Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  No one bathed me with the water mysteriously brought in by the one evangel who set it down and fled. I finally gave myself a cursory sponging, also giving the bed a very satisfactory soaking. The cart delivering breakfast trays passed my door, till a well-placed shout brought it back. My bed was not made, the request for Demerol, to which I was entitled every four hours, went unheeded. It was all this that prompted the farewell with which I took leave of the hospital the following Saturday morning, four days after I entered. “So long, everybody,” I called to the other patients as I was wheeled down the corridor. “Take care of yourself.”

  As I bounced over the threshold of the elevator I collapsed, my head dropping onto my chest. I was going home! Home!

  twelve

  I WENT BACK in an ambulance too. This seemed best owing to the flights of stairs to be dealt with at the rooming house where I now stayed. I had left home on beginning my career as a teacher, when I had been asked to move into a dormitory as housemaster. The building had recently caught fire, scattering a hundred of us into temporary private lodgings. Instead of returning home I had found a room at Mrs. Duncan’s, conveniently located on the corner of a street bordering the campus. As long as I was in a cast that prevented bending my knee, it appeared that I must go up and down stairs in a sitting position, which was all right inside the house but another thing outside, with all the onlookers gathered around the porch steps to witness my delivery.

  The ambulance was owned and driven by a local garageman named Mr. Hines, who was given to misguided religious zeal. He called his repair shop the Christ and Holy Trinity Garage, after the church next to which it stood—one of those examples of backfiring sincerity, since this expression of his piety had in the end not a pious air at all, but a frivolous and even blasphemous one, especially with the neon sign garishly proclaiming his place of business.

  The policeman arranged for by telephone to help Mr. Hines carry me in was waiting for us in front of Mrs. Duncan’s rooming house, along with the motley collection of pedestrians, which swelled rapidly as the ambulance stopped behind the parked squad car in which the cop had arrived. One spectator was an organ grinder with a monkey on a string—or I should say two spectators, for the monkey himself watched with that intent blinking stare peculiar to his kind as I was drawn out of the ambulance and carried to the house, while the music from the hurdy-gurdy remained respectfully suspended. There was a sprinkling of college students, at whom I smiled wanly as I was borne past them to the cottage. It was a white clapboard with a bay window in which a shingle hanging between lace curtains read: ROOMS FOR SELECTED GUESTS.

  The formidable figure of Mrs. Duncan awaited us in the vestibule. “It’s good to have you back, Professor Waltz,” she said, smiling severely down at me. I had given up trying to make her understand that I was only an instructor, realizing that the dignity of the house, as well as her own ego, were nourished by use of the more prestigious title.

  As we mounted the stairs to my bedroom a sudden apprehension seized me.

  Mr. Duncan was a reformed alcoholic whom Mrs. Duncan regarded as in mortal danger of backsliding. For that reason she was an inflexible advocate of temperance—if that is ever a good term for the fanatical extremes usually characteristic of people so minded. My mother was a member of some temperance society or other, and I can remember my father flinging pots and pans about as he tried to explain to her that in order to be temperant one had to indulge in alcohol, not proscribe its use absolutely. It was certainly absolutely barred from Mrs. Duncan’s premises, the pledge not to have it about in any form being one of the conditions of admittance as a lodger. I had quite understood the policy aimed at safeguarding a husband from temptation, and it had never bothered me since I did all my drinking at bars. I had simply never given the matter any thought. Now that I was trapped here, with the emotional strain of a very possibly deepening personal crisis added to the physical one of near-immobility, the problem became instantly a major one. I felt that I could have done with a stiff one even at that early hour. After devoting her mornings to the light housekeeping entailed by the rental of two rooms (only one of which was occupied at the moment, either for want of interested applicants, like my Dramatic Workshop, or because those who applied had failed to meet Mrs. Duncan’s exacting standards) she would have lunch and then set out for a local department store where she taught knitting from one to five. It was clearly in those afternoon hours that I must have liquor smuggled into the house. Mr. Duncan worked in the office of the fireworks factory past which in fancy I trotted the exasperating Hodges!

