The Fatigue Artist

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  I SLEPT A HEAVY, unbroken sleep that night. Eight-fourteen: the digital clock beside the fisherman lamp on the night table always surprised me. I would have expected something more old-fashioned of Ev’s parents, a plain round clock with easy-to-read numerals and a shrill ring relenting only after you fumbled for a cold metal button on the back. (Elder-hostels, color TV microwave, what next?) The graceless clock quantified time in so artificial and linear a way, as if time were a series of static moments dealt out from a deck like cards. The old round clocks quantify time, too—how else to track it?—but at least the circle tries, ingenuously, to mirror the cycles of the day. The hour hand journeying around the face imitates the sun’s slow journey over the face of the earth, ascending and descending like the arc of time.

  The phone rang and I reached out quickly so it wouldn’t wake Jilly. Who wanted what, so early? Had my mother finally totaled the car?

  Laura, my love.

  (Oh, no. I thought I was rid of him for a while. He almost felt like something I’d made up.)

  I know it’s early but I wanted to be sure to get you. I kept calling to say good-bye before I left. I thought you’d disappeared. Finally I looked up Mona and she gave me this number. You didn’t even tell me you were going to the Cape.

  That’s true, I didn’t. Anyway, I wouldn’t have known where to find you. Where are you now, anyway?

  In Washington. I stopped to stay with my father awhile on the way back. Well, it’s not really on the way, but . . . here I am.

  So where did you finally stay in New York? Peter’s new place?

  No, in the motel they booked for us in Queens.

  Uh-huh. And the woman who was too young? Did she grow up?

  Laura, surely you jest.

  Why? People age quickly in the city, what with the pollution and tension and noise and all the rest.

  I never thought you’d take that seriously. Don’t you think I can go for three weeks without a love affair? At my age? You flatter me.

  What about Arthur? How’s he doing?

  Hanging on. He’s surprising everyone. Last I heard, there was a chance he could go home again.

  Well, that’s good. Though it’s not the same home anymore. Do you think Peter’s sorry he moved?

  Frankly, it won’t matter that much. I saw the new place when we unpacked. It’s very much like the old one, the same kind of building, a similar layout, and Peter was arranging everything in the same way. Recreating it. It kept him occupied.

  So why are you calling me now when we’re hundreds of miles apart and not when we were both in New York?

  I did try, I told you. Anyhow, I had the distinct impression you didn’t want to see me. Don’t you remember you turned me away? No room at the inn?

  I didn’t want you to live with me. I didn’t say I didn’t want to hear from you at all.

  I must have misunderstood. Look, let’s not get into this. I really called to see how you’re feeling. You were in bad shape last time.

  I had some blood tests. I’ve got a virus that could go on awhile. My immune system has surrendered. It’s been insulted once too often. I’m a miniature ecological disaster, reflecting the larger global breakdown. A walking metaphor.

  (Only to Q. would I speak this way, from the place I write from. I also told him, in plain English, what the doctor said.)

  The good news is I won’t die of it, like Arthur, just sort of drag around indefinitely.

  I’m so sorry, mia cava. I know how you hate being sick. You could never bear having to stay in bed. By yourself, that is.

  Well, that’s changed. Now I’m in love with my bed. And I’m supposed to avoid stress. The only effective way I can think of is suicide.

  They always tell you that. Avoid stress, as if it were fried foods, said Q. Yes, I said, and I keep scoring so high on those quizzes in the magazines, you know, where you count up your stress in points? I go right over the top.

  Everyone does, Laura. How could we not? The things they list are just ordinary life—trips, paint jobs, illness in the family, death of loved ones, heartache, unemployment, no money. What else is there? Still, you’ve got to try. I wish there were something I could do for you.

  (Love me, I thought. Change history.)

  I know. Thanks anyway. How’s your father? I thought he was still in the nursing home.

  No, I guess I didn’t tell you. They gave him shock treatments a couple of months ago. It was extraordinary. He came back to life and went home.

