A Meaningful Life

by L. J. Davis

  “It's a slice of life, my dear,” said his wife.

  “This is the back parlor,” said the real-estate man as he detached himself from Henry. He indicated the front wall, where a plasterboard partition, its edges not matching and its nails badly driven, filled a wide, arched doorway. It was painted a different, more disturbingly fleshlike shade of pink than the rest of the room. A roach was crawling on it. "There may be sliding doors under there,” said the real-estate man. "Originally there were, but there's no way of telling. Sometimes they have silver doorknobs and panels of stained glass. If there was a hole we could see.” He seemed to regret that there was no hole. Lowell wondered what the tiny Puerto Ricans thought of all this. He found himself hoping that they really didn't understand English.

  “Look at that molding up there,” said the real-estate man, pointing at the worm-and-lettuce medallion in the middle of the ceiling. "You can chip that paint right off.”

  “Thank you very much,” said Lowell to the Puerto Ricans. "I'm sorry to have intruded. Thanks again.” He felt a compelling, incomprehensible urge to go on saying variants of "thank you,” smiling idiotically, and nodding along with his host, until he was either dragged from the room by force or somehow managed to convince them that his soul was pure.

  “No, no,” said the little man, rising from the chair with a desperate grin. Apparently he had fallen prey to a similar urge as Lowell's but was less capable of restraining it, no doubt because of his Latin temperament. "No, no, ess okay, yes? Ess okay, ess okay.” Smiling and bobbing his head, he followed Lowell to the door, patting him very lightly on the arm as though wanting to reassure him but afraid that this might not be the way Americans did it. "Good-bye,” he said, somehow contriving to smile even more broadly. He ushered Lowell and his party out into the hall, then closed the door slowly, smiling through the narrowing aperture. "Good-bye, good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” chimed the little lady from her chair as the door finally closed. Lowell felt drained.

  “This was the sewing room,” said the real-estate man, taking Lowell's arm in the same place where the Puerto Rican had patted it and turning him around in his tracks. Lowell found himself facing another door. They were all jammed together so tightly in the hallway that Lowell could smell his wife's powder and the liquor on Henry's breath and the sour odor of his own clothing. The real-estate man seemed to have no smell at all.

  “Shit, man,” said Henry. "That Bowman Parker's room. It ain't no sewing room, no kind of sewing room at all. What's the matter with you, anyhow? Don't go knocking there, he work nights. I said, don't go knocking there.”

  The real-estate man put his hand on the door and silently pushed it open. The room was deep but no more than seven or eight feet wide, and it ended in another tall window. A thin Negro man was sitting hunched over on the unmade bed, wearing nothing but a pair of pants and a set of what appeared to be Army dogtags. His feet and hands seemed far too big for his body. The light was off and the room was very dim in the twilight. The man looked up at them and then looked back at the floor. On a small table at the head of the bed was an alarm clock and a pack of Pall Malls.

  “Probably there was a door in that wall,” said the real-estate man, "connecting this room with the one we were just in. Actually, this place hasn't been cut up as badly as some. Originally there were twenty-one rooms, and all of them are still more or less intact.”

  “Twenty-one rooms?” said Lowell's wife. "Who needs twenty-one rooms? What would you do with them all? How would you keep them clean?” Lowell could tell that she was impressed, but it was difficult to guess in what way. He looked down at the man on the bed and wondered what was going through his mind and how he occupied his days. "Servants,” said the real-estate man. He gently closed the door and cut the man off from view. Lowell wondered if he knew they were gone. "All right, Henry, we'll have a look at your room now.”

  To Lowell's surprise, Henry turned and led them down the hall to his door, muttering about how some people didn't have no fucking respect. Lowell allowed himself to be carried along. The deeper his reluctance to continue this farce bored into his spirit, the less will he seemed to have to resist.

