Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) (10 page)

A fish was floating on its side, one of three orange fish, all the others being red and white. It had a long gray tail and was thoroughly dead. They all have long tails, and it
used
to be an orange fish, I ought to say, it being now pasty white and coming apart in the water, dissolving or fraying, except for the tail, which was unchanged in death, like our hair and toenails, they say. I had not been down there for several days, so I don’t know when it died, or of course why it died—not of hunger, I am sure. I lifted it out with a slotted spoon and flushed it down the toilet, and then I fed the others. I was still in college when my father died. Mama was also dead by then, though I don’t know if he knew that, as we never talked about her. He died suddenly one day while I was off at school of what I try always to think of as apoplexy, that sounding Victorian and dignified, rather than what it really was, acute myocardial infarction, which sounds perfectly heartless, nasty, and alone, sprawled on the bathroom tiles for three days before they found him. Myocardial infarction was the proximate cause, I ought to say, since in an overriding and actual fashion he died of an excess of drink. The house was sold, the debts were paid, and there was not a lot of money left over—not a lot, I mean, by the standards I had grown up with, though there was quite a lot by the standards of someone like Clarence, who had grown up with nothing—that might, I think, be the really fundamental difference between us. I spent a big piece of it in just three years, traveling to Europe and living in a nice apartment in New York, with big windows and pigeons on the balcony, before I met Clarence, and then a lot more of it afterwards, when we spent it together trying to be professional writers instead of working. After more than half of it was already gone I put the remainder in investments that were supposed to make it grow, on the advice of a man who had been an associate of Papa’s, but it never did grow—it did the opposite, did it quite slowly, though, so I didn’t notice the shrinking day by day but only after a number of years, by which time it had already shrunk. That was probably because, as I learned later, the man had only hunted quail with Papa, was not in business at all, and actually made his money painting pictures of racehorses. The fact that it then continued to shrink made Clarence desperate, and he was constantly after me to do something, but I did not do anything, since there always seemed to be enough for us to get by on if only we cut back a little. These days I tend to think of myself as impoverished. I tend to think it especially, even to the point of dwelling on it, when I happen to be feeling down for some other reason, because the milk has turned, for example, and at such times I have even said to people that I am impoverished. Potts, who offered to lend me money, was someone I once said it to. I am not strictly impoverished, in that I am not flat broke, except occasionally toward the end of the month if I have been rash. With four suppers at the diner, two trips to Starbucks for coffee and pastry, and a taxi ride back from the center, due to a large bag of groceries, I have already been rash this month and it has scarcely begun, and of course there is still the matter of the rent, or perhaps I should say the
question
of the rent, it having become questionable, having not been paid in full this month or the month before either. Instead of impoverished, I ought to say “in straitened circumstances,” though of course I actually will be impoverished in a few weeks, because of having been rash in the ways I just mentioned. I thought for a while that if this became a book I would call it
Poor People,
but I have decided against it, as that by itself, without explanation, gives a wrong impression: Clarence and I were never poor in the sense of living in a tarpaper shack and eating off tin plates. I was thinking of poor in the larger sense, as members of poor suffering humanity. I typed that and turned and the rat was looking at me, standing up against the glass and swaying back and forth, like Clarence in a doorway after a night on the town, holding on to the doorframe, I was thinking. I am finding its presence annoying and burdensome. After Papa died, I went to France for the first time as a grown-up. Most people I knew traveled by boat in those days; I went on the
Ile de France
with a friend named Rosaline Schlossberg. We had planned to spend the whole summer together but quarreled our first week in Paris, and she went on to London by herself and from there spread all sorts of rumors. She was not a friend in the strict sense, just an acquaintance; Clarence was my only friend in the strict sense. I imagine some people will prefer that I say something on the order of Clarence was the love of my life. I could just as well say that he was the boredom of my life, the annoyance of my life, the chief obstacle to higher things of my life, and so forth. I can say, sincerely, that he was the person I most enjoyed typing with, on many different machines.

