A Meaningful Life (20 page)

“Who?”

“Shh. The city man. You have to give him five dollars. Get it ready.”

“Why do I have to do that? Suppose I don't have five dollars? Can I write him a check?”

Lowell's lawyer signaled frantically for him to lower his voice and met his last suggestion with a look of horror. “No! No!” he whispered hoarsely. “You don't understand. Just give him the five dollars and forget about it.”

“You mean this is a bribe?”

Silence fell, and everyone seemed to stop moving for a second. No one looked at Lowell. The city man was still wearing his hat. Another second passed, and then, as though a spell had been lifted, they all went back to doing whatever they'd been doing when Lowell spoke, just as if he hadn't spoken at all.

“I'm not paying any bribe,” he whispered to his lawyer, indignant but also a little daunted. “It's against everything I believe in. I've never paid a bribe in my life.”

Every time Lowell uttered the word “bribe,” his lawyer winced visibly, as though Lowell was flicking fingers at his face. “Mr. Lake,” he whispered. “Mr. Lake, please, please, you don't understand. This is a very sensitive topic. Listen, if you like, I'll slip him the money myself. It's not usual, but I'm sure he'll understand. The usual thing is for the buyer to slip him the money.”

Lowell looked at him stonily. “What will happen if I don't give it to him?”

“People always give it to him. It's part of buying a house. He always gets it. I've never known a time when he didn't get it. It's usual.”

“Are you trying to tell me you don't know what will happen if I don't give him his five dollars? Is that what you're trying to tell me?”

“I'll give it to him myself,” pleaded the lawyer, casting desperate looks toward the other end of the table. “Please, out of my own pocket I'll give it to him. My own money. Just stop talking about it. Please just stop talking about it. Please?” He dug out his wallet and looked into it miserably.

“Okay,” said Lowell. “I'll pay him.”

His lawyer sort of collapsed a little with relief and swiftly put his wallet away. “You'd better get it ready now,” he told Lowell. “Any minute now he'll come over here to shake your hand.”

“Get it ready? What do you mean, get it ready? I'll give it to him when he gets here.”

“No no no no no no no,” begged the lawyer. “Please. There's a way these things are done, a way. They're always done that way, and you have to do it, otherwise it won't be right and everything will be wrong. You have to fold the money up in a little pellet and slip it to him under the table. That's what you have to do, you have to fold it up. Hurry, hurry, he'll be here in a minute. Oh, God.”

“Why do I have to fold it up? Doesn't everybody know about it?”

“Everybody knows about it, everybody knows about it. You just have to do it that way, don't ask me why. Just do it.” The lawyer gave a little whimper.

Pondering the fact that he was not only going to have to bribe a city official but do so in secret although everybody at the table knew he was doing it and perhaps would not sell him his house if he didn't, Lowell slowly drew out his wallet and removed a five-dollar bill. He supposed it was some kind of a comment on American culture and morals, but for the time being he wasn't worrying so much about morality as he was about whether or not he was doing something dumb. Just because he'd never paid a bribe before didn't mean it wasn't procedural, he supposed; he'd never bought a rooming house before, either. Suddenly he found himself wondering if people like him did indeed ever buy rooming houses. What if he was the first one? He hadn't even checked. The thought didn't make him feel any smarter, and he gazed dully at the money in his hand.

“Hurry, hurry!” begged his lawyer. “They're shaking hands. Fold it up!”

The city man was getting to his feet, chuckling conspiratorially with the bank man and Mr. Grossman's lawyer. Lowell knew instinctively that the city man wouldn't chuckle with him or his lawyer; they weren't the kind of people city men chuckled with. This knowledge made him feel small and unhappy. He folded up the five-dollar bill.

“Fold it up more!” whispered his lawyer. “Fold it up smaller! Get it out of sight, get it out of sight! Here he comes!”

Considerably unnerved by his lawyer's frantic excitement, Lowell rose to greet his bribee. He was surprised to discover that he was nearly a foot taller, even when you counted the hat. For some reason, this discovery didn't make him feel any better; it only made him feel thin. The city man was smiling tightly and with confidence, his eyes twinkling with amused contempt. Lowell knew he would never be able to smile like that, not even if he were to practice in front of the mirror for the rest of his life. There were no tight smiles in him at all. He wished that at least he'd learned to ride a horse when he was younger. He didn't know why, but somehow he thought it might have made him feel better at moments like this.

