Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) (8 page)

Typing or just sitting, I often have the radio on, but I don’t always hear it. I have it on because it blocks some of the unpleasant noises coming from the outside. But this morning while standing at the porthole, peering across at the ice cream factory, at the concrete walls darkened by rain, I suddenly heard a woman’s voice saying, “That was John Coltrane’s ‘Lush Life.’ Next up, the Modern Jazz Quartet and ‘Cortege.’” I waited at the window until it started: a vibraphone, pianissimo, alone at first, then joined by the faint tintinnabulation of a triangle—like harness bells, I thought—and, as the pace quickened, by the whispers of brushes on a cymbal, all of it muted, restrained, and melancholy, like the rain, I thought. Clarence owned several jazz recordings, including that one, which we carried with us from place to place, though I don’t think he actually cared much for the music and never put a jazz record on unless we had guests. I think he enjoyed the atmosphere of the music and the idea of himself sitting there listening to it and smoking and talking about literature and baseball with people he admired, most of whom I suppose were genuinely fond of that kind of music. I am going to want to say at the outset that Clarence was a sincerely affable person, embarrassingly affable, it seemed to me, when we went to parties and he made a spectacle of himself. In the presence of certain types of people—those with superior intelligence or talent or a great deal of money, the kind of people he could not stop himself from thinking were successful—he would feel intimidated, because of his background, and because he was, even at his pinnacle, only partially successful, and then he would become obnoxious after a few drinks, despite having started out being incredibly affable, where by “incredibly” I mean back-slappingly so. He would do that because even while trying to be affable in that way he was also trying to defend himself, and more often than not he would end up making the kind of loud, incoherent speech that people found so irritating. Oddly enough, as he became more of an American Outdoor Writer he became more British, despite having never really lived in Britain, except, as I think I mentioned, for a few weeks one summer—British in his manner of dress, his pronunciation, even his vocabulary—and the more he drank, the more imperially British he became, until he was slurringly drunk, at which point it was just North Carolina all over again. Clarence, slightly drunk and beginning to hold forth, would notice my disapproving silence and say something like, “You seem thoroughly steamed, old girl.” I hated that old girl stuff. Of course he would regret it all afterwards. At times, after a night of showing off, once he had become sober again and I had explained to him what had happened, he would curl up and shudder with remorse—on the floor sometimes or the damp ground, leaves and grass stains all over his jacket when he got up—and whimper with mortification and chagrin. The actual physical hangovers must have been terrific as well.

Sun again. I was at my table to greet it when it rose. I was eating cornflakes, chewing and thinking and staring out the window at the lightening sky above the factory, not seeing it, though, my vision clouded by memory. I suppose one could say that I was staring into the mists of time. I personally would never say that, though Clarence might have. After breakfast I trotted from room to room throwing open windows, and now the breeze—there is a small breeze—can come in the front windows and leave by the back. I am tempted to say that I have created a crosscurrent, but that is not what
crosscurrent
means, and I really ought not to have said that I was
throwing
open the windows, as that gives a picture of someone just flinging up the sashes with a flick of her wrist. It was a struggle to get some of them open, and I had to push up the storm windows as well, which have not been taken off yet. Ditto for the idea that I was trotting from room to room. I don’t trot. I put it that way because it seemed to convey the cheerfulness with which I went about it, which would not have come through had I talked about hobbling from room to room and wrestling with the sashes. “She walked with a springing step that belied her advanced years” is more or less how it felt, though maybe that should be “advancing years.” With the windows open, there is a lot of noise coming in from the street, and I have put on my muffs. I don’t know what possessed me to say that it sounds like the ocean—it never sounds like the ocean. I used to throw breadcrumbs out the window for the sparrows and pigeons but had to stop because of Potts and her husband, who