The Size of the World

by Joan Silber

  SO THAT WAS OUR BEGINNING. What an interesting creature she was, and full of opinions (Harry Truman was just a ham actor, Betty Grable was homely, colds could be cured by eating onions). I gave her enough to live on, and I was a much more adorable guy than I’d been in years, less sullen, more breezy. “Hello, chicken,” I would say when I called her after being on the road. “Hello, big shot,” she would say. She could be satiric and flirty at the same time, a good way to deal with a codger like me. We got along very well.

  We weren’t always in the hotel or at bars either. We had a favorite restaurant, where she always told me I held my chopsticks like a trained goat. She liked movies, especially thrillers, and she’d gasp or let out a faint shriek in the dark, and I’d say, “Be brave, Pearl Girl.” Pearl was probably not really her name either, but it was for me. In the third year I got her her own apartment, a nice place with old wainscoting and big windows. It was really more than I could afford, but I didn’t want to nickel-and-dime us out of staying together. She sent her son away whenever I came to visit—that was her own business, wasn’t it?—and his room was kept shut, though I was paying for that room. Once I tripped over a box of Cray-olas, but he was otherwise a remarkably invisible figure.

  I never came to see her without calling first, so it surprised me one afternoon when Pearl was making tea for us in the kitchen and a four-year-old boy walked in out of nowhere. “Oh,” Pearl said. “Want to meet Lincoln?”

  I shook his hand, which he thought was funny. He was a fat-cheeked kid in short pants. Was he all Chinese? Half Chinese? Why was I checking that out first?

  I pulled a dime out of his ear, I made my index finger fall off entirely and then grow back, I let him guess which hand had the Life Savers candy. Uncle tricks, which he was young enough to puzzle over. He insisted that I reperform them.

  Pearl’s gaze on us was like an X-ray beam in a Superman comic, a slice of blazing light. She said, “Don’t let him keep the dimes.” How cool she always was.

  IT WASN’T ANY BIG deal getting used to having Lincoln around. He was not allowed to be pesky—he had his minutes with me when I arrived, our goofy boy stuff, and then he was sent out of sight, and sent sooner if he was loud or whiny. I was her friend, sure, but I was also her employer. Pearl could not have loved her boy more (her work had been chosen as a way to keep him) but she believed that children had to be instructed in the hardness of the world or they would perish in hellish ways.

  I had my own apartment anyway (which Pearl never saw) and I was an early riser from my days on the road, so sometimes I made it out of Pearl’s place before Lincoln was up. But usually he trailed me to the door, an imp in Roy Rogers pajamas. When was I coming back? How far was I going? He made attempts to whisper, breathing his kid’s breath at me. If his mother woke up, she carted him away.

  PEARL, EVER IMPECCABLE, never talked about him when we were out. Sometimes she asked about my work—“Do the people try to bargain for their hardware? Can they cheat you?”—but mostly she talked lightly about the news of the day, whether Queen Elizabeth had proposed to her husband or vice versa and who cut Mamie Eisenhower’s bangs that way. She didn’t laugh easily but dumb puns sometimes took her by surprise.

  I did ask myself, was there something wrong with me that this arrangement suited me so well? What did it mean to be a man who had never married and never would? My friends thought I was just another sly dog, which wasn’t exactly what I wanted to be. Pearl and I understood each other as well as people ever do, though a good deal was left out of it. Of Lincoln’s father, for instance, I only knew that he’d been in the Navy, stationed in a town she wasn’t naming. “Not interesting,” she would say. All over the world people lived in families, and I had kept myself out of this most natural of fates. In Siam, Noo Kiang had gone away weeping when I wouldn’t marry her. Pearl, however, was not shedding any tears. She could have done a lot worse than me, and had.

  Since she kept her mouth shut on a wealth of subjects, Pearl didn’t need to bother (as far as I could tell) to invent any lies. Her particular spirit was above that sort of mincey ingratiation. Whatever you could say about our connection, it had the merits of truthfulness. I had a greater horror of fibbing the older I got. You saw how pathetic people looked trying to believe themselves, what shaky ground they lived on, how little it got them in the end.

