A Meaningful Life

by L. J. Davis

  “This is Mrs. Blouse,” said the real-estate agent. "Mrs. Blouse is always very good about showing us her apartment. She has the largest apartment in the whole building.”

  “That's right,” said Mrs. Blouse in a slurred voice, gazing at them with congested, unfocused eyes. "The biggest one.”

  “How do you do?” said Lowell, immediately getting the feeling that it was a foolish thing to say, although he couldn't decide why.

  Mrs. Blouse looked at him as though she thought it was a pretty foolish thing to say, too. Suddenly she wheeled in the other direction and shrieked: "SIT!” The little boy, who had allowed himself to slump a little, sat back upright and shook himself. "Little fucker,” said Mrs. Blouse, apparently to Lowell.

  “The kitchen is this way,” said the agent. He led them through a doorway into a large room that contained a stove and refrigerator in worse condition than any Lowell had seen abandoned in the street. Between them was an enormous two-basin sink, half of which was clogged and filled to the brim with black goop.

  “It's too bad it's gotten too dark outside to see the garden,” said the agent.

  Lowell's wife went to one of the windows and peered out between cupped hands. "I can see it,” she said. "It's filled with bags of garbage.”

  Lowell joined her. Sure enough, the garden was filled with bags of garbage. Not a patch of earth was visible, just garbage.

  “Ain't enough cans,” said Henry. "People afraid to come down after dark. I'm going to clean it up. I'm going to clean it up tomorrow. Just ain't enough cans. I'll clean it up.”

  “Shit you will,” said Mrs. Blouse.

  “Shut your mouth,” snapped Henry.

  “Well, I guess that's about all,” said the agent, taking Lowell by the arm and pointing him toward the door.

  “We were going to take a look at the furnace,” said Lowell's wife.

  “Don't you go telling me to shut my mouth, Henry Gruen,” said Mrs. Blouse.

  It appeared that the basement lights had burned out, but Henry said that he kept the bulbs upstairs in his room to prevent theft. He went up to get them, and Lowell and his wife and the agent stood around among the suits until he came back. Every so often Mrs. Blouse would appear in the doorway and stare at them, each time with a different expression, as though trying out the various ways her face would go. "I bet you got a real good job,” she said to Lowell during one of these visitations, but she disappeared again before he could think of an answer.

  Presently Henry returned with a couple of encrusted fifteen-watt bulbs, and they went downstairs to inspect the furnace. It was a great, antique leviathan of a thing, sheathed with rotting asbestos and displaying more arms than you could shake a stick at. It looked big enough to power a steamboat, but if Henry's mutterings were to be believed, it was scarcely adequate to warm the house. While they watched, an electric switch clicked somewhere in its bowels and it sprang to life with a muted roaring.

  “There was a wine cellar over there,” said the agent, pointing into the bottomless shadows that extended beyond their feeble circle of light. He seemed fidgety. "Well, I guess that's all. Let's go back upstairs.”

  He started toward the steps. At that very moment a toilet was flushed somewhere in the upper reaches of the house and a few seconds later its contents were deposited on the basement floor with a great gurgling and rushing of water. This event occurred more or less behind Lowell and his wife, their attention having been riveted in the direction of the invisible and possibly specious wine cellar. Quite a sight met their eye when they turned around. They were standing not more than ten feet from the edge of a shallow black pond, its agitated surface flashing dully. It extended into the shadows toward the rear of the house, and it was impossible to tell exactly how large it was, but it was clearly pretty big in an obscene sort of way. Something pale, perhaps fungus, seemed to be growing on the walls and pillars back there, but Lowell couldn't bring himself to look too closely; he felt as though his eyes might become polluted, and there was a funny metallic taste in his mouth. He'd heard that people with radiation poisoning got metallic tastes in their mouths, but he knew he couldn't have radiation poisoning. He didn't feel particularly disgusted, just a little worried. He supposed the reason he hadn't noticed the smell before was because he'd already smelled so many bad things today that he'd stopped paying attention.

  “Waste line got a crack in it,” said Henry. "Some stuff gets out through it, and some stuff don't.”

  “I see,” said Lowell.

  “Been like that for a couple years,” said Henry. "A couple years at least.”

