A New Life (45 page)

Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: A New Life

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“I needed one. Your picture reminded me of a Jewish boy I knew in college who was very kind to me during a trying time in my life.”

“So I was chosen,” Levin said.

That night, after packing his few possessions, he caught sight of his doubtful face in the mirror. Am I in my right mind? He
sat in a chair, head in his hands. His doubts were the bricks of a windowless prison he was in, where Gilley’s voice endlessly droned the reasons he ought to quit. Every reason was part of the structure. The prison was really himself, flawed edifice of failures, each locking up tight the one before. He had failed at his best plans, who could say he wouldn’t with her? Possibly he already had and would one day take off in the dark as she lay in bed. Unless the true prison was to stick it out chained to her ribs. He would look like a free man but whoever peered into his eyes would see the lines of a brick wall.

He left the house and walked to the river. What if he beat it now, sneaked back, and when the old lady was snoring away with her ears turned off he would lug his suitcase and valise down to the car and drive away? He could head north to Canada, and then east. No one would know where he was or was going. He would leave a note, “Sorry, I don’t think it will work. Too much has happened. I do this for you as well as myself. Sincerely, and with regret, S. Levin.” He would slip that under her door and fade away. All she had to do when she found it was unpack and call Gilley at the hotel. She would cry a little but could say, “He wasn’t worth your little finger. I made a dreadful mistake. The children miss you—please take us back.” And Gilley, the forgiver, would hotfoot it home, holding flowers. They’d go on as before.

Or if she were really sick of him, she could take the train to SF and stay with her uncle. She would feel bad for a while but sooner or later some middle-aged gent would show up who would want to marry her; she was that type. Let somebody else marry her, Levin thought. He had from the first resisted becoming her savior, or victim. She had in a moment of unhappiness after the death of a former flame picked him by chance from a pile of discards. She had marked him x in a distant port and summoned him across the continent. Did this casual selection make him responsible for her for life? Was he forever bound to the choice she had made? That was stretching
kismet too far. Who was a man if he surrendered freedom in a prior time?

The town was quiet as he walked, all but deserted since the college students had gone, the houses dark, silent. He met no one. At the river, after watching the moving water, he turned back, avoiding downtown and his reflection in store windows, still roaming, after so many years, the stone streets of the past. The city haunted him tonight. While others were sleeping Levin, in stinking clothes, had sneaked out of the bug-infested room he hid in during the day and wandered along long dark streets, peering into the houses of strangers for drops of light. Many a night he had walked in anguished desire of a decent future; failing that, another bottle. He drove the seasons away after hounding them to appear: winter, sniffing the icy wind for the scent, the breath, of spring; yet a time of flowers drove him wild; amid summer foliage, in ascetic heat, he obsessively hunted dead leaves and found them under every bush; autumn inspired his own long death. This went on for too many years to remember.

He came by a roundabout way to her house and stood under the ornamental plum tree across the street. The house looked already empty, except the lit living room where, through a half-open window, he could see her packing. She wore a shapeless shirt and her toreador pants, and with a cigarette in her mouth, was putting kids’ things into a suitcase. Who is she? Levin thought. What do I really know about her? He thought if after she got back from Nevada he was still not sure how it would work out, he would call it quits. That would finish the promise to Gilley and he would, after a year in graduate school, try again to get into a small liberal arts college and teach there. With luck he might make it.

Pauline was holding a yellow dress against herself to see how it looked. She put it down and with a cloth, rubbed something on the table. When she picked it up and placed it under her chin it was a violin. She tried the bow, then played. Levin listened till he recognized the music.

Overslept, he awoke with a bang and was splashing cold water on his face when the landlady knocked. “Mrs. Gilley called and said to come right over, it’s very important.”

This could go too far. He hurriedly dressed, shaved, and left the house, leaving behind both his bags for protection.

When he drove up, Pauline, watching at the window, opened the door for him.

“What’s wrong?”

She seemed not to want, or be able, to look at him. A massive excitement seized Levin.

Meeting his eyes at last, she murmured, “I’m about two months’ pregnant.”

He remembered then to remove his hat. The blood in his brain gave his head the weight of a rock.

“Mine?” he asked.

She smiled wanly. “Not Leo’s.”

“I mean Gerald—no, I guess I don’t.”

“I suspected something last month,” Pauline said, “but thought no because I had a slight flow at the more-or-less usual time.”

“I didn’t think of the possibility of conception those last times.”

“You want the right feeling for every event?”

