Varieties of Disturbance (6 page)

Addendum

Of interest, for comparison, may be a letter in Stephen's own handwriting, on an unlined page, written after he returned home, in which he thanks a former teacher for a gift evidently received during his convalescence. His letter is a rough draft, including one misspelling and one usage error, and lacking certain punctuation marks, and may closely resemble the rough drafts of his classmates' letters, if such existed. It is dated “Feb. 20 1951” and reads: “Dear Miss R., Thank you for the book. I am out of the hospital and I dont have to wear krutchs anymore Love Stephen.”

She didn't know if it was him or the dog. It wasn't her. The dog was lying there on the living room rug between them, she was on the sofa, and her visitor, rather tense, was sunk deep in a low armchair, and the smell, rather gentle, came into the air. She thought at first that it was him and she was surprised, because people don't pass wind in company very often, or at least not in a noticeable way. As they went on talking, she went on thinking it was him. She felt a little sorry for him, because she thought he was embarrassed and nervous to be with her and that was why he had passed wind. Then it occurred to her very suddenly that it might not have been him at all, it might have been the dog, and worse, if it had been the dog, he might think it had been her. It was true that the dog had stolen an entire loaf of bread that morning, and eaten it, and might now be passing wind, something he did not do otherwise. She wanted immediately to let him know, somehow, that at least it was not her. Of course there was a chance that he had not noticed, but he was smart and alert, and since she had noticed, he probably had, too, unless he was too nervous to have noticed. The problem was how to tell him.

She could say something about the dog, to excuse it. But it might not have been the dog, it might have been him. She could not be direct and simply say, “Look, if you just farted, that's all right; I just want to be clear that it wasn't me.” She could say, “The dog ate a whole loaf of bread this morning, and I think he's farting.” But if it was him, and not the dog, this would embarrass him. Although maybe it wouldn't. Maybe he was already embarrassed, if it was him, and this would give him a way out of his embarrassment. But by now the smell was long gone. Maybe the dog would fart again, if it was the dog. That was the only thing she could think of—the dog would fart again, if it was the dog, and then she would simply apologize for the dog, whether or not it was the dog, and that would relieve him of his embarrassment, if it was him.

1.

We have all these favorite shows coming on every evening. They say it will be exciting and it always is.

They give us hints of what is to come and then it comes and it is exciting.

If dead people walked outside our windows we would be no more excited.

We want to be part of it all.

We want to be the people they talk to when they tell what is to come later in the evening and later in the week.

We listen to the ads until we are exhausted, punished with lists: they want us to buy so much, and we try, but we don't have a lot of money. Yet we can't help admiring the science of it all.

How can we ever be as sure as these people are sure? These women are women in control, as the women in my family are not.

Yet we believe in this world.

We believe these people are speaking to us.

 

Mother, for example, is in love with an anchorman. And my husband sits with his eyes on a certain young reporter and waits for the camera to draw back and reveal her breasts.

After the news we pick out a quiz show to watch and then a story of detective investigation.

The hours pass. Our hearts go on beating, now slow, now faster.

There is one quiz show which is particularly good. Each week the same man is there in the audience with his mouth tightly closed and tears in his eyes. His son is coming back on stage to answer more questions. The boy stands there blinking at the television camera. They will not let him go on answering questions if he wins the final sum of a hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars. We don't care much about the boy and we don't like the mother, who smiles and shows her bad teeth, but we are moved by the father: his heavy lips, his wet eyes.

And so we turn off the telephone during this program and do not answer the knock at the door that rarely comes. We watch closely, and my husband now presses his lips together and then smiles so broadly that his eyes disappear, and as for me, I sit back like the mother with a sharp gaze, my mouth full of gold.

2.

It's not that I really think this show about Hawaiian policemen is very good, it's just that it seems more real than my own life.

