Searches & Seizures (45 page)

Anyway, I didn’t mean to burden you with all this detail. The point is that I don’t want you to spend your money on telegrams. We’re neighbors. As you say in your telegram, we live a few doors down the hall from each other. Actually, it made me very upset to see that wire. My hands shook so when it was delivered that I couldn’t even open it. I thought something had happened to Jerry. We’re estranged, but the man is still my husband. When you’ve lived with someone for almost twenty years you don’t forget him just like that. Also—I’ll be very candid—there was something too
importunate
about sending me that wire. What would have been perfectly acceptable in a letter seemed, frankly, “overzealous”—this is the best word I can think of—set down in a telegram. (Perhaps this is what McLuhan means when he says that “the medium is the message.”) Maybe I share some of the responsibility for this. I think I’ve left you with certain faulty impressions, and I really believe I ought to undo these if we are to become friends. We simply have to set out on a footing of mutual understanding and respect. It’s no accident that my first reaction, my
instinctive
reaction, to your wire (after I saw that it was not bad news about Jerry), had to do with the importunity I have already spoken of.

If you will forgive my opening up a subject which I know must be a very sore one with you—if you will permit me, this is, to probe areas which your normal filial affections and recent harrowing loss must certainly have left tender—I will be even franker. Perhaps you are wondering why I say my “instinctive” reaction…

Yes. He
was
wondering that. That’s what he was wondering. Then it was normal to so wonder. Then how was he mad? He wiped the tears from his eyes. When would they stop? He has lost a pound of tears so far. When would he begin to weep blood, when vision itself, weeping light till none was left to weep, then weeping dimness, then darkness? Then what? Calcium, marrow, all the chemicals of his body, all the juices of his glands. Then how was one mad who could parse sequence like a scholar at the blackboard? Weeping hair, skin, bone, gut, shit, nails and all, weeping his life and, when there was no more left, weeping death and even time.

…and here I will have to make certain “confessions” which I have not offered earlier—out of fear and jealousy and my own sense, however misguided, of protecting you, I suppose.

Yes. Protect me, he thought, weeping.

I never lost your father’s key, and it is not altogether true that I never used it. I did use it—
once
—the night of Dad’s death. Phil had begun to call me on the telephone at all hours. Sometimes my daughter would answer. She knew his voice, though he was so nervous about what he considered our “relationship” that if I wasn’t home he would try to disguise it or pretend that he’d gotten a wrong number, representing himself to her as a merchant or salesman or some such nonsense. But Sheila is no dummy. She knew his voice and began to suspect things between us that simply weren’t true, a relationship as fictitious as Phil’s voices. He made her very uncomfortable, and I warned him that if this continued I would have to seek other outlets. It wasn’t the neighbors I cared about—I had weathered their gossip and scorn when Jerry left me—but my daughter’s opinions did matter. That was
all.
The mother of a child from a broken home taking up with a man almost old enough to be her grandfather! That wasn’t the case, it was never the case, but from the peculiar ways Phil behaved she had, I suppose, every reason to suspect it was. I told him in letters that his behavior must change. (Letters I did not read to you that day.) But despite my entreaties it didn’t. He tried openly to hold my hand at the swimming pool. If I went into the water Phil went in too, cavorting, swimming between my legs, coming up behind me and diving down and raising me to his shoulders, touching me beneath the water where he thought it would not be noticed, challenging me to races and giving me headstarts so that he could catch up to me and make rough body contact, dunking me, pulling off my bathing cap and teasing—all masquerading as play but clearly the sublimated physical activity of a youth a third his age. It got so bad that I couldn’t go into the water, or I’d use my red guest band to swim at other pools. I couldn’t elude him. He followed me.

I liked Phil. All this was only toward the end. Even then, when he was calm we got along beautifully. He was a fabulous conversationalist. But he became less and less calm. I decided that I had to return his key. (Which, thank God, Sheila never knew I had.) To return it in a letter, however, seemed too cold and cruel. After all, we would still be neighbors and have to live on the same floor. To pass it to him at the pool was out of the question. I thought someone would see me, or that he might make a scene. I knew that the only way was to bring it to him, and that’s what I did that night—the night he died.

Sheila was watching TV in her room, and I told her I was going out for a while. I made up some excuse—I don’t even remember what it was. I came down the hall and rang Dad’s bell. There was no answer, though I could hear music playing inside the apartment from Phil’s new stereo, the Beatles, I think. I pressed the doorbell twice more, and when there was still no answer I let myself in with the key.

Your father was in his shorts on the couch. They were these skimpy silky bikini things and I would have left at once, but not after I saw his face. He looked awful. I asked what was the matter and he said he was a little uncomfortable. Naturally I forgot about the key; I must have slipped it back into my purse. I went over to him and he asked me if I would turn off the phonograph. He said he was very tired. I did what he asked and returned to him. He was sweating terribly, his face was pale, and it was clear to me that he was very ill. But even
then
he misunderstood why I was there. He tried to smile. “Evelyn,” he said, “this wasn’t how I expected it would be. I’m sorry it turned out like this, kid.” I told him I thought we’d better call a doctor, but he said no, he thought it might be only a little indigestion and that he was already beginning to feel a little better.

Marshall, he was—hard. I told him he’d better just lie still and that I’d try to get some help, and that’s when he became aroused. I was very frightened, but to tell you the truth I was more afraid of what could happen to him if I struggled with him than of anything that might happen to me. I held him up, and all the time he was kissing and touching me, and to calm him I said we’d better go into the bedroom. I wanted to get him to lie down, you see. I helped him into the bedroom and that’s when he asked to make love to me. I told him it was crazy, that we had to wait until he was better. I didn’t want to upset him. I promised that if he let me call the doctor I’d wait with him in bed until the doctor came. He agreed, and I called the number he gave me and got the answering service. I told the girl it was an emergency, and she said she’d get the doctor at once.

