Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  At the other end of the counter, the open part of the U, the door into the kitchen swung open and the red face of a waiter appeared through a font of steam. "Kostyk!" he called, and a man across from Charles looked up.

  "Varenyky," Kostyk said in an ecclesiastical bass, and made a gesture to pour something over it.

  The waiter disappeared into the kitchen with a shout. Another waiter, a wiry, bald-headed fellow with long ear lobes, stood at the shining urns in the center of the counter, talking to a customer while he drew a glass of coffee, and then a third came up to the stainless-steel condiment stand next to the urns, placed a stack of plates on its top, hurried to the cash register at the head of the counter, slammed down keys that popped "95" up in a window, and let the drawer strike his stomach and rebound. They were always busy in here, always in a rush, and their even-tempered nature as they went about their work made Charles want to climb the counter, tie a white towel around his waist, and go at it for free.

  Through the glass doors of the condiment stand he could see recessed trays of cole slaw, sliced cucumbers, pickled beets, sour cream, and rice pudding with raisins in it, but no hunger stirred in him. Somebody had written on the misted glass of the window opposite with a fingertip, but the message was dripping now, a hieroglyph, and it seemed relevant to him that he couldn't read it.

  He'd meant to be an actor, and on the day he arrived in the city, before even beginning to look for a place to live, had stuffed his luggage into a locker in Grand Central and gone to a matinee of Burton's Hamlet. Burton seemed unfocused, stone-faced, visionary and abstracted, and, indeed, perhaps part of his mind kept going to the crowd that lined the street outside the theater, hoping to get a glimpse of his recent wife, Elizabeth (or so a mounted policeman told Charles), when she came to fetch him at the stage door in her limousine. The supporting cast wasn't much better than most of the actors Charles had worked with in college. Horatio and Claudius and the Queen were excellent in themselves. But every time Polonius appeared onstage, Charles groaned in his seat; this Polonius moved in a hokey shuffle, a sham-darky breaking in a new pair of slippers, and gave off a boredom that bored, reading his succulent and pompous, mellifluous lines as if chatting with a crony on the street corner. Charles left the theater with a headache, and still carried the impression that Laurence Olivier was somewhere in the cast that afternoon that went into night.

  He bought copies of Backstage and began to go to try-outs, open tryouts, as they were called, or cattle calls, which were shamelessly political and were conducted in storerooms and lofts so shabby he was embarrassed for the people in charge (for Broadway tryouts one had to have an agent, and it was impossible to get an agent unless one had been in a Broadway play), and besides, he felt that if he was as good an actor as he believed himself to be, then he'd be discovered somehow, without having to endure such unpleasantness. So he stopped attending tryouts and sat in his room and read plays and re-rehearsed all the roles he'd ever done, ignoring neighbors' knocks on the walls (Caliban got pretty noisy), and when his money started running out, he felt neither over-anxiousness nor panic; he expected to be doing a lead on Broadway soon.

  Everything else he'd expected to discover in the city— knowledge his small-town background hadn't been able to supply, ceaseless excitement, sympathetic souls of his own temperament, wild sex—he hadn't discovered, and he was beginning to suspect this was due to some flaw in him, perhaps because his father, when he'd heard he was dropping out of college with only one semester to go, had said there must be something "damn wrong" with him; either that or what he heard a stranger on a bus say in conversation—"In New York, you know, if you don't have the cash, you're out of it"—was the truth. Or the truth, if there was such a rare and radiant, luxurious surety, lay lost somewhere between.

  One Sunday he was walking through the Wall Street district, awed by the buildings lined along streets so narrow they could have been Hyatt's, and so deserted it seemed an air-raid alarm had been sounded, when a matronly woman came around a corner, breathless, and asked where she could find the entrance to the BMT. "I'm sorry, ma'am," he said, in his flat Midwestern accent. "I couldn't say. In fact, I'm sort of lost myself. I—" She laid her hand on his sleeve and said, "Honey, you don't have to say to me. I know just how you feel. I'm from Brooklyn, too." And once on Park, feeling the resilience of his twenty-three years releasing him from the fact that it was fall and he had no job or acting roles yet, he began to trot along and then broke into a full-fledged sprint, and suddenly people began flattening themselves against buildings and diving into doorways, as though he were an armed robber or assassin on the loose. He didn't run in the streets any more after that.

