Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) (12 page)

The inhabitants of Potopotawoc, excluding Staff, were either permanent or provisional. I was provisional, permitted to hover at the margins and look on for three weeks in the fall, they said, and then they would see—see what kind of fit I was, is how they put it in their letter. That made me laugh when I read it, because of the word
fit,
which irritated Clarence, who had worked hard, filling out applications and drawing on the influence of friends, to get me in. It was because of the pages Clarence had sent them, which he had gathered up without telling me—more or less at random, I am sure, since even then I never numbered—that they took me. He told them they were the first pages of my novel, the first chapter of a novel called
Brunhilde’s Balcony
that I had been working on for twenty years, though they actually were not the beginning of anything, just some things I had typed, Brunhilde being a person like me in most respects, like me as I was when I wrote them, not so much like me now that I have had time to think. The perms generally looked down on the temps, except for the women temps, whom they tried to take for themselves. There were fights over women, because there were not many of them, cliques were formed, and some people were not allowed to sit at certain tables in the cafeteria. It was as if people merely by setting foot on the soil became instantly infected with the spirit of boys past, a spirit corrupted by age and failure into a kind of juvenile levity that they hoped would appear devil-may-care, though anyone could see that it was just desperate. And the newcomers quickly succumbed: they might tumble out of the vans tight-lipped and hollow-eyed, but two or three days later, when I would bump into them at ping-pong or checkers, they would be perky as titmice. “Hi, camper,” they would chirp, “up for a game?” I had no idea why I was there. Staff organized them into teams; they played football and Frisbee in the meadow, and I heard them at night in the canoes, paddling about in the lake with their hands. Somehow or other I became mixed up with the perms. I don’t mean that I associated with them in particular, in a convivial way, aside from checkers, but that the people in charge took me for one. I was there every day, looking more or less rooted, and after a while no one thought to say “What are you doing here?” Perms were not expected to leave, or they were not expected to leave permanently—they went away in the fall and reappeared in spring, like ducks. Most of them reappeared, I should say, along with others who had not been there before or had not been there for a long time. And in that way Potopotawoc was constantly renewed. “Interesting,” someone said, the constant advent of new people; “interesting and rejuvenating,” that person said in a speech during the conclave in the Shed at the start of the second session. Looking around at the people, I could scarcely tell one from the other.

I stopped typing and went over and sat in the armchair. I was trying to remember, but the rat was scratching. Maybe it has fleas. When it scratches it thumps its elbow against the glass. I am not sure that part of a rat is an elbow. I was conscious of how much of Clarence has slipped away, but I could not think because of the thumping, and I said to myself, “Oh well, I will pick up my pages,” indicating in my mind the pages that have slipped off the table, which is pretty much all of them now. They are scattered across the floor, as I am sure I mentioned, and I have been walking on them. I have almost slipped a few times, because they skid about when I step on them. I put a sofa cushion on the floor and knelt on that, and reaching out as far as I could I dragged the nearest pages to me. I tried using one of the broken fronds as a pull-stick to drag the more distant ones nearer, but that was too wobbly at first and then it snapped. I made a stack of all the pages I was able to reach. Nigel had stopped thumping. I glanced up, and he was watching me, whiskers twitching, I imagine, though I was not close enough to make out anything as small as whiskers. I crumpled up one of the pages. Looking down at the floor as if inspecting something there and mashing and kneading slowly, so as not to arouse suspicion, I squeezed the crumpled page into a tight little ball. I lifted my head: he was still looking. ”
What are you staring at?”
I shouted, and I hurled the balled-up paper. I had the feeling while I was throwing it that it was going to crash right through the glass wall of Nigel’s tank like a stone. It left my grip, flew a few feet, and dropped to the floor, arrested in midflight as if swatted down by an invisible hand. I crumpled another. I balled this one up even tighter by rolling it around on the floor under the heel of my hand, while Nigel, unconcerned, watched me from above. This one flew the distance and struck the glass with a feeble tap. He jumped back but didn’t retreat into his tube. I didn’t make another ball—I can’t continue balling up pages and expect to make headway. I hoisted myself back into the armchair and sat there, clutching the chair arms, my heart pounding. I was glaring, or glowering, probably. Nigel was spinning in his wheel.

