by Sam Savage
Possibly I am not making headway at all. I might even be falling behind. Life is still going on, is the problem. Not going on in a big way, but going on nonetheless, a little bit at a time. Chugging along, I suppose, is pretty much what it is doing, or inching forward, as I suggested earlier. Almost nothing is happening, in the full sense of happening, yet I find that I am not able to process even that little bit fast enough to keep up, despite being a better-than-average typist. I seem to be falling farther behind every second. Here I am wanting to type about things that happened fifty years ago, while Lily and the yellow-papered house and France in winter and so forth are panting in the wings, waiting to get processed, and a picture frame gets broken, and I am compelled to talk about that and about key-jams and dust and so forth, and when is it ever going to stop?
In college I typed things for other people. They asked me and I did it without complaining. It gave me status, I suppose, though I don’t recall caring about status, so that was probably not the reason—I enjoyed typing even then. And I fixed the punctuation and grammar as I went along, and the spelling too, of course. Correct grammar came to me as naturally as breathing, because of my background, my social class and whatnot, while it was extremely difficult for some of the others. I had only to say a sentence out loud in order to hear if it was all right, while they had to memorize rules, and even when they managed to write correctly, which some of them did after a time, after I had pointed out this and that and explained, I could tell just from the style that they were writing to rules. Even Clarence would stumble in this way, because of his background. He had a hard time recognizing that something had gone wrong with one of his sentences, just as he would not always notice when something was trite or derivative. He used to bring me things he wanted retyped, his own typing being so slow, clumsy, and completely inaccurate, to let me type it correctly and fix up the grammar. And sometimes I went a little further than that, than just striking out the worst and tidying up the rest, grammatically speaking. I sometimes changed quite a lot of it, changed quite a lot of it extensively. I told him that all the words he had meant to write were still there, but now his intentions were clearer. Of course he saw what I was doing, though he never asked me to do it, and we never discussed it. He never said, “Can you fix this, can you make it better, Edna?” It was always, “Can you type this up, old girl?” When he shouted at me about getting to the point, after he had developed the short fuse I mentioned, he had already taken up with Lily—taken up with her after-hours in the pharmacy, not taken up with her in public yet. Lily typed using two fingers. Of course that scarcely mattered, since Clarence had given up writing by then. At some point I am going to have to explain about Lily and the pharmacy, and I have still not gone into Potopotawoc, and that by itself will strike some people as odd. If Clarence were reading this it would strike him as odd, I am sure—odd and, to use one of his favorite phrases, entirely symptomatic. And now I am getting sidetracked, which is another interesting expression, but one that I am not going to go into here, unless I decide to talk about trains, which I have in the back of my mind to do at some point. I ought to say sidetracked again, as the sad fact is I am barely making headway, even without Lily and the pharmacy. And if I want to lie down on the sofa again, I will have to move the stuff I piled there, the books and photos and such, and the boxes of ribbons. I have not been wanting to lie down as often as I used to a few weeks ago, when I was spending most of the day horizontal. I could lie down in the bedroom, of course, if I felt like it, or on the rug next to the table, as I used to do sometimes also. I might not want to lie down on the rug now, because of the trash on the floor, the completed pages that have slid off the table as well as a large number of crumpled ones that I tore out of the machine and threw there and haven’t mentioned for fear of sounding discouraged, plus the fronds that snapped off the fern while I was pushing it against the wall, and some of Nigel’s pellets that have spilled regularly while I was carrying them in my hand from the bag in the kitchen, and Peter Handke’s book, and the difficulty of getting back up once I am down there. And I ought to have mentioned before that when I say floor I mean rug as well; most of my pages are on the rug. I think, Well, I need to tidy up, and then I don’t.