I am quite fond of the machine I type on now, have been fond of it ever since I bought it, at a store on Lafayette Street in New York just a month or so before moving to this apartment, even though I had already made up my mind to move and a typewriter was going to be just an extra thing to carry. I came here and got a job—not the one I recently stopped going to but the one before that—in a grocery store. That was the first time I had worked in the normal sense—in the pecuniary sense, I should say, since it did not feel normal to me. Obviously I had expected circumstances to turn out differently: I would not have bought a new machine just to type up a few letters and then stick it in the closet. I had owned a whole series of machines in the past but never enjoyed typing on them as much as on this one. It is a fairly big typewriter—I would describe it as a smaller office-type machine—made by Royal, and it emits a muffled yet solid-sounding thud when I strike it, as opposed to the cheap, tinny clatter the little ones make. A person need only hear the noise of the little machines, as I did constantly when Clarence used to type in our room at all hours, to be convinced that nothing worthwhile could possibly come out of one of those, though of course sometimes something actually does. When I say Clarence used to type at all hours, I am thinking of the habit he developed in the middle years of writing after he had taken too much to drink. We went to a lot of house parties back then, where there were hordes of clever people standing around. Clarence would get fired up by the clever conversations, and by the time we got back to our room he had usually convinced himself that he was hard on the track of something tremendously clever and beautiful. He would be terrifically impressed by the witty things he had found himself saying at the party and absolutely had to set it all down on paper right then and there for fear it would slip away while he slept. He would plant himself in front of that awful little Olivetti, as often as not standing in his underwear at the dresser, and clatter away while I was trying to sleep, now and then pausing to read over what he had written. He always approved of what he wrote in those states; I could hear him whispering plaudits to himself—“beautiful,” “fantastic,” “that’ll show ’em.” Thank goodness I had usually drunk quite a lot myself, as I regularly did in those days, and I would manage to fall asleep after a while and not wake up until the clatter stopped, startled awake by the silence or by the shaking of the bed when he finally tumbled into it, gray light of dawn at the window. Naturally he would find out the next day that what he had written in that state was not at all the stupendous thing he had imagined—it often did not even make sense, or it made sense but was trite or derivative or some other equally bad thing, and then he would be more depressed than ever. Of course feeling that way just made him want to go to more parties, even though I kept telling him we should get a place in the country somewhere and forget about those people, take walks every day over hill and dale and keep regular hours and drink less. I thought that if he could just forget for a while about becoming famous and start over from scratch, he would be all right. But of course he could not do that, because he knew in his heart that he was not all right. And then when we finally did do it, the regular hours, long walks, the whole kit and caboodle, really, it turned out to be a catastrophe—well, not a catastrophe, properly speaking; it turned out to be a letdown, at a time when we could not stand another letdown. Clarence wanted achievement as a writer, arrival at some recognized state of attainment, more than anything else in the world, except later perhaps whiskey, and later still whiskey and Lily, and for him that meant commercial success at least in a modest way and respect as a professional writer, from other professional writers, and it meant acting like a writer and doing writerly things like correcting proofs and attending publication parties of other writers whom we scarcely knew and who, when we crossed them on the street, failed even to nod in our direction. He was always peering over his own shoulder while he typed, wondering and worrying—and, toward the end, despairing—about what other people, especially people in the book business and later the movie business, were going to say about it. His idea of attainment was to eat in a restaurant in the Hamptons and overhear someone at another table whispering that the man sitting with the odd-looking woman over there was the writer Clarence Morton. I understood that this was an inherited disease of his, one he had brought with him out of his background, from having been born nobody and brought up among people who were always using the word “successful,” that it was not just an attitude he one day decided to have, and that that was why he was never able to rid himself of it, even though when we were first together I was confident that he could. He was capable of describing some person he had just met at one of those parties of his, after I had stopped going to them, as “a successful writer” or as having made “a successful movie.” I always objected to that way of talking, but I don’t believe he ever understood—he would give me a baffled look and say something idiotic like “What have you got against success?” There was, of course, no point in answering. Disgust, actually, was the reason I stopped going to those parties. And turning to me, someone would say, “And you, Edna, do you write also?” And I would say, “No. I type.” After he was writing regularly for magazines and after he wrote
The Forest at Night,
he truly was a successful professional writer, but he was not able to value it anymore. He could not value it because of me, possibly, because he knew that I did not place any value on it. So in our life together it became a question of which he was going to value, himself or me, and he could not make up his mind until he met Lily. With her, who did not value anything that I valued, he was able to break free and become himself again, though by then it was too late for that too. If I were feeling ironic, I would call my book
How to Write Like a Pro.
And I have to do something about the rat’s chips; I cannot just keep adding more on top. The tank is half full of them already, and it has made tunnels against the glass like an ant farm. A rat farm.

