A Meaningful Life (16 page)

“The master bedroom,” said the agent, gesturing into a room inhabited by strings of laundry and a young Puerto Rican couple, who had been interrupted either while making love or thinking hard about it. The girl, wrapped in a sheet beneath which she was rather obviously nude, turned her face to the wall and kept it there, furiously, throughout Lowell's visit, while her shirtless and shoeless husband (who was, nevertheless, wearing a beret that was more natty and smart-looking than any headgear Lowell had ever owned) followed them about the room with his arms folded across his chest and an extremely pissed-off expression on his face. There was a fireplace in the room, but it was different from the one that was downstairs.

Another room was in the turret. It was about ten feet tall and not much larger in diameter than the inside of a barrel, and it had no walls to speak of. Instead of walls, there were two enormous curved windows. "How do you do?” said the little old white man who lived there. He was wearing a bathrobe over a pair of long johns. He was also wearing shoes and stockings held up with old-fashioned garters, which had the effect of making his feet look both huge and quaint. "I'm the bat in the belfry,” he told them. "This is the belfry. I'm the bat. A bat in the belfry and spooks in the cellar. I'm not as crazy as I sound. You try living with colored people sometime and see how you like it.”

“That's okay, Charlie,” said Henry fondly, the way you might speak to a favorite old dog. "That's okay. You get on back in bed now, hear?”

The rear bedroom was occupied by a drunken Negro woman who was attempting to cook something amid dense billows of smoke while three small children, none of them wearing anything below the waist, played on the bed with old baby bottles and a couple of empty beer cans. Next door was another sewing room. It was darker than Henry's place, smelled powerfully of cigars, and was occupied by a crone who remained in the shadows, her presence barely visible but powerfully felt, like the emanations of a witch who had almost, but not quite, succeeded in turning herself invisible. Upstairs in the largest room a family of Puerto Ricans was eating supper at a big, plastic-looking table; they became utterly motionless the moment the real-estate man and his little party trooped in, and they remained utterly motionless-knives and forks in their hands, untasted food growing cold in front of them, jaws not moving, throats not swallowing, an absent smile playing about the lips of the head of the household-until the little party trooped back out again. They reminded Lowell of some French painting or other, but he couldn't remember which one.

“I think maybe we've seen enough,” he suggested, it seemed for the dozenth time. "I mean, it's getting kind of late and everything.”

“There's still the servants' quarters,” said the agent firmly. "Also the dining room and kitchen. You'll want to see them, surely?”

“By all means,” said Lowell's wife. "Also the cellar. My husband is very knowledgeable about furnaces and pipes.”

They climbed to the old servants' quarters in the top of the house-a series of little rooms incredibly close together, clustered around a central foyer-but although the odor of some ghastly boiled foodstuff hung heavily in the air, no one could be persuaded to open their door. Lowell was glad.

“This was the old dumbwaiter,” said the agent, indicating a gap in the paneling that was filled to the brim with crumpled papers-cups and wads of what appeared to be used toilet paper. He'd gotten very cross as he knocked fruitlessly on door after door, and Lowell had the impression that he pointed out the dumbwaiter from some spiteful private motive.

“Dumbwaiter my ass,” muttered Henry.

They marched back downstairs. Lowell was somehow next to last again, with Henry behind him. He wondered if he should try to make some explanation about his soul-food remark, but although the urge to do so was powerful, he couldn't think of any good-sounding mitigating comment. Fortunately it took less time to go down the stairs than it had to go up them, and he managed not to blurt anything out before they reached the bottom, where the real-estate man asked him if he'd noticed the banister.

“Was there something special about it?” asked Lowell.

“It had a
very
graceful curve,” said the real-estate man, fixing him with the same kind of look that he had bestowed on the doors that had refused to open. "It's one of the principal features of the house.”

“Oh,” said Lowell, hoping that he wouldn't be made to run back to the top of the house and look at it.

“Let's see the furnace,” said his wife.

“There's solid mahogany under that paint,” grumbled the real-estate man as he turned and led them down another flight of stairs, a dark one that seemed to descend into a cave of night. Lowell couldn't see where to put his feet, and his balance became uncertain, but he didn't want to support himself with the walls for fear of what they might have been smeared or impregnated with. No light whatever filtered down the stairway from the hall above, and his eyes were filled with swarming shapes. "Solid mahogany,” said the disembodied voice of the agent from somewhere ahead of him and below. "All it needs is a little paint remover.”

