A Meaningful Life

by L. J. Davis

  He wondered if he could catch a ball now. Once he had asked it, the question so intrigued him that he went down to the corner grocery and bought one of the pink rubber balls like the black and Puerto Rican kids had. He took it out in the backyard, picked a good blank spot high on the wall between a pair of mullioned windows, and (after setting himself) threw the ball at it as hard as he could. The ball bounced off with a wet sound. It came nowhere near him. It went over his head and disappeared into the junk-strewn yard of one of the houses behind him, where it was promptly seized by a dog and carried away to a corner where the animal covered it with dog spit and then rolled it around on the ground. Lowell made no attempt to retrieve it. His reactions to the whole brief episode were distinctly mixed. On the one hand, he felt like a fool. On the other hand, he still couldn’t catch a ball. He decided to think about contractors a little harder than he’d been doing.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t know any more about contractors than he did about putting up a wall—rather less, in fact. A few of them persistently sent him badly printed, semiliterate brochures offering to cover his house with either aluminum siding or artificial stone that resembled nougat candy or, if he were so inclined, to buy it from him, lock, stock, and barrel, for big cash. Once a contractor’s representative had come to the house, unsolicited. He was a pleasant but exceedingly tense young man who reminded Lowell, for some reason, of a chipmunk. He had a little slide projector and he showed Lowell pictures of a number of kitchens done in bright pink plastic. There were also several slides of a cozy den paneled in unreal-looking artificial wood. Lowell told the young man that these things were not part of his plan and showed him to the door, politely but with a certain amount of difficulty. The young man left brochures. They were just like the ones Lowell was always getting in the mail, and he threw them out.

  He wanted his house to be like claret and Dutch chocolate. He was a little vague as to ideas, but that was the general plan, and he was determined to have it. He had only to find someone to accomplish it. He tried the telephone book, but it wasn’t much help; there were any number of contractors in it, but nothing they had to say about themselves indicated a capability for claret and Dutch chocolate. On the contrary, their ads suggested a distinct proclivity for bright pink plastic and artificial stone, synthetic wood and aluminum siding. He supposed he could go and ask one of his fellow brownstoners for advice, but on the basis of the fellow brownstoners he had already met, he didn’t think he wanted to do that. It was all very depressing. For some reason he seemed to lack the energy or the will or something to think about the matter creatively. He didn’t even seem to be able to think about it intelligently. Frowning with formless, unproductive worry, he wandered from room to room in the huge house, upstairs and down, gazing at the outlines of old partitions on the walls and ceilings, the disemboweled wiring, the dismantled plumbing. In one of the rooms he came upon his wife, somewhat to his surprise, although of course she had to be somewhere. “How long has it been since you spoke to me before I spoke to you?” she asked as he entered.

  Enveloped in gloom, Lowell stopped in his tracks and stared at her with dull eyes. He tried to speak, but it was difficult to climb out of his pit so quickly, and the only sound he produced was a faint, sad mooing.

  “That’s what I thought,” said his wife. She bent down and began to brush furiously at a patch of floor with a hand broom. A tear or a drop of sweat fell at her feet, and she brushed it away. “There,” she said, straightening again. “I guess that does it. You can take me to the subway now.”

  Lowell mutely did as he was told, feeling as though his body had turned into some kind of semiflexible stone. He escorted her to the station and waited with her for the train.

  “Step away from the edge of the platform,” snapped his wife. “You always stand too close.”

  In a few minutes the train came, and she got on it and went home.

  She didn’t come to the house after that, which was probably just as well, because there was nothing for her to do. There was nothing for Lowell to do either, but every evening after work he dutifully came over to Brooklyn and put on his work clothes and wandered around the rooms of his house drinking beer. A curious inertia afflicted him, but if he drank enough beer, he would presently begin to feel tired, as if he’d worn himself out in the performance of some useful task.

  Spring came exhaustingly that year, almost as though something were leaving his life rather than entering it, and in the cold April sunsets the house took on the devastated look of the streets, as if it had been attacked, not recently but months ago, by a squad of compulsively tidy commando assassins, who had raced up and down the stairs, chucking grenades into every room, and then had cleaned up after themselves. Where partitions had been, there were jagged outlines on the walls. Nothing remained in the bathrooms but the heads of pipes. Holes were scattered here and there in the walls, in the ceilings, in the floors. Lowell couldn’t remember why he’d made some of them. There must have been a good reason. Electric blue in one room, green in another, shattered and stripped, the house didn’t look as though Darius Collingwood had ever conceived it, or that the poor people had ever occupied it, or that Lowell was ever going to live in it. It looked ready to be demolished. A weekend came, and Lowell wandered out in the back to look at his pile of linoleum again.

  It was a fine, warm day that was completely lost on Lowell but much enjoyed by his neighbors. In the houses opposite, the occupants were tumbling their bedding out the windows to air, festooning the weathered brick with pink and turquoise sheets and faded Army blankets, piling up the windowsills with pillows from Fulton Street and Athens, Georgia, calling to each other from floor to floor as if they hadn’t met in months. Lowell stood by his linoleum and watched them for a while through a film of either hangover or despair, he couldn’t decide which. Whatever it was, it had turned his mind to sludge. He supposed he ought to stop drinking so much, but he didn’t think he could face it. There would be all that empty time on his hands.

