The Man Who Lost the Sea (3 page)

Lulu went to work on Monday. It was pretty bad. The talk was the same as every Monday and that was what made it so bad.

 … 
about the ninth beer I was
 …

 … 
only a high-school kid, Joe, but she
 …

 … 
summagun rolled just one too many nines, so I
 …

 … 
so I
 …

 … 
pair of
 …

 … 
Roseland
 …

Pretty bad. It washed and splashed and flooded around him, trickled
away, and then came back, foaming and roaring to engulf him for the second time. He found that the Secret, in taking its departure, had left all its reflexes behind. He couldn’t unlearn his defenses. Any anecdote which dealt in coarse, boastful fashion with sex, sin or scandal, he had been accustomed to counterbalance with a hidden loftiness, and from that take his pleasure.

But how could he experience pleasure when he had to remember that black steel box with its damnable certificate? Each time it happened he was emptied, and emptied again, and each time, it all had to happen again.
But we got married, we got married
, he told and told himself, and was then without sin to call his own.

Tuesday was much worse. The hairy-chested histories were fewer, of course, having nothing as eventful as a Saturday night to draw upon. But they were, by contrast, more unusual and unexpected. Lulu never knew when a charity-patient’s face would appear in the grated arch above his desk, and give evidence of some riotous sin solely by its scars and contours, or drop before him some virile obscenity which he might repeat but could never hope to conceive. And when these things happened he was caught up in his hellish little chain and reflex, the lofty pleasure, the recollection and the emptying.

What made it so much worse was that, unlike Monday, Tuesday’s misery continued after quitting time. To be strictly accurate, the misery
re-emerged
after quitting time, after everything else, the homecoming, the potatoes, the dinner, the dishes, the radio and the reading. His last activity with Ivy on Tuesdays—and Fridays, except for every fourth—had regularized itself into a commonplace, and destroyed all piquancies but one. And that one had been Lulu’s alone, his own special creation. It was the core crystal of his Secret.

He was able to conceal the change from himself until the very moment arrived, in its usual form of two firm taps on his shoulder as he lay in bed with his back to Ivy. He immediately, and with conscious decision, shook his head. The gesture in darkness was invisible, but conveyed itself quite clearly through the bed; Ivy’s response was to stop breathing for a time. When she resumed, the sniffs which punctuated it were no more frequent, but they were much fuller in body, the oboe (as it were) replacing the clarinet.

This departure from routine was demoralizing in the extreme, and brought to Lulu his first dim awareness that the future was going to be quite different from the past. A miserable hour or two later he made the further distressing discovery that he missed tormentingly that which he had just refused, such being the tyranny of the habitual.

You, too?
he demanded wistfully of his body as he had for two days of his mind.
Can’t you understand that it’s all changed now?
Somehow his body couldn’t. He lay rigid and miserable until the window-sashes showed darker than the panes, and then got up and dressed and went to work. Ivy, who frequently showed signs of life when he got up in the morning, now lay with her eyes closed, too still to be asleep.

As might have been expected, Wednesday was a quiet day containing a stretch of hell. As quitting time approached, a couple of orderlies started horsing around in the employees’ locker room which adjoined Lulu’s office. Custom demanded that they have but one thing on their minds and three ways of getting rid of it—through comedy, insult, and loud-mouthed boasting. The location of their lockers—diagonally across from each other in the big room—made them fire their expletives at the tops of their voices. The position of the main exit set their course inevitably past the back of Lulu’s chair.

They boiled out of the locker room into the office. Lulu didn’t turn to look at them, even when one said, “Do you know what we ought to do some payday? We ought to take old Llewellyn out an’ get his ashes hauled.”

“He wouldn’t know what to look for unless you dressed it up to look like a ledger book.”

“Maybe he fool you. Maybe he set so quiet around here ’cause he keepin’ all he can handle around home.”

Lulu did not move, and his stillness seemed to force the orderlies’ attention on him. One wisecrack, one grin over his shoulder, and they would have moved away. But he had no wisecrack and he didn’t know how to make a grin. He could only sit still with his back to them.

“Nah. I’ll tell you somethin’. He just ain’t alive. Man don’t chase a little ain’t really livin’.”