“Well, Mr. Lake,” said the city man, sticking out his hand. Lowell looked at it without comprehension. From what his lawyer had said, he was pretty sure he wasn't supposed to put the money in it, but for the life of him he couldn't think of anything else to do. He'd been thinking so hard about doing one thing that he simply wasn't eqipped to think about doing another, although he was aware that the room had fallen strangely silent.

“Shake his hand, shake his hand!” whispered his lawyer in a squeaking voice that was apparently close to tears. “For God's sake, shake his hand!”

“Oh,” said Lowell. He shook the city man's hand. “How do you do?” he asked.

The city man, still smiling tightly, looked at him steadily. “Pretty well,” he said. “How are you?”

“Oh,” said Lowell, “just fine.” He had the bribe pellet in his other hand, but he'd been given no instructions beyond “slip it to him,” and he couldn't figure out how to do it. Maybe there was a special time, or maybe they had to do something else first, who knew? He continued to shake the city man's hand, awaiting developments, although he'd already shaken the city man's hand longer than he'd ever shaken anybody's hand except for his Aunt Maudie's, who was crazy as a bedbug and occasionally had to be gently pried loose from someone she'd latched on to.

“Give it to him!” croaked Lowell's lawyer in a voice that must have been audible to everyone in the room. He poked Lowell's bribe hand to emphasize his point. “Why don't you give it to him?”

Wishing that he knew what he was doing, Lowell started to sort of sidle the bribe across the space between himself and the city man, but his muscles were all tensed up and he found it hard to move with either accuracy or purpose. His lawyer gave him another punch in the arm, and the bribe fell from his lifeless fingers. “Oh, my God,” said his lawyer, burying his head in his hands.

“I think you dropped something,” said the city man. “Here, I'll get it for you if you'll let go of my hand for a second.” Feeling like a mechanical toy, Lowell forced himself to stop shaking the city man's hand. The city man bent over and searched the floor. “Nope,” he said. “I guess you didn't drop nothing after all.”

“Huh?” said Lowell.

“Nope,” said the city man, straightening up. “If there was anything down there, it's gone now. Forget about it.” He slapped, then squeezed Lowell's shoulder. “It gets easier after the first time, kid. See you around.” He told the others he would see them around too. Mr. Grossman's lawyer and the bank man nodded gravely. Lowell's lawyer took a pill.

The rest did not take long. Everyone sat around for a second as though in silent prayer, and then there was a good deal of throat clearing and paper shuffling, and Lowell was asked to write another check. In a few minutes he was handed his deed. He'd been handed so many things in the last few hours that it was a while before he realized what he was holding, and then it didn't seem like much.

“Well,” said his lawyer in a voice weak from strain, “that wasn't so bad, was it?” He mopped his face and watched Lowell write out a check for his fee with a queer expression of anxious yearning, like someone who was trying to stop smoking watching another person light up a cigarette. “Whoo,” he said when Lowell handed him the check. `Oh, boy, what a day. I swear to God, no more favors for the family. I swear this is the last time, positively.”

“You got paid,” said Lowell.

“That's not it,” said the lawyer, picking up his briefcase. “You don't understand.”

“How do you feel?” asked the bank man, peering at Lowell with the kind of mixture of sharpness and anxiety that is usually reserved for prostrate accident victims and women who have just had a baby. “Everything okay?”

“Just fine,” said Lowell.

“Congratulations,” said Mr. Grossman's lawyer in the perfunctory manner of a grocer asking a shoplifter if he can help him.

Lowell told them good-bye. He put on his hat and coat and went home. His wife was waiting for him in the living room, and although it was only three o'clock in the afternoon it was evident that she was pretty drunk. She was sitting in the Eames chair, watching the sleet. “Aruba,” she said when Lowell entered.

“Well,” said Lowell in a tone of forced good cheer, “we own a house.”

“I don't own any house,” said his wife. “It belongs to you and old Cyrus What's-his-name. Leave me out of it.”

“Darius,” said Lowell. “Darius Collingwood.”

“I could have been in Jamaica by now,” said his wife.

“At least you could get his name right. You're only trying to get at me. I can tell. Otherwise I wouldn't care. It's the principle of the thing.”

“Sure,” said his wife. “That's right.”

“You're goading me again,” said Lowell, looking around for the bottle and mixer. He found them in the kitchen and made himself a drink. “Darius Collingwood has nothing to do with it. I mean, of course Darius Collingwood has something to do with it, but not the way you think he has. He has something to do with it in another way.”

“Seven thousand dollars,” said his wife. She watched the sleet. “Cyprus.”

“Darius,” said Lowell automatically.