 

Different routes through the evening: Channels 2, 2, 4, 7, 9, or channels 13, 13, 13, 2, 2, 4, etc. Sometimes it's the police dramas I want to see, other times the public television documentaries, such as one called
Swamp Critturs
.

 

It's partly my isolation at night, the darkness outside, the silence outside, the increasing lateness of the hour, that makes the story on television seem so interesting. But the plot, too, has something to do with it: tonight a son comes back after many years and marries his father's wife. (She is not his mother.)

 

We pay a good deal of attention because these shows seem to be the work of so many smart and fashionable people.

 

I think it is a television sound beyond the wall, but it's the honking of wild geese flying south in the first dark of the evening.

 

You watch a young woman named Susan Smith with pearls around her neck sing the Canadian National Anthem before a hockey game. You listen to the end of the song, then you change the channel.

Or you watch Pete Seeger's legs bounce up and down in time to his
Reuben E. Lee
song, then change the channel.

 

It is not what you want to be doing. It is that you are passing the time.

You are waiting until it is a certain hour and you are in a certain condition so that you can go to sleep.

 

There is some real satisfaction in getting this information about the next day's weather—how fast the wind might blow and from what direction, when the rain might come, when the skies might clear—and the exact science of it is indicated by the words “40 percent” in “40 percent chance.”

 

It all begins with the blue dot in the center of the dark screen, and this is when you can sense that these pictures will be coming to you from a long way off.

3.

Often, at the end of the day, when I am tired, my life seems to turn into a movie. I mean my real day moves into my real evening, but also moves away from me enough to be strange and a movie. It has by then become so complicated, so hard to understand, that I want to watch a different movie. I want to watch a movie made for TV, which will be simple and easy to understand, even if it involves disaster or disability or disease. It will skip over so much, it will skip over all the complications, knowing we will understand, so that major events will happen abruptly: a man may change his mind though it was firmly made up, and he may also fall in love suddenly. It will skip all the complications because there is not enough time to prepare for major events in the space of only one hour and twenty minutes, which also has to include commercial breaks, and we want major events.

One movie was about a woman professor with Alzheimer's disease; one was about an Olympic skier who lost a leg but learned to ski again. Tonight it was about a deaf man who fell in love with his speech therapist, as I knew he would because she was pretty, though not a good actress, and he was handsome, though deaf. He was deaf at the beginning of the movie and deaf again at the end, while in the middle he heard and learned to speak with a definite regional accent. In the space of one hour and twenty minutes, this man not only heard and fell deaf again but created a successful business through his own talent, was robbed of it through a company man's treachery, fell in love, kept his woman as far as the end of the movie, and lost his virginity, which seemed to be hard to lose if one was deaf and easier once one could hear.

All this was compressed into the very end of a day in my life that as the evening advanced had already moved away from me…

Mother could not find her cane. She had a cane, but she could not find her special cane. Her special cane had a handle that was the head of a dog. Then she remembered: Jane had her cane. Jane had come to visit. Jane had needed a cane to get back home. That was two years ago. Mother called Jane. She told Jane she needed her cane. Jane came with a cane. When Jane came, Mother was tired. She was in bed. She did not look at the cane. Jane went back home. Mother got out of bed. She looked at the cane. She saw that it was not the same cane. It was a plain cane. She called Jane and told her: it was not the same cane. But Jane was tired. She was too tired to talk. She was going to bed. The next morning she came with the cane. Mother got out of bed. She looked at the cane. It was the right cane. It had the head of a dog on it, brown and white. Jane went home with the other cane, the plain cane. After Jane was gone, Mother complained, she complained on the phone: Why did Jane not bring back the cane? Why did Jane bring the wrong cane? Mother was tired. Oh, Mother was so tired of Jane and the cane.

If your eyeballs move, this means that you're thinking, or about to start thinking.

If you don't want to be thinking at this particular moment, try to keep your eyeballs still.

