A Meaningful Life (25 page)

“Hey, man,” said one of the nearby drunks, lurching a step in Lowell's direction, “what the fuck you think you doing here?”

“Visiting friends,” said Lowell with a neutral grimace that he hoped would discourage conversation while not inviting hostility.

“I said,” repeated the drunk, “what the fuck you think you doing here?”

“Yeah,” said another drunk. For some reason Lowell suddenly realized that all the men in sight were wearing hats. Not a man was without one. He wondered what it signified.

“Shee-it,” said the first drunk, staring with slack-jawed malevolence as Lowell reached the Warsaw's steps and ascended them with what he trusted was studied nonchalance. There was no doorbell, a circumstance that Lowell found a trifle unnerving under present conditions, but a little diligent searching revealed an egg-shaped brass knob set into the doorframe to his right. Above it was a tiny brass sign that said PULL, which Lowell promptly did. A dull clunk resounded from somewhere within the house, as though a large lead object had fallen off a table. Lowell wondered if he'd done something wrong, despite the fact that he'd done the only thing available. A casual glance over his shoulder revealed that virtually everyone in sight had paused in their pursuits in order to give him their undivided attention. Feeling conspicuous but not popular, Lowell overcame his inhibitions and gave the knob another hefty yank and produced a really heart-stopping thud. This time his effort was rewarded with the sound of footsteps, and presently the door was opened by a tall woman who bore a vague resemblance to Ringo Starr. She glared at him silently as though hoping to scare him off with her face now that the doorbell had failed.

“Mrs. Warsaw?” said Lowell.

“That's right.”

“How do you do? I'm Lowell Lake. I met your husband the other evening.”

Mrs. Warsaw pursued her lips in a manner that suggested that her husband met a lot of queer fish in the course of his travels and that she had no truck with any of them.

“I'm renovating the Collingwood mansion on Washington Avenue,” said Lowell with as much cheer as he could muster, hoping the information would either intimidate her or tell her something good about him. “Your husband said I should drop by.”

“I'm sorry,” said Mrs. Warsaw. “I never show the house when my husband is not at home. It's been nice meeting you.” So saying, she closed the door in his face and left him to his own devices. Lowell was certain she was still standing behind it. He could almost feel her standing there, listening to him. He wondered what would happen if he threw himself against it, clawing with his fingernails, shrieking obscenities and innuendos, kicking over the flower tubs, yanking up the plants, rubbing the roots in his hair, masticating the leaves and spitting them out with an unearthly howl. It was a tempting but unconvincing picture; Lowell had never done anything remotely like that in his entire life, and he knew he would never do anything like it now. Just thinking about it was pretty damned unusual.

Lowell turned and went slowly back down the steps while the first drunk commented on his adventure with a joyless but outrageously energetic parody of uncontrollable mirth, evidently having decided that this would get Lowell's goat more effectively than his previous display of unbridled hostility. This insight was correct. Lowell scarcely knew what to do with himself, but feeling that it would not be smart to indicate it, he set off vigorously in the opposite direction. It was considerably longer that way, but although his presence was noted and his purposes speculated upon by an unnerving number of people, he managed to gain the corner without further incident. The children had decided to throw rocks at passing cars. They threw a rock at Lowell too, but it missed. In a minute he was able to turn another corner and make his way slowly back to his house along the street of vacant, blasted buildings whose condition gave the impression that their inhabitants had been exterminated, perhaps recently, with tanks and hand grenades.

His house told him nothing. He walked around in it for a while with a hammer in his hand, looking for something to hit, but no likely target presented itself. When he realized that he had been standing in front of a wall for some seconds, staring at it blankly, he decided it was time to go back to Manhattan. On the subway it occurred to him that, unless things improved and his wife changed her mind, he would probably be the only man in the world with a pied-à-terre on the West Side and a country seat in Brooklyn. He wondered what he would do then.

His wife was at her mother's when he got home. No doubt he was being reviled at that very moment. It was a pretty safe bet. His mother-in-law should have seen him today. How she would have laughed.

