“The first pile consists of the bad poems.
It’s the biggest of the three piles as you can see. The second
pile, a sizable one, consists of poor poems.”
Now she looked up at me. I’d aged her by ten
years. As though I’d condemned him to overdose. Stop looking like
that, you good person.
Her premises were all wrong, I felt like
telling her. She’d blown up this idea in her head that
acknowledging merit for his poems would somehow get him off drugs.
When you’re in that situation – not the addict but the family – you
grab for the most waterlogged of straws. Genius and addiction
weren’t incompatible. Hadn’t she ever heard of Coleridge,
Baudelaire, Modigliani? Coleridge, maybe.
“
So much for the first two piles. There’s
the third pile. The third pile is very small, maybe twenty poems.
They have talent. Some are surprisingly good. In particular the one
called
Spring
Morning in the BMT
.”
I expected her face to light up at my gift,
the painful invention. I expected her to exclaim something like: Oh
Jerry you’re not saying that just to comfort me, are you?
Instead, she went through the rejected poems,
picking and quibbling, dissenting and hassling at the presence of
this poem and that poem. I pointed out that in the Kimberly mines
there were five tons of gravel for every diamond. She didn’t at all
appreciate the word gravel. It was just a metaphor, I said. She
recited the poems with great expression to convince me of my
error.
Hours went by. But you’re the expert, she
kept on saying. She didn’t act as if she thought I was one. When
she placed the poems back in the folder she undid my categories of
bad, mediocre and promising, shuffled them all together.
She saw me to the door in silence and
grudgingly wished me a good night. The thing that had stuck with
her, stuck in her throat, I felt, wasn’t so much my criticism of
the majority of the poems as it was the original invention. A lie,
she’d called it plainly.
Original sin, I supposed, for someone with
her hierarchy of values.
She begged off from the next bi-weekly
talking sessions because of another one of her headaches. Then the
second one she canceled because of “company,” she said. Apparently
I wasn’t company.
That evening from my room I saw her brightly
lit picture window and behind the gauzy curtain, as in artistic
soft-focus, a man she’d invited over for drinks. The table was set
for two. I couldn’t see how old he was. I made out the low
glass-topped table with two bottles and between them cut-glass
dishes probably containing anchovy-stuffed olives and toothpicked
cheese-cubes. Did he drink single malt too? Did he have pedagogical
talents? Or did his talents lie in another direction?
I saw her leaning forward in the eager
posture of communication and the other in receptive immobility,
then talking and gesturing himself. I almost had the illusion that
I was looking at myself earlier with her.
Then Harvey called me down into the cellar
for carpentry work on the new housing-units for the
second-generation sensors. He intended reducing their size in the
interest of mobility, he’d said mysteriously.
When I returned to my room two hours later
the drapes of the picture window across the way had been drawn.
There was soft light behind them. After a while the front door
opened and she stood in a tasteless gold lamé décolleté she’d never
worn for me, smiling and chatting with a young man of astonishing
beauty, far too young to be her husband. Besides, he had a fine
carnal head of hair.
I assumed the old schedule would resume the
following Tuesday evening. I went over and pressed her melodious
chimes into action and waited. That suburban music used to
materialize her, smiling, almost instantaneously. When she finally
opened the door she stared at me blankly for a second. She wasn’t
even dressed up in my honor.
She nodded acknowledgement, hesitated and
finally let me in. The low glass-topped table where we worked and
drank was bare of book and bottles. She’d forgotten, she said,
following my gaze. She went and got the bottle of scotch and a
glass and an unopened box of pretzels.
“I’m trying to cut down on my intake,” was
how she explained the solitary bottle. She made unconvincing
attempts at conversation. Her face was set in tragic lines. Wasn’t
that overreaction to the flash-shot under the shower and the
business with the poems? Or was it something else?
“Is everything all right?” I asked, breaking
another silence.
“Everything is fine,” she replied.
Then she noticed the book in my hand. I’d
been careful to leave the black briefcase in the other house.
“I haven’t read your chapters. I’ve been too
busy this week.”
“No tragedy.”
“You look as if it was. Didn’t it ever happen
that your students didn’t hand in their papers on time?”
