by Steve Tesich
Who is he and what is he doing?
Having stepped toward him when he fell out of the chair, she now steps back. The horror she feels only grows when he, sliding across the linoleum floor on his knees, comes toward her like a cripple without legs.
“Saul,” she says, “what are you doing? Get up. Get up.”
But he keeps creeping toward her.
She has backed up as far as she can go. He has backed her into a wall. She stands there shivering, looking trapped, the distance between them narrowing as he creeps on toward her on his knees.
“Oh, Mother,” he cries again and again.
As old as she is, and as totally inexperienced in scenes of this sort with her son, she starts to understand what is happening.
Something real is creeping toward her.
The first real moment between herself and her son is heading directly toward her.
He is looking up at her. Her child. Her son. This old man, pleading with her.
And she pleads right back at him, like some helpless old woman confronted by a mugger. She pleads with him to abandon his assault. Let us not have something real now, she pleads with him with her eyes. I’m an old woman. A widow. I haven’t got much longer to live. Please, spare me this moment.
He sees her eyes, he comprehends their meaning, but he can’t help it. The momentum of the moment is moving him toward her.
He, down on his knees, may look like an overwrought sentimental buffoon, but there is nothing sentimental in what he sees. He sees her with brutal clarity.
The dead dentures in her mouth. The lusterless cheap black hair dye. The perm-burnt, pubiclike quality of parts of it. The anal-like wrinkles around her eyes. And the eyes themselves, small, smeared, full of cataracts.
She could be any old woman.
She could be anyone’s mother.
And this is precisely what moves him so. That she could be anyone’s mother, even his.
“Oh, Mother,” he says.
And taking her reluctant hand, so small and cold and old, he kisses it and says:
“Mother, forgive me, please.”
It is not lost on him that the hand he kissed is the very hand with the very index finger where a splinter once lodged, nor is it not lost on her.
She remembers the incident of the splinter. His repugnance of her pain.
His response hurt her. But this hurts even more. This is truly horrifying because it implies that everything could have been different between them. That this love she now sees could have been there all along.
She is too old to change. To start again. To suddenly start loving again. What is even harder to accept is that she is loved. It’s too much to ask of an old woman. It’s almost merciless.
He can see the horror in her eyes and the hope that this moment will pass. She wants her old son back, not this loving one who is down on his knees looking up into her eyes and holding on to her hand.
He also knows that the forgiveness he seeks is too all-encompassing to be given to a single little old woman in a faded bathrobe.
But although all does not go as he would have wished, all is not lost either.
Some little wriggling life is engendered between them.
And something else too.
Looking up into her eyes, he catches the moment.
A briefest of glimpses is all that he is granted, but it suffices.
In that one single peek through her unguarded eyes, he sees that the collected memories and moments of a single day of her life, of anyone’s life, if fully explored, would surpass in volume the collected works of any author who ever lived. Whole wings of whole libraries, if not whole libraries themselves, would be needed to house a single day of anyone’s life, and even then that life would surely be shortchanged.
And yet, he thinks, down there in his suitcase, among his T-shirts and shorts and socks, in that magazine is Leila’s story. And Billy’s. And his own as well.
Life, it seems, is not meaningless but, rather, so full of meaning that its meaning must be constantly murdered for the sake of cohesion and comprehension.
For the sake of a story line.
And then the peephole passageway to his mother’s private universe vanishes from view, or she chooses to close his access to it.
Her eyes, through which he saw what he saw, are once again the eyes he knows, defiantly guarding the unknowable on the other side.
He is still holding her hand and she wants it back. He lets it go.
Her way of dealing with what has just occurred between them is this. She does not pretend that something didn’t happen. She just cannot talk about it now. She will incorporate it into her life, but not now, not in front of him. These things take time. And although she probably has little time left in her life, these things still take time.
She walks past him, through the kitchen, and walks all the way back to her bedroom, shutting the door behind her.
He rises slowly, feeling little flutters of pain in his lower back.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1
THE TRAFFIC ON the Hollywood Freeway had been moving slowly but steadily until he got off at Barham Boulevard. The traffic on Barham was backed up all the way from the overpass to the top of Barham Hill.
Highway construction of some kind, although he couldn’t tell exactly what it was.
He crept up the hill in his rented car.
It took him almost twenty minutes to reach the hilltop overlooking Burbank. The other side of Barham Boulevard led straight down to the Burbank Studios where he had an appointment with Cromwell. The traffic on the downside of the hill was just as backed up, if not worse. By the look of things, it would take him at least another twenty minutes to make his descent.
The angle of the hill was such that when he had a chance to creep forward a few feet at a time, he just released the pressure on the brake pedal. There was no need to touch the accelerator.
His appointment with Cromwell was for three o’clock and it was almost three. He had left the Beverly Wilshire Hotel with plenty of time to spare, intending, as was his habit, to be at the Burbank Studios long before three.
