Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) (11 page)

In America I traveled by car and airplane, and later, when we had become more or less impoverished, by bus occasionally. Sometimes I rode trains in America also, mostly between New York and Boston, and Clarence and I twice took a train all the way from New York to Los Angeles and back. I am referring to passenger trains, of course—Clarence was the only person I know who actually rode freight trains, though he did it in order to write something for a magazine, which is hardly the same as really doing it. Obviously, even if I had not woken up or had woken up and not been able to read the sign, I would still have passed through Switzerland once in my life. On the other hand, had I not woken up, etc., and the train had actually gone only through France, as one would think it should, that would not have made a difference in my life; I mean, there is really no difference between sleeping through Switzerland and sleeping through France. Which makes me wonder if the important thing is what actually happened in the past or only what we remember having happened. I suppose I might at this moment be altered in some very minute way by the knowledge I possess now that Switzerland was among the countries I visited. On the other hand, I probably would still be changed in just that minute way had the train in fact gone through France and I had merely imagined it stopping in Switzerland; imagined it, I mean, because I misread a sign in a French station or because I did not wake up at all and merely dreamed we were in Switzerland. Of course, if the train had gone through Switzerland, as I believe it truly did, and had fallen off a mountain on the way, that would have been very different from sleeping through France.

It was not as bad as I imagined. The moment I lifted the top, he shot into the pipe and stayed there, though the stench was dreadful. I took everything out, shoveled it out with a kitchen spatula, ready to whack him if he reappeared, and I cleaned the bottom with Clorox, provoking a tiny sneeze from inside the tube, like someone ripping a postage stamp. I put the dirty chips in a plastic bag that I set outside on the fire escape. France, when I went back there with Clarence one winter, was the second extravagance we undertook with my money, while there was still a great deal of it. The first was a trip to Africa. Even now, after all these years, it feels odd to think that I once went on a safari in Africa, and not the sort of excursion they call a safari these days but a genuine hunting safari with the goal of shooting as many large animals as possible, though we never did shoot an elephant, which is of course the biggest animal, a buffalo being the biggest that we actually shot. I personally did not shoot it, Clarence did, while I was at the hotel with a stomach disorder. It was not a hotel in the usual sense, just a long shed with bunk beds and a pair of tin-roofed toilets outside, where, if I had to use one in the daytime, as I did frequently while my stomach was disordered, I nearly suffocated in the heat and stench. The feeling I still have of the safari being a truly odd event in my life is probably due to the fact that it was out of character for me, though it was not out of character for Clarence. The photograph that was in the frame I broke the glass out of is from that trip. I removed it from the frame in order to pry the broken pieces from the grooves, and I have taped it temporarily to the window, where I usually only put notes, because it is a kind of note, being up there to remind me to buy another piece of glass. It shows Clarence with two dead lions. He is standing over them, a boot on the rump of one of them, which I think must be the male—they were a male and a female lion. The photograph was not taken at the spot where we shot them. They are on the ground in the middle of our camp, the Africans having just dumped them there after dragging them from the back of the Land Rover, two men pulling on the legs until they fell out. You can see the rear part of the Land Rover in the background. The lions fell one on top of the other. Their heads are cut off in the picture is the reason I can’t tell whether Clarence has his foot on the male or the female. In fact, so much of them has been cut off in the picture that if one did not already know they were lions one might think Clarence was standing next to a couple of sandbags, or bags of wheat or something, with his foot on one of them. He is standing with a glass of champagne in his raised hand, though naturally you can’t tell just from the photo what he has in the glass either—it was champagne, though, from the last of a great many bottles we had bought in Nairobi for occasions of this sort, when we (that being Clarence, usually) shot something large. We had used up the last of our ice a few days prior, and the wine was warm and sickening, I thought, though I don’t recall Clarence minding. I had been standing next to him a moment before, clinking my glass to his, and had stepped out of the frame to snap the photo. I was quite giddy from having shot a lion, which is probably the reason I left important things like their heads out of the picture. I regret shooting it now, though it was easy to do at the time, while I was still under Clarence’s influence. It seems to me that I was quite happy then. I don’t mean that I was happy then on the whole, just that I remember being happy for most of that particular trip, happy in a way that made it easy to be indifferent to the feelings of others, especially lions, who are themselves famously indifferent in that way. It was during this trip also that I took up Clarence’s habit of whistling for the servants. When I say it was easy to shoot the lion, I mean, of course, that it was morally easy; it was in fact a rather difficult shot. And when I say that I was under Clarence’s influence, I mean I was under his influence in regard to extraneous things like shooting lions and playing tennis, but when it came to most other things he was under my influence. Once years ago when Potts and I were still seeing if we could be more than just considerate neighbors, she was visiting up here and asked about that photograph, and I told her all about the time I had shot the lion. I think she was quite horrified when she realized how much I had enjoyed doing it. I am surprised that she has trusted me with her rat. Even with so much left out of it the photo is still quite true to life. I mean if one thinks about Clarence in later years one does tend to see a man standing alone with a drink in his hand, and if one really does mistake the lions for sandbags, then it becomes truer still, capturing the aspect of being embattled that was characteristic of those years—embattled, but also fortified, the latter referring to whiskey, of course, but also to the feeling he got later from his proximity to Lily, it seems to me, the illusion of being fortified. He felt fortified by the furious energy she brought to bear on everything at a time when he was running out of fuel, really, and which seemed to make him feel alive again, though it made me feel exhausted, but especially by her youthful beauty, by the fact that she still had it. There was the symmetry and the clarity of her features, which had nothing loose or accidental, but I believe that what really drew Clarence and made him feel fortified was the fact that she was at that point of life and vigor where it was difficult for the idea of death to find an attachment point on her. I say to myself, Enough about Lily, and mean to move on, but I am tripped, or tricked—or trapped, even—by a sudden ingress of unbidden memory. Nothing, I think, in my mind is my own. She is sitting at the window in the yellow-papered house, wavy black hair shadowing a portion of her face. I can see the blinding Southern afternoon through the string curtain she has made for my window. The heat has silenced even the insects, stifling them. She is talking to me, but I don’t hear any words—in my memory, I mean, I don’t hear any words. Lily had a habit of looking out the window while she talked, in a way that made you feel you were not with her, that you were somewhere off on the horizon, not stretched out on a broken-down sofa, which is where I actually was, and she had a way of talking about the future as if it were a proximate space that one had only to step over into, not a possibly unattainable time separated from us by a chasm of unpredictability. Listening to her I realized—meaning I had a sudden very clear thought, dazzling in its obviousness—that she and Clarence were just alike. I don’t think I said in so many words
they belong to each other,
though that was the feeling of it, suddenly. I don’t know why I always remember the black hair, since her hair was brown.

