Time Travail (46 page)

“I never got a letter. Maybe you dreamed that
too. And you never answered the phone. Anyhow I don’t want
apologies or flowers. I don’t want to talk about that, ever.”

Silence. Bees buzz in the weeds surrounding
them. A plane goes by.

“Of course not,” JW mumbles.

“Ever.”

Longer silence. The sound of the plane starts
fading away.

“I can understand that.” JW mumbles it
again.

“Ever, ever, ever, ever.”

JW says nothing. The bees go on and on.

“Who wants to talk about the most terrible
nervous breakdown in all my life? Martha nursed me for three
months. I lost my job, of course. I’ve had three jobs since then.
The last one was in the invoice department of an automobile part
concern. I had to sell the house and move into a tiny two-room
apartment. I just don’t want to talk about it. I’m trying to
positivize. I tell myself it’s essentially unreal.”

She shuts her eyes on him and dedicates her
face to exclusive dialogue with the sun. Her face is sweating.
After a while her blind hand undoes the two top buttons of her
blouse. JW feels totally excluded. He wants to offer reparation,
some great present. What present? He can’t think of anything. Eyes
still closed, she undoes a third button.

In the continuing silence JW briefly wonders
if he shouldn’t invite her, in this heat, to go on with the buttons
and discard her upper garments and sunbathe with her hands clasped
behind her neck as in the old days. The tall weeds shield them from
view. But he doesn’t ask. Like himself she’s taken great strides
toward desiccation. He realizes he’s basically indifferent to
breasts now as to music and money. It sounds like a process of
spiritual purification, a divestiture of secondary things. What’s
the primary thing though? The silence goes on. He dozes off.

When he wakes up her chair’s empty. The sun
has shifted westward. JW feels sorry he didn’t ask her to partially
disrobe for him. It might have boosted her morale to be able to
turn down that request with indignation. In his concern for her
morale he discovers, despite the betrayal of her face, a certain
residual tenderness for her. He thought he’d lost that too. The
sunshine hurts his eyes.

He goes inside and finds her sitting deep in
the striped armchair with closed eyes and parted lips. They have
trouble synchronizing their periods of consciousness. But is she
really asleep? Isn’t it the cult stunt, hoping he’ll vanish? Or
pretence at sleep to be able to account for the hour she’s been in
the house all by herself? Doing what? He thinks of Hanna stealing
down the cellar steps with the sledgehammer. Did he lock the
door?

She opens her eyes. She doesn’t retreat back
behind the lids at the sight of him. She looks around. He’s aware
now of what a lousy housecleaning job he’s done: dust everywhere.
“I thought you left,” he says. “Not without saying goodbye. I
didn’t want to wake you up. I wasn’t feeling too well. Too much sun
maybe. I’ll be going in a minute.”

She looks at the hi-fi components piled on
the table. “I told Ricky to bring it back. I said I wouldn’t speak
to him unless he did that. That was a year ago. You haven’t even
set it up.” A year ago? He explains that he doesn’t listen to music
any more. She takes that almost like another insult. “You
h
a
ve to listen to
music. You were always talking about music and your audio
system.”

Suddenly he has an idea so wonderful that he
stammers saying it. “I don’t need it anymore. It’s just gathering
dust. Listen, it’s yours. It’s a present. You can have it. Right
now. The CDs too. Everything. Go get your car and we’ll load it.”
She says she doesn’t want it. He insists. She refuses
passionately.

They start quarreling over it. He remembers
Harvey’s strip of garden and the house on the beach. He thinks: she
never wants any of my presents. “Never got anything from you,” she
said. Whose fault? Refusing this is a refusal of him, humiliation,
desertion, a sentencing to permanent disorientation. She’ll get
this present whether she wants it or not.

He embraces one of the dusty speakers,
staggers with impeded vision out of the house to the gate and out
onto the sidewalk. She’s parked her car a long way off. Every few
seconds he has to crane his neck to get his nose over the top of
the speaker for a quick glance at possible obstacles. Tricycling
kid. Ash-can to the left, street-lamp to the right, stop
zigzagging.

