A Meaningful Life

by L. J. Davis

  “That was supposed to be a sixpence lying flat,” said Mr. Busterboy, retrieving the bottle before Lowell could do it any more harm. “Let’s get going.”

  Somewhat amazed that he could do so, Lowell discovered that he could stand unaided by the doorway. He followed Mr. Busterboy out to the curb, feeling as though all his vital fluids had turned to sewage.

  Mr. Busterboy’s car was a little English model, brand new and very shiny. It was painted a handsome green, and Mr. Busterboy explained that the motor was sideways. Lowell was prepared to believe anything. No sooner had Mr. Busterboy seated himself than the vehicle seemed to spring away from the curb of its own volition. Mere inches from the pavement, they whipped around the corner and drove like the dickens down Greene Avenue.

  “Front-wheel drive,” said Mr. Busterboy.

  Lowell nodded to show that he had understood. His lower jaw showed a deplorable tendency to remain stationary as he did so, causing him to gape like a fish.

  “Don’t worry about a thing,” said Mr. Busterboy.

  Lowell regarded him with as much keenness as he could muster under the circumstances, but Mr. Busterboy’s open, cheerful face betrayed not the faintest hint of dark and secret knowledge. It reflected absolutely nothing but the good time he was having with his little car and its front-wheel drive. Maybe it was a commonplace occurrence for him to arrive at work and find his client hungover and stubbly, standing in a room bespattered with gore. Lowell’s crime was so much with him, the evidence so clear, the punishment so imminent, that it seemed incredible that the world was not shaken by it, or at least moderately interested. It was like being at war while everybody else was at peace. It was downright immoral of them.

  Suddenly the devil came and took him to the top of the mountain. He experienced an overpowering urge to tell Mr. Busterboy all about it. Only the thinnest membrane of silence enclosed his secret, and the temptation to break it was delicious and terrible. It wouldn’t be like he was telling a policeman or anything. He’d only be telling Mr. Busterboy. People like Mr. Busterboy knew all about that sort of thing. Fortunately, at the very moment that the temptation was at its strongest, Lowell was nearly knocked unconscious by a wave of nausea, and by the time he recovered, the fit had passed. He felt too weak to talk, much less confess, and as they went over the bridge he leaned his forehead against the cool glass of the window and watched the river.

  They drove uptown in silence, and by the time they reached Lowell’s building, he’d recovered his senses to the point where he was intelligently panic-stricken and sick with fear. Something awful was going to happen to him, and he didn’t have it coming to him. Perhaps the police were already waiting for him upstairs. Perhaps he would be approached by a burly man in a pork-pie hat the moment he got out of the car, and his elbow taken firmly. He only hoped they wouldn’t handcuff him in front of his neighbors. He’d never be able to live it down.

  “Nice place,” said Mr. Busterboy, gazing out the windshield at Lowell’s building. “Must cost a lot to live here.” He laughed melodiously.

  Lowell mumbled something, he scarcely knew what, and clambered out of the tiny vehicle with a maximum amount of difficulty. He was not arrested on the sidewalk, and no one was waiting for him in the lobby. Povachik was nowhere to be seen (had they told him to take cover? were they questioning him in the boiler room?) and Lowell was able to reach his apartment alone and unobserved in a building filled with old ladies, housewives, pre-school children, sick secretaries, and other defenseless folk. He could have been anybody, and under normal circumstances he would have reported it to the tenants’ committee. Now he didn’t know what to do.

  There were no police in the apartment, but at first glance the place gave the impression that it had been the scene of a struggle. Clothing was strewn everywhere in wild disarray, every piece of furniture was out of line, an ashtray had been overturned on the floor, and a glass lay on its side on the coffee table. There was a dirty plate on top of the piano. The Eames chair was stacked high with newspapers. Someone had left an orange peel on the windowsill, and the sofa cushions were squashed and askew. Lowell experienced a moment of numb alarm. Himself a murderer, he suddenly saw murder everywhere, as commonplace as doorknobs and coffeepots, and it would not have surprised him to discover his wife’s nude and broken body in the bedroom, a washcloth in her mouth and a stocking knotted around her throat. Instead he discovered an unmade bed and a discarded pair of panty hose. It took him a moment to realize that he beheld a scene of disorder, not violence. The place was not a shambles, but it was certainly a mess. Lowell dumped the papers out of his chair and sat down to look at it. Every lampshade in the room was askew, and the rug was full of lint and bobby pins. Clearly this was not the work of a single night. It must have been building up for weeks like the rubbish and sediment on the bottom of a pond, while Lowell came home late and got up sleepy and failed to notice a thing. Huddled over his obsession like a miser over a coin, he had failed to look up until a minute ago, only to find everything changed and odd.

