The Man Who Lost the Sea (38 page)

“I’ve got to find her,” whispered Smith, and then heard what Noat had said. “You mean
—that
old man? Wh-why, he told me it was an old
couple!
”

“I bet he didn’t.”

“You!
You
know where she is! You knew all the time.”

Noat spread his hands unhappily. “You never asked me.”

Smith’s scorn made him appear a sudden four inches taller. “Quit playing games!”

“Okay … okay.” The big man looked completely miserable. “I just didn’t want to hurt you, that’s all.” At Smith’s sharp look, he said “Honest. Honest … Gorwing, he’s right, you know. She doesn’t need you. I wish you didn’t make me tell you that. I’m sorry.” He went back behind the counter, as if he could comfort himself with the tools, the clutter back there.

“You better tell me the whole thing,” whispered Smith.

“Well … she, Mrs. Smith I mean, she came to me that day. She was all … mixed up. I don’t think she meant to spill anything, but she sort of … couldn’t hold it.” He put up a swift hand when Smith would have interrupted. “Wait, I’m telling this all wrong. What I’m trying to say, she came here because she just didn’t know where else to go to. She said something about ‘Anything Shoppe’; she wanted to know if ‘anything’ meant … 
anything
. She said she had to have
a job, something to do. She said never mind the money, just enough to scrape along, but something to
do;
that’s what she needed.”

“What she needed.”

“I know what you’re thinking. Yeah, Gorwing knew she needed something, and just what it was, too … y’see,” he said earnestly, “he’s always right. Even the lousy things he does sometimes, they’re always right. Or at least … there’s always a reason.” He stopped, as if to ponder it out for himself.

“Look,” said Smith, suddenly, painfully kneading his cheeks, “whatever it is you have to tell me, tell me. I’m all mixed up … and … and
where is she?
” Then he opened his blue eyes very wide—oddly like those of the boy he had saved on the cliff, when Gorwing had frightened him—and said piteously, “You mean she really doesn’t need me? Gorwing was right?”

G-Note crouched over, elbows on the counter, his big hands holding each other in front of him.

He said, “What she needed, what she needed more than anything in the world, she needed something to take care of. You—well, she tried to take care of you, but—Don’t you see what I mean?”

There was silence for a long time. Smith felt that somehow, if he could pull together the churned-up pieces of his mind, he might be able to turn it to this, make some sense out of it. He tried very hard, and at last was able to say, “You mean, when you come right down to it, there … was never very much for her to do for me.”

“Oh, you got it. You got it. You … well, she told me some things. She cried, I guess she didn’t mean to say anything, but I guess—she just had to. She said you could cook better’n she could.”

“What?”

“Well, things you liked to eat, you could. And those were all the things you ever wanted. She took care of the house, but you’d ’a done just the same things if she wasn’t there. She never felt she really
had
to …”

“But this old man—who’s
he?
”

“One of Gorwing’s … you know. Gorwing found him down by the tracks. Sick, wore out. Needing somebody to take care of him—
needing
it, you see? Not for long … Doc Tramble, he says he don’t
know how the old fellow hung on this long.”

“God,” said Smith, stinging with chagrin, “is that what she needed? Maybe I should be dying—she’d be happy with me then.”

“Ah, knock that off. She’s only like most people, she has to make a difference to somebody. She makes a difference to that old man, and she knows it.”

“She made a difference to me,” whispered Smith, and then something lit up inside him. He stared at Noat. “But she never knew it.” Suddenly he leaped to his feet, walked up, walked back, sat again bolt upright, holding himself as if he were full of coiled springs. “What’s the matter with me? You know what I did, I said she had somebody with her while I was at the Elks’ that night, you know, the night you picked me up in the car. That’s why she left.” He hit himself on the forehead with sharp knuckles. “I know she didn’t have anyone, she wouldn’t! So what made me think of it? why all of a sudden did I have to think of it, and even when I knew I was wrong, why did I have to go for her, curse at her, call her names the way I did, till she had to leave … why?” he shouted.

“You really want me to tell you?” Then Noat looked away from Smith’s frantic, twisted face and shook his head. “I don’t
know
,” he said carefully, “I only know what I think. I don’t know everything … I don’t know you very much. All right?”

“Yes, I understand that. Go ahead.”

