A Meaningful Life

by L. J. Davis

  There was a loud thud somewhere in the upper reaches of the house, and a little shower of pulverized plaster sifted down through a crack in the ceiling, just like in a war movie. The young man paid no attention to it. He folded his hands on the desk and looked steadily at Lowell's wife.

  “I can't remember what you came for,” he said. After a pause to let this information sink in, he added, "Houses or apartments?”

  “I came for the ride,” said Lowell's wife. "It is my husband who has a purpose.”

  Lowell was certain she was imitating some actress, and it bothered him that he couldn't figure out who. "Houses,” he said. "Are you the real-estate man?”

  “Good,” said the young man. "Apartments are a pain in the ass. How much money have you got?”

  Lowell reluctantly admitted to having about two thousand dollars, although not with him. "Who was the person I talked to on the phone?” he asked.

  “That was my associate,” said the young man. "That's not enough.” He looked at Lowell wearily. Lowell allowed as how he might have a little more. He might even have another thousand, in a pinch.

  “That's more like it,” said the young man. "I'll bet you've got even more than that. They always hold out on you.”

  “Three thousand dollars!” squeaked Lowell's wife, her face aghast, indignant, and astonished in roughly equal measure. "We don't have three thousand dollars! If we had three thousand dollars we could have gone to France last summer! We could go to Aruba right now! Where did we get three thousand dollars? Saint Thomas! We could go to Saint Thomas! We just don't have that kind of money!”

  Actually, the real-estate man was right and Lowell's wife was wrong. He was holding back, not exaggerating. The true sum was $8,322 and some odd cents. He had his bankbook right in his pocket. Except for food and rent and clothing, they never bought much of anything, and Lowell had been packing away the surplus for years. God knew why. It was just part of his monthly schedule. Anyway, this was the first he'd heard about a trip to France, much less Aruba. He wasn't even sure he knew where Aruba was.

  “I guess we can look at something now,” said the real-estate man briskly, as though the squeaking and sputtering of outraged wives was all in a day's work. He picked up some file cards, flipped through them, and selected one. "Asking twenty, take eighteen, with a third in cash and a five-year balloon at seven and a quarter,” he said. "The more cash you've got, the lower the price.”

  “I don't understand,” said Lowell, trying hard to sound forceful instead of bewildered, but not succeeding. "You're not the person we talked to on the phone, right? I mean, I'd just sort of like to get things straight in my mind.”

  “That was Raymond,” said the young man. "He's working upstairs and can't be bothered to change his clothes, although I don't know what that's got to do with anything. Let's go.” He shrugged on his coat and herded them out the door.

  “Don't even think about balloons,” whispered Lowell's wife. "Balloons are a trap.”

  “What's a balloon?” whispered Lowell.

  His wife drew in her breath with a sharp sipping sound and refused to say more, leaving him feeling like a spy who'd given the wrong countersign. It was all gibberish, and he didn't understand a thing.

  An early twilight was falling through the trees as the real-estate man led them toward Washington Avenue. Numbers of Negroes had gathered in silent, cold-looking groups outside the houses, apparently for the sole purpose of showing Lowell's wife how many of them there were, because they certainly didn't seem to have come outdoors for any other reason; they weren't even talking much. There was almost no place you could look without finding someone looking incuriously back at you from it. It was kind of eerie. The sky seemed unusually large and full of pollution, and there was no rest for the eye up there, either; it was growing grayer as the light failed, making everything look limp and dreary and drained of color, as if the whole neighborhood and all the people in it had been underwater for years. It was November. Over in Manhattan, Lowell never thought of it as being any special month-you just had winter, and you were glad when it was over, and then it got hot-but this was a real November he was feeling now, for the first time in years. It was a bad month in a bad season in a poor part of town. A cold wind was getting up and naked light bulbs had begun to shine from behind curtainless windows. Lowell wanted to go home.

  “The neighborhood slummed up after the war,” said the realestate man in a cadenced, unreal voice. "Before that, it was by far the most fashionable part of Brooklyn, and only millionaires could afford to live in it. Just look at these houses. The vast majority, including the one I'm about to show you, are in sound basic condition and only need minimal repair, if I make myself clear.”

