by L. J. Davis
“There was nothing the matter with me this morning,” said Lowell, taking a big swallow of his gin and tonic. He’d been drinking gin and tonic since he came home, and by now he was pretty drunk. “I mean, that wasn’t it. It was something else. Do you realize that something has been the matter with me for years? Years?”
His wife looked at him over her shoulder with an expression of perplexity tinged with alarm, as though she considered it possible that he was on the verge of confessing a secret passion for Arlo Povachik, their middle-aged, half-witted doorman who was seldom on duty when he was supposed to be. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” she said. “You’re not being very clear. Maybe you can explain it better.” For a computer expert, she did not grasp concepts very easily, if at all, but she was tenacious and seldom gave up. Her mind was capable of worrying an unclear concept for hours on end, shaking it like a rag doll until she had found out whether it was good for her, bad for her, significant in any way, or utterly meaningless. In recent years, Lowell had grown wary of this apparently incurable tendency, and he was usually able to nip it in the bud with a swift, simplistic lie. He lied now, drunk as he was.
“I don’t know what was the matter with me this morning,” he said, unsteadily pouring himself a fresh drink with more gin in it than tonic. He returned to the table and began to slice up the carrots every which way. “I must have been having a dream.”
“Let me do that,” said his wife, confiscating the carrots with a loving expression.
Later, seated alone in the dimly lighted, curiously shaped living room of his apartment, full of dinner, sexually sated, and still pretty drunk, Lowell sipped ice water and brooded about his life. His parents owned a motel on Highway 30, just outside of Boise, Idaho. They were absentminded, pale, thin people who seemed completely unaware that they were running a love nest for downtown merchants, students from the junior college, and state politicians, among whom they were treasured for their permissiveness, probity, and discretion. (Actually, it was mostly just absentmindedness.) Lowell had a pleasant, undemanding childhood, free from influences either stimulating or depressing. He did well in school, largely because he had an excellent memory and an undemanding personality. It was some years before he realized that his parents ran a kind of self-service whorehouse, and even then it didn’t bother him much. Nobody else seemed to think anything of it; a couple of the regular girls had been his mother’s coffee friends for as long as he could remember, and it neither impressed nor upset him to think that some of the most respected and powerful men in the state took off their pants in rooms he cleaned every morning. He graduated fifth in his high-school class, behind three home-economics majors and a strange-looking veterinarian’s son who had bad skin and never talked to anybody, and who committed suicide the following September, the day after Labor Day.
On the strength of his grades (and somewhat to his surprise), Lowell was accepted at Stanford, but his family had never made any money out of their motel despite the fact that it never had a slack season, and they didn’t have the money to send him. Lowell wanted to go to Stanford pretty badly now that it had accepted him, and after much thought he screwed up his courage and wrote a letter to the most powerful politician he knew, Judge Lionel B. Crosby. Judge Crosby stopped by the place every once in a while, and he was fond of saying that if there was anything he could do for you, just call. He had often expressed an admiration for Lowell’s intelligence, putting his hand on Lowell’s head and sort of kneading it as though trying to feel his brain through the skull. Lowell didn’t like him very much.
Dear Judge Crosby [he wrote],
I would not bother a man of your importance with a matter that cannot be very important to you, although it is very important to me, except that you have often suggested that if I ever encountered some problem, you would like to talk it over with me. I have decided to take you up on your offer. My problem is as follows: I have been accepted at Stanford University in California but they didn’t give me a scholarship and my family can’t afford it, so I was wondering if there is any fund or source of funds that the state, county, or other municipal body provides for any of the expenses of (prospective) college students in my position. If you know of any, I would certainly appreciate word of them. If you are too busy to do this, I will understand because I know what an imposition it is and I would not have written if you had not so kindly encouraged me to do so in the past, and I will just have to think of something else.
