Except for her incurable aloofness, we lived in artificial domestic tranquility alone together for more than two years, until my recurring urges forced me to permit myself to be sought out by a flesh-and-blood woman. This woman was not my secretary but that of my associate curator. Later she confessed to me that it had been her dearest wish to become my secretary, not that she didn’t like and respect my associate, but her whole motive in applying for work at the Foundation (and setting new records on typing-test scores and stenography-test scores) had been to insinuate herself into the closest possible proximity to me, whom she adored. She was the only woman who ever said “I love you” to me before I said it first. And much later I realized it was not actually me she loved, but rather my urbane and hearty pamphlets, articles and monographs on vernacular furniture and furnishings. She needed the longest time to separate the brilliant scholar from the mundane man, and, once having done that, was left feeling bitter and betrayed. We were working late one evening in our separate offices, my secretary having gone home, her boss having gone home, when we, who had never said more than “Good morning” or “Have a nice weekend” to one another, contrived to bump into each other in a hallway, and she, instead of saying, Excuse me, looked at me soulfully, threw her arms around me, and said, “I love you.” I was flattered, but being at that moment unable to return her words, I could only say, “Let’s go somewhere and do something, or something.” Our affair was passionate, but guarded, because she was married, her husband in insurance, and had two small children, and because I postponed indefinitely inviting her to my apartment. I dreaded the approach of the inevitable occasion when, I would have to explain to my lady friend, before taking her to my apartment, “who” she might expect to find there. As it turned out, when I finally had to forewarn her, she thought it was hilarious, and couldn’t wait to meet my doll, whom she embraced like a long-lost sorority sister and was on the best of terms with thereafter, although we parked the doll on the john and closed the bathroom door before using the bed, and afterwards the doll’s eyes seemed more accusatory and hurt than ever, and when my affair with the woman reached the point of apparent no return and the woman was talking of divorce and remarriage to me, or at any rate matters had reached the point where it was the woman’s 98.6° that kept me cozy all night while the doll remained sitting on the john or hanging in the closet, late one night when the woman went home to tell her husband everything and discuss the divorce, I summoned a taxicab and took my doll wife, and the large cardboard box of my tapes to her, to the Foundation’s back-alley service entrance, which led into the labyrinth of storerooms. There was one rarely used room, labeled “MISC. CULLED EPHEMERA & CURIOS,” and within that room was a dark and empty locker, in which I hung the doll by her collar and deposited the box of tape recordings at her feet. As I started to close the locker door on her, I swear, she began to shed tears. Oh, it’s known for a fact that certain religious statuettes, madonnas and saints, will drop a tear at the slightest provocation or monetary offering, but unless that confounded upholsterer had built in a much-delayed mechanism that I was unaware of, there was no accounting for this, and I was unsettled. I had toyed with the idea of some simple farewell ceremony, a valediction forbidding mourning, but had decided it best to remain unsentimental, and to curtail our parting. “Good-bye, sweetheart,” I said. “I might see you again.” I closed the door and slipped into its hasp a combination lock whose serial combination was known only to me, written on the reverse of my Social Security card.
The secretary left her husband and children and lived with me for a time. She was all I could ask for, and, yes, she was an excellent cook, did my laundry for me, massaged my back, darned my socks, remembered my birthday, vociferated at climax, everything…everything except agree to bear a child by me. One day we met my ex-wife and her husband and two toddlers in the Garden, and exchanged greetings and introductions, and of course my ex-wife phoned me as soon thereafter as she could to ask, “Whatever happened to my twin?” Oh, I said, chuckling and attempting lightness, she had to be put away. My ex-wife laughed too, but dryly, almost bitterly, and remarked, “Any woman who learned to live with you would eventually have to be put away. It’s a good thing I never learned.” But my new woman is something else, I said. “There! You see?” she demanded. “You said ‘something else.’ Freudian petticoat, no doubt, but this new woman is no less a ‘thing’ to you than I was, or was my ‘twin.’” This time she hung up before I could, and I was left reflecting that one can believe anything of oneself if one is told it often enough. A kind of conscious hypnosis. If enough different women repeatedly accuse me of objectifying women, of depersonalizing their identities, then I will begin to do just that, if I have not done so already. My new woman herself began to pick up on this. Doing as much as she did for me, she expected as much or more in return. She wanted me to fire my devoted and extremely efficient secretary and give the position to her. I could not, and she and my secretary began to snap and yell at one another, and to sabotage each other’s work, and thereby the Foundation’s. My associate curator resented me because it was common knowledge that his secretary was my lover, and although he dared not snap or yell at me he undermined my labors in subtler ways. Office boys and office girls became barometers of the tempests in the executive suites and not only spread the foul weather to other floors but also stormed among themselves. Whenever anything was going very