The unexpected traffic delay was going to make him late for an official meeting for the first time in memory.
It pleased him that he would be late. That he would keep Cromwell waiting.
The pain in his lower back made him predisposed to be pleased about something.
Ever since the trip to Chicago, a little over three months ago, maybe it was the snow shoveling, or the way he fell down on his knees in front of her, or maybe even the way he got up from his knees, but ever since then, the pain in his lower back had become a fixture of his life.
It became especially acute when he was forced to sit in one place for too long. Long plane trips. Driving a car. Watching a movie in a theater. Things like that.
It was as if a living paw with retractable claws had been surgically implanted around the base of his spine and almost anything, from sneezing to laughing to stepping too hard on the brake, could trigger the claws to snap out of their hiding place and sink into his flesh.
He knew that he should see a doctor, but he also knew that he never would.
Just as he would never see a dentist about getting his broken teeth bonded.
It was too late for that. He was bonded with them as they were.
He would eventually bond with his backache as well.
2
The traffic, moving in spasms of a yard or two at a time, kept stopping and going … stopping and going … and then it stopped completely.
And then it resumed stopping and going again.
The rhythm was that of dots and dashes in Morse code.
An endless line of cars draped over a hill, sending a message in a repeated linear sequence to the cosmos.
Dot. Dot. Dot. Dash. Dash. Dash. Dot. Dot. Dot.
3
Maybe, he thought, maybe Elke Höhlenrauch had been right. Maybe the pain he was feeling in his lower back was si
mply the result of his spine contracting.
The less spine, the more pain.
Until eventually you were all pain and no spine.
He sighed. It even hurt his back to sigh freely, so it was a cramped, constricted sigh.
The thought of Elke reminded him that he still had no medical insurance.
No insurance of any kind.
It seemed to him, however, that the number of life’s afflictions against which there was no insurance of any kind was growing.
There were, he thought, disasters in life that no Lloyd’s of London, or Lloyd’s of the World, or Lloyd’s of the Universe, could ever underwrite.
No comprehensive insurance against folly and tragedy, against unreached destination and unrealized yearning.
He wished he had a policy right now to insure him against what he might agree to in Cromwell’s office.
He had arrived in LA late Monday night.
Today was Wednesday.
But this particular Wednesday fell on both the end and middle of the work week.
Wednesday, the third of July, 1991.
Judging by the traffic, the start of the long weekend had already begun.
Cars creeping up Barham Hill and cars creeping down crept past each other, and the people inside those cars, those going up and those going down, looked at each other through their windshields like participants in some lonely diaspora.
Everyone was trying to get somewhere, but since they were trying to do so in both directions, it didn’t take much imagination for Saul to imagine that the traffic jam he was caught in was in a loop and that those going up and those going down would pass each other again and again, but heading in reverse directions.
Life on a loop, like the water in recycled fountains, which neither flowed from somewhere nor went anywhere but looked busy and pleasing to the eye, going around and around.
There were no destinations anymore. Only turnaround points on loops of various sizes.
Even time, which was supposed to be linear, seemed to be on a loop to Saul.
He had a growing suspicion that the year 1991 was pivotal in this regard.
Pivotal to whom, he didn’t know.
1991, reading as it did the same way left to right as right to left, was corroboration for his thoughts as he crept along in his rented car toward Burbank Studios.
The last year anybody will ever need.
It read the same way coming and going, and whether you came or went, there was no getting out of it.
He wasn’t sure when these thoughts first began to assail him, but perhaps it had something to do with the victory parades on television after the Gulf War.
He hadn’t followed the war itself. He hardly knew there had been a war because of his own problems. But he did watch some of the victory parades.
He could still recall some of the faces he had seen in them.
What he saw in the faces of people lining the parade routes, either because it coincided with what he was feeling or because he chose to impose his own disease upon the cheering multitudes, was a celebration of nothing less than the triumphant victory over privacy itself.
Something was revealed in those faces that human beings up to now had kept to themselves.
He didn’t know what to call it, but it was as if some line had been crossed that could only be crossed once. Once crossed, there was no going back, but only around and around within the loop of the year 1991.
He had missed the war entirely, he knew nothing about its causes, but on the strength of seeing a few victory parades on television Saul Karoo saw himself as some latter-day Clausewitz who had a comprehensive theory about the causes of all wars to come.
And his theory was this.
All wars were now evasions of privacy. Wars, big and small, civil and otherwise, were collective evasions of private lives. Many, many wars would be needed until mankind was free of privacy altogether and the memory of its existence forgotten.
Wars on a loop.
4
He heard a car horn, several short repeated blasts, and saw somebody waving to him from an uphill-bound car on Barham Boulevard.
Squinting through his windshield, Saul recognized the smiling, almost laughing face of young Brad. Cromwell’s former Brad. Cromwell had dismissed him and replaced him with his new black Brad, but the old Brad still had a job at Burbank Studios and was leaving work early like everybody else.
