A Meaningful Life (6 page)

Lowell's best friend was the heroically moustached art director of a tobacco magazine that published in the same building where Lowell worked at plumbing. His name was Harry Balmer, and despite the evidence of his moustache he was nervous, compulsive, and wracked with small fears. He looked his best from across a wide room; the closer you got to him, the more he seemed to fall apart into a mass of twitches and gnawed fingernails and the clearer it became that his big, smart-looking moustache was a kind of bush he was trying to hide behind. Every once in a while he and Lowell would go down to McSorley's after work and get drunk together on ale. Lowell didn't really know if he liked Harry Balmer or not—his feelings about him were vaguely mingled and not very strong, one way or the other; he never spent much time with him except at McSorley's, and afterward he could never remember very clearly what they'd talked about.

“I've got it figured out,” he told Balmer one night as they sat with their mugs near the old cast-iron stove.

“Good idea,” said Balmer. A group of students were making a lot of noise and falling down in the next room.

“It came to me one morning,” said Lowell. “I'm not having a meaningful life. It came to me just like that.”

“Bachelorhood,” said Balmer. “The only answer. Who needs a wife? Take it from me. Firmly committed. Firmly.”

Lowell shook his head from side to side in an effort to clear it. He was certain that they'd already had Balmer's half of this conversation before, perhaps several times, and he had the queer feeling that he wasn't getting through. It was like trying to have a conversation with a tape recording.

“Marry late, live long, see life,” said Balmer. “Marrying late does a lot for you. Take me, for example. Free as a bird. How come you're looking at your watch? You're worried about the time, aren't you? Got to be on time. The old wife. Not me. Did you say something?”

“I said, I'm not looking at my watch,” said Lowell.

“Some fucker filled this ashtray with beer,” said Balmer, picking up his hopelessly sodden, half-smoked cigarette and examining it as a nerve fluttered madly in one corner of his eye.

From time to time Lowell also went out to lunch with members of the staff, but he never drank enough to tell them anything important about himself.

Lowell and his wife had a good time living with each other, and they seldom quarreled. Their apartment was spacious and basically comfortable despite being strangely designed, and except on weekends they were never in it during the day, when you could see the place in the living-room ceiling where the plaster was badly patched and it became evident that pale green was not the color for the bathroom. Lowell generally returned home from work about half an hour before his wife, who had to take the shuttle and might decide to stop off first at Bloomingdale's. Once a week he paid the cleaning lady before he filled the ice bucket. The other four days he went straight to

the refrigerator first thing after hanging up his coat. In the summertime he made his wife a whiskey sour and prepared a gin and tonic for himself. In the winter he drank whiskey and soda and set aside a glass of sherry for his wife. Then he turned on the television and watched while he waited for her to get home. For the first year after they bought the set, he was in time to watch
Gigantor, the Space Age Robot
. Then
Gigantor
moved to a new time period and he watched
Speed Racer
. He'd seen all the episodes twice. When his wife came home he turned off the set and they made supper together while they had their drinks. Occasionally Lowell would bring in a pizza or some little paper buckets of Chinese food or, very rarely and only as a special treat, a complete Pakistani meal from a restaurant down on Broadway. They took such quiet pleasure in cooking supper together that they almost never went out, and Lowell tended to become uneasy if his routine was disturbed. Whenever he brought food in, he regretted it. No sooner did he place his order than he knew he wouldn't like it, and he never did.

