A Meaningful Life

by L. J. Davis

  Lowell nodded mutely, rubbing his face with his hands. His skin felt oily and soft, like some kind of substance in a nightmare.

  After breakfast he went down to Broadway and bought the Sunday Times. “Jesus,” said the news vendor, “you sure lost weight. You been sick or something?”

  “I’m fine,” said Lowell.

  “No offense,” said the news vendor. “You sure you’re strong enough to carry that paper? It’s nothing to be ashamed of, a lot of my customers can’t manage it, it’s a big paper. Maybe you should take out the sections you don’t need. You know, like travel and the want ads. Some of my customers do that. It cuts down, believe me. Here, I’ll do it for you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Lowell, snatching up his newspaper and nearly falling over with it. It seemed to weigh as much as a bowling ball. He clutched it to his chest and staggered away, stumbling over his own feet, acutely aware of how wild and feeble he must look. He hadn’t shaved, and his clothes were rumpled from being slept in.

  The walk back to the apartment with the newspaper exhausted him again, and he collapsed into one of the chairs. Not only were his clothes rumpled, but the trip outside under the watchful eyes of passersby had made him conscious of how baggy they were. Even his shoes felt too big. He guessed this must be what it was like to be at the end of your rope, when you went to sleep in your clothes and they were too big for your body, when a newspaper was too heavy to carry and your brain had been taken over by a Bulgarian radio station. It couldn’t go on.

  “It sure can’t,” said his wife, giving Lowell another nasty start. He hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud. “I’m glad you’re finally coming to your senses,” she added, although that was not an accurate description of how he felt. He felt as though he was losing his senses, not coming to them, just kind of fading out like the pattern of a cheap fabric that had been through the wash too often. “This is awful,” he said.

  “You bet it is,” said his wife. “I wish we’d gone to Berkeley.” She sat down on the bed and opened the drama section of the Times. She leafed through it for a while, rattling and snapping the pages sharply. “Are you just going to sit there?” she asked without looking up.

  Lowell opened his mouth, made a little sound, and closed it again for fear that nothing would come out but gibberish. His shoes began to feel funny again, and he suddenly found himself wondering if he had them on the right feet. With a strangled cry, he sprang upright in his chair and stared down at them, but thank God they were okay.

  “Can I get you something?” asked his wife in a strange voice, looking at him with an expression that was hard to decipher. It came to Lowell that he had just given a convincing imitation of a person who has just seen a tiny little man dart out from beneath his chair on a wee little pony, and then dart back again. Or, for that matter, a man who suddenly wonders if he’s been wearing his shoes on the wrong feet for thirty hours. No wonder his wife was staring at him like that. Had she really thrown out his birth certificate? Who could blame her if she had? “The magazine section!” he croaked desperately. “I was looking for the magazine section. I thought I saw it on the floor.”

  Without taking her eyes off him for an instant, his wife slowly reached behind her and wordlessly produced the magazine.

  “Thanks,” whispered Lowell. It had Oriental soldiers on the cover. He lifted it up and held it in front of his face.

  “Don’t mention it,” said his wife.

  They spent the next couple of hours barricaded behind walls of newsprint, warily passing fresh sections back and forth as the need arose, and doing their best not to meet each other’s eyes. The last section to come before Lowell’s face was the want ads. It was a moment before he realized what he was looking at. He wondered how it had come into his possession. Had he picked it up on purpose? Had his wife deliberately placed it where he could reach it? Was he absolutely certain his shoes were on the right feet?

  He folded the paper and looked across the room at his wife. She immediately got up from the bed and stormed out into the kitchen, where she began to take apart the top of the stove, throwing the knobs and reflectors and prong things into the aluminum sink with a noise that went straight to Lowell’s teeth. Lowell picked up his manuscript from the table. Curiously enough, although he had written it, he couldn’t recall ever reading any of it, but he knew approximately what he would find. He also knew what he would think of it. The first page was awful. The second page was a little worse, and the third was a little worse than that. It was a perfect counterfoil of his life these last few months, starting with good intentions and no talent and going steadily downhill, page by page, day by day, as though someone was slowly turning down the lights and slowly turning up the sound. He regarded this fact with a feeling that was utterly flat, as if something heavy had rolled over it.