  He hadn't seen Neil or Vi since that surrealistic summer day, and the one time he'd seen Jackie, near Times Square, she'd looked frightened and pursued and kept glancing over her shoulder, her hands performing in the air between them, and said she'd heard that Neil had smashed up an IBM machine and been kicked out of the Army as psycho for that. He saw Hap nearly every day and occasionally bought a nickel bag from him, but decided he'd better give up on dope for a while; once when he was high he spent three hours rearranging his room and fell asleep, and when he woke and saw his arrangement staring back at him, he knew he'd gone mad, at the least.

  The taciturn, self-conscious Charles Neumiller he hated ("cursed with the Germanic knack of being stiff, humorless, and on a constant search for the formula or platitude to classify everything," as he expressed it to himself in a German accent; possessed of a "grotesque sense of decorum," as a friend put it) should have become, through the influence of the city, an easy-going and urbane, if not debonair, extroverted ladies' man and sought-out conversationalist. But he still had his same flaws and fears, his likes and dislikes, his weekend drunks, his dissatisfaction; and his reserve and aloofness grew each day: the press of anonymous people, the millions of them, made him feel that if he extended himself beyond who he was, he would, like a droplet falling in a sea, be annihilated. So he had

  no friends or lovers, and was on speaking terms with only a few people at the office where he worked. He was a delivery boy.

  The one time he'd been laid, by an innocent-looking, seventeen-year-old from Queens, he'd picked up crabs and a bad case of clap that went to acute prostatitis, and had to endure a two-week series of shots, in case he'd picked up anything worse, and the antibiotic, Bicillin, was so thick it rode inside the muscle of his buttock like a wadded cloth, putting pressure on his hip socket—so painful that after one of the shots, on a day when he hadn't eaten again, he started to faint in the subway, and might have, if the woman beside him hadn't taken his arm, and said, "Are you all right, son?"

  "No," he said. "Yes," he said, and then got off at the next stop and went to the roof of the RCA building (why, he didn't know) and stared over its edge for an hour. The height put him out of focus for the rest of the week, and when he went into a small park that same day, near the mayor's mansion, he discovered that the silky tails of the squirrels there were transparent, and could be seen through to trees, ground, grass, and sky—a miracle performed out of the impermanent air, it seemed, and he knew he was close to a source that would help him in the kind of life he'd choose to lead.

  He saw the girl from Queens a few days later, and told her what he had, which must be what she had, because— And she said, "Oh, yeah? Hmmm, I thought it felt sort of funny down there. We can't ball then, huh?"

  His neighbors began to respond to Caliban with a melting pot of language as colorful as Shakespeare's; why had he chosen this profession anyhow, and hadn't he chosen it to begin with because he felt it would please his mother if she were still living, or alive in some form? Perhaps he should have been a lawyer—act every day for high fees; or a salesman (insurance?)—use his acting experience to bring in commissions; or a musician—he could improvise songs on the baritone as soon as he learned to regulate his embouchure, and played the right tones not from sheet music, which he couldn't read, but by gaugin
g the distance from one note to another on the staff; or a painter—the summer he graduated from high school he painted, in the space of two weeks, five large canvases, and felt sexual pleasure in the simple act of rubbing his brush in paint and then over the canvas (Masonite, actually, reversed for its rough texture) and an unearthly exuberance in watching colors bloom beyond mere color, ping and swoon, and take on the shape of his imaginings, and when he'd brought a painting to college and hung it in his dormitory cubicle, a senior in art wanted to know where he'd bought it (he'd constructed a fancy frame for it) and how much it had cost. Or a writer.

