by Paul Theroux
“You think I’m stupid, don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and I became very vague, as if it was impossible for me to determine whether or not he was stupid. I faced him and tried to look baffled.
“Hey, if you don’t like this job I could find lots of guys to take your place.”
I decided not to reply. I didn’t want to tell him what I thought of the job.
“I’ve got them pleading with me,” Mattanza said. “I could show you the applications. Know why there’s so many?”
I smiled at him.
He gathered his fingers and shook them at me in another Italian gesture.
“Because this place has class.”
I said, “You mean money. That’s all you mean. Money.”
“Fucken right that’s all I mean.”
I didn’t mention taste or intelligence or generosity, I didn’t say anything more. I was fairly sure he was crazy. He was certainly unpredictable. We went on doing the filters—Mattanza shaking the chlorine while I did the fitting—and then he spoke again.
“I used to go in disguise,” he said. “I was Joe Falco. I had this special suit that I just wore in the North End, nowhere else. I used to comb my hair different. Know something? A lot of broads like to be slapped around. You wouldn’t know that because you don’t know shit. But I can tell when they want me to hit them. I just fucken slam them and they love it. They get this”—he weighed his little fist—“right on the mouth. Only it wasn’t me. It was Joe Falco.” Mattanza looked at me and made his mouth into a smile. “Falco was a crazy bastard.”
* * *
No reading, no talking, and Mattanza didn’t like me looking away from the pool. A job that seemed to me to have pleasant possibilities quickly turned into a grind. How could a lifeguard job be hard? But at the Maldwyn Country Club it was hard. And if I was only a few minutes late, Mattanza ranted.
“I’m docking your pay! You’re losing an hour! You’re late!” he said. “I should give you your walking papers. Know my problem?”
“I can’t guess.”
“I’m too nice. Suit up and get your ass out here.”
“The bus was late.”
“Don’t blame the bus. Don’t give me no excuses.”
I hated the bus—hated the hard seats, and the way they smelled; hated the condescending bus advertisements that were designed for the down-at-heel bus passenger. Ever thought of completing your education? or There is a future for you in TV and Radio Repair! I wanted a motorcyle, but how could I buy one on forty-four dollars a week—they withheld seven-fifty in tax. I gave my mother fifteen, kept fifteen and banked the rest. I needed nine hundred by September: I would never make it. Working to make money made me distrust work and despise money.
What demoralized me was that all the members had money: they drove Cadillacs, they played golf, they had huge lunches, and if they wanted a drink they ordered it. They lay spread-eagled by the pool, tanning themselves; they drank. And I stood watching them, which was my job, and I resisted the urge to read.
They had sporty clothes and I had army-surplus. The only advantage I had was that all I was required to wear was a bathing suit. I was healthy and a good swimmer, but so what? I deeply resented the fact that I was a servant and regarded as inferior. And it was a trap: because they were stupid I would never be able to prove to them that I was intelligent.
One hot day in the second week at the club I stood in the sunshine feeling dizzy, and, fearing that I was going lightheaded, I decided to plunge in and cool off. Mattanza was waiting for me at the top of the ladder when I came out.
“No swimming,” he said. “Hey, don’t you like this job? Because if you keep goofing off like this I’m going to have to let you go.”
But less than an hour later he had put on his tiny bathing suit and begun diving into the pool. He swam poorly but he was a good diver. I was glad to see that he was the sort of show-off who sometimes goes too far. I hoped that he would overdo it and bash his brains out on the edge of the pool.
There were girls my age who spent the whole day there. I watched them but I did not speak to them. They had wide Armenian faces and were heavy, and had big brown thighs and broad feet and square shoulders. In spite of all their money they would always look the way they looked, which was a kind of warning. They lay sleepily in the sun and got even browner.