  IN THE LATE FIFTIES, U-Screw kept sending me to Arizona. I was the rep who knew aircraft the best, and there were a couple of growing companies out there making the guts of engines or the piloting systems. I always liked the last part of the long drive from California, where the land gave up being walls of rock and settled into desert, bare and reddish, with the cacti looking like a western’s stage set. I hadn’t meant to have such a citified life, and driving was my time on the trail. I’d arrive at the companies’ offices very calm and clear, a quiet guy who knew what he was saying, and I did well on those trips.

  I was always trying to get Lincoln interested in airplanes, but he was mostly obsessed with music, especially country music, of all things. Who ever heard of a Chinese boy who loved Hank Williams? Who wrote letters to Chet Atkins? Pearl wouldn’t let me give him presents, only money, which she put away in an account for him. She did get him a small crappy record player when he was eleven, and he was warned to play it softly in his room. Through his door you could hear Patsy Cline crying about how she went out walking after midnight. It was hell (in my opinion) when he discovered bluegrass and thought Earl Scruggs was amazing.

  Pearl thought I should put money in a college account for him, but she thought I had more money than I did. I was a salesman living as if he were Daddy Warbucks, paying rent on two households. “Ever hear the expression,” I said, “you can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip?”

  “Who’s a turnip?” she said. “You’re a lemon, that’s what you are.”

  Pearl was beautiful as ever, but passing thirty had made her angry with me. She wouldn’t have said I’d robbed her of youth, but something had. Her chances were running out. We still had our old camaraderie, but it counted for less.

  When she snickered at my teasing we were equals, but when she told me the heating bill was higher she was a cagey market vendor cajoling a stingy big shot. I thought I might be doing her a favor if I let her have more time without me. I had always lost to richer men. Fair enough, or so I tried to think. I thought of Corinna, with her long invectives against the tyranny of the dollar. (“It wants to turn everything into its ugly self,” she said. I used to say, “Go be a monk then and never carry it.”)

  One night, in a decent attempt to be festive again, I took Pearl to a pricey restaurant with Polynesian décor—fishnets and stuffed sharks on the wall, drinks served out of pineapples—and I hated it. Something about it made me ashamed to have ever been a colonial. Pearl ate her pupu platter with only mild amusement, but I railed against the fake tribal carvings turned into party trappings, the invitation to be tropical conquerors taking their pleasure like children. Who did I think I was, a man in his sixties with a tender-faced mistress, getting offended by Trader Vic’s?

  I COULD SEE THE FIGURE I cut, nothing to brag about, and I didn’t want to stand in Pearl’s way. It was an odd sort of sacrifice, to stay away more and more from Pearl, but I seemed to have to do it. I took longer trips to other states, I kept indoors at home and watched TV like the rest of the country. I missed the boy.

  Not that I didn’t pop in every now and then—I was still paying the rent—but only at very neutral times of day. Anyone seeing us would’ve taken me for an out-of-town uncle. I gathered from certain things the boy said that there were other men around. One of them took him on a duck hunting trip when he was fifteen, a week near some lake. “He’s so lazy,” Pearl said about Lincoln. “The world’s been handed to him on a silver platter.” It had?

  After the duck hunter was out of the picture, Pearl did the last thing I expected, she signed up for a course in bookkeeping. She did this somewhat grimly, out of a feeling th
at you couldn’t depend on anything. When I asked her how she liked the course, she said, “It is what it is.” The next time I saw her, a couple of restaurants had hired her to go over their books in case the IRS had a nosy spell. She said, “Now I know the secrets buried in every won-ton.” You could see she was brightening a little.

  I HAD NEVER known her to be much of a Buddhist, but she went to a temple in the neighborhood to coax Heaven for Lincoln’s success in his school exams. He was a perfectly smart kid, but he didn’t bother with subjects he didn’t like, which was a lot of the curriculum. She wanted him to get into a community college or a tech school at least. She certainly didn’t want him getting drafted. Pearl had him wearing a charm around his neck all during exam week—a carp turning itself into a dragon, success in transformation.

  I WAS IN ARIZONA a lot that winter. U-Screw had a new product they were pushing hard, and they were eager to underbid all the companies trying to get their wares into planes being built to soar over Vietnam. My sister hated the war (well, who liked it?), and told me what I earned was blood money. I said the U.S. had to watch its back. She said we were only greedy and the domino theory was hooey.

