A Meaningful Life (11 page)

Aware that he was playing the part of a very good fellow indeed but this morning taking no pleasure from the fact, Lowell washed the breakfast dishes and put them away, sponged the kitchen table, put out the garbage, and sat down with a second cup of coffee to wait patiently while his wife made them both late for work. He wondered what would happen if he were to rage and stamp about the room in his overcoat like the husband of popular fiction. He decided that he probably wasn't capable of it. He was a nice guy. That was the sort of thing you said about somebody you had nothing against and nothing in common with; you called him a nice guy. That was what Lowell was, even to himself. A nice, considerate guy.

“We're late!” cried his wife, bursting into the living room. “Oh, you
are
a darling. My hair wouldn't go right, it just wouldn't, and now we're late again. I suppose that's okay for you, you're important and everything, but I've already been late three times, and I'm going to get scolded by that old bitch again. Hurry! Hurry! You aren't even started yet.”

Lowell ambled in from the kitchen wearing, he knew, an absentminded but lovable smile. His face just sort of fell into it, and then, like a wrestler's hammerlock, he couldn't seem to break its grip.

“And you did the dishes, too,” said his wife in a hurried almost toneless voice, yanking herself into first one boot, then the other. “Aren't you sweet? Look at the time. Boy, I'm really in for it. Get a move on.”

As they waited for the elevator in the hall, Lowell asked, “What would you think if I cut off my moustache?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she snapped. Lowell had the impression that, combined with her hair problem and being late, his question had successfully ruined her day. It made him feel good for a while, but then he was ashamed of himself.

Lowell's cubicle at the office was slightly larger than a toilet stall, but no higher, and although the door said MANAGING EDITOR, Lowell always felt that the words had been printed there in the same spirit that moves service-station operators to paint KING on the door of the men's privy. The walls were a pale, smudged turquoise and didn't even come close to the high old ceiling, which seemed to exist up there on a plane of existence all its own, with its soot-furred sprinkler pipes and heating conduits, prepared to make the office wet in case of fire and warm in case of cold but otherwise having nothing to do with it. Lowell looked up at the ceiling a lot. He had very little else to do. Any nincompoop could run a magazine like theirs, and in fact one did: Crawford, who, fearful that anyone in the office but Lowell could do any job better than he could, ended up doing them all so that nobody would have a chance to show him up with a dazzling display of skill. About the only thing Lowell was clearly and indisputably in charge of was the advertising campaign. This consisted of inserting small boxes in the columns of like-minded publications, with the words: “Successful Plumbing Contractors Read the
Plumbing Contractor's Weekly Sentinel
.” The slogan was over forty years old and never varied, nor did the size of the boxes or the publications in which they appeared; everything had all been set in smooth motion a decade before Lowell was born, and he saw no reason to tamper with it. The slogan sounded okay to him. Once a month he received a batch of bills. He initialed them and put them on his secretary's desk, and she saw to it that they were paid.

Small tasks came his way in the course of the day, mostly in the form of approving things other people had already done. He always approved things that other people had done, trusting them to know more about their jobs than he did, especially the accountant, a malicious and vituperative old pedant whom Crawford kept for the purpose of breaking the spirit of the office staff. He was also a pretty good accountant and a complete kiss-ass in his dealings with Lowell and Crawford, which was just fine with Lowell. Other people passed before his eyes in a kind of haze: young men on the way up in the industry, old men on the way down, stick-in-the-muds who had reached their level—they all strove together to put out a newspaper read only by plumbers if at all, and Lowell wished them well at their task. They came and went, but like endless ranks of soldiers, they were all the same to him. He was a string of cans, and nobody had tripped over him yet.

For nine years Lowell had nourished the pleasant delusion that his job was only temporary, a kind of stopping-off place where he was getting his breath and taking his bearings after the grim and disorganizing experience of his novel. The job had come to him, not through the want ads, but by means of his putative uncle-in-law Lester, a shadowy figure from his wife's family who seemed to be related to all of them equally and to no one specifically, any more than he had a specific occupation. He was the person you went to when you wanted something fixed up, and he fixed it up, often in ways that were puzzling; there was always something in his bag of tricks. He had an office in an old cast-iron building in downtown Brooklyn, although what he did there, aside from counsel his relatives, was vague. His name was not on the board in the lobby, and there was nothing on his door but a number. It was before this door, brushed and wearing his wedding suit, that Lowell appeared one morning long ago, having gotten lost first on the subway and then on Schermerhorn Street. It was difficult to tell whether to knock. He tried listening for office sounds, but the room was as silent as if it had been empty—a probable circumstance for a variety of reasons, chief among them being that Uncle Lester had no idea that he was coming and Lowell wasn't sure he was in the right building.