  “I’m going to get a job,” he said.

  “It’s about time,” said his wife. She turned the water off in the sink with a furious motion, turned around and glared at him for a moment, and then stalked off into the bathroom, first slamming, then locking the frail door behind her.

  “It doesn’t have to be forever,” said Lowell with the eerie and quite accurate sensation of having played exactly this same scene before, although in different clothes. This time he had the good sense to shut up and wait, and presently his wife emerged with a resolute face, and they ate a huge meal and planned their life, and both of them went to bed at bedtime.

  3

  “When did I grow this moustache?” Lowell asked, turning his face from side to side in the mirror.

  “What did you say?” asked his wife from the bedroom.

  “I can’t remember when I grew this moustache,” Lowell repeated. “I can’t remember why I grew it, either. I don’t even like it. It’s the silliest thing I ever saw.” Viewed closely, it seemed to be losing its hair, if such a thing was possible. It had never been much of a moustache to begin with. You could see right through it, and from a distance it gave the impression that his upper lip was hairless but a little dirty. The only reason he didn’t cut it off this instant was the thought of the chaos such an act would cause in his relations with his wife and his employer. It would perplex his wife endlessly, and Crawford would be alarmed.

  “I think you grew it in 1967,” his wife called. “Sometime around there,” she added, as if 1967 was a sort of street corner. “How come you want to know? Has this got something to do with the funny way you’ve been acting lately? I don’t know what’s gotten into your these last few days. How come you want to know when you grew your moustache? What kind of a question is that?”

  “Nothing, dear,” said Lowell mildly. “Nothing at all.” He returned to the contemplation of his face. His hairline was receding, but instead of making his forehead look high, it made his face look as though the top of it had been cut off. His teeth were fragile, and his chin was small. His nose resembled less a majestic blade than a small, pale berry. The pure and innocent blue of his eyes had never been muddied by corrupt and secret knowledge, had never been blurred by sorrow or sharpened by command; he was thirty years old, and his eyes were still the color of flowers. He knew exactly who he looked like. He looked like a youthful Henry Tremblechin. He looked like a minor public official in a town where the Republicans have always been in power. He looked like a weakling, and you wanted to kick him right in the face.

  “Are you through yet, or do I still have to wait?” asked his wife from the bathroom door. She was wearing a skirt but no blouse, and her hair was going every which way. It occurred to Lowell that except for a few minutes in the morning between breakfast and work, he never saw his wife fully clothed; the rest of the time she was either putting on garments or haphazardly taking them off. “You’re not even shaving,” she said. “What are you doing? Don’t tell me if it’s something disgusting. Please hurry up with it, whatever it is. I’ve got to do my hair, and it’s almost time to go.”

  “I was looking at my
face,” said Lowell, stepping aside from the basin. His wife shot him a nervous glance and began to tear at her hair with fingers and comb, staring into the mirror with anxious intensity. It was not a good time for Lowell to remain around, and he gently slipped away.

  In the kitchen he drank coffee until it was time for the war to be over on the radio, and then he switched it on for the weather. It didn’t really make much difference what the weather was—he faced only short corridors of it, spaced at long intervals throughout the day—but he was reassured by hearing the temperature and precipitation data, and he liked to know the forecast. Then he could plan his weather gear with some care; it always pleased him to be the only man in a flash rainstorm to have an umbrella. At home his father had listened to the weather report every morning, and presumably still did; from it, he could predict with uncanny accuracy which of his friends he would meet when he drove downtown, and where he would encounter them.

