by L. J. Davis
He occasionally saw the hippies on the street too, looking around them as though the world had turned some delightful new color. Sometimes they looked at Lowell. They seemed pretty pleased with him too, but not in any human way. After a while Lowell began to check the street before he left the house, to make sure they were nowhere in sight. He didn’t like being looked at like that.
Lowell thought the matter over and decided that the situation was not normal. In the weeks since he’d first come to the neighborhood, he’d met a fag real-estate agent, two senile old people, a pair of stoned hippies, and a nut. (He’d also met, albeit briefly, a substantial number of Negroes and Puerto Ricans and one goofy grocer from the Canary Islands, but they were not the people he was looking for, and they didn’t count.) Clearly such a collection couldn’t be a reasonable cross-section of this or any other neighborhood. Therefore he had managed to meet the wrong people. Undoubtedly an opportunity for meeting the right people would arise in due time. Meanwhile, he decided not to worry about it. He’d worry about it when he got done with the house, and he went right upstairs with a couple of six-packs and set to work, attempting to pull a nest of old wiring out of the wall without electrocuting himself, shorting out the house, burning it down, or a combination of the three. Presently he began to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” or as much of it as he could remember, which was quite a lot more than he could remember when he wasn’t drinking beer. It established a good rhythm for his work, made the time pass quickly, gave rise to thoughts of Darius Collingwood, and was fun. He was aware that he’d forgotten to eat again. It was a good thing beer was so nourishing.
“I said, the downstairs door was open” roared a voice from somewhere as Lowell was trampling down the vineyards for the third or fourth time. Lowell broke off and peered around him as though squinting through a dirty windshield. He discovered a short, Assyrian-like man in the doorway, regarding him with a belligerent expression suggestive of unredressed grievances and unpaid bills. He had greenish-brown skin and comic-book blue hair, and his suit appeared to have been tailored for an oil drum. Lowell had never seen him before in his life and could only stare at him drunkenly, a bundle of live wires clutched in his hand.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” barked his visitor.
Lowell examined his wires. They looked all right to him. “Why not?” he asked.
“Leave the door open,” said his visitor with obvious exasperation and contempt. “I wouldn’t leave the door open. That was what I meant. I meant the door.”
“Oh,” said Lowell.
“My name is Warsaw,” the man went on. “I’m a lawyer.”
“How do you do?” said Lowell, wondering if he was about to be presented with a summons. He couldn’t imagine why, unless his wife was divorcing him, and she hadn’t said anything about it. “I’m Lowell Lake,” he added. “I’d come over there and shake your hand, but I have this bunch of wires.”
“We bought our house on Saint John’s Place six years ago,” Mr. Warsaw snapped out. “That was three years before anybody.” He jabbed toward Lowell with his index finger. “What have you done?”
Lowell searched his mind frantically for something he might have done.
“What rooms have you finished?” demanded Mr. Warsaw, allowing Lowell to know what he was talking about while keeping his reasons for asking the question hidden. Lowell wondered if Mr. Warsaw’s conversational style had been permanently effected by cross-examining recalcitrant witnesses, but he couldn’t decide whether they were having a conversation or not. Maybe he was really being cross-examined. “I can’t remember,” he said. “I mean, we haven’t finished any. No rooms are finished. Not one.”
“I see,” said Mr. Warsaw.
“I’d show you around,” Lowell explained, “but I have this bunch of wires.” He held them up.
“In that case, I’ll look around by myself,” said Mr. Warsaw, turning abruptly on his heel and striding up the stairs like a policeman. A moment later Lowell heard him walking around overhead. Lowell suddenly felt very silly, standing there in the empty room with his wires. He also felt wrong. He decided maybe he’d better go upstairs too. That seemed best. He carefully put down his wires and went upstairs.
Mr. Warsaw was darting from room to room like a man desperately searching for a lost wallet, flicking on lights as he went. Lowell stood on the landing and watched him. Soon all the lights were on and all the doors were standing wide open, even the closet doors. Mr. Warsaw came out of the last room, looked around in a harassed and disorganized fashion, did not seem pleased by what he saw, and hurried down the stairs, brushing past Lowell with no more regard than if he were some kind of especially uninteresting piece of hallway furniture. Lowell followed at a discreet distance, marveling.