The boys my age made me feel like an outsider. They were not intentionally rude, but they were too selfish to know how to be friendly and too stupid to hold a conversation. The girls were all daughters and the boys were all sons—special for that and protected. Their whole lives were taken care of. They were fat and slow and they would become fatter and slower; they had money. Even the younger ones were hairy, and a few fourteen-year-olds had mustaches. I could tell from the way they jumped into the pool and splashed everyone that they would be hell when they grew up.
“That’s my kid, Kenny,” a man said to me one day. The boy had done a cannonball from the end of the pool, nearly landing on a woman’s head. But the man was laughing. He loved seeing aggression in his son. He pointed to himself. He said, “Deek Palanjian.”
I smiled at him. I saw Mattanza watching. He was thinking: No talking. But Palanjian was talking to me.
“Elia Kazan—know who I mean? Big movie director? He’s an Armenian.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Michael Arlen? Wrote a lot of best-sellers? Know what his real name is?”
I shook my head because Mattanza was watching.
“Dikran Kouyoumjian.”
“No kidding.”
“That guy in Russia—he’s Armenian.”
“Which guy in Russia?”
“Anastas Mikoyan,” he said, and waved to his son, who had climbed onto the diving board. He was a short heavy brown boy with a shaven head, and he moved nimbly with his arms down, like an ape. “Hey, Kenny, show me a dive!”
“How do you stand this job?” the woman said. It was the same woman who had been reading Norman Mailer. Today she was reading The Henry Miller Reader—the man’s sly devilish face on the book jacket looking up at me from between the woman’s breasts.
“The job’s all right.”
“You don’t have to be polite to me. I’ve been watching you,” she said. “I think you hate it here.”
It astounded me that she was able to read my mind, and I was embarrassed because I guessed she might have an inkling of all the ingenious ways I had devised to destroy the Maldwyn Country Club: making a minefield of the golf course, poisoning the water cooler, bombing the clubhouse. And lately I had been thinking that, just for the cruel fun of it, I would jam a potato in everyone’s exhaust pipe—all those limousines in the parking lot—so that they wouldn’t be able to start the engine. Then they would have to walk, like me.
“I do hate it,” I said. “But I need a job.”
“What would you like to be doing?”
I thought: I would like to be lying here in the sun, drinking cold lemonade and reading a good book. I would like to be doing pretty much what everyone here was doing, which was another reason I hated this job. It was like being very hungry and working in a restaurant, bringing people food; like standing on the sidewalk reading Whale Steaks $1.29 and not having any money.
“I’d like to be reading,” I said, because it seemed rude to tell her what I pictured—myself on the chaise lounge, with my feet out. “What do you think of that book?”
“It’s lovely,” she said. “He’s so funny. Have you read Henry Miller?”
“No. I thought he was banned in the US.”
“His best books are banned. But someday we’ll be able to read them, and we’ll probably find them very boring. Imagine preventing people from reading something—as if reading is going to make us into monsters!”
I looked up expecting to see Mattanza: that stupid man had a book-banning mentality. No sane person could ever find a book dangerous, and it struck me then that an unmistakable sign of b
eetle-browed paranoia was seeing a book as a threat. The fact that I couldn’t spot Mattanza made me suspect that he was spying on me.
“Lawrence Durrell thinks Miller’s a genius. He wrote the Introduction.”
“I’ve read Justine,” I said. “And Balthazar. I’m waiting for the others to be published in paperback.”
“You know the characters Narouz and Nessim? I’m their mother.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Same name—Leila. My other name is much too difficult. You must find our names ridiculous.”
“Mine’s pretty ridiculous. Andy Parent.”
“I’m Leila Mamalujian—my husband’s the contractor. The John Hancock Building? He put it up. Big deal.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen him here.”
“We never come here together. We never do anything together. That’s probably why it works. Would you like to have lunch sometime?”
I said, “I’m not supposed to fraternize with the club members. It’s a rule.”
“That’s why I asked. It’s more exciting if you’re breaking a rule.”
“Mattanza would kill me.”