I have put the books that were on the sofa back in the small bookcase. They were not many. I keep most of my books on the tall shelves in the hall. The door to the kitchen is at the far end of the hall—not a door, strictly, just an open doorway. Standing in the living room one can see all the way through the apartment and out the rear window, though there is nothing to see out there but the iron railing of my fire escape and the back of a brick building across the alley that used to be a school but has been abandoned for years, windows boarded up. Nothing to see, that is, in terms of animate things like people and trees, but the kitchen window faces west, and so it frames sunsets in part, as I might have mentioned, frames part of a sunset, the remainder being blocked off by the schoolhouse. On one side of the hall is the door to my bedroom, and with the exception of that door and the doorway to the kitchen the hall is lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling and even across the tops of the doorframes. Getting a carpenter in to build the shelves was almost the first thing I did after moving here. Going to and fro in the course of the day, in and out of the kitchen and the bathroom, which is off the kitchen, I have to walk past the bookshelves, though I don’t ordinarily look at the books then, in the normal way one fails to look at things that are always there. I don’t mean that I avoid looking at them. It is just that these days I scarcely read books, so why would I look? I am not even sure why I keep them, except that I have owned many of them for a long time, decades in the case of some. They even smell old, like old clothes and old mattresses. I once read that for damaging a person’s health old books are worse than cats. Books are, now that I think about it, among the few personal items that are impossible to wash. The rat is making a dreadful ruckus. It has its forepaws up against the glass again. It is chattering its teeth, producing an awful ratcheting sound, and its eyes are bulging; they look about to pop out of its head. If I felt more sympathy for it, I could imagine that it is trying to say something, puffing out its cheeks and spluttering in a futile effort to utter some matter terribly important to it, or else it is having a fit. I am going to have to change the chips at some point, and that will mean reaching my arm inside. I am not going to do that while it is in there. Maybe I can dump it in the bathtub while I do it. The last time I was still reading a lot was at Potopotawoc, where it seems to me I was reading almost all the time, mostly magazines, because I was not able to type much there, as I think I mentioned, and it was either read or fret, or look out the window at the falling leaves, or at the falling snow, and later, after a long time, at the new leaves, and so forth. Only magazines, as a matter of fact—I don’t think I read a single book while I was there. I didn’t own a television there, though up in the main building was a gigantic set that was always turned on even when no one was sitting around it, and sometimes I went up and watched. I don’t have a television here either, having given the one I used to own to a young man who came to wash the windows ever-so-many years ago, as I might have mentioned also. I can already hear people saying, “What on earth did you do with your time, when you were not at work, if you didn’t read or type and you didn’t look at television?” The answer is that I really don’t know. I took little walks, I cleaned the house a little, I prepared small meals, shopped for a few things, looked out the window for a few minutes, napped a little while, thought a little, and the day was gone—the littles and the smalls piled one on another and added up to all there was. It is not difficult to fill a day, not because I have so terribly much to do, but because time itself is moving so fast. The days, I want to say, wink past; even the tedious days are gone in a flash. I say that, and I have an image of the lighted windows of a speeding train. I have not been an active reader for some time now, but even after I stopped reading, except for magazines, I went on acquiring books, inten
ding to read them at some point in the future, went on buying them even when I could not afford to. At various times in my life I have known people who, when they could not afford to buy books, would just steal them. Before he met me Clarence regularly stole books, though he would not steal anything else. In my experience people like Clarence usually think it is O.K. to steal books, where by “like Clarence,” I mean aspiring writers. And I have known painters who regularly stole paints. Years ago, on a day like today, I might have gone out to a bookstore. I used to spend hours in bookstores, reading entire chapters while standing at the shelves, and occasionally people would come over and stand beside me and say things like, “I see you are reading X or Y. What do you think of it?” More pages have tumbled off the table, falling with a fluttering sound like the wings of several birds. A jacket is the only significant thing