A door was thrown open at the foot of the stairs, a dim rectangle of light in the impenetrable tissue of the darkness, and although Lowell was still unable to see where to put his feet, he could now see where he was going. The knowledge made him feel better, but not for long. A great warm wave of new horrible odors, different both in degree and intensity from the old horrible odors that he'd almost gotten used to, rolled up over him and nearly knocked him flat. It was like the first whiff of the atmosphere of some alien planet: heavy, warm, barely breathable, seemingly compounded of urine and stale oatmeal in equal measure. Any astronaut in his right mind would have closed the airlock and gone straight home, but Henry was still behind Lowell, and he pressed on.

“I think I'm going to be sick,” said Lowell's wife as they emerged into the light. "No, I guess not.”

The hallway where they had emerged was low, narrow, and painted some dark color that once might have been a kind of green; now it looked black, but not exactly, and gave the impression that the walls weren't really solid but composed of some substance that would yield and engulf anyone unwary enough to lean on them. Somewhere a television set throbbed with a hollow sound, as though speaking from the bottom of a deep, narrow pit. Dozens of suits of men's clothing were hung from the sprinkler pipe on metal hangers. It was hard to move around without becoming entangled in them, a situation that was not improved by the fact that none of them were very clean and most of them were very old; it was like being embraced by a bum's ghost.

“Mrs. Blouse?” called the agent, pushing his way through the suits with a show of considerable bad grace. Evidently he was still mad about the banister. "Mrs. Blouse!” he called again, banging on a door whose surface was patched in several places with squares of battered tin. In a moment, to the accompaniment of strident muffled shouting, it was opened by a little Negro girl of five or six. She regarded them expressionlessly.

“You just keep on like that, Rory Fitzgerald,” said a shrill woman's voice from somewhere in the room, apparently on the verge of hysteria. "You just keep on like that and I'm going to slap your goddamn little face right off. You just keep on like that. Just keep on.”

The little girl remained motionless in the doorway. The real-estate man leaned past her into the room, holding the jamb with both hands. "Good evening, Mrs. Blouse,” he said to someone. "I've brought some people to see the place.”

“Pebbles!” shrieked the woman's voice. "You get in here and let them people by! Rory, you get up on that couch! Pebbles!”

“Good,” said the real-estate man as if he had done something rather clever and difficult, such as picking a lock. "We can go in now.”

The room wasn't as dark as Henry's or the old lady's, but it was considerably lower, as though something had sat on it. The windows were covered with old towels and the walls looked like they had been constructed by throwing handfuls of mud and cow shit at a framework of ancient lath until most of it was covered. The little girl and an even smaller boy were seated rigidly side by side on an enormous, spavined, yellowish sofa that was much and questionably stained and which stank to high heaven with an odor that resembled a superhumanly protracted fart. It was a wonder the children weren't overpowered where they sat, but overpowered was not what they looked like: they looked petrified. Their feet stuck straight out in front of them, their hands were folded on their laps, their backs were rigid, and their faces were impenetrable masks. On the opposite side of the room, next to another of those damn fireplaces, was an unfocused television set, its sound turned down to the threshold of audibility. On its screen Robert Vaughn, pursued by his ghost, ran down an alley paralleled by the ghost of an alley, while frantic chase music murmured like a love song from the speaker. It was a rerun of
The Man from U.N.C.L.E
. Lowell had seen it before, but he found it difficult to keep from watching. It was what he'd be watching if he were home right now, instead of out here on this fool's errand.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E
. was one of his favorite programs, and he was sorry the series had ever been discontinued.

“You just sit right there!” shrieked the woman's voice from somewhere to his left, jerking him from his reverie with a nasty start. "Don't you move a muscle! Don't you dare! One move and I'm gon' bang your little ass against the wall until it
stick!
”

Lowell watched with astonishment as a cronelike creature, preceded by this storm of senseless abuse, picked her way through a doorway that Lowell had assumed led to a closet of some sort. Her hair was dyed a rich shade of dark orange, which, in combination with the uncertain light and a faded green sweater, made her skin appear olive-drab. She was dressed in shapeless heavy clothes of the sort found in bins at church bazaars and Hadassah thrift shops, and she was evidently quite drunk in a kind of generalized way, as though drunk was the way she always was, just as some people are always sober. One of her stockings was falling down, just like in the racist propaganda.

