A Meaningful Life (8 page)

“I hear you're going to New York,” said his ex-roommate, meeting him one morning on the quad.

“That's right,” said Lowell, giving his friend a look of dumb appeal. “My wife is against it, but my mind is made up. Unless something happens pretty soon, we're really going to New York for sure.”

“Look up my uncle,” said his ex-roommate. “One hell of a guy.”

“I'll do that,” said Lowell.

One by one the familiar lights were going out in his life. He already felt like a stranger. He was no longer anybody he knew; he was somebody who was going to New York.

“I can take it or leave it,” he told everybody. “If I don't like it, I can always come right back. Nothing to it. Get in the car and start her up.”

“Be sure and go to Roseland,” said the sub-librarian, a faded little man who was cruel to his children. “I was there once, during the war. Roseland Dance City. It was real nice.”

“I might not be there very long,” said Lowell. “I might not like it there.”

“Wish I was going,” said the sub-librarian. “All I ever had was a three-day pass. Hell of a place.”

Lowell was glad that New York was supposed to be a good place to write novels in and that a lot of people had actually done so, because that was what he'd decided to do—write a novel. He wished it didn't feel like so much of an afterthought, because he'd always wanted to write a novel, he really had. He'd even started a couple of them, but although they were pretty dirty, they weren't very good and he'd gotten rid of them before somebody accidentally stumbled across them and made fun of them. He wondered what would have happened if, instead of New York, he'd said something like, “Hey, let's go to Greece. I read where everybody is going there this year.” His wife would probably have told him he was out of his mind.

“I'll have to go to work,” she told him. Ever since they started getting ready to go to New York, she'd been given to the utterance of sudden, sharp pronouncements, most of them ukases of one sort or another. “In Berkeley we would have had your scholarship, but in New York there's no other way.”

“You won't have to work,” said Lowell. “I'll get a job somewhere and write at night.”

“Not on your life,” said his wife. “I know all about you. You'll never write a line if you get a job. You just haven't got it in you. What kind of a job?”

“I thought maybe I'd drive a cab,” mused Lowell. “Drive a cab and write at night.” He saw himself driving his cab, putting down the flag and asking people where they wanted to go, storing matches in the band of his yellow-cab-driver's hat.

“Great,” said his wife. “That's just great. I can't tell you how that idea really grabs me. What do you think this is,
The Jackie Gleason Show?
I want you to meet my husband the cab-driver, I met him in college? I think you've really gone out of your mind. I think you've finally flipped. I have to travel three thousand miles and work my ass off for four years in order to marry a New York cab driver? I don't think you know how bizarre that really is. I don't even believe it. I've never worn a housedress in my life. At least you could have said you wanted to be a riveter. I might have been able to take that with some kind of grace, not much maybe, but a little. Riveters make good money and there'd be a nice little pension for me if you walked off a beam up there in the sky. I liked it better when you wanted to be a cowboy.”

Deep down inside, Lowell still wanted to be a cowboy, and he was not only stung but strangely saddened by his wife's scorn of his most secret places, almost as if she'd attacked him by mentioning one of the really dirty things he wanted to do in bed. “You don't understand,” he said weakly, knowing that he could never explain the innocence of his purpose, the purity of his motive. “It wasn't much of a scholarship anyway,” he muttered.

“Listen,” said his wife, “a writer is what you're setting out to be, and a writer is what you're going to end up, not a cab-driver. What do you know about driving a cab? The man I married a couple of months ago was going to be a college professor, in case you've forgotten. If I wanted to marry a cab-driver, I could have stayed in Flatbush. I could have done better than that if I'd stayed in Flatbush. I could have married Harry Ingleman. His father owns a whole
fleet
of cabs!”

Lowell rose abruptly and went into the kitchen to make himself a drink, but the bottle was gone.

“I threw it out,” said his wife. “You've been drinking too much. I had an uncle who drank too much, and I know all about it.”

Curiously, although their life together was terrible and they hadn't made love in more than a week, she was wearing all his favorite clothes and her cooking had never been better.

