by L. J. Davis
The rest did not take long. Everyone sat around for a second as though in silent prayer, and then there was a good deal of throat clearing and paper shuffling, and Lowell was asked to write another check. In a few minutes he was handed his deed. He'd been handed so many things in the last few hours that it was a while before he realized what he was holding, and then it didn't seem like much.
“Well,” said his lawyer in a voice weak from strain, “that wasn't so bad, was it?” He mopped his face and watched Lowell write out a check for his fee with a queer expression of anxious yearning, like someone who was trying to stop smoking watching another person light up a cigarette. “Whoo,” he said when Lowell handed him the check. `Oh, boy, what a day. I swear to God, no more favors for the family. I swear this is the last time, positively.”
“You got paid,” said Lowell.
“That's not it,” said the lawyer, picking up his briefcase. “You don't understand.”
“How do you feel?” asked the bank man, peering at Lowell with the kind of mixture of sharpness and anxiety that is usually reserved for prostrate accident victims and women who have just had a baby. “Everything okay?”
“Just fine,” said Lowell.
“Congratulations,” said Mr. Grossman's lawyer in the perfunctory manner of a grocer asking a shoplifter if he can help him.
Lowell told them good-bye. He put on his hat and coat and went home. His wife was waiting for him in the living room, and although it was only three o'clock in the afternoon it was evident that she was pretty drunk. She was sitting in the Eames chair, watching the sleet. “Aruba,” she said when Lowell entered.
“Well,” said Lowell in a tone of forced good cheer, “we own a house.”
“I don't own any house,” said his wife. “It belongs to you and old Cyrus What's-his-name. Leave me out of it.”
“Darius,” said Lowell. “Darius Collingwood.”
“I could have been in Jamaica by now,” said his wife.
“At least you could get his name right. You're only trying to get at me. I can tell. Otherwise I wouldn't care. It's the principle of the thing.”
“Sure,” said his wife. “That's right.”
“You're goading me again,” said Lowell, looking around for the bottle and mixer. He found them in the kitchen and made himself a drink. “Darius Collingwood has nothing to do with it. I mean, of course Darius Collingwood has something to do with it, but not the way you think he has. He has something to do with it in another way.”
“Seven thousand dollars,” said his wife. She watched the sleet. “Cyprus.”
“Darius,” said Lowell automatically.
“I didn't say Cyrus,” said his wife. “I said Cyprus. Not Cyrus. Cyprus is a place. Cyprus is real.”
“Where's your glass? I'll make you another drink.”
“I don't have a glass,” said his wife. She got up suddenly and left the room. Lowell looked around after she was gone, but it was true: she hadn't had a glass. If she hadn't had a glass, she couldn't have been drinking. Lowell knew his wife wouldn't have drunk out of the bottle. But if she hadn't been drinking, what had she been doing? It did not take Lowell very long to hit upon that one, although he was not very pleased with it when he got it. She'd been crying. She cried so seldom that he'd almost forgotten what she looked like when she did, and that was why he'd assumed that she was drunk. The two states did not manifest themselves in dissimilar ways. Lowell made himself another drink. Soon he had a third one, and presently it was possible to forget about the whole thing until he went to bed. His wife did not return, and he had leftovers for supper. When he finally joined her, she was pretending to be asleep. Lowell could tell that she was pretending—under the sheet her body was as rigid as a fencepost, and her eyes were squinched tightly shut as though against the glare of a powerful light—but he was a good fellow about it and pretended not to know that she was pretending. Shortly thereafter, without anything further having developed, he drifted off himself and slept soundly all night long.
Fortunately he had nothing resembling a plan, so he didn't have to worry about things not working out according to it. He simply let them happen, unable to make up his mind whether he was losing his judgment or finally developing some perspective. He didn't have much time to brood about the matter; for the first time in years so many things were happening to him that he actually forgot some of them. Even his hours at the office were full, phoning architects and contractors, making appointments to interview them, studying the building code, and reading up on the history of Brooklyn. He bought a half-dozen books full of helpful tips for the home handyman and went through them thoroughly, taking notes and making lists, the majority of which he misplaced. He was amazed at how little he knew about the simplest things. He didn't even know how to fix a leaky faucet. For years he'd listened to jokes about people who were so dumb that they didn't know how to fix a leaky faucet, but it had never occurred to him before that he was one of them; there were a dozen leaky faucets in his house and he couldn't have fixed them if his life depended on it. He didn't even know how to begin.
Lunches with Crawford and trips to McSorley's with Balmer soon became things of the past; a slice of pizza was his portion at noon as he hastened from hardware store to hardware store, trying out tools and being sold things that his books said he ought to have. It was great fun. In the evening he took his day's purchases over to Brooklyn and tried them right out, or else he carefully put them aside in his apartment until the time came to put them to work; in some cases the opportunity never came, and there were one or two exotic-looking tools whose exact functions he actually forgot, not that he cared.