  “Maybe you'd better go into it,” said Lowell's wife. "I wouldn't want anything left unclear in my husband's mind.”

  “Well, you can't make a definite statement about that kind of thing,” said the real-estate man. "It varies a lot from house to house. You can't expect every house to be the same. Am I right, sir?”

  “Guess so,” said Lowell. "I wasn't listening very closely.”

  “Don't take my word for it,” said the real-estate man. "Look around for yourself. Look in all the rooms. I'm only here to help you, don't take my word for a thing.”

  “Don't worry about that,” said Lowell's wife. "Not that it makes any difference. I'm just humoring my husband by coming out here. We have a marvelous apartment on the West Side, and I'm perfectly content to stay there for the rest of my life. How much commission do you make on a deal like this?”

  Lowell walked beside them, a thoughtful outcast. It was clear what his role was: he was a kind of conversational convenience, to be used as a foil when the need arose, and the rest of the time to be apostrophized as a way of clarifying his wife's feelings. On the whole he was glad that nothing more was required of him-it was an easy part to play, it would be over soon, and then they could go home and forget the whole thing-but at the same time it made him feel worried and jealous. It was like the times in his childhood when the big kids would leave him out when they talked about sex, except that his wife and the real-estate man were talking business. Lowell knew about as much about business as he used to know about sex, and his wife's apparent grasp of the subject was disturbing. Not only did he wonder where she'd had an opportunity to learn about it, but it upset him to hear her discussing it with another man. It was as though she'd started talking to someone else about strange bed positions he'd never heard of. "Isn't it getting a little late?” he suggested.

  “Here we are,” said the real-estate man, stopping before a mansion of such surpassing opulent hideousness that Lowell could scarcely believe someone was actually offering to sell it to him. It was just the kind of place he'd always really wanted with a powerful subconscious craving that defied analysis. "The townhouse of Darius Collingwood, foremost corporation lawyer in the Northeastern United States,” said the real-estate man. "Built between 1800 and 1885 of Philadelphia brick, brownstone, terra-cotta, and Runcorn stone, whatever that is.”

  “Darius Collingwood,” said Lowell.

  It had a turret and a mansard roof with a wrought-iron railing in a design of vines and flowers. The façade jutted forth in a great bay like the prow of a mighty ship, its windows decorated with panels of stained glass, its waist defined by a wide course of ornamental brickwork, interspersed with terra-cotta panels displaying a relief of urns and human faces. There were flat windows and curved windows, rectangular windows and oval windows with belts of stone. There was a lightning rod on the turret. The main entrance, on the right as you faced the house, and some twenty feet to the rear of the great aggressive thrust of the bay, was reached by a flight of wide brownstone steps and was framed by thick brownstone columns that supported a kind of porch or miniature fortress. The front door itself was deep in shadow.

  “It's a rooming house,” said Lowell's wife.

  “Delivered vacant,” said the real-estate man. "Very observant of
you.”

  Lowell hadn't known that it was a rooming house. He looked at it closely, but he still couldn't see why it was a rooming house.

  “What's the C. of O.?” asked his wife.

  “Class B roomer,” said the agent.

  Lowell didn't know what they were talking about.

  “The house on the right,” continued the agent in his reading-it-off voice, indicating a three-story frame structure in bad repair, "is occupied by a number of elderly Irish ladies.”

  As though alerted by a concealed microphone, an elderly Irish lady appeared at an upper window and regarded them suspiciously.

  “Hump,” said Lowell's wife.

  “The place on the left,” continued the agent, pointing to a narrow brick house that was separated from the mansion by a narrow alley piled high with discarded beer cans and burst bags of garbage, "is owned by an old man. Shall we go inside now?”

  The real-estate man led them down the walk toward the porch. Halfway there he stopped, picked up a weatherbeaten mop handle that was leaning against the house, and banged loudly with it on the window above his head. "Henry!” he called. He paused with a look of impatience and then banged again. "Henry! Henry, you home?”