  Henry's room was almost totally dark. There seemed to be no lights, and the windows were covered with all manner of things: old roller blinds, shredded at the bottom, perhaps by a cat or a child with long fingernails; scraps of old bedsheets, swaybacked and rumpled on limp strings; taped-up yellowing newspapers; pages torn from magazines; squares of Woolworth oilcloth; rags; cheap lace curtains, far too short, very old, turning to dust. Every window had a separate and distinct history, like the exposed strata in the face of a cliff, thickest at the bottom and growing thinner toward the ceiling, the layers never completely overlapping. Stray emanations of twilight filtered in through the chinks. It was hard to decide whether Henry feared the sun or simply hated the sight of the street; perhaps he suspected spies and peeping toms, and Lowell couldn't imagine how he'd gotten through to the sash, much less opened it, when the real-estate man had knocked. Maybe he had a technique.

  Enough light came through the open door so that shapes were visible, although not very clearly. Boxes and cartons and great looming things were heaped around in the gloom, in some cases all the way up to the ceiling, taking up half the floor space and containing God knew what-dead rats and old rags by the smell of them. Pictures and notices were taped haphazardly around wherever the walls were clear, but except for a Kennedy portrait clipped from the Daily News and a headline that said REJOICE, Lowell couldn't make most of them out too well in the dimness; he had a vague impression that most of them were about cows or religion. A pot of grits was boiling on the stove, stirred by a woman who seemed to be clothed in the same general sort of material that the windows were covered with, but he couldn't see her too well either, and it was hard to be sure. Her hand and the spoon stood out in the strange weak light from the burner, but her face was hidden in shadow. She seemed to watch them the whole time they were there, her hand slowly stirring. It was difficult for Lowell to look away from it.

  “The occasional parlor,” said the agent. "A room usually kept closed except for receptions, parties, important visitors, and major family holidays. The ceiling is pretty elaborate, and there are two big fireplaces in here somewhere. Why don't you put on the light, Henry?”

  “Power failed,” said Henry.

  “That's too bad. I'll have to mention that to Mr. Grossman when I call him up this evening, along with your cooperative attitude.”

  “Be sure and do that,” said Henry.

  They left the room and went upstairs, the agent leading, followed by Lowell's wife, then Lowell, and finally Henry, who hadn't spoken a single word, either of greeting, introduction, explanation, or farewell to his wife, or whoever she was.

  “Soul food, huh?” said Lowell utterly at random and completely without forethought. He'd been searching for something pleasant to say, and it just sort of popped out.

  Henry responded with an expression of implacable hatred. Lowell began to feel nervous about walking ahead of him.

  “Last year alone,” intoned the agent as they climbed the winding and apparently interminable staircase, "last year alone, twenty-two houses were sold in the area for renovation. That's not counting respectable old families who've been persuaded to stay on. You might say we've turned the corner,” he concluded just as, in fact, he turned a corner onto a landing and passed from Lowell's sight.

  “Respectable families my ass,” muttered Henry. "Ain't nobody going to sell no fucking house to nobody till I gets my two thousand dollars. No, sir. Two thousand dollars, and I ain't seen a penny of it. Doing plaster. Painting. Climbing fucking stairs. Shee-it!”

  Lowell fell into a daze. He reached the landing, and they looked at more rooms. The more rooms they looked at, the more dazed Lowell felt. No longer embarrassed, scarcely feeling a thing, he stared blankly through the open doors of other people's lives, and turned away without a word.

>   “The master bedroom,” said the agent, gesturing into a room inhabited by strings of laundry and a young Puerto Rican couple, who had been interrupted either while making love or thinking hard about it. The girl, wrapped in a sheet beneath which she was rather obviously nude, turned her face to the wall and kept it there, furiously, throughout Lowell's visit, while her shirtless and shoeless husband (who was, nevertheless, wearing a beret that was more natty and smart-looking than any headgear Lowell had ever owned) followed them about the room with his arms folded across his chest and an extremely pissed-off expression on his face. There was a fireplace in the room, but it was different from the one that was downstairs.

