A Meaningful Life

by L. J. Davis

  By and large, however, the rest of the book remained satisfactorily in character, and the next time Darius Collingwood shook a President’s hand (Chester Alan Arthur’s) it was in the course of another kind of transaction altogether. Antietam and Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding, there was not the faintest scrap of evidence anywhere else in the book that inside the Weasel of Wall Street there was a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant colonel struggling to be let out. At least there was none that Lowell could see. Anyway, it had all happened a long time ago.

  When he was finished with the book there was little left of it but the frayed binding and a pile of brittle brown flakes that got smaller and smaller the more you handled them. It was as though the book had a primitive self-destruction mechanism worked into it, like the tape recorders in the spy programs on television. Lowell put the relics in a manila envelope and placed it in his safe-deposit box at the bank, where he kept a replica of his birth certificate, his lease, his deed, and five canceled bankbooks. He was reasonably certain that he knew more about Darius Collingwood than anyone else alive. It didn’t bother him that he bored people. He was like a man with a peculiar but utterly banal fetish—earrings, umbrellas, or newspapers, for example—that he was compelled to talk about incessantly, although no one but himself found it either dirty or remotely interesting. He was really talking to himself. He was so intrigued with his own thoughts that he simply had to speak them aloud whether anyone was listening to him or not, although he usually preferred to have someone standing in front of him when he did it. He even managed to bore people who had started out interested in what he was saying. It didn’t matter; it was the act of speaking that counted, not the reaction it drew. For the first time in years he had something on his mind. No longer did he spend his days idly looking at the pipes in the ceiling as he waited for some bit of ephemera to come stumbling into his head like a crippled butterfly. Now he knew what all those pipes were for. He owned some just like them himself, and whenever he looked at them these days, it was with professional interest. He wanted to know how they were put together. Lowell had a great many plumbing problems, and he was glad of any hints. Every pipe in his house was either rotten or in the wrong place.

  As it turned out, a good many things in his house were either rotten or in the wrong place. The mansion had fallen on evil days since Darius’ first wife, Felicia Hargrove Collingwood, had passed on to her reward. (A virtual recluse, her children scattered and out of touch, she died in the master bedroom late in April, 1947, and was discovered early in May.) The house was not only a mess, it was falling apart. Down in the cellar the great main beam that supported the bearing wall was as soft as cheese; you could drive a butter knife into it up to the hilt with scarcely any effort at all. Several of the pillars supporting it had turned to punk, as had the floors of most of the closets upstairs and a disturbing number of beams and stringers. Lowell had the uncomfortable feeling that at any moment the place could come popping apart like a cardboard cutout whose tabs and slots had given way, and it was bemusing to think that if the house ever caught fire it would smolder instead of burn.

  Lowell was depressed but not deterred by these discoveries, and he went right ahead with his work. He only hoped the house would hold together long enough for him to get it cleaned out, so he could start rebuilding it. The longer it took, the more distant was the moment when he and his wife would have their final reckoning. At this rate, it might be years before they got around to it. He wondered if they could stand that.

  It was shortly after their reconciliation (or whatever it was) that Lowell met his neighbors for the first time. The weather turned fine and brilliant with the biggest sky Lowell had seen in years—a huge sky, tall and milky and bright and intimidating, the kind of sky you could lose yourself in. Lowell had gotten used to Manhattan skies, cozy and small and full of smoke. He didn’t like the Brooklyn sky at all. It made him feel cooped up when he was inside the house, and when he went outdoors it made him feel utterly exposed, like a beetle on a sidewalk.

  He took the opportunity to examine his linoleum crater. It had been rained on and frozen and thawed a couple of times, and it was not in good shape; it had kind of dissolved and run together in a particularly horrible way. At least it no longer stank to high heaven. It merely smelled bad, sort of like a mixture of Clorox and fusel oil. Somehow a couple of empty Goya food cans had appeared inside it, almost as though they’d generated themselves spontaneously. Their labels were coming off, and they gleamed in the sun. Lowell bent over pensively and picked them up.

