A Meaningful Life (15 page)

The real-estate man knocked on the door to the left. An attempt had been made to fit it with a peephole, but the hole had been drilled too large and the device hung out of it like an eye gouged from its socket. A woman's voice called, "Who?”

“Landlord,” said the real-estate man. "Open up.”

There were bustlings and whispers inside the room, and a heavy object was moved about on squeaky casters. It sounded to Lowell like they were barricading the door with a chest of drawers. On the other hand, he supposed they could just as plausibly be unbarricading it. Whatever they were doing, they soon stopped. A moment of silence followed, and then someone began to wash dishes.

“Damn that Henry,” said the agent, looking very cross indeed in a very prim way. He banged on the door with his fist. "You in there!” he barked. "Open up!”

“Don't you think we should come back tomorrow?” asked Lowell, uncomfortably aware that several heads had poked over the railing above them. At any moment Henry might come charging out of his room with a weapon of some kind and raise the house against the intruders. Lowell wondered what he would do if someone came at him with a knife; all his life he'd been afraid of knives, and he was always a little worried when he was in a room where they were being used. He imagined himself being backed into a corner by a knife-wielding resident of the building, trying to explain that all he wanted to do was leave in peace, not being understood because his attacker didn't understand English.

Before the agent could answer him, the door was opened by a tiny brown lady in the kind of loose cotton dress Lowell could vaguely remember his grandmother as wearing: it was faded and had flowers printed on it. She smiled at them hopefully, looking from one to the other as though in search of the one who was nicest. "Yes?” she asked.

“It's all right,” said the agent. "The landlord wants these people to look at your apartment. You understand? The landlord.”

“Who?” she asked, still smiling but not as hopefully. Her hair was tied back with a piece of string, and Lowell noticed that she was wearing an old pair of men's carpet slippers.

“I hope we're not disturbing you,” said Lowell's wife, rising on tiptoe to get a better view of the room.

“I no espik no Inglis. Please?”

“That's what they all say,” said the real-estate man to Lowell. "It's okay,” he said to the tiny lady, gently taking her by the arms and steering her back into the room. "
Es bueno. El casero dice
.”

“Ain't either all right,” said Henry, suddenly appearing in the hallway behind them. "God damn it, what I tol' you, you ain't got no right busting in on people like this. People gotta sleep, they gotta eat.”

“Now, then, Henry,” said the real-estate man, turning to the superintendent after having steered the woman to a chair, making a kind of hole for Lowell and his wife to enter the room by. The little old lady folded her hands on her lap, put her knees together, sat up straight, and gave them her entire attention.

The room was long, high, and narrow. It had been painted pink, including the ceiling and fireplace, but not very recently. Tall windows rose from the floor almost to the ceiling on two sides of the room, the bottom third screened with cardboard and the middle third covered with thin cotton curtains of an astonishing turquoise color, held together with sagging lengths of string. Tall mirrors stood above the fireplace and between the rear windows, their massive, pink-painted frames carved in a design of flowers and seashells. The pink ceiling, deeply coffered, centered on a heroic central medallion of what appeared to be lettuce leaves in a nest of worms. Every coffer had a five-o'clock shadow of dust and soot.

“Don't you go talking about no Mr. Grossman to
me
,” Henry was saying in an aggrieved high voice that sounded embarrassingly like a white man's imitation. "
I
run this building, and what
I
says goes.”

“They always paint the marble mantels,” said the real-estate man, apparently to Lowell. "God knows why.”

A candle guttered in a tall glass in a dim corner of the room, which was furnished only with a sat-upon-looking bed, a couple of end tables made of some kind of pressed synthetic material that was veined and painted brown to resemble wood, a kitchen table of the same substance (one leg of which was tied together with a strip of cloth), and a couple of old tubular chairs of the sort Lowell had seen discarded on the street. At the table was sitting a small brown man. For some reason, possibly because he was sitting utterly motionless and was the same color as the furniture, Lowell had failed to notice him before. It gave him quite a turn.

“Allo,” said the little man, smiling and nodding with desperate pleasantry, as though he expected Lowell to shoot, arrest, or strike him at any moment. "How are you today?”

