Oh What a Paradise It Seems (2 page)

T
HE
revolutionary discovery of the cerbical chip with its memory capacity infinitely greater than the silicon chip’s had necessitated Sears’s making several trips to the cerbical mines in the Carpathians and to the new deposits that had been discovered in the Danube Valley. At the time of which I’m writing both the silicon RAM and the ROM contained fewer than 16,000 facts, and while the silicon 64K contained 65,536 bits of information, the new VLSI circuit, introduced by the cerbical chip, contained more than a million pieces of information. A study completed by Thompson-Howard tended to support the superiority of cerbical chips. TH had tested 300,000 chips and found the cerbical freer of defects. The fact that the firm Sears worked for manufactured intrusion systems for computer containers kept him continuously exposed to the computer memory with its supernatural command of facts and its supernatural lack of discernment, and this may have heightened his concern with sentimental matters such as the end of his skating and the destruction of Beasley’s Pond. Quite recently yet another sentimental encounter had become his concern.

The time of which I’m writing was a time in our history when the line or queue had been seriously challenged by automation, particularly in banks. Customers were urged
by newspaper advertisements, television and mailings to make their deposits and withdrawals by inserting cards into responsive machines, but there were still enough men and women who had mislaid their cards or who were so lonely that they liked to smile at a teller to form a friendly line at a bank window. They were of that generation who imagined there to be a line at the gates of heaven. Some force of change could be felt in the lines, but it was no more than the change one might notice in an airport a day or so after the fare to Rome or San Francisco had been increased. The air was filled with faint and random music.

She was two or three ahead of him—a remarkably good-looking woman who was an inch or so shorter than he although she wore high heels. She was small enough to be held—a consideration that he had come to think of as practical. Her figure was splendid and endearing. He thought that perhaps it was nostalgia that made her countenance such a forceful experience for him. It could have been that he was growing old and feared the end of love. The possibility of such a loss was much on his mind. When in the movies he saw a man and a woman kiss ardently he would wonder if this was a country which tomorrow or the day after he would be expected to leave. When he saw a couple in the street embrace with deep tenderness or walk delightedly shoulder to shoulder, he would be reminded, for no more than a moment, of his approaching age. This could have contributed to the fact that he thought her presence stunning. Her looks aroused the most forthright and robust memories: the flag being raised at the ballpark before the first pitch while a baritone sang the National Anthem. This
was an exaggeration; but the memories her appearance summoned involved only brightness. Her hair was a modest yellow. Her eyes, when she took off her large dark glasses, would, he knew, be violet. In her rather small features he saw nothing at all like a mountain range and yet here was very definitely a declaration of paradise, either mountainous or maritime, depending upon one’s tastes. He might have been regarding some great beach on another day of the week, but today he seemed to see the mountains, seemed disposed to raise his eyes, his head, and brace his shoulders as we do when, driving along some ghastly gambling-house strip, we see snow-covered mountains and feel how enduring is their challenge and their beauty. The components of his life seemed to present the need for a bridge and she and he seemed competent to build one that morning in the bank. She would, as a girl and a young woman, have been thought very pretty and this was an element—a grain—in the presence. She could have been the winsome girl on the oleomargarine package or the Oriental dancer on his father’s cigar box who used to stir his little prick when he was about nine.

The music that filled the air of the bank at that hour was a Brandenburg Concerto, played as ragtime. He imagined the smoothness of her naked back—its marked absence of declivity—so like a promised land. He wanted her as a lover, of course, and he felt that a profound and gratifying erotic consummation is a glimpse at another’s immortal soul as one’s own immortal soul is shown. Our lovers are always as tall as or taller than we. He stepped out of line, tapped her lightly on the shoulder and said: “I wonder if
you can tell me what the music is that they’re playing. You look to me as if you understood music.”

