by John Sanford
“Last name?”
“Peterson.”
“First name?”
“Peterson.”
“Peterson first and last, eh?” Dan said.
“And all the time,” Peterson said.
“What’s on your mind, if you have one?”
“How’re you doing at that school for the underprivileged and feeble-minded?”
“Learning all the time. I’m studying how to overthrow you.”
“That’ll take more than thirteen lessons, kid.”
“Tonight we find out how to make a bomb with baling-wire, a hammer-handle, two potatoes, and a cough-drop. You’re all through, Pete.”
“What did that hostile bloke want that just tore out of here?”
“Now, what the hell do you think he wanted—a match? He wanted a job.”
“He looked as if he wanted mine.”
“I told him yours was filled,” Dan said. I also told him what it was filled with—a four-letter word.”
“You’re a four-letter man, kid,” Peterson said. “Hand over that bastard’s application.”
“What for?”
“He looked like a Red. He don’t get any job out of this agency.”
“You go four-letter yourself!” Dan said. “He came in here like all the rest, and he’s going to get the same kind of shake. There’s nothing against him on his application, but to four-letter you, I’d place him even if he was a terrorist. Now, what do you think of that?”
“I think you’re a very faithful employee,” Peterson said, and on his way to the door, he laughed.
“Pete,” Dan said, “why do you take this stuff from me?”
“You have it bass-ackwards, kid,” Peterson said. “You take. You’re the one that’s being four-lettered. I thought you knew that.”
After the door had closed, Dan remained where he was, gazing at the blotter on his desk and the dead hebraics of writing in reverse, but thinking of the living and insistent words that Peterson had left on the wing. He rose now, seeking to suppress thought with action, but the words seemed to have lodged in his mind, and he knew of nothing that would dispossess them [nothing? you thought]—and at once he raised the edge of the blotter and groped for a file-card that he had placed there some time before: the card was headed by the name JAMES, MISS EMMA. He waited for a moment [for what? you wondered], and then, taking up the telephone, he gave a number to the operator.
* * *
That evening, Dan left school at the half-time bell and walked west through a straight-down rain that grew gold and silver rosettes in the gutters [and the rain made you think of snow, and the snow made you think of Julia, and with Julia thought stopped as if your mind had run down and gone dead, and you were aware of no emotion, no movement, no intention, and no destination until you were before an open door in which a woman stood bordered by darkness and backed by light].
Saying nothing, she made way for him, and when he had removed his dripping coat and draped it over a chair in the entry, she followed him into the room beyond [rugs, furniture, draperies, books, pictures, bric-a-brac—objects bought and brought home, he thought, objects made for anybody and sold to somebody, objects of moderate value, little character, and no concern. You turned to the one other object not yet appraised]. She was seated on the further of two facing couches set endwise to an imitation fireplace harboring imitation logs.
Putting a cigarette to her mouth, she gripped it with her teeth, as if it were the stem of a pipe, and smoke espaliered her face, half-shutting her eyes, to mingle with her hair and drift away. Now, as she shredded the damp stub over an ashtray, she said. “Tell me what you see that makes you stare.”
“I knew someone once,” he said, “not for long and not too well, but long enough and well enough to have made me look for her in every face I’ve ever seen since. I haven’t found her, and I suppose I always knew I was bound to fail, but if I hadn’t met you, I think I’d’ve gone on searching all my life. The search ends with you, and I stare not because I see what I saw so many years ago, but because I see what she couldn’t’ve helped being today; I see a dream grown older. You’ll not take that kindly, and there’s no reason why you should: it isn’t meant kindly. But it’s the truth, for whatever the truth is worth to you, and I tell you, because I don’t want you to wonder, that it’s the only thing in the world that could’ve brought me here. You represent someone else—someone that I simply have to get rid of.”
With a look that he was unable to interpret, the woman contemplated him until a smile, equally unfathomable, overran her face. “I suggest a series of cold showers,” she said.
He went to the entry and put on his coat. “I’ll try that all week,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll be back next Monday night.”
“I’d like you back before that,” she said. “For some more talk, I mean.”
“The last time I saw you, you intimated that I was hard of hearing. I think you have the same defect. Next Monday night, I said.”
The woman came suddenly to her feet, but whatever she had been about to say was as suddenly rescinded, and when she spoke, her voice was so fully under control as to convey nothing more than the flat acquiescence of her words. “Next Monday night, then,” she said.
* * *
When Dan reached home, Mary said, “Another five minutes, and I’d’ve been dreaming of drowning, but I’d’ve been too tired to save myself.”
“I stopped for coffee with some of the class,” he said. “Are you too sleepy for Lecture III?”
“I can’t let you get ahead of me.”
“Here goes, then. Tonight we took up the matter of production-relations. Every social system known to man has had a set of its own, but to understand the one that Capitalism has developed, first you have to know how Capitalism came into being. Now, do you want to hear the life-story of Capitalism, or do you want to go to sleep and be a dunce?”
“Blow smoke in my face. That’ll keep me up.”