  Why not? He'd always read poetry and novels and biographies, and had even written a few poems on his own; Tim wrote, their father was always writing, or talking about writing, and writing didn't require any special training or superfluous trappings, or the approval of other people, or their presence, and it was an occupation he could work at every day instead of sitting around his room reciting other people's lines. He got out a letter tablet and pencil and lay on his stomach on the bed. But what about? He thought of a few of Tim's pieces he'd seen, about his mother and North Dakota, of the serenity of his early life and the upheaval after, and of a notion he'd been carrying from his first year in college, and wrote:

  A psychologist or poet I suppose would find deep meaning in the fact that I'm writing this down exactly a week after it began, at exactly the same hour. But that's foolishness. Since Edward is away at Fr. Garhopher's playing pinochle, it is only convenience.

  I've evaded it long enough and if I keep up at this rate I will evade it forever. That would be wrong.

  Last Friday Denny and Ronnie were playing with the Dibson boys in our back yard. I heard an argument and went to the kitchen window. They were contesting the death of Jimmy Dibson. He's the one with the strangely big head. Although I’ve asked them to please keep away from games of violence, in particular the one they call War, it keeps creeping into their play like water into a sponge. I’m afraid for these boys. They have war in their hearts. The threat of total destruction — the atomic bomb — was forced into their lives. They were born under it. Theirs will be a strange generation, cold and distant, without deep feelings, incapable of any strong action other than violence and what is torn loose from them by hysteria. And how can we expect more? What raises such a threat to them can't be separated from their lives, and for them each person will carry within him the possibility of destruction. Afraid for their emotions, their deepest thoughts, their inner beings, they will r emain detached and on the defensive.

  It's impossible to expect them to separate this threat from people. The ability to do so is a fault in itself, as strange and unnatural as those huge white tongues of fungus that stick out of the trunk of a tall healthy tree. I think of how I was affected as a child when I stood in a patch of sunlight in the forest gathering blueberries or blackberries and turned up to see one above me, gray and glowing in the shadow of the leaves, clamped onto the bark.

  They were playing War.

  The words had appeared on the page as if falling straight from his mind. He hadn't done any crossing out, even, until toward the end. It was a journal his mother was keeping. But what next? The incident she mentioned in her first paragraph, the one from a week ago, and the one he was leading up to, was his father announcing that the family might move to Illinois; this seemed the turning point of their closed world. He'd got off the track in that paragraph about the bornb, which was his notion from college, but that particular section was so good it had to stay, right? Then again, did it really sound like his mother? Would she have thought that? Was this the way she'd keep a journal? Would she keep one? Or did that make any difference? He read the page again and with those thoughts behind his eyes it didn't seem as firm as before. And his mother had never spent any of her childhood near a forest. Oh, well, nobody else knew that. And he liked the part about the fungus, which had taken some work. Then he noticed that the fungus was white the first time and gray the next. Well the shadow. But could a journal in which a forest was mentioned be set in North Dakota? Perhaps it might be better to compose a journal from a more personal point of view. This time the writing came harder—it was difficult to even move the pencil—and he kept crossing out false starts, transposing words, substituting others, putting back the old ones, consulting his paperback dictionary, blacking out entire phrases to hide them, and then whole sentences (conscious all the while of how the sun lay warm on his forearm), and finally, after more than an hour's work, ended with:

  To begin: My name is Karl Vogelwede. I've not yet acted a scene, not to mention a role, successfully; that is, utterly for myself. Even alone I've never acted as I'd prefer to; even then I feel the influence of an audience and go against my better judgment to please. This same absurd self-awareness stultified my religious inclinations as a child. Because of the manner in which I was brought up, in the Roman Catholic faith — the nuns always telling us God observed and looked over everything we did — because of this I felt the presence of a deity persistently, and, feeling it, merely said prayers which I presumed would placate it. I never prayed what I sincerely felt. (Or was it that I was so conscious of Self it was impossible to reach God, if there is one?)

