Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  "You know he knew his truck."

  "He had tools along in his car and got it running again.”

  "Too much."

  Charles is riding toward the Kitteridge Farms in a truck and the sun is falling over him in flashes through the branches above the country lane. He's ten. He has on a cloth painter's cap that his grandfather has doubled over at the headband and stapled to fit him, and he pushes it onto the back of his head, copying his grandfather's way of wearing a cap, and turns to his grandfather to see how he looks. There's a small hill ahead and the truck slows and sways in the loose sand. His grandfather reaches for the floor shift, and then says, Do you want to help me shift gears? Charles puts his hand under his grandfather's hand. The strength of his hand.

  Charles rearranged his weight in the chair and his eyes picked out a straw-colored bar of sunlight on the black-enameled coffee table. "The last time I was home, at my grandparents', that is, he and I were in the living room, just sitting there, when he said, “I hear you're making quite a name for yourself. I didn't know what he meant and was embarrassed. I mean in the theater,' he said. And then I was really embarrassed, because I'd never told him about being in it. I guess I thought he wouldn't think too highly of it, or something. 'Your dad's shown me some of your notices,' he said. 'I'm glad you've finally found something you like to do and are doing well at it. I'm proud of you.’ It's the only time he's been that open with me."

  Charles went into the bathroom and closed the door. When he was younger, and got into trouble, his grandmother would take him aside and say, "Your mother and dad gave you your grandpa's name, and as long as I'm around and have a say, you'll live up to it!" And when she wasn't angry, she'd say to him in a melancholy voice, "You know, you look just like your grandpa when he was a boy."

  He stepped in front of the sink, but all he could see in the mirror was a pair of eyes, and they looked anonymous. He couldn't remember his grandfather's face; lips, half a jawline, a high cheekbone, a blue eye, a crew cut thick as a brush and blue-silver—but when he tried to arrange them into a single face, they disappeared. He felt his grandfather leaving him, and his chest constricted with the loss.

  He turned on the shower and let it run.

  His grandfather would come to the house in the late summer afternoons, knowing Charles liked to sleep and say, "Well, Chuck, do you want to go to work today And they'd go together to the construction sites, where his grandfather supervised; everybody knew him and called him CJ.C, and Charles imagined himself having an extra initial, too. And in later years his grandfather had Charles help on the small projects he'd taken up to keep busy— building a playhouse for Jay's daughters, adding a patio onto the Forest Creek house, making cedar chests for granddaughters; and Charles realized, now, that his grandfather must have sensed, even early on, that his problems were unique and was watching out for him.

  The constriction tightened, rose, and closed around his throat, and then Speed knocked on the door, and said, "Are you all right in there?"

  "Yes."

  He took off his robe and got into the shower, whirring spray.

  His grandfather had to lift him up so he could reach the register in the foyer to sign his name. And then he took one of his grandfather's hands, Jerome the other, and they went into a long, dimly lit room with a semicircle of faces at one end of it. People seated on metal folding chairs. More chairs propped against the wall. He led them over the carpet to the other end, where hidden lights, flooding an alcove banked with flowers, were so brilliant it seemed the flowers were giving off radiance. Charles's father was kneeling at a prie-dieu in the alcove. Charles felt more pressure on his hand. Surrounded by the flowers and parallel to the prie-dieu, and only a few feet from it, was a casket. Their grandfather helped them kneel on either side of their father, who touched their shoulders, and then covered his face.

  Her dark head was sunk into a pillow of white silk. Charles followed the curve of her throat to her chin, then looked away. Her right hand, resting near her heart, was turned up. The arm was bare. Her white fingers held a white rosary. His eyes went to her neck, her cheek, her cheekbone, the familiar line of her nose, this corner of her lips set tight, sending a deep crease down her chin, her mouth. And then her forehead, the globe of her eye, closed now. Then the whispering and mourning behind him, and a wet mildewed smell mingled with another smell almost like incense, and the odor of too many roses, so cloying it seemed his nose was bleeding the sweet smell. His father had said, "Now, your mother might look different to you. She's been very ill," and he wanted to say, “Ill, Dad? Ill? Isn't she dead?"

