Roger's Version (7 page)

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. “Gilligan’s Island” had momentarily yielded to a commercial. For catfood. A handsome, caramel-colored cat, an actor-cat wearing a bow tie, was shown snubbing raw steak and fresh fish and then greedily burying its face up to its throat muff in a dish of gray-brown pellets. Pavarotti in the distance was reaching toward one of the higher shelves of canned emotion. The ceiling above our heads, in our old-fashioned, servant-oriented kitchen, showed cracks and a worrisome yellowness, as if pipes under the second floor were slowly leaking ectoplasm. Through our big kitchen “picture” window—an improvement inflicted in the Fifties—I could see across our yard and fence into the dining room of our neighbors, the Kriegmans. Myron teaches bacteriology at the medical school and Sue writes children’s books, and their three teen-age daughters are lovely in triplicate. Their five heads were arrayed in the light of the Tiffany lamp over their dining table and I could even see Myron’s mouth moving—his low-slung face, his thick hunched shoulders, the choppy gestures of the hand not holding the fork—and the haloed coiffures of his women rhythmically nodding as if in a subdued rapture of agreement and adoration. Myron and I often meet at parties; he is an avid small-talker, “up” on everything and bored by nothing, except possibly his own specialty. Though we have exchanged thousands of words and spent hours pressed together with watery whiskies in one hand and slippery hors d’oeuvres in the other, he has never told me anything about the one subject, bacteria, where he might be truly informative; nor has he ever elicited from me any information on Christian heresies.

In contrast with the sour, quarrelsome atmosphere and deteriorating ceiling of our own kitchen, how happy the Kriegmans appeared in their dining alcove, their multicolored lamp just barely illumining the shadowy walls, which they,
like most academic families, have strewn with clumps of eclectic objects—African masks and drums, Carpathian shepherds’ horns, Ethiopian crosses, Soviet balalaikas—displayed as evidence of foreign travel, like the mounted heads of kudus or leopards for another social class, in another time and empire. I envied the Kriegmans their visible bliss, their absolutely snug occupancy of their ecological niche, which came equipped with a tenant couple on the third floor, as a tax break and hedge against burglary, with a summer home on a suitably underdeveloped small Maine island, and with uproariously unsuitable suitors for the daughters—such wastrel, drop-out boy friends (some of whom became husbands) being, I suppose, at our level of conspicuous consumption what yachts and summer “cottages” were to Veblen’s rich. Esther and I, with our second marriage and single child and my relatively shabby job in the backwater of the Divinity School, didn’t fill our niche as snugly as the Kriegmans did theirs, and we didn’t even, unfashionably, put ourselves to the trouble of creating a third-floor apartment, preferring to use these old servant rooms as a storage attic and as Esther’s studio, when one of her ever less frequent painting fits was upon her. In our decade here she had done rather lurid, abstractified views of the rooftops from all of the third-floor windows, in all of the directions of the compass, and thus used up her world. Her painting style had become over the years increasingly violent—great gumboish sweeps of the brush and palette knife, with dribbles of turpentine and unlucky houseflies accepted into the texture. Sue Kriegman’s children’s books, oddly, portrayed families in disarray: sundered by divorce, beset by financial emergency, or comically swept up in a frenetic untidiness, of too many cats and furniture spilling its stuffing, quite unfamiliar to those of
us who visited her impeccably kept home—one street over, though its windows looked into ours.

“So why don’t you?” Esther was asking, still looking to release her tension, to cap the outrage of her boring day, with a fight. For the past few years, beginning as a volunteer and graduating to underpaid assistant, she has been working at a day-care center in another part of the city, four days a week; but this activity only seems to exacerbate her sense of useless vitality, of her life’s being wasted.

“Why don’t I what? I was spying on the Kriegmans, envying them their happiness.”

“That’s the way we look to them, too. Don’t worry about it. All families look great through windows.”

“Cora Kriegman’s a slut,” Richie volunteered.

“What’s a slut?” I asked him.

“Come on, Dad. You know.” He took refuge back in “Gilligan’s Island,” where some kind of reconciliation seemed to be in progress, a mass embracing beneath the stage-set palms. The Pacific sunshine, made of studio lights, cast no shadows.

“Have him to tea,” Esther clarified, “with your niece.”

“Why should I have this creepy computer whiz to my own blessed home? I’ll cope with him in my office, along with the other dirty work.”

“It doesn’t seem to me you
did
cope, though. You’re acting very annoyed and upset.”

“I am not.”

“His ideas sound more amusing than you seem willing to admit, for some reason.”

