I CAN set my clock by Mr. Morrison’s step upon the stairs, not that he is that accurate, but accurate enough for me. Eight-thirty, thereabouts. (My clock runs fast, anyway.) Each day he comes clumping down and I set it back ten minutes, or eight minutes or seven. I suppose I could just as well do it without him but it seems a shame to waste all that heavy treading and those puffs and sighs of expanding energy on only getting downstairs, so I have timed my life to this morning beat. Funereal tempo, one might well call it, but it is funereal only because Mr. Morrison is fat and therefore slow. Actually he’s a very nice man as men go. He always smiles.
I wait downstairs, sometimes looking up and sometimes holding my alarm clock. I smile a smile I hope is not as wistful as his. Mr. Morrison’s moon face has something of the Mona Lisa to it. Certainly he must have secrets.
“I’m setting my clock by you, Mr. M.”
“Heh, heh… my, my,” grunt, breath. “Well,” heave the stomach to the right, “I hope… ”
“Oh, you’re on time enough for me.”
“Heh, heh. Oh. Oh, yes.” The weight of the world is surely upon him or perhaps he’s crushed and flattened by a hundred miles of air. How many pounds per square inch weighing him down? He hasn’t the inner energy to push back. All his muscles spread like jelly under his skin.
“No time to talk,” he says. (He never has time.) Off he goes. I like him and his clipped little Boston accent, but I know he’s too proud ever to be friendly. Proud is the wrong word (so is shy) but I’ll leave it at that.
He turns back, pouting, and then winks at me as a kind of softening of it. Perhaps it’s just a twitch. He thinks, if he thinks of me at all: What can she say and what can I say talking to her? What can she possibly know that I don’t know already? And so he duck-walks, knock-kneed, out the door.
And now the day begins.
There are really quite a number of things that I can do. I often spend time in the park. Sometimes I rent a boat there and row myself about and feed the ducks. I love museums and there are all those free art galleries and there’s window-shopping and if I’m very careful with my budget, now and then I can squeeze in a matinee. But I don’t like to be out after Mr. Morrison comes back. I wonder if he keeps his room locked while he’s off at work.
His room is directly over mine and he’s too big to be a quiet man. The house groans with him and settles when he steps out of bed. The floor creaks under his feet. Even the side walls rustle and the wallpaper clicks its dried paste. But don’t think I’m complaining of the noise. I keep track of him this way. Sometimes, here underneath, I ape his movements, bed to dresser, step, clump, dresser to closet and back again. I imagine him there, flatfooted. Imagine him. Just imagine those great legs sliding into pants, their godlike width (for no mere man could have legs like that), those Thor legs into pants holes wide as caves. Imagine those two landscapes, sparsely fuzzed in a faint, wheat-colored brush, finding their way blindly into the waist-wide skirt-things of brown wool that are still damp from yesterday. Ooo. Ugh. Up go the suspenders. I think I can hear him breathe from here.
I can comb my hair three times to his once and I can be out and waiting at the bottom step by the time he opens his door.
“I’m setting my clock by you, Mr. M.”
“No time. No time. I’m off. Well… ” and he shuts the front door so gently one would think he is afraid of his own fat hands.
And so, as I said, the day begins.
The question is (and perhaps it is the question for today): Who is he really, one of the Normals or one of the Others? It’s not going to be so easy to find out with someone so fat. I wonder if I’m up to it. Still, I’m willing to go to certain lengths and I’m nimble yet. All that rowing and all that walking up and down and then, recently, I’ve spent all night huddled under a bush in Central Park and twice I’ve crawled out on the fire escape and climbed to the roof and back again (but I haven’t seen much and I can’t be sure of the Others yet).
I don’t think the closet will do because there’s no keyhole though I could open the door a crack and maybe wedge my shoe there. (It’s double A.) He might not notice it. Or there’s the bed to get under. While it’s true that I am thin and small, almost child-sized, one might say, still it will not be so easy, but then neither has it been easy to look for lovers on the roof.