  An elderly Negro man in a tattered undershirt pushed aside the curtains and sleepily heaved open the window. His eyes were bloodshot and foggy, and his face beneath the grayish stubble of beard had a kind of bruised, soft look, like some kind of dark, spoiled fruit. He looked down at the agent and swayed a little. "Man can't get no sleep,” he said.

  “These people want to look at the house, Henry,” said the agent.

  “I do my job,” said Henry. It was difficult to tell how he did anything at all, his eyes were so cloudy; the brown irises seemed to be dissolving. "Got a nice apartment. Fix it up all nice. Work all fucking day long. You come back tomorrow. I got to sleep.”

  “You can sleep later, Henry. Mr. Grossman wants you to show these people the house now.”

  “Shee-it! You go tell Mr. Grossman he can goddamn well go and fuck his goddamn self. I ain't no fucking horse. I got to sleep, I'm a working man. Now, you just get off my sidewalk and leave me alone.”

  “We'll see you at the door, Henry,” said the agent. "We go through the same scene every time,” he explained to Lowell and his wife. "It's just a big act.”

  “Don't you go doing that!” shouted Henry. "Don't you go talking about me when I'm standing right here! Ain't you got no fucking manners? Shee-it! I done told you before, you got something to say, you say it to me. Ain't never worked a fucking day in your life, waking up a man like that, talking about him when he standing right here, goddamn it, you stay away from that door, hear?”

  “Let's go in,” said the agent, climbing the steps. He took out a ring of keys and began trying them in the lock one by one. Other windows had gone up in the house, and Lowell saw faces peering down at them indistinctly in the dusk.

  “I think maybe...” he said.

  “You all get away from there!” shouted Henry, leaning perilously out of his window and waving his arms clumsily. "You hear me? I said get away from the goddamn door! People is trying to eat their supper!”

  “Here it is,” said the real-estate man, turning a key in the lock and pushing open the door. It had once been inset with a tall oval of glass, but a sheet of battered tin covered the place now. "Don't pay any attention to old Henry. He always carries on like that. He'll be here in a minute. Perhaps you'd like to take a look at the back parlor while we're waiting for him.”

  “Why not?” said Lowell's wife brightly. "Let's look at everything.”

  They were standing in a kind of lobby. The floor was filthy and the walls had been patched frequently but not well with huge handfuls of plaster. A staircase wound up into the darkness on the right. On the left were a pair of tall doors, and a short corridor behind Lowell's back terminated in a pair of equally tall doors, presumably the ones through which Henry would issue when he put on his shoes and got out his knife, or whatever he was doing. Everything in sight had been painted a peculiar and utterly depressing shade of pale green, which had then apparently been thickly sprayed with a mixture of soot and old cobwebs. They were the dirtiest walls Lowell had ever seen, and he instinctively shrank from touching them. The floor was so dirty it was impossible to tell what it was made of-a sheet of slightly flexible cardboard over an abyss, it felt like-and the only light came from a dim fluorescent ring high up on the ceiling, flickering off and on and nearly buried in another crude plastering job. There were water stains everywhere, and dim racks and banks of pipes went this way and that, up the walls and across the ceiling, festooned with a gray fur of dust and soot. The air smelled strongly of stagnant water and burned wood. Upstairs someone opened a door and spoke a word, then closed the door again. Somewhere a toilet flushed.

  The real-estate man knocked on the door to the left. An attempt had been made to fit it with a peephole, but the hole had been drilled too large and the device hung out of it like an eye gouged from its socket. A woman's voice called, "Who?”

  “Landlord,” said the real-estate man. "Open up.”

  There were bustlings and whispers inside the room, and a heavy object was moved about on squeaky casters. It sounded to Lowell like they were barricading the door with a chest of drawers. On the other hand, he supposed they could just as plausibly be unbarricading it. Whatever they were doing, they soon stopped. A moment of silence followed, and then someone began to wash dishes.

  “Damn that Henry,” said the agent, looking very cross indeed in a very prim way. He banged on the door with his fist. "You in there!” he barked. "Open up!”

