The Cry of the Sloth (5 page)

Anita, so much water has passed under so many bridges that I fear we’ve let happiness slip from our grasp. Eight turbulent years, and the image of you in my mind is as untarnished as if minted yesterday. I can still see you as you were on our last night together, seated on the edge of the bed in that dingy cement-block motel on the outskirts of Rochester. A huge neon sign flashing just outside the window is casting the room in alternating tints of garish green and red. Your head is lowered, your breasts bare, your damp hair falls in a dark curtain across your face. In the changing half-light you are looking down at a large menu lying open on your knees. Now the camera zooms out, and I am in the picture as well. I am leaning against a dresser, my elbow resting on a stack of empty pizza boxes. I am wearing just my trousers, a pair of charcoal J.C. Penney slacks, without shirt or socks. The carpet at my feet is littered with cast-off clothes and Budweiser cans. It is, as they say, the end of an affair. We are trying to decide whether to order meatballs or pepperoni. Concealed from your gaze by that curtain of hair, I am staring intently at you, attempting to fix this image in my mind, while you prattle on about toppings. I succeeded only too well, it seems, for the image is still there today, indelible and tormenting: salient against the dark of your summer tan, your breasts are turning green and red, semaphores flashing in the dark night of memory.

Is it really too late, Anita? I realize you may already have found happiness in some new relationship—the news I have of you is tardy and stale—or perhaps you are immersed in your work and too busy to spare an idle thought for an old flame, if that is what I am. Tear up this letter then, toss it into the wastebasket with the Kleenex and candy wrappers. Or don’t. Listen to your heart. I
had
to write. I told myself that it’s never wrong to clasp at straws, and having clasped, swim on. Whatever happens, upon what strange shore I am finally tossed, I’ll be glad that I have written. It is as if the little bird I held in my hand had spread its small wings and flown, even though it was dead.

Affectionately,

Andrew

¶

What is it about me that makes me want to make a fool of myself? I suppose at bottom it’s just a perverse form of vanity, the cut-up in class who makes himself into an idiotic spectacle in order not to vanish altogether. But still, I am not pretending, and the mortification I feel in these situations is perfectly genuine. I write a letter, blushing with shame at every sentence, right to the tips of my ears, and send it off; and walking back to the house from the mailbox I catch myself muttering, “That’ll show ’em.”

¶

Dear Captain Barrows,

I share your dismay at the state of American writing. It is quite true that everywhere one looks one sees cynicism and mockery and that we have lost sight of the great humanist tradition, whatever that was. In addition, as you say, most people use shoddy grammar, which does not reflect well on their parents and teachers, whoever they were. I am, however, not personally able to do anything about this.

Sincerely,

Andrew Whittaker

¶

Dear Mr. Kohlblink,

As I have said twice before, all submissions must be typed.

¶

Dear Jolie,

I wrote just a few days ago, I think it was, and already there are new things to say. I have been trying to play things down in my letters, to wear a brave face, as they say, over the other one, the ghastly drawn one that leers at me in the bathroom every morning, but you may have divined that I have been fairly pushed to the wall lately, backed into a corner. People would like me just to roll over and play dead, or maybe even
be
dead in the case of some of them. I feel exposed, hedged about, and vulnerable. Yet at the same time I am bristling with confidence. I am not going to take this lying down. I am taking steps. The first will be to establish a draconian regime of perfect parsimony when it comes to personal expenditures. With that in view I have had all phone service discontinued. If you’ve been trying unsuccessfully to call, that’s the reason. The next step will be to move out of here and into that little Polk Street efficiency, which no one seems to want anyway, while putting this place up for rent. To do that, to go from an eight-room house to a one-room flat, I am going to have to jettison a mountain of stuff, a lot of it yours. So if there are things here you’re still attached to, you need to send me the list right away. The instant I said to myself, Andy, you need to move out of this house, I felt a huge weight lift from me. The expression has it that the burden is on the shoulders, but lately I’ve been feeling it more as a tremendous pressure in my head. I’m using a toothpick to hold my cigarettes so I can smoke them right down to my lips. I figure this will mean four fewer cigarettes in a day, saving a pack every five days, six packs a month, and so on. Same thing with carrots. I mean, you don’t have to cut that little green bit off the end.

