Time Travail (36 page)

She was in exactly the same position as the
first time I’d seen her on the other side of the fence, clutching
the meshes with one hand but not holding a bag of tulip-bulbs with
the other this time. They’d already been planted. They were up like
red and yellow flames behind her. Some were already drooping. “But
I can’t give it to you through the fence. Come on over just a
minute. I’m not afraid of catching it from you. I already had
it.”

She guided me across her disordered living
room up the dusty staircase. She talked about sickness and medicine
without pause and when we reached the landing steered me toward the
guestroom but I resisted going that way. There’s something I wanted
to show you there she said but I resisted. She took me into her
bedroom and told me to lie down. From the bathroom I heard water
filling a glass and the clink of a spoon and her voice going on
about sickness. I fell asleep and when I woke up she was sitting on
the edge of the bed holding the glass and staring down at me.

She said she’d phoned over and over during
those two weeks but had never got an answer. She hadn’t dared knock
on the front door. So she’d written a long letter and put it in his
mailbox. She soon realized that nobody picked up the mail anymore.
I should read it. There were things in it she couldn’t say. And in
a little while I should go into the guestroom. From her bedroom
she’d seen a little of me in my bedroom through the gap of the
drawn curtains, just my feet on the bed, almost whenever she
looked. He must be sick too to be in bed all the time like that,
she’d thought and hoped it was the same thing that was wrong with
her. Once she’d seen me at the window. I looked terrible. I still
did, even worse, much worse. What was that ugly red welt on my
forehead?

She put her hand on my forehead. I reached up
and held on tight to her and spoke my first words since my return
from where I’d been. I said I didn’t want to go back to the other
house or stay in this one. We should leave together for somewhere
far away.

She simplified us. The drapes were drawn but
all the lights in the room were on us. I’m shameless, she exulted,
strenuous in the middle of the thirty wall spectators, atoning for
past passivity, silence and final tears. I did this, I did that,
saying crudely what she’d just done for my passive pleasure (the
doing and saying) and now I’m going to do this, she said and
did.

Had I
liked
that? she whispered at the end.

I’d
loved
it, I whispered back as in the old radio
wine-commercial.

I saw the picturesque dome-shaped scrolled radio
with the yellowed celluloid tuning screen and my mother leaning
toward it.

Quickly I spoke to her of the seaside in
June. She said yes.

***

Eighteen

Shopping about for her birthday present in
the neighborhood I found myself before her florists’. The name Dave
and Tom’s was spelled out in entwined roses and lilies. It was
almost the size of a supermarket. Through the plate-glass I could
see her next to potted ferns and a palm-tree, wearing a uniform
like a waitress. She was joking with the very handsome young man,
her guest that evening, the baby she’d consoled. Like the other men
he wore a green shirt with a red monogram, D & T. I drew a
little closer. It was just to see her, I wasn’t going to go in and
bother her. I’d tried phoning every morning and afternoon but she
said I shouldn’t, they didn’t like it except in emergency cases. I
told her truthfully it was an emergency when she wasn’t there. She
took it for lover’s hyperbole. Then I had this idea. I went in.

She looked flustered when she saw me. I
called her “Miss” as though I didn’t know her and explained: a big
bouquet, it had to have fragrance, so none of their roses. I nodded
at whatever she chose. It’s for Hanna’s birthday, I explained in a
low voice. From Mr Morgenstern? she asked in an even lower voice.
No, from me, I said. I said that Hanna was sensitive to such
gestures. “With Love from Jerry,” I wrote on the fancy card.

She took the flowers to the operating-table
and worked over them in silence. Asparagus ferns, the cellophane,
the silver ribbons, the love-card and finally the expensive gold
seal. It cost over forty dollars.

She handed me the rustling bouquet, still
frowning a little. I handed it back grandly. “For you.” She
reddened then looked around fearfully and said she couldn’t take it
here, she couldn’t gos home with it. She wasn’t supposed to waste
time making a bouquet for herself. So I had to take the bouquet
myself and carry it about ceremoniously in all the shops I visited
for her real present, her birthday present.