“You don’t understand the first thing about women,” she said. She laughed sweetly and dropped some papers she carried. Most of these he saw, when he picked them up, were real-estate advertisements, and when he passed them back to her he asked if she was in the real-estate business. She said yes and he said he was looking for an apartment. She gave him a card with the name Renée Herndon and they returned to their places in line.

Sears was quite content with his apartment on East 78th Street. He was not a dishonest man and when he telephoned Renée Herndon a few days later he fully intended to reward her generously for any time she spent with him. He said he was looking for a one- or two-room apartment, and that he was prepared to pay a substantial rent and sign at least a two-year lease. She agreed to show him what was available the next afternoon.

The offices where she worked struck him as being characterized by a kind of netherness. They were on the nether floor of a nether building in a nether neighborhood, and when he entered the place he saw nothing that was not distinguished by its portability. The reception room decorated with a vast urn, filled with artificial grasses and weeds, the receptionist’s desk, the receptionist herself all seemed highly mobile as if they could be moved, at short notice, to another building, another state or even another country. Renée Herndon, when she joined him, seemed
quite permanent. Her hold on his attention, his senses and his intelligence was quite the most he knew of permanence, at that point in his life.

She was, he guessed, thirty-five or perhaps forty and would have been married once or maybe twice. Her past was, at this point, none of his business. She was the sunny side of the street. The uniformity with which women of her age then dressed—widowed or divorced, showing real estate or working in china shops—seemed nearly ordained. She wore a suit, a little good perfume and no hat. He would have liked to kiss her, as she well knew, and when they got to the street and he offered her his arm she took it warmly and smiled or laughed with pleasure. She said they could either walk or take a cab and he said that he would be delighted to walk.

They had walked for no more than half a block when she was attracted—magnetized was the word—to a display of embroidered scarves in a window. Still holding his arm she admired these. He offered to buy her one of the scarves and she politely refused, but her refusal was, he thought from his experience, genuine. He had known many women whose refusals were transparent. He felt that her distinct refusal to let a stranger buy her a present displayed a glimpse at the proportions of her self-respect. He thought this intimate and lovely. He was also delighted to see that in the three blocks they had to walk from her office to the apartment she was to show him she stopped to look at the display in absolutely every window with the exception of a window that displayed surgical appliances. They looked at shoes and hats and dresses and pottery animals and jewelry
and china, and her interest in everything there was for sale charmed him and seemed to promise that she shared with him an undisciplined enthusiasm for men and women and circumstances and changes in the weather. The apartment she showed him was very different.

At about this time the high incidence of criminal rapes and robberies made it difficult to get into apartments in some neighborhoods, and though she had keys and credentials they had great difficulties with a doorman, whose uniform was unbuttoned and who cleaned his teeth, while he talked to them, with an old-fashioned kitchen match. When they finally got inside, the uniformity of the dim lights in the corridors, the sameness of the doors and the great difficulty she had in finding the place seemed to expose him to the loneliness of penance. The apartment that she showed him was a sort of nomadic hideout—it was still furnished with the chairs and tables of a divorcee whose lover or gigolo had abandoned her, although she still had photographs of him—many of them naked—hung on her bedroom wall. There was a narrow terrace from which you could see some blue sky, but the broad light of day could never reach the apartment.

She knew, of course, that he would not want it and said so. “I don’t,” she said, “know why I ever showed it to you. I detest the place myself.” “It’s given me an opportunity to ask you to dinner,” he said. “I’d love to have dinner with you,” she said, “if you don’t mind having a late dinner. I’m busy early in the evening.” “The time,” he said, “makes no difference.”

They walked back, now on the other side of the street,
looking at the gloves, shoes, antiques, embroideries and paintings that were displayed. “When do we meet?” he asked when they reached the door to her office. “Thursday?” she asked. “Meet me in the parish house of St. Anselm’s at about nine-fifteen on Thursday.” Then she was gone.