“Don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I called you as soon as I knew for sure. I happened to think last night that my period was late. Then I checked the calendar and it was very late. I called the doctor and was examined this morning. There isn’t any doubt I’m pregnant. I didn’t want you to think I had come back to you because of that. I thought I’d tell you before we left in case you want to call it off.”

“What would you do if I did?”

“I frankly don’t know. I could try to abort.”

“No.”

“Are you saying that with your steely will or pity for the human race?”

“I want the child.”

Pauline said, “I’m so relieved. I wasn’t sure how you’d take it.” Then she said, “Touch my breasts, they’re beginning to grow.”

Levin touched them.

“They’ll shrink after the baby is weaned but at least you’ll know how I look with little ones.”

He returned for his bags, passed up eating from the cherry tree and said goodbye to Mrs. Beaty. On the way back he saw Bullock in a new red station wagon. George had expected to be director of comp but Gerald, Pauline had said, was combining that job with his own.

Pauline was ready with both kids but instead of three bags she had four, a duffel bag, and a violin case. Levin, in a sweat, was thinking of a luggage rack for the roof of the car, but then the Buckets came along, Algene heavy-bellied in her ninth month; Joe helped Levin get five bags in the trunk, and two, with the violin case and his umbrella, they put in the back of the car.

“No rack needed yet,” Bucket said. “‘A penny saved is a penny earned.’”

“It’s the earned penny that worries me,” said Levin.

“‘God tempers the wind to a shorn lamb.’”

“Lev’s no lamb,” said Pauline.

“I speak for myself,” Bucket said.

Levin lifted Erik into the back seat. “I’m your father now.”

“I want my real daddy.”

When they were in, five counting Pauline’s baby, Levin started the Hudson and the Buckets waved them off. What if I had bought a seven-passenger car? Levin thought.

Mary sat in the baby seat, in front, the sores on her arms covered with ointment. Pauline’s hair, brushed bright, was drawn into a bun. He thought she would be wearing the yellow dress he saw last night but she wore the sleeveless white linen he had first seen her in. When they drove off she gazed back at the house, then turned away.

Levin drove to the edge of town for a last look at the view to the mountains. The clouds were a clash of horses and volcanoes.

“Beautiful country.”

“If beauty isn’t all that happens.”

They drove through the campus, the trees in full leaf, arched above the narrow streets, shading the green lawns.

“I failed this place,” Levin said.

“You got
The Elements
kicked out after thirty years.”

“A hell of a revolution.”

“Gerald is also thinking of offering some of the instructors doing graduate work a literature class.”

“I still want to teach,” he said.

“Don’t undersell yourself.”

“It’s what I do best.”

“What else have you tried?”

“Too much.”

They saw Fabrikant, a stogie in his mouth, hurrying to the office.

“He’s growing reddish whiskers,” said Pauline.

“I hear the dean asked him to handle the Great Books program.”

“That was your idea,” Pauline said. She said, “Gerald wouldn’t keep that promise if he had made it to you.”

“That’s the point,” Levin said.

She rested her head on his shoulder. “Trust me, darling. I’ll make you a good wife.”

Her body smelled like fresh-baked bread, the bread of flowers.

“Wear these.” He gave her the gold hoop earrings he had kept for her.

She fastened them on her ears. “God bless you, Lev.”

“Sam, they used to call me home.”

“God bless you, Sam.”

Two tin-hatted workmen with chain saws were in the maple tree in front of Humanities Hall, cutting it down limb by
leafy limb, to make room for a heat tunnel. On the Student Union side of the street, Gilley was aiming a camera at the operation. When he saw Levin’s Hudson approach he swung the camera around and snapped. As they drove by he tore a rectangle of paper from the back of the camera and waved it aloft.

“Got your picture!”

By Bernard Malamud

THE NATURAL
THE ASSISTANT
THE MAGIC BARREL
A NEW LIFE
IDIOTS FIRST
THE FIXER
PICTURES OF FIDELMAN
THE TENANTS
REMBRANDT’S HAT
DUBIN’S LIVES
GOD’S GRACE
THE PEOPLE AND UNCOLLECTED STORIES
THE COMPLETE STORIES

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

First published in 1961 by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy
This Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback edition, 2004

www.fsgbooks.com

eISBN 9781466805040

First eBook Edition : November 2011

Library of Congress Control Number: 2004108067

ISBN-13: 978-0-374-52949-9
ISBN-10: 0-374-52949-3