“Man has lived under five main systems: primitive communal, slave, feudal, capitalist, and socialist. The primitive communal system flourished in the age of the stick, the stone, and the broken bone. People lived off the country, and in order to avoid being used for food themselves, they banded together to hunt, to build shelter, and to beat off hungry neighbors. There was no private ownership, except in some prize tomahawk or some special pair of leather drawers. There was no exploitation, and there were no classes.”
A huffed puff of smoke opened Mary’s eyes, and she said, “I was listening, Dan.”
“It took seventy-nine million years to notice the difference,” he said, “but things gradually changed. Here and there, instead of making another club, somebody turned up with a spear or a bow-and-arrow, and when somebody else got the hang of fire, people began to use metals and shape pottery….”
“You know something, Dan?”
“I know everything.”
“You’re a nice boy.”
From the hiding-place behind his face, he said, “That’s a thing I didn’t know.”
“Blow smoke,” she said. “Blow smoke.”
“And then people learned how to tame animals, and then there were farmers and herdsmen instead of hunters, and there were tools instead of weapons, and now men began to keep for themselves what they’d wrought with their hands or wrung from Nature, and soon some of them had two of this and three of that and a dozen of something else—and trade was invented to dispose of the extras. But there were Republicans even then, and they sat up late, figuring how to give short weight, how to water milk and gravel corn, and it wasn’t long before a few owned most of the corn, most of the cattle, and most of the earth, and having grown strong on the backs of the weak, now they gathered the weak into armies, and the armies captured people as once people had captured animals—and now there were slaves….”
He raised his hand to touch his wife’s face, but she smiled very faintly in her sleep, and he allowed the gesture to remain incomple
te.
* * *
The only illumination came from the mock fireplace, in which, among the logs, a small bulb burned behind a slowly revolving color-wheel; a shoal of tinted ovals swam the hollow cube of the room, a cruising dapple for plaster and portieres, for furniture and faces.
“The showers seem to have done no good,” the woman said.
[On your way home, you thought, you would memorize a few paragraphs of recommended reading, and when Mary asked you about Lecture IV, you would say.…] “No good, no good at all.”
“Long walks might help, or a hobby, or something in your food.”
“Julia could be sitting behind you,” he said. “She could be telling you what to say.”
Lying against an arm of the couch, the woman arched herself a little, and the rounds of her body rounded out her garments. “You make love supernaturally,” she said.
“She couldn’t’ve told you to say that,” he said, “because I’m not making love at all.”
“What are you doing—preparing to offer me a cook?”
“It’s getting late, and there’s only one Monday night in a week.”
“There are six other nights—or do you have six other ghosts that you’re trying to lay?”
“That sounds more like her,” he said, and rising from the opposite couch, he started for the door.
“Look,” the woman said. “Look, Dan.”
He turned….
* * *
“You must’ve been out till all hours last night,” Mary said. “I never even heard you come in.”
“We stopped for coffee again, but this time we got into an argument. I think one of the guys is a Trotskyite.”
“I don’t know what a Trotskyite is, but he cost me Lecture IV.”
“I’ll tell you about it tonight, maybe.”
“I don’t want to miss anything. I have to keep up with you.”
“That isn’t very easy. Sometimes I can hardly keep up with myself.”
* * *
Across a sector of the ceiling above the bed moved the endless pointillism painted by the color-wheel. [Lecture V, you thought—a dollar’s worth of Mary’s money….]
“Why don’t you say something, Dan?”
“Capitalist production has two distinguishing features: a) commodity production prevails; and b) just as the product is a commodity, so is the labor-power that produced it.”
“Tell me how attractive I am.”
“How attractive you are!” he said.
“You talked quite well in the other room.”
“The other room is the talking-room, the room for great speeches. This is the doing-room—and the undoing room—where I prove to myself that I never meant a word I ever said.”
“Did you have the same regrets last week?” the woman said.
“The same in kind, but not the same in degree. Tonight there’s dirt on top of dirt.”
“What made you come back, then?”
“Capitalist production has two distinguishing features.”
The woman put her hand across the space between them and let it lie lightly against his body, and then she said, “Do you think you could carry any more dirt, Dan?”
He moved toward her, saying, “There’s no limit.”
The woman’s hand became a hindrance. “You’re going home now,” she said. “Like a good little boy.”
[Like a good little boy, you went home.]
* * *
“The lights,” he said. “What do the lights mean?”
“They’re fascinating, don’t you think?”
“I can’t understand them. I don’t know what they’re for, what they’re supposed to do.”
“They’re not supposed to do anything. They’re simply colored lights.”
“I’m always trying to make a comparison. I’m always thinking, ‘They’re like…,’ but that’s as far as I ever get, because they’re like nothing. What kind of mind imagined them? What kind of mind enjoys them?”
“What kind of mind is so disturbed?” the woman said.