Today is Thursday. I went to Starbucks to find out what day of the week it is. At a table by the window was a woman I used to be friends with, but she seemed not to see me, and I am not going to talk about her now. And while I was there I ate an almond croissant and read the newspaper. I don’t usually buy the newspaper—I take a copy from the rack, read it, and put it back—because I am not interested in much that is in the paper these days, except the crossword. I went to Starbucks instead of the diner, where I usually go for coffee, because the newspapers at the diner are inside a coin machine on the sidewalk in front. Before putting the newspaper back on the shelf, I tore out the crossword puzzle, holding the paper against my thigh under the table and tearing very slowly, to not make a ripping noise. Usually when I do that I also write in pencil above the headline of the paper, “No Crossword Puzzle in This Paper”—that way anyone who wants the crossword puzzle, who like me, perhaps, is buying the paper only for that reason, will know to choose a different copy. I didn’t bother doing that today. I don’t know why. On the way home I stopped at the grocery and bought batteries for the flashlight and seedless grapes in a transparent plastic bag. Instead of Elvie a young woman I don’t know was at the register. Where in the world do grapes come from at this time of year? I wonder if I have mentioned the season. Probably not, but I am not going to look back through all my pages to check. Instead, I will say right now, for the record, that by “this time of year” I am referring to late spring. It cannot be winter, obviously, or I would have mentioned being cold, which I am sure I have not done since I talked about my trip to the typewriter store, a trip that, at the time I mentioned it, was already weeks in the past. We have not for months had the sort of unbearable cold we had during the pit of winter and that I would certainly have touched on had I been typing then. At times, when Clarence and I were relatively impoverished, the houses were so cold I wore fingerless gloves while I typed, and also later, during the winters at Potopotawoc. I never thought of wearing gloves like that when I was horribly cold in the farmhouse in France, which I intend to talk about at some point, and that is odd, since I recall that one of the workmen who came to replace windowpanes in Papa’s house one snowy winter day was wearing gloves just like that, so I must already have known about them when I was in France, known that things like fingerless gloves exist. I bought my first pair at a hardware store in Ocean City, New Jersey, when we were impoverished near there. At Potopotawoc I came across a pair of wool gloves under a chair in the Shed and snipped the tips off the fingers, but even so my fingers turned blue on the really cold days. And that might be the reason I stopped typing there, and not anything that was going on in my head or anything people said. One day I forgot and wore those gloves when I went up to the Shed, and a camper said, “Hey, aren’t those my gloves?” When he saw I had cut the fingers off, he said, “Hell, you might as well keep them now.” I don’t know if I have mentioned this before, the fact that I stopped typing there. That was the only time, before coming here, that I completely stopped typing for a long while, though Clarence had tried several times to convince me that I ought to stop, when he thought I was typing too much and not eating properly, by which he meant at a table in a civilized manner instead of at the machine, especially when we went on vacation. In fact I hated getting crumbs in the machine and never ate there unless I was typing things I was afraid of losing, worried they would fall out of my head if I went and sat at the table with the others, paying attention to their conversation and so forth. Clarence wanted me to pay attention to the countryside, which was green and peaceful, probably, or sun-struck and stark, depending—we went to a variety of places on vacation. In Starbucks there are always a lot of people typing on computers. I see their fingers moving but I don’t hear any sounds, and I am not able to banish the suspicion that they are pretending. They did not, at Potopotawoc, want to give me back my typewriter at first, but I insisted. I told the director I was not going to leave his office until he gave it to me. And I kept it with me after that, carrying it up and down the hill between my cabin and the Shed several times a day and resting my feet on it in the cafeteria.

