by Sam Savage
Clarence was quite good-looking in a rough way, a masculine way, it seemed to me even then, though the real masculinity did not come out until later, after he had put on flesh and grown a Clark Gable mustache. By the time he was thirty he was stocky and truly impressive in that masculine way. It was almost an Emiliano Zapata mustache at one point. When we met he was already masculine, of course, but in an ethereal direction, if that makes sense, slender and boyish, with startled eyes, so one did not see the tendency to become heavyset and brutal; and it was that startled quality, the feeling that he was seeing the world new, as if it had just come into being before his eyes, that drew me to him, because of the fatigue I mentioned, and it vanished completely in later years. The first thing he published—we had been together for three years already—was a short story, a memoir, really, about hunting squirrels when he was a boy, the minutiae of hunting them with a small rifle, and the importance of squirrels as food in those days, and in that way he brought in his childhood deprivation and suffering. He sent the typescript off to three or four literary magazines, which held onto it for months before turning it down without explanation. It was his good looks in that masculine way that finally got it published, in a national hunting magazine, because he went up to their offices in person after he had mailed it in to find out what they thought of it, and they took one look at him and what they saw made what he wrote seem authentic. It was an epoch when being authentic seemed important to people. It is interesting how things that seem obvious and are even part of the atmosphere of a certain epoch become incredible later—now, it seems, something or somebody can be blatantly fake and nobody cares. The deprivations of his childhood made what he wrote seem authentic and significant, but they also made him narrow-minded and intolerant of my life, because he thought that if one had not suffered in a crude and obvious and really external way, in the way he had suffered, and his family had suffered for generations, then one had not truly suffered at all and was just acting up or pretending. “Neurotic misery” was the phrase he liked using, to make it sound fake, and he thought, though he never dared say it, that if you had not suffered in that obvious external way, then what you wrote could not be authentic and significant either. That was a terrible mistake on his part and led him to include things in his stories—war, murder, rape, and the like, a great many adulteries and divorces, even the Jewish genocide once, and a famine in Africa, as a setting—that he regarded as significant events, in the belief that they would make the stories significant also, but of course all they did was make them ordinary. I told him it was not up to the events to make the story significant, but the other way around, but he was never able to see it that way. In the refrigerator this morning I found the grapes I bought some time ago, as I think I mentioned, and forgot about, wrinkled but intact otherwise, and I ate the whole bag while working on the crossword puzzle I took from Starbucks. I was not able to get all the answers. There was a time when I regularly got all the answers, but that has become impossible now that so many of the clues refer to television shows and celebrities one could become familiar with only by watching television—watching a large amount of television, it seems to me. In recent years even the puzzles in the New York Times have become like that and are now unworkable by people like me, literary people without television. Reflecting on it now, I suppose that is the reason I didn’t bother writing my usual warning on the newspaper the other day, about the crossword puzzle having been torn out: because I don’t feel a connection to the sort of people who are able to work the puzzles these days. I look at the puzzles, and at the people in the cafés with computers on the table in front of them, staring, and I think, Who are these people?
The grapes are not as delicious as I thought they would be when I saw them in the store, even allowing for their not being entirely fresh, having sat in my refrigerator for so long. They also have the wrong shape for grapes, being oblong like jelly beans, and their flesh is firmer than it ought to be, almost chewy. I imagine those are all signs that they have traveled a long way, which of course they must have done, since, as I mentioned, it is spring here, from Chile or even Australia, I suppose. Somewhere on the other side of the world people are picking grapes. In fact, machines are picking grapes there too, I suspect. The grapes were bred that way in order to travel this long distance intact, bred firm, for example, so as not to become crushed when stacked. When I was in France the first time as an adult, while I was still in college, when I went over there with Rosaline Schlossberg, I traveled down to a village near Avignon to pick grapes at the end of the summer—when I had been in Paris for only about two months, though I was expected home by then—with two German boys I had met a few days prior. I slept with one, and then with the other, and then with both. We slept in sleeping bags on the floor of a room above a stable. In the space below us they kept two oxen, and during the night we could hear them moving about in the stalls, and they smelled horrible at first, though after a few minutes with them one became so used to the odor it was impossible to smell it even if one tried. By “slept” I mean we made love and also went to sleep together, pressed to each other in the warmth of a sleeping bag. People are going to find my way of talking quaint, I imagine. Several of the foreigners I met in Paris were used to going down every fall for the vendange, because that was a way to earn a little money, which is what everyone said, but actually because it was a lark. When I say foreigners I am referring to people who were not French rather than to people who were not American, and it was a way for them to earn money because one did not need a work permit to pick grapes, and as for myself I picked grapes only that one time. One of the boys was named Karl; I have forgotten the name of the other one, though I do recall that he had a long chin and was not as attractive as Karl but was amusing in other ways. You don’t actually pick grapes, you cut the stems using a knife with a curved blade, which if you are not accustomed to it, as I was not, quickly raises blisters on your hand. After work we went swimming in a little brook, and I sat on a rock in the middle of the stream and held my blistered hand under the cold water. I am going to want to leave this sort of thing out. It is amazing how much of one’s memory consists of trifles.