Digging through the stuff in the basement, I’ve run into a lot of spiders, as you can well imagine. I have carried a wooden spoon down from the kitchen, and I use it to push the webs out of the way. I endeavor to do this without hurting the spiders, and usually they scuttle off unharmed, but sometimes things go wrong. If only they were not so soft-bodied and vulnerable. It would be easier to swat them if they had some sort of shell. When a spider dies, it curls up, draws its legs under it, and shrivels. It seems actually to grow smaller, as if the air had gone out of it. That’s why I don’t want to kill them, because I hate to watch them do that. And yet they often possess a painful bite, and if you see them magnified you’ll notice their horrible faces.

Also in the basement, interlaced with the spiders, is all the stuff we moved out of Mama’s house. I can’t understand why we thought she was likely to
ever
want any of it. They accumulate all this stuff, treasures and mementos and so-called useful items, and the next generation comes along and sees that it’s just a pile of rubbish. Looking at it strewn across the basement floor, I couldn’t help thinking about the passage of time and the paths of glory leading to the grave, etc. Standing there, holding the spoon in one hand and Mama’s college annual in the other, the word “detritus” rang in my head like a bell, tolled like a funeral knell, as they used to say, used to be able to say without cracking up. I’m sorry to run on like this, but it’s been raining steadily here for three days.

Among Mama’s things, I found a silver and ivory brooch, which might be worth something, and my immediate thought was, I have to show this to Jolie. I miss having you around to talk to. I even miss the way you used to press your hands against your ears when you thought I was holding forth too long. It’s odd how the most irritating traits of the people we love can come to seem endearing when they are gone, when they, the people, are gone. I think also of Papa’s habit of sticking little bits of toilet paper on the bathroom mirror, I never knew why, or yours of blinking rapidly when I would try to explain something to you.

I spent two days carrying up all the junk and debris, brought it all up and stacked it in the dining room, which I never use anyway: the lawn mower, thick with a sticky melange of oil and dirt, four kinds of shovels (for snow, dirt, ashes, and, I suppose, flower bulbs), all of them rusted, two car batteries, tufts of blue moss sprouting from the terminals, two ladders, one with three broken rungs (what use did we think we would ever have for that?), several broken chairs, Papa’s enormous old Philco radio, minus all the knobs, axe, pickaxe, hoe, snow tires (flat), storm windows (two of them cracked), a duffel bag stuffed full with Papa’s old leather shoes (stiff as boards), a large expensive painter’s easel (remember that?), a shoebox bristling with Mama’s plastic hair curlers like a nest of little pink hedgehogs, a box of her stained flesh-colored girdles (the horror!), a dozen brass curtain rods (for what windows? in whose house?), your bicycle, a black ceramic umbrella stand, an American flag. I had almost finished, was tugging a roll of fiberglass batting out from where it was wedged beneath the basement steps, when I spotted the scaly thing: it looked like a dusty carp. The thing was so coated with dust it took me a moment of bug-eyed staring to recognize that it was one of Sokal’s snakeskin boots. I found the other one too, farther back under the stairs. And all this stuff is just a minute piece of the whole. A person can’t get sideways into the dining room anymore. I had to shove the last pieces in there with main force and pile the overflow in the hall. Which will prove convenient when the time comes to toss it all: just open the front door and
heave
. If it ever stops raining.

The tenants at the duplex, which I finally managed to rent just two weeks ago, went to the city about the roof, so I had to send a roofer over there. He says it’s not just the shingles; the sheathing underneath is rotten. He absolutely refuses to start work unless I pay in advance, and now the city has made me take the whole thing, even the half that doesn’t leak, off the market until it’s fixed.