“That’s a coffin niche, did you know that?” said Mr. Warsaw suddenly, indicating a recession in the wall where the staircase took a turn.
“No,” said Lowell. “I didn’t.” He wondered why it was called a coffin niche and what it had been used for, but he decided not to ask about it.
Mr. Warsaw reached the bottom of the stairs and immediately scurried into the parlor. He popped back out of it a second later. “What’s the matter with the lights?” he demanded. “The lights won’t go on; what’s the matter with them?”
“I’ll bet you got the wrong switch,” said Lowell. He went into the parlor and turned on the right one. Mr. Warsaw dashed past him again and immediately took up a central position.
“My wife and I,” he began, striking an attitude, “bought our house six years ago.” He’d asked so many questions that this utterance of a simple declarative sentence sounded extremely strange, as though he’d begun to read aloud. “No one else had bought in the neighborhood when he arrived. We were the first. Our house was built in 1873. The Pouch family owned it. Some of the original furniture was still in the basement.”
“That’s interesting,” said Lowell. “Our place was built by Darius Collingwood.”
“I see your parlor has two fireplaces,” said Mr. Warsaw. “So does ours. It was a common feature of the larger houses.” He was looking at Lowell with eyes that did not seem to register another human presence. It was as though he’d been told that there was an audience in that direction, and he’d decided that his voice would carry better if he faced them. “You’ll probably find that yours are Carrara marble. Ours are slate, which is extremely rare. Carrara marble is difficult to keep clean. It stains.”
“I don’t think they’re Carrara marble,” said Lowell. “I scraped off some paint, and it looks like something else.”
“Our house is virtually completed,” said Mr. Warsaw. “The parlor floor is completely restored. The New York Times Sunday Magazine came and took pictures of it. Come by some time and take a look at it.” He whipped a tweed cap from somewhere, suggesting that he was preparing to leave now that he’d finished talking about his house. “I have to go visit some people,” he explained in a way that somehow managed to convey that neither he nor Lowell were people. He drew on a pair of kidskin gloves and looked at Lowell expectantly. “Well,” he said sharply, “aren’t you going to show me out?”
Lowell showed him out. Mr. Warsaw scuttled away down the street without a backward glance, like some kind of immense bipedal rodent. Lowell waited on the stoop for a moment, half-hoping to hear the sounds of a violent mugging, but no such good thing happened, and he went back indoors. He disliked Mr. Warsaw, and he had an imaginary conversation with him while he drank another beer and finished untangling his wires.
A few days later, however, he tried to pay the Warsaws a visit. He had decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. This was easy to do because Lowell had drunk a great many more beers that night and as a result he had no confidence in his memories when he reviewed them the following morning. He remembered that he hadn’t liked Mr. Warsaw, but on the other hand, he’d been drunk. This was a powerful, and possibly conclusive, argument in Mr. Warsaw’s favor. Lowell al
ways retrospectively loathed himself when he’d been drunk in someone else’s presence, even if they were drunk too. He was certain he’d disgusted them, although this was seldom the case; in actual fact, people almost never realized he was drunk even when he was bombed out of his mind, possibly because he never did anything conspicuous or odd (usually he just went to sleep), and they were always surprised and a little annoyed when he made his apologies afterward. Sober people had a great advantage when there were drunk people around: they were sober. It really gave them the upper hand. They knew what was going on.
Viewed in such a light, it seemed far less important to Lowell that he hadn’t liked Mr. Warsaw than that Mr. Warsaw probably hadn’t liked him. It would go far toward explaining his behavior: instead of being peculiar and compulsive, he could have been pissed-off and disgusted, in which case Lowell had blown another opportunity to make meaningful contact with his neighbors. It was like trying to contact the maquis. Lowell began to feel pretty paranoid and unhappy about the whole thing, and he set out on his visit in an unusually humble and disturbed state of mind.