“Do something for you?” said a harsh voice in his ear, slicing through his reverie like a rusty knife. Lowell jumped as though goosed and spun around in a posture of startled guilt to confront a broad little man scarcely higher than his elbow but looking enormously strong, possibly because he was also enormously calm. “What? You're from the Board of Elections, right?” he asked, never taking his eyes from Lowell's face. They were very odd eyes. They were large, they seldom blinked, and they were extremely watchful. Behind them was no soul, only something calm and intelligent. Lowell had the queasy idea that a man with eyes like that would kill you in an instant if he thought it would do him any good, and neither enjoy it while he did it nor feel bad about it afterward.

“Uncle Lester?” he asked in a voice not quite itself.

“Go inside.”

Lowell hesitated, then opened the door and went inside. The little man followed him and closed it behind them. “You called me Uncle Lester,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“How come?”

“Well, I...”

“Wait a minute.” Pivoting so as to keep his eyes on Lowell at all times, Uncle Lester moved past him to the desk, picked up a telephone receiver, pushed a button, listened wordlessly for several seconds, and hung up. “Answering service,” he said. “You were saying.”

“Uncle Lester?”

“You said that already.”

“Well, you see, I married your niece Betty, I mean I'm married to her, we've been married for a while,” Lowell babbled while Uncle Lester gave him no help. Lowell began to feel like a first-class idiot, and his mission more and more took on the outlines of humiliating foolishness, as though he had suddenly found himself trotting beside a movie star begging to be given a break in pictures. “Well, anyway, I mean,” he continued.

“How's Leo these days?” Uncle Lester asked suddenly.

“He's fine,” said Lowell, wondering if this was some kind of test of his identity. He tried to think of something about Leo that would demonstrate to Uncle Lester that he knew him, but the kind of things that came to mind weren't the kind of things you say to a stranger about anyone, especially if the stranger was a relative. “Just fine,” said Lowell. “Saw him only the other day. He was looking swell.”

“What do you need?” asked Uncle Lester.

“Well, I'm kind of looking around for a job. I mean, Betty said maybe you could sort of give me some advice. I would have called, but nobody knew your number, so I just came over. If I came at the wrong time or something, I sure am sorry. I don't like to barge in like this. What I mean is...”

“What did you do before?”

“I was writing a novel.”

Some slight readjustment of Uncle Lester's features told Lowell that this last piece of information had finally certified him as a member of the family. He needed a job, and he'd been writing a novel. His credentials were complete: he was another dead-beat relative.

“Can you do paste-ups and mechanicals?” Uncle Lester asked.

“What's a paste-up?” asked Lowell.

“That's too bad,” said Uncle Lester. He wrote something on a pad, tore it off, and held it out. “Try this one. If it don't work out, come back and see me next Wednesday about eleven o'clock in the morning. It ought to work out.”

“I don't know how to thank you,” said Lowell. He wondered if he ought to shake hands, but Uncle Lester had put his hands back into his overcoat pockets, and Lowell didn't think he'd better risk it.

“It ought to work out,” Uncle Lester repeated. He took a step toward the door and nodded toward it curtly. “After you.”

Lowell thought it was strange that Uncle Lester was preparing to leave his office when he'd only just entered it. Maybe the office was only some kind of dummy, its doors and windows watched with mirrors and covered with guns, while Uncle Lester monitored his callers from a real office around the corner. Come to think of it, the place didn't look much like an office; there was no rug on the floor, the filing cabinet had all the earmarks of a prop, and there wasn't a piece of paper in sight. Wisely keeping his own counsel about these things, Lowell allowed himself to be herded into the hall. Uncle Lester carefully locked the door and turned to face him. “You got enough money for the subway?” he asked.