  He felt like getting drunk. This was sheer, sheer revelation on every sort of level and plane. He could understand now how his father must have felt during all those years, trying to make sense on paper of the experiences and memories he carried, made more dense and complex with the pressure of time. He washed, put on clean pants, a suit jacket, and was nearly out the door when he came back to the bed, picked up the tablet, and looked at the paragraph again. He read it three times, feeling a fever start in his cheeks, and then took a pencil, crossed it out with a big slash, and wrote below, "What you need is instant fame." And then he went out and got drunk, so drunk he had to continue sipping beer for two days, tapering off slowly to ease the tension and pain, and hadn't tried writing since.

  The waiter, broad and red-faced, his straight black hair going gray, his sleeves rolled up to expose muscular arms—a peasant transplanted—came waddling up and put a glass of water down in front of him. "Wot?" he asked.

  "The meat loaf," Charles said. "And some coffee." How come they never served him his coffee in a glass? Should he ask them?

  He opened the book of poetry. When depression came, settling down on him like the soot that settled over the snow of the city, smothering his senses, all he could do was read, in order to forget where he was. He was tired of the politics of the theater, of working as a delivery boy, walking world-renowned streets on an empty stomach, of living from hand to mouth and more often than not, or so it seemed lately, biting the hand, his hand, that fed him. He saw the plain, where the sky touched the flat land in every direction, blue against green, and the unopened openness of it now seemed a fabrication of his marginalia-oriented and not always perfect memory, and he missed the Midwest, where there were wide lawns, trellises, ditches, rows of hedge, and brick walks lined with elms whose leafy branches canopied the street and spoke in the air above him, making him feel surrounded by a secret, or the source and center of some secret that arrived in a whirlwind of leaves and left as a sign to him one gray glove. Now, when he stepped out of his room, he felt he'd stepped into a bigger room filled with elbows. There was no grass. There were walls on every side. There was a floor made up of asphalt, slate, and sometimes sheets of steel; in front of a few banks it was marble. The smog-darkened sky often made the tall buildings look decapitated, and he came to understand, in a literal sense, "low ceiling."

  And when he sought refuge in a park, threading his way through a stream of taxicabs and bicycles, and hacks sometimes, and cars, and stepped into the landscaped area squeezed between walls of brick like an afterthought, he saw externals that resembled trees and grass, but they looked so out of place, yet grew with such deep-green unhealthy profusion in the surroundings, it was as if he'd stepped from a bad dream onto the stage setting for a catastrophe that would be
filmed for its apocalyptic content, and then the film destroyed. Even the pigeons there carried, s he saw it, the municipal taint; many were molting, exposing pink heads and pink backs to the bad air, making him imagine they carried all kinds of diseases, and he fed them only out of pity for the poverty of himself.

  At home they'd be making preparations for Christmas, going shopping alone and together, setting up and trimming the tree, a task Susan helped with now; stringing up lights in the gables, wreaths in the windows, bells on the doors and mistletoe's pointed leaves and pearly berries above them. Poison. The girls would find the gifts their father had hidden away (he never put them out, knowing they'd open them), and Marie would spend days in the kitchen baking pastries and pies and cakes. The nimbus of serenity around Jerome at this time. Tim's tuneful seasonal turnings on the old upright piano.

  No, Laura and Ginny were with them, and there'd be a difference in the way they celebrated now. This was the first Christmas he wouldn't be home, and it was Marie he'd miss; he'd learned that he missed different ones during different seasons, as though each had shaped a particular part of the cycle of his life, and helped form of it a year; in the fall Jerome, in the summertime Tim, Susan in the spring, and Marie in the winter and cold. Marie's presence, merely her presence, made the holidays more festive for him. He hadn't even sent her a gift. A few months ago he'd received a letter from Vince, Vince of all the relations, and in it was a twenty-dollar bill, and at the end of the letter, this: "How I hope you make a go of it at acting, Charles, so dear to me."

  His food came and he put aside the book, only partly conscious of the poem he'd been reading, and wondered where he'd turn when he lost the ability to submerge himself in words. Somebody was tapping on his forearm. The man two stools down with the notebook nodded at the collection of poetry. "That's yours?" he asked. "Yes."