Day before yesterday, I think it was, the last time I fed the fish, I forgot to put the lid back on the aquarium, and the snails must have climbed out. The snails obviously climbed out; there are no snails in the tank. I looked for them on the floor, and in the flowerpots, thinking those would be the sort of thing they would hide in, being snails, even if they are not garden snails. I found a flashlight in a kitchen drawer, intending to shine under the furniture in case they had crawled there. The bulb glowed a faint yellow for several seconds and then went completely out. I have left the top off the aquarium in case they decide to climb back in, as they might want to do, being water snails. I will have to watch where I step, especially on the dark-patterned carpets on which a brown water snail will be practically invisible. I sat in Potts’s husband’s chair and watched the fish while they ate, the miniscule wafers of food drifting slowly downward as gently as snowflakes, the fish dashing this way and that catching them in their mouths—snowflakes falling, I want to say, through the green air of summer. One year Papa carried me outside during a snowstorm, held me in his arms, and we walked up and down the driveway in front of the house. Giant cotton-ball snowflakes drifted down, and I opened my mouth and caught them, and the air then was blue and black. After watching the fish a while I dozed off in Mr. Potts’s rocker, and it was dark when I awoke. The stairwell light is out and climbing back up the stairs I had to feel my way along the wall with my hands. I was reminded of the cover picture on my copy of
Crime and Punishment
—Raskolnikov climbing a dark stairway in just that posture, on his way to kill a useless old woman. And now, I thought, I am the useless old woman, on my way to kill …
what?
Time, I suppose. I had settled back in my armchair, when I remembered that I had forgotten to water the plants, even though I had set out with precisely that in mind. I went to the window and looked out. It is raining again. The rat is whirring in its wheel. For hours at a time it does that now, even in the middle of the day. It seems to have become more active in recent days—an effect of the weather, I suppose, though maybe I am just noticing it more, because of the rain. Two days ago, when I was typing up the bit about the days passing like the windows of a speeding train and the subsequent bit about not knowing whether I was in Switzerland or France, it occurred to me that I did not at that moment know what day of the week it was, the name of the window, so to speak, that was currently flying past. That is, I did not know what day of the week it was while I was typing, not while I was on the train, though, of course, I don’t know that either after all these years, though I must have known it at the time—one cannot travel about, catching trains and booking rooms and such, without knowing what day of the week it is. Since I didn’t know what day of the week it was two days ago, I don’t, as a consequence, know what day of the week it is now, when I am once again sitting at the machine. I have been having a hard time lately keeping my thoughts from getting in a jumble. The jumble seems to become worse the harder I struggle to get things straight, as happens to insects in spiderwebs, when their struggle only makes things more difficult for them. Once when I was looking at the mess in my room I told Clarence I couldn’t live in a state of disarrangement anymore. He thought I had said derangement, and I found myself yelling, “I don’t need a
doctor,
I need a
maid.”
It was typical of Clarence to miss a distinction like that.