“That happened. But it was an economically
defined situation then. Papers or no papers I got my salary at the
end of the week. What we do is extracurricular, for pleasure,
yours, I had hoped.”
“I can’t concentrate anymore. Not with the
problems I have. Never mind that. Anyhow I think I’m too old and
stupid for that kind of thing. It was very kind of you and I did
appreciate it.”
She didn’t sound as if she had. I didn’t
insist. That was the end of the talking sessions. I finished my
drink and left a quarter of an hour after I came, pretexting work
for Harvey and adding that I too was trying to cut down on my
intake. We were perfectly synchronized at least in that respect, I
said. She made no effort to keep me there a little longer. Her door
closed on me. Then it opened again.
“Oh, I forgot. You can tell Mr Morgenstern
that I’m not at all interested in his proposition. I don’t want any
of your prying machines in my house, not for all the money in the
world.”
The door closed before I could protest that
the prying machines weren’t mine.
Back in my room I told myself that the end of
our relationship wasn’t really important. I concentrated on her
physical and intellectual insufficiencies as one pathetically does
in such situations. But I couldn’t help picking about again for
other reasons for her changed attitude. Maybe it wasn’t just the
camera and poem fiascoes. She’d spoken of worries. Her job? Her
health? That son of hers? If so she clearly didn’t regard me as
worthy of being confided in. “Everything is fine,” she’d said and
then when it had slipped out that everything wasn’t fine: “Never
mind.”
I didn’t like confidences, that was true, and
apparently hadn’t concealed the fact well enough. But to be
undisguisedly excluded from them that way was almost insulting, an
uncharitable pointing to an insufficiency that wasn’t physical or
intellectual, something worse from her point of view I suppose.
***
Twelve
There was no way of hiding the collapse of
our relationship from Harvey. Hanna, always on the lookout, relayed
the information. When I confirmed it and told him that Beth
Anderson had turned down his rental proposition in the bargain, he
took it very badly. I wasn’t living up to the contract. I wasn’t
helping him down in the cellar. My memories of Rachel were useless
as eventual navigational assistance. Now I couldn’t even get into
the Anderson house anymore. How could I do this to him?
On February 14, Saint Valentine’s Day as it
happened, the sickness came back again. It had never been so bad.
Maybe it had nothing at all to do with the end of the visits to
Beth Anderson’s place. By now I understood that the sickness (I
called it time-travail) manifested itself cyclically. There may
have been an unrelated coincidence between the swing round to the
active phase of the cycle and deprivation of the banal
one-dimensional living room and the woman in it.
Whatever, the co-dwellers came back again, on
the very border of materialization I sometimes thought: younger
Harveys, his mother in various stages of progress to nothing,
friends, the cat slinking past my legs many times, relatives, the
reform rabbi, but not my mother. My mother wasn’t in that virtual
throng.
I tried to picture her there, very hard, but
what came up, as conventional memory, was my mother embracing
Rachel again, this time with annihilating compassion (it was after
the news from the liberated shambles of Europe, so in the summer of
1945) but when I tried to materialize her (my mother), transplant
her to the dirt and disorder of the dead room, nothing came.
I forced myself to jog. The first time I’d
done no more than five blocks when I started gasping for breath.
There was a diffused pain in my chest. I remembered in alarm my
juvenile heart-murmur. I had to go back to the co-dwellers.
I tried it again the next day. I jogged on
and on, taking unknown streets. When my chest was stabbed with pain
I don’t know how many hours later, I collapsed on a bench. I gasped
down air like a beached fish. A nice middle-aged woman asked me if
I was sick. When I found out where I was I realized I’d been
heading toward the seaside. That close it was all built up. I took
a bus back.
After that I didn’t even try to leave the
house. Things got worse there. What finally rescued me was the
contractual obligation to go to New York and do research for
Harvey.
Suddenly he’d stopped harassing me about the
house next door. He was on to something new. On the surface it was
new. He was going to resurrect a strategic part of old Forest Hill,
he said. What he wanted me to do was to recall the exact sites of
the old shops. In particular, the A&P, the beauty parlor, the
hardware store, Schultz’s butcher-shop, and the movie-house.
