Mr. Vertigo

by Paul Auster

  Molly’s medical bills had wiped out whatever cash we’d managed to save. I was four months behind on the rent, the landlord was threatening to evict me, and the only thing I owned was my car—a seven-year-old Ford Fairlane with a dented grille and a faulty carburetor. About three days after I left the hospital, my favorite nephew called me from Denver about a job. Dan was the bright one in the family—the first college professor they’d ever had—and he’d been living out there with his wife and son for the past few years. Since his father had already told him how hard-up I was, I didn’t waste my breath telling fibs about my big bank account. The job wasn’t much, he said, but maybe a change of scenery would do me good. What sort of job? I asked. Maintenance engineer, he replied, trying not to make it sound too funny. You mean a janitor? I said. That’s it, he said, a mop jockey. A position had opened up in the building where he taught his classes, and if I felt like moving to Denver, he’d put in a word for me and swing the deal. Sure, I said, why the hell not, and two days later I packed some things into the Ford and set off for the Rocky Mountains.

  I never did make it to Denver. It wasn’t because the car broke down, and it wasn’t because I had second thoughts about becoming a janitor, but things happened along the way, and instead of winding up in one place, I wound up in another. It’s really not hard to explain. Coming so soon after all those dreams in the hospital, the trip brought back a flood of memories, and by the time I crossed the Kansas border, I couldn’t resist making a short, sentimental detour to the south. It wasn’t so far out of the way, I told myself, and Dan wouldn’t mind if I was a little slow in getting there. I just wanted to spend a few hours in Wichita —and go back to Mrs. Witherspoon’s house to see what the old place looked like. Once, not long after the war, I’d tried to look her up in New York, but there was no listing for her in the phone book, and I’d forgotten the name of her company. For all I knew she was dead now, just like everyone else I’d ever cared about.

  The city had grown a lot since the 1920s, but it still wasn’t my idea of a good time. There were more people, more buildings, and more streets, but once I adjusted to the changes, it turned out to be the same backwater pancake I remembered. They called it the “Air Capital of the World” now, and it gave me a good laugh when I saw that slogan plastered on billboards around town. The chamber of commerce was referring to all the aircraft companies that had set up factories there, but I couldn’t help thinking about myself, the original birdboy who’d once called Wichita his home. I had some trouble finding the house, which made my tour a bit more thorough than I’d planned Way back when, it had been located on the outskirts of town, sitting by itself on a dirt road that led to open country, but now it was part of the residential hub, and other houses had been built around it. The street was called Coronado Avenue, and it came with all the modern accoutrements: sidewalks, street lamps, and a blacktop surface with a white stripe running down the middle. But the house looked good, there was no question about that: the shingles gleamed white under the gray November sky, and the little trees that Master Yehudi had planted in the front yard towered over the roof like giants. Whoever owned the place had been treating it well, and now that it was so old, it had taken on the air of something historic, a venerable mansion from a bygone age.

  I parked the car and walked up the steps of the front porch. It was late afternoon, but a light was on in a first-floor window, and now that I was there, I figured I had to go through with it and ring the bell. If the people weren’t ogres, they might even let me in and show me around for old time’s sake. That was all I was hoping for: just a glimpse. It was cold out on the porch, and as I stood there waiting for someone to appear, I couldn’t help thinking back to the first time I’d come to this house, half-dead from losing my way in that infernal blizzard. I had to ring twice before I heard footsteps stirring within, and when the door finally opened, I was so wrapped up in remembering my first encounter with Mrs. Witherspoon, it took a couple of seconds before I realized that the woman standing in front of me was none other than Mrs. Witherspoon herself: an older, frailer, more wrinkled version to be sure, but the same Mrs. Witherspoon for all that. I would have known her anywhere. She hadn’t gained a pound since 1936; her hair was dyed the same snazzy shade of red; and her bright blue eyes were as blue and bright as ever. She was seventy-four or seventy-five by then, but she didn’t look a day over sixty—sixty-three tops. Still dressed in fashionable clothes, still holding herself erect, she came to the door with a burning cigarette wedged between her lips and a glass of Scotch in her left hand. You had to love a woman like that. The world had gone through untold changes and catastrophes since I’d last set eyes on her, but Mrs. Witherspoon was the same tough broad she’d always been.

