A Meaningful Life (19 page)

“Can I do something for you?” asked Lowell.

“My furniture,” said the man tonelessly.

“Your furniture?”

“My good suit of clothes,” said the man, staring into the room. “My underwear.”

Though Lowell now understood what had happened, he was understandably reluctant to comment on the situation. He had a feeling the old man was about to become either unpleasant or boring, and he wished he could think of some way to get rid of him both swiftly and quietly. There did not seem to be such a way. “The door was open,” he remarked gruffly, assuming an expression that he hoped would intimidate the old man without making him mad. “You'll find your property downstairs by the garbage cans.”

“My bed,” said the old man like Rachel reciting the names of her children. “My cabnit. My chester draws.”

“They're all downstairs,” repeated Lowell in a loud, firm voice. “They're downstairs by the garbage cans. Help yourself.”

“Downstairs. By the garbage cans.”

“That's right,” said Lowell. “Now, if you'll excuse me.”

The old man stood there as though rooted to the spot. Lowell waited for him to ask for money or have a fit, but nothing happened. Lowell thought about going back to work on the room, but somehow he didn't think he could do it with the old man watching him like that. He was pretty sure he couldn't do it. He knew he couldn't do it. “Listen,” he heard himself saying, “I'll give you a break.” He wondered why he'd said that. He didn't have anything special in mind, and he found himself looking at the old man for some kind of clue as to the nature of the break he ought to give him.

“That's okay,” said the old man in a sad but soothing voice. “Don't you go worrying about me. I can always sleep down at the mental hospital if nothing else comes up. That's where I work at, the mental hospital. I expect they'll let me have one of the empty beds. They do that sometimes.”

Lowell scarcely knew how to reply. “That's nice of them,” he said lamely.

“I got a good job there,” said the old man, motionless as a rock, his huge hands still hanging limply at his sides. “Pays good money. Ain't much to do. Just fucking the dog. That's all, just fucking the dog. Food's good too. We eats just what the crazy people do. They eats good.”

Fidgeting and embarrassed, Lowell wondered how long it would go on, but he suspected that the old man was capable of standing there, droning on and on like a radio recounting the bleak details of some utterly crushing national disaster, much longer than Lowell was prepared to wait for him to stop. He pictured himself grabbing the old fellow by the shoulders and trundling him down the stairs like another piece of furniture, but he didn't think he could really bring himself to do that. The old man probably wouldn't let him, anyway. He decided to go and look in his toolbox in hopes that it would distract him or give him a good idea; he couldn't imagine what. He bent over it and threw back the lid.

“See you around,” said the old man suddenly. He was gone like a shot, leaving Lowell to stare after him with some surprise and a great deal of relief. He guessed he'd never figure out these people, but then he turned back to his toolbox and experienced a moment of insight.

The old man had stolen his brand-new drill, his brand-new drill that he hadn't even used yet. Lowell hadn't even taken it out of its plastic case. The old man had stolen the plastic case, too. Nothing else was missing, and the old man had left the toolbox a good deal tidier than he'd found it. Lowell stared into the box mutely for some seconds. He wished he'd gotten to use his new drill at least once. He'd really been looking forward to it. Then he closed the toolbox and carefully locked it and hurried after the thief, knowing in his heart that he was already too late. He kind of hoped so; he had no idea what he would do if he caught him, and he was pretty sure there would be a scene.

To Lowell's secret relief, the old man had vanished. There was no one in the hall (at least, there was no one in the hall in front of him; behind him, doors were opening like a kind of wake), and out in the street everyone was a Negro. A few of them were skinny old men, but it was impossible to tell if one of them had stolen anything. Lowell had never believed that every Negro of a certain physical type looked like every other Negro of the same type, but he was willing to concede the point now; they all sure looked alike to him. One of them might even be the thief, for all he could tell. He supposed he could pick one at random. He thought about it for a minute, and then he decided not to. One thing continued to bother him: he could not for the life of him imagine how the old man had managed to hide the damn thing on his body. It was as big as a bowling ball, and you would think that at least there would be a bulge or something.

