A Single Man (2 page)

Poached eggs on toast are very nice
,

If you try them once you’ll want them twice!

Ah, the heartbreakingly insecure snugness of those nursery pleasures! Master George enjoying his eggs; Nanny watching him and smiling reassurance that all is safe in their dear tiny doomed world!

Breakfast with Jim used to be one of the best times of their day. It was then, while they were drinking their second and third cups of coffee, that they had their best
talks. They talked about everything that came into their heads – including death, of course, and is there survival, and, if so, what exactly is it that survives. They even discussed the relative advantages and disadvantages of getting killed instantly and of knowing you’re about to die. But now George can’t for the life of him remember what Jim’s views were on this. Such questions are hard to take seriously. They seem so academic.

Just suppose that the dead do revisit the living. That something approximately to be described as Jim can return to see how George is making out. Would this be at all satisfactory? Would it even be worth while? At best, surely, it would be like the brief visit of an observer from another country, who is permitted to peep in for a moment from the vast outdoors of his freedom and see, at a distance, through glass, this figure who sits solitary at the small table in the narrow room, eating his poached eggs humbly and dully, a prisoner for life?

The living-room is dark and low-ceilinged, with bookshelves all along the wall opposite the windows. These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, according to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly – despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public – to put him to sleep, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.

He takes one of them down now, and Ruskin says to him:

. . . you liked pop-guns when you were schoolboys, and rifles and Armstrongs are only the same things better made: but then the worst of it is, that what was play to you when boys, was not play to the sparrows; and what is play to you now, is not play to the small birds of State neither; and for the black eagles, you are somewhat shy of taking shots at them, if I mistake not.

Intolerable old Ruskin, always absolutely in the right, and crazy, and so cross, with his whiskers, scolding the English – he is today’s perfect companion for five minutes on the toilet. George feels a bowel movement coming on with agreeable urgency, and climbs the stairs briskly to the bathroom, book in hand.

Sitting on the john, he can look out of the window. (They can see his head and shoulders from across the street, but not what he is doing.) It is a grey lukewarm California winter morning; the sky is low and soft with Pacific fog. Down at the shore, ocean and sky will be one soft sad grey. The palms stand unstirred and the oleander bushes drip moisture from their leaves.

This street is called Camphor Tree Lane. Maybe camphor trees grew here once; there are none now. More probably the name was chosen for its picturesqueness by the pioneer escapists from dingy downtown Los Angeles and stuffy-snobbish Pasadena who came out here and founded this colony back in the early twenties. They referred to their stucco bungalows and clapboard shacks as cottages; giving them cute names like
The Fo’c’sle
and
Hi Nuff
. They called their streets lanes, ways or trails, to
go with the woodsy atmosphere they wanted to create. Their utopian dream was of a subtropical English village with Montmartre manners; a Little Good Place where you could paint a bit, write a bit, and drink lots. They saw themselves as rearguard individualists, making a last-ditch stand against the twentieth century. They gave thanks loudly from morn till eve that they had escaped the soul-destroying commercialism of the city. They were tacky and cheerful and defiantly bohemian; tirelessly inquisitive about each other’s doings, and boundlessly tolerant. When they fought, at least it was with fists and bottles and furniture, not lawyers. Most of them were lucky enough to have died off before the Great Change.

The Change began in the late forties, when the world-war-two vets came swarming out of the East with their just-married wives, in search of new and better breeding-grounds in the sunny Southland, which had been their last nostalgic glimpse of Home before they shipped out to the Pacific. And what better breeding-ground than a hillside neighbourhood like this one, only five minutes’ walk from the beach and with no through traffic to decimate the future tots? So, one by one, the cottages which used to reek of bathtub gin and reverberate with the poetry of Hart Crane have fallen to the occupying army of coke-drinking television-watchers.