“There's still time,” said Lowell on the last morning as he settled himself behind the wheel and put the key in the ignition. “We can still change our minds.” The old car was dangerously laden; for some reason, although they had relatively few possessions, they had contrived to find a great many big heavy containers to put them in. Not ten minutes ago their landlady had confiscated their deposit on the grounds that she couldn't find another tenant in the middle of the month, which Lowell knew to be a bald-faced lie even though he couldn't prove it. Otherwise everything was fine. The University of California had been informed by mail that he would not be needing their nice scholarship after all, thanks very much. Lowell had said good-bye to his friends. Sentimentally, he vowed to say good-bye to one friend a day, but he soon ran out of friends and he ended up saying good-bye to some people twice because he kept running into them on campus. He said good-bye to his roommate four times. It was all kind of embarrassing, and after a while he got the idea that people were looking at him in a funny way. “How about it?” he asked his wife, whose face was hard as stone.

“It's too late for that,” she said. “This isn't the place. Drive on.”

It was hard to believe that changing your life could be as easy as flipping a switch, but that was exactly what happened: Lowell turned the key in the ignition and drove away from everything he had ever known in his life. They went across the bay and over the hills and down into the valley and over the mountains, and the next day they crossed Nevada and after that they were no place Lowell had ever been or imagined he would go.

“Do you realize that I'm the first member of my family to cross this thing in a hundred years?” said Lowell as they bridged the Mississippi at Saint Louis. His emotions were strange and sinking, but not precise enough to put a name to.

“Big deal,” said his wife.

They came to New York at night, hurtling through a hellish New Jersey landscape the likes of which Lowell had never dreamed existed, a chaos of roadways and exits, none of which made any sense, surrounded by smoke and flashes and dark hulking masses and pillars of real fire a thousand feet high, enveloped in a stench like dog's breath and dead goldfish.

“There it is,” said his wife.

“Where? Where?” cried Lowell, bending over the wheel, uncertain of anything, his heart in his mouth and his mind in a fog. The geometry of the place was all wrong, and nothing made sense.

“Over there,” said his wife.

Out of the corner of his eye Lowell caught a fleeting glimpse of something huge and calm-looking in the distance, but his perspective was shattered by neon and oncoming lights, and at that moment a sign convinced him that it was really a truck, and he almost ran into a real truck that he hadn't even noticed. He swung away from it in the nick of time, only to be confronted by a fork in the roadway, each half marked with a meaningless sign.

“Which way? Which way?” he shouted to his wife.

“Beats me,” she said.

And so they came to New York.

When Lowell woke up the next morning, he was astonished to discover that he wasn't in New York after all. He was in Brooklyn instead. Somehow that frightened him. He couldn't remember coming to Brooklyn. He couldn't remember anything but highways and tunnels. He felt like a man emerging from some kind of coma. The desk clerk got quite a kick out of it.

“We're in Brooklyn,” he told his wife when he returned to the room. She was just waking up, and she didn't look a bit surprised, although she did look a little pissed-off.

“That's right,” she said. “The St. George Hotel. What's so strange about that?”

“How did we get to Brooklyn? I don't remember coming to Brooklyn.”

“We came by car and you drove us,” she said, swinging her legs out of bed. “Ask me about it later.”

She went into the bathroom and began running the water. Lowell sat down in the nearest available chair and felt dumb. He didn't ask her about it later.

“Let me show you the sights,” his wife suggested as they finished their breakfast in the restaurant downstairs. Lowell felt the weight of the enormous building overhead. “Borough Hall is right down the street.” She gestured vaguely.

“Later,” said Lowell. “I never wanted to come to Brooklyn to begin with. Now we've got to go back to New York and find a place to live.”

“For your information, Cholly Knickerbocker, Brooklyn
is
in New York,” said his wife primly. He hated it when she did that. “There are some very nice places to live in Brooklyn. This is the Heights. The best people live here. I'll bet you knew that already.”