Sometimes I wish I were a little, fast-moving lizard, dull green or a yellowish brown. I could scamper in under his stomach when he opened the door and he’d never see me though his eyes are as quick as his feet are clumsy. Still I would be quicker. I would skitter off behind the bookcase or back of his desk or maybe even Just he very still in a corner, for surely he does not see the floor so much. His room is no larger than mine and his presence must fill it, or rather his stomach fills it and his giant legs. He sees the ceiling and the pictures on the wall, the surfaces of night table, desk and bureau, but the floor and the lower halves of everything would be safe for me. No, I won’t even have to regret not being a lizard, except for getting in. But if he doesn’t lock his room it will be no problem and I can spend all day scouting out my hiding places. I’d best take a snack with me, too, if I decide this is the night for it. No crackers and no nuts, but noiseless things like cheese and fig newtons.
It seems to me, now that I think about it, that I was rather saving Mr. Morrison for last, as a child saves the frosting of the cake to eat after the cake part is finished. But I see that I have I been foolish for, since he is really one of the most likely prospects, he should have been first.
And so today the day begins with a gathering of supplies and an exploratory trip upstairs.
The room is cluttered. There is no bookcase but there are looks and magazines by the hundreds. I check behind the piles. I check the closet, full of drooping, giant suit coats I can easily hide in. Just see how the shoulders extend over the ordinary hangers. I check under the bed and the knee hole of the desk. I squat under the night table. I nestle among the dirty shirts and socks tossed in the corner. Oh, it’s better than Central Park for hiding places. I decide to use them all.
There’s something very nice about being here for I do like Mr. Morrison. Even just his size is comforting for he’s big enough to be everybody’s father. His room reassures with all his father-sized things in it. I feel lazy and young here.
I eat a few fig newtons while I sit on his shoes in the closet, soft, wide shoes with their edges all collapsed and all of them shaped more like cushions than shoes. Then I take a nap in the dirty shirts. It looks like fifteen or so but there are only seven and some socks. After that I hunch down in the knee hole of the desk, hugging my knees, and I wait and I begin to have doubts. That pendulous stomach, I can already tell, will be larger than all my expectations. There will certainly be nothing it cannot overshadow or conceal, so why do I crouch here clicking my fingernails against the desk leg when I might be out feeding pigeons? “Leave now,” I tell myself. “Are you actually going to spend the whole day, and maybe night, too, cramped and confined in here?” Yet haven’t I done it plenty of times lately and always for nothing, too? Why not one more try? For Mr. Morrison is surely the most promising of all. His eyes, the way the fat pushes up his cheeks under them, look almost Chinese. His nose is Roman and in an ordinary face it would be overpowering, but here it is lost. Dwarfed. “Save me,” cries the nose. “I’m sinking.” I would try, but I will have other, more important duties, after Mr. Morrison comes back, than to save his nose. Duty it is, too, for the good of all and I do mean all. Do not think that I am the least bit prejudiced in this.
You see, I did go to a matinee a few weeks ago. I saw the Royal Ballet dance The Rite of Spring and it occurred to me then… Well, what would you think if you saw them wearing their suits that were supposed to be bare skin? Naked suits, I called them. And all those well-dressed, cultured people clapping at them, accepting even though they knew perfectly well… like a sort of Emperor’s New Clothes in reverse. Now just think, there are only two sexes and everyone
of us is one of those and certainly, presumably that is, knows something of the other. But then that may be where I have been making my mistake. You’d think… why, just what I did start thinking, that there must be Others among us.
But it is not out of fear or disgust that I am looking for them. I am open and unprejudiced. You can see that I am when I say that I’ve never seen (and doesn’t this seem strange?) the very organs of my own conception, neither my father’s nor my mother’s. Goodness knows what they were and what this might make me.
So I wait here, tapping my toes inside my slippers and chewing hangnails off my fingers. I contemplate the unvarnished underside of the desk top. I ridge it with my thumbnail. I eat more cookies and think whether I should make his bed for him or not but decide not to. I suck my arm until it is red in the soft crook opposite the elbow. Time jerks ahead as slowly as a school clock, and I crawl across the floor and stretch out behind the books and magazines. I read first paragraphs of dozens of them. What with the dust back here and lying in the shirts and socks before, I’m getting a certain smell and a sort of gray, animal fuzz that makes me feel safer, as though I really did belong in this room and could actually creep around and not be noticed by Mr. Morrison at all except perhaps for a pat on the head as I pass him.
