by Paul Theroux
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t work here anymore. So take a walk.”
I wanted to hit him, but if I did he would have had an excuse.
I said, “I’m going to talk to Kaloostian.”
Miss Berberian, seeing me, handed me an envelope. I opened it, thinking it was a letter. It was a check for thirty-one seventy-six.
“Where’s Mr. Kaloostian?”
“He’s not in today.” She was very intent on her typing.
“I’ve just been fired. Doesn’t Kaloostian know that?”
“Yes. See, he signed the check. I’m really sorry, Andre.”
“Mattanza’s crazy, you know. He’s really nuts.”
She didn’t say anything.
I lurked for a while. I went to the kitchen and asked Reuben for a coffee. He gave it to me and said, “I hear that little wop canned you. Don’t worry. There’s plenty of work around. Know what I think? Get an education and then you’ll never have to work.” I drank the coffee and when Reuben left the kitchen I heaved a bag of potatoes onto my shoulder and headed for the parking lot.
Every car, except for Mrs. Mamalujian’s, received a potato in its exhaust pipe. I jammed them as far as I could, so that they wouldn’t show and would be hard to remove. And I laughed to think of them all stranded here, when they wanted to go home.
Instead of going straight home, where my mother would ask questions about my losing my job—why else was I home so early?—I went to Medford Square for lunch—a submarine sandwich, at Salem Street Subs.
A new man was making them today. He looked slightly drunk, his paper hat crookedly fitting his head. He was Italian, which was odd, because Italians seldom got drunk in the Boston area.
“What can I do for you?”
“A large meatball sub.”
“What do you want on it?”
“Everything.”
He measured off a foot of Italian bread from a long loaf and cut it and then slashed it lengthwise. He began ladling meatballs into it.
“So what do you think of Henry Miller?” He had seen my book.
“He’s good. He’s funny,” I said. “He’s got a great vocabulary.”
The man smiled. “He employs sesquipedalian verbiage,” he said, and eased the meatballs into the bread with the heel of the ladle.
I was fascinated that a drunken Italian in a paper hat would say something like this.
“But his best books are banned because of our procrustean laws,” he said. “Know what I mean?”
“Something like procrastinate?”
He shook his head—no. He was spooning chopped onions and tomatoes.
“Procrustes was a robber in Greek legend who had an iron bed. It was a certain size. He made people lie on it and if they were too tall for it he cut their legs off. If they were too short he stretched them to fit the bed. Procrustean. It means ruthlessly inflexible.”
“What if they were the right size—what if they fit?”
“No one ever fits,” the man said, and handed me my meatball sub. “He was killed by Theseus. You owe me thirty-five cents.”
He said he was a writer and I was sure he was telling me a secret. He was writing a play set in Leipzig. Had I thought of writing plays? I said yes, telling him one of my secrets. He said he hoped to see me again, the next time I wanted a sub. His name, he said, was Sal Balinieri.
That night I wrote a Henry Miller letter to the Maldwyn Country Club and used the word “procrustean” in it.
3.
The next day I went to the MDC pool on the Charles River, across the road from the Mass General Hospital, and I was hired as the third lifeguard. The other two were Larry McGinnis and Vinny Muzzaroll.
Larry said, “A position just became vacant this morning. It’s kind of a strange story. See, Arturo Lopez, the other lifeguard, was a member of a street gang on Harrison Avenue. About five of the guys jumped a woman around midnight and dragged her up to the roof of a building, where they took turns raping her. When it was Arturo’s turn, and he was about to bang her, he saw it was his mother, and he jumped off the roof. Which is why we have a vacancy.”
I was on the point of saying It’s like a Greek tragedy when Vinny Muzzaroll piped up.
“Don’t believe him,” Muzzaroll said. “Lopez joined the army. It was the only way he could get back to San Juan.”
Still, I kept thinking of the story. It made no difference to me that it hadn’t happened. As he had spoken I had vividly imagined it, and I knew I would never forget it.