When I was talking earlier about the reasons I might stop typing—the need to ruminate and the desire to go do something else for a while—I forgot about key-jams. I never used to have them, and now there is one practically every day and at the worst possible moment, when I am least inclined to stop typing. I have not mentioned them until now because they are hard to talk about without seeming to complain. At times I become caught up in typing, so thoroughly in the throes of it that my thoughts run faster than my fingers can fly, they pile one on top of the other, and when a great many thoughts are making a racket in my head at once, I can falter, my fingers trip and stumble, and there are spasms: keys collide, pile up, and jam into a frightful tangle. To free the keys I have only to pry them up with my fingers, top key first and so forth—not difficult and scarcely worth mentioning were that the end of it. But that is not the end of it. After prying the keys up, my fingertips are stained with ink, and I have to get up from the table and trundle to the kitchen or bathroom. And there I cannot just stick my hand under the faucet—ink is not dust. I have to wait, tapping a foot or whistling irritably, possibly, until the water runs hot (it comes up from the basement and takes a long time), scrub my fingers, and then dry them on a towel, assuming there even is a towel, which I have just discovered there is not at present, the last clean one having gone for a dust rag, as I think I mentioned, or wipe them on my dress, as I have just done, or pants, or wave them in the air, pacing. Key-jams are maddening. One wants to flail the typewriter with one’s fists or even pitch it across the room as Clarence did once, and I do sometimes hammer the carriage with my forehead, though I know that does no good at all, except of course psychologically. He did not throw the typewriter because of a key-jam; he threw it because he had decided he was never going to write again, at least that is what he was shouting when he hurled it. He threw it another time as well, but the reason then also had nothing to do with key-jams or even with typewriters. He did not throw the same typewriter both times, as the one he threw the first time was thoroughly ruined and could not be thrown a second time, except of course in the trash. It was my typewriter he threw the second time, and he didn’t break it, since he threw it onto the bed. It occurs to me that people under the age of about thirty probably have no idea what a key-jam even looks like. If this ever becomes a book I am going to have to explain how typewriters work, and the book can include a picture of a typewriter with a little insert showing a close-up of a key-jam, to help them understand. At Potopotawoc they took away my typewriter. I had sent my luggage on ahead, and when I arrived my suitcases were lined up next to the cot in my cabin, but the typewriter was not among them. They told me it had become lost in transit, that they would get me another, but they did not. Then two weeks later I saw it in the director’s office. I was walking past, his door was open, and I spotted it on the floor beneath a chair. He said it had just arrived, but I didn’t believe him. The Peter Handke book has jiggled off as well, taking several of my pages with it, hitting the floor with a loud slap that made me jump. There are now a great many pages on the floor. You cannot, I suppose, call it a farm if there is just one animal.

Possibly I am not making headway at all. I might even be falling behind. Life is still going on, is the problem. Not going on in a big way, but going on nonetheless, a little bit at a time. Chugging along, I suppose, is pretty much what it is doing, or inching forward, as I suggested earlier. Almost nothing is happening, in the full sense of happening, yet I find that I am not able to process even that little bit fast enough to keep up, despite being a better-than-average typist. I seem to be falling farther behind every second. Here I am wanting to type about things that happened fifty years ago, while Lily and the yellow-papered house and France in winter and so forth are panting in the wings, waiting to get processed, and a picture frame gets broken, and I am compelled to talk about that and about key-jams and dust and so forth, and when is it ever going to stop?