Lowell said he did, and before he could start in again with expressions of gratitude and humility, Uncle Lester turned and walked down the hall and around the corner without looking back. Lowell took the piece of paper to the address that was written on it and was immediately given a job writing copy about the doings of plumbers. His wife settled down almost as if a wand had been waved over her, bought a black garter belt, and never chewed gum again.

Having settled in his mind that his job was only temporary, Lowell was not ambitious and took things much as they came. It was easy work, and he went about it day after day rather in the same way that he sometimes wore a single suit for weeks on end. At first he and his wife had a few fitful discussions about children, but they kept putting it off, and soon their life had organized itself so comfortably that the idea just kind of petered out from lack of interest. Lowell's mother-in-law brought up the subject once or twice, driving it further back into the recesses of his mind, but eventually even she gave up.

Nine years: an endless chain of days, a rosary of months, each as smooth and round as the one before, flowing evenly through his mind. You could count on the fingers of one hand the events and pauses of all that time: two promotions; two changes of apartment (each time nearer the river); a trip to Maine, where he realized that his wife's legs had gotten kind of fat—five memories in nine years, each no more than a shallow design scratched on a featureless bead. It was life turned inside out; somewhere the world's work was being done and men were laboring in the vineyards of the Lord, Khrushchev was being faced down on the high seas, and Negroes were being blown up and going to jail, but all Lowell did was change his apartment twice, tell his wife to put on some pants, and get promoted faster than anybody else on the paper—a tiny, dim meteor in an empty matchbox. Nobody up at
Life
or on the staff of the
Paris Review
was sleeping badly and trembling for their job because of redhot Lowell Lake; he couldn't even remember the layout of his own apartment, and the doorman kept confusing him with someone named Mr. Stone who lived on the top floor. One day Lowell saw Mr. Stone. He was about fifty years old, almost bald, and had a furtive, terrified, scurrying air about him, as though momentarily expecting the pounce of an enormous cat. There was no similarity between them whatever except for the moustache, and Mr. Stone's was black, not blond, and probably dyed. The doorman was a notorious dimwit and about as useful as a potted fern, but Lowell brooded about it for weeks, and the next time Povachik called him “Mr. Stone” it was all he could do to keep from screaming in the man's face.

Seated at his desk with a sick feeling of dread in his stomach, Lowell stared at the ceiling and tried to think of something smart and meaningful that would impart a sense of purpose to his life and clothe his actions with nobility. Novel-writing was out. He'd reread his old manuscript two nights ago while drunk and last night while sober, but the perspective of years had not dimmed its overwhelming livid awfulness, and his relative condition while reading it did not alter his perception of it in the least; it read exactly the same when he was drunk as when he was sober. Over the years he'd developed a serviceable hack style that enabled him to say anything he had a mind to, provided it had to do with meetings, banquets, simple objects, and building codes; it was a style that tended to tire quickly, and something odd seemed to happen to it over distances longer than a couple of standard columns. It didn't get dull, exactly, but it started to look distinctly funny, like a man who had held his breath for too long. No doubt he could have done something about it, whipped it into some kind of shape, were it not for the fact that he had nothing whatever to write about. Every so often—although with steadily diminishing frequency—a weak urge, a kind of feeble longing, would afflict him, and he would feel the old need to get something down on paper, start another novel, work up a story, something. His ambition would burn palely for a while and then gutter out with nothing to show for itself. The truth was, he realized now, he had no subject matter. Nothing had ever happened to him. He'd grown up, gone to school, tried and failed to write a novel, and become the managing editor of a plumbers' newspaper. Written down with a straight face, his life would sound like one of those pointless Victorian morality tales, usually found in books entitled something like
Food for Thought
that his Sunday-school teacher had been so fond of reading aloud to the class. Once he'd almost been felled by a copy of
The New York Times
, and his doorman couldn't tell him apart from a fifty-year-old man. It was true that his parents ran a whorehouse, but he couldn't very well write about that; everyone in town would recognize them, and their feelings would be hurt. Anyway, except for the bald recital of the facts, he couldn't for the life of him think of how to turn his parents' occupation into a story. He was forced to conclude that the writing of fiction was definitely not his bag.