  He could smell the flowers now. He got out of the shower, half dried himself, and went into the other room and sat in the chair. Speed ate the last of the Turns, put the crumpled wrapper on the coffee table, then dropped it into an ashtray.

  "Hey, I hope you don't think I was futzing around with

  I how you feel?"

  "No."

  "There's nothing worse than the jag-off who thinks I everything'll be better if you just laugh, ho ho, when all you want to do is be by yourself."

  "No." Charles saw Jerome's face above him, and went to his bedroom door. "I better get ready for class."

  "You said you weren't going."

  "Oh. Well, I guess I will. He'd want me to. Grandpa." Charles stepped into the bedroom, then said, "I mean, he probably would. I didn't mean it that way."

  "I know.” Speed's voice sounded querulous and indistinct and like the voice of somebody else. Jerome? Charles sat on the bed and looked at the calendar; on its upper half, above the spiral hinge, was a color photograph of the Grand Canyon, and next to the photo he noticed some delicate lines of script, partly obscured by a streak of reflected sunlight, and went to the dresser and read:

  The swallows are making

  them ready to fly,

  wheeling it out on a

  windy sky:

  goodbye, summer,

  goodbye, goodbye ...

  —George Melville

  Moby Dick. He'd been through this moment the same way once before. He saw the copper ashtray and alarm clock and shook his head as though to shake free the dream. He went to the door and Speed wasn't there. The quilt was gone. There was a concussive sucking thud, and then a high whine, and when he realized that Speed was there, in the bathroom, he started trembling; what was it he'd done, he thought, as he threw himself across the bed or hadn't done?

  Jill was taking the history of philosophy from a graduate student so brilliant and amusing, she said, that if Speed and Charles came to the class they wouldn't be able to keep up with him. It was a dare, as she'd meant it, and they promised to take her up on it. Since he woke, and even before then, he'd been at the mercy of circumstances beyond his control, and when he came across this offhand promise everything in his mind was displaced by it. He went to the bathroom, knocked on a door that pulled open, and Speed said, "You look like hell."

  "I'll see you in Tergulio's class."

  Speed's face was glistening and dripping water. He brought a towel to it. "You don't plan to go now? I mean, you know—"

  "I told Jill we'd be there."

  "Shake her up."

  "I have to see her anyway, to tell her."

  “I'll tell her. Stay here. You look awful, really."

  "I'll see you there at ten," Charles said. He picked up three books that were handy and went through the kitchen, narrow as a corridor, and up the steps and out into fall air. He turned and came back and went to the refrigerator and took out a juice can with triangular holes punched in its top, and as he drank it down (chilly grapefruit with a mouth-shocking taste of metal) Speed stepped into the room, the towel still in his hands, and studied him with what seemed censure. Charles left the apartment and went for a full block before he felt free of Speed's eyes.

  The red brick sidewalk blurred, floated up toward him, and then fell away, greatly widened. His gait and carriage changed. He was walking up the drive to his grandfather's house. It was ho
t, and at this time of evening, when the sound of summer insects started rising from the grass, his grandfather would set the sprinkler out on the terraced lawn, and then he and Charles would go down toward the road, his grandfather's hand swinging at the level of his eyes, and on the way they'd stop to look at the roses on the trellis and to check the level of water in the concrete pond where the big goldfish were, and his grandfather would examine the stake and the binding around the willow he'd planted, and then they'd go over the grass, across the crushed-rock drive to another part of the lawn, shaded by box elders, and here it was Charles's job to test the swings, swing in them all, and then test the seesaw to see if it squeaked, and then they'd go over to the merry-go-round, and his grandfather would stare at it, his fists on his hips, while Charles waited for him to say what he said each time, "This, too, I suppose." Then he'd sit Charles on the merry-go-round and turn it until Charles came around to him, and then turn it once more, to make sure, and then he'd say it needed oil, and they'd go toward the back of the house, checking flower beds along the way, and into the small workshop (cool and damp and smelling of sawdust and burlap), and after they'd straightened up and put the tools in their proper places, his grandfather took the oilcan and they went outside, where it was darker and the sound of insects had grown more shrill, and after the merry-go-round was oiled, his grandfather sat him on it again and pushed against the small of his back to get it going, and then his grandfather appeared and then passed, and reappeared and passed again, faster now, the grass turning to a blur, as Charles closed his eyes and felt himself lift away out into the darkness over this yard that was a playground and garden guarded by a force as true as the center post of the spinning wheel he was on.

