Death Is a Lonely Business (3 page)

Yes!

For the quickest shadow had crossed the window, as if someone had come to stare down at me and gone away, like a moth,

I stood remembering.

Hers had been a swift year in the Twenties, with a quick drop down the mine shaft into the film vaults. Her director, old newsprint said, had found her in bed with the studio hairdresser, and cut Constance Rattigan's leg muscles with a knife so she would no longer be able to walk the way he loved. Then he had fled to swim straight west toward China. Constance Rattigan was never seen again. If she could walk no one knew.

God, I heard myself whisper.

I sensed that she had ventured forth in my world late nights and knew people I knew. There were breaths of near meetings between us.

Go, I thought, bang the brass lion knocker on her shore-front door.

No. I shook my head. I was afraid that only a black-and-white film ectoplasm might answer.

You do not really want to meet your special love, you only want to dream that some night she'll step out and walk, with her footprints vanishing on the sand as the wind follows, to your apartment where she'll tap on your window and enter to unspool her spirit-light in long creeks of film on your ceiling.

Constance, dear Rattigan, I thought, run out! Jump in that big white Duesenberg parked bright and fiery in the sand, rev the motor, wave, and motor me away south to Coronado, down the sunlit coast!

No one revved a motor, no one waved, no one took me south to sun, away from that foghorn that buried itself at sea.

So I backed off, surprised to find salt water up over my tennis shoes, turned to walk back toward cold rain in cages, the greatest writer in the world, but no one knew, just me.

I had the moist confetti, the papier-mâché mulch, in my jacket pocket, when I stepped into the one place where I knew that I had to go.

It was where the old men gathered.

It was a small, dim shop facing the railway tracks where candy, cigarettes, and magazines were sold and tickets for the big red trolley cars that rushed from L.A. to the sea.

The tobacco-shed-smelling place was run by two nicotine-stained brothers who were always sniveling and bickering at each other like old maids. On a bench to one side, ignoring the arguments like crowds at a boring tennis match, a nest of old men stayed by the hour and the day, lying upward about their ages. One said he was eighty-two. Another bragged that he was ninety. A third said ninety-four. It changed from week to week, as each misremembered last month's lie.

And if you listened, as the big iron trains rolled by, you could hear the rust flake off the old men's bones and snow through their bloodstreams to shimmer for a moment in their dying gaze as they settled for long hours between sentences and tried to recall the subject they had started on at noon and might finish off at midnight, when the two brothers, bickering, shut up shop and went away sniveling to their bachelor beds.

Where the old men lived, nobody knew. Every night, after the brothers grouched off into the dark, the old men dispersed like tumbleweeds, blown every which way in the salt wind.

I stepped into the eternal dusk of the place and stood staring at the bench where the old men had sat since the beginning of time.

There was an empty place between the old men. Where there had always been four, now there were only three, and I could tell from their faces that something was wrong.

I looked at their feet, which were surrounded by not only scatterings of cigar ash, but a gentle snowfall of strange little paper-punchouts, the confetti from hundreds of trolley line tickets in various L and X and M shapes.

I took my hand out of my pocket and compared the now almost dried soggy mess with the snow on the floor. I bent and picked some of it up and let it sift from my fingers, an alphabet down the air.

I looked at the empty place on the bench.

"Where's that old gent...?” I stopped.

For the old men were staring at me as if I had fired a gun at their silence. Besides, their look said, I wasn't dressed right for a funeral.

One of the oldest lit his pipe and at last, puffing it, muttered, "He'll be along. Always
does.
"

But the other two stirred uncomfortably, their faces shadowed.

"Where," I dared to say, "does he live?"

The old man stopped puffing. "Who wants to know?"

"Me," I said. "You know me. I've come in here for years."

The old men glanced at each other, nervously.

"It's urgent," I said.

The old man stirred a final time.

"Canaries," murmured the oldest man.

"What?"

"Canary lady." His pipe had gone out. He lit it again, his eyes troubled. "But don't bother him. He's all right. He's
not
sick. He'll be along."

He was protesting too much, which made the other old men writhe slowly, secretly, on the bench.

"His name...?” I asked.

That was a mistake. Not to know his name! My God,
everyone
knew that! The old men glared at me.

I flushed and backed off.

"Canary lady," I said, and ran out the door to be almost killed by an arriving Venice Short Line train thirty feet from the shop door.

"Jackass!" cried the motorman, leaning out and waving his fist.

"Canary lady!" I yelled, stupidly, shaking
my
fist to show I was alive.

And stumbled off to find her.

I knew her address from the sign in her window.

canaries for sale.

Venice was and is full of lost places where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls, hoping no one will buy.

There is hardly an old house with unwashed curtains which does not sport a sign in the window.

1927 NASH. REASONABLE. REAR. Or

BRASS BED. HARDLY USED. CHEAP. UPSTAIRS.

Walking, one thinks, which side of the bed was used, and how long on both sides, and how long never again, twenty, thirty years ago?

Or VIOLINS, GUITARS, MANDOLINS.

And in the window ancient instruments strung not with wire or cat-gut but spider webs, and inside an old man crouched over a workbench shaping wood, his head always turned away from the light, his hands moving; someone left over from the year when the gondolas were stranded in backyards to become flower planters.

How long since he had sold a violin or guitar?

Knock at the door, the window. The old man goes on cutting and sandpapering, his face, his shoulders shaking. Is he laughing because you tap and he pretends not to hear?

