It was possible that he wasn’t even very smart. It seemed to him that a smart person would have gotten bored with his kind of life after a couple of months, but it had taken Lowell nine years. If his wife had had a baby right away, the kid would be in the fourth grade by now, and his daddy would only just have gotten bored. It was a frightening thought.

  “Lake!” bellowed Crawford from the doorway, his voice, as usual, having a cigar in the middle of it. Lowell took his eyes off the ceiling. “Morning, Harold,” he said.

  “Bah!” said Crawford, snatching his cigar from his mouth, examining it with an expression of total disgust, and putting it back in his mouth again. Occasionally he would swallow tobacco juice in the middle of some forceful utterance and nearly choke to death. “Do you think you’re paid to do nothing but sit around?”

  This was precisely what Lowell was paid for, but he di
dn’t say so out loud. “Aw, gee, Harold,” he said instead. He gestured vaguely toward his desk.

  “At least you can try to look like you’re doing something!” Crawford barked. Lowell could tell that secretly he was happy as a clam and enormously relieved to find that his associate had relapsed into typical somnolence after two weeks of strange facial expressions and small, muted cries of anguish. Crawford had been going around as if hearing rumors that the planet was departing from its orbit, peering nervously at Lowell from around corners and across rooms. “Or is it too much of an effort to deceive people?” he went on in a delighted snarl. “The managing editor! Great Caesar’s ghost, do I have to do all the work on this newspaper myself?” He snatched up a piece of paper from Lowell’s desk and strode out of the cubicle, chewing his cigar like an obscene brown tongue. He was back in a flash. “WHAT IN GOD’S NAME DO YOU CALL THIS?” he roared, furiously shaking the sheet of paper under Lowell’s nose.

  “It’s a shopping list,” said Lowell mildly.

  “A SHOPPING LIST?” Crawford’s neck seemed to grow larger as well as more red, spilling out over the edge of his collar. “A typed shopping list? On letterhead stationery? Are you out of your mind?”

  “I can’t read my wife’s handwriting,” explained Lowell. “Margaret can. She’s a real whiz at it. She always reads my wife’s shopping lists and types them out for me. Otherwise I wouldn’t know what to buy on my way home at night. It’s nothing to get excited about.”

  “Lake,” said Crawford, putting down the shopping list with a kind of awesome gentleness, “if I didn’t have a newspaper to run...”

  “I put the dummy on your desk an hour ago,” said Lowell, understanding by his superior’s ritual phrase that the game was drawing to a close.

  “Spagh!” exclaimed Crawford, getting (or pretending to get) something loathsome on his tongue. Pressing a handkerchief to his mouth, he stormed from the room. A second later Lowell heard him growling contentedly to himself on the other side of the partition, where he occupied a cubicle slightly larger but in some indefinable way more squalid than Lowell’s. He was at peace again, his paranoia momentarily laid to rest. A firm and practicing believer in the limitless mutability of man, he nevertheless had a touching faith that the last mood he had encountered in a person was the one he would sustain for the rest of his natural life. Lowell was a sleepy, genial blockhead again, and a sleepy, genial blockhead he would trustworthily remain. Crawford always had everybody all figured out.

  That night on his way home from work, Lowell stopped off in the Village and bought a 1930’s-style tweed motoring coat with a belted back and double vents. It went beautifully with his trousers and cap, and he wore it home beneath his overcoat.

  “What on earth is that?” his wife demanded the moment she saw it, her voice alarmed and her eyes widening as if he’d suddenly burst into the bedroom carrying a pair of handcuffs and an eggbeater.

  “It’s time for a change,” said Lowell. “We’ve gotten in a rut, and it’s time to get out. This coat is only the beginning of a whole new era.”

  “I don’t understand,” said his wife. “What kind of a change? Will it be expensive? Have you thought about it and weighed all the pros and cons?”

  “I think you’ve got the wrong idea,” said Lowell, although he couldn’t have told her what the right idea was. He’d bought the coat on pure impulse—itself a sign that things were coming loose in his mind, although it was still impossible to tell whether they were loosening up nicely or were about to throw themselves from side to side like loose cargo in a storm at sea. He never did anything on impulse, never. No wonder his wife was worried.

  The next evening he went to a shop on Greenwich Avenue and bought himself a pair of tweed trousers and a set of leather gaiters. He wore them home. Having committed himself to a policy of new-clothing purchase, it only seemed right that he should make an effort to complete his first costume, although he was beginning to feel a little reluctant. He hoped that if he could contrive to change his exterior in some smart, hip way, then some kind of smart, hip change would occur inside himself and he would see new paths before him and discover hidden potentialities that he hadn’t dreamed existed. Smart and hip, however, was not exactly the way he felt as he surveyed the figure he presented in the mirror of the clothing store, clad in tweed and gaiters, with a snap-brim cap on his head. No, smart and hip he definitely wasn’t; by some strange instinct, he had succeeded in turning himself into an almost exact sartorial replica of the youthful Harold Macmillan.