The cat is crying at the window. It wants to come in. You think about how living with a cat and the demands of a cat make you think about simple things, like a cat's need to come indoors, and how good that is. You think about this and you are too busy thinking about this to let the cat in, so you forget to let the cat in, and it is still at the window crying. You see that you haven't let the cat in, and you think about how odd it is that while you were thinking about the cat's needs and how good it is to live with the simple needs of a cat, you were not letting the cat in but letting it go on crying at the window. Then while you're thinking about this and how odd it is, you let the cat in without knowing you're letting the cat in. Now the cat jumps up on the counter and cries for food. You see that the cat is crying for food but you don't think of feeding it because you are thinking how odd it is that you have let the cat in without knowing it. Then you see that it's crying for food while you're not feeding it, and as you see this and think it's odd that you have not heard it cry, you feed the cat without knowing that you're feeding it.

Sun in eyes, faces east, waits for van bound for south meeting plane from west. Carries book,
Worstward Ho
.
^*

In van, heading south, sits on right or west side, sun in through windows from east. Highway crosses and recrosses meandering stream passing now northeast and now northwest under. Reads
Worstward Ho
: On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.
^†

Road turning and van turning east and then north of east, sun in eyes, stops reading
Worstward Ho
.
^*

Road turning and van turning east again and south, shadow on page, reads: As now by way of somehow on where in the nowhere all together?
^†

Road and van turning briefly north, sun at right shoulder, light not in eyes but flickering on page of
Worstward Ho
, reads: What when words gone? None for what then.
^‡

Van turning off highway, sun behind, sun around and in window and onto page, does not read.

Van pointing east motionless in station, in shadow of tree, reads: But say by way of somehow on somehow with sight to do.
^*

Van pointing south and moving, reads: So leastness on.

Van turning off highway, sun behind, sun around and in window and onto page, does not read.

Van pointing east then north of east motionless, in treeless station not in shadow, sun in face, does not read.
^†

Van turning, sun ahead, sun around and in opposite window, shadow on page, van pointing south and moving, reads: Longing the so-said mind long lost to longing. Dint of long longing lost to longing. Said is missaid. Whenever said said said missaid.
^‡

Van turning off highway, sun behind, sun around and in window and onto page, does not read.
^*

Van turning last time back onto highway, sun ahead, sun around and in opposite window, shadow on page, reads: No once. No once in pastless now.

Van turning last time off highway, sun ahead, sun around and in window, does not read.
^†

Van farthest south motionless in shadow, pointing north, reads last words: Said nohow on.
^‡

A translator and a critic happened to be together in the great university town of Oxford, having been invited to take part in a conference on translation. The conference occupied all of one Saturday, and that evening they had dinner alone together, though not entirely by choice. Everyone else who had participated in the conference or attended it had departed, even the organizers. Only they had chosen to stay a second night in the rooms provided for them in the college in which the conference had taken place, a down-at-heels building with stained carpets in the hallways, a smell of mildew in the guest rooms, and creaking iron bedsteads.

The restaurant was light and airy, entirely enclosed in glass like a greenhouse. The meal was good and most of the time their conversation was lively. She asked him many questions and he talked a good deal about himself. She knew something about him, since they had corresponded now and then over the years—she had asked his help on one or two points; he had admired an essay of hers; she had praised a reminiscence of his; he had courteously included an excerpt from her latest translation in an anthology. He had a certain almost obsequious charm. He liked talking about himself, and did not ask many questions of her. She noticed the imbalance but did not mind. There was some goodwill between them, though also an underlying tension because of his negative reaction to her translation.