Once every month or so, his wife would smile apologetically and a little defensively, put on her longest skirt, and pack herself over to see her mother in Flatbush like some kind of installment-plan Eurydice. Her mother still had a nice spare bedroom ready in case her daughter came to her senses, and while there was no danger of this ever occurring—at least, not that way—the knowledge that his mother-in-law continued to nourish hope was a source of considerable irritation to Lowell, especially because he suspected that she was doing it at least partly to get his goat. As he conceived it, his mother-in-law's mind was a place of dim shadows and brooding malice, and he could find nothing in it to recommend her, but curiously his wife had made friends with her mother almost immediately after they came to New York, and they were now fast friends. They went to

S. Klein's together and called each other up on the telephone and talked about people with comic-opera names like Marvin and Irving who lived in comic-opera places like Canarsie and Ozone Park—people Lowell had never met but about whom his wife unaccountably seemed to know volumes. It gave their conversations a peculiar, other-dimensional quality that profoundly disturbed him, as though his wife had a second identity that was completely alien to the one Lowell knew and cherished, a whole separate personality dwelling in another ethos that he could occasionally glimpse but never understand.

“How come you never talk to your mother about me?” he asked. “I'm your husband. I'm your mother's son-in-law. How come you never mention me?”

“It's not polite to eavesdrop,” said his wife primly. “Anyway, we do talk about you, so there. You just aren't eavesdropping at the right times.”

“You're always talking about a bunch of strangers.”

“That's not true. They're not either strangers. I've known Milly Norinski for years and years. What's the matter with you? Can't I talk about my friends with my own mother if I want to? Anyway, I don't even like Milly Norinski. She's nothing but an old bag and all she can talk about is money. You'd hate her, believe me. Count yourself lucky that I only talk about her to my mother. Listen, you want me to bore you? Ask me about Milly Norinski one of these times. Boy, would you ever be bored. I only keep up with her because I've known her since grade school. She never used to talk about money. People turn out funny sometimes. They surprise you.”

Although over the years Lowell had heard his wife suddenly begin talking like this at odd moments, he'd never gotten used to it. Usually she didn't talk like that. Strangers talked like that, but not his wife. He just couldn't understand it. Sometimes he caught her bullying the butcher or fighting with the vegetable

man, and he couldn't understand that, either. It was as though another person inhabited a little room in his wife's mind, the Hyde lurking in the Jekyll, marching forth at certain moments to take command of the situation. It always made him worry. Sometimes he felt that he didn't know his wife at all, or at least not much of her. Sometimes he had the feeling that the person he knew and loved in the evenings and on weekends was nothing but a cunning impersonation, speaking in his dialect, acting out a charade of mildness and happy marriage, and that the occasionally glimpsed person with the news vendor's voice was the real one. It bothered him how easy it would be to manage it—they were together for only a few hours of their lives, not counting the times one or the other of them was asleep. Was she somebody else the rest of the time, punching computer keys and chewing gum and winking at the office boy with her legs crossed? What really disturbed him more than anything was the feeling he had that the personality he imagined for her, though crude and devious to an incredible degree, was in a strange way more complex and plausible than the one she really seemed to have, at least most of the time.

Actually, Lowell knew that all of this was pretty paranoid and ridiculous, and normally he didn't give it a second thought once the bad moment was over. Their days went on, one piece of string tied to another, and until Lowell woke up that horrible morning soon after his birthday, it seldom crossed his mind that his little fantasies might be trying to tell him something, and not necessarily about his wife. If it did chance to cross his mind, that is exactly what it did: it came in one side and went out the other, leaving a chill little wake that was soon covered over.

Lowell tried hard to be a dutiful son-in-law, and his mother-in-law tried equally hard never to speak a word to him. If he happened to answer the phone when she called, she asked him if her daughter was there; if she was, she said, “Put her on,” and if she wasn't, she said, “I'll call back,” and hung up. Lowell was always very civil to her.

Part of being civil—the major and most difficult part, rather like eating a boiled sheep's eye with good grace and a tactful smile—consisted of twice-yearly appearances in his in-laws' living room, although never close to mealtime. He had the idea that he wasn't kosher or something, and exactly what purpose these dinnerless, tense, and arid visits accomplished was vague. It seemed that once every six months his mother-in-law wanted to look at his fingernails and his father-in-law wanted to talk to him about Negroes, and he dutifully trundled himself out to Flatbush so that they could do it.