  It was dark when they finally returned to the street, much darker than in Manhattan, as though the night lay more heavily on Brooklyn. A cold wind was tossing the branches of the trees back and forth with a stiff, ungainly motion, not like trees at all, like people whose joints were locked by some disease.

  “Of course, a thing like that can be fixed,” the agent was saying, somewhat too rapidly. "It can be put in the contract.”

  “I'm all turned around,” said Lowell, watching the dark trees struggle with the wind. "Which way is the subway?”

  “I thought we could go back to the office and have a chat.”

  The idea of going back to the office had never entered Lowell's mind, and the prospect of going back there and having a "chat” made it sound positively repulsive. It sounded like some kind of fag thing he would never want to do as long as he lived. "I don't think so,” he said.

  “We could look at some other places. Perhaps something not quite so grand?”

  “Not today,” said Lowell.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “I'll give you a call.”

  “I guess you aren't really serious,” said the agent peevishly. "I can usually tell when people aren't serious by looking at them, but you two had me fooled. I thought you were serious. I thought you were the kind of people who really get involved. I don't do this for a living, you know. I do it as a service.”

  “I'm cold,” said Lowell's wife before the agent could go on and tell them what he really did for a living.

  “I think we'd better go,” said Lowell. "My wife is very sensitive to the weather.” He put his arm around her and turned her in the direction he presumed the subway lay, which also happened to be in the teeth of the wind. "Women have poor circulation,” he heard the agent say, or thought he heard the agent say, but he didn't look back, and for all he knew the agent continued to stand there, staring after them with a cross expression on his face, until they vanished from sight. Nobody had ever told Lowell he wasn't serious before. Usually people told him he had no sense of humor.

  The street was dark and very empty, and the stiffly tossing branches of the trees made strange, uncertain patterns against the lighted windows of the houses. It wasn't a pleasant emptiness; it was the kind of emptiness that suggested that if someone else was moving in it too, he probably didn't mean you well. It was a thief's emptiness, the emptiness of a street in a city occupied by a hostile power. No one who was out of doors belonged there, least of all Lowell and his wife, who weren't even the right color. He'd had the same feeling on certain streets on the West Side, but they were only a few blocks long and this street seemed to go on for miles, the street lamps falling away in the distance for as far as the eye could see. He'd never thought of how big Brooklyn was or how enormous a slum in it could be, low and all spread out and unconfined. It didn't make him feel fortunate in his wealth and comforts; it made him feel powerless and small and infinitely fragile. There were so many of them; he'd never realized before how many of them there were.

  In a short while, fighting the wind, they reached Fulton Street. None of the remaining stores were open, although it was only about seven o'clock, and the absence of trees had the peculiar effect of making the street seem more sinister, not less. Pulverized glass glittered on the sidewalks like handful scatterings of hard tiny jewels, and broken storefronts and burned buildings were everywhere. It wasn't even possible
to buy a loaf of bread. Everyone with money had gone away when the sun went down, and everyone else had gone indoors.

  “Man!” a voice burst on them when they were only a few steps from the subway. "Look at that white motherfucker hustle along!”

  “Shit, man,” said another voice, "you got something the matter with your eyes? That ain't his mother.”

  They went down the stairs almost running and then felt sheepish about it when they got to the bottom and no one else had followed them. They were back in the familiar world again, the grimy station and the harsh lights, the people standing on the platform sourly wrapped up in their thoughts: it was New York again, ugly, shabby, and thirty years out of date, familiar, safe. Lowell felt the same way he used to feel on the infrequent occasions when he'd made it home before the bullies caught up with him. He also felt dirty all over, as though he'd been dipped in some loathsome fluid and not a single part of him had escaped. He wanted a bath.

  “I need a bath,” he told his wife.

  “Me first,” she said. "I see that you've come to your senses.”

  “Something like that,” said Lowell. Then the train came.

  That night he dreamed of sewage and suffocation. Nothing unusual happened to him the next day except that an old man keeled over dead on the corner of 92nd and Broadway and Lowell joined the crowd in time to see the swaddled body being put into the ambulance. He knew that he'd tell his father-in-law about it the next time they met; his father-in-law was the kind of person you told about things like that. When he went to bed that night he had a dream so dull that he woke up from sheer boredom and sort of stumbled around the apartment until he got tired enough to go back to sleep. The next night he got so drunk that he forgot to take his underwear off before putting on his pajamas. "Darius Collingwood,” he said to himself as he sat in his office that afternoon. "Darius Collingwood.” It was a good name. It was the kind of name he wished he had.