The Warsaw house would have been easy to spot even if Lowell hadn’t bothered to look up the number in the phone book beforehand. It stood out like a prince among beggars. With its mellow sand-blasted brick facade, its tastefully painted cornice and trim, its immaculate windows, polished oak door, and tubs of flowers, it gave the impression that it was the only inhabited building on the block, despite the fact that it betrayed no signs of life while all the other buildings were visibly teeming with humanity. Here and there along the street broken windows had been replaced with sheets of warped, unpainted plywood. Half the front doors appeared to be off their hinges, all the brownstone facings were flaking in a way that unpleasantly suggested rotting teeth, and naked light bulbs could be seen burning weakly in bare and garishly painted rooms beyond cheap and often ragged curtains hung from sagging bits of string. Despite the coolness of the weather, people hung from the upper windows of the houses like shapeless lumps of laundry, dry, their elbows cushioned with pillows, and down on the street small groups of drunken men stood around on the sidewalk or sat on the stoops, wearing the remnants of ancient suits with trousers too wide for their legs and belted too high on their bodies, passing bottles back and forth in crumpled paper bags. The scene was so hyperbolically poverty-stricken that it didn’t look real; it looked contrived, like a set for some kind of incredible squalid version of Porgy and Bess. As Lowell walked down the street—conspicuous, he was aware, not so much by his clothing and color as by his air of purposeful, energetic activity—a pack of children streamed past him from nowhere, yelling and screaming and running and waving their arms more frantically than seemed biologically possible. They raced to the end of the block, then turned and raced past him again to the other end of the block, where they fell upon one of their number, apparently chosen at random, and began beating him unmercifully.
“Hey, man,” said one of the nearby drunks, lurching a step in Lowell’s direction, “what the fuck you think you doing here?”
“Visiting friends,” said Lowell with a neutral grimace that he hoped would discourage conversation while not inviting hostility.
“I said,” repeated the drunk, “what the fuck you think you doing here?”
“Yeah,” said another drunk. For some reason Lowell suddenly realized that all the men in sight were wearing hats. Not a man was without one. He wondered what it signified.
“Shee-it,” said the first drunk, staring with slack-jawed malevolence as Lowell reached the Warsaw’s steps and ascended them with what he trusted was studied nonchalance. There was no doorbell, a circumstance that Lowell found a trifle unnerving under present conditions, but a little diligent searching revealed an egg-shaped brass knob set into the doorframe to his right. Above it was a tiny brass sign that said PULL, which Lowell promptly did. A dull clunk resounded from somewhere within the house, as though a large lead object had fallen off a table. Lowell wondered if he’d done something wrong, despite the fact that he’d done the only thing available. A casual glance over his shoulder revealed that virtually everyone in sight had paused in their pursuits in order to give him their undivided attention. Feeling conspicuous but not popular, Lowell overcame his inhibitions and gave the knob another hefty yank and produced a really heart-stopping thud. This time his effort was rewarded with the sound of footsteps, and presently the door was opened by a tall woman who bore a vague resemblance to Ringo Starr. She glared at him silently as though hoping to scare him off with her face now that the doorbell had failed.
“Mrs. Warsaw?” said Lowell.
“That’s right.”
“How do you do? I’m Lowell Lake. I met your husband the other evening.”
Mrs. Warsaw pursued her lips in a manner that suggested that her husband met a lot of queer fish in the course of his travels and that she had no truck with any of them.
“I’m renovating the Collingwood mansion on Washington Avenue,” said Lowell with as much cheer as he could muster, hoping the information would either intimidate her or tell her something good about him. “Your husband said I should drop by.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Warsaw. “I never show the house when my husband is not at home. It’s been nice meeting you.” So saying, she closed the door in his face and left him to his own devices. Lowell was certain she was still standing behind it. He could almost feel her standing there, listening to him. He wondered what would happen if he threw himself against it, clawing with his fingernails, shrieking obscenities and innuendos, kicking over the flower tubs, yanking up the plants, rubbing the roots in his hair, masticating the leaves and spitting them out with an unearthly howl. It was a tempting but unconvincing picture; Lowell had never done anything remotely like that in his entire life, and he knew he would never do anything like it now. Just thinking about it was pretty damned unusual.