Sincerely yours,
Lowell P. Lake
Lowell read it over and decided it was a pretty terrible letter. It didn’t look a bit like the kind of courtly, terse letter people were always writing to Sherlock Holmes when they implored his assistance, and Lowell put it aside. He made three more attempts. He was unable to finish two of them, and the syntax of the third was so tangled that it made no sense whatever. He scarcely knew what to do, and with a kind of sick despair he mailed the first letter after all. He immediately thought better of it, but it was in the box, and there was nothing he could do about it but sit and wait for someone to come and scold him about it.
The letter frightened Judge Crosby out of his wits.
At three-month intervals for five years, Judge Crosby had met a middle-aged traveling bandleader at Lowell’s parents’ motel and spent the night with him. The judge thought it was a very dirty, sinful thing to do, but he had yielded to his passions long ago and could no longer help himself. He lived with his aged mother in a big old house in the heart of town, where he had a book-lined study with a bust of Homer and a handsome marble fireplace. In this fireplace he burned certain letters he received on the second Monday of every month and also the various publications that came to him from New Jersey in manila envelopes marked “Educational Materials.” In the summer he scattered the ashes in the garden under the shrubs, where they would do the most good. In the winter he put them on the sidewalk with the clinkers, and nobody was the wiser.
For years the judge had lived in constant terror of blackmail and exposure. His mind had dwelt for two decades with the turgid subtleties and intricate sharp practice of the law, until, like a doctor who sees symptoms wherever he looks, he could think no other way, and whenever he tried to imagine what a blackmail letter would look like, it always looked very much like the letter Lowell had sent him. It was the kind of letter the judge would have written if he’d been trying to blackmail someone; the threat was there, but it was nothing you could put your finger on in court. He didn’t doubt for a minute that the little son-of-a-bitch had gotten the goods on him; it was plain as a pikestaff, and the chickens had come home to roost. He always knew it would happen someday. The judge’s opponent in the next election was an unscrupulous nincompoop who would love to know his guilty secret and who would love telling people about it even more. He supposed that Lowell planned to place the information in his hands if the judge failed to meet his terms. If the judge had been in Lowell’s place, that was exactly what he would have done. In fact, he’d already done something pretty much like it, not once but a couple of times.
The judge spent all afternoon locked in his study with Lowell’s letter and a bottle of heart pills. He was so utterly certain that he was being blackmailed that it never occurred to him for a moment that he might not be; Judge Crosby had waited so long to be blackmailed that if he hadn’t been, it was altogether possible that he would have gone to his grave a disappointed man, kind of relieved to get it all over with but feeling strangely unfulfilled. At the end of the day he put Lowell’s letter in the fireplace and burned it, crumbling the ash with the tip of a poker. Then he sat down at his desk and began a hearty, avuncular letter of reply, concerning a confidential private fund, the existence of which was not widely known.
So it was that Lowell went to Stanford. He had a good time at the university and never gave another thought to how he came to be there; things had always had a way of working out for him, one way or another. (Two years after Lowell graduated, Judge Cro
sby was surprised by his political enemies with his hand in the till and arrested, whereupon he immediately—and profusely—confessed to being a homosexual too, which pretty generally amazed everyone and ended up causing quite a little rumpus.)
At Stanford, Lowell majored in English. It had always been his best subject and it didn’t commit him to do anything specific in later life, which was just fine with Lowell. He had no idea of what he was going to do in later life and the very words lacked meaning when he tried to apply them to himself. He thought he might go ahead and get a Ph.D., but he couldn’t see much farther than that, and even it was dim. Sometimes it seemed to him that all the grown-ups he’d ever known had been old and calm, the sort of people who made up their lives the same way they made up their beds, neat and clean and tight at the corners and no nonsense about the spread, and although Lowell supposed it must have been very nice for them, it didn’t seem to have a whole lot to do with him. Whenever he thought about the future, he vaguely supposed that things would go on much the same as they always had, and that when he left college (provided he ever left college) it would be to take up an existence much the same as the one he’d always known, where people gave him tasks to perform and praised him when he did them well. He did them well consistently, if not with much originality, and he was more conspicuous for his highly developed sense of responsibility than for any keenness of intellect; in his eating club, he was the chairman of the committee that cleaned up after parties.