The uproarious laugh. Apparently the heartiness of their mirth was a good substitute for the missing reaction from Lulu, for they turned abruptly and moved to the exit.

Suddenly Lulu got to his feet excitedly. “I know what I’ll do. I’ll go out and pick up some actress,” he told himself. And suddenly felt fine. He felt better than he had at any time since the night when he had first seen the marriage certificate. He couldn’t explain why the idea had come so abruptly into his head—only that it had.

I’ll pick up this actress, he told his image in the washroom mirror five minutes later. The image nodded encouragingly back at him. No matter what happens then, I’ll have it to tell. Maybe I’ll tell them and maybe I won’t. Maybe it’ll be all about how she steals my wallet and my watch, and that’s funny. Or maybe it’ll be about how she can’t get enough of me, how she gives me her money and sells her ring.

I won’t tell them a thing, he decided firmly as he left the hospital. I’ll make it happen, that’s all. They don’t have to know. I’ll know.

Halfway home he said to himself, I don’t even have a wallet. I’ll have to buy one first.

On the steps at home he added, a watch too.

Considerably sobered, he let himself into the apartment, hung up his jacket, and got the potatoes and the knife and a pan of water and a paper bag for the peels, and stood in front of the counter in the kitchenette.

How much money is a wallet and a watch …

He didn’t know. It would have to be a whole lot, because he’d have to have money for the actress too.

He put down the potato he was peeling and pulled on his lower lip. There was one thing he could do—he could quit going to the movies on Saturdays.

“That’s a lot of Saturdays,” he murmured.

The idea of holding on to his own pay envelope simply did not occur to him; anyway, when he thought about money he thought about Ivy. In fact, it took him quite a while to dispose of the very direct idea of getting the money from her simply by asking for it. He decided against that very direct solution only because he didn’t think she’d have any. He just couldn’t erase from his mind the picture he
had of her paying out money every month for electricity and gas and other household expenses.

The amount of money that could be accumulated by two people with steady jobs and a medium-low standard of living over nineteen uninterrupted years of employment, was completely beyond his comprehension. When he began to search her writing desk it was only with some vague recollection of one of his painful overheard anecdotes at the hospital—something about a boy who was eighty cents short rummaging in his mother’s purse and finding forty dollars. “Lift it from the old lady’s shopping money,” he murmured.

Well, there wasn’t any shopping money. There wasn’t a thing in Ivy’s desk but painfully neat stacks of writing paper and envelopes and the file of cancelled checks cross-indexed by number, date and alphabet—he recalled the incomprehensible ritual each New Year’s Day when she burned every check seven years old—little boxes of paper clips, three sizes; rubber bands, two sizes; first and fourth class package labels; bottles of ink, red and blue-black; forty-two thousand dollars in bonds, three unopened boxes of pencils, and a file of correspondence. Lulu turned away in disappointment and went back to peeling the potatoes.

He sighed and turned on the radio and went on peeling the potatoes. He heard a commercial advertising wristwatches and paused midway in his task to listen to it. The man said they started at only $49.95. That didn’t sound so “only” to Lulu. That much money would amount to—uh—He closed his eyes and moved his lips while he worked it out—about two years and nine months worth of Saturday movies. After that he’d have to get a wallet, and then more money—to give to the actress. He wandered how much money you had to give actresses. Oh well. He could certainly manage to find out in the next three years, or four—or however long it took him.

Bulletin. Five-state alarm for two men who had only an hour before held up a suite of offices on High Street. The robbers had made off with four thousand in cash and negotiable bonds and twelve thousand in securities.

All that money would be enough, thought Lulu. Good heavens! Imagine it—wanting money real bad, and going out and getting it,
just like that
. Imagine having a story like that to tell about yourself (whether you kept it to yourself or not.)
So I took out the gun and said all right, let’s have them there securities
. He didn’t quite know what securities were, but they sounded like fine things to have twelve thousand dollars invested in. Anyone with enough spunk to do a thing like that could make up for a good many years of sinlessness.