  The day was cold and windy and freezing rain was falling intermittently, although it was expected to turn to snow by midmorning. The temperature in Central Park was twenty-seven degrees and precipitation probability was one hundred percent for the rest of the day and night. Lowell got out his wife’s heavy coat, her gaily flowered plastic slicker, her fur hat, her red umbrella, and her tall fur-lined boots, and arranged them on the sofa in the living room. Cries of dismay rose from the direction of the bathroom, accompanied by the patter of a box of bobby pins maliciously upending itself in the washbasin. Lowell thought for a moment and then replaced the heavy, warm boots with a pair of shiny off-white English ones with a cuffed top and zipper back. Then he got out his own garb—overcoat and tweed cap, Drago galoshes and push-button umbrella, cashmere muffler and deerskin gloves—and tossed them onto the overstuffed chair by the baby-grand piano that his wife could play but never did; it had been left by the previous tenant, no doubt because the only way to remove it was through the window by means of a derrick on the roof, at fabulous expense. The piano was just another thing that got in the way and didn’t belong to him, tripping him in the dark, taking up space where he could have put his Eames chair.

  Aware that he was playing the part of a very good fellow indeed but this morning taking no pleasure from the fact, Lowell washed the breakfast dishes and put them away, sponged the kitchen table, put out the garbage, and sat down with a second cup of coffee to wait patiently while his wife made them both late for work. He wondered what would happen if he were to rage and stamp about the room in his overcoat like the husband of popular fiction. He decided that he probably wasn’t capable of it. He was a nice guy. That was the sort of thing you said about somebody you had nothing against and nothing in common with; you called him a nice guy. That was what Lowell was, even to himself. A nice, considerate guy.

  “We’re late!” cried his wife, bursting into the living room. “Oh, you are a darling. My hair wouldn’t go right, it just wouldn’t, and now we’re late again. I suppose that’s okay for you, you’re important and everything, but I’ve already been late three times, and I’m going to get scolded by that old bitch again. Hurry! Hurry! You aren’t even started yet.”

  Lowell ambled in from the kitchen wearing, he knew, an absentminded but lovable smile. His face just sort of fell into it, and then, like a wrestler’s hammerlock, he couldn’t seem to break its grip.

  “And you did the dishes, too,” said his wife in a hurried almost toneless voice, yanking herself into first one boot, then the other. “Aren’t you sweet? Look at the time. Boy, I’m really in for it. Get a move on.”

  As they waited for the elevator in the hall, Lowell asked, “What would you think if I cut off my moustache?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she snapped. Lowell had the impression that, combined with her hair problem and being late, his question had successfully ruined her day. It made him feel good for a while, but then he was ashamed of himself.

  Lowell’s cubicle at the office was slightly larger than a toilet stall, but no higher, and although the door said MANAGING EDITOR, Lowell always felt that the words had been printed there in the same spirit that moves service-station operators to paint KING on the door of the men’s privy. The walls were a pale, smudged turquoise and didn’t even come close to the high old ceiling, which seemed to exist up there on a plane of existence all its own, with its soot-furred sprinkler pipes and heating conduits, prepared to make the office wet in case of fire and warm in case of cold but otherwise having nothing to do with it. Lowell looked up at the ceiling a lot. He had very little else to do. Any nincompoop could run a magazine like theirs, and in fact one did: Crawford, who, fearful that anyone in the office but Lowell could do any job better than he could, ended up doing them all so that nobody would have a chance to show him up with a dazzling display of skill. About the only thing Lowell was clearly and indisputably in charge of was the advertising campaign. This consisted of inserting small boxes in the columns of like-minded publications, with the words: “Successful Plumbing Contractors Read the Plumbing Contractor’s Weekly Sentinel.” The slogan was over forty years old and never varied, nor did the size of the boxes or the publications in which they appeared; everything had all been set in smooth motion a decade before Lowell was born, and he saw no reason to tamper with it. The slogan sounded okay to him. Once a month he received a batch of bills. He initialed them and put them on his secretary’s desk, and she saw to it that they were paid.

