A Meaningful Life (2 page)

Lowell wasn't aware that he'd said anything.

“I thought you said something,” she muttered. She yawned. “Maybe you were dreaming or something. It sounded like a groan.”

“It's nothing,” said Lowell. “I was just, um, stretching.” He stretched and groaned elaborately, demonstrating. “Like that,” he said. “That must have been what you heard.”

“Mum,” she said. “Come back to bed and wait for the alarm.”

Normally Lowell stayed in bed for as long as he could, fighting wakefulness and never totally giving up. Sometimes on weekends he stayed in bed until noon and then dragged himself heavily around the apartment until it was time to go to sleep again. This morning he looked at his bed with fear and loathing.

“I'm too awake for that,” he said. His wife rolled over and went back to sleep.

Lowell dressed furiously. He wanted to be out of the room before the alarm rang and he had to watch his wife hoist on her girdle and buckle on her bra. Usually he was half-asleep when this happened, and he didn't think he could stand it, somehow, awake. Tucking in his shirt with desperate haste, he raced down the hall to the bathroom, first making an inaccurate feint in the direction of the kitchen. The apartment was constructed around a narrow, wormlike central hall, and although he'd lived there for three years, Lowell had never gotten the hang of it.

Peeing, then shaving with considerable speed and indifferent accuracy, he trotted down the hall to the kitchen (having first taken a step toward the living room) just as the alarm clock went off. It was a hateful sound. In a moment it stopped, and he heard his wife beating the pillow where his head should have been.

“Lowell?” she called, not too confidently. “Dear?”

“In the kitchen,” Lowell said. “Making coffee.”

“Oh,” she said. There was a pause. “Oh, yes, I remember. You got up.”

“That's right,” said Lowell. “I got up.” He held his hand in front of his face and watched the fingers tremble. He giggled nervously, then stopped himself.

“Something's the matter with you this morning,” said his wife as they sat down to their instant coffee and frozen coffee cake. They were not great breakfast people. “You look kind of funny. Was it something in the news?”

“Thirty,” said Lowell before he thought. “I mean,” he corrected himself, “no, there's nothing the matter. What makes you think something's the matter? I just woke up early, that's all. Is there something wrong with waking up early?”

“Forget I said anything,” said his wife. They put on their coats and went down to the subway together. At 42nd Street his wife got off the train and transferred to the shuttle, which took her to the place where she punched computer keys, or whatever she did over there. Lowell continued downtown, wearing a tweed cap. He stared bleakly at his dim, jostled reflection in the window. It was a silly tweed cap.

“What in God's name is the matter with you this morning?” demanded his boss, a man named Crawford. As a youth, Crawford had developed a fixation about Perry White, editor of the
Daily Planet
, which had molded his character and determined the course his life was to take. He looked back on those days with nostalgia and regret, but he would have cut out his tongue before admitting that his life had been shaped by a minor character in a child's radio serial, the comic-book counterpart not having affected him in the least, but there was no getting around it. Most of the time he managed not to think about it, but every once in a while awareness would suddenly strike him and he would feel like a supreme ass. “Pay attention, Lake!” he barked. “I said, what's the matter with you?”

“I heard you,” said Lowell, who had been doing random violence to the papers on his desk, picking up one and throwing it away, scribbling a note on the margin of another, driven by a fierce but aimless need. “Keep your shirt on,” he snapped.

Crawford gave a startled little hop and looked at Lowell with a face on which fear was close to the surface. A modest man, not much older than Lowell, Crawford lived in constant terror that one day his job would be snatched from him by a smart subordinate. He firmly believed that an office boy with pluck and stamina could rise to be editor, and he was accordingly careful to select his office personnel for cowardice and lethargy. In fact, he'd never had a spot of trouble with office boys, but he'd once been forced to make life so miserable for a junior copy editor that the man had finally quit, a little hysterically. The somnolent Lowell Lake was just his sort of man, and Crawford had seen to it that he rose swiftly through the ranks to a position where he served as a buffer against any threat from below. The road to the editorship lay through the managing editorship, and even if they got Lowell, it would still be possible for Crawford to pick them off before they were able to gather for another spring. Under these circumstances, Lowell's sudden display of unprecedented energy was alarming indeed, and Crawford scarcely knew how to deal with it. It contradicted nature and defied experience and confirmed his darkest and most secret fears that someday they would contrive to get him no matter what he did to stop them.

“Any idiot could do this kind of work,” Lowell snarled, regarding a piece of paper as though some outrageous insult were written upon it. He initialed it viciously, put it in his Out basket, and picked up another. “Any idiot,” he repeated.

“Now, see here, Lake,” began Crawford hesitantly.

“Do you realize that I've never fixed a pipe in my life?” Lowell raged. “What do I know about plumbing? I'll tell you what I know about plumbing. I don't know shit about plumbing.”

“Has everybody around here gone stark staring mad?” bellowed Crawford in desperate mimicry of his hero. He stuck the cold stump of a cigar in his mouth and stormed into his office, braying the name of the senior copy editor, who promptly appeared, only to be told to go soak his head.

“I've got it figured out,” Lowell told his wife that night as they prepared supper together. Lowell was cutting up the vegetables and his wife was cutting up the meat. “I know what my problem is. I'm not having a meaningful life. There you have it in a nutshell.”

“I knew there was something the matter with you this morning,” said his wife.

“There was nothing the matter with me this morning,” said Lowell, taking a big swallow of his gin and tonic. He'd been drinking gin and tonic since he came home, and by now he was pretty drunk. “I mean, that wasn't it. It was something else. Do you realize that something has been the matter with me for years? Years?”