He met his future wife at the beginning of his sophomore year and immediately nicknamed her Tex for reasons that were obscure even to himself, but the joke, whatever it was, soon wore off and eventually he came to call her by no name at all, or at least none he could use in public. When he wanted to attract her attention in a crowded room he usually called her “dear,” which admittedly was a pretty lame expedient and one that always embarrassed him. Her real name was Betty and she came from Flatbush. Lowell couldn’t bring himself to believe that there really was such a place as Flatbush, any more than he believed in Allen’s Alley and Wistful Vista, and he could no more picture himself marrying a girl named Betty from there than he could imagine himself marrying a horse from Kentucky. As far as Lowell was concerned, her life began the day he met her and it took place exclusively in places that he knew. When vacation came and she went back to Flatbush and became Betty again, it was almost as though she had ceased to exist for a while, like a well-loved character in a favorite book that he’d momentarily put aside. For some reason, he began to feel the same way about himself whenever he went back home to his parents’ motel, and after the Christmas of his sophomore year he no longer did so. He told his parents that he couldn’t afford it; they believed him and didn’t offer to help out. His mother kept in touch with one letter every month, in which she gave exhaustive descriptions of the weather and the state of his father’s health, and advised Lowell to wear a tie whenever he thought he should. Lowell liked his parents and was always glad to hear from them. He never failed to write back promptly.
Two days after graduation, Lowell and his wife were married with nonsectarian pomp amid the gold-leafed, erotic splendors of Memorial Chapel. The place looked like a cross between a Byzantine whorehouse and a Victorian ladies’ parlor, and Lowell was somewhat at a loss when he tried to comprehend the vision of heaven that had inspired it. He’d always wondered what it would feel like to be married there, and when his future wife suggested it, he figured that it was as good a time as any to find out.
“I’m not sure I like this,” said his future mother-in-law grimly as he took her on a tour of the premises the day before the ceremony. In the course of a very few hours she had managed to convince him that there really might have been somebody named Betty from Flatbush. Betty from Flatbush was the daughter of this woman; she was also nobody Lowell had ever known. He was still getting used to being a Bachelor of Arts, he was presently about to become the husband of the girl he loved, and naturally he was a little confused about things, but when it came to contemplating becoming this unpleasant woman’s son-in-law, his mind went completely blank. It wasn’t anything he knew about, and he simply couldn’t imagine it at all. “I don’t know if I like this,” she repeated, staring unblinkingly into some middle distance where nothing seemed to be. It was a habit she employed whenever she spoke to either Lowell or her husband, and in a very short time it had come close to driving Lowell mad. It made him feel ridiculous and hard-put for a reply, and it worked every time she did it. They continued down the aisle toward the altar, with great gleaming butterscotch columns rising all around them. “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you think, Leo? Let me just say that, for myself, I definitely don’t know.”
“It’s hard to say,” said Leo, Lowell’s future father-in-law. He was a little, bald, chickenlike man, and Lowell didn’t know what to make of him, either. At the airport, shaking Lowell’s hand, he’d said furtively, “Hi. I’m Leo. I guess I’m going to be your father-in-law. That was sure some plane ride, let me tell you. Up and down all the way. Ha, ha, some of the passengers really looked worried about that. You can call me Leo.”
At intervals throughout the day he continued to remind Lowell to call him Leo, like a little kid trying to get someone to address him with a nickname he’d just thought up for himself. “I don’t know whether I told you, but you can call me Leo even if I am your future father-in-law,” he would say, right out of the blue. “You can call me Leo when I’m your father-in-law too. I mean, you can call me Leo anytime. Everyone does, you don’t have to be shy. I don’t remember if I told you before.”