“I hope we're not disturbing you,” said Lowell, looking around the room, so barren of sources of enjoyment or activity, and wondering what in the world he might have disturbed them at.

“No, no,” said the little man, smiling more broadly and nodding more rapidly than ever. "Please.”

On the end tables were a pair of lamps with plastic bases in the form of black panthers, their muzzles red with blood. On the left-hand table there was also a vase of faded plastic flowers, covered with a dusty polyethylene shirt bag, and on the righthand table, also covered with a bag, was the statue of some saint. Against the other walls were a beaverboard bureau for clothes, and a tiny, ancient, and unspeakably filthy gas range with a sort of brown halo behind it. In a tall alcove that must once have been intended for books, a kind of cardboard hut had been constructed, no doubt to conceal a toilet. The linoleum on the floor was peeling in strips, and someone had taped a loaf of French bread to the wall by the door; it looked like it had been there for a long time. Lowell wondered what they'd been pushing across the floor before they opened the door.

“It's a slice of life, my dear,” said his wife.

“This is the back parlor,” said the real-estate man as he detached himself from Henry. He indicated the front wall, where a plasterboard partition, its edges not matching and its nails badly driven, filled a wide, arched doorway. It was painted a different, more disturbingly fleshlike shade of pink than the rest of the room. A roach was crawling on it. "There may be sliding doors under there,” said the real-estate man. "Originally there were, but there's no way of telling. Sometimes they have silver doorknobs and panels of stained glass. If there was a hole we could see.” He seemed to regret that there was no hole. Lowell wondered what the tiny Puerto Ricans thought of all this. He found himself hoping that they really didn't understand English.

“Look at that molding up there,” said the real-estate man, pointing at the worm-and-lettuce medallion in the middle of the ceiling. "You can chip that paint right off.”

“Thank you very much,” said Lowell to the Puerto Ricans. "I'm sorry to have intruded. Thanks again.” He felt a compelling, incomprehensible urge to go on saying variants of "thank you,” smiling idiotically, and nodding along with his host, until he was either dragged from the room by force or somehow managed to convince them that his soul was pure.

“No, no,” said the little man, rising from the chair with a desperate grin. Apparently he had fallen prey to a similar urge as Lowell's but was less capable of restraining it, no doubt because of his Latin temperament. "No, no, ess okay, yes? Ess okay, ess okay.” Smiling and bobbing his head, he followed Lowell to the door, patting him very lightly on the arm as though wanting to reassure him but afraid that this might not be the way Americans did it. "Good-bye,” he said, somehow contriving to smile even more broadly. He ushered Lowell and his party out into the hall, then closed the door slowly, smiling through the narrowing aperture. "Good-bye, good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” chimed the little lady from her chair as the door finally closed. Lowell felt drained.

“This was the sewing room,” said the real-estate man, taking Lowell's arm in the same place where the Puerto Rican had patted it and turning him around in his tracks. Lowell found himself facing another door. They were all jammed together so tightly in the hallway that Lowell could smell his wife's powder and the liquor on Henry's breath and the sour odor of his own clothing. The real-estate man seemed to have no smell at all.

“Shit, man,” said Henry. "That Bowman Parker's room. It ain't no sewing room, no kind of sewing room at all. What's the matter with you, anyhow? Don't go knocking there, he work nights. I said, don't go knocking there.”

The real-estate man put his hand on the door and silently pushed it open. The room was deep but no more than seven or eight feet wide, and it ended in another tall window. A thin Negro man was sitting hunched over on the unmade bed, wearing nothing but a pair of pants and a set of what appeared to be Army dogtags. His feet and hands seemed far too big for his body. The light was off and the room was very dim in the twilight. The man looked up at them and then looked back at the floor. On a small table at the head of the bed was an alarm clock and a pack of Pall Malls.

“Probably there was a door in that wall,” said the real-estate man, "connecting this room with the one we were just in. Actually, this place hasn't been cut up as badly as some. Originally there were twenty-one rooms, and all of them are still more or less intact.”