“I didn't say Cyrus,” said his wife. “I said Cyprus. Not Cyrus. Cyprus is a place. Cyprus is real.”

“Where's your glass? I'll make you another drink.”

“I don't have a glass,” said his wife. She got up suddenly and left the room. Lowell looked around after she was gone, but it was true: she hadn't had a glass. If she hadn't had a glass, she couldn't have been drinking. Lowell knew his wife wouldn't have drunk out of the bottle. But if she hadn't been drinking, what had she been doing? It did not take Lowell very long to hit upon that one, although he was not very pleased with it when he got it. She'd been crying. She cried so seldom that he'd almost forgotten what she looked like when she did, and that was why he'd assumed that she was drunk. The two states did not manifest themselves in dissimilar ways. Lowell made himself another drink. Soon he had a third one, and presently it was possible to forget about the whole thing until he went to bed. His wife did not return, and he had leftovers for supper. When he finally joined her, she was pretending to be asleep. Lowell could tell that she was pretending—under the sheet her body was as rigid as a fencepost, and her eyes were squinched tightly shut as though against the glare of a powerful light—but he was a good fellow about it and pretended not to know that she was pretending. Shortly thereafter, without anything further having developed, he drifted off himself and slept soundly all night long.

Fortunately he had nothing resembling a plan, so he didn't have to worry about things not working out according to it. He simply let them happen, unable to make up his mind whether he was losing his judgment or finally developing some perspective. He didn't have much time to brood about the matter; for the first time in years so many things were happening to him that he actually forgot some of them. Even his hours at the office were full, phoning architects and contractors, making appointments to interview them, studying the building code, and reading up on the history of Brooklyn. He bought a half-dozen books full of helpful tips for the home handyman and went through them thoroughly, taking notes and making lists, the majority of which he misplaced. He was amazed at how little he knew about the simplest things. He didn't even know how to fix a leaky faucet. For years he'd listened to jokes about people who were so dumb that they didn't know how to fix a leaky faucet, but it had never occurred to him before that he was one of them; there were a dozen leaky faucets in his house and he couldn't have fixed them if his life depended on it. He didn't even know how to begin.

Lunches with Crawford and trips to McSorley's with Balmer soon became things of the past; a slice of pizza was his portion at noon as he hastened from hardware store to hardware store, trying out tools and being sold things that his books said he ought to have. It was great fun. In the evening he took his day's purchases over to Brooklyn and tried them right out, or else he carefully put them aside in his apartment until the time came to put them to work; in some cases the opportunity never came, and there were one or two exotic-looking tools whose exact functions he actually forgot, not that he cared.

He was suddenly famous. In a building where he had labored five days a week for nine years without a single person asking him what he did, he suddenly found himself cloaked in a highly conspicuous new identity: he became known as the Guy Who Moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant. He tried to persuade them that he hadn't moved yet and that it wasn't Bedford-Stuyvesant, but nobody listened to him, and he thought that it was symptomatic of the feeble grip he'd taken on the memories and imaginations of his colleagues over the years that nobody ever referred to him as the Managing Editor Who Moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant. He found it difficult to care.

As for his wife, she left him.

She left him at the end of the second week and went to her mother's. During the two weeks she had steadfastly refused to join Lowell at the house, not even to keep him company, and they even stopped having supper together. Lowell usually picked up a ham sandwich at the bodega on Greene Avenue and washed it down with beer; he had no idea what his wife ate, or where. They continued to eat breakfast together, after a fashion: they sat at the same table and devoured food, with the radio tuned to WNCN. It was a curious situation, but it seemed perfectly natural to Lowell at the time. He spent his nights dreaming of rooms and hammers, and he woke up full of plans. During breakfast he thought about them. Occasionally his wife made attempts at conversation, but he couldn't keep his mind on what she was saying, and after a few minutes she just sort of ran down for want of response. In fact, he more or less forgot about her for long periods of time, and when he came home one night and found the bed empty and unslept in, there was a moment when he couldn't remember whether she'd been in it last night, either. Anyway, the point was that she wasn't in it now. Her clothes were also gone, as were her cosmetics. Lowell wasn't sure what he ought to do about it. At least he knew that you didn't call the police. You only did that when people were missing, and his wife wasn't missing, she was only gone. Lowell supposed he ought to search for a note; on television they always left a note when they walked out on you or killed themselves. He looked around the room for a while, but when he found no trace of one he decided to go make himself a cup of coffee instead. He wondered if it was significant that he always ended up in the kitchen when there was a crisis in his life.