St. Anselm’s was Presbyterian and he wondered what she could be doing there on a weekday night. This was in Lent and the only church observations would be mournful. He didn’t know but he thought the Presbyterians had a less exacting calendar than his own Episcopal Church, and he guessed that Thursday was not a church holiday and that she had not gone to church to pray. None of his wives or lovers had been enthusiastic church members and this might be the first time in his life that he had gone to church to meet a woman. St. Anselm’s was on Park Avenue in a good neighborhood—that is a neighborhood where wealth was of the first importance. The main entrance to the church was dark and locked, but the parish-house door around the corner was lighted and unlocked. He let himself into a large vestibule. There was a second door—royal in its proportions. A sign was thumbtacked to this:
MEMBERS ONLY, THIS IS A CLOSED MEETING
. The sign was amateurish and he could imagine some woman—neither young nor beautiful but charmingly earnest—working on the sign at a kitchen table. Sears’s imagination was inclined to be optimistic and that the gathering beyond the closed doors involved membership—some vow or commitment or oath—did not seem to him sinister. He thought perhaps that dues were paid. He did not feel that to take a look at the gathering
would in any way involve an intrusion and he opened the door a crack.

He saw an ecclesiastical meeting room or auditorium—one of those places where the rummage sale would be held and the nativity play would be performed. He looked into the faces of forty men and women who were listening attentively to a speaker at a podium. He was at once struck by his incompetence at judging the gathering. Not even in times of war, with which he was familiar, not even in the evacuation of burning cities had he seen so mixed a gathering. It was a group, he thought, in which there was nowhere the force of selection. Since the faces—young, old, haggard and serene—conveyed nothing to him, he looked at their clothing and found even fewer bearings. They wore the clothes of the rich, the clothes of the poor and a few cheap imitations of the rich. Who were they: who in the world could they be? Here were the plain, cheerful faces of the mixed nationalities that distinguished his country.

He looked at the woman on the podium. She was a black-haired woman, perhaps in her forties, wearing one of those long nondescript dresses known as evening dresses although they are worn to weddings, christenings and barbecues. She was reading a list of names. Three men and two women came to the platform as she called their names. One of the women was bent with age, surely a septuagenarian. One of the men was perhaps nineteen. He had three cowlicks and a high color and wore a sweatshirt with Odium University printed on it. Beside him was a blond young man in a full suit and next was his beloved Renée, wearing one of those very simple frocks that cost a little
less than a good used car. She looked as lovely—as bright—as she had looked to him from the start.

“Turn out the lights, Charlie,” said the woman in the long dress. The lights went out and after a minute or two of suspense a door opened and a man came in carrying one of those flat, cheap cakes with candles that are ordered to celebrate the retirement of the building maintenance assistant or the oldest member of the stenographic pool. The lights went on and the gathering got to their feet and sang in the customary genuinely sincere and tuneless voices, “Happy anniversary to you, Happy anniversary, dear celebrant …” Renée smiled, laughed, and seemed truly happy with their wishes, and he looked back at the congregation. It seemed that he should be able to make some sense of the variety in their faces, and then he found himself, countenance by countenance, man and woman, young and old, trying to imagine how their faces would look contorted by the throes of erotic love. He was chagrined at his willingness to invade their lives—he was ashamed of himself and he closed the door.

A workman was sweeping the vestibule. “What is going on in there?” Sears asked. “I don’t know,” the workman said. “They’re either trying to stop smoking or drinking or eating but I don’t remember which bunch is in there tonight. It’s the no smokers that give me a pain in the ass. I smoke a pack, maybe a pack and a half a day, I sweep up cigarette butts, that’s my job, that’s what I get paid for and it’s nobody’s business but my own. For instance I went to pay my state tax last week. This is in a government building, this is in a building I pay for and right on the wall there is
this sign that says
THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING.
How the hell do they know that I’m not going to smoke? How do they know that I’m not going to piss or fart or get a hard-on? Thank you for not smoking. What the hell business is it of theirs? Thank you for not breathing….” Then he went out a door.