  After he had looked at it for a while, Lowell noticed a peculiar thing about the mess. None of it belonged to him. Not a single one of his belongings was anywhere to be seen. His clothes were neatly put away, his dishes had been tidied up, and not a single one of the discards, nor the tiniest scrap of debris, bore the unique and recognizable stamp of his personality. It was his wife’s mess, every bit of it. Even the cigarettes in the overflowing ashtrays were exclusively her brand, a denicotinized and heavily filtered variety that tasted like warm air and were about as much fun to smoke as sucking on an empty straw. Search the room as he would, Lowell could discover no visible indication whatever that his wife did not live here alone. He had been erased.

  He waited all day for the police to come and take him away, but they never showed up. He tried to watch television, but nothing was on but a lot of soap operas where people stood around looking agonized and self-conscious, delivering stilted, unlifelike lines of script punctuated by long, embarrassed pauses, as though they could not quite believe that anybody had really expected them to say that. It was so much like real life that Lowell couldn’t stand it, and after a while he turned the set off and stared at the blank screen. At five-thirty his wife came home. “You startled me,” she said. She dumped her parcels on the sofa and went into the bedroom to take off her girdle.

  “I spent the night at the house,” said Lowell.

  “So I gathered,” said his wife. She emerged from the bedroom and went into the kitchen. Lowell followed her hesitantly, like a shy guest at loose ends. He sat down at the table, wishing she would ask him to do something for her, and watched as she made supper without looking at him once.

  The police didn’t call in the evening either. Lowell sat in the living room, and his wife lay down in the bedroom. She turned out her light at nine-thirty. Lowell continued to wait. He knew that police stations didn’t close for the night, but he had an idea that homicide detectives went home at a certain hour, and he wanted to wait until they gave up for the day. He wished he knew more about their schedule. He looked in the paper to see if there were any police shows on television, but the only thing even vaguely municipal was an old Lloyd Nolan movie about firemen. He tried the ten-o’clock news, but it was too busy with the war in Vietnam, the insurrection in California, and a case of juridical malfeasance in the Bronx to worry about a piddling murder in Brooklyn. Evidently Lowell hadn’t killed anybody important. He didn’t know whether that was good or bad, but by the time the news was over he couldn’t stay awake any longer. He went straight to bed, where he fell instantly asleep and dreamed that his teeth were crumbling.

  All the next day Lowell waited for his secretary to come into his office with a strange expression on her face and the news that some men wanted to see him, but nothing of the sort happened. If anything, it was an even duller day than usual. Lowell began to worry in earnest, and it crossed his mind to go down to the police station and give himself up. Fortunately, h
e did nothing of the kind. People gave themselves up only in movies, books, and England. It was also possible that they gave themselves up in America if they were overcome by guilt. Lowell wasn’t overwhelmed by guilt. He was being driven out of his mind by suspense and nearly starved to death by tension, but he didn’t feel in the least bit guilty about anything. His body had gone walking one night, and his brain had gone with it, dimly witnessing about two-thirds of a murder and half a cleanup. He could hardly believe that it had happened. He’d had dreams that he remembered better. If it hadn’t been for the dreadful consequences involved, he would have forgotten all about it in a couple of days. That was exactly what he wanted to do, forget about it. One could scarcely consider this the sort of foundation upon which a scaffold of guilt and remorse could be erected. You would have to be some kind of masochist or other nut.

  On the fourth day Lowell stopped his furtive purchases of the Daily News. His crime had gone unheeded in its pages, and he was beginning to hope that it had gone undetected too. By the fifth day he was nearly convinced of it. On the night of the sixth day he had horrible nightmares, but the following morning he felt almost like his old self again. His appetite improved, and he found it easier to answer the phone. By the end of the second week the memory had receded to the back of his mind, and it was able to frighten him only in unguarded or clearheaded moments, like the intimation of death. If he ever called it consciously to mind, it was only to rehearse the lies he was prepared to tell.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Busterboy and his workmen, laboring with the remorseless energy of army ants, were slowly dismantling the interior of Lowell’s house. Whenever they found a rotten beam, they took it right out. They ripped up the entire floor of the kitchen and threw it away, and for a week or two you could stand at the edge of the dining room and look down at the furnace and the lake of shit. Then they took the furnace out, and you couldn’t look at it anymore. They made enormous holes in the walls and ceiling, and you had to be extremely careful where you walked to avoid falling suddenly into the room directly below. Mr. Busterboy and his men also broke a number of windows and accidentally dismantled, smashed up, and threw out one of the irreplaceable parlor fireplaces. They were very sorry about their mistake, and Lowell decided not to press the issue. He felt a curious alliance with Mr. Busterboy. He felt obligated toward him, grateful, and he didn’t want him to think too hard about certain recent events. He wanted to keep him happy and contented, and he let his workmen do whatever they wanted. Lowell got along with them wonderfully. Soon he had to take a loan.