Now his visitor, barring the way. “Put that
down, you’re killing yourself. I told you I don’t want it.” He
pants out: “You reject all my presents, everything I offer you.
It’s not true nobody ever offered you flowers. I did. You prepared
them for me but I paid for them, forty dollars, and they were for
you.” “They were for Hanna’s birthday.” They argue over that.

He ends by panting out, “This goddam audio
system belongs to you now. I’m going to give you five thousand
dollars, too. Money doesn’t mean anything to me anymore either.” “I
don’t want five thousand dollars.” “Ten thousand then. It’s all I
have. How much more do you want?”

She gets into the car and drives away,
leaving him in pain in the middle of the sidewalk embracing his
teak speaker. He’s strained his heart badly. He eases the speaker
down on the sidewalk, upends it and sits down on it, panting.
Waiting for the chest pain to let up he watches her beat-up Chevy
turn the corner and disappear. The tricycled three-year-old
contemplates him huge-eyed. His mother snatches him out of danger.
A well-dressed business type skirts him like dog shit, looking
intensely ahead.

After a while he hears a car pulling up
alongside him. The door slams. “Stop this craziness, Jerry. I think
you do it on purpose to scare me off. Stop it. Get up and give me a
hand with it.” Well, that was all he wanted in the first place.
She’s yielded, so he helps her load the car with that heavy
fraction of her present. She drives them back, gets out and opens
the barbed-wired gate with the warning signs mitigated by bindweed
bells and drives in. Instead of asking him to get the other speaker
and the components she orders him to help her unload. He doesn’t
move. She starts struggling with the speaker on the back seat,
cries out in exasperation: “You stop this craziness!” She commands
him to give her a hand.

When they place the speaker back in a corner
next to the sensor she commands him to place the second speaker in
the other corner, then to set it up. “I don’t listen to it
anymore,” he says, collapsing in the striped armchair. “Tell me how
to set it up.” He gives her the instructions. She goes over to the
cases with the CDs. “OK, what’s your favorite?” “No favorite.”
“Beethoven? Bach? “I think you’ll find Bach is nice as I remember.”
“Bach … Bach … O.K., what Bach?” “You’ll find the B Minor is nice,
I think.” “B Minor what?” “The Mass, naturally.” “Haven’t you got
something more cheerful?” “It’s extremely cheerful, I seem to
remember.” She starts it.

When she turns around to him his hands are
hermetically pressing his ears. He makes out her lips forming “What
are you doing?” and hears his voice imprisoned deep within him:
“It’s yours, I don’t want any of it.” She leaves the room. He frees
his ears and beneath trumpets hears her car starting and then
driving away. He waits a while. When she doesn’t return he gets up
and turns off the Kyrie Eleison. The sudden silence is
deafening.

He goes to the cellar door. It’s all right.
He locked it. Coming back into the living room something tickles
his neck. He jerks violently. He thinks it’s a roach. It’s just his
long hair. One of these days he’ll have to have his hair cut. He
decides to go out for a walk. He has to buy eight electric light
bulbs, razor blades, furniture-polish and salt anyhow. The
sunshine’s much weaker now. It doesn’t hurt his eyes.

When he returns, he puts the salt in the
cupboard, the razor blades in the medicine chest and replaces the
burned-out bulb above the mirror. He replaces the burned-out bulbs
in the other rooms. He goes back to housecleaning. Dusting and
polishing the furniture, his mind is a perfect blank again. He
can’t find the Swiss electrostatic-nullifying feather-brush. He
sacrifices four handkerchiefs and a woolen scarf for the job.

After he finishes, he switches the machine
back on. With the vacuum cleaner he has to raise the volume. When
he finishes with what can be done to the living room he removes the
Scherchen B Minor, puts on the superior Harnoncourt 1969 version
and sinks into the flowered armchair. After it’s over he looks at
his watch. One thirty-six. He adds, “A.M.” out loud. He removes the
CDs, places them in their jackets, puts them back in alphabetical
order and goes to bed.

For the second night in succession,
sleepless, he tries to capture her real face two years before and
concentrate on it to the exclusion of anything else. But all he can
get is the new altered one. It’s not as effective but it doesn’t
shock him so much now. She salvaged her eyes, ears and nose after
all and probably other things as well. His fingers recall her
vertebras.