Love,

Andy

¶

The man stared at the girl as if puzzled by some memory. He then turned on his heels and disappeared inside the shack, for that is what it was. The girl, whose name was Florence, gazed after him a long time. She noticed the grass in the yard needed cutting, and she kept this in mind as she pedaled off, for it was nearly supper time and she had to buy eggs. Though her family were small farmers, they did not have chickens. Or they had chickens, but they had been struck down by a blight. The remaining flock, for most had died, wandered about the farmyard in a daze, clucking mournfully. It was a desolate scene, and contemplating it from the porch, where he sat in an old wooden rocker, had caused her father to wear an expression of great sadness which he was able to banish only in the presence of his daughter, who would read to him from the Almanac. She had little time for this lately, as she had to do the milking as well as the plowing and reaping, not to mention nursing the sick chickens. Her father had been in a wheelchair ever since he was struck by a hit-and-run driver while crossing the highway to get the mail, which included his beloved Almanac, strewn on the pavement beside him. His sun-burnished visage was still rugged, though bristled, for he often did not shave. And before she reaped, she sowed. Wheat and barley and other grains, probably. Meanwhile, the man sat on a bed, on a bare mattress with the springs poking out and stains from generations of strangers, and tried to think of nothing, for that is what he had come to, what he had come to this desolate place for. It was his beloved childhood home from before his parents had let their desire for modern appliances tear the family away. They had been small farmers. They were Amish probably, and they did not associate with the family on the grand farm up the road from whence Florence had ridden on her bicycle that significant morning. There had been bad feelings between the two families for over eighty years, though neither Florence nor the man, whose name was Adrian, or Adam, was aware of this. But Florence’s father was—he was a hard, bitter, hard-bitten man—as was Adam’s mother, who though once beautiful was now a half-forgotten figure in a nursing home in Burbank, California, a strand of gray hair falling across her still youthful features. As a girl she had been known far and wide for her fiery temper and unkempt hair, and this had frightened most suitors away, though not the randy young hellion who would become Adam’s father. He was not a man to walk behind a plow or to cut ice from the lake in winter using a large hand saw. Packed under straw in the cellar the ice melted very slowly, but still by July they were drinking warm sodas, if they could afford them, and warm unpurified branch water otherwise. Until one blazing August day, when Adam’s father staggered in from the fields. His young wife, her face flushed and beaded with sweat, handed him a glass of hot Coke, as she was wont to do. He took a big swig, and his whole body revolted. A spray of sweet brown liquid fell on the stack of clean dry clothes his wife had just taken in from the line after washing them in the little stream back of the house. “Pack the bags,” he muttered, wiping his chin with his hand. So he had taken his wife and infant son off to southern California, and to Adam growing up the old farm had been only a black-and-white photograph on the wall of a pleasant living room in Glendale, where the picture window framed a pomegranate tree. And now in this strange yet familiar land, which would be snow-bound one day and where “pomegranate” was only a word in a dictionary, sitting on the soiled mattress, he tried to think of nothing as he had vowed he would do. Yet the figure of the raven-haired girl on the bicycle impinged upon his wounded psyche like a moth battering its wings against the light of a dying bulb.

¶

Dear Marvin,

Much as I would like to make amends for the screwup, I really can’t reprint your poems in the next issue. They were legible, with a little effort, in at least half the copies, and the people who got those copies, and who worked at making them out the first time, certainly don’t want to open the next issue and find them in there again. Send me something else, and if it’s any good, I’ll print that.

All the best,

Andrew

¶

Dear Miss Moss,

Rest assured, when I suggested you send your poems to
American Pony
I did not mean it as a “put-down.” I thought, and still think, that would be a good place for you to start. It does not mean that I think you write “dumb poems.” I have said already what I think of your writing; and if I said it, I meant it. I am not in the business of being polite. I am sorry to hear that your parents are so unsympathetic to your aspirations—I suffered similar misunderstandings when I was young, especially from my father, who raised dogs and thought I should become a veterinarian, but nothing quite on the scale you describe, and of course it’s easier for a boy. You are lucky to have the support of someone like Mr. Caldwell—perhaps he can do something. As for me, I really can’t offer advice as to whether you should “cut out,” and I don’t know anywhere in San Francisco you could stay. Please understand, this is all quite beyond me. As for your wish to send me more of your writing, even if not for publication, I can scarcely say no, under the circumstances. However, you must keep in mind that I am a busy person, even a harried person, and right now I am caught up in all sorts of very disagreeable financial entanglements, plus I am in the process of moving from my present house, forced out, really, by an accumulation of stuff, so I can’t promise more than a few quick notes in the margins, just whatever comes to mind as I read on the fly. And please do enclose a stamped return envelope.