Lowell turned and went slowly back down the steps while the first drunk commented on his adventure with a joyless but outrageously energetic parody of uncontrollable mirth, evidently having decided that this would get Lowell’s goat more effectively than his previous display of unbridled hostility. This insight was correct. Lowell scarcely knew what to do with himself, but feeling that it would not be smart to indicate it, he set off vigorously in the opposite direction. It was considerably longer that way, but although his presence was noted and his purposes speculated upon by an unnerving number of people, he managed to gain the corner without further incident. The children had decided to throw rocks at passing cars. They threw a rock at Lowell too, but it missed. In a minute he was able to turn another corner and make his way slowly back to his house along the street of vacant, blasted buildings whose condition gave the impression that their inhabitants had been exterminated, perhaps recently, with tanks and hand grenades.
His house told him nothing. He walked around in it for a while with a hammer in his hand, looking for something to hit, but no likely target presented itself. When he realized that he had been standing in front of a wall for some seconds, staring at it blankly, he decided it was time to go back to Manhattan. On the subway it occurred to him that, unless things improved and his wife changed her mind, he would probably be the only man in the world with a pied-à-terre on the West Side and a country seat in Brooklyn. He wondered what he would do then.
His wife was at her mother’s when he got home. No doubt he was being reviled at that very moment. It was a pretty safe bet. His mother-in-law should have seen him today. How she would have laughed.
He made himself a martini and turned on a rerun of The Avengers. It was one of the ones with Linda Thorson instead of Diana Rigg and watching it with a drink gave him a measure of peace. He was the only person he knew who liked Linda Thorson better than Diana Rigg. He made a couple more martinis and liked her even more. When the show was over, he ate some lobster salad he found in the refrigerator. Then he had some more drinks and watched some more TV. He couldn’t remember what time he went
to bed or whether his wife had come home yet, but she was beside him when he woke up the next morning. He had a vague recollection that at some point in the evening he had stood up and yelled, “I AM NOT A NERD!” He wondered if anyone had heard him. He hoped not.
The living room showed no signs that anyone had been drunk in it, with the exception of the small writing desk in the corner. It was open and a sheet of letter paper was lying on it. Acutely
conscious of the stubble on his face and the various imperfections and malfunctions of his body, Lowell padded over in his pajamas and picked it up. There was a brief scrawl in his most drunken handwriting. “Dear Mother and Dad,” it said, “I want to come home.”
Lowell looked at this message for a while and thought about it as best he could under the circumstances, but it didn’t seem to him that he really wanted to do that, either. He didn’t know what he wanted to do. He crumpled up the paper and threw it away before his wife could see it, and then he went out to the kitchen in his bare feet and drank a great quantity of nice cold, fresh milk.
8
By the first of April Lowell and his wife had gone about as far as they could go with their work of demolition and tidying up. They had reached the limits of their competence, and it was time to summon architects and contractors if the work was ever to go forward. A determined but ill-fated attempt to erect a new wall—the thing, when completed, looked exactly like one of the partitions he’d just finished pulling down, only cleaner—and a drunken, equally ill-fated, and physically painful attempt to install a new sink had convinced Lowell that he had about as much skill in these matters as a Puerto Rican, which had the curious effect of making him think less of himself, not more of Puerto Ricans. No matter how many books he read, he simply wasn’t up to the mark. This was not a new thing with him. He’d never been up to the mark. His model airplanes had seldom flown, often fell apart, frequently were never finished, and never looked much like airplanes, despite an attention to the instructions that bordered on the fanatical. His dog had been run over before he finished building the doghouse, which had persistently refused to come out right. He couldn’t even catch a ball. Even when they came right to him, they invariably fell at his feet. He studied and practiced, but it was always the same. Possibly his body was wrong for catching balls, like the body of someone who could never learn to swim. (He couldn’t swim very well, either.)