At 3:00 am he’s ready to apologize for his
behavior and tell her that he’s decided to keep the audio system
and use it too. She’d been so passionate about it that it seems to
him to be the greatest of presents for her, replacing Harvey’s
garden and the house on the beach. Then he thinks of another
present so tremendous for him that he weeps at it. He goes
downstairs and picks up the phone. At the last moment he remembers
the time (of night) and hangs up. He’s hesitating between his bed
and the cellar door when the phone rings.

In a fast breathless voice he can hardly
understand she says she can’t sleep and apologizes for waking him,
apologizes for her behavior that afternoon, denounces herself in
detail, finds no mitigating circumstances. They’d behaved like
strangers, talking about roaches of all things. She’d gone back to
old things best left unsaid. It was grave spiritual backsliding on
her part, getting mired down in the ephemeral. Could she come again
tomorrow? She’d been so … ungracious. Of course, of course, she’d
accept his marvelous present, his hi-fi.

When he opens on her he finds her transformed
for the second time, even further from what he still takes to be
her real face. She has wet-looking pink lipstick, blue lids, gold
dust at the base of her throat. Chemical blondness has got the
upper hand over the gray and the surviving natural blondness. She’s
covered with rings and bracelets and pendants. They generate some
kind of field-force of illuminated certitude in her face. The scoop
neck of her gay embroidered peasant blouse reveals collarbones
urgent against tired skin. Her eyes and ears and nose remain
faithful though.

He praises her appearance this time. Had my
hair fixed up she says. See you had a haircut too. Not nearly as
gray either. Why shouldn’t we? He invites her in again. She still
wants to sit in the garden. He speaks of something very important
he wants to show her. She steps inside the living room like a blind
and deaf woman and sits down on the very edge of the striped
armchair. She starts chatting, with great poise, about the weather
and then about her son.

It’s incredible but she hasn’t noticed the
new things in the room. There’s
The Four Seasons
, for her of course, mercifully low but perfectly
audible, the third cleaning job, the new carpet, the painstaking
gilding job on the wooden roses of the oval mirror, what’s piled up
against a wall, above all what’s on the table. It’s true she’s
sitting with her back to it. She’s still talking about her son
(“He’s saved, thank God. He’s out of drugs. He’s changed so
completely that sometimes I think he’s somebody else.”)

When she stops for breath he makes an
inviting gesture toward the table with the new linen tablecloth,
the bamboo place-mats, her favorite port, cut-glass dishes with
radishes, toothpicked cheese-cubes, black and green olives, celery,
also the gigantic bouquet, also the neat stack of papers, the two
pens and the fat worn
Treasury of Great Poems
edited by Untermeyer. “Oh, th
a
nk you.” She chooses a branch of celery, rapidly
inspects it and nibbles symbolically. He starts filling the new
cut-crystal wineglass.

“
Oh not for me, thank you.” She explains
that she doesn’t drink any more. She doesn’t need it any more.
Pills either. When he has to point at the flowers, she says, “Oh
lovely, just lovely.” Trying to control his irritation, he says,
“Goes well with Vivaldi, don’t you think? That’s
The Four
Seasons
. Spring. You
know, flowers.” “Oh yes, I love Vivaldi.” “I remembered that. We
heard it once in the supermarket. That’s why I bought you the CD.”
She returns to her son.

In another of her gasps for breath he points
to what’s piled up against the wall: the five-gallon cans of paint,
the rollers and paint brushes, trays, sponges, pails, the pile of
soft new rags, etc.

“Oh yes,” she says. “You won’t be able to
rent the house without fixing it up.”

“Rent? Did you actually imagine I was going
to make you pay rent to live here?”

Her face goes blank at that. Then she laughs
incredulously.

“Oh gosh, Jerry, I haven’t come to move in
with you. Of all ideas. I’ve come to convince you to move out, of
course. You have to leave this horrible place. Otherwise I’ll never
see you again, Jerry, ever, I swear I won’t.”

“Move out? Where? With you?”

“You know I’m married. You’ll find something,
a two-room flat like mine. We could see each other very often.”

He sits there in deep silence. Finally he
says sullenly that he’d already lived in a two-room flat with big
purple flowers everywhere for two years. The landlady was nice
though. Suddenly nostalgic, he tries to recall Mrs Philip’s face.
He can’t.