We took turns on the lifeguard chair. The pool was a stew of thrashing swimmers. Larry said, “It’s impossible to watch them all. Every night when we clear the pool I expect to see a stiff on the bottom that’s been there all day.” The pay was better than at the Maldwyn Country Club, the hours were shorter, and no one minded if I read on the job, providing the book wasn’t obvious.
“The only reason Muzzaroll doesn’t read on the job is he can’t read,” Larry said.
I found it very relaxing here. It had been a strain to work among people who had money and no brains. Except for Mrs. Mamalujian, they had seemed dreadful people; and I did not know which was worse, the way they had ignored me or the way they had stared. Thinking about them often made me angry. One lunch hour I called Kaloostian. Reuben had baffled me one day by telling me that this man was an Assyrian.
I said, “You didn’t reply to my letter.”
“I didn’t realize you wanted one. It’s not the kind of letter that’s easy to answer.”
“That would have been the polite thing to do,” I said. “I guess it’s not an Assyrian custom.”
He went silent. It was probably a mistake to refer to his origins.
“I think Mattanza’s out of his mind,” I said. “I think he’s a feeb.”
“We understood that from your letter, but we can’t give you your job back.”
“I don’t want the fucking job back—I want an explanation.”
“So do we. For example, we were wondering what happened to a twenty-five-pound bag of potatoes that vanished from the kitchen.”
“Don’t ask me.”
“And how they ended up in the parking lot, stuck into the exhaust pipes of the members’ cars.”
I had been so angry about his not replying to my letter that I had forgotten about that. I was glad we were on the phone, so that he could not see me smile.
“Noreen Dorian had a sick mother. Naturally she couldn’t visit her. I understand the poor woman was beside herself. Putting a potato into someone’s exhaust pipe is a pretty heartless act.”
Hearing him say it that way made me laugh, but I put my hand over my mouth.
“Some of those cars are still not working properly.”
“It’s got nothing to do with me,” I said. “I’m not interested in those cars. All I want is an answer to my letter.”
Kaloostian wasn’t apologetic. He said, “Know what I’d like to do? I’d like to keep that letter and show it to you in about twenty years.”
“What for?”
“Just to see what you’ll say. I think you’ll be ashamed of it.”
“I won’t! I’ll be proud of it. In twenty years I’ll say the same thing.”
“About ‘pernicious little tyrants in Bermuda shorts’?”
“Yes, all of that. I won’t forget it. I want you to know one thing. I will always remember that you and your friends will never get hemorrhoids, because you’re perfect assholes.”
I hung up, banging the receiver hard.
There was a snicker behind me—a girl suppressing laughter; but when I saw her I laughed too.
“I’m glad you weren’t talking to me,” she said.
“That was the president of the Maldwyn Country Club. He let me down. I have no mercy.”
She was slim, pinch-faced and blonde. She had a biggish nose and small breasts. Her dark blue bathing suit made her seem paler than she was, and she had alert intelligent eyes. I liked her lips and the way her hair
was tangled. She had the bad posture that I associated with shy girls—sort of pigeon-toed as she stood there. She was carrying a book. Anyone with a book interested me. Hers was On the Road, the hardback.
“Can I use the phone?” she said.
“Go ahead,” I said, and realized that I had been staring at her.
I went back to my post, which was a tall steel chair at the edge of the pool. I put my leg up and tucked The Henry Miller Reader just behind my knee. I had thought the crowd and the noise—all the running and screaming—would make this pool a hard place to work. But my reading took the curse off it. The swimmers didn’t create problems, but the others did—they fought, they tripped and fell, they bruised themselves and cracked their skulls. Muzzaroll did the bandaging and then kicked them out. That made it easy: if someone didn’t behave we sent him home. If only I could have done that at the Maldwyn Country Club.
