Time Travail (17 page)

On the low table next to the sofa there was a
dish with half a salami-sandwich and a roach on it, pencils, a
ruler, a draftsman’s compass, a directional compass and a pile of
papers. I tried to chase the roach away. It didn’t budge. I touched
it and it fell over on its back.

It was strange. The living room used to swarm
with roaches. This was the first one I’d seen since the sensors had
been set up. Maybe they had the sense to steer clear of them. I
looked at the papers.

At first glance they looked like cubist
drawings. Examined, they resolved into confused house-plans. The
confusion came from the overlap of a second, dotted, house-plan on
the first one. It was like a photo of a bombed-out city with one
roofless building disastrously involved with another one. No two
diagrams were identical. The angle and degree of overlap differed.
So did the layout and size of the rooms in the two houses. There
was a red circle on the dotted diagram. On each paper the red
circle covered a different part of what I understood was Beth
Anderson’s house.

I understood that he was trying to situate
Rachel’s bedroom on it, the past on the present. No version was
definitive. There were question marks on all of them. Some had been
crumpled and then smoothed out.

When I woke up I was still holding one of the
diagrams. A sensor lens zoomed in on my sudden movement as I placed
the diagram back on top of the pile.

I went upstairs and started changing into my
jogging clothes. The rain dashed harder against the panes. Beth
Anderson’s house was ghostly behind the undulating curtain of rain.
There was movement behind a first-floor window. I thought of a
pretext and went over to the bookshelf where my books had replaced
his and chose something easy. I changed back and went over to her
house.

She took a long time opening the door. She
was holding a window-wiper in one red rubber-gloved hand with the
other cupped beneath it to catch a dirty drop. “Why Jerry, you’re
drenched, come on in. But promise not to look at me.”

She looked like an aging street-urchin in a
man’s shirt four sizes too big and knotted over her bare abdomen.
She was wearing low tattered jeans. She had a cap on her head at an
angle and a smudge on her cheek. I’d never seen her that
spontaneous sweating way. For some reason she made me think of Huck
Finn and afterwards I sometimes called her that.

A vacuum cleaner was lying in the middle of
the living room. I apologized. I hadn’t realized it was Saturday
morning. It had been a sudden idea. She’d once said how she wished
she could have sat in on one of my classes. The class could come to
her, I said, showing her the book. Some other day, of course, I
added. She blinked. I realized too late that she was wondering: if
poems why not her son’s poems? I’d have to get around to that blue
box.

She recovered and said, “Oh, Robert Frost! I
… I’d be delighted, honored. Don’t go. I’ve practically finished
with the house cleaning. I’ll be down in a few seconds.” She almost
ran upstairs. A shower started up.

I stood in the middle of that other living
room. I didn’t move or make a sound. I remembered how once in a
wood I’d stood like that, absolutely motionless and silent waiting
for some small shy animal to come for my camera. I stood like that
(in the wood) for an hour. It hadn’t come. After a while (in her
living room) I began wandering around, examining the goldfish
goggling magnified in his bowl, the potted plants, the imitation
Scandinavian furniture, the reproductions of harmonious bouquets
and landscapes on the pastel walls. There was nothing beneath it.
It was all safe surface, I thought.

A minute later I came across an imitation
18th century jewel-box with a porcelain lid showing a shepherdess
and a swain simpering against pink clouds. I opened it and found a
tube of Valium inside.

When she came down a half hour later she
was all dressed up and coiffed in her usual banal perfection. Scent
had replaced the faintly acrid smell of her sweating body. She’d
been more attractive dressed down for house cleaning. We did a few
Frost poems. She said she’d adored
Wall Mending
and would love to do more. That’s how our
classroom sessions started. I felt better after and told myself
again that her house was a good place to retreat to when it became
impossible to breathe in the other house.