The vets themselves, no doubt, would have adjusted pretty well to the original bohemian utopia; maybe some of them would even have taken to painting or writing between hangovers. But their wives explained to them, right from the start and in the very clearest language, that breeding and bohemianism do not mix. For breeding you need a steady job, you need a mortgage, you need credit,
you need insurance. And don’t you dare die, either, until the family’s future is provided for.

So the tots appeared, litter after litter after litter. And the small old schoolhouse became a group of big new airy buildings. And the shabby market on the ocean front was enlarged into a super-. And on Camphor Tree Lane two signs were posted. One of them told you not to eat the watercress which grew along the bed of the creek, because the water was polluted. (The original colonists had been eating it for years; and George and Jim tried some and it tasted delicious and nothing happened.) The other sign – those sinister black silhouettes on a yellow ground – said CHILDREN AT PLAY.

George and Jim saw the yellow sign, of course, the first time they came down here, househunting. But they ignored it, for they had already fallen in love with the house. They loved it because you could only get to it by the bridge across the creek; the surrounding trees and the steep bushy cliff behind shut it in like a house in a forest clearing. ‘As good as being on our own island,’ George said. They waded ankle-deep in dead leaves from the sycamore (a chronic nuisance); determined, now, to like everything. Peering into the low damp dark living-room, they agreed how cosy it would be at night with a fire. The garage was covered with a vast humped growth of ivy, half dead, half alive, which made it twice as big as itself; inside it was tiny, having been built in the days of the model T Ford. Jim thought it would be useful for keeping some of the animals in. Their cars were both too big for it, anyway; but they could be parked on the
bridge. The bridge was beginning to sag a little, they noticed. ‘Oh, well, I expect it’ll last our time,’ said Jim.

No doubt the neighbourhood children see the house very much as George and Jim saw it, that first afternoon. Shaggy with ivy and dark and secret-looking, it is just the lair you’d choose for a mean old story-book monster. This is the role George has found himself playing, with increasing violence, since he started to live alone. It releases a part of his nature which he hated to let Jim see. What would Jim say if he could see George waving his arms and roaring like a madman from the window, as Mrs Strunk’s Benny and Mrs Garfein’s Joe dash back and forth across the bridge on a dare? (Jim always got along with them so easily. He would let them pet the skunks and the raccoon and talk to the mynah bird; and yet they never crossed the bridge without being invited.)

Mrs Strunk, who lives opposite, dutifully scolds her children from time to time, telling them to leave him alone, explaining that he’s a professor and has to work so hard. But Mrs Strunk, sweet-natured though she is – grown wearily gentle from toiling around the house at her chores; gently melancholy from regretting her singing days on radio, all given up in order to bear Mr Strunk five boys and two girls – even she can’t refrain from telling George, with a smile of motherly indulgence and just the faintest hint of approval, that Benny (her youngest) now refers to him as ‘That Man’, since George ran Benny clear out of the yard, across the bridge and down the street; he had been beating on the door of the house with a hammer.

George is ashamed of his roarings because they aren’t play-acting. He does genuinely lose his temper and feels humiliated and sick to his stomach later. At the same time, he is quite aware that the children want him to behave in this way. They are actually willing him to do it. If he should suddenly refuse to play the monster, and they could no longer provoke him, they would have to look around for a substitute. The question – is this playacting or does he really hate us? – never occurs to them. They are utterly indifferent to him, except as a character in their myths. It is only George who cares. Therefore he is all the more ashamed of his moment of weakness about a month ago, when he bought some candy and offered it to a bunch of them on the street. They took it without thanks, looking at him curiously and uneasily; learning from him maybe at that moment their first lesson in contempt.

Meanwhile, Ruskin has completely lost his wig. ‘Taste is the ONLY morality!’ he yells, wagging his finger at George. He is getting tiresome, so George cuts him off in mid-sentence by closing the book. Still sitting on the john, George looks out of the window.