He made himself a martini and turned on a rerun of
The Avengers
. It was one of the ones with Linda Thorson instead of Diana Rigg and watching it with a drink gave him a measure of peace. He was the only person he knew who liked Linda Thorson better than Diana Rigg. He made a couple more martinis and liked her even more. When the show was over, he ate some lobster salad he found in the refrigerator. Then he had some more drinks and watched some more TV. He couldn't remember what time he went to bed or whether his wife had come home yet, but she was beside him when he woke up the next morning. He had a vague recollection that at some point in the evening he had stood up and yelled, “I AM NOT A NERD!” He wondered if anyone had heard him. He hoped not.

The living room showed no signs that anyone had been drunk in it, with the exception of the small writing desk in the corner. It was open and a sheet of letter paper was lying on it. Acutely

conscious of the stubble on his face and the various imperfections and malfunctions of his body, Lowell padded over in his pajamas and picked it up. There was a brief scrawl in his most drunken handwriting. “Dear Mother and Dad,” it said, “I want to come home.”

Lowell looked at this message for a while and thought about it as best he could under the circumstances, but it didn't seem to him that he really wanted to do that, either. He didn't know what he wanted to do. He crumpled up the paper and threw it away before his wife could see it, and then he went out to the kitchen in his bare feet and drank a great quantity of nice cold, fresh milk.

By the first of April Lowell and his wife had gone about as far as they could go with their work of demolition and tidying up. They had reached the limits of their competence, and it was time to summon architects and contractors if the work was ever to go forward. A determined but ill-fated attempt to erect a new wall—the thing, when completed, looked exactly like one of the partitions he'd just finished pulling down, only cleaner—and a drunken, equally ill-fated, and physically painful attempt to install a new sink had convinced Lowell that he had about as much skill in these matters as a Puerto Rican, which had the curious effect of making him think less of himself, not more of Puerto Ricans. No matter how many books he read, he simply wasn't up to the mark. This was not a new thing with him. He'd never been up to the mark. His model airplanes had seldom flown, often fell apart, frequently were never finished, and never looked much like airplanes, despite an attention to the instructions that bordered on the fanatical. His dog had been run over before he finished building the doghouse, which had persistently refused to come out right. He couldn't even catch a ball. Even when they came right to him, they invariably fell at his feet. He studied and practiced, but it was always the same. Possibly his body was wrong for catching balls, like the body of someone who could never learn to swim. (He couldn't swim very well, either.)

He wondered if he could catch a ball now. Once he had asked it, the question so intrigued him that he went down to the corner grocery and bought one of the pink rubber balls like the black and Puerto Rican kids had. He took it out in the backyard, picked a good blank spot high on the wall between a pair of mullioned windows, and (after setting himself) threw the ball at it as hard as he could. The ball bounced off with a wet sound. It came nowhere near him. It went over his head and disappeared into the junk-strewn yard of one of the houses behind him, where it was promptly seized by a dog and carried away to a corner where the animal covered it with dog spit and then rolled it around on the ground. Lowell made no attempt to retrieve it. His reactions to the whole brief episode were distinctly mixed. On the one hand, he felt like a fool. On the other hand, he still couldn't catch a ball. He decided to think about contractors a little harder than he'd been doing.

Unfortunately, he didn't know any more about contractors than he did about putting up a wall—rather less, in fact. A few of them persistently sent him badly printed, semiliterate brochures offering to cover his house with either aluminum siding or artificial stone that resembled nougat candy or, if he were so inclined, to buy it from him, lock, stock, and barrel, for big cash. Once a contractor's representative had come to the house, unsolicited. He was a pleasant but exceedingly tense young man who reminded Lowell, for some reason, of a chipmunk. He had a little slide projector and he showed Lowell pictures of a number of kitchens done in bright pink plastic. There were also several slides of a cozy den paneled in unreal-looking artificial wood. Lowell told the young man that these things were not part of his plan and showed him to the door, politely but with a certain amount of difficulty. The young man left brochures. They were just like the ones Lowell was always getting in the mail, and he threw them out.