I sprayed the fern again, making three times that I have sprayed it today, having forgotten yesterday and the day before, I forgot all last week, in fact. It seems overall less green than before, but perhaps that is an effect of light. I didn’t forget every minute of the past week—sometimes I remembered and said to myself, “O.K., I am going to do that,” and then I forgot. I have been careful not to spray close to the wall, and now the half of the fern on the wall side has turned brown. I am going to drag it out into the center of the room, so I can walk around it spraying. Clarence became concupiscent when he had drunk too much, randy in an ungainly and ruthless manner, especially in the middle years, when he was still quite good-looking in a heavy, knocked-about way, like a defeated prizefighter, and he regularly went off with young women he had met at parties or at readings, when he was still giving readings, or at sporting events, when he was writing about those for magazines. By “going off” I mean he would decamp with them from wherever they were at the time—the pool or party or whatever, stadium, tennis court—and also, metaphorically, that he would explode on meeting them, an appetite for some young woman or girl overtaking him in a rush, like a fit, really. It looked, I told him, practically pathological. But the fits, overwhelming while they lasted, would vanish as quickly as they came, in a twinkle: they would go poof and land Clarence on his bottom, collapsed in a chair or on the grass, red-faced and gasping, sprawled and beached, I could say, sometimes still wearing his cartridge vest, looking perfectly ridiculous. Ridiculous also because the targets of his infatuations were, until Lily, so unsuitable, as everyone but he could see from the outset—it took him a day or two longer, usually; it took him a month in one case. He had an especial weakness for college girls, his defenses, such as they were, being easily overpowered by the adoration of well-formed, sexually charged young w
omen with undeveloped wiles and a smattering of education, girls or women who were simply not equipped to penetrate his charms. Whenever we visited a campus or went to a party with that sort of girl around I had to prepare myself for an explosion or escapade. I was not accorded a similar latitude, naturally. Not that I wanted it. Even in Venezuela, it was just a matter of dropping in on a few nightspots with some of the crew while he was working, and even that was too much for him. I don’t think he cared in a personal way what I did by that time; he was worried that I would make him look bad in public, especially in Venezuela, where men are so cruel. When he passed through the hotel lobby, where a lot of them would be lounging about, drinking Scotch and talking loudly, one or another of them was sure to hold two fingers to his head in imitation of horns. And Clarence did not make it easier for himself by wearing the straw hat, as if he were hiding something. They wiggled their fingers behind their heads, which of course horns do not do—horns, I mean, don’t wiggle. I told Clarence they looked as if they were pretending to be rabbits. He did not find it amusing, though, and avoided the lobby, going in and out of the hotel through the kitchen. After a while we gave up speaking about those things; not a single word, ever. What could we have said that would not have been unbearable? If Clarence and I had looked at each other once during the latter part of those years, which I don’t think we ever really did, we would have seen just ravages. The fact is, Clarence was a child of the world, while I belonged in a nunnery.