First Lowell had missed New York in the dark, and now he was being pressured to live in Brooklyn. Pressured was exactly it: he felt as though his brain and body were being inexorably squeezed like a tube of toothpaste. The building was above him and his wife's mouth was across the table, the first pushing down and the other sort of slapping at him lightly but incessantly. He wasn't even properly awake. He was still tired from all the driving he'd done, and every time he closed his eyes, he saw nothing but highway. “No,” he said. “I mean, that's not what I had in mind. I had Manhattan in mind, actually, and I think we ought to go there pretty soon and find a place to live before our money runs out.”

“Whatever you say,” said his wife. “If you are determined to lie in the bed you made, far be it from me to sprinkle it with cornflakes. I have to call my mother.”

She called her mother from a nearby phone booth, but she did not share their conversation with Lowell when she returned. “I told her we were here,” she said, her eyes staring fiercely into some middle distance where everything was stupid. Then she guided him back over the bridge and into Manhattan, where he had made his bed.

By the end of the first day they'd taken an Upper West Side apartment that was not only very clean and too small, but far too expensive. It was in an old brownstone, and once upon a time it had been somebody's dining room, but you would never have guessed by looking at it. It looked like a room in one of the newer dormitories at school, except that it had a kitchen and was not pastel-colored. There were two windows at one end of the room and a stove and a sink at the other; off to one side was a refrigerator, and off to another was a sort of independent cubicle that seemed to have been stuck on as an afterthought and which contained a closet and a bathroom, facing in opposite directions. The whole apartment was painted stark, smooth white, and the previous occupant had not left his mark on it. Lowell examined it minutely in the days that followed, but there was absolutely no sign that anyone had ever lived in the place or done anything there. All traces of prior human occupancy had been obliterated, and there was nothing to indicate that the room had not been built yesterday. Lowell was sure that when he left the place, no one would ever know that he had been there either. It would still look like it had been built yesterday. When you were alone in it, it gave you the feeling that you weren't there. It was a kind of spooky feeling, and as time went on, it got worse, not better.

“When you're alone in the room, do you get the feeling that you're not really there?” he asked his wife.

“I'm never alone in the room,” said his wife. “Whenever I'm here, you're here too. Sometimes, though, I wonder if you're really here when I'm away, if that's what you mean.”

“Not exactly,” said Lowell.

“How did the writing go today?” she asked.

“It's coming along,” he said.

Once their life had settled down, there wasn't much to it. There was a sense of dwindling, like a slow leak in a balloon, as if all the vigor was slowly going out of their existence, all the light from the sky, all the color from the world, all the good thoughts from Lowell's head. They bought a bed and a secondhand table; they sat at the table at night, and Lowell wrote on it during the day. On one wall he hung his print of Maurice Vlaminck's
Summer Sky
and on the other wall he hung his print of Maurice Vlaminck's
Winter Sky
. He put them up with loops of masking tape, and after about a month they began to come unstuck, bulging depressingly when they weren't hanging limply by one corner. Every time they came unstuck, Lowell stuck them right back up again.

In addition to the bed and table, they had their desk lamps from college, their typewriters, their books, and a couple of wooden kitchen chairs that were weakly constructed and about twenty years old. Lowell's wife bought a set of pots at the variety store for ninety-nine cents; the plastic parts of the handles disintegrated after a little while, and you had to be careful when you picked them up. She also bought a broom and dustpan, and she cleaned the apartment from top to bottom every evening when she came home from computer training school. First she cleaned under the windows, where a lot of soot came in during the day. (It crackled when you stepped on it, much to Lowell's surprise.) Then she got down on her hands and knees and poked viciously under the bed with the broom as though trying to kill a mouse. When she got tired of that, she swept the corridor between the bed and the table and the area between the door and the closet, stabbing hard at the dust and fuzz she found. Then she got down on her hands and knees again and mopped the kitchen floor with a dishtowel. Then she started supper. They ate a good many eggs, in one form or another. Eggs were cheap.