  Bright sunlight on blacktop made Charles blink. He was in the middle of a street five blocks from his apartment, and most of them in the wrong direction.

  He went into a cafeteria across from the quad and got a cup of coffee and sat in a booth. He opened a book. Nearly every evening his grandfather sat out in a chair on the highest terrace of the lawn, looking over the willow and the trellis, past the road and railroad tracks and a vacant lot, to the building that held the office and shop of the business he turned over to his sons, and then he'd glance away and shift his weight and recross his legs and remove his cap and pass his hand over his hair, and then pull the cap lower and look off in another direction, but soon his body gravitated back and he was staring at the building again. And then the cycle of restlessness started over and went on into the night. Charles saw himself drawing up a lawn chair in the darkness and sitting next to his grandfather. The side of his grandfather's face glowed orange as he smoked. His cap was of red leather. Charles would sit here until his grandfather explained exactly what was bothering him and what he was looking for at this hour.

  Charles saw that it was almost ten. The place was filling up. The page of the book in front of him was still saying, in its first line, "This condition of the psyche has been proved irreducible, although . . ."He closed it up. There was an empty mug of coffee at his elbow he couldn't remember drinking or touching before this. Whatever he came near this morning was altered, it seemed, or else gone.

  On the sidewalk he looked for Jill. There'd always been an air of impromptu and surprise about their encounters; last year, at a dress rehearsal of Twelfth Night, he was squinting into the mirror above his makeup table, trying to line an eye, when a form moved from the edge of his mirror to its center and stopped there; his eyes adjusted and he saw a blond girl. "I'm on the makeup crew," she said. "You need my help."

  She affected him so much it would have been a risk of his manhood to tell her, so he didn't; he loved her from a distance, telepathically. She walked with smart satisfied strides, as though she was being well taken care of by somebody else, and seemed as distant as he, except in repose; then, with her pillowy lips parted, she looked like a young girl surprised she'd been overtaken by maturity, and saddened by it, in spite of the beauty it brought. She hadn't mastered the expressions that come naturally to most women and her face had the fixed and astonished prettiness of a manikin's. Just when he began to believe he was making headway with his telepathy, she'd laugh at Sir Toby Belch belching to ready himself for an entrance, or line another actor's eyes and lean into him with her knees and ruin everything. But he didn't give up, and on the night of the final performance she came up to him, kissed him on the mouth, and said, "You're my Feste. I love you." Which he didn't hear at first because the texture, the pressure, the softness of her lips had over-; powered the rest of his senses.

  He sat on the wide windowsill across from Tergulio's room. A radiator under him was clanking and sending up a smell of metallic paint, and burned the backs of his calves when they touched.

  "Jill!" he cried. He hadn't seen her, really, among the other students in the hall, but his eye had caught a red skirt and black sweater she wore in combination so much I she called it her national costume.

  "Oh, good, love," she said, and came over, looking I dazed without her glasses. "I was afraid you weren't going to be here."

  i He took her by the elbows and tried to begin. Her eye-I brows went high, questioning him, it seemed, but then he I saw that her eyes were widened and opaque with an intimate sadness. Did she already know? Could she sense it from seeing him? "Oh, Jill, I—"

  "I know. I feel the same way. It's the fall." She leaned I her head on his chest and worked the zipper of his jacket. "You know that paper I did on Blake? The one I worked I on for two weeks and thought was so good? I just got it back and he gave me a D on it. I went up after class, and the old fogy bastard said, 'It's been copied from somewhere, and the only reason I didn't flunk you on it is I haven't found out where yet.'" She turned her face to him and tears rose above the rims of her eyes. "You know I didn't copy a word! Every one of those ideas is mine!”