  His wife noticed the direction he was taking and did her best to stem the tide. "Let's do it differently tonight,” she said. "I'll be the man and you be the woman, how about it? If that doesn't suit you, we could do something else. We could do anything you want. Anything. What do you say?”

  But Lowell was too drunk to talk and it was quite a job just getting him into bed, much less doing something with him after he got there.

  Then she bought a new wardrobe of mini-dresses, but she forgot to purchase enough panty hose to go with them, and garters and stocking tops were alarmingly visible about half the time when she sat down. Garters and stocking tops were not Lowell's thing, but he knew they were a big deal to other men, and he worried about it a lot and became a nag, which was not exactly the kind of result his wife had hoped to produce. She tried hiding the gin. When Lowell discovered what she'd done, he didn't say a word. There was a fifth of crème de cacao in the liquor cabinet, and he drank it instead. He drank the entire fifth, sitting in front of the television set; it didn't make him very drunk, although the stickiness caused his speech to thicken badly, and it completely spoiled his appetite. The next night his wife put the gin back where it belonged, and Lowell made himself a martini as he watched a rerun of The Patty Duke Show, which ironically enough was set in a townhouse on Brooklyn Heights. Lowell did not comment on the fact.

  The following morning Lowell called up the public library and asked them for information about Darius Collingwood, prominent Brooklyn attorney in the last century. The girl was gone from the phone for a long time, and Lowell sat there with his hangover, wondering exactly what he thought he was doing.

  “There's an awful lot of stuff on Collingwood, sir,” said the girl when she returned, for some reason sounding surprised and breathless and much cleaner and less hungover than Lowell had felt for years. "Articles and Ph.D. theses and things like that, and then there are the usual biographical sources, and then there's his own book, The Autobiography of a Scoundrel, published in Caracas in 1892. He's also mentioned in a lot of places.” She sounded pretty pleased with old Darius in a helpful sort of way. Despite himself, Lowell began to wonder if anyone had ever really socked it to her, ever taken her and really stuffed it in. He wondered how clean and young and breathless she'd sound then, by God. In a minute he was going to start panting hoarsely into the receiver. He wished he knew what size breasts she had, and he was on the verge of asking her when he remembered that he'd given her his name and his paper's address. He also remembered who he was. He couldn't imagine what had come over him. He never had thoughts like this, at least not very often. It must be the hangover. He'd always wondered what kind of a man would pant over a telephone, but it had never occurred to him that he might actually be one of them. He'd never wanted to pant over the phone to anybody in his life, not even Jane Fonda, and he'd absolutely never thought of asking any girl the size of her breasts.

  “If you want to see them, you'll have to come down to the library,” said the girl, frightening him out of his wits and almost eliciting a hysterical response, he scarcely knew what, before he realized that she was talking about the reference materials. "However, there is a kind of incomplete biographical sketch that I could read to you over the phone if you want me to.”

  “Go ahead,” said Lowell in an unnatural voice. He wanted the information, he told himself; the information. Forget the voice. The information. Not the voice. The information. Yes.

  “‘Darius Collingwood,"' said the girl, as chipper and pert as could be. "‘Born; Brooklyn, Long Island, 1841, child of Tunis Collingwood, merchant, and Catherine Joralemon Collingwood, youngest daughter of...' I guess I forgot to tell you, but this comes out of the Proceedings of the Old South Brooklyn Historical Society, 1923, published by Livingstone and Cooper, Brooklyn, 1924. Do you want me to repeat that so you can write it down or something?”

  “That won't be necessary,” said Lowell.

  “I'm not usually such a scatterbrain, but this is my first day on the job, and I'm not used to it yet.”

  “That's perfectly all right,” said Lowell. "Just go right ahead.”