It was a Smith Corona in a hard plastic case with a handle that made it look like a small suitcase, so carrying it was not as difficult as one might think. But I was still worried that someone was going to take it while I slept. I had brought along a length of clothesline for stringing my wet clothes across the room as I did at home when we were relatively impoverished, and I used some of that to tie the typewriter to my wrist at night. It was heavy string, as I said, and not wire, so obviously anyone who wanted to could have cut it with scissors. My thought was that since they couldn’t know the string was going to be there it would not occur to them to bring along scissors, and without scissors or a knife they would be flummoxed by the truly difficult knots I had learned to tie when I was mountain climbing with Clarence. After a while, though, when I realized that I was not going to be typing anyway, I stopped carrying the typewriter around, and I did not use the string anymore either. I was on my way home from there, I was sitting in Penn Station, and somebody actually did steal that typewriter, just reached over the back of the bench I was sitting on and took it while I was trying to make sense of my ticket. I got off the train in Trenton and bought another just like it, even though I was not sure I wanted to type anymore.

It was dark when I went down to Potts’s place. I stepped through the door and was reaching for the light switch, when I heard the crunch. I was wearing shoes. I don’t know how many of them there were to start with—more than one, surely. I gathered it up with a Kleenex and put it down the toilet. Clarence loved raw oysters and laughed when I told him they were still alive when he swallowed them. I think I should get rid of my books. After all, I haven’t read much in quite a long time, and I expect that I won’t read at all in the future, now that I am typing again. I do, it is true, sometimes glance at the titles while going to and fro in the hall, if I happen to stop there for some reason, to steady myself by holding on to a shelf, for example, if I happen to become dizzy between the kitchen and the living room, or to recollect whatever it was I had been setting out to do, if I have lost track, and just a fleeting glimpse is enough to set me thinking, remembering what the book was about or what was happening in my life when I read it for the first time. I was reading
Winesburg, Ohio
for the first time when I met Clarence. It is not, in fact, entirely misleading to say, as I used to at parties, that
Winesburg, Ohio
caused us to meet—it was, at any rate, the excuse he found to stop and talk to me, since he had just been reading it himself. I was reading it on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, because it was warm there in the April sun, sheltered from a cold wind blowing out of the park, and that was where he stopped to speak to me. He had come there to educate himself about art. That was his phrase: “I want to educate myself about art.” And he
said
he had just been reading
Winesburg, Ohio,
is how I ought to have typed that, because when we began discussing the book he did not seem to remember it very well. In that way, in the way of being carriers of memory, books are like photographs.
Light in August
would be another good example: one glance at the yellow-and-black dust jacket, and I am back in the huge farmhouse in France where Clarence and I once spent an entire winter. That was his first time in Europe, but it was my third time as an adult. There was a tremendous cold spell in France that year, so cold that big chunks of ice were floating in the Seine—there were pictures of them in all the papers—and the cold forced us to retreat into the kitchen and keep a fire going in the fireplace day and night, eating and sleeping in that room, even though the house was enormous, with five or six bedrooms. The fireplace too was enormous, and the heat went right up the chimney—we had to sit practically inside it to feel any warmth at all—and my hands were so cold I could scarcely turn the pages of the book I was reading, which was
Light in August,
as I said. I had bought it at the little English bookstore on the Rue de Seine in Paris, thinking I ought to like it, because I had liked
The Sound and the Fury,
but it turned out not to be my sort of book at all. Even so, I have kept it all these years, packing and unpacking it I don’t know how many times since then. Oddly, I have not experienced this as a burden until now. Not just
Light in August
feels burdensome now, but all my other books too. Or maybe it is not the books that are the burden but the memories; packing and unpacking them. While we were peripatetic, which was most of the time we were together, we lugged steamer trunks full of books around with us, along with Clarence’s guns and golf clubs. We did not physically carry them along while we were traveling—that would have been too inconvenient—we had them shipped ahead to the place we were going. The only time we took all our possessions along with us was on our last trip, when we carried everything down South in a Pontiac station wagon. Nigel is in his wheel, making it whirl and whir. I scarcely notice anymore; and then I do notice, suddenly, and have to tap on the side of his tank to make him stop. Sometimes, when I do that, he jumps out of the wheel and then jumps right back in again.