  I recognized her before she recognized me. That was understandable, since time had taken a more drastic toll on my looks than on hers. My freckles had all but vanished now, and I’d turned into a squat, dumpy sort of guy with thinning gray hair and a set of Coke-bottle lenses perched on my nose. Hardly the dashing smoothy she’d dined with at Lemmele’s thirty-eight years before. I was dressed in dull workaday clothes—lumber jacket, khaki pants, cordovan shoes, white socks—and my collar was turned up to ward off the chill. She probably couldn’t see much of my face, and what she could see was so haggard, so worn out from my struggle with the booze, there wasn’t anything to be done but to tell her who I was.

  The rest goes without saying, doesn’t it? Tears were shed, stories were told, we gabbed and carried on until the wee small hours. It was auld lang syne on Coronado Avenue, and I doubt there could have been a better reunion than the one we had that night. I’ve already given the gist of what happened to me, but her story was no less strange, no less unexpected than mine. Instead of parlaying her millions into more millions during the Texas wildcat boom, she’d sunk her drills into dry ground and gone bust. The oil game was largely guesswork back then, and she made one too many bad guesses. By 1938, she’d lost nine-tenths of her fortune. That still didn’t qualify her as a pauper, but she was no longer in the Fifth Avenue league, and after floating a few more ventures that didn’t pan out, she finally packed it in and returned to Wichita. She thought it would be only temporary: a few months in the old house to take stock and then on to the next bright idea. But one thing led to another, and by the time the war came she was still there. In what can only be called a startling about-face, she got caught up in the patriotic fervor of the time and spent the next four years working as a volunteer nurse at the Wichita V. A. Hospital. I was hard-pressed to imagine her doing that Florence Nightingale bit, but Mrs. W. was a woman of many surprises, and if money was her strong point, it was by no means the only thing she thought about. After the war she went into business again, but this time she stayed in Wichita, and little by little she built it into a nice profitable concern. With Laundromats of all things. It sounds funny after all that high-stakes speculation in stocks and oil— but why not? She was one of the first to see the commercial possibilities of the washing machine, and she got a jump on her competitors by entering the field early. By the time I showed up in 1974, she had twenty Laundromats scattered around the city and another twelve in neighboring towns. The House of Clean, she called them, and all those dimes and quarters had turned her into a wealthy woman again.

  And what about men? I asked. Oh, lots of men, she answered, more men than you could shake a stick at. And Orville Cox— what about him? Dead and gone, she said. And Billy Bigelow? Still among the living. As a matter of fact, his house was just around the corner. She’d brought him into the Laundromat business after the war, and he’d worked as her manager and right-hand man until his retirement six months ago. Young Billy was pushing seventy now, and with two heart attacks already behind him, the doctor had told him to go easy on the pump. His wife had died seven or eight years back, and with his kids all grown and gone, Billy and Mrs. Witherspoon were still in close touch. She described him as the best friend she’d ever had, and from the way her voice soft
ened when she said it, I gathered that relations between them went beyond simple shop talk about washers and dryers. Ah ha, I said, so patience finally won out, and sweet little Billy got what he wanted. She threw me one of her devilish winks. Sometimes, she said, but not always. It depends on my mood.

  It didn’t take much arm-twisting to get me to stay. The janitor thing was only a stopgap measure, and now that something better had turned up, I didn’t have to think twice about changing my plans. The salary was only a small part of it, of course. I was back where I belonged, and when Mrs. Witherspoon invited me to step in and take over Billy’s old job, I told her I’d start first thing in the morning. It didn’t matter what the work was. If she’d invited me to stay on to scrub the pots in her kitchen, I would have said yes to that, too.