  “You’re trying to tell me something,” said his wife as, thus garbed, he entered the kitchen later that evening. “I don’t understand it yet, but I’m definitely getting signals.”

  “It’s nothing of the sort,” said Lowell, plumping down dejectedly on one of the chairs with his cap wadded in his hand. Secretly he’d hoped to end up looking like Dr. Grimesby Roylott, and this had happened to him instead. He didn’t even know why he’d gone ahead and paid for the damned things, much less worn them home. He supposed it was a good thing he hadn’t tried to look like John Kennedy; with his luck, he would have ended up looking like Richard Nixon. “A top hat,” he said. “Maybe a top hat would have done it.”

  “You’ll have to speak up,” said his wife. “Either I can’t hear you or you’re not making sense.”

  “Everything is all wrong.”

  “Are you going to start up on that again? Listen, why don’t you go see an analyst or something. I mean it. Lots of people do. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Nobody even has to know about it unless you tell them. You can go on your lunch hour. You never eat lunch anyway.”

  “I don’t need an analyst. It’s not that sort of thing.”

  His wife looked at him pointedly, but he pretended to ignore her, and set about getting as drunk as he could. First he made his wife a little drink, then began making his own drinks stronger and stronger; if she was a little drunk herself, she never noticed a thing. Lowell always hoped that some good idea would occur to him while he was drunk. But if any did, he was never able to remember them in the morning.

  His life wasn’t breaking up. On the contrary, it failed to show the smallest fissure in its bland and seamless surface. It was like the old movie scene where the hero enters a cab, only to find that the insides of the doors have no handles and the glass partition cannot be shouted through or broken. He was along for the ride whether he liked it or not, and perhaps a deadly gas would soon begin to seep insidiously from some concealed orifice and put him back to sleep forever. Strong measures were clearly called for; time was short. Lowell had an idea that people in his circumstances didn’t get to wake up just every day. Already he felt himself fighting sleep, struggling against the old suicidal urge to lie back and take it easy like a good fellow. His first escape attempts had failed: it was apparently impossible, at least for Lowell, to think, drink, or clothe himself out of his situation. There was still no light at the end of the tunnel. The moment had come for a supreme effort. It was now or never, he told himself, now or never; while from some distant recess deep in his brain, a tiny voice kept whispering that if he hadn’t done it by now, he was never going to do it. Lowell didn’t listen to the little voice. Instead, he stared at the ceiling above his little cubicle at the office and reviewed his options, one by one.

  Realistically speaking and fantasy put ruthlessly aside, these were few and discouraging. He could change jobs, find satisfying and creative labor, conquer new worlds. A good plan; too bad he wasn’t trained to do anything. He supposed he could go back to college, but every time the notion came into his head, a sort of wall seemed to crash down between his eyes and his brain. He was definitely not going back to college. He was no more going back to college than he was going to spend the rest of his life on some beach in a little hut made of driftwood and leaves. Nor was he going to look for another job. The more he thought about abandoning his present job and going out to look for another one, the wider appeared the abyss that seemed to y
awn at his feet. He wouldn’t be throwing himself on the market; he would be throwing himself into a hole. He knew his limitations. Anyway, he couldn’t think of anything else that he wanted to do. He was forced to conclude that he really wasn’t cut out for capitalism. Under the circumstances, he was far, far better off where he was. Eventually he would become editor, and then—unlike Crawford—he would farm out all the work. He could see himself doing it as clearly as if he’d already done it. In the world of work, it was his destiny, and he decided to accept it. Better to accept it than to court certain fiasco.

  As for the arts, they fell into the category of unrealizable fantasy. Writing was out, he’d never played a musical instrument and had no desire to learn, and the only thing he’d ever painted was the side of a house, about fifteen years ago. The very idea of artistic achievement was preposterous, bittersweet though his memories were of his lost ambitions and smothered hopes. He considered doing a research project on some subject that interested him, writing up his findings in his best journeyman prose, and sending them off to some good place like American Heritage. He thought about it for a while, but nothing interested him that much.

  His whole problem, he finally decided, was simple lack of scope. His life had no scope whatever; rooms and hallways and subway cars were his portion, with an occasional street thrown in. He went in the direction he was pushed, and stood where he was told. Should catastrophe strike in his vicinity, he would participate in it in some passive way, perhaps by adding himself to the roll of the slain, perhaps as a dazed survivor, perhaps as a stunned bystander, depending on his distance from ground zero. If no catastrophe struck, he would continue on his way. When newscasters talked about pedestrians, they were talking about Lowell; on the rare occasions that he drove, he was a motorist; at least twice a day he was a subway rider; the night the power failed, he was a trapped subway rider; when one of his acquaintances sickened, he became a well-wisher; in any given situation he occupied the dead center of his role and seldom spoke to anyone. He might just as well have gone to Nevada and died of ignorance and exposure for all the good he’d been to anyone since, except as a kind of statistical entity. The whole thing was pretty depressing.