Time Travail (33 page)

***

Seventeen

How could I sleep? The living room was just
beneath my bed, Harvey’s bed, actually. Demented and
tetrahydrocanniboled in the bargain, he’d pipe-dreamed that trip
back through the time-barrier with the swap of dreary now-minutes
for joyous then-hours. But he hadn’t invented the scene. The
sensors must have exhumed it. I knew my mother was (had been, I
tried to correct) down below chatting with Mrs Morgenstern and in
the summer of that final year for her she was certain to be
expressing worry about me.

And of course the two women would be talking
about Rachel (I had her name back) and be remembering this scene
and that scene involving her and I could imagine some of those
scenes myself and another the two women couldn’t possibly be in a
position to speak about.

I tried the third safeguard, time-travel too
but counter time-travel, to the future he claimed didn’t exist, the
summer vacation I’d talked to Beth about. We were both on a clean
white empty beach. Now running into a big green wave. Over and
over.

The old antidote against insomnia worked
against the other thing as well.

I slept chaotically through the whole day.
What awoke me, at 6:10 pm, was foreboding, quasi time-travel to the
immediate future. You read about such instances of prescience.
Mothers who suddenly drop their bridge-hand and rush into the
nursery and there, sure enough, is the baby toddling, for the first
time, but towards an open window.

Bolt upright in bed, I looked about the room
for the danger, even sniffed for smoke. Then got up and went over
to the window.

There it was (mistakenly I thought that’s
what the foreboding was about) down below. Ricky and his friend
were staggering toward their cars, each bearing one of my giant
teak-cased speakers. In their yawning trunks I could see, like a
dismembered baby, the tuner, the amp, the pre-amp, shoved any which
way, and box after box of CDs and vinyls.

Beth was standing there on the sidewalk
motionless except for her hands strangling a sweater. She had her
befuddled tranquilized face. Why wasn’t she stopping them? Why
hadn’t she stopped them?

I recovered from paralysis, leaned out and
started yelling.

They didn’t stop. Paid no attention to me.
Didn’t even accelerate the pace of the operation. Ricky held the
loudspeaker like a crate of oranges. Now he roughly threw it onto
the rear seat. It bounced about perilously. His friend, a chunky
Hispano type, did the same thing in his car with the other speaker.
I appealed to the whole neighborhood and the police in a radius of
a mile for assistance. Kept it up while struggling into my pants
and shoes.

“Stop it! You stop that, you! You shut
up!”

Beth had finally intervened. Radius of a mile
too, easily. I was the only one she could be yelling at to shut up.
Who else? The two others hadn’t said a word. Devoted themselves
wholly to the task. I yelled again. She yelled back.

“That’s the hi-fi I bought for my son and I
can prove it. You stop that, you!”

Now like honest workmen at the end of a job
they clapped their hands free of imagined dust (I’d warred on the
slightest speck on my components), slammed the rear-doors shut,
bang, bang, and got into their cars.

What did I do then? Was it possible?

I’ll need Lord’s assistance for this. Let me
grope for the flask and guide it through the tangle of wires to my
lips. That sweet blandness in my mouth turns to fire in my gut.
Ulcers? Worse? The price to pay. Pay again. Again. Now: what did I
do then? Was it possible? Distance. View him from way above,
practice safe detachment, lucid dissociation. Look down at him
blundering away. Match his grimaces with grins. Try to double up
with laughter when he doubles up with pain. What does he do next?
Is it possible?

Rushes downstairs, still buttoning up his
shirt, almost tripping over the unlaced shoes and bursts out of the
gate in time to see the two cars picking up speed. Sprints after
them, eyes glued to the dwindling license plate of her son’s car.
Halts in the middle of the street, panting. Mumbles the numbers,
frisks himself for a pen not to forget, returns to where she’s
standing, strangling her sweater again, maybe crying a little. “A
pen, quick,” he commands. She has no pen, she replies in a tiny
bewildered voice. A pencil, anything. No pencil, either.

Now what’s he doing? Running through her open
gate, looking around for a stick on that impeccable lawn of hers.
Finally takes off a shoe, yes, his shoe, hops over and with the toe
of the shoe starts inscribing the plate-number deep in the soil of
her long tulip-bed.