#3

The first time I met her was by accident. You
hadn’t even told me she’d arrived. Why all that secrecy? I happened
to drop by with books I thought would interest you. You hadn’t come
back from your CCNY classes yet. I didn’t know your schedule. Your
mother was there. She had hazel eyes and a mole on her right cheek.
She told me about her, how her father was a famous mathematician. I
should never talk to her about him or about her mother. She’d
brought one of her father’s books with her but couldn’t understand
it and was always asking you to help her with it. I was surprised
at that. I hadn’t seen her as a scientific type like you. Your
mother went upstairs and coaxed her out of her room. I could hear
them. I stayed in the living room. She came down with a book and
that cat. She was shy and didn’t talk very much although her
English was good. You came back. She started asking you questions
about equations, don’t ask me about those questions, it’s a
language I’ve never understood. After a while I went back home with
the books. They hadn’t interested you. I’d come over for
nothing.

(
I stand there in the middle of that other living
room waiting for them to come down. In those days I’m on the
friendliest of terms with mirrors and am prepared to see myself
reflected in glory in her face: the tweed jacket with the bully-boy
padded shoulders of the time, the buttoned-down collar with the
laboriously double-knotted necessarily blue Sulka silk tie, keenly
creased cream flannel cuffed trousers, correctly breaking over
black shoes coaxed to soft shine. The book money is for clothes
mainly.

My smile, rehearsed a hundred times, is
winning. Her smile is shy and brief. Later Mrs Morgenstern mentions
extensive dental work as well as the obvious other things to
explain the limits of it. I get the prologue to smile plus great
brown eyes for a second. Then the cat gets her mouth and gaze as
she kisses its round head.

We are introduced. She has to leave the cat.
I initiate the handshake, a European gesture, I know. It’s for the
contact. The table is next to her but she doesn’t relinquish the
book and pencil to free her right hand. She shifts them to the
other hand awkwardly. Also full of awkward grace, the slight recoil
of her slim body in compensation for the surrender of her hand
briefly and passively in mine. Out of this. She reclaims her hand
quickly. Mrs Morgenstern says that Harvey will be back any minute
now. She’s wrong. I know his schedule. She praises me inaccurately
to Rachel and leaves us together in the living room. She has
shopping to do.

Rachel is involved silently with the cat
again. I’m involved with her plain mysterious averted face. The
girls I go out with never avert their faces. They give you
everything in minutes and it’s nothing. Rachel keeps what she has
and what she is. I’d seen that immediately on the second photo she
doesn’t suspect I have in my wallet.

For the next fifteen minutes I present her
with an image of myself fashioned to correspond to the image of her
I’d fashioned on the basis of two photographs, one blurred. I
parade Central European names and titles I’ve memorized.

She sits stiffly in her chair as though
undergoing an oral examination. Oh yes, Grillparzer, Kafka, yes,
she murmurs as I go on not just for the sake of my image but
because that way I take her away from the cat, monopolize her
docile eyes. And of course Hugo von Hoffmanstahl, I say,
identifying him as the librettist of Der Rosenkavalier. Richard
Strauss, she says positively, identifying the composer of the
opera. That gets us (gets me) onto arduous modern Central European
music I’ve listened to a few seconds on WQXR. It turns out she’s
vaguely heard of Schönberg, not at all of Alban Berg. I pretend to
have conquered both of those unscalable bergs.

To break the silence I fall back on easier
and authentic things. I ask who she prefers, Schumann or Schubert?
I think they are both very great, she says respectfully in her low
voice. I have the strong impression that she doesn’t care for music
any more than she does for literature. I’m left with that carefully
constructed and conveyed image of myself, corresponding to
nothing.

I ask about her plans and extract from her
that she’s going to attend Monroe High which I’m still struggling
to graduate from because of geometry. If you like, I could help you
with Shakespeare, I say casually, in poor command of my heart.
You’re going to have to study Shakespeare. You could help me with
German. She’s politely evasive.

Now I try to construct a new more effective
identity. I invite her to a baseball game at Ebbet’s Field. I say
that for the naturalization test of course you have to know all the
presidents of the United States chronologically but also they ask
questions about the national game and they turn you down if you
can’t explain “double-play” or “steal home”.