“He has a problem. His size, I think. Did you know that his wife won’t sleep with him unless they’re planning to have a baby? She thinks sex has something to do with having children.”
She didn’t laugh. She lit a cigarette, reddening one end with her lipstick and looking at me through big bulbous sunglasses.
“Mrs. Mattanza could use a little Henry Miller,” Mrs. Mamalujian said. “So how about lunch?”
“I work every day.”
“You have a day off. I’ve been watching you.”
“On my day off I’m usually hustling.”
Mrs. Mamalujian said, “Lunch is just a figure of speech.”
It wasn’t a figure of speech to me. It was a meal in a restaurant. You went in, had a drink, ordered prawn cocktail to start, and then a whale steak with mashed potatoes and string beans, and apple pie à la mode for dessert, and two coffees; and afterwards you went for a walk and smoked a White Owl to digest the meal. It was something I longed to do. I liked the weighty word “meal” and nowadays meal meant whale steaks.
Mrs. Mamalujian’s close attention was making me self-conscious. I said, “I’ve got to get back to work.”
That evening as I was getting ready to go home, Mattanza stopped me and said, “I’ve been getting complaints about you.”
“What kind of complaints?”
“Serious ones. Like you’re neglecting your job. Like you’ve been goofing off. Like you talk too much. And somebody saw you with a book.”
“What was I doing with the book? Something weird?”
My sarcasm enraged him. “That’s right—keep it up! Piss me off. See where it gets you.”
For a moment I was going to tell him to shove the job. But I needed it. It was more money than I would be earning at Wright’s, and fewer hours. The State was hiring lifeguards for the MDC pools, but I knew they were zoos.
“These complaints,” I said, “are they verbal or written?”
“You are such a smart-ass,” Mattanza said.
“Who complained about me? What did they say? I’ve got a right to know.”
Mattanza narrowed his tiny eyes at me. “You writing a book?”
I stared at him until he blinked. Then I said, “Yeah.”
“Then leave this chapter out.”
He started to walk away, a little bowlegged Indian brave from Sicilia. He suddenly turned as I was watching him, and he said, “Don’t mess with me. I was in the army. Korea. I seen action.”
For a few days I didn’t speak to anyone. Were any of these people complaining about me? I felt Mattanza was making it all up, but what if he wasn’t? On my way to work one day, cutting through the parking lot, I saw a big blue Lincoln leaking gas—the full tank expanding in the heat, and gas all over the bumper. Why not fling a match on it and blow it up? The only thing that kept me from doing it was the thought that I might be blown up with it. I hated these huge cars; but I knew how to sabotage them—sugar in the gas tank to foul the engine, a potato to plug the exhaust pipe. I saw Mrs. Mamalujian drive in—she had a white Buick—and I crept away.
She never swam. She wore a big billowy gown with poppies on it, and a white sunhat and sunglasses. Her straw shoes had fake fruit stitched to them. She drank gin and read The Henry Miller Reader, She looked clownish but I knew that while she was sober she was intelligent. She never spoke to anyone else.
After a few drinks she stopped talking about books. Then it was just that business about lunch.
“What we should do is simply meet and have a bite of something. It doesn’t matter what.”
I found It doesn’t matter what very strange.
“Do you like Chinese food?”
“It gives me pimples but I like it.”
“Or we could meet anywhere and talk about books. And maybe this place where we meet could be out of town, or somewhere special. You like talking about books, right?”
“Yes. At the moment I’m trying to get Ovid’s Metamorphoses.”
“That sounds heavy going.”
“I need it for something I’m planning to write.”
“About ancient Rome?”
“No. It’s a play set on the Notions Counter of a big department store like Filene’s. You know Filene’s Basement?”
She nodded. “And when I say this place could be somewhere special I have lots of ideas.”
“The thing is I don’t have a car.”
“You can use mine anytime you like.”
“Thanks very much,” I said. “I wish I had a motorcycle.”