He felt that she kept too close to the original text. He preferred the studied cadences of an earlier version and had said so in person and in print. She felt that he admired lyricism and empty rhetorical flourishes at the expense of accuracy and faithfulness to the style of the original, which was far plainer and clearer, she said, than the flowery and obfuscating earlier version. During the conference, she had given a formal presentation of her approach and he had said nothing in response, though from her lectern she could see by the expression on his face, half amused and half scornful, and by the occasional wince, as he shifted in his seat, that his feelings were strong. For his own presentation he had chosen to discuss the language of translation criticism, including his own, mischievously—or malevolently—taking as his examples the reviews of the translations of the participants in this conference. He had caused almost all of them discomfort and embarrassment, and stung their pride, for only one of them had received no bad reviews.

When they had finished their dinner, it was still light out, since the summer solstice was only a few days away. As the sky would be light for several more hours and they had been shut up in the conference room all day, suffering some tedium at various points and some tension at others, much of it caused by him, and as they were, to some extent, anyway, enjoying each other's company, they agreed that a walk would be pleasant.

The college where the conference had been held, and the restaurant, which was near it, were a good ten minutes on foot from the center of town, and their plan was to walk into town, stroll up and down the streets a bit, and then walk back out. He had not been there for many years and was curious to see it again. She had explored it on her own for the first time when she arrived the day before, but not very thoroughly or satisfactorily, since it had been crowded with tourists and too hot under the midday sun to be comfortable. She had taken the circular tour bus twice, or rather, she had made two full circuits and one half circuit, going down the main street twice, past the botanical gardens twice, to the outlying colleges twice and in again, and out to the outlying colleges one more time in order to return to where she was staying, and so she was more familiar with the town than he was. By tacit agreement she became the guide. They both felt like the colonials they were, in the mother country, she with one accent displeasing to native ears and he with another that they would not have been able to place.

They talked steadily as they walked into town, still mostly about him, his academic position, his students, his children and how he was bringing them up, and his wife, whom he missed. He and his wife had attempted a separation, but after some weeks she had returned to him. He had, during those weeks, he said, sunk into despair. When there were two of you, you decided so many little things together, such as which room to sit in with your morning coffee. When you were alone, he said, it was so miserably difficult to make those little choices.

The streets were relatively empty, though it was a Saturday night. There were not many tourists, only a few families and couples. The pavements were clear, as though they had been swept clean of the crowds. Now and then, undergraduates in formal evening dress rushed past in a cluster or singly, on the way to a university function. He and she had the curious sense that the town was full of people, but that the people were all attending events behind closed doors and out of sight. The streets were theirs for the moment. The sun hovered low in the sky, hanging above the horizon, descending so slowly that its descent was barely perceptible, and bathing the yellow stones of the old buildings in a honey-colored light. The sky above the rooftops was vast, a pale painted blue.

At the end of a long pedestrian street paved in cobblestones, they heard a full chorus of voices traveling out on the quiet evening air. The concert was taking place in a circular, rose-colored hall. They climbed the steps to a side entrance, thinking they might slip in for the remainder of the concert. He, a cosseted youngest child, was not one to obey regulations, and although she felt in this hour somewhat like a kindly aunt indulging him and his outrageous statements, she was by habit no more law-abiding than he was. Especially here, in the mother country, feeling they were less proper than the native citizens, they would be tempted to behave less properly.

But blocking the entryway were two middle-aged, heavyset women in long skirts and stout-heeled shoes chatting and laughing together, one of whom turned to them and told them civilly but firmly that they could not enter. He and she stood still for some time next to the women, enjoying the rising and falling song while they gazed down into what had been the heart of the original university, a small, centuries-old courtyard fronted by the modest façade of the first university library.

Each of the short neighboring streets, as they continued their walk, offered the surprise of another old college, often with its own gate and spiked fence and courtyard, or some tracery or corbel or bell tower to be admired. Sometimes they both wanted to go up the same street, sometimes only one of them, when the other politely went along. She found it an interesting exercise to explore a place with a person she did not know well, following not only her own impulses but also his.

Since they had both been married for many years, strolling together like this had some of the comfortable familiarity of long habit, yet it also had some of the awkwardness of a first date, since, after all, they did not really know each other very well. He was a small man, and delicate in his motions and gestures. She took care not to walk too close to him, and thought from his slight unsteadiness now and then that he was probably taking the same care to keep a certain distance from her.