“Twenty-one rooms?” said Lowell's wife. "Who needs twenty-one rooms? What would you do with them all? How would you keep them clean?” Lowell could tell that she was impressed, but it was difficult to guess in what way. He looked down at the man on the bed and wondered what was going through his mind and how he occupied his days. "Servants,” said the real-estate man. He gently closed the door and cut the man off from view. Lowell wondered if he knew they were gone. "All right, Henry, we'll have a look at your room now.”

To Lowell's surprise, Henry turned and led them down the hall to his door, muttering about how some people didn't have no fucking respect. Lowell allowed himself to be carried along. The deeper his reluctance to continue this farce bored into his spirit, the less will he seemed to have to resist.

Henry's room was almost totally dark. There seemed to be no lights, and the windows were covered with all manner of things: old roller blinds, shredded at the bottom, perhaps by a cat or a child with long fingernails; scraps of old bedsheets, swaybacked and rumpled on limp strings; taped-up yellowing newspapers; pages torn from magazines; squares of Woolworth oilcloth; rags; cheap lace curtains, far too short, very old, turning to dust. Every window had a separate and distinct history, like the exposed strata in the face of a cliff, thickest at the bottom and growing thinner toward the ceiling, the layers never completely overlapping. Stray emanations of twilight filtered in through the chinks. It was hard to decide whether Henry feared the sun or simply hated the sight of the street; perhaps he suspected spies and peeping toms, and Lowell couldn't imagine how he'd gotten through to the sash, much less opened it, when the real-estate man had knocked. Maybe he had a technique.

Enough light came through the open door so that shapes were visible, although not very clearly. Boxes and cartons and great looming things were heaped around in the gloom, in some cases all the way up to the ceiling, taking up half the floor space and containing God knew what-dead rats and old rags by the smell of them. Pictures and notices were taped haphazardly around wherever the walls were clear, but except for a Kennedy portrait clipped from the
Daily News
and a headline that said REJOICE, Lowell couldn't make most of them out too well in the dimness; he had a vague impression that most of them were about cows or religion. A pot of grits was boiling on the stove, stirred by a woman who seemed to be clothed in the same general sort of material that the windows were covered with, but he couldn't see her too well either, and it was hard to be sure. Her hand and the spoon stood out in the strange weak light from the burner, but her face was hidden in shadow. She seemed to watch them the whole time they were there, her hand slowly stirring. It was difficult for Lowell to look away from it.

“The occasional parlor,” said the agent. "A room usually kept closed except for receptions, parties, important visitors, and major family holidays. The ceiling is pretty elaborate, and there are two big fireplaces in here somewhere. Why don't you put on the light, Henry?”

“Power failed,” said Henry.

“That's too bad. I'll have to mention that to Mr. Grossman when I call him up this evening, along with your cooperative attitude.”

“Be sure and do that,” said Henry.

They left the room and went upstairs, the agent leading, followed by Lowell's wife, then Lowell, and finally Henry, who hadn't spoken a single word, either of greeting, introduction, explanation, or farewell to his wife, or whoever she was.

“Soul food, huh?” said Lowell utterly at random and completely without forethought. He'd been searching for something pleasant to say, and it just sort of popped out.

Henry responded with an expression of implacable hatred. Lowell began to feel nervous about walking ahead of him.

“Last year alone,” intoned the agent as they climbed the winding and apparently interminable staircase, "last year alone, twenty-two houses were sold in the area for renovation. That's not counting respectable old families who've been persuaded to stay on. You might say we've turned the corner,” he concluded just as, in fact, he turned a corner onto a landing and passed from Lowell's sight.

“Respectable families my ass,” muttered Henry. "Ain't nobody going to sell no fucking house to nobody till I gets my two thousand dollars. No, sir. Two thousand dollars, and I ain't seen a penny of it. Doing plaster. Painting. Climbing fucking stairs. Shee-it!”

Lowell fell into a daze. He reached the landing, and they looked at more rooms. The more rooms they looked at, the more dazed Lowell felt. No longer embarrassed, scarcely feeling a thing, he stared blankly through the open doors of other people's lives, and turned away without a word.