When she finally understands what it’s all
about she rushes over and starts stomping all over the figures,
shouting jumbled numbers to efface the real plate numbers from his
mind as her feet are doing to the soil-inscription, crushing tulips
in the process, also jostling him as, one-footed, he tries to
protect those inscriptions. Her head barely comes up to his
shoulder but he warns her, very loudly: “Don’t you knock me down
again.” By a sinister coincidence he’s in the same spot as the
night she shoved him into forget-me-nots and mud.

“You leave my flowers alone,” she pants out,
going on crushing more of them.

He’s never seen a relationship disintegrate
so fast. A sudden revelation of their true center of gravity, not
each other. He tries to gain command over himself. Holds his hand
up and says or shouts: “Stop. Let’s stop this. Let’s reason. Let’s
be reasonable.” Puts his dirty left shoe back on.

She stops immediately. Can afford to, he
thinks bitterly. She’s trampled the numbers out of the flowerbed,
jostled them out of his mind. She looks about bewildered, blinking.
As if she’s emerging from a dream. Kneels and administers first aid
to the tulips.

There’s no problem to get excited about, he
says very loudly to her back. It’s very simple. He wants his hi-fi
back and in good condition and right away. Also the records. She
should contact Ricky immediately. She goes on nursing the tulips.
He has to repeat it, much louder.

Finally she gets up and says he has no right
to make such wild accusations, yelling for the police like that.
It’s all his fault anyway. He promised to come over at seven that
morning and take it away. She phoned and phoned and phoned and
never got an answer. Anyhow it wasn’t Ricky, it was that awful
friend of his. She doesn’t know where Ricky lives. He moves about.
But it wasn’t Ricky. It was the other, that awful José. No, she
doesn’t know where José lives either, doesn’t even know his family
name.

Yes, of course, he says: José, not Ricky.
Ricky had just been giving him a friendly hand. Why the goddam hell
hadn’t she done something? Stopped them? Phoned him? Let the air
out of their tires?

He projects these questions with great force
and emotion and realizes he’s already in the impotent stage of
recriminations. He pictures the two cars far away by now, his
delicate components bumping together dangerously. He feels weak and
jostled by his heart. Has to sit down on her white-lacquered bench
near the sheet-iron Disney deer. Closes his eyes and tries to calm
the inner uproar.

After a while something touches his foot
softly. Beth is kneeling in front of him and trying to clean his
left shoe with her sweater.

“Oh your shoe, Jerry, I’ll buy you another
one, brand-new.”

He stares, thinking she’s talking about his
left shoe. Then realizes she means a hi-fi system. It officializes
the loss, he feels. It’s gone forever, a part of himself, like his
heart or liver. How can he ever get up from the bench without heart
or liver?

Following the initial shock comes grief and
outrage. After, he won’t be able to remember how much he poured
forth or kept burning within like molten lava. He’ll imagine his
lamentations were Old Testamental, testifying to triumph over the
apostasy of his blond (slightly graying) hair, blue eyes and
somewhat sagging Greek profile. He’ll recall that June, his first
wife, Christian like the second one, used to refer to his “Job
bit.” He’ll suppose that he must have mourned Eastern-wise his
handcrafted Kos 321 amplifier, his gold-wired Poly-Astroc speakers.
And the records, his rare vinyl pressings with three diamond-point
needles dedicated exclusively to them in rotation, his Busches, his
Budapests, his Schnabels and Scherchens and the CDs: 1,854 of them
in the card-catalogue Ricky probably hadn’t bothered stealing,
four-fifths of all the recorded Bach cantatas, all of the Mozart
and Haydn quartets, four different versions of the Beethoven
quartets, Busch, Berg, Italiano, Vegh.

Vegh, oye Vegh.

She repeats that she’ll buy him an even
better hi-fi system. He says that the best available isn’t half as
good. It’s practically a funeral eulogy. You can’t find those
components on the market anymore, he says. It’s like poking about
in a junk-shop to replace a stolen Rembrandt. Why the goddam hell
hadn’t she phoned him when they started in?