“Well, then.” Noat watched his big brown hands press and slide on the counter until they squeaked, as if they had ideas under them and could express the words by squeezing. He raised them and looked under them and folded them and looked at Smith. “You hear a lot of glop,” he said carefully, “about infantile this and adult that, and acting like a grownup. I’ve thought a lot about that. Like how you’ve got to be adult about this or that arrangement with people or the world or your work or something. Like they’d say you never had an adult relationship with the missus. Don’t get mad! I don’t mean—well, hell, how adult is two rabbits? I don’t mean the sex thing.” He opened his hands to look for more words, and folded them again. “Most people got the wrong idea about this ‘adult’ business, this ‘grownup’ thing they talk about but don’t think about. What I’m
trying to say, if a thing is alive, it changes all the time. Every single second it changes; it grows or rots or gets bigger or grows hair in its armpits or puts out buds or sheds its skin or something, but when a thing is living, it changes.” He looked at Smith, and Smith nodded. He went on:

“What I think about you, I think somewhere along the line you forgot about that, that you had to go on changing. Like when you’re little, you keep getting bigger all the time, you get promoted in school; you change; good. But then you get out, you find your spot, you got your house, your wife, your kind of work, then there’s nothing around you any more says you have to change. No class to get promoted to. No pants grown too small. You think you can stop now, not change any more.” Noat shook his craggy head. “Nothing alive will stand for that, Smitty.”

“Well, but why did I think she … why did I say that about—some man with her, all that?”

Noat shrugged. “I don’t know all about you,” he said again. “Just sort of guessing, but suppose you’d stopped, you know,
living
. Something’s going to kick up about that. It don’t have to make a lot of sense; just kick up. Get mad about something. Your wife with some man—now, that’s not nice, that’s not even true, but it’s a
living
kind of thing, you see what I mean? I mean, things change around the house then—but good; altogether; right
now
.”

“My God,” Smith breathed.

“ ’Course,” said Noat, “sooner or later you have to get over it, face things as they really are. Or as they really ain’t.” He thought again for a time, then said, “Take a tree, starts from a seed, gets to be a stalk, a sapling, on up till it’s a hundred feet tall and nine feet through the trunk; it’s still growing and changing until one fine day it gets its growth; it’s grown up: it’s—dead. So the whole thing I’m saying is, this adult relationship stuff they talk about, it’s not that at all. It’s
growing
up that matters, not
grown
up.… Man can get along alone for quite a long time ‘grownup’—taking care of himself. But if he takes in anyone else, he’s … well, he’s got to have a piece missing that the other person supplies all the time. He’s got to need that, and he’s got to have something that’s missing in the other person that they
need. So then the two of them, they’re one thing now … and still it’s got to be like a living thing, it’s got to change and grow and be alive. Nothing alive will stand for being stopped. So … excuse me for butting in, but you thought you could stop it and it blew up on you.”

Smith stared silently at the big man, then nodded. “I see. But now what?”

“You want to know where she is?”

“Sure. By the Lord, now I can …”

“What’s the matter?”

Smith looked at him, stricken. “Gorwing said … she didn’t need me.”

“Gorwing!” snarled Noat. Then he scratched his head. “I see what he meant. She never could take care of you much, and she awful much needs to take care of somebody. Now she’s got the old feller. He needs her, God knows. For a little while yet … Gorwing … hey! Why d’ye suppose he tried to make you think—you know—about your wife?”

“You know him better than I do.”

“It comes to me,” said Noat, inwardly amazed. “I see it. I see it. He makes it his business to take care of what people really need, need real bad. Right? Good. How do you do that?”

“Get ’em what they need, I guess.”

“That’s one way. Two—” he held up fingers—“you get ’em out of range. Like he does with dope addicts. Right? Then—three. You fix it so they just don’t feel they need it any more. I mean, if he was to fix it that you got so mad at your wife you wouldn’t want ever to see her again—see?”

“That poor little man! He couldn’t do that.”

“He just tried. He has a gift, Smitty, but that don’t mean he’s bright.”

“It doesn’t?” said Smith in tones of revelation. “It’s bright enough. I need her—that’s one big need, correct? Now, suppose I go find her, take her away from that poor old man. He starts needing her—and she starts needing to take care of somebody again. So—two big needs. That Gorwing, he knows what he’s doing. I—I can’t do that, Mr. Noat.”