The morning is quiet. Nearly all of the kids are in school; the Christmas vacation is still a couple of weeks away. (At the thought of Christmas, George feels a chill of desperation. Maybe he’ll do something drastic; take a plane to Mexico City and be drunk for a week and run wild around the bars. You won’t, and you never will, a voice says, coldly bored with him.)

Ah, here’s Benny, hammer in hand. He hunts among
the trash-cans set out ready for collection on the sidewalk and drags out a broken bathroom weighing-machine. As George watches, Benny begins smashing it with his hammer, uttering cries as he does so; he is making believe that the machine is screaming with pain. And to think that Mrs Strunk, the proud mother of this creature, used to ask Jim, with shudders of disgust, how he could bear to touch those harmless baby king-snakes!

And now out comes Mrs Strunk on to her porch, just as Benny completes the murder of the weighing-machine and stands looking down at its scattered insides. ‘Put them back!’ she tells him. ‘Back in the can! Put them back, now! Back! Put them back! Back in the can!’ Her voice rises, falls, in a consciously sweet singsong. She never yells at her children. She has read all the psychology books. She knows that Benny is passing through his Aggressive Phase, right on schedule; it just couldn’t be more normal and healthy. She is well aware that she can be heard clear down the street. It is her right to be heard, for this is the Mothers’ Hour. When Benny finally drops some of the broken parts back into the trash-can, she singsongs ‘Attaboy!’ and goes back smiling into the house.

So Benny wanders off to interfere with three much smaller tots, two boys and a girl, who are trying to dig a hole on the vacant lot between the Strunks and the Garfeins. (Their two houses face the street frontally, wide-openly, in apt contrast to the sidewise privacy of George’s lair.)

On the vacant lot, under the huge old eucalyptus tree, Benny has taken over the digging. He strips off his windbreaker and tosses it to the little girl to hold; then he
spits on his hands and picks up the spade. He is someone or other on TV, hunting for buried treasure. These tot-lives are nothing but a medley of such imitations. As soon as they can speak, they start trying to chant the singing commercials.

But now one of the boys – perhaps because Benny’s digging bores him in the same way that Mr Strunk’s scoutmasterish projects bore Benny – strolls off by himself, firing a carbide cannon. George has been over to see Mrs Strunk about this cannon, pleading with her to please explain to the boy’s mother that it is driving him slowly crazy. But Mrs Strunk has no intention of interfering with the anarchy of nature. Smiling evasively, she tells George, ‘
I
never hear the noise children make – just as long as it’s a
happy
noise.’

Mrs Strunk’s hour and the power of motherhood will last until mid-afternoon, when the big boys and girls return from school. They arrive in mixed groups – from which nearly all of the boys break away at once, however, to take part in the masculine hour of the ball–playing. They shout loudly and harshly to each other, and kick and leap and catch with arrogant grace. When the ball lands in a yard, they trample flowers, scramble over rock-gardens, burst into patios without even a thought of apology. If a car ventures along the street, it must stop and wait until they are ready to let it through; they know their rights. And now the mothers must keep their tots indoors out of harm’s way. The girls sit out on the porches, giggling together. Their eyes are always on the boys, and they will do the weirdest things to attract their attention; for example, the Cody daughters keep fanning their ancient black poodle as though it were Cleopatra on the
Nile. They are disregarded, nevertheless, even by their own boy friends: for this is not their hour. The only boys who will talk to them now are soft-spoken and gentle – like the Doctor’s pretty sissy son, who ties ribbons to the poodle’s curls.

And then, at length, the men will come home from their jobs. And it is their hour; and the ball-playing must stop. For Mr Strunk’s nerves have not been improved by trying all day long to sell that piece of real estate to a butterfly-brained rich widow, and Mr Garfein’s temper is uncertain after the tensions of his swimmingpool-installation company. They and their fellow-fathers can bear no more noise. (On Sundays, Mr Strunk will play ball with his sons; but this is just another of his physical education projects, polite and serious and no real fun.)