  Small tasks came his way in the course of the day, mostly in the form of approving things other people had already done. He always approved things that other people had done, trusting them to know more about their jobs than he did, especially the accountant, a malicious and vituperative old pedant whom Crawford kept for the purpose of breaking the spirit of the office staff. He was also a pretty good accountant and a complete kiss-ass in his dealings with Lowell and Crawford, which was just fine with Lowell. Other people passed before his eyes in a kind of haze: young men on the way up in the industry, old men on the way down, stick-in-the-muds who had reached their level—they all strove together to put out a newspaper read only by plumbers if at all, and Lowell wished them well at their task. They came and went, but like endless ranks of soldiers, they were all the same to him. He was a string of cans, and nobody had tripped over him yet.

  For nine years Lowell had nourished the pleasant delusion that his job was only temporary, a kind of stopping-off place where he was getting his breath and taking his bearings after the grim and disorganizing experience of his novel. The job had come to him, not through the want ads, but by means of his putative uncle-in-law Lester, a shadowy figure from his wife’s family who seemed to be related to all of them equally and to no one specifically, any more than he had a specific occupation. He was the person you went to when you wanted something fixed up, and he fixed it up, often in ways that were puzzling; there was always something in his bag of tricks. He had an office in an old cast-iron building in downtown Brooklyn, although what he did there, aside from counsel his relatives, was vague. His name was not on the board in the lobby, and there was nothing on his door but a number. It was before this door, brushed and wearing his wedding suit, that Lowell appeared one morning long ago, having gotten lost first on the subway and then on Schermerhorn Street. It was difficult to tell whether to knock. He tried listening for office sounds, but the room was as silent as if it had been empty—a probable circumstance for a variety of reasons, chief among them being that Uncle Lester had no idea that he was coming and Lowell wasn’t sure he was in the right building.

  “Do something for you?” said a harsh voice in his ear, slicing through his reverie like a rusty knife. Lowell jumped as though goosed and spun around in a posture of startled guilt to confront a broad little man scarcely higher than his elbow but looking enormously strong, possibly because he was also enormously calm. “What? You’re from the Board of Elections, right?” he asked, never taking his eyes from Lowell’s face. They were very odd eyes. They were large, they seld
om blinked, and they were extremely watchful. Behind them was no soul, only something calm and intelligent. Lowell had the queasy idea that a man with eyes like that would kill you in an instant if he thought it would do him any good, and neither enjoy it while he did it nor feel bad about it afterward.

  “Uncle Lester?” he asked in a voice not quite itself.

  “Go inside.”

  Lowell hesitated, then opened the door and went inside. The little man followed him and closed it behind them. “You called me Uncle Lester,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How come?”

  “Well, I...”

  “Wait a minute.” Pivoting so as to keep his eyes on Lowell at all times, Uncle Lester moved past him to the desk, picked up a telephone receiver, pushed a button, listened wordlessly for several seconds, and hung up. “Answering service,” he said. “You were saying.”

  “Uncle Lester?”

  “You said that already.”

  “Well, you see, I married your niece Betty, I mean I’m married to her, we’ve been married for a while,” Lowell babbled while Uncle Lester gave him no help. Lowell began to feel like a first-class idiot, and his mission more and more took on the outlines of humiliating foolishness, as though he had suddenly found himself trotting beside a movie star begging to be given a break in pictures. “Well, anyway, I mean,” he continued.

  “How’s Leo these days?” Uncle Lester asked suddenly.

  “He’s fine,” said Lowell, wondering if this was some kind of test of his identity. He tried to think of something about Leo that would demonstrate to Uncle Lester that he knew him, but the kind of things that came to mind weren’t the kind of things you say to a stranger about anyone, especially if the stranger was a relative. “Just fine,” said Lowell. “Saw him only the other day. He was looking swell.”

  “What do you need?” asked Uncle Lester.