He wanted his house to be like claret and Dutch chocolate. He was a little vague as to ideas, but that was the general plan, and he was determined to have it. He had only to find someone to accomplish it. He tried the telephone book, but it wasn't much help; there were any number of contractors in it, but nothing they had to say about themselves indicated a capability for claret and Dutch chocolate. On the contrary, their ads suggested a distinct proclivity for bright pink plastic and artificial stone, synthetic wood and aluminum siding. He supposed he could go and ask one of his fellow brownstoners for advice, but on the basis of the fellow brownstoners he had already met, he didn't think he wanted to do that. It was all very depressing. For some reason he seemed to lack the energy or the will or something to think about the matter creatively. He didn't even seem to be able to think about it intelligently. Frowning with formless, unproductive worry, he wandered from room to room in the huge house, upstairs and down, gazing at the outlines of old partitions on the walls and ceilings, the disemboweled wiring, the dismantled plumbing. In one of the rooms he came upon his wife, somewhat to his surprise, although of course she had to be somewhere. “How long has it been since you spoke to me before I spoke to you?” she asked as he entered.

Enveloped in gloom, Lowell stopped in his tracks and stared at her with dull eyes. He tried to speak, but it was difficult to climb out of his pit so quickly, and the only sound he produced was a faint, sad mooing.

“That's what I thought,” said his wife. She bent down and began to brush furiously at a patch of floor with a hand broom. A tear or a drop of sweat fell at her feet, and she brushed it away. “There,” she said, straightening again. “I guess that does it. You can take me to the subway now.”

Lowell mutely did as he was told, feeling as though his body had turned into some kind of semiflexible stone. He escorted her to the station and waited with her for the train.

“Step away from the edge of the platform,” snapped his wife. “You always stand too close.”

In a few minutes the train came, and she got on it and went home.

She didn't come to the house after that, which was probably just as well, because there was nothing for her to do. There was nothing for Lowell to do either, but every evening after work he dutifully came over to Brooklyn and put on his work clothes and wandered around the rooms of his house drinking beer. A curious inertia afflicted him, but if he drank enough beer, he would presently begin to feel tired, as if he'd worn himself out in the performance of some useful task.

Spring came exhaustingly that year, almost as though something were leaving his life rather than entering it, and in the cold April sunsets the house took on the devastated look of the streets, as if it had been attacked, not recently but months ago, by a squad of compulsively tidy commando assassins, who had raced up and down the stairs, chucking grenades into every room, and then had cleaned up after themselves. Where partitions had been, there were jagged outlines on the walls. Nothing remained in the bathrooms but the heads of pipes. Holes were scattered here and there in the walls, in the ceilings, in the floors. Lowell couldn't remember why he'd made some of them. There must have been a good reason. Electric blue in one room, green in another, shattered and stripped, the house didn't look as though Darius Collingwood had ever conceived it, or that the poor people had ever occupied it, or that Lowell was ever going to live in it. It looked ready to be demolished. A weekend came, and Lowell wandered out in the back to look at his pile of linoleum again.

It was a fine, warm day that was completely lost on Lowell but much enjoyed by his neighbors. In the houses opposite, the occupants were tumbling their bedding out the windows to air, festooning the weathered brick with pink and turquoise sheets and faded Army blankets, piling up the windowsills with pillows from Fulton Street and Athens, Georgia, calling to each other from floor to floor as if they hadn't met in months. Lowell stood by his linoleum and watched them for a while through a film of either hangover or despair, he couldn't decide which. Whatever it was, it had turned his mind to sludge. He supposed he ought to stop drinking so much, but he didn't think he could face it. There would be all that empty time on his hands.

Lowell was so mantled in gloom that some time passed before he realized that someone was looking at him from one of the upper windows of the old ladies' rooming house. Then for the next few minutes he was so engrossed in horrified contemplation of the creature that he was completely unable to analyze the significance of his presence there in anything like rational terms.