  “Don't you think we should come back tomorrow?” asked Lowell, uncomfortably aware that several heads had poked over the railing above them. At any moment Henry might come charging out of his room with a weapon of some kind and raise the house against the intruders. Lowell wondered what he would do if someone came at him with a knife; all his life he'd been afraid of knives, and he was always a little worried when he was in a room where they were being used. He imagined himself being backed into a corner by a knife-wielding resident of the building, trying to explain that all he wanted to do was leave in peace, not being understood because his attacker didn't understand English.

  Before the agent could answer him, the door was opened by a tiny brown lady in the kind of loose cotton dress Lowell could vaguely remember his grandmother as wearing: it was faded and had flowers printed on it. She smiled at them hopefully, looking from one to the other as though in search of the one who was nicest. "Yes?” she asked.

  “It's all right,” said the agent. "The landlord wants these people to look at your apartment. You understand? The landlord.”

  “Who?” she asked, still smiling but not as hopefully. Her hair was tied back with a piece of string, and Lowell noticed that she was wearing an old pair of men's carpet slippers.

  “I hope we're not disturbing you,” said Lowell's wife, rising on tiptoe to get a better view of the room.

  “I no espik no Inglis. Please?”

  “That's what they all say,” said the real-estate man to Lowell. "It's okay,” he said to the tiny lady, gently taking her by the arms and steering her back into the room. "Es bueno. El casero dice.”

  “Ain't either all right,” said Henry, suddenly appearing in the hallway behind them. "God damn it, what I tol' you, you ain't got no right busting in on people like this. People gotta sleep, they gotta eat.”

  “Now, then, Henry,” said the real-estate man, turning to the superintendent after having steered the woman to a chair, making a kind of hole for Lowell and his wife to enter the room by. The little old lady folded her hands on her lap, put her knees together, sat up straight, and gave them her entire attention.

  The room was long, high, and narrow. It had been painted pink, including the ceiling and fireplace, but not very recently. Tall windows rose from the floor almost to the ceiling on two sides of the room, the bottom third screened
with cardboard and the middle third covered with thin cotton curtains of an astonishing turquoise color, held together with sagging lengths of string. Tall mirrors stood above the fireplace and between the rear windows, their massive, pink-painted frames carved in a design of flowers and seashells. The pink ceiling, deeply coffered, centered on a heroic central medallion of what appeared to be lettuce leaves in a nest of worms. Every coffer had a five-o'clock shadow of dust and soot.

  “Don't you go talking about no Mr. Grossman to me,” Henry was saying in an aggrieved high voice that sounded embarrassingly like a white man's imitation. "I run this building, and what I says goes.”

  “They always paint the marble mantels,” said the real-estate man, apparently to Lowell. "God knows why.”

  A candle guttered in a tall glass in a dim corner of the room, which was furnished only with a sat-upon-looking bed, a couple of end tables made of some kind of pressed synthetic material that was veined and painted brown to resemble wood, a kitchen table of the same substance (one leg of which was tied together with a strip of cloth), and a couple of old tubular chairs of the sort Lowell had seen discarded on the street. At the table was sitting a small brown man. For some reason, possibly because he was sitting utterly motionless and was the same color as the furniture, Lowell had failed to notice him before. It gave him quite a turn.

  “Allo,” said the little man, smiling and nodding with desperate pleasantry, as though he expected Lowell to shoot, arrest, or strike him at any moment. "How are you today?”

  “I hope we're not disturbing you,” said Lowell, looking around the room, so barren of sources of enjoyment or activity, and wondering what in the world he might have disturbed them at.

  “No, no,” said the little man, smiling more broadly and nodding more rapidly than ever. "Please.”

  On the end tables were a pair of lamps with plastic bases in the form of black panthers, their muzzles red with blood. On the left-hand table there was also a vase of faded plastic flowers, covered with a dusty polyethylene shirt bag, and on the righthand table, also covered with a bag, was the statue of some saint. Against the other walls were a beaverboard bureau for clothes, and a tiny, ancient, and unspeakably filthy gas range with a sort of brown halo behind it. In a tall alcove that must once have been intended for books, a kind of cardboard hut had been constructed, no doubt to conceal a toilet. The linoleum on the floor was peeling in strips, and someone had taped a loaf of French bread to the wall by the door; it looked like it had been there for a long time. Lowell wondered what they'd been pushing across the floor before they opened the door.