After a long while, sitting there thinking these things, plus a lot of other things too trifling or fugitive even to mention, I put on my robe and went down to Potts’s place. I switched on the light over the aquarium and sat in Arthur’s chair and watched the fish. Now and then one of them would swim over to the chain of bubbles rising from the air pump and drink a bubble, like a person swerving aside to sip from a drinking fountain—if fish could talk they would call breathing drinking, probably—and I thought of Lawrence’s poem about fish. Loveless and never touching. No fingers, no hands and feet, no lips. Sometimes a fish swam over and looked out through the glass. I suppose it could see me sitting there in Arthur’s chair, as if in a tank of my own looking out at it, it might have been thinking. Back upstairs, after switching off the lights, I went over and stood at the window awhile and looked out at the street. It was late and there was no one down there. I was turning away when I caught sight of what I thought was a large rat on the pavement across the street. I turned back just as it was creeping under a parked car, and I remained at the window, watching, until it emerged on the other side: a small half-starved cat, a broken hind leg causing it to creep like that. I tapped on the pane in an attempt to make it look up. Had it remained under the car, I suppose I would remember that one night while looking down from my window I had seen a large rat. I had left the radio on when I went down to Potts’s place and now, as I was preparing to switch it off, I happened to notice they were playing Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of Animals. I am not a highly sexed person. I don’t know if that is evident to outsiders. I mean, how could someone tell, seeing me and Lily together, that one of us was highly sexed and the other not? Apart from the difference in our ages, one naturally assuming the younger will be more highly sexed. On the other hand, the older one, just because she is older and not as attractive as the younger, might feel sexually deprived and even desperate, which is also something an outsider might sense. I am talking nonsense, of course—people obviously do sense it. Even when I was young they could tell that I was not as highly sexed as the others just by looking at me, as I could tell by the way they looked at me, or failed to look at me. I am not sure that Clarence cared one way or the other. That I was not highly sexed must have made him feel secure, since I was not always out there for grabs the way some women are, the way they cannot help being, because of the sexual charge that comes off them.
Something smells bad in Potts’s apartment: an acrid musty odor, the smell, I want to say, of wet plaster and mushrooms, though neither of those is likely to be present, except maybe in the bathroom in the case of wet plaster—not in the bathroom lately either, since I have been forgetting to water there. I notice it the moment I step through the door. It seems to be getting stronger by the day. It might, I suppose, be the odor of dead snails and algae, those being the only things I can think of that were not in Potts’s place until recently. I have walked all around the apartment two or three times trying to sniff out the source, but I can’t discern where the odor is coming from. After being down there for a minute or two I am not able to smell it anymore, is the problem, like the oxen in France, their stench nearly knocking us off our feet when we stepped through the door after work but vanishing completely by the time we went to bed, or the roar of the compressors on the roof of the ice cream factory, which I have to strain to hear. I have to strain to pay attention, and then I hear. All our senses are like that, more or less. I am sure I don’t notice ninety percent of the things around me ninety percent of the time. I don’t even notice that I am not noticing anymore, unless I pause and truly think about it as I am doing now. “Edna gradually failed to notice that a film of insignificance and tedium had coated the things of the world” is how I might describe it. I want to say that this dullness, this incapacity to notice, is merely a natural product of familiarity and habit, but I fear it might actually be produced by a weariness with looking. “She has looked at the world a long time, and has grown tired of it.” Which might be why the notes I tape to the windows seldom have their intended effect. I stick them up there in order to have them where I can’t possibly miss them if I open my eyes at all—I have only to turn my head in the general direction of the windows and they are right there in front of me. Yet after just a few days I don’t see them anymore—I can’t see them, is my point. Now that I am actively looking I notice a Post-it on the window to my left, above Clean the Bathroom. This one is in red marker and reads: Return Library Books. I have no idea how long that note has been up there. I don’t know what books it refers to. The note, in fact, is thoroughly opaque, as I have not visited a library in years. After turning off the lights in the living room, I went over and stood at the window as I do nearly every night. It was late and the street was deserted. On the opposite sidewalk, illuminated by the lights of the factory, a woman was walking in the direction of the Connector, in housecoat and slippers, her arms around a plastic bag so full she had to tilt her head to one side to see where she was going. Viewed from above she looked like an ant carrying an enormous crumb. A police car rolled by, slowing as it came abreast of the woman, who did not turn to look—slowing menacingly, it must have felt to her—and then went on. She was almost at the corner when the bus came. She lifted an arm, but she was not at a regular stop, and the bus rolled on past her. From my window I could see into the lighted interior, the driver’s blue-jacketed shoulder, his arm and a portion of the steering wheel, a line of empty plastic benches.