Of course I couldn’t do it, not after so many
years. The new shopping center had been erected on the bulldozed
old order. The Chase National, radically renovated, was still
standing as a landmark but it didn’t help. When I said that I had
memory problems myself and couldn’t do the job unaided he told me
to go to the 42nd St Library and try to dig up old photos of Forest
Hill. I was pretty sure that wasn’t the place to look but didn’t
say so. I was glad to be forced out of the house. On my own I’d
never have managed it.
Just before I left he said: “Also I want you
to do other research. On tits. Maybe there are things about them.
You don’t already know.” He explained what he meant.
Just climbing past the stone lions with my
black briefcase in view of research (even on the futile things he’d
commissioned) made me feel much better. In the studious hush I felt
meaningful for the first time since retirement as I positioned my
index cards and pens on the desk.
I started in on the tits, titmice,
chickadees, genus Paries, family Paridae, order Passeriformes. I
didn’t know what he was looking for. It turned out that the tit was
the best-studied bird in the world. It had an agitated sex-life.
There was plenty on them in the library, lots of photos.
I handed him my notes on the bird and said
that I hadn’t found any photos of old Forest Hill. He wasn’t happy
about that and also said I hadn’t given him anything on Rachel for
a week now. I said I’d take care of that. As for the photos I’d try
the local newspaper and City Hall.
#5
Once I was over at your place when your
father came back from the road with presents for Rachel. That day I
took Rachel to the movies, for the first time I think. There were
two other times later. She’d have preferred going with you I think
but you didn’t like movies and had work and you told her to go with
me instead. I don’t remember the year or the month but it was a hot
day. Everybody was sweating except Rachel. The picture starred
Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. I don’t remember the
title.
(A long hoot announces his coming. No one
moves in the living room. “Your father, Harvey,” says Mrs
Morgenstern over her crossword. Harvey goes on reading. Rachel puts
her book aside and waits, a little stiffly. A car door slams. The
front door bangs shut.
Now he’s in the living room, filling it, a
squat ungrammatical blare of a man looking ill-shaven five minutes
after a shave. His fat wet lips are perpetually wrapped around a
cigar. He smells of cigars, after-shave lotion and sawdust. He
reminds you of a parody of Edward G. Robinson in a gangster
role.
“
Wheeew!” he deflates loudly, conveying
exhaustion from a week on the road. Rachel instantly stands up. I
do too, more slowly. He goes over to his wife. They peck. “Good,
Morris?” “So-so.” “Pickled tongue and mashed potatoes,” she says.
He grunts with satisfaction and raises his hand to Harvey.
“Einstein,” he says. Harvey looks up, nods, returns to his book. Mr
Morgenstern glances at the two books on the table I’ve procured for
Harvey. Then he shakes my hand silently with intent to impress.
Like many small men he puts all his force in it. I know he doesn’t
like me.
Now that he’s disposed of us he turns to
Rachel. He’s crazy about her. He tells everybody that, including
her. He calls her “Rachie” and makes her call him “Uncle Morris”
even though the blood relationship is more diluted than that. She
submits to his bear hug. Now he holds her at arm length and praises
her beauty, an exaggeration. She stares down at the carpet and
blushes into beauty now. He makes her show him her school marks.
She stares down at the carpet again. It looks like more modesty but
I know it’s shame. She’s just a strong B student. He gazes at her
marks as at jewels.
“
Jesus, we got two geniuses in the family
now. One of them beautiful too. Don’t get a swelled head, Harvey, I
don’t mean you.”
Now he goes through his routine. Harvey’s
told me about it. I witness it for the first time. He freezes,
mouth open, smites his forehead with the heel of his hand and
leaves the room. He comes back a second later with a fancy bouquet
and a gift-wrapped box for her. She rewards him with another blush
and a little O! for the flowers and soon another little O! for the
chocolates. Then she gets a vase and transforms the flowers into a
collective offering on the living room table. She does the same
thing with the chocolates. Mr Morgenstern looks vaguely
dissatisfied. I feel sorry for him and want to tell her to be kind
to him and accept his presents for herself.