He returned to the little room, preceded by the sound of gently closing doors. They were always just ahead of him, like soft drum messages pacing an explorer through the jungle. He entered the front hall, and all the doors on the first landing closed; he reached the first landing, and all the doors on the second landing closed; he reached the second landing, and all the doors on the top floor closed. It was sort of like being in a haunted house, except that the house wasn't haunted, it was inhabited; that was the whole trouble. For all he knew, the thief might be hiding in one of these very rooms, plastered against the wall with every sense alert, like a partisan sweating out a Gestapo search. Lowell might be passing the very door even now. Big deal. He reached the empty room and sat down on the sill, and for a while nothing moved in the entire house. Then a door opened far below, someone spoke, and a child raced down the stairs, rattling a stick against the spindles of the banister. Gradually, at first with a kind of wariness and then with increasing confidence, the house came back to life and went about its business. Lowell sat on the sill a while longer, but now that he'd demolished all the furniture in the room and thrown the clothing in the street, there was really nothing left for him to do today. He hauled the bundles of broken bureau downstairs, and then he returned to the room and changed his clothes and took his toolbox and went home.

For some reason that Lowell didn't understand and that no one seemed able to explain, the accidental eviction of the old man had the same effect on the other tenants as the removal of a keystone. Soon everyone in the building was on the move. The elderly Puerto Rican couple were the first to go, nodding and smiling and refusing to be helped as they carried their furniture and possessions out to a U-Haul trailer that had miraculously appeared at the curb, apparently without benefit of car. Lowell put on his work clothes and watched them from the window of the old man's room, scarcely able to believe the stupendous burdens they were able to carry, or the boundless, wizened energy with which they scurried back and forth, mattresses and chairs held aloft, occasionally pausing at the curb to chat with a passing acquaintance. Lowell was glad that they apparently bore him no ill will. Once they caught sight of him in the window and waved. Lowell waved right back. Suffused with benevolence, he stood there and watched as they stole the stove and refrigerator from their apartment and heroically manhandled them into the trailer; it was no skin off his nose, and they were welcome to whatever they could take, provided it wasn't something he wanted. He wondered if, when they were finished loading, the old man would simply pick up the tongue of the U-Haul and trot off down the street with his ton of furniture and plunder like some kind of superhuman Spanish coolie; nothing seemed impossible. Presently a rust-splotched and fender-crumpled 1959 Chevrolet raced dangerously up the street, squealed to a halt in front of the house, screeched back and forth a couple of times with a smell of burning rubber, and eventually, with a good deal of horn blowing and happy shouting, took up a towing position of sorts at the head of the trailer. The doors opened and a half-dozen young men spilled out, all of them more or less drunk and apparently members of the same family. The trailer was hitched up with much
machismo
and to-do, the old people were somehow squeezed into the car, and they all roared off to wherever they were going, shouting and laughing, the tappets clattering, and a cloud of blue smoke rising in the air. Lowell heartily wished them well. He wondered who would come to help him move when the time came. He imagined Leo coming to help and getting in the way, carrying a pair of salt shakers and unable to figure out how to open the elevator door without putting one of them down on the floor. The image made Lowell feel sorry for himself, but not very much; anybody who had a father-in-law like Leo was bound to feel sorry for himself whenever the fact was called to his attention, and he'd gotten used to it over the years. It was too bad that he didn't have a big drunk Spanish family at a time like this, but he supposed you couldn't have everything.

The vacated apartment was empty and tidy if not very clean, and they had been careful about turning off the gas before removing the stove. Unlike many apartments, including Lowell's, the place looked like it had really been lived in by people, and he felt a little reluctant to start working on it so soon after they'd left; it still felt faintly inhabited. Lowell hesitated, but he reminded himself that he was there to do a job, not ponder, and presently he began his work of destruction. For a while it was like he was smashing someone else's dishes for no good reason, but soon he made enough of a mess that he didn't feel that way anymore.