I can feel it almost physically in front of me—a vast intransigence against which I keep knocking my head. I can’t describe it exactly; I have never been able to obtain a clear view of it. Whether that is because it is too close or too far away I can’t decide. I only know that it impinges, that it is made of something extremely hard that will break my head if I don’t watch out, if I go on banging against it, and that it bars my way. On rare occasions, though, when the sun is out, the windows are open, and the birds are cheeping, I don’t feel it there and I become hopeful. I make a first cup of coffee and carry it to the little table, too excited to linger over breakfast. There will be time for that later, I think, but first…. And I pull up the chair and wind a fresh sheet of paper into the machine. Yet even as I am doing this I can feel my confidence ebbing, slipping away despite my (mental) attempts to hold on to it. This has been going on for a long time. And something is wrong with the begonias—they have dropped most of their leaves and there is a white moldy-looking fuzz on the stems.

I rode a train and two buses to get to Potopotawoc. I was on the second bus for hours, bouncing and swaying on a narrow, twisting, mountainous road overhung by tree branches on which the leaves were starting to turn. I was there before any of the others. I stood on the steps of the Shed and watched them arrive, spilling from the vans and buses in their funny hats. Some were dizzy from the gyrations of the road and staggered and blinked in the cool, bright September sun, others whistled and shouted or pumped a fist in the air as they climbed down from the vehicles, while the ones who had arrived before them clustered with the staff at the edge of the parking lot and clapped and waved. In former days Potopotawoc had been a summer camp for boys, and locally it was still called “the Camp.” For the residents too it was just “the Camp” and they called each other camper: it was “Hi, camper,” when you bumped into one of them on a path, and “Pass the ketchup, camper,” in the cafeteria. Unlike an actual camp, though, the others—the workers, the people in authority, if one can call them that—were not considered counselors—they were staff. “Staff” was sometimes a collective term, as in “Staff is having a meeting up at the Shed,” and sometimes not, as in “Watch out, Staff is standing beneath your window,” in a case where, when you leaned out, there was just one person crouching there. Some of the residents were famous in small ways, well-known in certain circles, but they were not distinguished, the circles were not distinguished, and they, the people, had gone to pieces or otherwise declined, lost their talent or impetus or whatever, and a stay at Potopotawoc was supposed to help them get it back; set them back on their feet, was the phrase. Considering their condition, the atmosphere was relentlessly jolly, partly I suppose because so many of them were oblivious—deluded is what they were, and a tidy number were drunks. Deluded about themselves and their prospects, I mean, deluded about their talent, not deluded in the wider hallucinatory sense. The camp consisted, geographically speaking, of a hill and a lake. On top of the hill stood a glass-fronted building of intensely modern style, with exposed girders and out-slanting walls of rough-hewn sandstone, called the Shed, in reference to the long sloping roof, which descended so low at the entrance that taller men sometimes cracked their heads going in, cursing. Next to it was an older and smaller brick building with decorative cornices and tall windows with steel muntin bars like an old-fashioned textile mill, and they called that one the Factory. Most of the residents, along with a portion of the staff, had rooms in the Factory. The rest of us stayed in cottages scattered about in the woods. I don’t know if it was by accident or design that nearly all the noisy hypersociable types had rooms in the Factory, where most of the incidents occurred, parties as well as fights, though usually not fistfights—word fights and water fights, toilet paper sometimes. They threw books sometimes. Most of the fights took place at their parties, I think. I never went to one of those, but I could hear them from my cabin. A wide meadow ran from the Shed down through the middle of the woods to the lake. There was a rotting boathouse at the edge of the lake and three or four battered canoes that were always drifting off and getting stuck in the reeds on the opposite side. The lake was too swarmed with weeds for swimming, and there were never any paddles. Most of the cabins were on the other side of the meadow from mine, so I did not often run across people if I stuck to the paths on my side.