  The first thing I did when restored to the privacy of my room was to rub contraceptive jelly into my toes. These alone protruded from the cast, and I had begun to feel there the numbness against which I had been warned to be on guard. Some lubricant such as cocoa butter had been advised as an ideal massage, and since the preparation was composed largely of this ingredient, according to a declaration on the box, I used it for that immediate purpose, working it well into the crevices between the toes. I had bought it some months before, for use in a relationship that had never materialized, and saw no point in wasting it since it filled the bill from a practical point of view now. It came in the form of pellets in a brightly colored packet, which I kept hidden under a notebook in a desk drawer.

  As I massaged my foot, I reviewed the arrangements hastily agreed on with Mrs. Duncan a few minutes before. Meals were not provided here unless a guest was sick, but under the circumstances she agreed to feed me for the few weeks in question. In return for this concession, I would try to be reasonable in the number and frequency of my callers, and in the hours they stayed, as well as apply the same standards as to the “sort” of visitors I had in my room as she did to roomers admitted to the house. I anticipated no difficulty in this area, since all I wanted to do was stay in bed with the covers pulled over my head and not see anybody again, ever. I promised again solemnly to observe the injunction against alcoholic beverages.

  Removal from the human race has the compensating merit of at least enlarging one’s inner resources. My happiest hours, I think, were those of early afternoon when I had the house to myself and could prowl it unmolested. It was then that I solved some of my drinking problems. Such problems in logistics refine themselves further, to a man on crutches, into makeshifts of sheer animal survival. The following brief scene will be instructive, if not edifying.

  At two o’clock sharp the next afternoon, I was waiting in the vestibule to receive the first quart of bourbon ordered by telephone from a neighborhood package store for that time promptly. I was watching for the delivery man through the curtained pane of the door when he pedaled up on a tricycle cart of the sort ridden by ice cream vendors. I thrust the correct money plus a tip out to him in return for the bottle, which he handed to me in a brown paper bag. After closing the door, I folded the bag into a pocket of my bathrobe, set the bottle on the floor, and worried it toward the foot of the stairs with the tip of my crutch, like a puck with a hockey stick. Leaving it there for the moment, I hobbled to the kitchen where the paper bag disappeared among a collection Mrs. Duncan accumulated in a broom closet. After filling my pockets with ice cubes at the refrigerator, I returned to the vestibule stairway. Now began the laborious ascent, backwards in a sitting position. With each few steps I would have to pause and shove the crutches up another stage ahead of me—or more literally behind me—doing the same with the bourbon of course. Erect once more at the head of the staircase, I nudged the bottle down the passage and into my room with the tip of a crutch again. I was soon lolling gratefully in my window chair, sipping a highball from my bathroom tumbler.

  In this way I gradually worked out some sort of convalescent routine for myself. At first I debated asking Mrs. Duncan to supply me a regular pitcher of bedside ice water, but decided against introducing into my habits any innovations short of those making actual clinical sense, so as not to generate speculations in one all too suspicious by nature—one who administered
her domain with the general air of a policewoman. There was risk enough in having to hide a bottle in a drawer where already a packet of contraceptive jelly lay concealed, along with a notebook of poems on which I was at work. They were mostly drafts, in varying embryonic or finished stages, of sentimental ballads in a vein of old-fashioned innocence Mrs. Duncan would not have appreciated. A sort of hobby. They bore self-explanatory titles: “That Little Bed of Myrtle,” “Christmas at the Whorehouse,” and “Why Is Daddy Walking Funny?”

  An extra tumbler I was presently assured, by Mrs. Duncan’s insistence that I daily drink the water in which my breakfast egg had been boiled, for the calcium so vital to knitting bones, with which she herself toiled faithfully up the stairs each morning when it had cooled. Whether her assumption that the boiling water actually extracted this substance from the shell was scientifically valid or an old wives’ superstition I do not know, but in any case, since I had no intention of hastening my recovery in any fashion whatever, I poured the water either into the bathroom basin or out the bedroom window each day, a fate also reserved for the milk with which she tried to ply me for the same curative ends. I thought first of asking her to put ice in the milk, but decided in the end against risking any such odd request simply as a stratagem for smuggling cubes into the room. It was easy enough to carry them in my robe, or even in my coat and trouser pockets. Luckily both Mr. and Mrs. Duncan were heavy drinkers of soda pop and iced tea and coffee, so there was always a supply in the refrigerator from which my own modest needs could be met without risk of detection.