that I can remember stealing—significant in contrast to trivial items like ballpoint pens and paper clips, which I also occasionally took from work, though I doubt that anyone, had they seen me going off with those items, would have cared. I took the jacket last fall. A man tapped on the glass of the outer door while I was in the room sorting. Since Brodt was upstairs I opened it myself, and the man handed me a woman’s leather jacket that he had picked up from the floor of the garage. I hung it over the back of my chair, meaning to give it to Brodt when he came back, but I took it home instead. I don’t recall taking anything else, except, as I said, minor things like paper clips, and once a large blue stapler and another time a miniature radio no bigger than a cigarette pack. I left the earphones, because I thought I would not like having plastic buttons in my ears, but when I got home I discovered the radio could only be listened to in that manner, not having any speaker of its own, and I threw it away. I certainly was not taking things on a regular basis. Even so I think Brodt became suspicious at one point. One Friday, when I returned from distributing upstairs, my paycheck was lying on the table as always, and when I opened my handbag to slip it in I noticed the contents were not in the usual order, as if they had been rummaged with. Brodt could not have seen the man handing me the jacket, but he might, I thought, have bumped into him later, perhaps sat next to him at a ball game the following weekend, for example, where they could have fallen into conversation, the man happening to mention that he had dropped a leather jacket off at Brodt’s office the other day, at which point Brodt could not help putting two and two together. Or something like that. The incident of someone rummaging in my purse took place a long time ago, and I might not be remembering the sequence right. Maybe the rummaging occurred before I took the jacket, not after, in which case he was rummaging for some other reason, if he was rummaging at all. Why would he rummage? I like the phrase “trick of memory” for things like that, as when people, when they fail to recollect something in the same way as you, will say “I think your memory is playing tricks on you, dear,” with the implication that memory is mischievous or even malevolent. I once took a sleeper from Seville, in Spain, to Heidelberg, in Germany. The cessation of motion at each stop along the way would rouse me from sleep, and I would lift the window shade and peer out at the platform and try to discover where we were. The names of the stations were posted on signs that hung above the platform, but sometimes the car I was on did not stop at a spot from which I could see a sign, even when I pressed my cheek to the glass, and I was astonished, at one point in the middle of the night, when I did see a sign, to discover that we were in Switzerland. Who would have thought that a train from Seville, in Spain, to Heidelberg, in Germany, would be passing through Switzerland? Though I traveled all over Europe, or that part of Europe one was permitted to travel all over in those days, I was never in Switzerland again, so if I had not awoken at that moment on the train from Seville or if the train had not stopped at just that point along the platform, I might have passed my entire life without ever knowing that I had once visited Switzerland.
In America I traveled by car and airplane, and later, when we had become more or less impoverished, by bus occasionally. Sometimes I rode trains in America also, mostly between New York and Boston, and Clarence and I twice took a train all the way from New York to Los Angeles and back. I am referring to passenger trains, of course—Clarence was the only person I know who actually rode freight trains, though he did it in order to write something for a magazine, which is hardly the same as really doing it. Obviously, even if I had not woken up or had woken up and not been able to read the sign, I would still have passed through Switzerland once in my life. On the other hand, had I not woken up, etc., and the train had actually gone only through France, as one would think it should, that would not have made a difference in my life; I mean, there is really no difference between sleeping through Switzerland and sleeping through France. Which makes me wonder if the important thing is what actually happened in the past or only what we remember having happened. I suppose I might at this moment be altered in some very minute way by the knowledge I possess now that Switzerland was among the countries I visited. On the other hand, I probably would still be changed in just that minute way had the train in fact gone through France and I had merely imagined it stopping in Switzerland; imagined it, I mean, because I misread a sign in a French station or because I did not wake up at all and merely dreamed we were in Switzerland. Of course, if the train had gone through Switzerland, as I believe it truly did, and had fallen off a mountain on the way, that would have been very different from sleeping through France.