You pass a window with a final sign.

ROOM WITH A VIEW.

The room looks over the sea. But for ten years no one has ever been up there. The sea might as well not exist.

I turned a final corner and what I was searching for was there.

It hung in the sunbrowned window, its fragile letters drawn in weathered lead pencil, as faint as lemon juice that had burned itself out, self-erased, oh God, some fifty years ago!

canaries for sale.

Yes, someone half a century ago had licked a pencil tip, lettered the cardboard and hung it to age, fixed with flypaper adhesive tape, and gone upstairs to tea in rooms where dust lacquered the banister in gums, choked the lightbulbs so they burned with an Oriental light; where pillows were balls of lint and shadows hung in closets from empty racks.

canaries for sale.

I did not knock. Years before, out of mindless curiosity, I had tried, and, feeling foolish, gone away.

I turned the ancient doorknob. The door glided in. The downstairs was empty. There was no furniture in any of the rooms. I called up through the dusty sunlight.

"Anyone home?"

I thought I heard an attic-whisper:

"... no one."

Flies lay dead in the windows. A few moths that had died the summer of 1929 dusted their wings on the front screens.

Somewhere far above, where ancient Rapunzel-without-hair was lost in her tower, a single feather fell and touched the air:

"... yes?"

A mouse sighed in the dark rafters:

"... come in."

I pushed the inner door wider. It gave with a great, grinding shriek. I had a feeling that it had been left unoiled so that anyone entering unannounced would be given away by rusty hinges.

A moth tapped at a dead lightbulb in the upper hall.

"... up here. . . ."

I stepped up toward twilight at noon, past mirrors that were turned to the wall. No glass could see me coming. No glass would see me go. . . .

"...
yes?"
A whisper.

I hesitated by the door at the top of the stairs. Perhaps I expected to look in and find a giant canary, stretched out on a carpet of dust, songless, capable only of heart murmurs for talk.

I stepped in.

I heard a gasp.

In the middle of an empty room stood a bed on which, eyes shut, mouth faintly breathing, lay an old woman.

Archaeopteryx, I thought.

I did. I really did.

I had seen such bones in a museum, the fragile reptilian wings of that lost and extinct bird, the shape of it touched on sandstone in etchings that might have been made by some Egyptian priest.

This bed, and its contents, was like the silt of a river that runs shallow. Traced now in its quiet flow was a jackstraw litter of chaff and thin skeleton.

She lay flat and strewn out so delicately I could not believe it was a living creature, but only a fossil undisturbed by eternity's tread.

"Yes?" The tiny yellowed head just above the coverlet opened its eyes. Tiny shards of light blinked at me.

"Canaries?" I heard myself say. "The sign in your window? The birds?"

"Oh," the old woman sighed. "... Dear."

She had forgotten. Perhaps she hadn't been downstairs in years. And I was the first, perhaps, to come upstairs in a thousand days.

"Oh," she whispered, "that was long ago. Canaries. Yes. I had some lovely ones."

"1920," again in the whisper. "1930, 1931…" Her voice faded. The years stopped there.

Just the other morn. Just the other noon.

"They used to sing, my lands, how they sang. But no one ever came to buy. Why? I never sold
one.
"

I glanced around. There was a birdcage in the far north corner of the room, and two more half-hidden in a closet.

"Sorry," she murmured. "I must have forgotten to take that sign out of my window. . . ."

I moved toward the cages. My hunch was right.

At the bottom of the first cage I saw papyrus from the
Los Angeles Times,
December 25, 1926.

HIROHITO ASCENDS THRONE

The young monarch, twenty-seven, this afternoon . . .

I moved to the next cage and blinked. Memories of high school days flooded me with their fears.

ADDIS ABABA BOMBED

Mussolini claims triumph. Haile Selassie protests. . . .

I shut my eyes and turned from that lost year. That long ago the feathers had stopped rustling and the warblers had ceased. I stood by the bed and the withered discard there. I heard myself say:

"You ever listen Sunday mornings to the 'Rocky Mountain Canary-Seed Hour'…?"

"With an organist that played and a studio full of canaries that sang
along!"
the old woman cried with a delight that rejuvenated her flesh and reared her head. Her eyes flickered like broken glass. " 'When It's Springtime in the Rockies'!"

" 'Sweet Sue.' 'My Blue Heaven,' " I said.

"Oh, weren't the birds
find?"

"Fine." I had been nine then and tried to figure how in hell the birds could follow the music so well. "I once told my mom the birdcages must have been lined with dime-store song-sheets."

"You sound like a sensitive child." The old woman's head sank, exhausted, and she shut her eyes. "They don't make them that way any more."

They never did, I thought.

"But," she whispered, "you didn't
really
come see me about the canaries...?”

"No," I admitted. "It's about that old man who rents from you...”

"He's
dead.
"

Before I could speak, she went on, calmly, "I haven't heard him in the downstairs kitchen since early yesterday. Last night, the silence told me. When you opened the door down there just now, I knew it was someone come to tell me all that's bad."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I never saw him save at Christmas. The lady next door takes care of me, comes and rearranges me twice a day, and puts out the food. So he's gone, is he? Did you know him well? Will there be a funeral? There's fifty cents there on the bureau. Buy him a little bouquet."

There was no money on the bureau. There was no bureau. I pretended that there was and pocketed some nonexistent money.