There were solitary men here who never swam, but only lurked and watched the little girls with hot eyes. Some kids did nothing but chase each other. Others hung on the fence like monkeys. On good days the nurses from the Mass General came over for a dip.
My back was turned to the Charles River. Sometimes I glanced around and saw the people in sailboats, the racing eights, the lovers in rowboats, the yachts making their way to Boston Harbor. But the view from the lifeguard chair was of the pool, and behind it the bathhouse, and across Memorial Drive the Mass General—people in pajamas at the windows, staring with chalky faces, looking upset.
I discovered that I could read amid the screams, the honking traffic, the running feet, and Muzzaroll’s announcements on the loudspeaker: We have found a purse. Will the owner please come to the office and identify its contents? They played radios, they yelled, they sang. The factory whistles blared across the Charles, and the MTA trains rattled on the bridge to City Square.
At the end of the day, Muzzaroll said sharply, We close in half an hour. All swimmers should leave the pool immediately. This means you—
They had specific rules that everyone had to follow. It was not like the Maldwyn Country Club, where no one knew the rules and people did whatever they wanted, because they had money.
That day I climbed down from the lifeguard’s chair, feeling relaxed from an afternoon of reading.
“Hello.”
She said it in a friendly singsong way: it was the pale girl I had seen near the telephone.
“We’re closing pretty soon,” I said.
“I know. I’m going.”
But she wasn’t going. She was standing in front of me.
“You were really mad,” she said, smiling. “I’ve never heard anyone say those things in real life. I thought people just yelled like that in movies.”
“I wasn’t yelling. I was being coldly abusive, reducing that guy to a physical wreck.”
“It was nice,” she said.
“Where do you live?”
“Pinckney Street,” she said. “Just over there.”
I liked her for not saying Beacon Hill.
“I’m walking that way,” I said. “I could walk you home.”
“Sounds good,” she said.
I went to change and by the time I had locked up she was outside waiting. I was glad that neither Larry nor Vinny had seen her: I wanted her to be my secret. We crossed the street, and I thought: If I had some money I could take her to Harvard Gardens and have a few beers. She said she worked in a bookstore on Charles Street, but this was her day off. I could tell from her accent that she was from the South Shore. She went to BU, she was an English major; she was renting a room here for the summer. I told her my name. She said hers was Lucy.
“Want to come in?” she said, as we turned into Pinckney Street. “The thing is, if you do you have to be careful. The landlady’s deaf but she’s got very good eyesight. If you’re quick she won’t see you.”
“I’ll be very quick.”
She turned her key and eased the front door open, and listened; then she nodded and I followed her to the end of the hall. Her room was only half a room, just a bed and a closet and a narrow space. There was nowhere to sit except on the bed.
“She didn’t see us!” She seemed very pleased that we had outwitted her landlady.
I sat next to her and she leaned against me.
“So we’re perfectly safe,” I said.
“Sure. As long as we don’t leave. If we stay right here, we’re fine.”
In that tiny room, with the window shut, and the shades drawn, and the closet door closed, sitting side by side on the bed.
“Then why don’t we stay right here?”
I put my arm around her and she drew nearer to me. Then I leaned over and kissed her and she put her mouth on my lips and licked them. I reached under her blouse and ran my hand over her breasts and let my fingers graze her nipples. She didn’t stop me, and so I did it again. She sighed, and her sigh was the sweetest kind of encouragement. I put my other hand between her thighs. She moved her legs to accommodate me. And then I jammed myself against her and pleaded for her to let me in. I thought she was resisting, but she was pleading for me to begin.
It all happened quickly, and a few minutes later we were panting in the dusty heat of the small room, our skin stuck together. The tension had left me. I did not know what to say. I felt somewhat awkward to be here with her, and the air stifled me. I wanted to get away so that I could think about it—walk down to the bus, buy an ice cream and head home; and maybe see her tomorrow and do it again. But I stayed where I was, stuck to her, out of politeness.
She said, “That was nice. I was thinking about that today.”