  “Golly, it's sure good of you to be so tolerant and everything. Now, where was I? Darius Collingwood blah blah blah 1841, son of Tunis blah blah blah blah, youngest daughter blah blah blah, here we are. I found it, sir. Are you ready? ‘Attended the Busby School, displaying a remarkable precocity. Graduated from Columbia in 1859 at the age of eighteen, admitted to the bar the following year, meanwhile standing unsuccessfully for Brooklyn city alderman on the Republican ticket. Engaged in real-estate speculation, 1859-60. Declared bankrupt, May, 1861. In June of that year, following his father's death by apoplexy, he joined Walker's Gowanus Zouaves (later the Seventeenth Brooklyn) with the rank of lieutenant. Elected lieutenant-colonel, winter, 1861-62. Mentioned for conspicuous gallantry at Antietam. Wounded at Chancellorsville and invalided home. Commanded a detachment of Special Constables during the Draft Riots, July, 1863. Returned to the army the following month. Breveted colonel of volunteers, November, 1863. On detached duty to the Department of War, January, 1864-January, 1865. Personally congratulated by President Lincoln for gallantry ("Collingwood's Ride") preceding Jubal Early's abortive attack on the capital. Present at Lee's surrender, although it is unclear in what capacity. (See K. Hedingger's painting: Collingwood appears as third officer from the left, mistakenly depicted in the uniform of a brigadier general.)

  “‘Following the war, Collingwood established a practice in San Francisco. Records are vague about his activities there. Returned to New York, August, 1871. Established an office on Wall Street the following month. Denounced in the Senate by Carson Pike, 1877. Termed "Jay Gould's Gray Eminence” by the New York Herald, March 21, 1879. An attempted assassination on the floor of the Stock Exchange by the Irish anarchist Fergus O'Dowd, April 5, 1879, failed due to the pistol's misfiring and the intoxicated condition of the assailant. Declared bankrupt for the second time, January 1, 1880. Commenced building a substantial home on Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, sometime during the following three months. M
arried Felicia Hargrove, fifteen-year-old daughter of Dr. Erasmus Hargrove, pastor of the Military Garden Dutch Reformed Church, in June of that same year. Named as co-defendant in the Nebraska Grain Case (State of Nebraska vs. the Texas and Midwestern Railway, et al.), September, 1881. Appointed Consul at Venice by Chester Allan Arthur, October, 1881, amid further protests on the Senate floor. Traveled widely through Europe, 1881-84. Rumored to have been close to the Prince of Wales. Children: Albert, b. London, 1882; Humility, b. London, 1883; Tunis, b. Berlin, 1883; Edgar, b. aboard White Star liner Carithnia, two days out of Southampton, Sept., 1884.

  “‘Following their return from Europe, the family took up residence in the Washington Avenue mansion (Oct., 1884). In March, 1885, Collingwood fled to South America one day before the collapse of the Far Western Trading Corporation (the "Montana Bubble"), leaving his associate, Lester A. Birdcoat, to bear the brunt of public censure and legal prosecution. (Note: Birdcoat, a man of high principles and unquestionable probity, was subsequently cleared by a high court. He died shortly thereafter.)

  “‘Collingwood's whereabouts remained shrouded in mystery until May, 1887, when he appeared at the Conference of Buenos Aires as the official representative of the now defunct Republic of San Pedro, then under the control of the dictator Felipe Ryan. Appointed San Pedro's Minister of the Interior, June, 1887. Divorced his wife by decree (in absentia: Mrs. Collingwood naturally having remained in America), June, 1887. Married the following month (July) to Ysibel Rivas y Mondonza, thirteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy landowner, subsequently known as "La Piranha.” Fled with his wife to Caracas during the revolution of 1887 (November 3–7), in which Ryan and the majority of his followers perished. Lived quietly in Caracas for five years, writing his memoris. May have traveled to England sometime in 1894. Vanished from Caracas residence in March, 1895 (exact date uncertain). Reappeared April 15, 1895, at Cucuí, Brazil, with a band of sixty armed men, principally Americans secretly recruited in the dives of Seattle and San Francisco. They were accompanied by the enigmatic False Emperor of Brazil, João Antonio de Sousa e Bragança (the so-called João VII), whose claim to be the nephew of Dom Pedro II and legitimate heir to the Brazilian throne has largely been exploded but whose true identity remains uncertain. He may have been a Scotsman named McCormack. Whether he was a tool of Collingwood's or whether, as it was rumored, they were both pawns of British ambitions in the Orinoco Basin, are largely matters of conjecture. The truth will probably never be known.