complained about crumbs blowing into their living room. Sometimes I carry crumbs down to the sidewalk in a bag, if I am going down anyway, though I don’t usually remember until I am already in the street and happen to notice the birds. The bay windows are the reason I took this apartment in the first place—those and its being on the third floor, facing east, and not seeming expensive at the time, in relation to the money I had then. It is important that I see sunrises if I am going to keep my spirits up, as I believe I have explained already, so it matters what floor I am on. The apartment is in an old brick building that must have been posh at one time. Being just two blocks from the Connector is what made it not expensive, I suppose, because of the traffic noise and the frightening people who live under the overpass, and because of the compressors, and also, I think, because the building is not being kept up, was already not being kept up when I moved here, and that has only gotten worse. The windows have not been washed thoroughly since the young man I gave the TV to was here to clean them. He took the storm windows off and washed them along with the others, and in the fall of that year the same young man returned and put them in again, and I gave him the television. I called Giamatti about the windows again last fall, about how dirty they have become, and he said window washing was a tenant’s responsibility, even though it apparently was not my responsibility for the first five or six years I lived here, when someone came every spring and fall to wash them. They would even scrape all my old notes off with a razor blade and never complain. Window washing in those days was treated as such a matter of course that I was not even warned that they would be coming. They just came, in the fullness of time, like the seasons. I would look up, and there peering in a window would be some man on a ladder; I would notice the squeegee and think, “Oh, it must be spring.” Now the windows have become so filthy it is a wonder I can keep my spirits up at all. The table I use for eating and now also for typing stands in the center of the bay, as I think I mentioned as well. Or maybe not. With most of my pages on the floor I cannot go back and look and find out what things I have actually mentioned, as opposed to the things I merely considered mentioning, considered in passing, so to speak, and then didn’t. Cannot
easily
go back, I mean, as I probably could do it if I really wanted to. I don’t bend easily at the knees (I think I have mentioned my knees also), or at the waist either for that matter, so I don’t immediately pick the pages up when they fall off and now I have been walking on them. I generally neglect putting numbers on my pages, don’t forget so much as find it too tedious to bother, since I seldom remember to stop typing until I am so close to the bottom of the page it is about to fall out of the machine, and then I am usually in the middle of a sentence or in an agony of thought and in no mood to fuss with numbers. If I picked a page up from the floor now, I would not right off the bat know if it was page ten or page thirty. I used to think that one advantage typing had over ordinary unrecorded thinking was that one could go back over a pile of typed stuff and see what was in it. One cannot go over a pile of thought stuff in that way, because there is no pile, just thoughts falling endlessly down a hole, and even when you have managed to haul something up out of the hole you cannot know for sure whether it was down there all along or was something you had merely imagined being down there and had in fact invented while you were hauling. I sometimes wonder, for example, how much I actually remember about Clarence. And now, with all my pages on the floor and there being so many of them and none of them numbered, I can’t go back and look in the typed pile either. And it is not even a
pile
of pages, more like a slither or slew—they are spread out all across the floor, as if I had flung them there.
Broadcast,
I think, is the word for that kind of flinging. Contemplating the sheets of paper broadcast across the floor, I think, Well, I am going to have to do something about that, but then I don’t do anything about it. Strewn across the floor like that, the pages remind me of my typing days with Clarence, when I used to send one sheet after another to the floor on purpose, as a sign of indifference and disdain, while he was busy numbering his (at center bottom, the numeral bracketed by hyphens) and stacking them neatly next to his machine. When a stack had attained a certain thickness, he would pick it up and heft it, the same way he hefted pistols at a gun show, and sigh. Like Papa, Clarence had faith in accumulation.