  Into my pockets I also stuffed such snacks as could be abstracted from the refrigerator without arousing suspicion—slices of cheese and cold meats to be eaten with crackers, or some of the pumpernickel to which Mr. Duncan was loudly addicted. This indulgence was of a piece with my traffic in alcohol, and like it a problem in logistics. This not only because picnicking in bed became part of the sybaritic ways into which I fell, in my general retreat from the world to which I would soon enough be recalled to account, but for another reason having to do with house rules. Foodstuffs were also forbidden in guests’ rooms because of a spreading infestation of ants. They were everywhere in the kitchen and dining room, and would, Mrs. Duncan insisted, no doubt rightly, proceed to any part of the house where the faintest evidence of food was to be found. The only exception to this was milk, to which insects are not prone. I was for this reason always scrupulous in my regard for the way I ate anything in my room, cupping one hand under another to catch any crumbs, and licking my palms clean. This was certainly not too much to ask. I must have mashed hundreds of ants underfoot on the lower floor, where the Duncans went out of their way to step on them too, and the rooms of which were regularly sprayed with a broad-spectrum pesticide called Blast (there was also some fear of roaches and silverfish at the Duncan’s in those days).

  Thus nearly everything I did in my waking hours was forbidden, which added the guilt of broken regulations to my continuing shame as a de facto malingerer goldbricking on the proceeds of a willed mishap. Sometimes, athirst in the insomniac nights to which an inactive life increasingly doomed me, I would creep downstairs for some ice. I dislike drinking whiskey neat. I took every precaution possible against awakening the Duncans on these nocturnal excursions, after of course ascertaining that they were in fact asleep, which was easy to tell from the respiratory duet with which they obliged. Having paused at their closed bedroom door to this end, I would then proceed quietly on down in my flannel bathrobe, whose capacious pockets held all the ice cubes I needed plus any available cold cuts, pickles and other délicatesse I might care to take back in quantity to my lair. The hinges of my own door I kept lubricated with contraceptive jelly.

  When I had telephoned to order my second quart of bourbon and saw the empty bottle staring at me, I realized I had another problem on my hands, that of disposal. This time when the delivery man handed the new bottle through the door I handed the empty one back to him.

  “There’s no deposit on these.”

  “There’s no deposit on these?”

  “Not on whiskey empties, no.”

  “Well, take it anyway, and here’s a little extra something for you, my good man.” Our exchanges had something of the surreptitious flavor of Prohibition days, I guess, though, for his part, he probably suspected he was delivering merchandise to some sort of disorderly house, or perhaps private sanatarium.

  I filled my pockets with ice and, settled down in bed with a fine highball at elbow, did some work on “Christmas at the Whorehouse.” It was a long narrative in ballad quatrains that told the story of a cruel father who drove his daughter out of the house for some minor wrong and then, years later, deserted by his wife for his tyrannical behavior, sought solace in a brothel one lonely Christmas, to find his daughter there. Writing sob ballads was (apart from the value of all hobbies as offering a relief from the rigors of reality) an extension of my interest in collecting them. I had by now amassed quite a library of records, a few of which I played on my portable phonograph that afternoon when I found composition bogging down. It was, on the whole, a pleasantly lazy and relaxing afternoon.

  This whole fabric of existence, so painstakingly woven and so meticulously sustained, like a prolonged perfect crime, suddenly began to unravel and disintegrate without a hint of warning.