  Lowell was so mantled in gloom that some time passed before he realized that someone was looking at him from one of the upper windows of the old ladies’ rooming house. Then for the next few minutes he was so engrossed in horrified contemplation of the creature that he was completely unable to analyze the significance of his presence there in anything like rational terms.

  It was Demon Rum himself. Many years ago Lowell had briefly attended a crackpot Methodist Sunday school, and he was therefore able to recognize him at once, although not with pleasure. Tiny and emaciated, dressed in decaying rags and smeared with nameless filth, its skin the color and in places evidently the texture of dried diarrhea, a toothless idiot’s smile on its face and its eyes vacant of both intellect and soul, it stood framed in the window like a lurid illustration in a hard-core temperance magazine that only adults were allowed to buy. He looked so depraved that it was amazing that he was still alive, and Lowell found it difficult to believe that he wasn’t some kind of hallucination sent by the god of hangovers. As he watched, the creature seemed to take a fancy to him. It bent forward. As it did so, Lowell became aware (although not as swiftly as he would have liked) that the pane had been broken out of the window, and while he was mulling that over, the creature’s smile broadened. Lowell could see right into its mouth. It was horrible in there. The lips gave little spasmodic twitches, as though preparing to deliver utterance. Lowell wondered what he would do if this loathsome being were to address him. He supposed that would depend on what it said. In a moment the whole question became academic, as it became obvious that the creature had not been preparing to speak, after all. It had been preparing to vomit, and it proceeded to do so. Lowell turned away, thinking very hard with his eyes tightly closed, and when he looked back a few moments later, the creature was gone. A glance at the ground told him that it had, however, unquestionably been there, and it was only then, swallowing hard, that he began to consider the implications of that fact, beyond its obvious merits as an objec
t lesson. A remarkably clear picture of rape and carnage flashed suddenly across his mind’s eye, almost as though it were being beamed to him from some external source—the bodies of the old ladies strewn through the halls with their dresses horribly up, the doorjambs bespattered with gore, etc.—but although the spectacle held him momentarily rooted to the spot, on the whole he did not think it very probable. For one thing, although he knew it happened every day to people in all walks of life and was an unusually well-documented phenomenon, Lowell didn’t really believe that people killed people. Lowell didn’t really believe in death at all. He’d never seen a real dead person in his entire life. All he’d ever seen was pretend-dead persons on TV. He supposed his life could be considered either sheltered or fortunate. Anyway, there it was.

  Secondly, granting intellectually if not emotionally that death and murder were possible, Lowell didn’t believe that anybody could murder that many old ladies, at least not all at once. There were at least a dozen of them, at least half of whom expected to be raped and murdered any minute and were semipermanently barricaded in their rooms. It certainly could not have been done by the creature Lowell had seen. It couldn’t even have been done by three or four of them. The old ladies would have cut them to ribbons.

  Thirdly, Lowell noticed that the lace curtains were missing from every single window in the back of the house. That was an even stranger occurrence than the appearance of the interloper. Lowell made his way to the front of the house. All the curtains were gone from the windows there, too, and the door was standing wide open. Lowell cautiously climbed the steps and looked inside. It was as he suspected: the house was empty. The doors of all the little rooms were ajar, and every stick of furniture was gone. With the possible exception of a faded picture of Jesus taking off his shirt, glued to the wall by the stairs and therefore unremovable, the house was stripped as clean as a whistle. One had to admire the efficiency with which it had been done, and Lowell looked about himself with a certain dull amazement. He was so used to having the old ladies next door that their sudden and utterly complete disappearance was kind of alarming, like going to sleep in one place and waking up in another.

  From somewhere overhead there came a bubbling cough, followed by muffled, animal-like sounds of an indeterminate nature. Someone started coming slowly down the stairs. Lowell went home and locked the door.

  Later that day, he called the real-estate man from the drugstore. His house was barricaded as solidly as Fort Knox, and there was some doubt whether he would be able to get back into it without climbing to the second story.

  “Blocks are like airliners,” said the real-estate man. “Some go up, some go down. You just happened to get on one that went down. That’s a tough break, and I sure wish I could help you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Lowell, somewhat more shrilly than he would have liked. “I only called to ask your advice about closing up the house next door. What do you mean, the block is going down? Which block? My block?”

  “You heard me,” snarled the real-estate man in a voice from which all trace of faggotry had vanished. “Listen, if I were you, I’d talk about it with Mr. Grossman. Mr. Grossman has recently bought a lot of property around there and will not doubt offer you the best deal you can get.”

  “I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  “Live and learn,” said the real-estate man, hanging up.

  Lowell remained in the phone booth for a while. If he closed his eyes, he could pretend he was in a little elevator car whose cable had snapped. If he opened his eyes, he could see where he really was. It was not a good place. His dreams were bathos, his hopes were ashes, his marriage was a wreck, and his mother-in-law was right. That was where he really was, and it had cost him only seven thousand dollars, which meant there was also a good chance that he was a chump. He was racking up quite a score.

