by Paul Theroux
Fear made me jump up and find her dress in the next room.
“My eyes are terrible,” she said. “I can’t tell whether you’ve got your clothes on or not.”
“They’re on,” I said.
It was four o’clock. I had been reading for half an hour or more. When Mrs. Mamalujian dried off and got dressed and put on her lipstick, it was after four-thirty.
She said, “Will you do me a very big favor?”
I was afraid to say yes, but I managed it.
“I have to go home now, but I want you to pay for the room.”
She paused, making me choke for a moment at the thought of my paying for the room with the three dollars I had in my pocket.
“I’ll give you the money.” She took out crushed and crumpled bills, not seeming to count them. “That should be enough,” she said, adding another one to the pile.
It was over a hundred dollars.
“If there’s any left, you can keep it. Buy some books.” She kissed me. “I have this feeling you never want to see me anymore.”
“No,” I said. “I had a good time. Really.”
She smiled and kissed me again, and her lips moved as though she were speaking to me.
“You don’t have to go home,” she said. “Sit here. Stay as long as you like. Stay overnight. I can think about you sitting here, reading—what?”
“Moby Dick.”
She laughed in her deep-throated way. “That title kills me!”
“It’s the whale,” I said.
Then she left, mumbling a little. I read a few pages, and put the book down. I couldn’t read. I went into the other room—her smell was here, of perfume and clothes, and the shampoo or soap. The bathroom was unpleasantly wet and the towels soggy. The bed was the biggest, the widest, I had ever seen.
I picked up the telephone and called Lucy.
“Darling,” she said.
“I’m sorry I’m so late in calling you.”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “I knew you’d call.”
I loved her for that.
Very soon she was with me in the room. She said, “You’re amazing. What are you doing here?”
“It’s a secret,” I said, and when I looked up again she had her clothes off. Now what Mrs. Mamalujian had said did not seem so silly. We were in the next room and this was better than anything. She had been right—this was living. Lucy arched her back beneath me as we made love, and she gasped at how deep I had gone, as though she had just then lost her virginity.
6.
That was the oddest day I had ever spent—the afternoon in the hotel; lunch with Mrs. Mamalujian; her shower and my Moby Dick; and then a long night with Lucy. We checked out at five in the morning, and with the thirty dollars left over I took a taxi home. If I had blundered in at midnight my mother would have asked me where I had been. But because I arrived just before breakfast and didn’t wake them they assumed I had been in bed all night and had just got up early. I was in the yard, ankle-deep in dew, marveling at my luck.
There was more. The rest of July was like a new life to me: I had a girlfriend, I had money, I had a job, and I had Mrs. Mamalujian. I suspended my reading of Baudelaire.
Mrs. Mamalujian was lonely. She told me that she had met her husband, the construction man, when she was eighteen. Her children were my age, but she was vague about how many she had and didn’t like talking about them. She preferred to talk about herself as a girl and said, “I was spoiled rotten,” and smiled. She had never gone to college. Because of that she had never stopped reading, and she read everything, Norman Mailer, Freud, Somerset Maugham, Kahlil Gibran, Frances Parkinson Keyes, A Night to Remember, Tennyson, Salinger, I Jumped Over the Wall, Jacques Barzun, and sex books. I was the same, only I varied it a bit more by reading Ovid, and books about camping, gun catalogues and Isis Unveiled by Madame Blavatsky.
She did not treat me like a son. She made me understand that I was her friend and that she was grateful for my company. We had lunch and talked about books. Now and then she would be talking about a sexual episode—the man in the Norman Mailer story sodomizing his girlfriend, for example—and she would call it “spicey.” The word would remind me that she was thirty years older than me, and I thought God! We didn’t go to a hotel again. It was always restaurants.
“Is there anything you want?” she usually said after lunch.
She didn’t mean food. She meant anything else. She urged me to want something.
“How about one of those blazers we were looking at on the way here?”