badly, I would declare, to my new woman, to her boss my associate curator, to my secretary, to anyone in earshot, as I had been in the habit of declaring for years to any ears that could hear, “Lord, I’d like to build myself a log castle out in the deep woods somewhere, anywhere, and just go hole up in it.” Why don’t you? my woman would retort. Splendid idea, old boy, my associate curator would exclaim. We’ll miss you, probably, my secretary would say. Sounds like fun, some office boy would remark. Can I come too? an office girl would tease. At the next annual Christmas office party, my assembled employees sang to me a booze-lubricated improvisation of “Good Night Charlie We Hate to See You Go” and then unveiled and presented me with—I never learnt the identities of the designers and modelers—but I suspected the people down in the Architectural Restoration Department—an exquisite miniaturized log castle, not a log cabin like any on record, nor like a castle in the conventional battlemented concept, but a rambling, organic, multi-tiered hewn-log palace, with towers and decks and chateau-roofs, such as some French-Swedish eccentric nabob might have visualized in an opium dream. Judging from their cheers and laughter, most of my employees were as surprised by the sight of it as I was. I was surprised, but not exactly amused, although I tolerated all the back-slapping and rib-elbowing that accompanied the presentation, and when everyone began to yell “Speech! Speech!” I managed to mutter words to the effect that it was the nicest Christmas present I’d ever had and if it were a little bit larger I could probably get inside it [laughter] and I would keep it and cherish it forever. (I still have it, and when I first came to these woods I was earnestly determined to copy it life-size, but after felling a few trees and trying to trim them I realized it would take me the rest of my life, and then some, so I moved into my cavern and placed the miniature log castle on a kind of stone throne in the deep end.) The night of the Christmas party, my woman was too tipsy for serious discussion, and when I asked if she thought they were trying to tell me something, she could only reply, wearily, not really meaning it (I hoped), “Of course, you dummy. You keep talking about losing yourself in the woods, so they’re telling you to get lost.”
Things fell apart rapidly. Apropos of nothing, my woman declared one day that she would never even consider living in the woods with me, log castle or not (I had never suggested that she might wish to). Another day she declared that her work at the Foundation, all of our work at the Foundation, seemed meaningless to her because it was bound up totally with the vanished American past, and there was no future in it. We argued, and she said I didn’t love her, never had, because I was afraid of falling i
n love because I knew that falling in love is loss of control because to love is to make a fool of oneself because I was desperately afraid of being made a fool of because they had made a fool of me because of the model log castle because they knew I could never feel anything for them because I had never felt anything for her because I never felt anything because I was afraid to feel because maybe I had felt something once long ago because I needed to because I had been deprived because I deserved it because I lived because I had been born. I advised her to see a psychotherapist. He advised a period of care in a sanitarium. I phoned my ex-wife to tell her I was going to my homeland mountains, to the deepest woods, to live, and she said, “It’s what you always wanted to do, isn’t it?” and then she asked, “Whatever happened to your new love?” Oh, she had to be put away, I said. There was a small gasp, a long pause, and then she said, “I’m glad you are being ‘put away.’ Or putting yourself away. I hope there aren’t any women in that wilderness unlucky enough to find you.” Thanks, I said, I don’t expect there are. I won’t be watching for any.
Chapter ten
The lightning bugs are out now, in full force. If I had a Mason jar with me, I could catch enough of them to improvise a rude lantern to light my way home. Surely one of the abandoned buildings in the dead village has a Mason jar somewhere inside, but it is cruel to capture a lightning bug, and I regretted those I had caught in my childhood, not realizing, then, that all of the hundreds, the thousands of lightning bugs in the air are boy bugs, males, and that by capturing so many of them into Mason jars I was depriving the females, who waited, immobile, in bushes or the grass.
I am startled by a sudden rush of animals that comes thundering down the road, but it is only a pack of the pigs that freely roam the abandoned town.
One cabin, on a back road outside the village, is not abandoned. There is light in the window of one wing of the dogtrot.
The old woman lives here, now alone since the recent death of her husband. Could she tell me about death? Could we discuss the two most recent burials in the cemetery? I do not want to talk with her;
I simply want to borrow a lantern.
I cross her yard. Like the yards of old, it is not sewn with grass (a fire hazard) but swept clean with a broom; its dirt immaculate, if maculate dirt can be. All of a sudden, two dozen cats emerge from various lairs and attack my dog. He fights back manfully—or dog-fully—but is defeated and withdraws to the road. The noise of the scuffle brings the old woman out into the breezeway.
“Hello,” I say. “It’s me.”
She squints into the gloom. “The Bluff-dweller,” she says. “Do come in out of the dark.”
“I just wanted to borrow a lantern,” I declare. “If you have a spare lantern I could borrow, just overnight, to find my way home.”
“Why, I could just put you up in the other house,” she offers, indicating the second pen of the double-room dogtrot.
“Well, my dog doesn’t seem to get along very well with your cats,” I point out.