  I slept in the same top-floor room I’d occupied as a boy, and once I learned the business, I did all right for her. I kept the washing machines humming, I jacked profits up, I persuaded her to expand in different directions: a bowling alley, a pizza joint, a pinball arcade. With all the college kids pouring into town every fall, there was a demand for quick food and cheap entertainment, and I was just the man to provide those things. I put in long hours and worked my buns off, but I liked being in charge of something again, and most of my schemes turned out pretty well. Mrs. Witherspoon called me a cowboy, which from her mouth was a compliment, and for the first three or four years we galloped along at a sprightly clip. Then, very suddenly, Billy died. It was another heart attack, but this one took place on the twelfth fairway of the Cherokee Acres Country Club, and by the time the medics got to him, he had already breathed his last. Mrs. W. went into a tailspin after that. She stopped going to the office with me in the morning, and little by little she seemed to lose interest in the company, leaving most of the decisions in my hands. I’d been through something like that with Molly, but it wasn’t much good telling her that time would take care of it. The one thing she didn’t have was time. The man had worshiped her for fifty years, and now that he was gone, no one was ever going to replace him.

  One night in the midst of all this, I heard her sobbing through the walls as I lay upstairs reading in bed. I went down to her room, we talked for a while, and then I took her in my arms and held her until she drifted off to sleep. Somehow or other, I wound up falling asleep, too, and when I woke in the morning I found myself lying under the covers with her in the large double bed. It was the same bed she’d shared with Master Yehudi in the old days, and now it was my turn to sleep beside her, to be the man she couldn’t live without. It was mostly a matter of comfort, of companionship, of preferring to sleep in one bed rather than two, but that isn’t to say the sheets didn’t catch fire every now and then. Just because you get old, that doesn’t mean you stop getting the urge, and whatever qualms I had about it in the beginning soon went away. For the next eleven years we lived together like husband and wife. I don’t feel I have to make any apologies for that. Once upon a time I’d been young enough to be her son, but now I was older than most grandfathers, and when you get to be that age, you don’t have to play by the rules anymore. You go where you have to go, and whatever it takes to keep on breathing, that’s what you do.

  She stayed in good health for most of the time we were together. In her mid-eighties she was still drinking a couple of Scotches before dinner and smoking the occasional cigarette, and most days saw her with enough spunk to doll herself up and go out for a spin in her giant blue Cadillac. She lived to be ninety or ninety-one (it was never clear which century she’d been born in), and things didn’t get too rough for her until the last eighteen months or so. Towards the end she was mostly blind, mostly deaf, mostly unable to get out of bed, but she remained herself for all that, and rather than put her into a home or hire a nurse to take care of her, I sold off the business and did the dirty work myself. I owed her that much, didn’t I? I bathed her and combed her hair; I carried her around the house in my arms; I wiped the shit from her ass after every accident, just as she had once wiped mine.

  The funeral was a bang-up affair. I made sure of that and didn’t stint on the extras. Everything belonged to me now—the house, the cars, the money she’d made for herself, the money I’d made for her—and since there was enough in the cookie jar to keep me going for another seventy-five or hundred years, I decided to throw her a big send-off, the biggest bash Wichita had ever seen. A hundred and fifty cars joined in the motorcade to the cemetery. Traffic was tangled up for miles around, and once the burial was over, mobs tramped through the house until three o’clock in the morning, swilling liquor and stuffing their maws with turkey legs and cakes. I’m not going to say I was a respectable member of the community, but I’d earned some respect for myself over the years, and people around town knew who I was. When I asked them to come for Marion, they turned out in droves.