Sometimes a blank space lasts for days. I sat at the typewriter, but I didn’t touch the keys. I sat at the table where the typewriter is, not at the typewriter precisely, just staring at the windows, though not in fact seeing them. Not typing, not seeing, not thinking really, or if thinking not remembering what I thought. I wrote a postcard to Grossman, in pencil, telling her that I had changed my mind, that I would be happy to write a short preface. The card sat on the table for a day or two, and then I threw it out. I went to the park every day except the day it rained. I went over there yesterday afternoon with a bag of crumbs—the pigeons in the park will eat out of your hand if you are patient. All the benches were occupied, and I don’t enjoy sharing a bench with strangers, so I dumped the crumbs in a heap next to the trash can and started back. I was approaching my building on the opposite side of the street, when I noticed a man standing in the middle of the sidewalk, hands in pockets, looking up at my windows. He was wearing a dark waist-length jacket, perhaps a leather jacket, and a red baseball cap pushed back on his head. As a rule I don’t pay attention to people I e
ncounter on the sidewalk, my gaze being more or less directed to the ground in front of me, more or less focused. If I see feet on the pavement in front of me, I veer to one side or the other. So it was sheer chance that I happened to glance up and notice the man. I stopped and looked more intently, in part because he was staring up at my building, but mainly, I think, because he looked like Brodt. I am not sure it was Brodt, it might have been someone else with a profile resembling his from a distance—a great many overweight men of a certain age, seen from a distance, have profiles like that. But in the confusion of the moment I failed to reflect on that fact and just assumed it was Brodt. I didn’t assume it either, actually, in the sense of making an educated guess after weighing the evidence. “I looked up, and there on the sidewalk ahead of me stood Brodt” was how it was exactly. I was surprised, of course, and my thoughts leaped to the various things I had removed from work—stapler, jacket, and other items I mentioned, I think, scissors, paper clips, and so forth—and I stepped off the sidewalk into the street behind a parked van. If he turned in my direction, I did not want to be conspicuously there, stock-still and staring. I could see him through the windows of the van, though, and he seemed disinclined to turn, planted as he was with eyes nailed to my windows. It was afternoon rush hour, and he had placed himself squarely in the center of the busy sidewalk. Some passersby veered around him, creating a little eddy where he stood, while others, seeing him looking up at my building, slowed their pace and looked up also, expanding the eddy, though none of them stopped. After a few minutes he seemed to shrug. He crossed the street to a brown sedan parked almost in front of my building and drove away. I say seemed to shrug, because I was not close enough to see anything as small as a shrug. I have put the shrug in in order to lend an air of discouragement to his actions, though the discouragement too is just an assumption on my part: I was thinking that he had probably tried the doorbell and after getting no answer had walked across the street to see if he could tell from my windows if I was home, and then, not learning anything from that either and feeling discouraged, he shrugged, probably. Of course he could not have learned anything just by staring up at my windows unless I had happened to be standing there when he glanced up, which I actually might have been doing had I been at home, since I might have walked over to the window to see who was down there pushing the buzzer. On the other hand, it is also possible, as I suggested, that the person on the sidewalk was not Brodt at all but someone else of roughly similar profile, and furthermore, even if this person, whoever he was, had in fact been pushing a buzzer in my building, it was more likely to have been Potts’s buzzer, in which case it was her windows he was staring up at. Or perhaps he had not buzzed at all. He might have been someone hired by the landlord to make repairs to the building, in which case he was probably not staring so much as studying, estimating materials, and so forth, in which case it is unlikely that he shrugged. I lay awake a long time last night, making a mental list of the items I had taken from work and wondering which ones Brodt was on to, if it was Brodt, as I was convinced in the delirium of half-sleep it must have been. The list was not huge, and I am not entirely certain that I had taken all the items on it. I might have merely considered taking some of them, picking them up perhaps, or shifting them around on a shelf, thinking that I could. I will have to go through my closets and drawers to make sure, even though failure to discover an item there won’t prove anything: sometimes after leaving work with an item in my handbag I would realize that I had no use for such a thing and throw it out on my way home or leave it on the bus seat. I distinctly recall doing that on several occasions. But even as regards the items that I am sure I did take—trivial doodads like paper clips and ballpoint pens, as I mentioned, and a small porcelain frog, a hairbrush, and a few other things—I cannot see why after all this time they would want to send someone to spy on me. Unless, of course, they have decided to make an example of me, and why would they want to do that? It is possible, I suppose, that Brodt knew all along that I was taking things—after all, he had cameras watching me everywhere I went except in the women’s toilet, and I don’t recall taking anything from the women’s toilet except a roll of paper now and then. In that respect the building might as well have been made of glass, not just on the outside, which it actually was—blue glass in which on nice days one could watch the clouds sailing—but on the inside as well. He could see me even in the elevators, even when I wedged myself into a corner, due to the convex shape of his lens. I always took an elevator when I had the mail cart, not being able to drag the cart up the stairs, though it was all the same to Brodt, I am sure—his eyes were everywhere, in halls, offices, stairwells. I tried not to look at the cameras, but sometimes I couldn’t stop myself and would steal a glance, even though I knew he would see me doing it. Those would have been the only times our eyes truly met—his met mine, that is, not mine his, unless one considers the lens of the camera to be his eye, which I could not help doing.