She laughs. Her laugh is youthful, not the high cackle of an old woman. Dim in the dark, and her silhouette in the door’s light as shapely as a girl’s, she seems to deny her years. “Give them time,” she says. And then she asks, “Have you had your supper?”
“No, and my dog hasn’t had his.”
Again that young laugh. “Well, I’ve got some marrow bones for him, and some fried chicken for you.”
I had not had any chicken, fried or otherwise, since becoming undomesticated. Fowl of the air and of the field (wild turkey, grouse, quail) there were plenty, but never fried chicken. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” I protest.
“Not at all. It’s on the stove, keeping warm. Come in.”
I go in. The one large room is cluttered but tidy, dominated by a large old cast-iron cookstove. A bed is in the corner. The rest of the room is taken up with chairs, bureaus, tables, and several bookcases. Her collection of books—or her late husband’s collection—is larger than mine. From the refrigerator the old woman takes a package wrapped in oilcloth, unwraps it, and takes out several bones. She goes out into the breezeway again and flings these, one by one, with remarkable accuracy, out to the road, to the very vicinity in which my dog is hiding from the cats. Then she calls out: “Cats, you listen to me! Y’all let that poor dog eat his supper, hear? Any of yuns bother him won’t get breakfast in the mornin!” There returns a chorus of meows that sounds like “Yes, ma’am.”
She shuts the door. “Just pull you up a chair, Bluff-dweller. I’ve already had mine.” I sit at the table, and she serves me. “What would you like to drink? I’ll bet you haven’t had some real sweet milk in a real long time. Am I right?”
“You are right.” I had often thought of keeping a cow, but I knew the Bluff-dwellers had kept no domestic animals except the dog.
“You know, it’s traditional hereabouts to have a big dinner right after a funeral. That’s why I fried all this chicken, and my grandson brought over one of his prize hams cooked and ready to eat, and his friends baked all kinds of pies and cakes, but I didn’t invite you, because it looked to me as if you might want to be with your sister after the funeral.”
“Thank you. I wish I hadn’t been.”
“Did you show them your rock house?”
“I did. But how do you know I have a ‘rock house’?”
“Why, those two ladies, those Jehovah’s Witnesses, some years back, they stopped here next, trying to sell us a Watchtower. They told us about you. My husband gave them a sermon and converted them from the Witnesses to the Kindred.”
“I’m sorry about your husband.”
“I’m sorry about your father.”
“I’m not. Not now. Not after what I learned from my sister.”
I wait for her to ask, “What did you learn?” but she does not. I need to talk about it to someone. I need to borrow a lantern so I can find my way home and write a letter about it to my former wife. I wait for the old woman to urge me to continue, but she does not. She simply looks at me with sympathy. My sister had kept it a secret all these years. Perhaps I should keep it a secret for the rest of these years. What could the old woman say if I told her. Would it be of any help to me to hear her say, “Oh, that’s too bad!” or “What a wretched life you must have had!”? Not even if she were my favorite aunt could I accept such sympathy without embarrassment.
But she will not question me. So I question her. “Did you know my father?”
“We went to school together,” she says, “but I was several grades ahead of him, I think I was already in the sixth grade when he started school, so I just knew him by sight. And I never had a chance to ask him why he moved to the city. Did you know your father?”
The question thrown back at me takes me by surprise. Like a tossed ball it nearly eludes me, but I fumble it and catch it. “He was several grades ahead of me,” I say, grinning, “when I started school, he was already working as a linesman for the telephone company, and I only saw him on occasion at suppertime.”
She does not laugh. There is a silence, while I finish my supper, and drink my milk, and am served a piece of lemon meringue pie, the first pie I’ve had in years. I ask for a second helping, and it is given me. Since neither of us is talking now, and she is studying her hands, I study her, imagining how she looked fifty years before, or sixty years before; she must have been exquisitely beautiful, with hair as dark as her eyebrows still are. In my years as chief curator of the Foundation, I had occasion to meet a large number of old ladies, all of them as well preserved as their considerable fortunes would allow, but I had never seen a “senior citizen” who still carried with her such a tangible suggestion of her early bloom. And the soft light of the kerosene lamp further enhances (or conceals) her features. I would guess that she is close to eighty, but in certain angles of this light could pass for much less than that, and, if she bothered to dye her white hair, could shave another ten years from her age, making her not much older than I. But m
ost striking to me, she has, even more than those elegant patronesses, benefactresses and sponsors of the Foundation, a certain courtliness, unexpected in this rural hinterland.
“Coffee?” she asks.
“I had to kick the coffee habit when I first became a Bluff-dweller.” I wait for her to ask me why I became a Bluff-dweller, but she does not.
Instead she asks, “Who—or what—are you hiding from?”
“Myself.” The answer is so immediate and unpremeditated it surprises me. It is as if a third person is present, and both the old woman and I must ponder the significance of the word he has uttered.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 26