I woke up this morning feeling lightheaded. Going down the hall I had to put out a hand to steady myself on the bookcase. I went over and sat in the armchair, where I fell asleep again, and woke up with the sun shining on my face. I dropped food into the tray, pushing the pellets through the wire lid one at a time, so as not to have to lift it, and when they hit the tray some of them bounced out into the shavings. The odor in there is terrific. Droppings are piling up along the edges; it seems to prefer the edges. I said, “Sorry, Nigel,” said it out loud, and he looked up as if he understood. It struck me that his eyes are quite intelligent; they have a glittering quality that could be taken for that, though I suppose it would sound odd, in the case of a person, if one were to say, “His eyes glittered with intelligence.” I have made coffee and placed it next to the typewriter. The surface of the coffee vibrates each time I strike a key, and the sunlight, reflecting off the trembling liquid, casts bright rippling circles on the ceiling, like water into which a stone has been tossed. I was still quite young, at boarding school, when I learned how to type, and from the first day everyone could see that I excelled at it. I was quite precocious, really, they said, and they were surprised by that, because I was not athletic otherwise, in ways involving the larger muscle groups. I was clumsy and slow at softball, field hockey, and games of that nature. It was the team aspect of those that did me in and made me slow and clumsy, because I wanted to be elsewhere. I typed right through college, becoming faster every year. Had I been a run-of-the-mill typist, I might never have formed the idea of finishing; it would have seemed preposterous, impossibly out of reach at normal speed. Mama had imposed piano lessons practically from infancy, and a line of governesses had followed suit, and I suppose the lessons contributed to my success at typing, though I failed to become a superior pianist, as my heart was not in that either—willfully failed is what they implied, what Mama implied, when Teacher told her. I could strike the right notes most of the time, but I was plodding and timid, is what Teacher said, looking at me fiercely. Not that I dislike music; on the contrary, in the early days, if I knew Clarence was going to be out of the house for a long while, I liked to play records while I typed, Bartok’s
Concerto for Orchestra
being a favorite at the time, though now, were I to hear it, I suspect I might not much care for it. I don’t have a record player, not one that works, so I can’t find out if that is true, and if I try to recall it in my head, I don’t hear anything there. I hear a great many things there, actually, but not Bartok’s
Concerto for Orchestra.

Howlings, grindings, and a weird sort of rubberized shuffling, mostly from the traffic outside, along with the throbbing of the compressors, were what I heard just now, when I listened to see if could hear any Bartok, plus the beating of my heart. Back then, when I still liked the
Concerto for Orchestra,
as soon as Clarence left I would close all the windows and doors, turn up the sound, and go into a frenzy. I would start off in the usual way, smoothly and at a normal pace, but as the tempo quickened with the entrance of the brass and upper strings, I would begin to type faster, and I would close my eyes, and I couldn’t hear the typewriter then, but I could feel it shuddering beneath my fingers, and I would commence to sway in my chair. After a minute or two of that a ribbon of words would sometimes start to stream out of the music onto the page, trickle at first and then stream, and I would let go, let myself fall into the music, and it was like falling from somewhere high with no fear of striking bottom, and I would abandon myself to it, turning slowly head over heals as I tumbled, and I felt as if my fingers were tools the music was using to write what it wanted—the music or the machine, I was not sure which—that the typewriter had become the tongue of my hands, not of my brain, and I was unburdened by reflection. Among the incidents in my early life with Clarence that I find most portentous were the times he contrived to walk in on me in the midst of one of those sessions. I don’t suppose he did it on purpose, he just stumbled in without thinking that it mattered, and I say contrived because that was how it felt at the time. With the music clamoring wildly, the typewriter thundering beneath my fingers, my back turned to the door, and my eyes closed, I would have no inkling he was there until he flicked off the record player—brutally flicked it off, was how
that
felt. Clarence and I did not have the same taste in music. He just did not have it in him to respond with understanding when I said, “Look, it’s Bartok, it’s
all
Bartok,” and handed him a dozen pages of gibberish. He just glanced at it and then walked around the house opening windows. Had he paused to think, he might have tiptoed up and touched me gently on the shoulder—that would have been startling enough—or he might have withdrawn discretely, taken a seat on the steps outside, or on the swing under the oak in the place in Connecticut where we had one of those, and waited until he could hear that I had finished. It was gibberish to him, is what I mean.