Time Travail (20 page)

On the Friday of the second week of my regular
pedagogic visits to the other house I overheard Harvey wheezing to
Hanna:

“Goddam it. You do. What I tell you. To do.
Clean it up. Buy good stuff. Don’t forget the tablecloth.” It
proved to be in my honor, a little celebration in the kitchen just
before the humiliation of the payment ceremony. The dirt and the
roaches were still there. But she’d covered the Formica table with
a linen tablecloth. It was yellowed and deeply creased from having
been folded away in a closet for maybe thirty years. It smelled
that way. Even doubled up it was too big for the table and dragged
down onto the filthy floor. There was a jar of sticky salmon-eggs,
a box of Ritz crackers with the top ripped off, a big bottle of
Cointreau and three turdish chocolate éclairs.

The celebration was for my “breakthrough”
with Beth Anderson. He knew our relationship had taken a new turn.
That was because he deputized Hanna to keep him informed about my
movements. Whenever I went over to Beth’s she was sure to be
watching at a window.

The day before the kitchen feast I happened
to look out of Beth’s picture window. I saw Hanna behind the attic
window with binoculars trained on the two of us. I drew the drapes,
telling Beth it was cozier that way.

Harvey misinterpreted that completely. When I
told him we engaged in tutorials behind those drawn drapes his lips
withdrew from his yellowed teeth in a spectral grin.

As I forced myself to sample the sickening
stuff on the table he said it was probably a little too early in
our relationship for me to sound her out about the placement of the
sensors in her house.

Much too early, I said.

A
little
too early, he repeated and then returned to that matter of
the location of Rachel’s room. It was worth $500 to him if I could
manage to get hold of the blueprint of Beth Anderson’s house. Now
that I was a regular visitor it shouldn’t be a problem. I replied
that a house blueprint wasn’t something you borrowed like a cup of
flour. Or was his idea for me to steal it? He didn’t answer that
one but came up with a substitute tactic. I should draw a plan of
the house to scale from memory. Hadn’t I said she’d shown me
everything? He made a try at a leer.

So I became a reluctant unpaid draftsman for
him. He wasn’t satisfied with my job. He was sure I’d screwed up
the measurements. He produced a steel ribbon tape measure and told
me to measure every one of her rooms and the corridors too. I said
that you couldn’t do a sneaky crazy thing like that in a house
you’d been invited to. He couldn’t tell me that was part of our
contract. Maybe not, he said, but it was still worth $500 to him to
get the exact measurements of that house.

He left the tape measure on my desk. I
wondered how it could possibly efface the question marks on his
sheets and position the red circle of the immeasurable room on a
measured one.

I didn’t so much as touch his cold-blooded
coiled instrument. It didn’t budge from my desk. I couldn’t accept
the image of myself kneeling down to figures in his service. That’s
how it had all begun, with the check on the floor of a furnished
room. Still, I couldn’t help translating dollars into days. I’d
figured out that every fifty dollars meant a day closer to clean
break with that house.

One evening Beth Anderson returned from the
kitchen too soon and caught me in the middle of my compromise,
stalking along her pastel living room wall, counting under my
breath. One of my long paces was a yard, give or take an inch. She
looked at me queerly.

All things considered I handled the situation
pretty well. I went on pacing off, unfazed, excusing myself for the
exercise: lumbar rheumatism, a sudden attack. At the onset of pain,
long stiff-legged strides were prescribed. She looked relieved at
that, maybe even happy I’d finally confided intimate things. While
I strode on, she told me all about her own back troubles.

By the end of her symptoms I’d lost count of
the paces. I handed the tape measure back to Harvey that very day
and told him it was impossible.

A few days later he came up to my room and
handed me a compact camera with a 28-70 millimeter focal zoom. He
expected me to photograph every room in her house. It was worth
$1,000 to him. That meant twenty days to me. But I said he must
think I was crazy to think I’d do something like that. I handed it
back. He didn’t insist but left the camera on my desk.