  “Trash,” said a voice that seemed to fall from the sky, as though by way of explanation. It was the kind of voice a small, very nasty angel would have, a spiteful angel that had recently been passed over for promotion. Considerably startled, Lowell looked up and discovered a small, very nasty-looking old lady in the yard next door. She was staring at him fixedly with narrowed eyes, as though he was a long way off and she was trying to make him out. She wore a nubbly black coat of the sort Lowell’s mother had owned and constantly worn when he was a little boy, back in the middle of the Second World War. It even had the same kind of fur collar. In one hand she held an ancient rake, although for what purpose was obscure. The dirt in the yard where she stood was as hard and as barren of vegetation—either living, dead, or dormant—as a naked tabletop.

  “How do you do?” said Lowell politely.

  “Trash,” she repeated, making a short, aggressive gesture with the bleached handle of the rake.

  Lowell gave her a cautious look. He had never gotten over how many crazy people there were in the city, and he always had a hard time disengaging himself once they got started with him.

  “Puerto Ricans!” she croaked, as though calling to some of them.

  Lowell smiled agreeably and took a step toward the door.

  The old woman began to sput and jerk about like a person on the wrong side of a window, in the last furious throes of frustration because she could make herself neither heard nor understood. “Puerto Ricans!” she said, mouthing the words exaggeratedly. “The coloreds! Trash and garbage! Can’t do nothing with them!” Lowell realized at last that in some way she was referring to the origin of the cans in his hand. He looked down at them witlessly and couldn’t think of a thing to say. He gathered that it was somehow okay for him to have a big rotting linoleum crater in his yard, but it was not okay for Puerto Ricans to throw cans in it; but it wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted to get into a conversation about. He took another step toward the door and then stopped, arrested by a look of dumb pleading in the old woman’s face.

  “I’m Lowell Lake,” he said heartily.

  “Lake,” said the woman. “Lake.” Her eyes were pale blue, and they looked out upon the world with a kind of panic-stricken innocence, as though everything she saw was strange and possibly the source of some concealed and incomprehensible menace. “You ain’t been living here long?”

  “I just bought the house.”

  “A nice young man like you.”

  “I’m going to live in it,” he said.

  “You should have seen this neighborhood forty years ago,” said the old woman. “It was some swell place.”

  “Yes, indeed. Well, it was nice meeting you.”

  “HEY!” a voice suddenly roared behind him. They were cropping up everywhere. “HEY! ARE YOU THE GAS METER?”

  Lowell scarcely knew how to answer that, if at all, but he was no longer surprised by anything. He turned and discovered an old man standing in the other yard.

  The old man was far older than the old lady, and it was obvious that he was also much crazier. He was bald, purplish, and completely toothless, his mouth like an obscene flabby asshole stuck into the middle of his face, and despite the coldness of the day, he wore neither a shirt nor an undershirt. His shoulders were rounded, and his chest was caved in as though he no longer had any vital organs, and his muscles were as shriveled as if they’d been drying out in the sun for weeks. All in all he was a pret
ty horrible sight as well as an alarming one. Lowell glanced around at the other yards that were visible from where he stood, half expecting to see more old people proliferating in various degrees of madness and nudity, like some kind of ghastly, pale fungus brought forth from the sterile soil by the sun, but there was no one else to be seen. There weren’t even any sounds.

  “HEY!” roared the old man again, cupping his hands to his mouth and leaning forward. Lowell swore that when he was old he would always wear his false teeth, always, even to bed. “I ASKED YOU! ARE...YOU...THE...GAS METER?”

  “That’s Captain Macaulay, he drinks,” said the old lady. “His mind is gone, drink took it. He thinks you’re the meter man, he makes no sense, it’s because of the drink. Pay no attention to him, you’ll only encourage him. He was such a fine figure of a man in his prime.”