He was suddenly famous. In a building where he had labored five days a week for nine years without a single person asking him what he did, he suddenly found himself cloaked in a highly conspicuous new identity: he became known as the Guy Who Moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant. He tried to persuade them that he hadn't moved yet and that it wasn't Bedford-Stuyvesant, but nobody listened to him, and he thought that it was symptomatic of the feeble grip he'd taken on the memories and imaginations of his colleagues over the years that nobody ever referred to him as the Managing Editor Who Moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant. He found it difficult to care.
As for his wife, she left him.
She left him at the end of the second week and went to her mother's. During the two weeks she had steadfastly refused to join Lowell at the house, not even to keep him company, and they even stopped having supper together. Lowell usually picked up a ham sandwich at the bodega on Greene Avenue and washed it down with beer; he had no idea what his wife ate, or where. They continued to eat breakfast together, after a fashion: they sat at the same table and devoured food, with the radio tuned to WNCN. It was a curious situation, but it seemed perfectly natural to Lowell at the time. He spent his nights dreaming of rooms and hammers, and he woke up full of plans. During breakfast he thought about them. Occasionally his wife made attempts at conversation, but he couldn't keep his mind on what she was saying, and after a few minutes she just sort of ran down for want of response. In fact, he more or less forgot about her for long periods of time, and when he came home one night and found the bed empty and unslept in, there was a moment when he couldn't remember whether she'd been in it last night, either. Anyway, the point was that she wasn't in it now. Her clothes were also gone, as were her cosmetics. Lowell wasn't sure what he ought to do about it. At least he knew that you didn't call the police. You only did that when people were missing, and his wife wasn't missing, she was only gone. Lowell supposed he ought to search for a note; on television they always left a note when they walked out on you or killed themselves. He looked around the room for a while, but when he found no trace of one he decided to go make himself a cup of coffee instead. He wondered if it was significant that he always ended up in the kitchen when there was a crisis in his life.
The note was propped up against the coffeepot; Lowell reflected that another woman, with another kind of husband,
might have rolled it up and put it in the barrel of the family gun. On the whole, he supposed he would rather be a coffee drinker, although he doubted that it made much difference in the long run.
“I have gone to my mother's,” the note said simply, exactly like the little missives they used to leave for each other when they went down to the newsstand or the delicatessen when the other one wasn't home. For a moment the laconic, familiar wording made him think that it was all a mistake that she'd only gone for the evening, at most the night, and would be back soon. Then he remembered that she'd taken all her clothes, and his little spark of hope went out like a light.
When his coffee was ready, he took the cup to the phone and dialed his mother-in-law's number. His mother-in-law answered. “Is my wife there?” he asked.
“That depends,” replied his mother-in-law in a voice so flat that it had lost all trace of an accent.
“On what?”
“On who you are,” said his mother-in-law.
“Don't be ridiculous. You know very well who I am.”
“Do I?”
“Stop playing games. This is Lowell, and I want to talk to my wife.”
“Lowell who?”
Angry but not confused, Lowell opened his mouth to speak, not the rest of his own name, but hers; to utter it like a rebuke and at the same time remind her of the bond that existed between them, whether she liked it or not. His mouth remained open for some seconds, and then it closed on empty air. He didn't know her name. Maybe he'd known it once—he must have known it once, it wasn't possible that he hadn't known it once—but he sure didn't know it now. He didn't even know what letter it began with. It was a ridiculous situation, and partly his own fault, but this insight did not help him, at least not now. It probably wouldn't help him later, either. There was
still one solution. He could call her “Mother.” Lots of people did it. It would stop her in her tracks. He had only to utter the word, and victory was his. Unfortunately, the very thought of doing so stopped Lowell in his tracks, too. He was hoist by his own petard, and there was no way down. He sensed that he wasn't doing very well. Meanwhile, the silence lengthened.
“Listen,” Lowell said at length with as much snap as he could muster, which was not as much as he would have liked, “I'm your son-in-law.”
“Is that my fault?” asked his mother-in-law. “Believe me, if I had my way, you'd be nothing but another name in the phone book, but I ask you, who listens to a mother? What's a mother?”
With difficulty Lowell restrained himself from answering her question. “See here,” he said.
“I'll tell you what a mother is!” his mother-in-law suddenly shouted. “A mother is someone who was right!”
“Are you going to let me speak to my wife or not?” demanded Lowell without putting the phone back to his ear.
“Don't take my word for it, ask any psychologist. Ask the biggest men they got. You know what they'll tell you?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER!” his mother-in-law bellowed faintly as Lowell hung up the receiver. “That's what they'll tell you!”
Somehow, as he threw on his coat and made sure he had his keys, Lowell had the feeling that she hadn't been taking to him at all.
“Good evening, Mr. Stone,” said the doorman as Lowell raced past him in the lobby. Uttering a strangled cry, Lowell hurled himself into the night.
It was incredibly dark. Something had happened to the street light again, and the sensation of emerging from the soulless fluorescent glare of the lobby into profound darkness was like suddenly being afflicted with blindness while drunk. For a moment Lowell was simply unable to think. He'd never imagined it could get this dark in the city; he couldn't even remember it getting this dark in the country. There was always a moon or something. Although he was standing on his own street, in front of a building where he'd lived for years, there was a moment when he couldn't remember where anything was, and all at once he thought: My God, what am I doing here? It was almost as though someone else had spoken in his ear. Then he lunged off in the direction of Broadway, with his hands held slightly before him, like a blind man who had lost his cane.