By that time I was going down to the machine
regularly. Those descents were like appointments with someone who
never showed up. My eyes burned constantly and I was nauseous
pretty often. But maybe the nausea had nothing to do with that
although one night I was half way down the cellar stairs when I
heard Hanna’s voice behind me. “You better quit going down there
all the time. That’s how it started with him. You better not go
down there anymore. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Some days I felt the co-dwellers very
strongly, some days not at all. It seemed to be cyclic. Once I
thought I was on the verge of sensing my mother in the dead room
although I’d never seen her on his screen. The feeling lasted a
second and then vanished. I stood there in the middle of the room
like a defective fifth sensor for maybe half an hour until I felt
too tired to remain standing.

I lay down on the sofa and looked at the
overlapping houses on the table. He’d done more of them. Again the
gone house with the red-circled room haunted the existent house at
different angles and degrees of overlap. There was something new
now: a sheet with a big “J” above a long list of numbers. I still
recall the first ones: J. #1: 12-23 6.5 h. I gave up trying to make
sense of it.

At subconscious levels my brain must have
gone on processing it, fitting this and that together. The
completed pattern woke me in the middle of an unrelated dream. J. #
1 12-23 6.5 h.: Jerry, Viewing Number One, December 23, six and a
half hours. Six and a half hours before the screen.

His careful bookkeeping accounted for all my
visits down there and the duration of exposure to the rays.

Bolt upright in bed in the darkness of
four-something in the morning I thought I understood, in that
moment of insight or paranoia, why he’d labored up the stairs that
night with the news that my mother had swum up on the screen for a
few flickering seconds.

What else if not to lure me back down there?
And when I resumed ghouling night after night and saw nothing and
might well give it up again, there had been that further invention
of a second capture of her in the striped armchair coinciding
neatly with a moment of dozing on my part.

Did he want to radiate me into his image? I
saw myself shrunken with a Groucho Marx wig and painted upper lip
wisecracking to invisible co-dwellers.

When I woke up to a room filled with rational
daylight I remembered that Harvey himself had warned against the
effects of the rays. I came up with a sensible explanation of the
sheet. He’d spoken of the need for a control of his vision. I was
the control. It was simply a control sheet.

I was bringing up in the toilet for the third
time that day and must have been noisy about it with nothing on my
stomach because she stopped in front of the door.

“I told you not to go down there. Didn’t I
tell him not to go down there? You’re gonna get what he got. I’m
gonna have two sick men on my hands.”

But couldn’t it have been intestinal flu?
People were coming down with it right and left.

(
I don’t see how I’ll be able to survive those
thirty-five days without her. Four days later I meet a jolly
green-eyed freckled redhead called Josie who’s a counselor at the
girl’s camp on the other side of the lake. I talk romantically
about swimming over at night to see her but actually go the long
safe way round through the woods skirting the lake. She lives in
Queens so there’s the promise of relative duration. Her photo’s on
the top of the public part of my wallet by the end of the week. It
would be topmost on the private part except that I’ve begun judging
that distinction between public and clandestine as childish. I
don’t look at them any more even if I haven’t gotten rid of them.
Her breasts too are freckled. Sometimes I think of Rachel and
realize that I haven’t done that for a good hour. Then hours.
Everything ends up diluted that way.

In September I come over to Harvey’s with
books. It’s no pretext now. Rachel’s in the living room by herself,
carpet-sweeping. She produces her predictable shy smile and “O”.
Why does she always wear the same unbecoming dresses? I shake hands
with her. That contact confirms my recovery. I sit down at my ease
opposite her, waiting for Harvey. I don’t go on talking and
talking, as I used to do with her in what I look upon as the
humiliating old days the month before. I let her silences go on and
on. Sometimes I look at my watch. When she starts in on Harvey I
even yawn. Not to her face of course. Behind my hand. It’s an
ostentatious gesture anyhow. I could have stifled that yawn.