“I knew a girl once who paved her place with dolls, long-legged dolls. They were everywhere—squatting in the chairs, propped up along the walls, sprawled out on the bed—and no matter what you were doing, always a few of them seemed to be watching you, listening to you, passing judgment on you, but the one thing they never did was move, and therefore you could manage them. These lights, though, are all motion, and like so many other things, motion without life—tricks, novelties thought up to prevent thought.”
“I like them. You’ll find them every time you come here.”
“That’ll be once a week for a certain number of weeks.”
“Oftener, if I wish, and longer,” the woman said. “You can’t keep your hands off me.”
“On Monday nights,” he said. “Only on Monday nights.”
“When you reach home and go to bed, remember me just as I am now. Remember with your mind or your hands or your mouth or whatever else you remember with, and then tell yourself that the memory has to last you all week. I doubt it’ll last you a day.”
“If it doesn’t, I’ll try something in my food,” he said. “Arsenic.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow evening. Be here around eight, Dan.”
[And that was Lecture VI, you thought.]
* * *
Dan was about to enter the elevator when the operator said, “I’m sorry, sir, but Miss James is not at home.”
“Drop the ‘sir,’” Dan said. “Did she leave a message?”
“She said, ‘If I have a caller, tell him he’s six days late.’”
“Did she say when she’d be back?”
The man shook his head, saying, “That was all.”
“I think I’ll wait around for a while,” Dan said. “Join me in a smoke?”
“It’s against the rules.”
“Everything’s against the rules. God damn the rules!”
The man took a cigarette. “I didn’t know you spoke my language,” he said.
It was two hours before the woman returned. She said nothing to Dan until they reached the door of her apartment, and there she turned to him, saying, “Have you been waiting long, Dan?”
“A few minutes,” he said.
She walked back to the shaft and rang the bell. “A few hours, you mean,” she said.
“Win or lose, you’ll be cheaper if you ask.”
“Never be afraid of the truth,” she said, and when the gate was opened, she faced the operator. “Dale, how long has Mr. Johnson been waiting for me?”
The man pressed a plunger and cleared the signal-box. “It’s hard to say exactly, Miss James. Not more than a quarter of an hour.”
“That’ll be all, Dale,” the woman said.
Dan stepped past her into the car. “Never be afraid of the truth,” he said. “That’s Lecture VII.” On the way downstairs, he put his hand on the operator’s arm. “Why did you do it?”
“You think that’s the first time I’ve been asked a question like that? Christ, the things that go on!”
“But why did you do it for me?”
“I told you before: you speak my language.”
Through a slow wet snowfall, Dan went westward across the Village to one of the uptown entrances of the Christopher Street subway-station. He descended a few steps, stopped, and almost at once ascended them again, and through the slow wet snowfall, he returned to the apartment-building. He neither looked at the operator nor spoke to him until the fourth-floor gate had been opened, and then he said, “The things that go on.”
* * *
“What did you mean when you said, ‘Lecture VII,’ the other night?”
“I meant that capitalist production has two distinguishing features.”
“And that’s another thing. I want to know why you say it all the time.”
“Put them together. I’m taking a course in Political Economy—was taking, that is. I was studying how to become the John Brown of the workin
g-class, and I stumbled over an old erotic dream. The cause of the oppressed has been set back a century.”
“You grow more interesting by the week.”
“It was a thirteen-week course to start with, and eight weeks of it are gone. I advise you to make good use of the rest.”
“We’ll see each other after the course is over, Dan.”
“We’ll see each other tonight and five more times.”
The woman let herself slide a little lower on the couch, and her skirt was drawn back to expose garters of flesh above the tops of her stockings. “Fifty-five,” she said.
“I’m married.”
She sat very still, staring up at him, and he stood very still, looking down at her, and then suddenly she tugged at her skirt and concealed her knees. “He’s married from Tuesday to Sunday,” she said. “On Monday, when he’s supposed to be studying Marxism, he’s practicing lechery. An easy-Marxist!”
“It’s a good joke,” he said. “I expect to laugh till I die.”
“Sit down over there and tell me all about your wife. Is she more attractive than I am? Is she more intelligent?”
“You don’t think I’m going to make any comparisons, do you?”
“Why not, Dan? What else’ve you been doing all along? Every time you come here, you make a comparison. Every time we go into the other room, you make a comparison. If you can do a thing, you can talk about it. This is the talking-room, remember? Well, talk. Don’t be mealy-mouthed….”
* * *
“‘Tell him to attend Lecture IX,’” the elevator-operator said. “That’s all there was to the message, and I hope you know what it means.”
“Only too well,” Dan said.
“Smoke one of mine this time?”
“Glad to—and the name is Dan.”
“I was in the same pickle myself last year,” the man said. “Only it was every night in the week, not just Monday.”
“How’d you get out of it?”
“If I had an answer to that, I could make a million, but, hell, you can’t even take shots for it.”
“Try something in your food, she said—as if your brain were in your pants. The only thing I don’t like about a mind is that you can think with it.”
Within the car, a bell sounded, and the operator glanced at the box above the control-lever. “In your place, Dan, I’d go to Lecture IX,” he said, and he began to slide the gate. “She’d hate it.”