Saul returned the wave and the smile. But because the two cars were creeping past each other so slowly, both men kept waving and smiling, as if to suggest some close bond between them that would last no longer than it took their cars to pass each other.
Oh, Brad, Saul thought.
Brad was young enough to be Saul’s son, and just as Saul could not think of his own mother, or any mother, or even the word “mother” without thinking of Leila, he could not think of any young man anymore without thinking of Billy.
And so from one name he went to the other.
Oh, Billy, he thought. My boy.
Billy was dead. Leila was dead. The Old Man, Mr. Houseman, was dead. And this death on a loop reminded him of his visit with the Old Man while he was still alive.
When he went to visit his mother in Chicago, he had had no plans of either going to LA or seeing the Old Man, but by the time he left his mother’s house three days later, his plan of doing both had materialized.
He remembered, in a loop-within-a-loop kind of way, the last time he saw his mother.
Their parting.
They were in the living room when the cab arrived and honked its horn.
He was sure they were going to part right there, but she offered to walk him to the waiting cab.
And so they went out together. The snow had all melted, the sun was shining, and a warm southwesterly wind was blowing. March was going out like a lamb as the two of them walked slowly toward the yellow cab.
His memories of his mother up to then had been of a woman inside the house. He could not remember the last time he had seen her outdoors. Nor could he tell if the bright sunlight illuminating her face made her look a little older or a little younger than she was. But she did look different.
A whole series of women he had never seen peeked out of her old eyes, and each one of them seemed to remember a different sunny day from her life, with a promise of spring in the air.
They embraced like a couple trying out a new and unfamiliar dance, a bit clumsily, a little self-consciously, but with an eagerness both could feel.
Then he took his bag and his backache and got into the cab.
She stood there waving. Maybe it was because it was such a breezy, springlike day that she reminded him, despite her age, of a whole school-yard full of schoolgirls waving goodbye to him.
He tried to figure out on the plane why he was doing what he was doing.
He knew why he was flying to LA, but he couldn’t figure out how he had come to his decision.
Maybe it was that videocassette of the Old Man’s film. Maybe just having it in his suitcase had caused the idea to be born. Or maybe it was knowing, from the newspapers, that the Old Man had only a handful of days left. Or maybe it was both. Or neither. All he knew was that he had to go there, had to see him, had to beg the dying old artist to forgive him for what he had done to his work.
Others had come on that Wednesday afternoon to pay their last respects to the master. Some were legendary figures in their own right, movie stars who had worked for the Old Man when all of them were young.
People were leaving when Saul came and people would be coming when Saul left. It was like an open house. There were parked cars everywhere on the huge expanse of land surrounding the house. Liveried drivers standing outside their limos, smoking. There was a large trampoline with some kids jumping up and down on it, but in complete silence.
The whole event had the feel of an occasion that had been announced, without Saul’s knowing it, in the papers.
I am dying. Come say goodbye. Arthur Housem
an.
He was met at the door by a young woman who told him to go upstairs, where he was met by another young woman who told him where to sit down and wait his turn.
There were others in the waiting room, waiting theirs.
Yet another woman, this one neither young nor old, was in charge of escorting the visitors to the room of the Old Man himself.
The procedure, Saul observed, was always the same. She first inquired about the identity of the visitor, then went off, probably to announce the person to the Old Man, then returned to escort him or her to his room. Several people ahead of Saul were so well-known that she escorted them to the Old Man’s room without any inquiries.
Saul sat on a straight-backed wooden chair and waited his turn. On his lap was a yellow manila envelope with the videocassette of the Old Man’s film. Inside the envelope was also a letter he had written to the Old Man explaining who he was and why he had come. He had written the letter just in case Mr. Houseman proved to be too sick to receive visitors.
The room, the whole house, in fact, smelled of cigar smoke. The Old Man had been, among his many legends, a legendary cigar smoker and either the house had absorbed the smell of Cuban cigars or the Old Man was smoking them on his deathbed.
People left the waiting room. Others came in. The room seemed to contain the same number of visitors at all times.
When his turn finally came, Saul gave the manila envelope to the woman and told her that the letter inside would explain everything.
He stood up while handing her the envelope and remained standing when she left.
Then he sat down to wait.
It seemed to take longer than usual for her to return, and when she finally reappeared (with the yellow manila envelope in her hands), she seemed to make a point of looking elsewhere while walking toward him.
Saul stood up as she approached.
The envelope in her hands, he saw, was perfectly flat. The videocassette had been removed. In a moment of joy, Saul imagined himself being forgiven by the Old Man and the two of them watching his masterpiece together.
“Mr. Karoo,” the woman addressed him, stopping a few feet in front of him.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Houseman has instructed me to tell you that you must leave his house. He doesn’t wish for you to be here,” she told him and extended her hand with the envelope in it.