  “HEY!” bellowed the old man again, as though a hundred yards of storm-tossed sea lay between them instead of fifteen feet of frozen yard. It was amazing that such a small chest could produce such a volume of sound. “I SAID ...”

  “I’m not the meter man,” said Lowell.

  “YOU THERE!” the old man roared. “YOU! PAY ATTENTION! ARE YOU THE GAS METER, OR ARE YOU NOT?”

  “Captain Macaulay!” barked the old lady in a voice that was both sharp and strangely sane. It was as though a door had opened suddenly in her mind, and she was speaking through it from twenty years ago. “Amos Macaulay! Go inside this instant and put on a shirt! I won’t speak to you again!”

  The old man’s mouth suddenly collapsed in a gummy pucker that was horrible to see, and his eyes lost all their sense of purpose. For a moment he stared at Lowell and the old lady as if he couldn’t imagine who they were or how they got there, and then he slowly looked down at his chest. When he looked up again, his face was hard to read. “You old bitch,” he said, in one of the most malevolent voices Lowell had ever heard outside of a radio. Then, with a grimace of pure hatred, he turned and shuffled slowly back into his house.

  “He drinks,” said the old woman. “It was drink that took his mind. He thought you were the meter man. He does so look forward to their visits. It’s strange to think of, when you consider that he simply can’t stand the Witnesses. You’d think if he liked the meter man, he’d like the Witnesses too, wouldn’t you? Maybe it’s because there isn’t any kind of logbook he can keep for the Witnesses, I don’t know.”

  “Well, it’s certainly been nice talking to you,” said Lowell. He held up his Goya cans to show her he had an errand to do.

  “Nineteen-nineteen,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nineteen-nineteen,” said the old woman, looking off into space. “He started drinking in nineteen-nineteen, that was the year it was. Nineteen-nineteen. He lost his wife in the epidemic, she died while he was at sea, dead and buried before he set foot on shore, his wife and his little boy, it was the epidemic, he started drinking then and never stopped.”

  Lowell scarcely knew what to make of that. If it had been a movie, he probably would have been moved by it, but it was reality, and he was a little bewildered and kind of irritated. It was as though some kind of claim was being made on him. He didn’t mind the fact that elderly people were old and strange, but he really hated it when they tried to act like people.

  “I’ll be darned,” he said, or some such thing, and hurried into the house, scarcely conscious that the old woman was no longer even looking at him.

  He was depressed for the rest of the day. When evening came he went home with his wife, got moodily drunk in a very total way, and silently failed to arrive at any conclusion about what was wrong with him, either at the present moment or at any other time in his life. He was still engaged in his quest when his wife went to bed, and shortly thereafter he passed out in his chair.

  7

  As though meeting the old people had been some kind of signal that his good times were about to be over, everything suddenly started to go wrong. It didn’t go wrong all at once or with any kind of drama. It went wrong in a very Lowell way—by dribs and drabs. Sometimes he was almost able to convince himself that nothing was really going wrong at all. Other times he told himself it was only a phase. The rest of the time he tried not to think about it.

  It was a great disappointment to Lowell that no one who was hip and smart and dynamic—even as hip and smart and dynamic as he was, which God knew wasn’t asking for much—had bought a house on his block and begun their fight with urban problems. Lowell wasn’t sure what the local issues were or where to go to find out, and he was kind of hoping that somebody issue-conscious would buy a house nearby so he could talk to them and find out. Even if he managed to sniff out the issues on his own, there wasn’t much he could do about them by himself. He couldn’t very well run out on the street with a sign or hire a hall. People might pay attention to him and either laugh at him or demolish his arguments with close reasoning. Lowell needed to be led but he was all by himself, a willing Indian in the cause of virtue, with a leaky tepee, an ambiguous marriage, and no chief in sight.