His wife looked at him over her shoulder with an expression of perplexity tinged with alarm, as though she considered it possible that he was on the verge of confessing a secret passion for Arlo Povachik, their middle-aged, half-witted doorman who was seldom on duty when he was supposed to be. “I don't understand what you're talking about,” she said. “You're not being very clear. Maybe you can explain it better.” For a computer expert, she did not grasp concepts very easily, if at all, but she was tenacious and seldom gave up. Her mind was capable of worrying an unclear concept for hours on end, shaking it like a rag doll until she had found out whether it was good for her, bad for her, significant in any way, or utterly meaningless. In recent years, Lowell had grown wary of this apparently incurable tendency, and he was usually able to nip it in the bud with a swift, simplistic lie. He lied now, drunk as he was.

“I don't know what was the matter with me this morning,” he said, unsteadily pouring himself a fresh drink with more gin in it than tonic. He returned to the table and began to slice up the carrots every which way. “I must have been having a dream.”

“Let me do that,” said his wife, confiscating the carrots with a loving expression.

Later, seated alone in the dimly lighted, curiously shaped living room of his apartment, full of dinner, sexually sated, and still pretty drunk, Lowell sipped ice water and brooded about his life. His parents owned a motel on Highway 30, just outside of Boise, Idaho. They were absentminded, pale, thin people who seemed completely unaware that they were running a love nest for downtown merchants, students from the junior college, and state politicians, among whom they were treasured for their permissiveness, probity, and discretion. (Actually, it was mostly just absentmindedness.) Lowell had a pleasant, undemanding childhood, free from influences either stimulating or depressing. He did well in school, largely because he had an excellent memory and an undemanding personality. It was some years before he realized that his parents ran a kind of self-service whorehouse, and even then it didn't bother him much. Nobody else seemed to think anything of it; a couple of the regular girls had been his mother's coffee friends for as long as he could remember, and it neither impressed nor upset him to think that some of the most respected and powerful men in the state took off their pants in rooms he cleaned every morning. He graduated fifth in his high-school class, behind three home-economics majors and a strange-looking veterinarian's son who had bad skin and never talked to anybody, and who committed suicide the following September, the day after Labor Day.

On the strength of his grades (and somewhat to his surprise), Lowell was accepted at Stanford, but his family had never made any money out of their motel despite the fact that it never had a slack season, and they didn't have the money to send him. Lowell wanted to go to Stanford pretty badly now that it had accepted him, and after much thought he screwed up his courage and wrote a letter to the most powerful politician he knew, Judge Lionel B. Crosby. Judge Crosby stopped by the place every once in a while, and he was fond of saying that if there was anything he could do for you, just call. He had often expressed an admiration for Lowell's intelligence, putting his hand on Lowell's head and sort of kneading it as though trying to feel his brain through the skull. Lowell didn't like him very much.

Lowell read it over and decided it was a pretty terrible letter. It didn't look a bit like the kind of courtly, terse letter people were always writing to Sherlock Holmes when they implored his assistance, and Lowell put it aside. He made three more attempts. He was unable to finish two of them, and the syntax of the third was so tangled that it made no sense whatever. He scarcely knew what to do, and with a kind of sick despair he mailed the first letter after all. He immediately thought better of it, but it was in the box, and there was nothing he could do about it but sit and wait for someone to come and scold him about it.

The letter frightened Judge Crosby out of his wits.

At three-month intervals for five years, Judge Crosby had met a middle-aged traveling bandleader at Lowell's parents' motel and spent the night with him. The judge thought it was a very dirty, sinful thing to do, but he had yielded to his passions long ago and could no longer help himself. He lived with his aged mother in a big old house in the heart of town, where he had a book-lined study with a bust of Homer and a handsome marble fireplace. In this fireplace he burned certain letters he received on the second Monday of every month and also the various publications that came to him from New Jersey in manila envelopes marked “Educational Materials.” In the summer he scattered the ashes in the garden under the shrubs, where they would do the most good. In the winter he put them on the sidewalk with the clinkers, and nobody was the wiser.

For years the judge had lived in constant terror of blackmail and exposure. His mind had dwelt for two decades with the turgid subtleties and intricate sharp practice of the law, until, like a doctor who sees symptoms wherever he looks, he could think no other way, and whenever he tried to imagine what a blackmail letter would look like, it always looked very much like the letter Lowell had sent him. It was the kind of letter the judge would have written if he'd been trying to blackmail someone; the threat was there, but it was nothing you could put your finger on in court. He didn't doubt for a minute that the little son-of-a-bitch had gotten the goods on him; it was plain as a pikestaff, and the chickens had come home to roost. He always knew it would happen someday. The judge's opponent in the next election was an unscrupulous nincompoop who would love to know his guilty secret and who would love telling people about it even more. He supposed that Lowell planned to place the information in his hands if the judge failed to meet his terms. If the judge had been in Lowell's place, that was exactly what he would have done. In fact, he'd already done something pretty much like it, not once but a couple of times.

The judge spent all afternoon locked in his study with Lowell's letter and a bottle of heart pills. He was so utterly certain that he was being blackmailed that it never occurred to him for a moment that he might not be; Judge Crosby had waited so long to be blackmailed that if he hadn't been, it was altogether possible that he would have gone to his grave a disappointed man, kind of relieved to get it all over with but feeling strangely unfulfilled. At the end of the day he put Lowell's letter in the fireplace and burned it, crumbling the ash with the tip of a poker. Then he sat down at his desk and began a hearty, avuncular letter of reply, concerning a confidential private fund, the existence of which was not widely known.