Time Travail (10 page)

Once, after a half-hour’s silence, he said:
“Not even her eyes? The color?”

“Age,” I said and we went on working in
silence.

I was involved in other ways with his memory
problems. Once a week I had to join him in a hunt for his earlier
mother. He had a silver-framed photo of her but in her last years.
She was shrunken and white-haired on it. He’d had a younger photo
of her, dark-haired and smiling, he said, but it had disappeared
mysteriously a few years before. Now he couldn’t remember what
she’d looked like then. He suspected Hanna had ripped it up and
flushed it down the toilet. She’d been insanely jealous, he said.
Still was. She’d thought it was the photo of an old girl friend of
his. That was typical of her. The dumb bitch even thought he was
getting into the neighbor, the blonde. In the days when that had
mattered he’d preferred his women more substantially titted and
assed, he said. I had trouble imagining Harvey at any age in close
involvement with a woman configured that way. Or any way.

So once a week I had to poke about in the
dusty chaos of closets with him. After, I had to take a long shower
to get rid of the dust and grime. We never found it. I had to tell
him I didn’t remember the color of her eyes either. It was true
this time.

Another thing about the job that I didn’t
appreciate was the crazy payment ceremony. Instead of receiving a
check in a discreet envelope, I had to pick up – literally pick up
– my “retainer” (I preferred this term to “salary” with its
associations of subordination) on Fridays at 5:00 pm in a tiny room
where Hanna kept track of the performance of Harvey’s investments.
There was a wall-safe and a big filing cabinet. She hulked there at
a battered desk over ledgers with steel-rimmed glasses astride her
red pug nose, her lipless mouth downcurled. She looked strangely
efficient in her official capacity. Harvey was always present,
silently looking on. It lent solemnity to the occasion.

They had an idiotic joke. Was it a joke?
Fifty of the three hundred and fifty dollars were paid in petty
coins: dimes, nickels and even pennies. Yes, pennies, one hundred
of them. They weren’t even neatly stacked but sprawled in disorder
over the desk. It took minutes to pick up and count all those coins
while they both looked on. When I expressed my surprise Harvey
croaked something about loose change accumulated over the years.
But those coins looked brand-new.

The following Friday Hanna happened to open a
drawer for a pen and I saw unbroken rolls of coins fresh from the
bank. They went to the trouble of procuring those rolls, breaking
them and scattering the small change on the table just to see me
rooting for it. That’s the way I interpreted the ritual. They
arranged something similar with the bills. These were all new
singles and fives heaped up in disorder. It took me a good five
minutes to sort them out and count them while they looked on. Then
I signed her ledger. Sometimes I forgot the ballpoint pen wasn’t
mine, pocketed it and she asked for it back, rudely.

One Friday I revolted. I laboriously
collected the small denominations, the dimes and the nickels but
told her to keep the change, meaning the hundred pennies. The
pennies disappeared after that, replaced by nickels I think it
was.

For conversation I had the neighbor on the
other side of the hurricane fence. That is, before she soured on
me. It was a glorious mellow October, like two-hundred-dollar
single-malt. When I wasn’t on duty I fixed up a spot with a deck
chair in the high grass near the fence. I’d unclasp the black
briefcase that had once contained lecture-notes. I’d remove the
bottle, a glass and sometimes a book, for justification. Soaking up
sunshine and scotch, I would meditate or try to read. My only
expenditure of energy was to move the deck chair when the
criss-crossed shadow of the pylon encroached on me. It was like a
giant sundial.

I pretended to feel guilty at this ease.
Harvey said I was doing just the right thing. A very important part
of my work was being accomplished on my back in the deck-chair
bullshitting with the blonde. I would understand why pretty soon,
he added.

The first time I encountered her again she
was back on her knees planting forget-me-nots between twigs that
marked the spots where the tulips were buried. Her blouse was
buttoned all the way up. Yet it was such a warm day.

She gave a little cry of surprise when she
saw me. I invented a reason for my sudden departure and return:
business to settle, I said vaguely. She said she was happy I was
back. I thought of her son’s poems hanging over my head. She didn’t
speak about them immediately.