“You mean, to the old man?”

“Well, yes, that. But her … my wife. I need her. You know that, and I do.”

“And Gorwing does.”

“Yeah, but she doesn’t. God, what do I have to do? Do I really have to be dying?”

“Living,” said George Noat.

You’re a freak
.

Sometimes for days at a time he could content himself with the thought that all the rest of them were freaks. Or that, after all, what does anyone do? When it gets cold, they try to get warm. When they get hungry, they go find something to eat. What people feel, whatever’s crowding them, they get out from under the best way they can, right? They duck it or move it or blast it out of the way, or use it on something else that might be bothering them, right? And what bothers people is different, one from the other. Hunger can get to them all and cold and things like that; but look, one wants some music, some special kind of music, more than anything else in life, more than a woman or a drink, while another needs heroin and another to have a roomful of people clapping their hands at him. Or needing, needing like life-and-death, some stupid little thing that would mean nothing to anyone else—something as little as a couple of words, like that Calla girl, about to jump off the Tappan Zee Bridge for wanting somebody to come up to her and say, “Hey, I need you to do something nobody else can do.” Or needing to feel safe from some something that lurks inside them, like the Blinker: you’d never guess it to watch him cuss and laugh and make the pass, and chalk the cue, just like anybody, but he was epileptic and he never knew when it was going to hit him. Or needing defense against things lurking outside of them, like Miss Guelph at the high school, crazy afraid of feathers, terrified one might touch her. So the things people need and the things they need to be safe from, they’re all kinds of things: it doesn’t make one of them a freak if his special need is a little different.

What if you never heard of anyone with a need just like yours?
Does that automatically make you a freak? … There are lots of people who have to make it alone, who can’t share what they have with anyone. Who can’t drive a car for fear that faint-making, aching cloud will suck them down into it when they don’t expect it.

Sometimes, too, you can get to believe that the very thing that’s wrong with you makes you special. Well, it does, too. You have power over people. Now just how many people in this—or any—town could tell you a little kid two blocks away was lost, and a woman three blocks the other way was looking for him? Or look at the way you found that boy on the cliff—now that boy would be dead right now.

So if you’re so special how come old Noat throws you out on your ear?

You’re a freak
.

Now cut it out. You got it made. You got a nice spot. The town’s just big enough so nobody much notices you, just small enough so when that faintness comes, and that ache, and then the picture in your head—of a traffic light or a building front or a green fence or a cliffside—you know just where to go to find the person who has that big noisy need for something. Remember that trip down to Fort Lee? So big, so noisy; God, you almost went out of your head. Plank you down in the middle of New York, say, you’d be dead in a second, all that racket. And the things they need, you’d never know where to get them in a big place, but here, heck, you know where to find anything if it’s in town. Or old Noat will get it for you.

What he want to throw you out like that for? Just trying to shut off the shrieking lonesomeness of that squirt Smith; him and his Eloise, it gave him a headache.

Ow. Here comes one now. Shut your eyes. Ow, my neck. Shut your eyes tight, now. See … see a … see a street, store-front, green eaves over the window. Felt carpet slippers, a man’s belt. That would be Harry Schein’s Haberdashery on Washington Street. Somebody standing there, needs—what? Sleep, wants to sleep, for God’s sake, gets wide awake soon as hits the sack … a man. Screaming for sleep, frantic for sleep. Get some sleeping pills, everything closed now. Hey, this could be worth a buck. Go call Doc Tramble. Here, phone in
the gas station. NY 7 … 0 … 0 … 5 …

“Doc? Gorwing here. Got some sleeping pills in your bag? Oh, nothing serious … yes, I know what’s dangerous and what ain’t. No, not for me. Oh, five, I guess. I’ll send the Blinker or somebody around for ’em, okay?”

Ow. Guy walking toward Broad Street now. Oh boy does he want some sleep. Where’s dime … here. Call poolroom … 4 … 7 … “Hi—Danny? Gorwing. Hey, the Blinker there? Hell … Who else is around? No … Nuh, not her. Smith? What Smith—you mean that guy’s been hanging around G-Note’s? Yeah, put him on.”