“I resent your poking at me about him. I also resent the way
he
poked me about Verna. He seemed to think I should be doing more for her than I am.”

“Maybe you should. Don’t you think it’s unnatural, here
she’s been over a year in town and you haven’t once called her up?”

“Edna told me not to. Over the phone. She said the girl had disgraced herself and her family, including me. Including you and Richie, for that matter. Including the Kriegmans and Mrs. Ellicott, you could almost say.”

“Don’t rave, Rog. You don’t care what Edna told you. You’ve never been crazy about Edna.”

“I can’t stand her, to be precise. She was messy and shallow and bossy. And I’m sure her daughter would be the same.”

“What a mean spirit I’m married to,” Esther said. Her green, hyperthyroid eyes had been tipped into glassiness by her last sip of wine. One whole side of her hairdo had collapsed and was falling loopily to her shoulders. “What a cold, play-it-safe bastard.”

I told her quickly, as one cuts short a student who is garrulously bluffing, “My dear, you’ve been looking ever since I came home for an excuse to attack me and I don’t think you’ve quite found it yet. I am not my niece’s keeper. When on earth is dinner?”

Richie, indignant at our quarrel—children take our friendly adult give-and-take all too seriously—punched off the television and said upward, “Yeah, Mom. When’s dinner? I’m
starv
ing.”

Simultaneously, Pavarotti, in the far-off living room, had exhausted his string of sob stories and automatically clicked off.

For fourteen years we’ve had the same cheap white timer, a wedding present given to us by an old lady in my former parish who didn’t seem to realize that I had disgraced myself into an outer darkness beyond all such homey things. The device had a docile little long-nosed clockface you twisted to the required
minutes; when the minutes were up, it gave out its flat, furious peal. Looking like one of Shakespeare’s slim transvestites, a bosomless boy in an unravelling gingery-red wig, Esther bowed toward the timer as toward a fellow actor. Dramatically extending one hand, palm up, she announced to her audience of two, “
Voilà. Le meatloof
.”

“
O mia cara
,” I said, thinking,
Más, más
. I love meatloaf; it’s easy to chew.

Her wrist, thrust from her loose sweater, looked thin as a dog’s foreleg. The faintly desperate impudence of this her burlesque of the housewife’s role triggered in me that old enchantment, that fourteen-year-old sense of the space in her vicinity being sacred, charged with electrons agitating to one’s own. Cathexis is, as Freud repeatedly says (where?), never lost, just mislaid, like a one-armed doll lodged among worn, rolled-up carpets and empty picture frames in the attic.

iii

Then a few days later I found myself walking in the steps of Dale Kohler as I imagined them, the afternoon he left my office. The trees held a few leaves less but the weather was otherwise similar, in-and-out, the blue-bottomed clouds twisting and fragmenting as they sailed their sea of air, the American flags shining in the sunny intervals. My route passed fire stations, schools, and other buildings where the public services of the commonwealth and the nation were distributed. I had looked up Verna Ekelof in the phone book, and was somehow astonished to find her there, to see that a girl with so few resources and little reason to be in our city had been allowed to procure a telephone.

Our city, it should be explained, is two cities, or more—an urban mass or congeries divided by the river whose dirty waters disembogue into the harbor that gave the colonial settlement its
raison d’être
. From the time when villages clustered here and there in the land, which the Indians had already partially cleared, there grew up municipalities each with its own city hall and power-jealous boards of administrators; but automobiles and their highways in this century have welded the whole area into one. We skim past boundary signs too quickly to read them. Bridges, some of painted steel, some of arched stone, connect the river’s two sides. Lifted up suddenly out of a subway tunnel on one of the bridges—an old bridge, say, of sandstone hacked into big rough blocks and set there as if by a race of Titans, with buttresses and quaint conical towers and floriate lamp standards—the metropolitan transit passengers wince at the splendor of the sudden view, of the hotels and emporia of glass and anodized metal which glitter at the city’s commercial center, of the roseate and powder-blue skyscrapers of the financial district that hover above the brick silhouette of the old residential neighborhoods built on rubble-filled marsh a century ago, of the recently condominiumized warehouses and deserted churches, of the ribbon of Olmstead park along the riverbank and the bandshell and planetarium and the rented sailboats tilting on the river’s sparkling plane, all these man-created wonders thrown into brilliant visibility by the impassive slant of our local star, the sun.