Passing Brooks Brothers in Harvard Square I had said I liked the striped blazer in the window. Mrs. Mamalujian had a very good memory for wishes and desires.
“Let me buy it for you.”
I had never bought things I wanted. I had been made to believe that they were beyond me and that I did not deserve them. Work was the proof that I could have them, but being a lifeguard was not work—not real work. I saved the money I earned and cheated myself with what my mother called pin money. I bought secondhand military clothes in the Army and Navy Store. I still wore a khaki shirt and fatigue pants, combat boots, and sunglasses.
I let Mrs. Mamalujian take me to the shops—Brooks Brothers, J. Press, the Ivy League Shop, or the Coop, and I would try things on. What surprised me was that they fit me so well. But I was shocked by how expensive they were, and if you added the price of lunch it was fifty dollars or more.
The salesmen were always sly, and they would pressure Mrs. Mamalujian because they could see she was paying and she was eager to please me.
“It’s excellent quality,” they said. “That cloth wears like iron.”
“What do you think, Andy?” she would say to me.
The salesmen never listened to me.
“Everyone’s wearing that style,” they said.
That did it. As soon as I heard that I didn’t want the thing.
So when Mrs. Mamalujian said, “Is there anything you want?” I thought: Yes, what no one else has, what no one else wants or can even imagine. People with money bought things to be like everyone else. If I had money, I thought, I would try to be as different as possible.
But the idea of wealth was so remote that I could not imagine having any money myself. And I could not think of anything I could do to become wealthy. It would never happen.
That made me value Mrs. Mamalujian and it made me hate the rich even more than I already did. The sight of Kennedy’s face—his lovely teeth showing behind his smile—made me want him to lose the election. It was an unfortunate irritation because wherever I looked he was smiling—gloating—at me. I realized that I could never have lasted at the Maldwyn Country Club. I despised those people too much. And I was proud of the fact that I had been fired. I reasoned: If you couldn’t succeed with the rich you had to be their enemy.
Yet I needed money badly—for tuition fees, for my rent at college, for books, to take Lucy out. I had about four hundred dollars in the bank; if I didn’t have a thousand by September I would have to find a job in the second semester. I kept thinking of Vinny Muzzaroll saying You can sell your body. How did people get money? How did a banker become a banker? How did a man become a landlord? These people who drove Cadillacs—how did they get them? There were boys my age at the Maldwyn Country Club who had Thunderbirds and Bulova watches and some had their own golf clubs. They got them from their parents. I had the idea that people who had things—money, cars, tennis rackets, beautiful shoes—had been given them. I could not imagine that they earned them. What on earth could a person do to earn a Caddy? My father worked hard and drove a jalopy.
There was a secret that I suspected, did not know, that I would never know. That suspicion made me secretive—if I don’t know theirs why should I tell them mine?—and it made me grateful to Mrs. Mamalujian. If I wanted something she would give it to me. That was a helpful thought, but it was only a thought. I did not want anything conventional.
When I politely refused these gifts—
a suit, a jacket, a pretty tie—she said, “You shouldn’t be so modest—”
She didn’t know that it was arrogance. Something special, that no one else had—that’s what I wanted.
But she had a talent for gift-giving. It is a rare talent, fitting a gift to a person, since most gifts are an obscure burden or obligation. No one had ever tried to please me with a present. Did she know that I disliked having lunch in expensive restaurants? It wasn’t a favor. I felt these places confining. I hated sitting in the dark watching her drink. Perhaps she knew that, which was why she was likewise grateful to me. There was no sex, so it had to be a profound friendship.
She gave me a wallet with my initials on it; a jackknife with six blades; an electric razor; a belt with a fancy brass buckle; a leather keyring; a Japanese camera; a Timex watch; a pair of ivory chopsticks, a leatherbound Tom Jones; Italian sunglasses; a cigarette holder—just handed them over, “That’s for you.” When I protested, she said, “You’ve got to have it,” as if this trinket was one of life’s necessities, like shoes. I accepted them because they weren’t expensive, and because I could have bought them myself.