It bothered me almost as much as it did her
that in a few weeks she wouldn’t be thirty-nine any more. For a man
my age, being loved by a woman still technically in her thirties
was far more ego boosting than being loved by a woman in her
forties even though just a few days separated the two states.
Anyhow, birthday gift hunting was my main activity when she wasn’t
there. Maybe the reason I took so long deciding on the right
present was that buying it would have put an end to shopping and in
its place what would time have been filled with?

There were other activities, of course, as
there had to be, mainly furious weeding and housework again. I
hardly ever listened to music. I resisted temptation and avoided
the honored guestroom. I had to pretend to her that I spent hours
there listening to the expensive pitiful hi-fi system she’d bought
me on credit along with the boxed Beethoven symphonies (Karajan,
his last unsatisfactory integral, not the great 1950 one, but how
could she know?).

When I was tired I sat at the living room
table staring down at the road map and at the holiday leaflet with
the empty white beach. I’d finally come up with one for us in
southern Maine. I had doubts about that beach. The shadows of the
dune-grass were very long in the sand-ripples. The photo had been
taken with the sun low in very late evening or maybe even in
winter. In winter even Jones’ Beach would be empty, not counting
washed-up dogs.

One evening I found her in a state of stupor
with the stiff face and rambling mumble that abuse of tranquilizers
gives. I got out of her that a friend had finally disclosed what
everybody else had known for ages: that her husband was living with
a girl half his age, had been from the beginning. He’s a dirty
hypocrite. Goes on shaving his head. But how about celibacy? How
about that? How about carnal temptation? And all the money she’d
sent him for the literature and the jewelry. She said she’d
denounce him to the leadership of The Golden Galaxy. I was sorry
for her but glad for us.

To calm her I suggested it might be a
spiritual relationship. “Spiritual, shit. They don’t m-meditate. I
know Jack. They f-fuck. All night long. She’s twenty-five.”

It was a shock to hear her say that. I’d
never heard her use words like that except for my private delight
recently. It cheapened that use.

Now she started crying like a little girl. It
aged her badly. Her mouth was square with grief. She tried to bring
forth words. “All my life,” I made out. She said it over and over.
“All your life what, Beth?” I had to ask as she repeated it for the
fifth time.

It came out bit by bit like a hard delivery.
Exploited, all my life. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve been
exploited. When I got married I thought it’d be different. But they
exploit me. Jack and even Ricky. Came out in a rush: “O Jerry you
won’t exploit me too will you?” I said of course not and that I was
going to give her a wonderful birthday present. I kissed her and
stroked her wet face till her mouth came out of squareness. A
wonderful present, I soothed.

After an hour or so she said she felt better
and thanked me for the present I was going to give her and asked me
to show her that leaflet on the beach in southern Maine. It was the
first time she’d ever done that. She asked if there was driftwood
on it.

One day on my knees, warring on incipient
weeds, I saw Harvey through the fence. He was urinating in the rank
garden just out of the shadow of the elm-tree. He didn’t travel
anymore. Hadn’t stuck that thing on his head for days now, Hanna
had told me jubilantly. Didn’t it work any more? He stood pissing
in the present, blinking at Beth’s house and at the birds quick in
her bright yellow forsythias. He was standing disarmed in the
dangerous sunshine of late April. Hanna had gone shopping.

I went over into the other house for the
first time in a week and got his umbrella for him. I opened it and
placed it in his hand. Urine had dribbled down one leg of his
shapeless pants.

As usual I tried to convince him that he
should resume the treatment. Fifty thousand dollars? he asked.
Would she still say no to that? They were the first words I’d heard
from him in days. He was back to that. He wanted another room,
another person. Quickly I replied that when I’d mentioned his
leasing the corners of her living room I’d spoken of a sum bigger
than that and she’d refused, flatly.