  Presently the druggist came over to the booth and asked if there was anything wrong. Lowell briefly pondered asking him for some kind of a drug, but he decided that a drug wasn’t really what he wanted, at least not yet, and he apologized instead.

  On his way home he observed that a group of men had broken into the old captain’s house and were busily engaged in stealing all the plumbing. They were also breaking out all the windows, apparently for the hell of it. While it was possible that they were only an exceedingly clumsy crew of workmen, Lowell did not think so, and he quickly returned to the drugstore and called the police. The police never came, and after a short break for supper the men came back and stole the furnace and the cast-iron fence. Lowell assumed that the old man was either dead or not at home, and he was only mildly surprised to discover that he didn’t really care. He looked around for the old man the following day, but he didn’t find him, and he never saw him again.

  On Saturday two thin, elderly Negroes in pale dungarees came to the former old ladies’ rooming house and painstakingly replaced the old mahogany front door with a much smaller plywood door with a tiny triangular window. During the following week his new neighbors moved in and immediately gathered on the steps and set about getting as drunk as humanly possible, as though they were being paid to do it or were participating in a contest. One was an enormous woman with immense, bullet-shaped breasts and a huge stomach that stuck out beneath them like a shelf. She was fond of sitting with her legs spread like a sumo wrestler, and Lowell found it exceedingly difficult not to look at her, but possible. The rest of the drunks were scrawny middle-aged men, and he never even bothered to try to tell them apart. They sat on the steps from dawn until far past midnight, shouting and carrying on, their faces slowly swelling shut, drinking Rheingold and throwing the cans in the street. They never seemed to do anything else with their time, and Lowell never saw them eat anything, although he occasionally saw them throwing up. Meanwhile, the top floor of the captain’s house caught fire one night, and the roof fell in. Down the block, another house became empty.

  Lowell took none of this lying down. Lying down was what he’d been doing when things were going relatively well, but now that the struggle was absolutely hopeless he stood up and began to fight like hell. He could do nothing about Mr. Grossman man and his schemes, any more than he could command the waves or treat with the devil, nor could he get his wife back or quiet down the drunks, but he could get back to work on his house, and that is exactly what he did. With the distracted, slightly crazed intensity of a man trying to remember the periodic table in the middle of a bombing raid, he cleaned up his backyard in nothing flat. Then he swept all the rooms and washed all the windows and shoveled all the dried sewage out of the basement and put it in plastic bags. Meanwhile, a dozen seemingly adultless children, looking and dressing exactly like old-fashioned Hollywood pickaninnies, moved into a newly vacated house across the street and began playing frantically in the traffic and pulling the bark off trees. Lowell celebrated their arrival by opening the yellow pages and purposefully summoning contractors to hear his plans and give him estimates. Actually, it was principally the contractors’ recording devices and answering services that he purposefully spoke his summonses to, but they were better than nothing. He was on the move at last.

  Only two contractors showed up out of the dozen that he called. God only knew what happened to the others—maybe they never played back their phone tapes, or maybe they just cruised past the block and kept on going—but in Lowell’s position an inch was as good as a mile, and two contractors were a great improvement over none. The first one was a morose little man with the eyes of a bloodhound and the shape of a half-empty bag of damp flour. Wordlessly he followed Lowell upstairs and down. When Lowell pointed at something, he looked at it, and when Lowell talked about something without pointing at it, he looked at Lowell. After Lowell had taken him through the house and outlined his plans, he left. He never came back.

  The second contractor was a Trinidadian who was much taller than Lowell and who gave the impression of being far stronger and somewhat more gentle, a
lthough he never performed any feats of strength or special gentleness. He was a rich, deep color that Lowell greatly admired, and he had a soft, melodious laugh that he used at every possible opportunity. He laughed melodiously when Lowell showed him the rotten main beam, and he laughed melodiously when Lowell showed him where the plumbing had been taken out. Laughing melodiously, he told Lowell that things were in pretty bad shape, all right, but they could be fixed. Lowell hired him on the spot. His name was Cyril P. Busterboy. He was a very formal person who always called Lowell “Mr. Lake,” compelling Lowell to call him “Mr. Busterboy.” It was not easy to do.

  Lowell’s work was extensive, and Mr. Busterboy was not cheap, but they were able to come to an agreement. Mr. Busterboy laughed melodiously as he drew up the document, and he laughed melodiously as Lowell signed it. The next day, to the utter delight of the drunks next door, a truck came and delivered a big portable refuse bin that resembled an immense green lunchpail. The truck deposited it at the curb with a great clanking of chains and much shiny expansion of hydraulic pistons, and as soon as it was in place men from Mr. Busterboy’s crew began to fill it with the bags and bundles of dreck and rubble that Lowell had accumulated over the winter, some of which burst like soft corpses as the men carried them, making a horrible mess all over the sidewalk. Lowell took a day off from the office and watched the workmen in a state of nervous excitement. He had to keep stopping himself from picking his cuticles. They were already picked down so far that he was afraid of infection. “Do you realize that this house used to belong to Darius Collingwood?” he asked Mr. Busterboy.