She gave me earrings and scarves. “That’s for your mother.” I passed them on to Lucy, and it amazed me that Lucy liked them. Why hadn’t I been able to think of such gifts? But it made Lucy wonder why I could afford earrings and not two tickets to The Seventh Sea at the Exeter Theater, or Smiles of a Summer Night, which was famous for having a nude scene.
Sometimes Mrs. Mamalujian said, “You’re lucky.”
I hated that. It was when she was drunk and we were the only ones left in the restaurant. The waiter would be standing nearby and rocking on his heels—wanting us to pay up so that he could go home.
“Very lucky.”
Was I supposed to say yes or no? I just politely murmured through my nose, because I did not want to insult her by saying that I did not feel lucky at all most of the time. Sometimes I felt like a servant—her servant or anyone’s—because I had no other place in the world. I was a good servant—well-mannered, tactful, discreet, gliding in and out. Mrs. Mamalujian did not treat me like a servant, which was another reason I liked her. But when she told me how lucky I was, and I had to sit and listen, I felt trapped.
“You’re young—”
That wasn’t luck. I hated being young.
“You’re good-looking. You’re intelligent. You’ve got your health. It’s amazing you don’t have a girlfriend.”
That was what I had told her.
“But in a way I’m glad you don’t. A girl would just waste your time.”
When she said that I saw Lucy very clearly, sitting on her bed, at her window, smiling. This is my garden.
Mrs. Mamalujian only had a few conversations that she could hold when she was drunk. One began You’re lucky, and another Gin and tonic is good for you; and sometimes it was how she had been spoiled rotten in New York.
At the end she always did the same thing—reached across the table and took my hand. Her grip was bony and damp, but I let her hold on because I knew it was what she wanted me to do.
In ways I could not explain, knowing Mrs. Mamalujian helped me with Lucy. Was it a question of confidence, or belief? I needed Mrs. Mamalujian’s friendship to have Lucy’s love. I didn’t want to understand why. Understanding things made them go away. I wanted a mysterious tangle of secrets and, without putting it into precise words, I felt that no one must know me. In order to be strong I needed to have secrets. Neither Mrs. Mamalujian nor Lucy knew of one another. That was very important to me.
Lucy didn’t know what to make of the presents I passed on to her. But I loved her for not asking me where they came from. She was perhaps like me—thinking that if she asked too much the things would disappear.
Her father was dead, her mother lived just south of Plymouth, and having seen her driver’s license I now knew that she was almost two years older than me. I wasn’t old enough to drink in bars legally, but she was always asked to show her ID on the assumption that if she was twenty-one so was I.
I loved her because she was patient and never asked questions and because she liked sex. Sex most of all. In bed we talked about it, but only in bed. She said she didn’t know when she had lost her virginity because she was too drunk at the time. She had passed out and had just assumed it had happened.
“I’m terrible when I’m drunk,” she said in a naughty-girl voice. “Sometimes I break bottles or throw things out the window. Or I turn to jelly and sort of collapse.”
I had never seen her drunk and didn’t want to. I hated hearing people’s own versions of themselves: they were either much worse or much better than they ought to be.
Many times, after we had made love, I simply wanted to go home. I felt there was nothing more to do, nothing to say. Often it was the sense that we might make love one more time—after the bar or the movie or a walk around the block—that kept me from getting on the bus.
Lucy was at her most talkative just after we had made love, when I was still and silent. She said surprising things.
“When I started BU I was going out with a guy, and I kept asking him to make love to me. I didn’t love him and the sex was no fun, but I was, um, small, and I wanted him to stretch me.”
That shocked me, the way she said it.
“After a while I got bigger, and it was more fun. It used to hurt. Do you think I’m awful?”
“No,” I said, and I wondered whether I really believed it.