All the cabs on Broadway seemed to be going in the wrong direction. Lowell stood and watched them for a while, and then he decided he didn't want a cab tonight anyway; he was not in the mood to hear about what the mayor and the Negroes had done wrong this time, either separately or in collusion, although he supposed that in a certain sense a New York cab driver would be an appropriate prelude to the kind of visit he would no doubt have with his mother-in-law. It was like a 1930's urban movie gone mad, the same characters but a different script, a whole myth turned vicious and the actors believing every word. Lowell didn't want to be part of a movie. He never had. He stood and watched the cars go past for a few more minutes, and then he turned and walked toward the subway. If concrete took a print, he supposed he could have seen the path he'd made over the years from his building to the station. He'd be willing to bet that it wouldn't have been more than three feet wide, at the widest.
He waited on the platform for half an hour. When the train came it was full of smoke. He got on it anyway and rode to Brooklyn.
At night his in-laws' neighborhood looked like nobody really lived in it. Lights burned behind most of the windows, but they seemed to have been turned on only to create a realistic effect, like the lights in the windows of the little buildings on a model railroad. Lowell walked the streets without encountering another person, surrounded by a kind of bleak municipal tidiness where the sidewalks were cleaned and the shrubs trimmed and the grass cut by people who did it solely because it was their job and they got paid for it, like steelworkers. The cars were neatly parked at the curbs, the people were neatly tucked away in their rooms where they belonged, and there wasn't a speck of litter or a scrap of imagination anywhere to be seen. It made Lowell feel exceedingly strange and completely out of place as he raced along to rescue his wife, almost as if activities of that sort were not allowed here and he was going to get away with it only as long as someone didn't spot him.
“There's not a psychologist in the world who doesn't have a mother!” announced his mother-in-law when she opened the door of her apartment, momentarily stunning Lowell with a sense of warped time and insanely fixated purpose, although she was actually speaking over her shoulder to someone in the room behind her. “What do you want?” she demanded, suddenly turning on Lowell with suspicion but without much apparent recognition. It was like being addressed by a creature from another dimension, and for a moment Lowell was at a loss for words.
“I want my wife,” he finally said, somewhat less forcefully than he would have liked.
“I think we talked about this before,” said his mother-in-law.
“Never mind about that,” said Lowell. “I know my wife is here and I want to see her.”
Down the hall the door of another apartment opened a crack. Lowell was aware of being watched from a new quarter. It was not a good feeling. All his life he'd hated being conspicuous, and he would often deliberately lose an argument to avoid making a scene. He could scarcely do that now.
“Why don't we talk about it inside?” he suggested.
“We can talk about it out here,” said his mother-in-law. “I'm not particular.”
“I want to see my wife.”
“So you said.”
“Now, you listen to me ...” said Lowell.
“There's no need to shout,” said his mother-in-law, calmly folding her arms. Although almost two feet shorter than he was, she somehow gave the impression that she was looking down at him. No doubt this was what other men meant when they said they felt emasculated, but Lowell didn't feel emasculated, he felt as though he'd never had any balls and his mother-in-law had just found out about it. Down the hall another door opened and a man came out in his stocking feet and stood beside it nervously. He was about fifty, and he succeeded in neither looking directly at Lowell nor taking his e
yes off him for a minute, a feat which gave him a severe facial tic. He conveyed the impression that he was ready to spring back into his apartment at the slightest provocation and place an anonymous call to the police, disguising his voice and putting a handkerchief over the receiver. Lowell found it hard not to hate him on sight, especially because the man's appearance only proved that he really had been shouting. “This is crazy,” he heard himself saying. “Absolutely crazy.”
“This is crazy?” said his mother-in-law in tones of mild amazement. “Am I hearing right? This is the opinion of the big-real-estate tycoon, the Zeckendorf of Bedford-Stuyvesant? This is crazy?”
“Mother,” said Lowell's wife from somewhere in the apartment. Lowell was glad to hear her voice. It meant that something different might begin to happen—not necessarily something better, but different. It might even get him out of the hall.
“That's enough, Mother,” said his wife. Her face, determined and cool, suddenly appeared over her mother's shoulder. She stared intently at her mother's profile. Her mother, meanwhile, continued to look hard at Lowell, who was gazing supplicatingly at his wife. They stood there like that for a long moment, their eyes not meeting and totally different expressions on their faces, a sort of invisible Möbius strip of conflicting but strangely congruent purposes. Then, without warning, his mother-in-law began to back into the room like a bank robber backing away from the scene of a crime, alert, slow, ready for anything, her eyes never leaving Lowell's face. Lowell followed right along, closing the door behind him. His wife and mother-in-law continued to move backward at a stately pace, until they reached the middle of the living room, where they stopped cold. Lowell's wife was looking at him now, too. God knew how long they might have stood there like that, each of them waiting for one of the others to make a move; if it had been up to Lowell, they would have stood there all night. He couldn't think of a thing to say. He was even afraid to open his mouth for fear that the movement would be seized upon as a pretext for something.