“When?”
“At the pool—looking at you.”
“You were thinking about that?”
She laughed and said, “Yes!”
I was slightly shocked that a girl would sit down and stare and think about screwing; but I was glad, too.
I said, “It’s hot in here, Lucy.”
“I’ll open the window,” she said.
“That’s okay. I have to go pretty soon.”
She didn’t object. She just said, “And I have to eat.”
Amazing. We had just made love passionately and furiously—and in a few minutes she would be eating spaghetti or something and I would be on the bus to Medford Square, as if nothing had happened.
I said, “As soon as I get some money we can go out to eat. I know a few places. I’d like to see you again and have some fun.”
She said, “Sure.”
I thought: I don’t want anything more than this. And then I was walking down Pinckney Street alone, and whistling. The sun was behind the houses and the air was cool.
I kept glancing up from my book, expecting to see her in her blue bathing suit. But she didn’t turn up that day, nor the day after, which was July Fourth. We always worked on holidays. Kennedy came to Boston, and Larry and Vinny ducked out to see him. They were very grateful to me for taking over, but it was no sacrifice. Kennedy was a bad Catholic and a millionaire. I had grown up with the sense that the rich were dishonest.
At about eleven o’clock Larry and Vinny came back saying that they had seen him and that he had class.
“What’s Jackie Kennedy like?”
“I’d fuck her,” Vinny said in a praising way.
A little later I was looking for Lucy and saw a man staring at me.
“Excuse me—you got a minute?”
I had always found that a forbidding question.
He was skinny, with very short hair and piercing eyes that were two different colors—one gray, the other blue. That made me think he had been hit very hard on the side of his head. His mouth hung open, making him seem both thoughtful and stupid. He breathed through his mouth in a laborious way that suggested he had low intelligence. His bathing suit was too tight, and I began to wonder whether men who wore very tight bathing suits were strange.
He said, “Does it bother you that we’re sending tractors to Cuba, I mean actually shipping the
m to that dictator Fidel Castro?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. I said no, it didn’t bother me; and I looked around the pool for Lucy. “I wrote him a letter. I called him names.”
“Castro? Did he write back?”
“Would you write back if someone called you names?”
I could only think of my letter to Kaloostian, which was actually a letter to the entire Maldwyn Country Club. Was there anal symbolism in shoving potatoes into their exhaust pipes?
“Then I wrote to the President,” the skinny man said. “Of the United States. ‘Ike,’ I says. ‘How can you be so stupid?’ That’s all.”
“Any reply?” I was still glancing around.
He laughed. “I was telling him something!”
I saw Larry tapping his watch: lunchtime.
“I have to go, pal.”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“You already did. I think it’s very interesting that you wrote to Fidel Castro. Maybe next time you should write in Spanish.”
“See, the thing is,” he said, not listening to me. “I’ve got one of these tiny little cameras. Japanese. I can take pictures of anything.”
I thought I was walking away from him, but he was following. I could hear the air going into his mouth.
“I want to take your picture. I mean with your clothes off. You’d probably be too shy, huh?”
When I stopped and turned he bumped into me. He was apologizing as I said, “You like it here, pal?”
“My name’s Norman. You can call me Norm, or Norman. I’m here for my nerves. I can’t work. It’s my nerves. The doctor told me to swim.”
“If you want to swim here, then swim. But don’t make strange requests. Understand?”
But the man had startled me and made me uneasy. And that crazy talk had given me a strong desire to see Lucy. She was what I wanted—I needed a girlfriend. And she worked in a bookstore. I thought of sex and I also thought how she might get me a discount on books.
“Aren’t you having a beer?” Larry said at the Harvard Gardens.
We had taken our sandwiches there, to the bar, because it was air conditioned and there was a jukebox. He was drinking a Budweiser.
“This is going to sound batty,” I said, “but I don’t have any money. About five bucks, that’s all. It has to last me until payday.”