She said, “You can do anything you want with me.”
I couldn’t think of much and that was maddening.
She said, “That Henry Miller stuff.”
What did that mean? I reminded myself to have a closer look at the book. All I could remember was Miller with a pathetic prostitute, who was crying, and Miller saying Has no one been kind to you? Which sounded untruthful to me.
With Lucy I was so impatient I often made love to her before she took all her clothes off, and then I preferred it that way, remembering my the fantasies looking at the underwear section of the Sear’s Catalogue. I was in such a hurry the room seemed very small and hot. We were very careful not to make too much noise—breathe too hard or kick anything. There were other roomers at Miss Murphy’s. But I liked the thought that we were making love under Murf’s nose. It made me feel like a burglar, and when I left Lucy’s at eleven-thirty I pretended I was a thief sneaking successfully away from a house I had just robbed.
One day I tried out her sentence myself and said, “You can do anything you want to me.”
She pretended to be shocked, but she was smiling. She knelt and kissed my stomach. I could not control my penis. It throbbed and fattened with desire, and swung sideways and came to rest against her chin. In one movement she twisted her head and took it into her mouth. I was fascinated by the way she treated this stupid thing seriously: I had often looked at my penis and thought: You moron. She was sort of speaking silently to it for a while, and then she slurped it like a noodle. I was desperately afraid she didn’t like doing it, and that spoiled my pleasure at the beginning. But she did it again and again, and I didn’t want her to stop.
We had no word for that. I was too shy even to mention it. It was something we did in the dark.
I used to think of it when I saw her licking a Popsicle, or when she mentioned food she disliked—boiled carrots, or lima beans, or raw oysters—and said, “I could never eat that!”
Lucy knew I wanted to be a writer. She never saw what I wrote, but she used to ask me to tell her stories. Talking to her gave me ideas.
“It’s about a man who goes to a foreign country and keeps making mistakes,” I said.
“Like a Martian landing on earth.”
That was a good idea.
“When he wants to mail a letter he very carefully puts it into one of those trash cans that have a narrow opening at the top.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“And when he wants to throw away a scrap of pap
er—”
“He puts it into a letter box,” Lucy said.
“He squeezes a tube of oil paint onto his toothbrush, because it looks like toothpaste.”
“I like it,” she said.
But telling her took the place of writing, and it helped to see the merit of a story. This one was a dud, I was sure.
I saw Lucy three times a week, in the evening. We went for walks, we saw movies, we went to Harvard Gardens and drank beer. But every evening ended the same way. We went back to Pinckney Street and sneaked into the house, and into her room, and made love. Then I sneaked out, which was harder than sneaking in, and I walked to the bus stop. I always felt energetic after being released from her small room.
I saw Mrs. Mamalujian twice a week, in the daytime. One of the days we drank, the other we ate.
The women did not know about each other. But they mattered to me, and I needed them both. I often felt that Mrs. Mamalujian was overgenerous with me but that I justified it by passing it on to Lucy; so Mrs. Mamalujian was Lucy’s patroness, not mine. And if it hadn’t been for Lucy I probably wouldn’t have sat all those hours with this fifty-year-old woman; just being with Mrs. Mamalujian made me feel lucky to have this pretty girl, whom I could squeeze and kiss and tell stories to.
So far I had only dreamed of whale steaks: I was saving that pleasure.
7.
Then I had my first whale steak.
Mrs. Mamalujian showed up at the pool early in August looking strangely eager and panicky, as if she was trying hard to remember something she had just forgotten. She had an it’s-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue expression, the kind that makes you feel totally helpless. All the wild screaming kids worried her, I knew—she was uneasy around poor people. I had noticed that they made her feel trapped and her reaction was to be too reasonable. She smiled too much and overtipped them. When she was very worried she agreed to anything, just to get away.
But today she seemed as though she were studying the people at the pool, trying to understand, trying to remember.