“I suppose you’ll be leaving any day now for
good. I thought university classes had started already.”

“I’m not teaching this year.”

“Oh, a sabbatical leave, I’ve heard of
that.”

“More a permanent leave, actually. I’ve
retired.”

“At your age?” she said with wondering eyes.
Sweet woman.

I said it was a kind of pre-pre-retirement
and to change the subject I remarked that each time I saw her she
was gardening.

“O gardening!” she exclaimed, holding the
clump of forget-me-nots against her meager bosom. It looked like
spinach. Her eyes were closed and her face ecstatic. I thought it
was overdone, a little ridiculous. She didn’t have the build of an
Earth Goddess. Or maybe she was trying to isolate that kneeling
moment in the sun from everything else before and behind and
pretending she’d succeeded.

She opened her eyes. The pink tip of her
tongue appeared and moistened her lips a little. “Uh, Professor
…”

“Jerry,” I said. I knew what was coming and
felt like running.

“Jerry. I’m Beth. Beth Anderson. What I
wanted to say, Jerry, about those poems I spoke to you about the
other day, my son’s poems, you do want to read them, don’t you? You
said you did.”

“Naturally,” I said weakly. “Love to read his
poems.”

I have a pathological reaction to unsolicited
literary efforts when I suspect there’s too much emotion invested
in them. It dates back to my student days in NYU and involvement
with a Russian language instructor, an intense Bulgarian woman in
her mid-thirties with short black hacked hair. She talked,
ceaselessly and obscurely, in a low monotonous murmur. Hours on end
she subjected me to a rolling barrage of her poems printed in green
ink. They were in English but as unintelligible as if they’d been
in Bulgarian. She was one of the first of those uncataloged
visitors from far, far outer space that were to periodically graze
my orbit with disturbing effect. She never let up with the poems
except in bed where her inspiration was spectacular and her
discourse intelligible, of astonishing crudity.

Outside of bed it was an ordeal. I had to
maintain a tense mask of interest and emit murmurs of appreciation
at regular intervals. My face muscles ached hours after. She was so
easy to wound, super-sensitive to any relaxation of my mask. Her
opaque black eyes would flick up from the green lines. “You don’t
like it!” she would accuse, face whitening. Once when I hazarded
the most timid of criticisms involving intelligibility she broke
down and cried for an hour.

The strain was terrific. I feared infection.
The day some of the green lines seemed to be making sense I
determined to opt out. But I was afraid rupture would send her into
a mental tailspin. That’s what finally happened to her anyhow
although I thought I’d maintained my intense appreciative mask to
the end. Maybe I hadn’t and what happened was partly my fault.

She once sent me a letter from the place, a
very subdued one in black ink with sensible remarks about the
weather and the food and the visiting hours. They must have shocked
all the poetry out of her. I suppose I should have visited or at
least answered her. Whatever happened to her? I can’t remember her
name even though my palms still recall her body. She’d be well into
her seventies now.

Then twenty years later, ghastly replay with
Marty Stein. I won’t think of Marty Stein.

Beth Anderson produced surface scruples.

“
I don’t want to impose on you. I’m making
a selection of the best poems, the ones
I
like best, anyhow. I hope you’ll agree. I’ll let you have
them as soon as I finish.”

But then the next day she saw me unloading
the electronic material from the Volvo with Hanna and now knew that
I was involved with the mysterious machine that woke her up in the
middle of the night and sabotaged her TV programs. The next
afternoon when I strolled over to the deck chair with my scholarly
briefcase she was on her knees again in the flowerbed on the other
side of the hurricane fence.

She looked up from her plants, gave me a
brief pained smile and said, “Hello, Professor,” and went back to
the plants for a few seconds. Then she got up, clapped her hands
clean and said, “Well, that’s that,” and went into her house.

At least I was saved from the poetry ordeal.
But Harvey noticed the coolness or else Hanna had been spying on us
and had told him about it. When I was in the garden I often caught
her peering down at me through a dirty pane. Harvey wasn’t happy
about the coolness. He seemed to take it very seriously. He
returned to the matter a number of times, vocally and in writing.
In writing it had a legal look, as though I’d committed a breach of
contract. Finally I said I’d see what I could do about it.

