Time Travail (21 page)

She smiled again and sipped her port. She was
enjoying her end of the game. The wind buffeted the picture
window.

“But I have my job here.”

“You’ll find work in Florida. Don’t they have
florists there? Or do flowers grow everywhere, free for the
picking? You’ll find something else to do. I’ll dye my hair and
find a teaching job. Anyhow with what I’ve been earning at Harvey’s
I’ve saved up nearly eight thousand dollars.”

I was half hoping she would say that my hair
wasn’t all that gray (which was true). Instead she frowned a little
and blinked twice. I think she was on the point of saying something
else but remembered that the game wasn’t over yet. The rules had to
be abided by. She mechanically objected, trying to smile a little
again:

“But I’m a married woman.”

I was tempted to say that she was only
technically a married woman and add that after two years and more
of unilateral rupture there must be something like automatic
annulment. She should learn to break free of the past. Instead, I
said:

“You could say I’m your grandfather.”

“Nobody’d believe that.”

“Your father, then.”

She must have thought that was a credible
relationship for she went on to something else, but still frowning
a little.

“There are no empty beaches in Florida
anymore. It’s all built up. Why, you’d have to go back fifty years
to find an empty beach in Florida.”

So we were back to my feared starting-point.
I didn’t know what to say. She didn’t say anything either. She was
frowning again and rubbing the rim of her glass with her finger
trying to coax music from it.

“I didn’t know you were working for Mr
Morgenstern,” she said finally.

It was a confession that had slipped out.
It was the alcohol. I took another drink. Was it fair of her to
take something from a game and use it outside the game? I realized
that my status in her eyes had suffered a damaging blow, that
the
persona
I’d
constructed mainly through omission but also through
misrepresentation had now collapsed. I’d explained my presence in
that other house as an act of altruism, appealing to her from those
flattering heights for comprehension of poor Harvey, setting an
example of self-sacrifice. Now it turned out I was a salaried
employee rather than a “good person.” I realized the
misrepresentation could be repaired only through further
confession, voluntary this time. Instead, I tried to return to what
she’d defined, from the beginning, as the game:

“So no empty beach, no Florida for you?”

“No,” she said absently, still looking down
into her glass.

“Let’s go to a desert, then.”

Reluctantly, without looking up, she
played.

“Death Valley?”

“Too many whitened bones there. Pioneers
lying in wait. Even the Sahara was inhabited once. The Gobi desert,
maybe? It was always uninhabited. Except way back by dinosaurs, a
hundred million years ago. That’s out of range. Not all the dynamos
on earth. Who’s afraid of dinosaurs anyhow?”

She frowned and said:

“I don’t understand what you’re doing in that
awful house, a person like you. Why don’t you go back?”

I had an instant of fright when she said that
and almost replied that I’d been going back too often and was
losing my grip because of it, couldn’t she see that? It was stupid,
the alcohol and the track I’d been on. Then I realized she was
talking in terms of space. In the confessional mode to make amends
I said:

“Back to what? The last two years I was
living in a furnished room. That sounds seedy. Furnished rooms I
should have said. The plural changes things considerably. I never
did get used to the purple flowers on the wallpaper, though. My
wife got the house. You didn’t know I was married, did you?”

“Of course I did. You can see where the ring
was.”

I looked down at my finger and didn’t see any
telltale mark of former mutual possession. Women are supernaturally
keen-eyed about such things. After the failure of soap and then
glycerin (she’d fed me too well all those years and I’d put on
weight) I’d nearly amputated that finger with a hacksaw.

She wanted to know if men did that often when
they broke up with a woman, take off the wedding ring?

I said that I didn’t know. In this particular
case it was the man who had been broken up with, I said
ungrammatically.

The wind buffeted the picture window again.
Ash-can covers rattled again.

“Well,” she said after a while, yawning and
stretching. “Time for bed.” She got up and started for the front
door. Before, I’d always been the one to initiate endings. It was a
shift in the balance of power. I joined her at the door. I didn’t
want to go back to bed. I didn’t want to go back to the house.

I tried again, already on the wrong side of
her door.

“Then you don’t want to go to Florida with
me?”

“Not really,” she said and wished me a good
night.

I smiled at her standing in the narrow gap,
stifling a yawn.

“Just a joke. While waiting for InGathering,
what would we have talked about during those long semi-tropical
evenings?”

When I passed through her gate, I turned my
back on the two houses and walked in that opposite direction. It
was hard going against the wind which was trying to shove me back.
The wind was even wilder now. The trees were hysterical about it.
There were flights of paper, like night birds, skittering cans, a
flailing of twigs. Once a ripped-off branch nearly struck me. I
thought of the other branch. It would be banging against the house
non-stop.

After a while I turned back. I didn’t have to
struggle anymore. Now the wind was shoving me in that
direction.

I returned to the other house and went to
bed. I counted the irregular banging of the branch for hours. I was
up to eighty-something when I finally fell asleep.

***

Eleven

Our relationship started falling to pieces
like
The
House of Usher
I’d
analyzed for her the week before. Fissure, crack, gap and down into
the dark tarn.

She’d suddenly become very sensitive to my
joking remarks on the cult. I’d taken the initiative on the subject
now. I may have been a little aggressive about it as though to
reconquer the territory I’d lost to her that stormy night. She took
my remarks as ironic criticism of her husband and tried to talk
about other things. She was careful now not to leave the cult
leaflets hanging around.

But one evening in the kitchen, getting
ice cubes, I came across one on the kitchen table. I took it back
to the living room. She saw me ostentatiously reading the
outrageous thing but said nothing. The leaflet was full of
celebrated faces, among others, Ramses II (“The Mightiest of the
fabulous Egyptian Pharaohs”), Benjamin Franklin (“The Founding
Father and Eminent Inventor”) and Ludwig von Beethoven (“The
Celebrated Composer of
The Moonlight Sonata
”). They’d all been members of The Golden Galaxy.
I asked her what she thought of those extravagant claims. She said,
why not?