Thump… pause. Clump… pause. One can’t miss his step. The house shouts his presence. The floors wake up squeaking and lean toward the stairway. The banister slides away from his .slippery ham-hands. The wallpaper seems suddenly full of bugs. He thinks (if he thinks of me at all): Well, this time she isn’t peeking out of her doorway at me. A relief. I can concentrate completely on climbing up. Lift the legs against the pressure. Ooo. Ump. Pause and seem to be looking at the picture on the wall.
I skitter back under the desk.
It’s strange that the first thing he does is to put his newspaper on the desk and sit down with his knees next to my nose, regular walls, furnaces of knees, exuding heat and dampness, throwing off a miasma, delicately scented, of wet wool and sweat. What a wide roundness they have to them, those knees. Mother’s breasts pressing toward me. Probably as soft. Why can’t I put my cheek against them? Observe how he can sit so still with no toe-taping, no rhythmic tensing of the thigh. He’s not like the rest of us, but could a man like this do little things?
How the circumstantial evidence piles up, but that is all I’ve had so far and it is time for something concrete. One thing, just one fact is all I need.
He reads and adjusts the clothing at his crotch and reads again. He breathes out winds of sausages and garlic and I remember that it’s after supper and I take out my cheese and eat it as slowly as possible in little rabbit bites. I make a little piece last half an hour.
At last he goes down the hall to the bathroom and I shift back under the shirts and socks and stretch my legs. What if he undresses like my mother did, under a nightgown? under, for him, some giant, double-bed-sized thing?
But he doesn’t. He hangs his coat on the little hanger and his tie on the closet doorknob. I receive his shirt and have to make myself another spy hole. Then off with the tortured shoes, then socks. Off come the huge pants with slow, unseeing effort (he stares out the window). He begins on his yellowed undershorts, scratching himself first behind and starting earthquakes across his buttocks.
Where could he have bought those elephantine undershorts? In what store were they once folded on the shelf? In what factory did women sit at sewing machines and put out one after another after another of those otherworldly items? Mars? Venus? Saturn more likely. Or perhaps, instead, a tiny place, some moon of Jupiter with less air per square inch upon the skin and less gravity, where Mr. Morrison can take the stairs three at a time and jump the fences (for surely he’s not particularly old) and dance all night with girls his own size.
He squints his Oriental eyes toward the ceiling light and takes off the shorts, lets them fall loosely to the floor. I see Alleghenies of thigh and buttock. How does a man like that stand naked before even a small-sized mirror? I lose myself, hypnotized. Impossible to tell the color of his skin, just as it is with blue-gray eyes or the ocean. How tan, pink, olive and red and sometimes a bruised elephant-gray. His eyes must be used to multiplicities like this, and to plethoras, conglomerations, to an opulence of self, to an intemperate exuberance, to the universal, the astronomical.
I find myself completely tamed. I lie in my cocoon of shirts not even shivering. My eyes do not take in what they see. He is utterly beyond my comprehension. Can you imagine how thin my wrists must seem to him? He is thinking (if he thinks of me at all), he thinks: She might be from another world. How alien her ankles and leg bones. How her eyes do stand out. How green her complexion in the shadows at the edges of her face (for I must admit that perhaps I may be as far along the scale at my end of “humanity” as he is at his).
Suddenly I feel like singing. My breath purrs in my throat in hymns as slow as Mr. Morrison himself would sing. Can this be love? I wonder. My first real love? But haven’t I always been passionately interested in people? Or rather in those who caught my fancy? But isn’t this feeling entirely different? Can love really have come to me this late in life? (La, la, lee la, from whom all blessings flow… ) I shut my eyes and duck my head into the shirts. I grin into the dirty socks. Can you imagine him making love to me!