Everything in their apartment seemed to be either made of plastic or covered with plastic. Even some of the things that were made of plastic were covered with plastic, such as the vases of plastic flowers that were encased in polyethylene bags and tied with big faded ribbons. There was actually very little furniture, and it was arranged like a kind of exhibit: everything faced in the direction of an imaginary observer and had been placed far apart for better viewing, which made conversation difficult without a lot of swiveling around and loud talking. The transparent plastic slipcovers made this exceedingly difficult to do. They also made it exceedingly difficult to sit still. They were cold in the winter and clammy in the summer and hard to get a purchase on no matter what the weather was like, so that some part of you always felt like it was about to slither off onto the floor, even though your back was glued in place with sweat. Beneath the plastic the upholstery was pale and washed-out, as though it had been under water for a long time. There was a very little color anywhere in the apartment, and the floor was covered with spotless pale linoleum. There were no rugs anywhere. “It's because they were born on the East Side,” said Lowell's wife. “That's why.” Lowell couldn't have cared less.

“Negroes look different nowadays,” Leo told him. He was sitting on his electric Relaxacizor pad. It was making him vibrate faintly, as though with a mild palsy, especially when he nodded his head. “It's all this intermarriage.”

“Hmmmm,” said Lowell, muscles tense from the effort of keeping himself in place. He got up and sat down again. It didn't do any good. Out in the kitchen his mother-in-law's voice droned on and on like a nasal radio.

“They used to look like monkeys,” said Leo. “I guess that was before your time. You can take it from me, they looked just like monkeys with big white teeth. It isn't like that anymore. How we used to laugh. They stir them up now.”

There was a long pause. “Who does?” asked Lowell at last. If you watched Leo vibrate long enough, he began to go blurry around the edges, like a picture that was going slowly out of focus.

“The agitators,” said Leo. “The agitators stir them up. Outside agitators. They're moving in now.”

“The agitators,” said Lowell. “I see.” He wondered how long a man could put up with this sort of conversation before he went out of his mind.

“No, no,” said Leo, leaning forward in his chair. “The agitators are stirring them up. It's the Negroes who are moving in. The agitators aren't moving in. You've got it backwards.”

Out in the kitchen his mother-in-law suddenly stopped talking, as though her voice had been cut off with a pair of shears. Leo was waiting anxiously for Lowell to say something again, and there was a peculiar moment of silence that was disturbed only by the low muttering of Leo's machine. Everything, for some mad reason, seemed to focus on Lowell with crushing intensity. It was kind of unnerving. “That's too bad,” he managed to say.

“Listen, they're coming in like flies,” whispered Leo, as though you could hear some of them now, making a characteristic noise. Out in the kitchen his mother-in-law began talking again at exactly the same rate and exactly the same tone, as though the arm of a record player, having been raised for a second, had come back down on the same spot.

“It's been going on for years,” Leo continued in the same hushed, urgent tones, with a look of mingled intimacy and fear. “Years. You know what I mean?”

Lowell agreed that he knew what Leo meant. He always felt a little drunk at his in-law's place, and afterward he had a funny hung-over feeling, as though they had put something in his coffee. Actually, they never put anything in his coffee, and he was lucky if he got any at all. When he did get some, it came in a different kind of cup from everybody else's. He wondered if his mother-in-law kept the cup in a special place, wrapped up in a plastic bag. Drunk was not quite the way he felt; he felt like he'd watched too many girders flash past on the subway.

Lowell's visits always came to a barren end, somewhere near the fulcrum of the afternoon, when out in the real world the real people were clearing the Sunday paper off the floor and getting out the cocktail shaker and others were putting on their hats and going out the door.

“Well, so long, Lowell,” said Leo in a false voice, shaking his hand as though still attached to the Relaxacizor. Lowell wondered if Leo thought he could make Lowell like him by shaking his hand that way. “I certainly enjoy these little visits of ours. I really look forward to them a lot, you can't imagine. Time sure does fly and it's too bad you have to go.”