  It was not for lack of trying. There were a few interesting-looking people in the neighborhood, and Lowell had done his best to make friends with them. He started with a hippie couple. They were blond, willowy, ethereal, and physically as similar as a matched pair of bookends. Lowell frequently saw them in the street, dressed in blankets and cowboy clothes, walking along with distant eyes and serene smiles, as though lost in contemplation of another world where everything was much nicer. Lowell had the idea that hippies were easier to approach than other people, in addition to knowing where it was at, and he introduced himself one evening when he met them down in the grocery store while buying beer. “I’m Lowell Lake,” he said.

  “You sure look it,” said the boy hippie dreamily, and before Lowell could think of a good reply, they gathered up their groceries and cigarette papers and departed into the night with a faint ringing of bells.

  “Heepies,” said the proprietor merrily. He was a round little man from the Canary Islands who seemed to have been born with a feather up his ass. As a result he was very popular, although not with Lowell, who disliked merry people and always suspected that there was something wrong with their heads. “Heepies,” giggled the proprietor again. “Heeheeheeheehee. What you say, eh?”

  Lowell couldn’t think of a good reply to that one, either. He gathered up his beer and left, feeling as though he was the object of some kind of minor conspiracy that was designed to make him look funny and feel bad without ever finding out what it was all about.

  The next person he tried to befriend was a pretty young mother, relatively smart-looking and apparently not spaced out, whom he occasionally encountered on one of the major avenues, laboring under an incredible number of groceries and two small children. It seemed impossible that anyone so small and pretty would have to carry so many packages so frequently, but she did. There was something odd about it, something not quite right. Lowell supposed it was because she didn’t have a car. On the other hand, neither did Lowell, and his wife never went around loaded down like a packhorse. Neither did the wives of any of the people he knew, most of whom did not have cars either. Under normal circumstances Lowell would have dismissed the whole thing as another little urban mystery that was best left alone, but these were not normal circumstances. Lowell needed a contact, even a strange one, and the girl was obviously part of the world he was trying to get into: she lived in a freshly painted, pumpkin-colored house on Greene Avenue, with a newly planted tree at the curb, a tiny but beautiful front garden, and a shiny brass number plate just like the one Lowell wanted to get for his own house. Anyway, if she really was a weirdo, he could always drop her after she introduced him to her friends. One thing could be said for all those sacks and bags and kids: she would be easy to catch.

  Spurred on by his encounter with the hippies, he approached her the very next time he saw her, one bright day on Lafayette Avenue, where he’d gone to buy a box of brads. S
he was struggling with a full shopping cart and an immense bag full of canned vegetables and condensed milk. She carried one child in a backpack and dragged the other one along by means of a length of clothesline that joined her waist to his, like mountain climbers use. Her hair was in her face, and her eyes were kind of wild. Both kids were crying to beat the band.

  “How do you do?” said Lowell in his most manly voice, stepping up to her with a confident smile. “I’m Lowell Lake. I just bought the old Collingwood place on Washington Avenue. May I help you?”

  She looked at him as though he’d just offered to buy one of her children. Her pace quickened and she swept past him without a word, narrowly missing his shin with the hub of her shopping cart. “Mommmmeee!” screamed the older child. “We’re going too fast again!”

  Lowell gave chase and soon overtook them. “Are you sure I can’t take your package?” he asked.

  “I’m all right,” said the girl, her eyes darting about a little wildly. “Everything is okay. Everything is fine.” She began to walk even faster, the shopping cart fishtailing behind her. The older child fell into a stumbling trot beside her, and the baby in the backpack looked around with an expression of astonishment. “But ...” said Lowell. He made a feeble gesture, as though hopelessly begging for help instead of hopelessly offering it, and then he gave up. He just stood there on the sidewalk in the full blaze of noon and mutely watched the girl double-time off into the distance with her kids and freight like some weird kind of urban Mother Courage. He decided that she was crazy, and he never tried to talk to her again, although in the days that followed he occasionally sighted her in the distance, struggling along like some kind of ant. She was probably a tenant at the neat-looking house on Greene Avenue. She probably didn’t have anything to do with the way it looked at all.