  How horrible, though. Shock treatments.

  I know that’s the liberal line but the fact is, Laura, they work. You should have seen him before. Più morto che vivo. The living death.

  I remember your description. So is he okay now? This isn’t another crisis, I hope?

  No, just a visit. It hasn’t been too bad, this time. I’ve been cooking and putting it all in the freezer for when I’m gone. I got him new underwear and shoes, vacuumed, changed some bulbs. He must have been sitting in the dark. He can’t get up on a ladder anymore and maybe he doesn’t care. Still, he’s doing all right, relatively. He doesn’t have a lot to say—well, that’s putting it mildly. He spends most of the time in his radio room puttering with—

  Where?

  His radio room. Didn’t I tell you about his radios?

  No.

  Oh. What he does is, he goes around to flea markets looking for old radios. They have to be early, prewar is best, he says, and he buys them for two or three dollars, though he once went as high as twenty. They don’t work, you understand. He takes them apart. He sits in this little room upstairs that my mother used to use as a practice room, with all the disassembled parts around him, and puts them back together lovingly. Come maijunziano—I mean, how he gets them to work is beyond me, but I swear that when he finishes, voices come out, real live voices, Laura, from these antique radios. I always expect to hear those famous old radio voices—Fred Allen, Jack Benny—you’re too young to remember and I just got the tail end of it, but no, it’s those flat, smooth voices of today. Always cheery. Anyhow, Aldo seems happy enough up there, although since I’m here he brings whatever he’s working on downstairs in the evening and does it at the kitchen table, so we keep each other company. I read the paper and he tinkers away. We don’t talk much. That is, he doesn’t, and you know I require a response. But it’s nice, watching him putter.

  Do you talk Italian with him?

  What else? Senz’altro. I sometimes think, here we are in this town house in Georgetown surrounded by politicians, movers and shakers—they’re probably planning the new world order within fifty feet of us—and we sit like two old men, reading the paper and fixing radios. We could be back in his village in Tuscany, sitting in the piazza.

  Did he do this when you were a boy?

  Oh, no. Just since he’s been alone, in between going to the hospital, though now he tells me he fooled around with ham radios as a young man. I only found out about the radios a couple of years ago. I was cleaning up while he was in the hospital and I discovered cartons of radios and radio parts in this former music room. After he does the insides and gets them to work again, he cleans the outsides. He refinishes the wood and spray-paints the plastic and metal parts until they look like new. You must have seen those prewar radios in fancy antique shops. They can be quite beautiful.

  Is that what he does with them? Sells them to antique shops?

  No, at least not yet. He didn’t use to do anything, just resuscitate them, but the last couple of years he’s been subscribing to antique radio magazines. You’d be amazed how many people read those things—there’s a whole world of radio cognoscenti out there. He reads the ads for radios wanted and he’s started advertising his own for sale. A few months ago he made his first sale—ten dollars. It was to a small theatre in Maryland where they needed a 1930s radio for a play. Unfortunately, in the play, what they do with the radio is throw it across the room.

  But it could be destroyed in one performance. After all his work.<
br />
  Maybe they were very careful. If they wanted an authentic 1930s radio and they were running for more than one night I suppose they would be careful, wouldn’t they? One of the few things he said to me this week, after he told me about this sale, was that I should keep an eye out for any plays that might need a radio as a prop, so I said I would. And that’s not all. Last week, right after I arrived, he sold one to an Australian in Adelaide who’s a collector. That’s getting into the serious big time, so chi lo sa? Maybe he’ll be getting more business. It’s a lot better than sitting in a stupor in front of the TV so if it takes shock treatments . . .

  I suppose so, I said.