Then your father made me keep my promise to lie down next to him. Marshall, he had taken off his
shorts.
He was very excited because he didn’t understand why I had come to his apartment, and he just kept—well, thanking me. I let him undress me, and because he was so ill and moved so slowly I actually helped him. I threw my clothes off as if they were on fire, and I suppose this excited him even more. I got him into position and all I could think was, I don’t know, that this was better than that he should he hard, that that would be a terrible strain on his heart, and I wriggled like a mad woman because all I wanted was to bring him off. He came almost at once, and he died on top of me.

I got out. I couldn’t wait for the doctor. I cleaned his penis. I looked around for any evidence, and destroyed it. I ran away.

That’s the story. Now you understand why I couldn’t come to the chapel or the funeral. That’s the story. Please don’t answer this letter.

There was a postscript: “I’ll get the key back to you.”

Then how was he mad? Didn’t he see the inconsistencies in her letter? “I don’t want you to spend your money on telegrams. We’re neighbors. As you say in your telegram, we live a few doors down the hall from each other.” And all that stuff about “if we are to become friends.” If she’d looked for evidence, why hadn’t she taken the letters with her? And after telling him the whole story about that night why hadn’t she simply enclosed the key? He could drive a truck through her ambivalences. Then how was he
mad?
And what about his reactions to what he’d been told? Were
they
mad? Was it mad to be stirred by that part where his father went swimming through her legs? He was hard as the mourner’s bench he sat on when he read that. Was
that
mad? Or his own ambivalences, his disgust and jealousy at her final revelations, were they mad? Was the awful pity he felt? Then how had his nerves broken down? His inkling that the key might still turn in his lock—was that nuts? Or, modifying inkling to simple bald hope that it would, was
that?
If only he could stop this damn weeping.

No longer were the tears coursing down his cheeks like anguish in a prizewinning photograph; now he was sobbing, bellowing, howling. He stuffed a handkerchief into his mouth. Choking on it, he pulled it out. (Was that, self-preservation normal as apple pie, was
that
?) He was astonished to be insane yet see so clearly, every reaction fitted immaculately to its cause like a Newtonian law.

He huddled on the mourner’s bench and had an idea. He phoned Evelyn. She answered on the second ring. (Was it nuts to suspect that having slipped the letter under his door she would be waiting for his call?)

“It’s Marshall,” he sobbed. “I got your letter.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. I got it. I read it. I understand.”

“Oh.”

“I agree about the telegrams.” He was squalling into the phone, He made a stutterer’s effort to speak plainly and said goodbye clear as a bell.

He waited on the mourner’s bench for three hours but she never came. He’d shown every patience, giving her time to do the supper dishes, to think up something to tell Sheila, to wait until Sheila was asleep, to prepare herself. He didn’t even leave the bench to urinate, fearing that he wouldn’t hear her timid knock in the toilet. All hope left him. He understood her reluctance; he understood everything. And he stopped crying.

He stepped out onto the balcony. He saw the skyline, the lighted windows that ran across the horizon like a message, like signal fires of the abandoned on those desert isles of his hypotheses, like bonfires on mountain tops for the search planes to see. He saw all the warehouses, office buildings, hotels and apartments. He saw the houses and condominiums, service flats, bed-sitters, kips and billets. He saw barracks and bunkers and chambers in university and wards in hospitals, saw all places where being lodged, those visible and those invisible—rooms underground, basements, shelters, code and map rooms, vast silos beneath the desert and under the badlands, Sweden’s civil defenses, the booths in tunnels where officers stood watching the traffic, the cars in those tunnels, the passengers snug in their moving envelopes of space, subway trains and staterooms beneath the water line—saw the cabins of jets and two-seaters and the berths in trains, their club cars and coaches, the locked toilets on buses and the vans of trucks, the wide ledge behind the driver where the helper snuggles. There were palaces and theaters, arenas in the open air, auditoriums where people sat listening to orchestras, stalls and dress circles and private boxes and the gods. There were pits where technicians recorded those performances and prompter’s boxes in theaters where a man, crouching, followed what the actors were saying, his fingers moving along the lines of the script as if it was in Braille. There were caves. There were mud huts and huts of straw and the hogans of Navahos, all the earth’s vulgate architecture, its mounds and warrens, Rio’s high
favellas
and Hong Kong’s sea-level houseboats. There were cellblocks in prisons and the tiger cages of solitary. The world was mitered, walls and floors and ceilings, angled as the universe and astronomy, jointed as men.

There were balconies like this one he stood on, with railings like this one. He raised one leg over and now the other. Intestate, sitting there for a moment perfectly balanced, he pushed off gently and began his fall.

As he plunged he addressed the condominium, quoting from the lecture he had been preparing. “From what incipit, fundamental gene of nakedness,” he gasped, “came, laboring like a lung, insistent as the logical sequences of a heartbeat, the body’s syllogisms, this demand for rind and integument and pelt?” But it was too difficult. His velocity shoveled the words back into his mouth, the air that forced itself into his lungs canceling his breath. All he could manage at last, with great effort, the greatest he had ever made, were individual words.

“Cage,” he shouted. “Net,” he screamed. “Pit, sheath, vesicle, trap,” he roared above gravity. “Cell, cubicle, crib and creel.” He tried to expel the air that suffused him, billowing his body like a flag. “Nest,” he yelled, “carton, can.” His descent pulled the wind, igniting it like a fire storm. “Jakes,” he squealed, “maw!” But it was too much. He could open his mouth but couldn’t close it. So in the split seconds he had left he had to think the last.
And the hole,
he thought,
the hole I’m going to make when I hit that ground!