In college I typed things for other people. They asked me and I did it without complaining. It gave me status, I suppose, though I don’t recall caring about status, so that was probably not the reason—I enjoyed typing even then. And I fixed the punctuation and grammar as I went along, and the spelling too, of course. Correct grammar came to me as naturally as breathing, because of my background, my social class and whatnot, while it was extremely difficult for some of the others. I had only to say a sentence out loud in order to hear if it was all right, while they had to memorize rules, and even when they managed to write correctly, which some of them did after a time, after I had pointed out this and that and explained, I could tell just from the style that they were writing to rules. Even Clarence would stumble in this way, because of his background. He had a hard time recognizing that something had gone wrong with one of his sentences, just as he would not always notice when something was trite or derivative. He used to bring me things he wanted retyped, his own typing being so slow, clumsy, and completely inaccurate, to let me type it correctly and fix up the grammar. And sometimes I went a little further than that, than just striking out the worst and tidying up the rest, grammatically speaking. I sometimes changed quite a lot of it, changed quite a lot of it extensively. I told him that all the words he had
meant
to write were still there, but now his intentions were clearer. Of course he saw what I was doing, though he never asked me to do it, and we never discussed it. He never said, “Can you fix this, can you make it better, Edna?” It was always, “Can you type this up, old girl?” When he shouted at me about getting to the point, after he had developed the short fuse I mentioned, he had already taken up with Lily—taken up with her after-hours in the pharmacy, not taken up with her in public yet. Lily typed using two fingers. Of course that scarcely mattered, since Clarence had given up writing by then. At some point I am going to have to explain about Lily and the pharmacy, and I have still not gone into Potopotawoc, and that by itself will strike some people as odd. If Clarence were reading this it would strike him as odd, I am sure—odd and, to use one of his favorite phrases, entirely symptomatic. And now I am getting sidetracked, which is another interesting expression, but one that I am not going to go into here, unless I decide to talk about trains, which I have in the back of my mind to do at some point. I ought to say sidetracked
again,
as the sad fact is I am barely making headway, even without Lily and the pharmacy. And if I want to lie down on the sofa again, I will have to move the stuff I piled there, the books and photos and such, and the boxes of ribbons. I have not been wanting to lie down as often as I used to a few weeks ago, when I was spending most of the day horizontal. I could lie down in the bedroom, of course, if I felt like it, or on the rug next to the table, as I used to do sometimes also. I might not want to lie down on the rug now, because of the trash on the floor, the completed pages that have slid off the table as well as a large number of crumpled ones that I tore out of the machine and threw there and haven’t mentioned for fear of sounding discouraged, plus the fronds that snapped off the fern while I was pushing it against the wall, and some of Nigel’s pellets that have spilled regularly while I was carrying them in my hand from the bag in the kitchen, and Peter Handke’s book, and the difficulty of getting back up once I am down there. And I ought to have mentioned before that when I say floor I mean rug as well; most of my pages are on the rug. I think, Well, I need to tidy up, and then I don’t.

I have put the books that were on the sofa back in the small bookcase. They were not many. I keep most of my books on the tall shelves in the hall. The door to the kitchen is at the far end of the hall—not a door, strictly, just an open doorway. Standing in the living room one can see all the way through the apartment and out the rear window, though there is nothing to see out there but the iron railing of my fire escape and the back of a brick building across the alley that used to be a school but has been abandoned for years, windows boarded up. Nothing to see, that is, in terms of animate things like people and trees, but the kitchen window faces west, and so it frames sunsets in part, as I might have mentioned, frames part of a sunset, the remainder being blocked off by the schoolhouse. On one side of the hall is the door to my bedroom, and with the exception of that door and the doorway to the kitchen the hall is lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling and even across the tops of the doorframes. Getting a carpenter in to build the shelves was almost the first thing I did after moving here. Going to and fro in the course of the day, in and out of the kitchen and the bathroom, which is off the kitchen, I have to walk past the bookshelves, though I don’t ordinarily look at the books then, in the normal way one fails to look at things that are always there. I don’t mean that I avoid looking at them. It is just that these days I scarcely read books, so why would I look? I am not even sure why I keep them, except that I have owned many of them for a long time, decades in the case of some. They even smell old, like old clothes and old mattresses. I once read that for damaging a person’s health old books are worse than cats. Books are, now that I think about it, among the few personal items that are impossible to wash. The rat is making a dreadful ruckus. It has its forepaws up against the glass again. It is chattering its teeth, producing an awful ratcheting sound, and its eyes are bulging; they look about to pop out of its head. If I felt more sympathy for it, I could imagine that it is trying to say something, puffing out its cheeks and spluttering in a futile effort to utter some matter terribly important to it, or else it is having a fit. I am going to have to change the chips at some point, and that will mean reaching my arm inside. I am not going to do that while it is in there. Maybe I can dump it in the bathtub while I do it. The last time I was still reading a lot was at Potopotawoc, where it seems to me I was reading almost all the time, mostly magazines, because I was not able to type much there, as I think I mentioned, and it was either read or fret, or look out the window at the falling leaves, or at the falling snow, and later, after a long time, at the new leaves, and so forth.