  He enjoys his radios. I see him fussing over them at the kitchen table after supper while I do the dishes, and I think how peaceful he looks. More peaceful than any other time since he retired, and certainly more than when he was at the embassy. Oh, and besides that, he has his ham radio, which is another thing entirely. Sometimes while he’s fixing or painting, he listens to foreign stations. Strange languages, not Italian or French or anything he might understand. Hungarian, Turkish, I can’t tell, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Maybe he’s tired of hearing English, or he just wants to hear a human voice without the burden of having to understand what it’s saying. After all, he spent his whole working life being careful about what he heard and what he said. It could be he’s had enough of words but still needs the voices. At least that’s what goes through my mind when I watch him. He’d rather listen to those strange languages than to me, magari. . . . Laura, are you there? Tell me, do you still love me?

  What a non sequitur, I said. I’m unprepared.

  I need you to still love me. I have my doubts. Say you do.

  Okay. I do.

  Say it with some feeling.

  Some feeling.

  Oh, come on.

  I love you with some feeling.

  He made me promise to call soon. He’d done all the calling lately—now my turn. Okay, okay. I hung up slightly feverish. Not a fever of lassitude but of excitement. I could feel my eyes glinting. It wasn’t Q.’s voice this time, still live in my ears, that excited me so. It was the story. The radios. I sat very still, breathing the way the Tai Chi teacher taught us, feeling the outgoing breath leave its wake of energy, and waited. Something was there for me, in those radios. My fingers curled, trying to grasp it, the thumbs stiffening. The thumb is the grabber, the Tai Chi teacher said. Let it relax. Don’t grab. Keep the hand open.

  10

  The newest Town Reports on the shelf have changed with the times—more so than the town itself, whose concessions to fashion are few, notably one gourmet food store selling fresh-ground coffee and tortellini salad. These stylish volumes are as large as popular magazines, with matte covers and subtle photos. Inside, the language is streamlined, bureaucratized. Since time in the ’nineties is measured in microchipped increments, sound bites, syllables, the Finance Committee is called Fincom; it includes women now, as do the other committees. The Rescue Squad has begun handling “environmental injuries.” The Recycling Committee, too, has expanded its operations, and the new elementary school is built at last. No more complaints of overcrowding. Handwriting is forgotten.

  Alcoholics and drug addicts, battered women and rape victims claim a good share of the budget. It’s jarring to see, on the police listings, rape, arson, bombing, crimes that never appeared in the old days. “The Town is now growing at an unusual rate,” reports the Chief, “and we ask all citizens if at any time a citizen sees, hears, or finds anything out of the ordinary, that the Police be called immediately.” The Police Department itself has grown at an even greater rate than the town and, fittingly, is computerized.

  Among the couples joined in wedlock are quite a few out-of-towners. They’ve discovered the romance of marrying by the beautiful sea; it will become a piquant note in their family mythology, something to tell the children. Ev and I were married here, too, but I don’t feel like looking it up for confirmation. I do check under deaths, where I find more suicides than before. The birth and death dates of the deceased are given in businesslike fashion now, no more biblical years, days, and months.

  His name isn’t there. No, of course not, it happened elsewhere.

  The tides alone are unchanged, still moving in and out, shaping the shore. The Conservation Committee reports, I daresay to no one’s surprise, that “the forces of nature are altering the coastline.”

  Again the phone jolts me from my reverie. “Tim, I’ve been meaning to call you. How’re you doing?”

  He’s feeling lonely. Unloved. Visiting in the Hamptons on weekends. Could I save a weekend right after I get back? We were invited to his friends Hal and Celia’s house at the shore. I vaguely remembered hearing about Hal, one of Tim’s many friends involved in real estate. They all joked wryly about the sorry state of the market without suffering much, so far as I could tell.

  “I’m at the shore right now. I think I might like some city streets for a change.”

  “Is it doing you any good?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Then a few more days will be even better.”

  “Okay, as long as they won’t expect me to do anything. Sports or parties, I mean.”

  “They’re very easygoing people. All we’ll do, probably, is eat and drink and lie on the beach. Or at the pool. They have a beautiful pool right in back of the house.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “I should warn you, though, they’re having a few people over Saturday night.”