When she asks me about my summer camp I show
her Josie’s black-and-white photo with a certain residual rancor.
Rachel finds her “very pretty.” Did I want her to say or betray
something else? I feel almost tempted to say impossible things
about Josie, the sort of thing Harvey used to pay to hear. Instead,
I say something about Josie’s green eyes and the association with
jealousy. Rachel doesn’t understand “green-eyed monster.”

She comes out with her usual exotic “Please?”
I suddenly find it irritating. I tell her “please” in that context
isn’t colloquial at all, isn’t correct English and that she does it
all the time, particularly with Harvey who purposefully says things
he knows she can’t possibly understand just for the satisfaction of
hearing her say “please” as though begging for something. The
correct expression is “Excuse me?” said in a self-possessed
non-begging way. I don’t remember if I said all that but I thought
it for sure.

I get up and put the books on
the table and say, in English this time: “Goodbye.” As I reach the
door, she says with tremendous intimacy: “Jerry, why do you steal
books?” So she knows that and for the first time shows interest in
me. I don’t bother explaining or denying. I say “goodbye” again, as
if I haven’t heard, and leave
.)

One night in late January at about a quarter
to midnight a muffled banging woke me up. The wind was howling and
buffeting the house. It was practically a hurricane. You could hear
things toppling, ash-can lids noisily driven across the street. I
wished it would blow all the houses into the sea. The muffled
banging came again, from outside. I looked out of the window.

A branch of the elm tree planted too close to
the house was knocking against the side of the house, just above my
window. It was like a long black arm. It would have to be lopped
off. The tree had an unbalanced shape from all of those house-side
branches that had already been sawn off. The job had been botched.
From having watched professionals I knew that a branch had to be
removed flush with the trunk in order not to leave an ugly dead
snag. It had to be undercut first so that it would break off
cleanly and not wrench off part of the trunk itself. Then the wound
had to be tarred. In the rips of the trunk and the jagged snags I
recognized Hanna’s signature. Tomorrow I’d ask Harvey to get her to
deal with that branch too.

With the howling and banging I couldn’t
sleep. I had to leave the house. I dressed and went outside,
staggering against the force of the wind. I saw Beth Anderson in
front of her house, blown about by the wind, trying to chase her
ash-can cover. The wind was driving it like a noisy wobbly hoop
down the street. I intercepted it for her. She said that she
couldn’t sleep either and invited me in for a drink. While she went
into the kitchen I stood again in the middle of her living room
without moving. Bringing in the tray she said behind me: “What’s
the matter, Jerry? Why don’t you sit down?”

We had more than one drink and spoke of
insomnia remedies, mostly things to be taken in from outside and
not things to be suppressed inside. I told her of an old method in
my younger days, a recurrent fantasy. I gave it to her for whatever
it was worth. She listened to me, her glass immobile halfway to her
lips. It wasn’t worth that much attention.

I’d been to Florida with my parents when I
was about seven. In the mid-forties, I added for the sake of
rejuvenation in her eyes. It had actually been a decade earlier. I
hadn’t forgotten the beach, I said. It represented something like
paradise to me for a long time, I didn’t know why. The fantasy to
combat sleeplessness was that I was a solitary and indefatigable
runner, breasting state-line after state-line like 200-yard
finish-tapes except this was a 1500-mile run, Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, the cotton-pickers of Georgia
applauding me, then the Everglades, racing over the backs of
slumbering alligators, and finally I reached the vast white empty
beach, unless I’d already fallen asleep.

“There were empty beaches in Florida
then?”

“Perfectly empty and white. It was early
morning. I ran into the sea, a great big green wave. Let’s go to
Florida.”

“Excuse me?”

“Let’s go to Florida.”

“You and me?”

She smiled. She took it for one of our
games.

“When do you want us to go?”

“Now.”

“Yes, January’s a good time for Florida.”

“No, now. Right away. Time to pack, say a
quarter of an hour and we’ll be out of the house, out of the
houses, and in Florida in a couple of hours. Someone told me they
have round-the-clock flights to Florida. We’d be there before
dawn.”