The next afternoon she was digging when I
came. Her back was turned to my deck chair. She hadn’t heard me and
went on digging. Or maybe she had heard me but went on digging
anyhow. I watched her unhurried efficient movements. She levered up
a slab just right for her strength. A twist of the wrist and the
slab slipped reversed exactly up against the ruins of the last one.
Quick jabs disintegrated the slab into crumbs. Then the operation
over and over again, unhurried but quick. The freshly dug area was
perfectly neat. She wouldn’t need to rake it.

When she turned around I expected the
ecstatic face of the forget-me-nots. Her face was wet with
tears.

Seeing me she wiped her eyes with her bare
forearm. She was wearing green garden-gloves.

“Migraine,” she said and I wondered if
migraine could make you weep. “I didn’t get a wink of sleep last
night with that machine of his. Doesn’t the noise bother you? I
guess not.”

I said that yes, it did, terribly, I suffered
from insomnia and headaches myself. But despite migraine I tried to
remember the condition he was in, I said. He was an old, old
friend, a childhood friend. He looked much older than he actually
was, I added quickly. He’d convinced me to stay with him for a few
weeks. I didn’t know how much longer he’d got. It wasn’t a picnic
for me either. He wanted me to help him with the … thing. So
sometimes – not very often – I give him a hand with his work.

She was leaning with clasped hands on the
spade, lips slightly parted, looking at me with a touching
expression of trust as I went on.

I tried to convince her that people were
unjust about a little midnight noise. If people only knew what he
was working on, they’d be more tolerant, I said. I stood there in
silence, staring at her solemnly, visibly weighing whether I should
divulge the secret or not.

She seemed to have forgotten her pain or
grief or whatever it was.

“Oh, I always try to be tolerant,” she said.
“Just what is it he’s working on? If I may ask. I don’t mean to be
curious. It’s just that I want to be tolerant.”

“It’s pathetic actually,” I said. “He’s
working on a machine to cure what he’s got.” I told her what he
had.

“The poor man!” she exclaimed with great
pitying blue eyes still wet with the tears she’d forgotten. “Like
my sister Martha.” She felt guilty for her past cruelty. I felt a
little guilty because of her guilt. She was the kind of nice silly
woman who’d believe anything you told her. It’s a type. Aunt Ruth
and Mrs Morgenstern had been like that. She said I was a good
person to have come. She could well imagine it wasn’t a picnic for
me.

So we made up. It was Jerry and Beth
again.

She asked me about the poems, was it still
all right? And when I said of course, she said, “wait” and started
trotting, then running, back to the house. She hurried back, out of
breath, holding something mercilessly big. But there was the
hurricane fence between us so I left Harvey’s place and went over
to her neat friendly low gate, white-painted wood, where she was
waiting for me with a blue cardboard box closed by a golden clasp
and bearing on the side in ornate print: Poems by
Richard L. Anderson.
(Age: 15-17)
.
There were pounds and pounds of
them.

She asked me to come in, have a look at her
roses, a cup of coffee if I liked. I thanked her but said I’d
better go and see how Harvey was doing. I didn’t like to leave him
alone too long. She looked guilty again.

Sometimes when the neighbor wasn’t there
Harvey worked his way over to my deck chair, blinking at the light,
pushing aside the rank grass with his free hand. He walked about
under a black umbrella for protection against the mellow fall
sunshine. Because of the treatment at the hospital, sunshine was
bad for him, it appeared. Hanna would bring him a chair and soda
pop and make sure he was holding the umbrella against the sun.

The day Beth Anderson gave me the poems he
came again. I was relaxing in the deck chair with the whisky. There
was a blob of shadow on me, too sudden to be the sundial pylon. I
looked up into his ravaged face beneath the juvenile blond curls.
He noticed the unopened blue box in my lap and said, “Good work.
Let me brief you on her,” as though she were a military
problem.