The other tenants moved out shortly thereafter, although neither as amiably nor as colorfully. They moved out like people being evicted from their homes, sluggishly, resentfully, and destructively, smashing holes in the walls, scarring the hallway with their furniture, breaking the banister in two places, knocking out a couple of windows, stealing the brass pipes from the plumbing, and breaking off their keys inside the locks so that it was impossible to get into the rooms without taking off the doors. There was quite a little fad of key breaking, and sometimes Lowell wasn't able to get the pins out of the hinges and was forced to kick a door in, shivering the frame often knocking out a panel. He complained about it to Mr. Grossman, who told him that it was no goddamn problem of his in such a way that Lowell got a good idea of what it must be like to rent an apartment from him.

Every time someone moved out, Henry emerged from his room and watched them silently with his arms folded, like the general of a defeated army brooding over its retreat. One day, when all the rooms upstairs were empty, he went too. Lowell came back from work one day and he was gone, leaving his enormous collection of junk and offal behind, as if he'd been collecting it all these years for no other purpose than to give Lowell a hard time getting rid of it. A few days later Mrs. Blouse wandered upstairs to visit somebody, found nobody but Lowell, looked around at the heaps of rubble with the same expression she always had, and moved out the following afternoon. As for the crazy old white man and the silent Negro with no shoes, Lowell never did find out what became of them. It was a long time before he could bring himself to enter their rooms, but when he did, he found no sign of either of them except for a crumpled, dusty Pall Mall pack under one of the beds.

Nor did he ever get to see Mr. Grossman, who was represented at the closing by a lawyer of such intimidating respectability that he made Lowell feel like some kind of meek crook whenever he spoke to him. Sometimes Lowell wondered if Mr. Grossman existed at all, if he wasn't the creation of real-estate interests, doing voice imitations over the phone in order to collect rents and fight off city agencies and sell houses to people like Lowell. Anything seemed possible, even probable. Sitting there in the lawyer's office above Court Street with sleet rattling on the windows, money changing hands, and a great deal of incomprehensible but threatening nonsense going on all around him, he felt like a mental defective on trial for rape and witchcraft: he couldn't understand a word of it, but he had the distinct feeling that it would not end well. Papers were produced and signed; Lowell wrote checks, and they were taken from him; men conferred in glum, hushed voices with their heads close together, continually referring to Lowell as “him.”

“What's going on now?” he asked his lawyer at one point when things seemed held up. He hadn't written a check or signed a paper in five minutes, and the men at the other end of the table were involved in a lengthy intramural discussion that required them to pass a great many documents back and forth, indicating passages to each other with the ends of pencils.

“I don't know,” said Lowell's lawyer, turning up his palms in a gesture of helpless ignorance. He was a weak little man who was some kind of relative of Leo's. Lowell had hired him for want of a better idea, never having needed a lawyer before and therefore knowing none. He would have dismissed him long before now, but the man inspired his pity, and besides, he knew he would never hear the end of it from Leo if he did. “I think it's some bank business,” the lawyer suggested after a moment, not with much confidence. “They usually do bank business about this time. I think that's what it must be. Bank business.” He began to rifle frantically through his briefcase as though the answer might be found there if only he could lay hands on it, meanwhile throwing Lowell nervous, ingratiating glances over the tops of his glasses. “Hey, heh,” he said.

Lowell looked out the window. The sleet was coming down worse than ever.

Eventually matters got unstuck at the far end of the table, no thanks to Lowell's lawyer, and the affair ground on to its conclusion. Lowell wrote more checks and signed more papers.

“That's the city man,” whispered Lowell's lawyer, indicating a person who had just come into the room and seated himself without taking off his hat. A mumble of greeting flowed around the table. The city man handed the bank man a document, and the bank man handed it to Mr. Grossman's lawyer, who studied it. Lowell noticed that nobody ever seemed to hand his lawyer anything. “You have to give him five dollars,” whispered his lawyer.