He wouldn’t have to wait around for years counting every penny until he had enough money set aside to pick up an actress. (Much of Lulu’s radio listening was in mid-afternoon, and the disruptive elements in the lives of decent people in the serials was very frequently an actress.) Matter of fact, if you could steal like that, you wouldn’t even need the actress. The stealing would be sin enough.
All right, you, let’s have those negotiable bonds
. He didn’t know what bonds were either. And he didn’t have a gun.

Suddenly his hands stopped moving and he looked down at them and the long curl of potato skin depending from the paring-knife, and he said aloud, “I do so know what bonds are and I don’t even need a gun.”

At half past two on Thursday afternoon he was standing timidly at the edge of a wide expanse of polished marble inside the First National Bank. He no longer carried the folder next to his skin, with his undershirt and outer shirt tucked over it. (Ivy had said, as he left, “Lulu, I do believe you’re putting on more weight.”) He had secured one of the hospital’s big manila envelopes and crammed the bonds into it. The envelope was wet now where his hand grasped it. He peered all around and just didn’t know what to do.

A man in a policeman’s uniform—but grey instead of blue—crossed over to where Lulu was standing. He had a gun. “Can I help you, sir?” he asked.

Lulu swallowed heavily and tried to say, “I got some bonds.” But no sound came out. He coughed and tried again.

“You want to talk to somebody about some securities,” the guard almost miraculously divined.

Lulu managed to nod. The guard smiled and said, “All right, sir. Just step this way.”

Lulu followed the guard to a low shiny wall with a mahogany gate that swung open both ways. Beyond the gate was an area containing a half-dozen desks and a half-dozen chairs, all very far apart like small islands in a big river. The guard pointed at one of the chairs beside one of the desks.

“Just sit down there, sir. Mr. Skerry will take care of you in a moment.”

The guard turned away.

Lulu sidled through the gate, wondering with mounting alarm what “take care of” might lead to, and sat down on the edge of the chair with the envelope on his lap. The man behind the desk was huge. He had snow-white hair and ice-blue eyes and nobody in the world could have had a collar that clean. He finished doing something with a ruled card on the desk and then hit the card hard with a rubber stamp. Then he looked at Lulu, who shrank under the impact of a truly frightening smile. The man asked, “What can I do for you?”

“Uh,” said Lulu. He dropped his eyes, saw the envelope, and remembered the bonds. He gave the envelope to the oversized Mr. Skerry.

Mr. Skerry looked at him almost accusingly before he took out the bonds, and after he took out the bonds, and a third time after he had riffled through the stack, and that final scrutiny was the worst. He said, “What are these?”

“Well,” said Lulu. “Bonds.”

“Hmm, I see.”

Mr. Skerry took a glass-case out of his waistcoat and opened it with a snap and took out a pair of glasses and put them on. They hung to his face by biting the bridge of his nose with little gold lips. Lulu was fascinated. Mr. Skerry bent his iceberg of a head and looked at Lulu between the tops of the lenses and a frown. “Are these bonds yours?”

“Oh yes,” said Lulu.

“Hmph,” said Mr. Skerry to the bonds. He lifted them a little and let them fall to the desk and looked at the stack again.

“What I wanted,” said Lulu timidly, “is the money.”

“Oh?” said Mr. Skerry.

The phrase from the radio bulletin came to Lulu, and he pointed his finger. “They’re
negotiable
bonds,” he said, his voice quavering a little.

“Oh yes, they certainly are, Mr. Er-ump.”

“Llewellyn,” Lulu supplied.

“Llewellyn. Of course, naturally. Excuse me.” Mr. Skerry picked up a yellow sheet with some very black typing on it, made three quick motions with his finger on the telephone dial, and said into the instrument, “I’ve got BW listing No. three seventy-eight. Is that the latest? You’re sure, now? Very well.” He hung up, and studied the yellow sheet, and then put it down beside the bonds and began methodically to go through them, comparing numbers on the bonds with numbers on the list. “Well,” he said after a while, “that part’s all right, anyway.”

He picked up the yellow sheet again and waved it at Lulu and smiled. Over the smile his eyes were precision-aimed—as ready as a pair of steel drills. “This is the latest list of stolen bonds,” he said. “We always know.”