She’d been afraid of violence. That night you
almost killed him with the spade, she says and then with no logical
transition says he called her a whore, his own mother, when he saw
the room, but she did it for him, that money had been for him. I
never wanted you to bring it into my house. Last night I told you
to take it back. Why didn’t you do that? Why did you insist on
staying? Why did you take advantage of me?

With that profound intellectual dishonesty
inscribed from conception in female genes, she’s reversed the
situation. He’s at fault for what happened.

Flare of anger: says that her son is costing
him a fortune. First five thousand dollars and now his hi-fi and
records. They were – had been – his universe. He actually uses that
expression. His personal universe is going to be swapped for a few
adulterated fixes, he says. She has to get it back. Better she than
the police.

How can he say such a thing? such a
horrible thing? she whispers. I didn’t
know
you, I didn’t
know
you.

It’s like an echo of other distant feminine voices
except they’d known him much longer before realizing they hadn’t
really.

It goes on and on, down and down, like a fall
off a cliff, at first grabbing at tree-roots, grass tufts, granite
outcroppings to check the fall and then giving up grabbing at
things, not able to or not wanting to. They were in fatal
free-fall.

Now she’s accusing him of having taken
advantage of her that day with his money. He’s tempted to say that
if it had been for that he could have gotten better value for his
money. Maybe he actually says something like that. It ends with her
saying that she’ll pay him back for everything, his machine, his
records, his five thousand dollars. You’ll get your pound of flesh,
she says.

She shouldn’t have said that, he thinks. It
was predictable that with all the crooked “z”s and noosed “y”s in
her maiden name (he thinks) she’d say it one day. It’s a thing she
shouldn’t have said. But why does he have a feeling of relief on
hearing her say that definitive thing?

He replies, calmly he thinks, that he knows
she knows where Ricky lives, has his phone-number. She should
contact him as quickly as possible, tell him to bring the hi-fi and
the records back and no questions will be asked. If not, the police
will be notified.

You just try that, she says in a low menacing
voice, her face suddenly aged and ugly (as he sees it). She says he
can call in the FBI if he likes. She’s the owner of the house. No
one’s broken in. Except you, right now.

At that he retorts that she’s the owner of
the house all right but he’s the owner of the hi-fi as the police
will be told if it’s not back by tomorrow evening.

What hi-fi? she says. Get out of here.

Doubly dispossessed, he turns around and
leaves that house.

Back on the bed I tried for a while to
believe it was one of the nightmares of the day I’d slept through.
How could it have imploded like that, so fast? We’d each blundered
into the other’s elaborately mined sanctuary. Reserved zones
usually turn out to be mutually antagonistic. Music, indissociable
from the machine that vehicled it, was revealed to be mine, her son
hers.

Put like that it makes me seem essentially
deficient, I know, prizing teak and transistors over flesh and
blood. Somewhere along the line she’d made that point. I tried to
retort to myself as I hadn’t to her that it wasn’t machine versus
flesh and blood, anyone but a monster knew what choice to make in
such an abstract opposition, but my machine (key to the nearest I’d
ever come to paradise) versus her flesh and blood, violent and
grubbing, thieving, exploitive and insulting. That changed the
fundamentals of the problem altogether.

I did have to admit though that I’d never
seen a woman so uncompromisingly dedicated to another human being
who treated her like shit. Maybe Hanna. I couldn’t help feeling a
certain grudging admiration and envy, not quite sure about the
nature of the envy. To be the object of such dedication? To be
capable of it myself?

I thought of the foreboding that had awakened
me an hour before. It had been foreboding of loss all right, but
more than the loss of my hi-fi system, deeper even than the loss of
what I felt was my ultimate woman. Beth Anderson now enlarged into
a whole dimension of time. Losing her I’d lost my future.

I sought comfort. That future wouldn’t have
been an empty white beach (did such beaches exist any more?) and an
instant in a green wave as I’d imagined. My future would have been
the daily reality of chintz, iron lawn-deer, tooth-picked olives,
imposed conditions for tenderness with tears at the end as after
violation, all the rest, including her crazy husband and her son.
Wasn’t that the deep reason for what I’d said and done, to avoid a
future defined in those terms?