“Right, Leo,” Lowell would say. “Sure thing.” And they would march on, with Lowell’s future mother-in-law (who never asked him to call her anything) beating near-perfect time with her voice, like a drum that yakked instead of boomed. She talked all sorts of aggressive nonsense, but for some reason although Lowell disliked her, he did not feel strange about her; he was used to women who did that sort of thing, mostly on television. It was Leo that made him feel strange. Leo was a puzzle; Lowell had never met anyone remotely like him, at least that he could remember. Most of the men Lowell knew strove either to be tough and mean or tough and nice, and even the weak little men that had come his way had cherished a Henry Fonda of the spirit and rode tall in the saddle in their dreams. Leo, on the other hand, actually seemed to be struggling to project a deliberate image of himself that was about as craven as humanly possible. Whenever there was an opportunity to cringe, he cringed. Sometimes he didn’t even wait for the opportunity. It was amazing without being pleasant or very interesting, and after a while it began to get on your nerves and make you snappish, which in turn offered Leo wonderful fresh cringing opportunities. Lowell could see how it would be easy to get locked in a cycle with him, a cycle that would last for years and years. Lowell decided right then that he didn’t want to do that. Leo didn’t even try to bully, hector, or needle people younger, poorer, less articulate, or more polite than himself—any of that bookkeeper’s vast constituency of the ego. He didn’t seem to think that he was smarter, cleaner, or better bred than anybody, and Negroes openly terrified him. Apparently he was meek and craven through and through, the kind of man who would always strive industriously to remain beneath any situation that might arise or sort of creep up on him, the kind of man who went through life continually ducking his head. Lowell got the disturbing impression that if somebody finally came and told him it was time to go to the gas chamber, he would hop right into the truck, asking them to call him Leo.
“I’m not sure,” said Lowell’s future mother-in-law, planting herself squarely in front of the altar and standing there as though waiting for the crucified Christ to make a move for his gun. “I don’t think I like it, but I’m still thinking it over. Tell me what you think, I’m open for suggestions.”
“We don’t have to have it in church,” said Lowell. “We could have it anywhere. We could have it in your church....I mean ...”
“When I want y
our opinion, I’ll ask for it,” she snapped, without taking her eyes off the altar. “You can just keep out of this. I wasn’t talking about that, so shut up.” Then she burst into tears.
“Excuse me,” said Leo. “My wife is crying.”
Lowell wasn’t exactly sure what was going on, but his future mother-in-law was carrying on pretty loudly, and he looked helplessly about the church, alternately hoping that no one would see him and that someone would come and help him.
“It’s okay,” said Leo to his wife, standing beside her with fumbling, incompetent gestures, patting her like a city boy trying to make friends with a cow. “Look, if it doesn’t work out, she can divorce him in a couple of years, it’s not like it’s forever or anything. Who knows, maybe it will work out. Personally, I think it will work out.”
Lowell’s future mother-in-law made a kind of strangled noise and struck out at her husband. “All right,” she said. “All right. After all, what do I know? Who am I, after all? Only a mother. Who listens to a mother? Just remember, my blood is on your hands.”
Lowell couldn’t tell whether this incredible threat was directed at himself, Leo, Christ, or some combination of the three of them, but evidently it meant that they were free to go. Moving as though balancing a plate on her head, his future mother-in-law turned and marched up the aisle without so much as a backward glance.
“I don’t know if I told you,” Leo remarked as they followed her out of the church, “but I’m a cutter.”
Lowell wondered if it was an occupation or a pathology. Nothing could surprise him anymore, not even if Leo were suddenly to strip off his shirt in the middle of the quad to show him his collection of self-inflicted wounds. Maybe it had something to do with organized crime, a sort of job title like “torpedo” or “goon.” The only kind of cutters Lowell had ever heard about were Coast Guard boats and horse-drawn sleighs, and he was in no condition to think very clearly about anything right now. No matter what it was, if it had anything to do with Leo or his wife, Lowell didn’t want to know a thing about it. He never wanted to see them again as long as they lived. All he wanted to do was marry their daughter. These outrageous people seemed to live in a world entirely different from any he had ever known, a kind of bizarre parallel universe that had somehow overlapped our own. Once when Lowell was a little kid, he got the idea if you held your breath and squinted your eyes a certain way, the sky would turn red and everybody would have six legs, among other things. Leo and his wife made him feel like he had finally pulled off the trick, although in a much worse way.