  That was a year and a half ago. For the first couple of months I moped around the house, not quite sure what to do with myself. I’d never been fond of gardening, golf had bored me the two or three times I’d played it, and at seventy-six I didn’t have any hankering to go into business again. Business had been fun because of Marion, but without her around to liven things up, there wouldn’t have been any point. I thought about getting away from Kansas for a few months and seeing the world, but before I could make any definite plans, I was rescued by the idea of writing this book. I can’t really say how it happened. It just hit me one morning as I climbed out of bed, and less than an hour later I was sitting at a desk in the upstairs parlor with a pen in my hand, scratching away at the first sentence. I had no doubt that I was doing something that had to be done, and the conviction I felt was so strong, I realize now that the book must have come to me in a dream—but one of those dreams you can’t remember, that vanish the instant you wake up and open your eyes on the world.

  I’ve worked on it every day since last August, pushing along from word to word in my clumsy old man’s script. I started out with a school composition book from the five-and-ten, one of those hardbound things with a black-and-white marble cover and wide blue lines, and by now I’ve filled nearly thirteen of them, about one a month for every month I’ve been working. I haven’t shown a single word to anyone, and now that I’m at the end, I’m beginning to think it should stay that way—at least while I’m still kicking. Every word in these thirteen books is true, but I’d bet both my elbows there aren’t a hell of a lot of people who’d swallow that. It’s not that I’m afraid of being called a liar, but I’m too old now to waste my time defending myself against idiots. I ran into enough doubting Thomases when Master Yehudi and I were on the road, and I have other fish to fry now, other things to keep me busy after this book is done. First thing tomorrow morning, I’ll go downtown to the bank and put all thirteen volumes in my safe-deposit box. Then I’ll go around the corner and see my lawyer, John Fusco, and have him add a clause to my will stating that the contents of that box should be left to my nephew, Daniel Quinn. Dan will know what to do with the book I’ve written. He’ll correct the spelling mistakes and get someone to type up a clean copy, and once Mr. Vertigo is published, I won’t have to be around to watch the mugwumps and morons try to kill me. I’ll already be dead, and you can be sure I’ll be laughing at them—from above or below, whichever the case may be.

  For the past four years a cleaning woman has been coming to the house several times a week. Her name is Yolanda Abraham, and she’s from one of the warm-weather islands—Jamaica or Trinidad, I forget which. I wouldn’t call her a talkative person, but we’ve known each other long enough to be on fairly cozy terms, and she was a great help to me during Marion’s last months. She’s somewhere between thirty and thirty-five, a round black woman with a slow, graceful walk and a beautiful voice. As far as I know, Yolanda doesn’t have a husband, but she does have a child, an eight-year-old boy named Yusef. Every Saturday for the past four years, she’s parked her offspring in the house with me while she does her work, and having watched this kid in action for
more than half his life, I can say in all fairness that he’s one monumental pain in the ass, a junior hooligan and wise-talking brat whose sole mission on earth is to spread mayhem and bad will. To top it off, Yusef is one of the ugliest children I’ve ever set eyes on. He has one of those jagged, scrawny, asymmetrical little faces, and the body that comes with it is a pathetic, sticklike bundle of bones—even if pound for pound it happens to be stronger and more supple than the bodies of most fullbacks in the NFL. I hate the kid for what he’s done to my shins, my thumbs, and my toes, but I also see myself in him when I was that age, and since his face resembles Aesop’s to an almost appalling degree—so much so that Marion and I both gasped the first time he walked into the house—I continue to forgive him everything. I can’t help myself. The boy has the devil in him. He’s brash and rude and incorrigible, but he’s lit up with the fire of life, and it does me good to watch him as he flings himself headlong into a maelstrom of trouble. Watching Yusef, I now know what the master saw in me, and I know what he meant when he told me I had the gift. This boy has the gift, too. If I could ever pluck up my courage to speak to his mother, I’d take him under my wing in a second. In three years, I’d turn him into the next Wonder Boy. He’d start where I left off, and before long he’d go farther than anyone else has ever gone. Christ, that would be something to live for, wouldn’t it? It would make the whole fucking world sing again.