“You want a motorcycle? I’ll give you a motorcycle.”
Just her saying that made me stop wanting it.
“God, am I bored,” she said. “Aren’t you bored?”
“I’m working,” I said. “So it doesn’t matter.”
“These women are always looking at you.”
“Mattanza’s had complaints.”
“I feel like complaining about him,” Mrs. Mamalujian said. She was drunk but at least she was on my side.
I looked up and saw his big Indian nose and tiny eyes peering at me through the shrubbery.
Every night after work I took the bus to Medford and walked home. I changed. I went for an ice cream at Brigham’s and ate it outside in the cool night air. Or I sat in the public library across from Saint Joe’s, and read. Or I watched television, the progress of the presidential campaign. I went to bed after the Tonight Show. One night Jack Paar said he was going to introduce a living saint, and a little Irishman with glistening eyes stepped onstage—Dr. Tom Dooley.
Dooley talked awhile about his hospital and his wonderful work, and then he stood up and put his hands together in a praying gesture and said, “God bless you all. As long as I have strength in my body I will go back among my people and work. But I need your help. Give, for God’s sake—give.”
The way his voice broke gave me the creeps. I thought he was crazy, too, and the fact that everyone applauded like mad also gave me the creeps.
“He has cancer,” my mother said the next day. “He does God’s work—it’s a miracle. You used to talk about being a missionary.”
Once I had seen a missionary wearing an Arab headdress and talking about the desert, and I thought: That’s for me—but it wasn’t the preaching part, it was the travel. I’ll get out that way, even if it means being a missionary, was my idea.
“I’d still like to go to Africa or Turkey, or somewhere.”
“And do God’s work?”
“No, just do my work,” I said. That was my new idea.
But it annoyed her to hear me say so. What a summer. It was almost July. I still had no girlfriend, no money, no motorcycle. I was trying to save for the fall, so I avoided everything that cost money. I hated the bus. I hated my job. I delved deeper under the black lid of the big cauldron where imperceptible and vast Humanity was b
oiling. Baudelaire.
“Want to borrow it?” Mrs. Mamalujian said to me. This was the end of my second week at the Maldwyn Country Club. She handed over The Henry Miller Reader. Miller’s roguish face leered from the cover. It was hardback, brand-new, smelling of Mrs. Mamalujian’s perfume.
“I’ll take good care of it.”
“I think he’s basically a comedian,” she said. “He’s funny, he uses funny words, the sex is a farce. That’s the whole point.”
At lunch, in the kitchen, when Reuben served us coffee, I took it out and began to read it.
Mattanza said, “Hey, what’s that supposed to be?” and snatched it.
“Give that book back,” I said and stood up to intimidate him.
“ ‘I pulled my cap over my eyes and muttered, “Fuck you, Jack.” And that’s the way it was that summer, a bloody fucking nightmare in which—’ Hey, that’s nice. That’s very nice. What would your mother say if she knew you were reading this shit?”
“It’s not shit.”
“It’s gatz. I wouldn’t have that in my house. Hey, where did you get this fucking thing.”
I tried to grab it from him, but before I could he flipped it open and saw scribbled on the flyleaf Leila Mamalujian.
“Hey, you stole this book!”
“She loaned it to me.”
“You’re not supposed to talk to the members. Hey, you got something going with her? Hey, you know what I think of this book?” He held it over a pot of stew that was bubbling on the stove.
Reuben said, “Get out of my kitchen” and took the book from Mattanza and handed it to me.
I read some of it that night. It was wild, it was funny, it thrilled me. I had never read anyone so foulmouthed who was at the same time so bright. It was energetic and coarse. I went to sleep smiling, thinking of o glabrous, o glab and glairy, and I was still reading it on the bus the next day.
Mattanza was waiting for me when I arrived at the club.
He said, “Don’t bother to change.”
He stood in a break in the hedge, blocking my way.
“I’m letting you go.”