  I was left alone at my lunch in the dining room, one afternoon during the second week of my confinement, when Mrs. Duncan excused herself, explaining that she had some shopping to do before going to work and would clean up when she returned. I was grateful for the peace, Mrs. Duncan having developed the habit of hanging about and talking after serving my food. I had come to cherish my solitude, to the point of disparaging all potential lodgers on whom I laid eyes. I had remarked that a woman who had just inspected the still vacant room looked to me like a Lesbian. Mrs. Duncan replied, rather self-righteously, that tenants were not barred from her premises on grounds of nationality.

  Left alone, I began to scratch under my cast with my table fork. Anyone who has ever had a limb so imprisoned knows this frustration, which can send the victim into a frenzy. I had found the best implement for such emergencies to be a wire coat hanger, which can be bent into a variety of surgical shapes, but I had none at hand here, with the result that in trying to reach the spot where I itched I pushed the fork down too far and couldn’t get it out again. I tried to fish it out with a knife, which only made matters worse. In fact, that too was lost. The end of the handle kept slipping from between my thumb and forefinger, like a wet pip, just beneath the top of the cast, till it was too far down to recover. In a fit of pique, I seized my spoon and thrust that down into the cast also. “Get in there then,” I said, “if that’s what you want.” I had no doubt I would recover them all quite readily with the coat hanger, which turned out not to be the case.

  With an odd laugh, I set to work assembling my stock of provisions for the night. Suddenly parched for beer, I had ordered two cans from my vintner, due at the appointed hour also with a fresh quart of booze. I stuffed the pockets of my trousers and robe with enough ice cubes to keep one can cold in the bathroom wash basin while I drank the first, or to chill both if they arrived warm. The problem of pressing on the delivery man the empty beer cans could be faced when the time came. For snacks, I took a few slices of the ever-present pumpernickel and a can of sardines which I located so far back in the recesses of a kitchen cabinet that I was sure it had been forgotten and would not be missed. The sardines I lashed to one leg with a stout rubber band. In order to add to my store several stalks of crisp celery and a scallion or two left over from my lunch, I set them on top of my head and tied them with the cord of my bathrobe, which I knotted under my chin like a maiden tying on a bonnet. There was more to this than the instinct of self-preservation, or self-dramatization either. It was a kind of protest—the passionate outcry of honyocks everywhere. Viewed in that light, my behavior from here on became a kind of self-laceration, the urge to define pli
ght by deliberate monstrosity. After pocketing a drumstick, I popped two or three ice cubes into my mouth for extra measure, hunched myself between my crutches, and, grasping the handles, propelled myself toward the front vestibule.

  As I reached it, the door opened and Mrs. Duncan entered, her arms laden with provisions of her own, in the more conventional form of grocery sacks. I had misunderstood her. I had thought she meant she was going to shop downtown before proceeding directly to work, not that she was going to the food market and would drop off her purchase at home first.

  It would be hard for us to say which of us was the more surprised. We both stopped in our tracks. I smiled, as best I could with my cheeks bulging, and mumbled something.

  “Professor Waltz, what on earth,” she said, standing aside to let me pass, for I had resumed my clomping if for no other reason than to get her behind me so we would not have to look at one another. I mumbled again, this time gagging, and with a spluttering cough disgorged the three ice cubes. One of them shot against the opposite wall, the other two dropping at my feet. I looked down at them with an expression of curiosity, as though I had never seen them before. “Well, of all the … I just thought I’d … And there’s always so …”

  Mrs. Duncan set her parcels on a living room table and marched back to the vestibule, where she stood, arms folded and lips compressed, and watched me back up the stairs on my hind end. When I had gone halfway, my eyes resolutely lowered, she said:

  “And this is what goes on under my roof. This is how I am repaid for my kindness.”

  “If I could only …” I picked up my crutches and hurled them the remaining distance up the stairs and even some length down the hall. As I toiled along on my seat, Mrs. Duncan shook her head with the same look of sorrowing dismay, more for the ice cubes and what reprehensible use they clearly implied than for the foodstuffs stolen from one part of the house and eaten in another from which we were trying to keep vermin. I thudded along on my behind to my door, swiveled into it and disappeared into my room, cursing the day that had ever brought me here.