  “Well.. . no. I don’t think I’m up for that.”

  He cleared his throat at length. He found me difficult. So did 1.1 had no choice, but why did he put up with me? I almost wished he wouldn’t, for I could see the era of Tim the benevolent drawing to a close. Better for both of us to do it soon, but I dreaded it. It takes energy to do real, as distinct from imagined, damage to others.

  “It’s not as if you have other plans, Laura. It’s professional snobbery. If it were your writer friends you wouldn’t feel this way.”

  “It’s nothing like that. I’m tired, that’s all. I’m feeling lousy.”

  “It’s two weeks away. Think about it. By the way, you’re missing an unbelievable heat wave. Four straight days in the high nineties.”

  The forbearance ploy. He understood me, I had to admit. The less he pressured, the more I’d come round. And why couldn’t I take some pleasure in a group of people eating a well-prepared meal in fairly elegant surroundings?

  He was mistaken, however, about my snobbery; it wasn’t professional. I liked his cronies’ talk of deals and stratagems, warlike aggressions and gallant defeats, the boasts of hours put in at exorbitant rates, of corporate hanky-panky and legal skulduggery. Stories of how the world works are always worth listening to. It was the rest, what goes by the name of “socializing.” The health club, the margarine, the ozone layer, the aimlessness of the young. . . . The issues. Plus the meal would be so well-prepared, the surroundings so elegant. Like an ad in a slick magazine, airbrushing out reality’s pockmarks.

  To top it off, there’d be someone with a pungent anecdote, urging me to turn it into a story.

  Our time here feels sadly short—more days behind us, now, than ahead. Jilly gets in late, going out after work with new friends from the restaurant, I suppose. When we’re together she’s affectionate but still brooding. I know the silence that seals her like a coat of varnish. I hope it’s not her failure to play the saint on the Golden Gate Bridge.

  I keep reading the local paper, but with a gnawing dismay. For it’s hardly different from the city. Groups meet regularly for adoption healing, skin cancer education, gay male alcoholics... . There’s the stroke recovery club, the cancer support group, the AIDS support group, and one Dina, no last name, wants to start a support group for brain-tumor and seizure sufferers. Twelve-step programs flourish at various accommodating churches—Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and Par
ents Anonymous; that must be quite a trick, being an anonymous parent. The Attention Deficit group supports parents of children with the eponymous problem, while Provincetown/Truro Mediation Services offers constructive ways to resolve disputes.

  A regular little magic mountain, only sea level. What a far cry from 1965, when the Board of Public Welfare had a caseload of sixteen and the Board of Health fretted over a few animal bites and the controversial fluoride clinics.

  I’m a realist, not a Utopian writer. How can I show the seaside town as an idyllic haven, while the buzz, of countless support groups drifts toward me on the vibrations of the air?

  I ponder this as I walk in the bay, the water up to my hips. I want to feel its texture and resistance, so that at home when we practice swimming in air, I’ll remember.

  ON HER DAY OFF Jilly and I sit at the edge of the sea while surfers like shiny devils in their slick black wet suits ride the wild waves. She studies them keenly. Then we return to the bay where the wind is calm, and watch the tide retreat.

  “Jilly? Want to have another try at the ship? It’s almost all uncovered. It’s a good time, if we’re ever going to do it.”

  She sits up and gazes out, shading her eyes with her hand. “You don’t give up, do you? What’s out there that you need?”

  “I’d just like to accomplish something, I guess. Don’t you ever get this need to do a certain thing for no good reason, or you forget whatever reason you once had?”

  “Sure, but you’ve picked something impossible. I keep telling you it’s farther than it looks. I’d have to carry you back.”

  “You could leave me clinging to a mast and go for help. Come on.”

  Other people are ambling aimlessly on the flats, but we head straight out, with purpose. Jilly is pensive; once or twice she looks up as if about to speak, but doesn’t. Finally it rises to her lips.