She looks very serious at that last term and
her lips repeat it soundlessly. To make her laugh, the necessary
first stage for contact, I pantomime the stealing of home there in
the living room and nearly break a vase. Why do I clown? Does she
define me as a clown? Does she define me as anything at all? She’s
gone back to kissing the stupidly indifferent cat.

Now for the first time her face awakens, the
inner light of the photo in my wallet, as she looks up beyond me at
the doorway where Harvey is standing. Sharp, he says, taking me in.
I’ve brought you books, I say. Dressed to kill, he says. Dressed to
kill, he repeats, much louder, staring at her, wanting response to
that. He’ll do that constantly with her: use slang expressions she
can’t possibly know. Her English is very good but of the British
variety. He’ll stare and stare at her for response until she has to
confess her ignorance. This is the first time before me.

Dressed to kill? she confesses her ignorance
now. Kill the girls he says with heavy patience. Jerry’s a
girl-killer. If you’re a girl you’d better be careful. Her lips
silently form the insanity in bewilderment split by a fractional
second of a quick polite smile, and her plain lovely face returns
to bewilderment. Then smiles a little, nods, clearly hasn’t
understood. I imagine he’ll be explicit with her later. But I’ve
already defined myself with Arnold Schönberg as an intellectual. Or
as a clown with the theft of home.

May I show you this, Harvey? she says and
abandons the cat and shows him a formula she’d worked out and says
more to him in thirty seconds than she had with me in thirty
minutes. I can’t understand a word she’s saying. He looks bored. He
glances at me seated in the armchair and at the books on the table.
He interrupts her. “Jerry’s my book-procurer. But he’s procured the
wrong titles.” I know that. I pretend I don’t.

When I leave I say:
“
Auf
Wiedersehen
,
Rachel.” She says: “Goodbye.”
)

The new year started jerking by monotonously
like an escapement-wheel. Rain-bound, I spent the days upstairs
dredging up memories, paid-for written ones, also unwritten ones,
paid for too, differently. I started going down to the cellar again
from time to time but taking precautions. I was careful not to stay
there for more than an hour at a time. I positioned myself as far
away as possible from the lead-plated wall, up against the
cinder-block wall. For comfort in peril I straddled a chair,
crouched forward. A good part of my body was shielded by the back
of the chair and half of my face by my crossed arms.

The fifth or sixth night my mother came
again, supposedly. It had been very short, he said, a few seconds.
She’d been in the same position, in the same striped armchair
facing his mother in the flowered one. But it might have been years
before the first capture or years after, he couldn’t tell. They’d
always been in that position when my mother visited, saying
basically the same things year in year out, he said. Anyhow I’d
missed her. I must have been dozing. That week I did see fragments
of his mother several times, more Christmas dinners, a cat, his
father, Harvey himself in his early thirties judging by the
duration of the image.

One night I brought the old Morgensterns up
with me to my room once more and endured them for the sake of those
five seconds of total restitution. The next morning I sensed the
co-dwellers in the rooms and corridors again. But I didn’t feel my
mother there. I felt the cat and Harvey’s father but not her.

Even when the physical symptoms began to set
in I told myself it was just for a while. I’d had to do a lot of
reading on the subject once and should have remembered that “just
for a while” is what a drug-novice in the honeymoon stage of
addiction tells himself and even sets dates for pulling out. I’d
set deliverance-date, the clean break from the house, for the
beginning of April. I underscored the day of fools in my
pocket-diary. I decorated the space with exclamation marks and the
sum I’d have saved by then: $10,000. And then there would be the
money in the special account if he kept his word. That would amount
to either $15,600 or $8,400 or $3,600. It depended on what my
weekly salary was. I still hadn’t been able to find out.

I made constant efforts not to think of
another, prodigious, sum of money which couldn’t be dated. I’ve
always had an unsatisfactory relation to money. I recorded my
outlays for each day. Certain golden days the expenditure was zero.
To economize on restaurants I’d taken to bolting down what Hanna
left moldering in the refrigerator. I had no idea where I would be
going. I thought vaguely of a Florida beach, far from the parts
where childishly clad seniors herd themselves.