Only
magazines, as a matter of fact—I don’t think I read a single book while I was there. I didn’t own a television there, though up in the main building was a gigantic set that was always turned on even when no one was sitting around it, and sometimes I went up and watched. I don’t have a television here either, having given the one I used to own to a young man who came to wash the windows ever-so-many years ago, as I might have mentioned also. I can already hear people saying, “What on earth did you do with your time, when you were not at work, if you didn’t read or type and you didn’t look at television?” The answer is that I really don’t know. I took little walks, I cleaned the house a little, I prepared small meals, shopped for a few things, looked out the window for a few minutes, napped a little while, thought a little, and the day was gone—the littles and the smalls piled one on another and added up to all there was. It is not difficult to fill a day, not because I have so terribly much to do, but because time itself is moving so fast. The days, I want to say, wink past; even the tedious days are gone in a flash. I say that, and I have an image of the lighted windows of a speeding train. I have not been an active reader for some time now, but even after I stopped reading, except for magazines, I went on acquiring books, intending to read them at some point in the future, went on buying them even when I could not afford to. At various times in my life I have known people who, when they could not afford to buy books, would just steal them. Before he met me Clarence regularly stole books, though he would not steal anything else. In my experience people like Clarence usually think it is O.K. to steal books, where by “like Clarence,” I mean aspiring writers. And I have known painters who regularly stole paints. Years ago, on a day like today, I might have gone out to a bookstore. I used to spend hours in bookstores, reading entire chapters while standing at the shelves, and occasionally people would come over and stand beside me and say things like, “I see you are reading X or Y. What do you think of it?” More pages have tumbled off the table, falling with a fluttering sound like the wings of several birds. A jacket is the only significant thing that I can remember stealing—significant in contrast to trivial items like ballpoint pens and paper clips, which I also occasionally took from work, though I doubt that anyone, had they seen me going off with those items, would have cared. I took the jacket last fall. A man tapped on the glass of the outer door while I was in the room sorting. Since Brodt was upstairs I opened it myself, and the man handed me a woman’s leather jacket that he had picked up from the floor of the garage. I hung it over the back of my chair, meaning to give it to Brodt when he came back, but I took it home instead. I don’t recall taking anything else, except, as I said, minor things like paper clips, and once a large blue stapler and another time a miniature radio no bigger than a cigarette pack. I left the earphones, because I thought I would not like having plastic buttons in my ears, but when I got home I discovered the radio could only be listened to in that manner, not having any speaker of its own, and I threw it away. I certainly was not taking things on a regular basis. Even so I think Brodt became suspicious at one point. One Friday, when I returned from distributing upstairs, my paycheck was lying on the table as always, and when I opened my handbag to slip it in I noticed the contents were not in the usual order, as if they had been rummaged with. Brodt could not have seen the man handing me the jacket, but he might, I thought, have bumped into him later, perhaps sat next to him at a ball game the following weekend, for example, where they could have fallen into conversation, the man happening to mention that he had dropped a leather jacket off at Brodt’s office the other day, at which point Brodt could not help putting two and two together. Or something like that. The incident of someone rummaging in my purse took place a long time ago, and I might not be remembering the sequence right. Maybe the rummaging occurred before I took the jacket, not after, in which case he was rummaging for some other reason, if he was rummaging at all. Why would he rummage? I like the phrase “trick of memory” for things like that, as when people, when they fail to recollect something in the same way as you, will say “I think your memory is playing tricks on you, dear,” with the implication that memory is mischievous or even malevolent. I once took a sleeper from Seville, in Spain, to Heidelberg, in Germany. The cessation of motion at each stop along the way would rouse me from sleep, and I would lift the window shade and peer out at the platform and try to discover where we were. The names of the stations were posted on signs that hung above the platform, but sometimes the car I was on did not stop at a spot from which I could see a sign, even when I pressed my cheek to the glass, and I was astonished, at one point in the middle of the night, when I did see a sign, to discover that we were in Switzerland. Who would have thought that a train from Seville, in Spain, to Heidelberg, in Germany, would be passing through Switzerland? Though I traveled all over Europe, or that part of Europe one was permitted to travel all over in those days, I was never in Switzerland again, so if I had not awoken at that moment on the train from Seville or if the train had not stopped at just that point along the platform, I might have passed my entire life without ever knowing that I had once visited Switzerland.