It must have been the word “leasing” that
gave me the tremendous idea. Thought it was tremendous at the time.
I took his bony wrist and rectified the angle of his umbrella so
that he was in safe shadow and said that it wasn’t a question of
money any more. He’d antagonized her from the start. A gesture on
his part might be more effective in the long run. Predictably he
asked, what gesture?

This huge once-garden of his where you half
expected a tiger to slink out of the man-high weeds, wouldn’t it
look better full of flowers like the other side of the fence? My
idea was that he should lease a strip of land to her for a nominal
fee. What I had in mind was a Hong-Kong style lease, at least the
lifetime of a rosebush, but didn’t say so yet. Maybe later she’d
reciprocate, tit for tat, lease for lease, I said.

He gave in so easily that I felt a little
guilty and asked him over and over if he really wanted to do it,
even backed slightly out of my own proposal until he came after me
with harassment. The delicate part was when I said that of course
the fence would have to be pulled back, say twenty feet. He didn’t
react even to that.

I must have had misgivings. That very day I
dropped broad hints about my prodigious love-present. Partly it was
to cheer her up and take her mind off Jack. I’d picked up
garden-center catalogs, another precious new activity, and asked
her what she would plant if suddenly she had extra land. The
“suddenly” must have given me away. She got it out of me finally.
What did he want in return? I whispered it in her ear, adding that
he wouldn’t get it, all for me. But it was no joke for her.

She must have realized my disappointment
because she sat me down like a child, all but holding my hands, and
told me that I couldn’t do such a thing, the land wasn’t mine to
give, you couldn’t dispose of other people’s property like that.
Her rectitude had the allure of the exotic for me.

A couple of times in the week that followed I
surprised her sadly staring through the fence at Harvey’s weeds.
But maybe she wasn’t thinking of the garden, not even seeing
it.

Three days before we were to leave I finally
told Harvey about it. He was lying shrunken and doll-like on his
cot. The long mark of the helmet clamp stood out very red on his
papery forehead. You can’t do that, he whispered without moving,
without opening his eyes. He needed me for the final work on the
storage unit.

Try and stop me, I said and by the way I said
it (I thought) he didn’t dare insist. He simply said I wouldn’t be
paid for those two weeks, I’d better think it over. He played it
wisely, not too much indignation, not too much indifference. In
compensation I agreed to help him on the storage unit all day and
all night if he liked until we left.

It was his last device. He didn’t have the
strength to finish it. He remained on the cot most of the time,
working through me. I hammered, soldered connections, screwed with
a screwdriver, for two days.

The accumulator was a black cubic-foot box. A
temporal sequence recorded by the sensors could be stored in it,
supposedly. Like a conventional storage battery its life was
limited. In time (he didn’t know how much time) the images
disintegrated. He said he hoped he would have time to devise
something permanent.

He was bitter that everything came too late.
If he’d developed the storage unit and perfected the range of the
relay and everything else a few years ago the mechanisms could have
been fitted into a truck. He could have traveled all over the
country in search of privileged moments. Imagine the charged
accumulators hooked up in series with those moments available at
the touch of a finger and enlarged at a time ratio of 1:1000, the
here-time trip lasting a year. Fifteen lifetimes of straight joy.
You’d have to come up sometime for food wouldn’t you? I
objected.

He spoke of people in deep coma fed by tubes,
voyagers in blackness though. The idea sounded nightmarish. In his
defective time travels, I knew, you were deprived of all senses
except sight and guilt. Retrotemporal flowers were scentless, there
was no music there and entry into a wave or a woman could only be
cerebral. That beach in southern Maine in the immediate but still
non-existent future seemed more real and much more desirable than
his resurrected mutilated past.

Finally late in the evening of the second day
I tightened the last screw on the lid of the storage unit. “Another
day another dollar,” I said and started leaving. He beckoned me
back to the cot. He whispered:

“Why didn’t you come? To the house?”