When more than an hour had passed, they decided to return to their college. Now she volunteered to lead them by a different way, for the interest of it, along a street that ran parallel to the one they had come in on and would then connect to it near their destination. She did not explain all this to him, but simply assured him that the street they were about to enter would take them back to their college. He entrusted himself to her and paid little attention to where they were going, as he continued to talk.

He spoke emphatically, using strong adverbs, often expressing indignation, and admitting that some of his opinions were, as he put it, virally jaundiced: Certain things, according to him, were flagrantly obvious, or embarrassingly inaccurate, or patently ridiculous; others, of course, were magnificent, delightful, or entrancing. Condemning a certain publishing house, he remarked—although he was not old enough to have experienced the Second World War—that in its front line, incompetence and dishonesty pullulated like trench lice among infantrymen, and that the upper-level administrators should be taken out of the trenches every so often and given something restfully self-restoring to do, like sewing pages. She was content to listen, and several times thought how perfectly suitable was this conclusion—her own relative passivity, and the mild physical exertion—to the long, trying day.

Much of the street was familiar to her from passing it three times before, when the circular tour had headed out of town, but she became a little worried ten minutes into their walk back, when she was not sure which left turn to make. After all, things had flown by relatively quickly out the window of the bus. He questioned her mildly twice and she admitted her uncertainty the second time. But when they took what turned out to be the correct left turn and correctly rejoined their original road nearly opposite the restaurant where they had had dinner, and she was enjoying a feeling of satisfaction, he did not notice where they were, and simply walked on by her side, across the street from the restaurant, until she pointed it out to him. Then he was truly astonished, as though he had imagined they were far away from that corner and she had produced it out of her jacket pocket.

Now she thought he would recognize a parallel with a scene in the book she had translated, but he did not; she thought perhaps he was too occupied with reorienting himself. In the version he preferred, the passage read:

Since he had not noticed, she intended to mention it soon, but was at the moment more interested in pointing out to him a house they were about to pass. It had once been the home of Charles Murray, the great editor of
The Oxford English Dictionary.

When she had arrived in this town the day before, her strongest desire had been to see, not the more famous sights, but the house in which this editor had lived while doing the better part of his work, a personal account of which she had read by his granddaughter. She had taken pains to ask each person she met if he or she knew where this house might be. No one had been able to tell her, and as she ran out of time, she had given up the idea of finding it. Then, at the end of her day of touring, just as the tour bus had reached her street for the third time and stopped to let her off by the porter's lodge of the college, the guide had said something about this same editor and his house. She was already climbing down the steps and half off the bus when she heard it, and could not question the guide further. She could not believe the house was right here, in this neighborhood where she was staying, and the next day she continued to ask each person she met where the house might be.

After she had given her talk at the conference, she was approached by a short, stout man with a preoccupied, almost angry expression who concentrated his attention on her alone, ignoring everyone around them, and asked several pertinent questions and made several concise remarks about her talk. He was modest enough not to identify himself, and when she asked him who he was, he said he had just retired as librarian of this college and would be pleased, in fact, to give her a tour of the library. Since he seemed to be a highly competent person with many facts at his disposal, she thought to ask him the question she had been asking everyone else since the day before. The librarian said that of course he knew the house—it was right across the street. And he immediately led her out to the corner and pointed. There it was, its upper story and roof showing above its brick wall, as though the librarian had taken it from his jacket pocket and set it there just to please her.

The situation was not exactly the same, of course, since the librarian had not magically brought her home but had instead produced the very house she had been looking for. But now she told the story to the critic, with whom she felt a closer companionship after walking so far with him and bringing him safely back. She thought that now he would recognize the situation, and think of their walk and the passage from the book he knew so well.

In her version, the scene read: