A High New House

by Thomas Williams

  “Scotch? Bourbon? What? Soda? Water?”

  “Scotch and water, I guess.”

  The major went up to the bar, where an enlisted man now presided, and brought back the scotch—a double one—and a beer for himself.

  “Don’t want to change now,” he explained. “I’d end up under the table. Had a sandwich earlier, but that’s all. My wife’s in Chicago with my folks for a few days, and it’s damned quiet at home with the kids gone. Just about everybody else I know is off flying someplace.”

  This Robert recognized as the standard American apology for friendliness toward strangers: I’m lonesome but it’s just temporary; I’m really quite well adjusted, normal, happy and successful.

  “Usually I don’t go around like a damn’ fool asking questions. In fact I don’t usually have time. Don’t even have time to read. Have you read this?” he added abruptly, and turned the book so that Robert could see its cover: A Farewell to Arms.

  “Sure,” Robert said.

  “It’s a damned sad book. I read it in college—I went to Northwestern—but ever since he did the shotgun bit I wanted to read it again. But what.… Hell, I don’t suppose you’d know any more than I would. But why should a guy like Hemingway, who’d done so damned well with his life? Made things. Lived it up. Nobel Prize. Why?”

  There was more than simple doubt upon the major’s face, or plain curiosity. He seemed quite deeply sorrowful about it.

  “Listen,” he went on, “I really like this Lieutenant Henry. He’s a good man. He’s going to be an architect. Do you think he walked back to his hotel in the rain and shot himself?”

  “No, but he might have felt like it.”

  “I don’t mean to say a guy doesn’t have the right to blow his bloody brains out if he feels like it. That’s his business, but why did Hemingway have to feel like it? Christ, a man—even if he was sick—who’d done what he’d done.”

  “I heard he’d begun to doubt the value of what he’d written.”

  “Value! Jesus I wish I’d been there. I’d told him.”

  “I guess a lot of us would have, if we’d been there,” Robert said.

  The major picked up the book and bent it. “It must have been a terrible black thing in his brain to make him choose to end it. Or maybe red—a terrible dark red. I keep thinking about it. He walks around the room, he tries to sit down—no. He tries to stand still—no. Everything he sees says, ‘No more, no more.’ He picks the sweet little double out of the gun rack. Pretty little twelve with that damn’ fine English engraving on it—those little lines about half a hair deep. Smells clean, of Hoppe’s No. 9 solvent. ‘Made some beautiful shots with this little beauty.’ No! I can’t follow him any more. Right there I can’t follow him any more.”

  The major shook his head back and forth, back and forth, his face so bleak it seemed as though he too stared at some terrible dark redness.

  “Why I asked you about whether or not you liked your work—you know what I do, more or less—I’m a navigator. I used to be a fighter pilot, but don’t ask me what I’ve ever done. I’ve got a real sick desire to make things, and right now all I’m making is kids and years. You know, ‘Flying Around is Our Profession.’”

  “A difficult profession, though,” Robert said.

  “Somebody’s got to do it, sure. But don’t ever ask yourself, ‘Why me?’. You know what I’d like to do? I’d give my left nut to run a woodworking shop or something like that. Make good chairs. Good chairs. Or I’d like to teach, maybe, like you. But it’s too late.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, you know. How old are you? I’m thirty-six, and I guess we’re about the same age. Try just thinking about changing your profession. Just try it, and you’ll see.”

  “I guess I never have.”

  “One thing I’ll tell you. I’m sick to death of those goddam airplanes. They go too fast; they land too fast. I’m scared every time we take off and I’m scared every time we land. I don’t want to go that fast any more.”

  Robert had another drink with the major, who had a Japanese wife and four children, and another bun in the oven, he said. He’d dropped napalm on a massed company of Chinese infantrymen in Korea, and he said this like a curse. “Now I only tell them where to fly.”

  A very sad major. When Robert left they shook hands and the major said he was very grateful for Robert’s company.

  When he got back to the Lubies’ apartment he told Geoff what a drag the class had been.

  “But I love that class!” Geoff said, really surprised.

  “They’re so eager to hear new ideas—you should hear some of the things we discuss! They call me Geoff and kid me about the beard.” Here he pulled at the fringe. “And because I’m a pacifist. We have a ball!”

  On the way home Alice told him that Billy was fine, but that Geoff had been in bad shape. “He went into the kids’ room and cried,” Alice said. “We could hear him in there crying.”

  “He does tend to overdo things,” Robert said. Suddenly an involuntary darkness came down like a shutter over his eyes, and it was an idiotic fit of compassion for Lubie and his child. He was terribly angry at himself. Stupid! he thought. Tears were in his eyes, and he was careful not to reveal himself to Alice by wiping them off.

  They were riding home in bright moonlight. He told her what it was like on the base, trying to be bright and funny about it.

  “Well, what did you expect? Paris?” Alice said, and he laughed.

  “It was more like, say, Reykjavic. I don’t know—all I see is that major, a sort of middle-aged military Holden Caulfield—The Major in the Rye—and nobody inside the fence for him to drink with, maybe. Or maybe he doesn’t dare drink with anybody. I guess he wasn’t trained cross enough. But you know? The weirdest part was that I didn’t hear one airplane all the time I was in there, and nobody walked on the sidewalks.”

  “I wonder what it’s like on Russian SAC bases,” Alice said.

  “That is a truly depressing thought.”

  But they were coming home, and inexplicably he was very sad, and the world was precarious all of a sudden; maybe it was the major’s brave and dignified oak leaves. After all, the major probably did his job with precision and intelligence—a difficult and extremely dangerous job it was, too. Or maybe what had crept up upon him now was Geoff Lubie’s world, in which the race was half sweet angel, half monster.

  The air was cold, and in the headlights the leaves of the roadside trees turned their silvery undersides toward them in the wind. A clear and somewhat violent, windy night; he could even hear the wind in the leaves as they rode along home, even over the noise of the car.

  You know what I will do? he thought, I will go up to my house, my home that is mine, a place I do not rent, my warm and beautiful place each nail and screw and joist of which is my own loving business, place my chest against its straight corner boards and feel along my arms how it is staunch and human, and protects me.

  And then he had a terrible idea: what if it weren’t there any more? What if the house were gone? And then an even more terrible idea: where would he stand, what would he do if he lost what was, after all, only a house? Would he then be homeless, too tender, an orphan?

  A few days later, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Alice called him at school.

  “I thought I’d better warn you,” she said, her voice quite worried, “and not let you come on it cold…” She hesitated, and he wasn’t really full of dread; after all, she was calling from home, wasn’t she?

  “What? Come on what cold?”

  “Well, Forrest Sleeper’s moved in across the road, in a great big house trailer.”

  He said, “Oh, God!” but he knew it hadn’t quite hit him yet.

  “It’s such a gaudy-looking thing I didn’t want you to just run onto it. To tell you the truth, it’s almost funny. Wait’ll you see it! It’s about as big as a Greyhound bus—even longer—and it’s pink and yellow and blue with great chrome strips along the sides, and veneti
an blinds, and a TV antenna about twenty feet long they haven’t put up yet. I never saw one quite like it—I mean the whole outfit.”

  He was silent, and finally she said, “Are you warned?”

  “Yes. How can we get him off?” He felt as though someone had smeared him with filth. Exactly, and he couldn’t get his shirt off to wash it.

  “How can we? There’s a woman, too. Is he married?”

  He didn’t answer right away, so Alice said good-by and hung up, her voice compassionate, as though she’d just had to tell someone he had a fatal disease. Perhaps someone had. He canceled his last conference and went straight home.

  She hadn’t told him about the pile of old automobile tires, or the baby-blue 1946 Buick without front wheels—how did it arrive?—or the mattress hanging over the limb of a tree, its center absolutely black. She hadn’t told him that the “woman” would be sitting in their kitchen holding the most incredibly filthy baby he’d ever seen. Not even overseas had he seen such an encrusted, beshitted, besnotted piece of humanity. Its nostrils were plugged with yellow tallow, and it breathed wetly, complicatedly through a mouth that seemed as much vertical as horizontal. Its clothes didn’t matter—was that shirt blue once? White? There was a kind of invisibility in such filth. Above them, above that mouth, olive-drab eyes were open but seemed to see nothing; he had no idea how old it might be.

  The woman was somewhat cleaner. Her dirt was at least smoother, more evenly applied. Her blue cotton dress was really grimy only where the baby had lain on her enormously pregnant belly. Her face was roundish and pale, her hair the color of slate. She was quite young, and he realized immediately that she was in some way feeble-minded.

  “I’m going to give the baby a bath,” Alice said in a rush as he stood in the doorway. The woman smiled at her, but didn’t look at him. “They haven’t got electricity in yet, and they’ve no hot water or anything yet.”

  He saw that Alice was trying to pacify him, trying in the worst way. She knew that he knew that such dirt was not the result of one day’s lack of soap and water. A fly landed on the baby’s chin; for an awful moment he imagined that it hadn’t flown there at all, but had crawled out of that formless mouth. He hadn’t seen a fly for a week, since the first frost.

  “Yes,” he said vaguely. He felt sick, and went on into his study and quietly shut the door. Quiet and guilty, full of real horror.

  Automatically he tried to look at the notes for his article, but the 3x5 cards that had seemed so orderly might as well have been written in cuneiform. Through his window he could just see that mattress hanging on the lowest limb of a pasture pine. How could the ticking have turned so black there in the center? From here it looked as though it had been smeared with gobs of black axle grease.

  In a little while he heard happy sounds from the bathroom, gay swashings and diddly-boos, and God it was Alice’s voice, but different. He felt in himself again that same ferocious guilt that had made him leave the kitchen without saying a real word. Guilt? Why guilt? God damn it! It was his house! And as these last words came to mind it was as if he were going out of himself, leaving his own skin—but taking a last cold look. How far had he come away from that tough young swaggerer in the Ike jacket, who wore the pretty ribbons? That ridiculous orphan in the real, tougher world? But that baby, that thing! (that real live thing) he saw again, looking as if it had been made out of Silly Putty by somebody with dirty hands (no, out of flesh like his own).

  A long time after the happy sounds had stopped, Alice knocked on the study door. He couldn’t answer. In his mind he was yelling at her; great shouts of sentences rang in his head.

  “Bob?” Alice said, and he was full of terrible anger. She knew goddam well he was sulking in there!

  “Bob? Do you want me to make a drink? Can I come in?” Had he ever kept her out, for Christ’s sake?

  He heard that sad inner voice saying good-by, good-by. What’s the matter with me? he thought, and then said, “I’ll be out in a minute, Alice.” Now how did that sound? Too sulky? “You make a drink, OK? and I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “All right, Bob,” she said, and went away.

  She was his wife, the woman who sat across from him, and he thought: if I see her only as my wife, that socio-legal organism, that institution, that name on deeds, possessor of duplicate car keys, alternate closets and bureau drawers, then what is she to me? No, what is she? She becomes all attitude, and is all the immediate meaning of her an attitude toward just a sort of legal part of me? No, she is still an animal, but one that gives off heat as impersonal as heat from an iron radiator. I can smell her, but her odor is just human in general, like the odor of a strange and not very attractive woman on a bus. Defects can then be observed without caring much one way or the other—the enlarged pore on the side of her nose, for instance, or her fingernails, which are dried and cracked from handling plaster.

  She was being solicitous; she was being careful of him. How sick did she think he was? He was not as upset as she thought he was, but he couldn’t think of a way to dispel this terrible, frigid carefulness they both now had for each other.

  They sat at the kitchen table drinking after-supper coffee, and she wore a starched white blouse with the top buttons unbuttoned, so that he could see her collar bone and some of the smooth skin of her chest. He could see her; he knew her body so well, but now that knowledge seemed as academic as a map of the moon. Was there even nostalgia at the memory of the night before last, when they had made love? Only surprise, and a slight tick, even, of embarrassment; it seemed about as possible as it would have been to do the same thing with one of the maiden-lady town librarians.

  And yet they weren’t mad at each other. They’d had their fights, their periods of disagreement, serious and not-so-serious. Sometimes she came back to him, sometimes he came back to her—back from a friend’s house, back once (in his case) from as far as New York; back across a room; back across a foot of cool bed sheet. In those cases there was the known territory separating them, the anger that had always been outspoken. But how could one find one’s way even to want to come back, when the territory between was so unknown? When, in the most complicated way, Alice hadn’t even gone anywhere?

  So it was almost with the sense of trying a cure (but did he care?) that he told her he was going to his office to correct a few papers he’d left there and to get a book he needed. She made no comment, and he left her sitting at the kitchen table with her half-cup of coffee in front of her.

  As his headlights swung around and hit the road, like a recurring nightmare the gaudy trailer, the blue wreck of a Buick, and now another, red-and-white Buick of the same year shone at him as though the whole shoddy scene were transparent, illuminated like some ghastly slide from behind. Next to the pasture pine stood a tall man in overalls, his back toward the lights; his posture revealed unmistakably that he was urinating on the trunk of the tree.

  At school he let himself into the dark building and walked down the cool, brittle corridor to his office, then had to light a match to find his office key. He opened the door, and after their long hesitation the fluorescent lights came on like bright zippers along the high ceiling. His desk was clear and clean as usual, except for the dirty but empty ash tray. He had no papers here, no book he wanted. He could think of nothing he wanted to do, here or anywhere. So he turned out the lights, went back to his car and by habit started it up and drove out onto the street. He just drove for a while, taking whatever small road came as a choice before him. Not home, though—not that road. He didn’t bother to shift down when he should have, and the old engine lugged and knocked at times, complaining to him. It was unfair of him, he knew; that big old lunker of an engine had been pretty faithful. Faithful? he thought, surprised at himself: come on, now, Robert.

  Then he found himself on the bumpy little dirt road that led to Herb Rutherford’s house—or the house that Herb and two other unmarried instructors rented—and he knew that he’d been vaguely headed there all the
time. Maybe nobody would be home, and in a way he hoped so, because he ought to have been home himself. Herb had been asking him to come out and try some of his home brew. Well, here he was. And there was the old white farmhouse in its pines, and just about every light was on in every room, although only a couple of extra cars were parked in the driveway. From the open living-room windows came the happy metal notes of a banjo, a lively, clean sound, and that would be Herb himself. He had no excuse now not to go in.

  The tall metal flagpole in the front yard was bare; its rope swung in the wind and a metal gismo of some sort clinked against steel. Every morning Herb raised the flag and every evening he lowered it, sometimes with full ceremony—he played stringed instruments well, but the bugle badly—, carefully folded it in triangular shape with the blue field of stars outside, and stowed it away in a chest in the front hall. His landlady had rented the house to them on this condition, and Herb faithfully carried out her instructions. Robert had seen this ceremony, and if there had been any irony in it on Herb’s part, it certainly hadn’t been obvious. He’d held the large flag with reverence, and folded it carefully according to regulations.

  But of course he would never talk seriously about anything, and if someone tried to pin him down he simply changed the subject. Irony was such a part of his thinking process, it seemed to Robert, that he nearly always said the opposite thing. If it were raining, for instance, Herb would come into the office, look up to the windows that were high along the walls and say, “Nice day.”

  The old porch flooring creaked as Robert came up to the door; it wasn’t a bad house, really, and without the Victorian additions and gingerbreading—jigsaw madness—it would have been a very good example of that area’s farmhouse of about 1800. But now it was being let go. One final stage in the disintegration of a house was to rent it to a bunch of bachelors, but Herb’s famous landlady, Mrs. Colpitts, cared only about certain odd things like the flag ceremony, and the health of the microbes who lived in the septic tank (no coffee grounds down the sink) and dandelions. Once a week she came on an inspection tour, and never noticed that the roof leaked, that the gutters were plugged with pine needles and rotting pine cones, that the clapboards were sprung here and there.