  Another room was in the turret. It was about ten feet tall and not much larger in diameter than the inside of a barrel, and it had no walls to speak of. Instead of walls, there were two enormous curved windows. "How do you do?” said the little old white man who lived there. He was wearing a bathrobe over a pair of long johns. He was also wearing shoes and stockings held up with old-fashioned garters, which had the effect of making his feet look both huge and quaint. "I'm the bat in the belfry,” he told them. "This is the belfry. I'm the bat. A bat in the belfry and spooks in the cellar. I'm not as crazy as I sound. You try living with colored people sometime and see how you like it.”

  “That's okay, Charlie,” said Henry fondly, the way you might speak to a favorite old dog. "That's okay. You get on back in bed now, hear?”

  The rear bedroom was occupied by a drunken Negro woman who was attempting to cook something amid dense billows of smoke while three small children, none of them wearing anything below the waist, played on the bed with old baby bottles and a couple of empty beer cans. Next door was another sewing room. It was darker than Henry's place, smelled powerfully of cigars, and was occupied by a crone who remained in the shadows, her presence barely visible but powerfully felt, like the emanations of a witch who had almost, but not quite, succeeded in turning herself invisible. Upstairs in the largest room a family of Puerto Ricans was eating supper at a big, plastic-looking table; they became utterly motionless the moment the real-estate man and his little party trooped in, and they remained utterly motionless-knives and forks in their hands, untasted food growing cold in front of them, jaws not moving, throats not swallowing, an absent smile playing about the lips of the head of the household-until the little party trooped back out again. They reminded Lowell of some French painting or other, but he couldn't remember which one.

  “I think maybe we've seen enough,” he suggested, it seemed for the dozenth time. "I mean, it's getting kind of late and everything.”

  “There's still the servants' quarters,” said the agent firmly. "Also the dining room and kitchen. You'll want to see them, surely?”

  “By all means,” said Lowell's wife. "Also the cellar. My husband is very knowledgeable about furnaces and pipes.”

  They climbed to the old servants' quarters in the top of the house-a series of little rooms incredibly close together, clustered around a central foyer-but although the odor of some ghastly boiled foodstuff hung heavily in the air, no one could be persuaded to open their door. Lowell was glad.

  “This was the old dumbwaiter,” said the agent, indicating a gap in the paneling that was filled to the brim with crumpled papers-cups and wads of what appeared to be used toilet paper. He'd gotten very cross as he knocked fruitlessly on door after door, and Lowell had the impression that he pointed out the dumbwaiter from some spiteful private motive.

  “Dumbwaiter my ass,” muttered Henry.

  They marched back downstairs. Lowell was somehow next to last again, with Henry behind him. He wondered if he should try to make some explanation about his soul-food remark, but although the urge to do so was powerful, he couldn't think of any good-sounding mitigating comment. Fortunately it took less time to go down the stairs than it had to go up them, and he managed not to blurt anything out before they reached the bottom, where the real-estate man asked him if he'd noticed the banister.

  “Was there something special about it?” asked Lowell.

  “It had a very graceful curve,” said the real-estate man, fixing him with the same kind of look that he had bestowed on the doors that had refused to open. "It's one of the principal features of the house.”

  “Oh,” said Lowell, hoping that he wouldn't be made to run back to the top of the house and look at it.

  “Let's see the furnace,” said his wife.

  “There's solid mahogany under that paint,” grumbled the real-estate man as he turned and led them down another flight of stairs, a dark one that seemed to descend into a cave of night. Lowell couldn't see where to put his feet, and his balance became uncertain, but he didn't want to support himself with the walls for fear of what they might have been smeared or impregnated with. No light whatever filtered down the stairway from the hall above, and his eyes were filled with swarming shapes. "Solid mahogany,” said the disembodied voice of the agent from somewhere ahead of him and below. "All it needs is a little paint remover.”