“This is Mrs. Blouse,” said the real-estate agent. "Mrs. Blouse is always very good about showing us her apartment. She has the largest apartment in the whole building.”

“That's right,” said Mrs. Blouse in a slurred voice, gazing at them with congested, unfocused eyes. "The biggest one.”

“How do you do?” said Lowell, immediately getting the feeling that it was a foolish thing to say, although he couldn't decide why.

Mrs. Blouse looked at him as though she thought it was a pretty foolish thing to say, too. Suddenly she wheeled in the other direction and shrieked: "SIT!” The little boy, who had allowed himself to slump a little, sat back upright and shook himself. "Little fucker,” said Mrs. Blouse, apparently to Lowell.

“The kitchen is this way,” said the agent. He led them through a doorway into a large room that contained a stove and refrigerator in worse condition than any Lowell had seen abandoned in the street. Between them was an enormous two-basin sink, half of which was clogged and filled to the brim with black goop.

“It's too bad it's gotten too dark outside to see the garden,” said the agent.

Lowell's wife went to one of the windows and peered out between cupped hands. "I can see it,” she said. "It's filled with bags of garbage.”

Lowell joined her. Sure enough, the garden was filled with bags of garbage. Not a patch of earth was visible, just garbage.

“Ain't enough cans,” said Henry. "People afraid to come down after dark. I'm going to clean it up. I'm going to clean it up tomorrow. Just ain't enough cans. I'll clean it up.”

“Shit you will,” said Mrs. Blouse.

“Shut your mouth,” snapped Henry.

“Well, I guess that's about all,” said the agent, taking Lowell by the arm and pointing him toward the door.

“We were going to take a look at the furnace,” said Lowell's wife.

“Don't you go telling me to shut my mouth, Henry Gruen,” said Mrs. Blouse.

It appeared that the basement lights had burned out, but Henry said that he kept the bulbs upstairs in his room to prevent theft. He went up to get them, and Lowell and his wife and the agent stood around among the suits until he came back. Every so often Mrs. Blouse would appear in the doorway and stare at them, each time with a different expression, as though trying out the various ways her face would go. "I bet you got a real good job,” she said to Lowell during one of these visitations, but she disappeared again before he could think of an answer.

Presently Henry returned with a couple of encrusted fifteen-watt bulbs, and they went downstairs to inspect the furnace. It was a great, antique leviathan of a thing, sheathed with rotting asbestos and displaying more arms than you could shake a stick at. It looked big enough to power a steamboat, but if Henry's mutterings were to be believed, it was scarcely adequate to warm the house. While they watched, an electric switch clicked somewhere in its bowels and it sprang to life with a muted roaring.

“There was a wine cellar over there,” said the agent, pointing into the bottomless shadows that extended beyond their feeble circle of light. He seemed fidgety. "Well, I guess that's all. Let's go back upstairs.”

He started toward the steps. At that very moment a toilet was flushed somewhere in the upper reaches of the house and a few seconds later its contents were deposited on the basement floor with a great gurgling and rushing of water. This event occurred more or less behind Lowell and his wife, their attention having been riveted in the direction of the invisible and possibly specious wine cellar. Quite a sight met their eye when they turned around. They were standing not more than ten feet from the edge of a shallow black pond, its agitated surface flashing dully. It extended into the shadows toward the rear of the house, and it was impossible to tell exactly how large it was, but it was clearly pretty big in an obscene sort of way. Something pale, perhaps fungus, seemed to be growing on the walls and pillars back there, but Lowell couldn't bring himself to look too closely; he felt as though his eyes might become polluted, and there was a funny metallic taste in his mouth. He'd heard that people with radiation poisoning got metallic tastes in their mouths, but he knew he couldn't have radiation poisoning. He didn't feel particularly disgusted, just a little worried. He supposed the reason he hadn't noticed the smell before was because he'd already smelled so many bad things today that he'd stopped paying attention.