  The drunks next door never said a thing. Lowell had a bad moment the first time he had to pass them, but they just sat there and looked at him with a very total kind of indifference, as if he were a traffic accident or a fly. For a couple of days he was afraid that they were staring at him, but then he realized that they were only staring at him because he was staring at them, and when he stopped doing it, so did they. There was obviously no danger from that quarter. They never even tried to hit him for beer money.

  July came, and everyone went on vacation. Lowell’s wife bought a bikini and a quantity of black underwear and went off mournfully to spend two weeks with her parents at a New Jersey resort whose name sounded made up and which Lowell failed to find on any map. He let her go with scarcely a word. Everything was all wrecked between them anyway, and although he could probably have stopped her if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t think of what he’d do with her after that.

  He returned to the house one night while she was away. He’d avoided the place at night since the murder, and there was absolutely no reason to visit it now, but when he returned to his apartment that evening and contemplated the hours that separated him from that moment and the imperfect oblivion of sleep, he nearly cried aloud. He no longer drank, and he’d discovered that television nearly drove him out of his mind when he was sober. He didn’t want to read; the thought of sitting in one place long enough to make sense of printed words filled him with a kind of panic. He looked around the apartment almost wildly. It had been cleaned up, and everything in it seemed deliberately calculated to bore him silly. He considered going to a movie; then he considered the huge, half-empty palaces in which most movies were shown. Then he considered the probable clientele. Soon he found himself walking toward the subway to Brooklyn. It would take him a while to get there and a while to get back, and then he might be tired enough to sleep.

  Not even his house belonged to him anymore. It was out of his control and no longer bore the mark of his hand. It bore the mark of Mr. Busterboy’s hand instead, which was a much better hand than his. He walked through the darkened rooms, joylessly inhaling the odors of fresh plaster and newly sawed wood, feeling as though a giant trap was slowly being constructed around him. The place no longer meant anything; there were no dreams or excitements left in it. Yet he was going on, step by step, and God knew where his steps would lead him. Probably nowhere in particular. He knew now that the police were never coming. He was safe, and the one great act of his life would never be certified by the public realities of arrest and trial. He would never know the name of the man he’d killed or what kind of life he’d had or why he’d come to Lowell’s house that night to drink beer in the parlor and meet his fate. Lowell would never even be able to prove that it had happened. Mr. Busterboy had been as good as his word, and all trace of the deed had vanished. Where the wall had been speckled with gore like raspberry jam, a huge patch of sterile new plaster glowed in the darkness; where the stain on the floor had been, there was a hole instead. A few miles away across the East River was the apartment he could never get used to, the job where he had nothing to do, the dozen or so people he knew slightly and cared about not at all: a fabric of existence as blank and seamless as the freshly plastered wall he faced. Soon his wife would return from New Jersey. Soon everyone would be back, and things would go on much as they had before. From the street outside came the sound of laughter and shouting, bottles breaking, voices droning in the warm air, and children playing far past their bedtime. It all meant nothing whatever to Lowell. Standing in the parlor of a house no longer his, listening to the voices of people whose lives where closed to him forever, contemplating a future much like his past, he realized that it was finally too late for him. Everything had gone wrong, and he had succeeded at nothing, and he was never going to have any kind of life at all.

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1971 by Lawrence J. Davis

  Introduction copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Lethem

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Davis, L.J. (Lawrence J.)

  A meaningful life / by L.J. Davis; introduction by Jonathan Lethem.

  1. Housing rehabilitation—Fiction. 2. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3554.A935M43 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2008041187

  eISBN 978-159017-394-7

  v2.0

  Cover photograph: © Camilo José Vergara, 40th St. at 9th Ave., New York, NY, 1995; cover design: Katy Homans

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

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