It was not as bad as I imagined. The moment I lifted the top, he shot into the pipe and stayed there, though the stench was dreadful. I took everything out, shoveled it out with a kitchen spatula, ready to whack him if he reappeared, and I cleaned the bottom with Clorox, provoking a tiny sneeze from inside the tube, like someone ripping a postage stamp. I put the dirty chips in a plastic bag that I set outside on the fire escape. France, when I went back there with Clarence one winter, was the second extravagance we undertook with my money, while there was still a great deal of it. The first was a trip to Africa. Even now, after all these years, it feels odd to think that I once went on a safari in Africa, and not the sort of excursion they call a safari these days but a genuine hunting safari with the goal of shooting as many large animals as possible, though we never did shoot an elephant, which is of course the biggest animal, a buffalo being the biggest that we actually shot. I personally did not shoot it, Clarence did, while I was at the hotel with a stomach disorder. It was not a hotel in the usual sense, just a long shed with bunk beds and a pair of tin-roofed toilets outside, where, if I had to use one in the daytime, as I did frequently while my stomach was disordered, I nearly suffocated in the heat and stench. The feeling I still have of the safari being a truly odd event in my life is probably due to the fact that it was out of character for me, though it was not out of character for Clarence. The photograph that was in the frame I broke the glass out of is from that trip. I removed it from the frame in order to pry the broken pieces from the grooves, and I have taped it temporarily to the window, where I usually only put notes, because it is a kind of note, being up there to remind me to buy another piece of glass. It shows Clarence with two dead lions. He is standing over them, a boot on the rump of one of them, which I think must be the male—they were a male and a female lion. The photograph was not taken at the spot where we shot them. They are on the ground in the middle of our camp, the Africans having just dumped them there after dragging them from the back of the Land Rover, two men pulling on the legs until they fell out. You can see the rear part of the Land Rover in the background. The lions fell one on top of the other. Their heads are cut off in the picture is the reason I can’t tell whether Clarence has his foot on the male or the female. In fact, so much of them has been cut off in the picture that if one did not already know they were lions one might think Clarence was standing next to a couple of sandbags, or bags of wheat or something, with his foot on one of them. He is standing with a glass of champagne in his raised hand, though naturally you can’t tell just f
rom the photo what he has in the glass either—it was champagne, though, from the last of a great many bottles we had bought in Nairobi for occasions of this sort, when we (that being Clarence, usually) shot something large. We had used up the last of our ice a few days prior, and the wine was warm and sickening, I thought, though I don’t recall Clarence minding. I had been standing next to him a moment before, clinking my glass to his, and had stepped out of the frame to snap the photo. I was quite giddy from having shot a lion, which is probably the reason I left important things like their heads out of the picture. I regret shooting it now, though it was easy to do at the time, while I was still under Clarence’s influence. It seems to me that I was quite happy then. I don’t mean that I was happy then on the whole, just that I remember being happy for most of that particular trip, happy in a way that made it easy to be indifferent to the feelings of others, especially lions, who are themselves famously indifferent in that way. It was during this trip also that I took up Clarence’s habit of whistling for the servants. When I say it was easy to shoot the lion, I mean, of course, that it was morally easy; it was in fact a rather difficult shot. And when I say that I was under Clarence’s influence, I mean I was under his influence in regard to extraneous things like shooting lions and playing tennis, but when it came to most other things he was under my influence. Once years ago when Potts and I were still seeing if we could be more than just considerate neighbors, she was visiting up here and asked about that photograph, and I told her all about the time I had shot the lion. I think she was quite horrified when she realized how much I had enjoyed doing it. I am surprised that she has trusted me with her rat. Even with so much left out of it the photo is still quite true to life. I mean if one thinks about Clarence in later years one does tend to see a man standing alone with a drink in his hand, and if one really does mistake the lions for sandbags, then it becomes truer still, capturing the aspect of being embattled that was characteristic of those years—embattled, but also fortified, the latter referring to whiskey, of course, but also to the feeling he got later from his proximity to Lily, it seems to me, the illusion of being fortified. He felt fortified by the furious energy she brought to bear on everything at a time when he was running out of fuel, really, and which seemed to make him feel alive again, though it made me feel exhausted, but especially by her youthful beauty, by the fact that she still had it. There was the symmetry and the clarity of her features, which had nothing loose or accidental, but I believe that what really drew Clarence and made him feel fortified was the fact that she was at that point of life and vigor where it was difficult for the idea of death to find an attachment point on her. I say to myself, Enough about Lily, and mean to move on, but I am tripped, or tricked—or trapped, even—by a sudden ingress of unbidden memory. Nothing, I think, in my mind is my own. She is sitting at the window in the yellow-papered house, wavy black hair shadowing a portion of her face. I can see the blinding Southern afternoon through the string curtain she has made for my window. The heat has silenced even the insects, stifling them. She is talking to me, but I don’t hear any words—in my memory, I mean, I don’t hear any words. Lily had a habit of looking out the window while she talked, in a way that made you feel you were not with her, that you were somewhere off on the horizon, not stretched out on a broken-down sofa, which is where I actually was, and she had a way of talking about the future as if it were a proximate space that one had only to step over into, not a possibly unattainable time separated from us by a chasm of unpredictability. Listening to her I realized—meaning I had a sudden very clear thought, dazzling in its obviousness—that she and Clarence were just alike. I don’t think I said in so many words they belong to each other, though that was the feeling of it, suddenly. I don’t know why I always remember the black hair, since her hair was brown.