I said I’d thought nothing was known about
Ramses II’s associative life, but maybe so. I said that I had
doubts about Benjamin Franklin. Where’d he find the time? Pretty
busy man, it seemed to me, coping with stoves and lightning-bolts
and diplomacy. Did a lot of tomcatting too in his spare time. Maybe
so, though. But Beethoven, absolutely out.

To my surprise, she counterattacked. Could
I pr
o
ve that
Beethoven hadn’t been a member of The Golden Galaxy? And when of
course I said I couldn’t prove that any more than I could prove
he’d not been having a steamy affair with the reigning Hapsburg
Emperor, she looked as though she’d won the argument.

It irked a little. A few minutes later,
during the music break, I noticed something new on her finger. I
took her hand and scrutinized the massive brass ring consisting of
three intertwined serpents with red-stoned eyes. I asked if it was
another present from her husband. She reluctantly said it was. I
asked how much she’d had to pay for it. She withdrew her hand and
dropped it out of sight on her lap.

She didn’t remember. Approximately? She
didn’t remember even approximately. I persisted.

“Two hundred dollars? Two hundred dollars is
what you said he charged you for that thing around your neck.”

“It’s not a ‘thing’. It’s a unique piece of
hand-crafted jewelry.”

“Ah.”

“I don’t know what you’re implying by
‘ah.’”

“That he picks up those things for maybe five
dollars and sells them to you for forty times the price. It’s
exploitation. Can’t you see that? I’m trying to help you. By all
rights you’re the one who ought to be getting money. Isn’t there
something like alimony for desertion?”

“They’re not worth five dollars! And it’s not
desertion. It has something to do with a phase of spiritual
development. You have to step back from certain kinds of
involvement for a while, take stock and then you return to them on
a higher level.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“I believe him. I believe him. I have a very
bad headache. I’d prefer not talking about this private matter any
more.”

She went back to the Brahms Opus 111 quintet
with exaggerated attention, staring past me at the wall. When it
was over she said:

“
I wouldn’t try to price
your
ring if it was still on your
finger.”

Right from the start there’d been problems
with the camera. My first opportunity had occurred one Saturday
afternoon when she went into the kitchen for more pretzels. It
almost ended then and there. I whipped the camera out of my pocket,
backed up against a wall and wide-angled as much of the living room
as I could.

The flash was unexpectedly indiscreet. She
came out of the kitchen instantly. I barely had time to shove the
camera back in my pocket.

“What was that? A short-circuit?” She
sniffed. “Didn’t that come from here?”

I told her it had come from outside, like a
flash of lightning. She went over to the window and examined the
sky which was largely blue. She frowned then shrugged. After all,
she said, there was that expression, “like a bolt out of the blue”,
so it sometimes happened. But this was the first time in her
experience.

In each of the rooms I operated in I stood in
a corner to take in as much as possible, the lens briefly zooming
in and out in search of the correct focus. For some reason I was
bothered by the phenomenon of parallax, the discrepancy between
what I saw through the viewfinder and what the lens saw. I didn’t
share its vision. Things lay beyond the margins of the viewfinder.
I don’t know why it bothered me.

By the end of the second week I’d managed by
hook or crook to photograph all of the rooms of her house with the
exception of the unvisited room at the end of the corridor and the
second-floor bathroom. I urgently wanted to finish the job not just
for the money (the days) involved but also to end the strain. There
was a certain harmless duplicity to the operation.

One afternoon in the middle of another Poe
story,
Ligeia
, I
excused myself. “There’s a bathroom on this floor,” she reminded me
as I headed for the stairs. I continued as if I hadn’t heard
her.

I tried the door of the room at the end of
the corridor but it was locked. I went into the bathroom. The
cramped quarters posed a technical problem even at the widest
focal. I backed up in various spots and ended by knocking over a
hair-dryer poised on the washbasin. It clattered to the floor,
making a hell of a racket. Finally the only spot that allowed a
general view of the bathroom was the shower. I slipped my shoes
off. The porcelain unit underfoot proved to be wet.

The flash went off and I got a good part of
the bathroom including the door which was now open with Beth
Anderson framed in blinded stupefaction. Was it the clatter of the
hair-dryer or had she been suspicious already?

I was caught off base. Usually I can come up
with expert instant rectification of reality, a form of creativity
in a way, I used to think. “Sculpting the sad gray clay of facts
into ideal beauty,” I used to say. Time had taken its toll. The
best I could manage, standing with graying hair soggy-footed in her
shower, was: “Trying out a new camera.” She nodded briefly and
groped down the staircase in silence.

She hardly opened her mouth that evening
and abridged the session saying she had a bad headache. Maybe she
really did. She had the hunted look she must have had when Hanna
decapitated
Sutter’s Gold
. I
could imagine her sleepless that night, pitching and tossing away,
trying to digest other things: that alleged flash of lightning in a
largely blue sky, my pacing off her living room to remedy a
supposed back complaint, the revelation of a cash-nexus between me
and Harvey Morgenstern.

And that was the moment Harvey chose to start
harassing me to convince her to let us set up the sensors in her
house.

By this time he was tired of his
time-exploration of the dead room. He showed me a long list of the
people he’d encountered on the screen. His body-count included his
mother and father and himself in varying stations toward decay,
four cousins, two uncles, eighteen family friends, the Negro maid
he claimed to have caught stealing twenty years after the act, a
reform rabbi, a cat and a Fuller Brush man. And my mother, twice.
He hadn’t been able to locate her a third time, he said. New
catches were becoming less and less frequent.