  Who should he begin with and where? He slid off the sill and took her in his arms, and saw Speed at the end of the hall making signs that he wanted to retreat.

  "No, no," Charles said. "Come on."

  "What?" Jill asked.

  "It's Speed."

  Jill turned to him and said, "Oh, great! Now things'll get moving!"

  Speed looked at her in bewilderment, then at Charles, then at her.

  "I mean in Tergulio's class," she said. She put her hand to his cheek and patted it with her lips pursed. "Aw, poor fella. Tergulio's class, remember? You and Chuckle. Raise hell. Remember?"

  Speed's lips went white and she said, "There's the bell Come on!"

  She ran into the room and Charles leaned to Speed and whispered, "I couldn't tell her." Speed blushed.

  The class met around two long conference tables pushed end to end and Speed and Charles went to the back of the room, where a smaller table stood in one corner, and sat on its top. Tergulio came in late, looking harried and preoccupied, pulled some mimeographed sheets from his portfolio, passed them around, and told one student to begin reading, and the possibility of class discussion, an open field for repartee, evasion of the subject, and whatever else was on the interlopers' minds, was destroyed. The student began, in a voice that was high and strident, "No positive quality possessed by a false idea is removed ' by the presence of what is true, in virtue of its being true. For instance, when we look at the sun . .."

  Charles wrote on a scrap of paper, "This isn't history, it's hell." Speed opened his notebook, took out a pencil, and then handed the notebook to Charles, who saw, in wobbly block letters: "THIS KID'S VOICE IS SO HIGH I CAN'T HEAR IT." Charles turned to the wall and a spasm of laughter came so fast it blew streamers of snot over his lips onto his chin. He got out his handkerchief, used it, and had almost recovered when Speed, imitating the reader, cleared his throat in a stringy falsetto. Charles put his head against the wall, held Speed in front of him as a shield, and his laughter rose into swells, the swells into waves—his diaphragm heaving with pain, his brain dark numb jelly jarred by his laugh—and the waves wouldn't let up, until the high voi
ce of the reader became a part of him and his laugh, a part of the pattern his spread hand made against the rough corduroy of Speed's jacket, and then part of his fingernails, and he realized his cheeks were wet with tears, and thought he saw tears down the wall, too.

  He scribbled a note—"Please tell Jill. See you after class in the Y"—tore it out and gave it to Speed, and, ignoring the eyes of Jill and Tergulio, left the room. As he went down the stairs, he felt as he'd felt going up or down stairs after an argument with Jill, which was often that the stairs under him were leading into a recess sullen, self-habitation, where he'd remain sometimes for days, distant and disaffected and speechless and in pain, playing the martyr to a mons.

  *

  His reflection grazed the dusty glass at the top half of the door, cupped its hands, and vanished as he stared into Jerome's apartment; the arm of a rocker, a bullfight poster, a corner of the black-and-white fiber floor mat, and the study desks and comfortable chairs and couches of a full-sized, expensive basement apartment. Charles knocked again and again nobody answered. One of the three roommates was usually home. He tried the knob and the door swung in, which surprised him; all of them were careful about that. The room and the furniture, and the study desks with their arrangements of books on them, seemed too stilled and personal to intrude upon. He was on his way out when he saw Jerome in the door of his bedroom. His eyes were red-rimmed and contrite. Charles's own behavior since he woke went through his mind, and he stepped past Jerome and into the kitchen and stared out a window along the low ceiling and saw the underside of the lowest branches of an oak, and beyond the oak a section of red brick wall, leaves against brick, bronze against red, and then the colors trembled, and then mingled and went out of focus as his eyes filmed and formed beads radiating lines that shot through the colors and sent them awry. He'd come to Jerome for guidance, and it was that simple; he was to submit, to grieve.

  "Did you go to any classes?" Jerome asked.

  He nodded.