  A door was thrown open at the foot of the stairs, a dim rectangle of light in the impenetrable tissue of the darkness, and although Lowell was still unable to see where to put his feet, he could now see where he was going. The knowledge made him feel better, but not for long. A great warm wave of new horrible odors, different both in degree and intensity from the old horrible odors that he'd almost gotten used to, rolled up over him and nearly knocked him flat. It was like the first whiff of the atmosphere of some alien planet: heavy, warm, barely breathable, seemingly compounded of urine and stale oatmeal in equal measure. Any astronaut in his right mind would have closed the airlock and gone straight home, but Henry was still behind Lowell, and he pressed on.

  “I think I'm going to be sick,” said Lowell's wife as they emerged into the light. "No, I guess not.”

  The hallway where they had emerged was low, narrow, and painted some dark color that once might have been a kind of green; now it looked black, but not exactly, and gave the impression that the walls weren't really solid but composed of some substance that would yield and engulf anyone unwary enough to lean on them. Somewhere a television set throbbed with a hollow sound, as though speaking from the bottom of a deep, narrow pit. Dozens of suits of men's clothing were hung from the sprinkler pipe on metal hangers. It was hard to move around without becoming entangled in them, a situation that was not improved by the fact that none of them were very clean and most of them were very old; it was like being embraced by a bum's ghost.

  “Mrs. Blouse?” called the agent, pushing his way through the suits with a show of considerable bad grace. Evidently he was still mad about the banister. "Mrs. Blouse!” he called again, banging on a door whose surface was patched in several places with squares of battered tin. In a moment, to the accompaniment of strident muffled shouting, it was opened by a little Negro girl of five or six. She regarded them expressionlessly.

  “You just keep on like that, Rory Fitzgerald,” said a shrill woman's voice from somewhere in the room, apparently on the verge of hysteria. "You just keep on like that and I'm going to slap your goddamn little face right off. You just keep on like that. Just keep on.”

  The little girl remained motionless in the doorway. The real-estate man leaned past her into the room, holding the jamb with both hands. "Good evening, Mrs. Blouse,” he said to someone. "I've brought some people to see the place.”

  “Pebbles!” shrieked the woman's voice. "You get in here and let them people by! Rory, you get up on that couch! Pebbles!”

  “Good,” said the real-estate man as if he had done something rather clever and difficult, such as picking a lock. "We can go in now.”

  The room wasn't as dark as Henry's or the old lady's, but it was considerably lower, as though something had sat on it. The windows were covered with old towels and the walls looked like they had been constructed by throwing handfuls of mud and cow shit at a framework of ancient lath until most of it was covered. The little girl and
an even smaller boy were seated rigidly side by side on an enormous, spavined, yellowish sofa that was much and questionably stained and which stank to high heaven with an odor that resembled a superhumanly protracted fart. It was a wonder the children weren't overpowered where they sat, but overpowered was not what they looked like: they looked petrified. Their feet stuck straight out in front of them, their hands were folded on their laps, their backs were rigid, and their faces were impenetrable masks. On the opposite side of the room, next to another of those damn fireplaces, was an unfocused television set, its sound turned down to the threshold of audibility. On its screen Robert Vaughn, pursued by his ghost, ran down an alley paralleled by the ghost of an alley, while frantic chase music murmured like a love song from the speaker. It was a rerun of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Lowell had seen it before, but he found it difficult to keep from watching. It was what he'd be watching if he were home right now, instead of out here on this fool's errand. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was one of his favorite programs, and he was sorry the series had ever been discontinued.

  “You just sit right there!” shrieked the woman's voice from somewhere to his left, jerking him from his reverie with a nasty start. "Don't you move a muscle! Don't you dare! One move and I'm gon' bang your little ass against the wall until it stick!”

  Lowell watched with astonishment as a cronelike creature, preceded by this storm of senseless abuse, picked her way through a doorway that Lowell had assumed led to a closet of some sort. Her hair was dyed a rich shade of dark orange, which, in combination with the uncertain light and a faded green sweater, made her skin appear olive-drab. She was dressed in shapeless heavy clothes of the sort found in bins at church bazaars and Hadassah thrift shops, and she was evidently quite drunk in a kind of generalized way, as though drunk was the way she always was, just as some people are always sober. One of her stockings was falling down, just like in the racist propaganda.