Well below his abstracted, ceilingward gaze, I crawl on elbows and knees back behind the old books. A safer place to shake out the silliness. Why, I’m old enough for him to be (had I ever married) my youngest son of all. Yet if he were a son of mine, how he would have grown beyond me. I see that I cannot ever follow him (as with all sons). I must love him as a mouse might love the hand that cleans the cage, and as uncomprehendingly, too, for surely I see only a part of him here. I sense more. I sense deeper largenesses. I sense excesses of bulk I cannot yet imagine. Hounded afterimages linger on my eyeballs. There seems to be a mysterious darkness in the corners of the room and his shadow covers, at the same time, the window on one wall and the mirror on the other. Certainly he is like an iceberg, seven-eighths submerged.
But now he has turned toward me. I peep from the books, holding a magazine over my head as one does when it rains. I do so more to shield myself from too much of him all at once than to hide.
And there we are, confronting each other eye to eye. We stare and he cannot seem to comprehend me any more than I can comprehend him, and yet usually, it seems, his mind is ahead of mine, jumping away on unfinished phrases. His eyes are not even wistful and not yet surprised. But his belly button… here is the eye of God at last. It nestles in a vast, bland sky like a sun on the curve of the universe flashing me a wink of heat, a benign, fat wink. The stomach eye accepts and understands. The stomach eye recognizes me and looks at me as I’ve always wished to be looked at. (Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.) I see you now.
But I see him now. The skin hangs in loose, plastic folds just there, and there is a little copper-colored circle like a quarter made out of pennies. There’s a hole in the center and it is corroded green at the edges. This must be a kind of “naked suit” and whatever the sex organs may be, they are hidden behind this hot, pocked and pitted imitation skin.
I look into those girlish eyes of his and there is a big nothing, as blank as though the eyeballs are all whites… as blank as having no sex at all… like being built like a boy doll with a round hole for the water to empty out (something to frighten little-boy three-year-olds) .
God, I think. I am not religious but I think: My God, and then I stand up and somehow, in a limping run, I get out of there and down the stairs as though I fly. I slam the door of my room and slide in under my bed. The most obvious of hiding places, but after I am there I can’t bear to move out. I lie and listen for his thunder on the stairs, the roar of his feet splintering the steps, his hand tossing away the banister as he comes like an engulfing wave.
I know what I’ll say. “We accept. We accept,” I’ll say. “We will love” (I love
already) “whatever you are.”
I lie listening, watching the hanging edges of my bedspread in the absolute silence of the house. Can there be anyone here at all in such a strange quietness? Must I doubt even my own existence?
“Goodness knows,” I’ll say, “if I’m a Normal myself.” (How is one to know such things when everything is hidden?) “Tell all of them that we accept. Tell them it’s the naked suits that are ugly. Tell them the truth is beautiful. Your dingles, your dangles, wrinkles, ruts, bumps and humps, we accept. (We will love.) Your loops, strings, worms, buttons, figs, cherries, flower petals, your soft little toad shapes, warty and greenish, your cats’ tongues and rats’ tails, your oysters, one-eyed between your legs, garter snakes, snails, we accept. (Isn’t the truth always more lovable?)
But what a long silence this is. Where is he? For he must (mustn’t he?) come after me for what I saw. If there has been all this hiding and if he must wear that cache sex thing across his front, then he must silence me somehow, destroy me even. But where is he? Perhaps he thinks I’ve locked my door. But I haven’t. I haven’t.
Why doesn’t he come?
Dangerous Visions, Doubleday, 1967
Krashaw
SUPPOSE KRASHAW does go out there? A crazy man’s house. Maps on the wall. Sea charts. Aerial views. Maybe Monday morning or Saturday afternoon? (Maybe “with soft repentant moan?…”) A half a day on the train?
Parmentier says: “Go, by God!” (Is he getting rid of Krashaw?) Contributes eighteen cents and pays for the beer where Krashaw sits holding his glass in a hand as pale as his foot.
While Parmentier tests and weighs’, Krashaw wonders. Things like: Could I live out there without vices? Is she really older than Parmentier? Black slacks, white shirt, tie, crazy man’s house. He thinks: I might learn to love her and she could love Parmentier. With the eighteen cents, he has the necessary $3.66 one way, but no plan. Yes, no plan is best, he thinks. “I don’t know what your line of reasoning is,” he says, not listening to him but finds himself on the afternoon train. He doesn’t feel hopeless. Parmentier has lent him a navy blue tie with stripes.
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1 Page 20