The university is situated on the duller, shabbier side of the river. Having walked a few blocks from the Divinity School, through the shady enclave of tall turn-of-the-century houses each of which, including mine, has doubled in value several times in the last decade, I came to the avenue called Sumner Boulevard in honor of that fanatic Yankee abolitionist now
best remembered for having been beaten on his bald head by an equally self-righteous, if oppositely persuaded, Congressman; this unlovely broad way marks the end of university precincts. A big young man in a dirty loden coat, with a wide head of uncut curly sawdust-colored hair and a Mormon-style beard that left the area around his mouth clean of whiskers, stood stock still, as if signalling a boundary; he could have been an aging divinity student, or a TV repairman waiting for his partner to park the van or a madman about to strangle me in order to silence the voices in his head. Just the way this ambiguous stout fellow stood, unbudging in the center of the sidewalk, introduced a touch of menace to the neighborhood.

Sumner Boulevard stretched straight a mile, heading diagonally toward the river. A supermarket had boarded up the lower portions of its plate-glass windows, making it harder to break them. A drugstore advertised itself with a dead neon sign. Vinyl siding replaced honest clapboard; the houses took on that teetering three-decker look. Malvin Lane’s lush back-yard beeches and oaks gave way to tougher city trees, scabby-barked sycamores and primeval ginkgos spaced as evenly along the sidewalk as telephone poles; instead of plump plastic pillows of raked leaves nicely set out by the picket fences for the trash collector, here dog-torn bags of garbage and stacks of flattened cartons were heaped up along the curb. There were no more Volvos and Hondas, just Chevies and Plymouths and Mercurys, rusted and nicked, Detroit’s old big boats being kept afloat by the poor. Trans Am. Gran Torino. Sunoco. Amoco. Colonial Cleansers. Boulevard Bottle. Professional Podiatry. A triangular intersection was marked with the Italian name of a soldier killed in Vietnam. Imitation stone, oddly painterly in its mixture of artificial tints, wrapped around the little windows of a corner grocery
store. On the asphalt of a gasoline station a puddle of an astonishingly pure green color meant that here a car had been bled of antifreeze; but I sensed that to Dale such utter viridity would have been a marvel, a signifier of another sort, a sign from above. To a believer of his elemental sort glory would have been in the air: the very width of this crass commercial avenue, and some lots where buildings had been torn down, flooded the eyes with light. Above the many intervening flat roofs and weathered chimney pots, against the backdrop of tormented clouds, the silver and emerald hems stitched at the tops of skyscrapers gleamed, marking the city’s steely heart across the river.

A plumbing-supply store, advertising not Kohler but Crane fixtures, held in its dusty window a tree of toilet seats, padded or plain, white or pastel, and the lowest of them showing a pattern of nude Japanese women, drawn, disappointingly, without pubic hair or nipples. As the avenue gradually slanted downward toward the river, its tone worsened, its liveliness increased. Kung-Fu. Locks: Master Protection. Santo Cristo Center. Todo Para Casa. The Irish and Italians in this section had been supplanted by Portuguese and Hispanics, who now were yielding to Vietnamese, who were taking over the little food marts and had opened up several restaurants offering their spicy, insinuating cuisine. The Vietnamese women were no bigger than children, and the men had unlikable squarish heads on slender necks, and snaky wisps of mustache growing out above the corners of their mouths, and black hair of a dullness not quite Chinese or Japanese or Indian. We had dabbled overseas and in extracting ourselves had pulled up these immigrants like paint on a stirring stick. There was something about them distasteful and erotic, these remnants of an old adventure, yet something grand also in the global
mixingness, the living anthropology of so many tints of skin jostling here, on this tough thoroughfare, the world’s people partaking of and amplifying the energy of our American shopfronts and tenements, our cinder yards and body shops. Here came a couple, unmarried no doubt but indubitably matched: a tall pale black man and a Latino girl friend almost his coffee color, exactly his height, both of them in tight long-legged jeans and short black leather jackets, both with hair teased into tall oiled crests and wearing tiny earrings, kicking along in stride, one, two, arms locked, a stirring sight. Election Day was at hand and red-white-and-blue stickers were everywhere, on mailboxes and car bumpers and the plywood sheets closing off abandoned doorways and shattered windows. An old lady was trundling along a supermarket cart loaded with what seemed to be her possessions, including an ivory plastic radio; with her pink face and blue crocheted cap and raw white sneakers, she seemed a huge baby, toddling along. I was taking this walk in the steps of another and I felt his spirit invading mine, that greedy blind bliss of youth, when the world appears to be arranged by our impulses and full of convenient omens, of encouraging signs. A gaunt drunk in a Russian-style cap with fur earflaps muttered resentfully as I went by, at the alien innocence in my face and the blunt joy younger than my years.