  And why wouldn’t I want the reward of a fat commission? My softness for Pearl had kept me from any kind of savings. The new product pretty much sold itself. It was a brilliantly cheap screw in a steel alloy with a new and astoundingly tough protective coating and the impact strength tests looked very good and so did the shear testing. I had to present it to a bunch of engineers in a gloomy office, pointing to the shining evidence in my sample case, while they asked smart questions and had to hear me say, “As a man who’s fought in a war.” And two weeks later the contract from Bydex Guidance Systems came back signed.

  MEANWHILE, THE AMULET hadn’t done a thing for Lincoln’s performance in school. He said the teachers didn’t like him. “Why would they?” Pearl said. She issued orders against his seeing certain friends who were never going anywhere and only wanted to drag Lincoln down with them.

  “That won’t work,” I said.

  “Is anyone asking you?” she said. “I don’t think so. Just because I take your money doesn’t mean I listen to your opinions.”

  We were both stunned when she said this, and we stared at each other in bitter recognition. She had always been decorous—not fawning, but always offering the rights due my station; I suppose I thought it was a matter of honor. But now we were inside the rawness of money, the acid clarity of power. Pearl wanted me to know just how far she was bought, where the bargain ended. I had to ask myself then if things might have been different between us if I’d never paid her a dime. Not that she would have talked to me without my dimes, a man my age, but I hated money at that moment and was sorry I’d ever had more than Pearl had. I was disgusted by the taint of obedience around it, the notion that Pearl had had to oblige me to live. I was sick with resentment against money for what it had done to me.

  IT WAS A MOMENT we couldn’t undo, and Pearl probably wasn’t surprised when I really did keep away after that. I kept on paying her rent; that was my honor, it seemed. I was fine. I went back to reading Tacitus, whom I’d had to read as a boy, and I liked Mary Renault and Nero Wolfe.

  In the late spring Pearl phoned me to say that Lincoln was threatening to enlist in the Navy after he graduated. He wanted the Navy because his father had been in it.

  “He doesn’t know anything,” Pearl said. “I gave birth to a dope. A dope moron goof-off.”

  Even when she was crying, Pearl cursed like a four-year-old.

  Pearl herself was in favor of the war. She hated Communists, for what they had done to China, and she thought that killing was all that certain people understood. This did not mean she wanted her son anywhere near the killing. She saw no contradiction in this.

  She must have railed and berated him for days before he left, but once he was gone, Pearl tried to be okay about it. I gave her credit for that. And she had some basis for cheer. First Lincoln was in training on a base in San Diego, looking very photogenic in his white sailor’s cap, and then when they sent him overseas, he lived inside a ship, a destroyer, that floated off the south coast of Vietnam. He told his mother that his feet didn’t touch land, except for recreational visits to Saigon. “He says it’s boring,” Pearl said. “Isn’t that the best thing you’ve ever heard?”

  There were soldiers in my war too who were never under fire, even in France. A person could have luck. I tried to picture the coast of the South China Sea, where Lincoln was, farther east than I’d ever been, and I wondered if being a young man in Asia had any good in it for him.

  OUTSIDE PHOENIX THERE was a roadhouse where they knew me, and I got so ripped one night I left my sample case in the parking lot while I was pissing in the bushes. When I came back the next day, some joker on a motorcycle had run over it and flattened a trail into the mangled leather. I unzipped the battered case that night, and I had to laugh at the wreck it was—the foam padding mashed, and screws all over, with the protective plating chipped off some of them. Silvery flakes in the foam, and the screws striped with darker patches of naked metal. Too much party for the hardware.

  Plating had chipped off? They were screws for aerospace, they weren’t for doll furniture. How much did anybody’s motorcycle weigh? The tensile strength of these screws was supposed to have been tested at thousands of pounds per square inch. I kept turning them over in my hands, hoping for better news.

  How many of these screws had I sold? The next morning I called the vice president for design and development, whose secretary would hardly speak to me (a sales rep, a nobody from no place) until I invoked the term defect. Later that day I made my little speech and dumped an envelope of chipped screws on the man’s desk.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Holy Jesus. No.”

  “There’re a lot of them in planes too,” I said.

  “Not anymore there won’t be,” he said. “Who let this through? Poor old U-Screw. It was always a good company.”

  “They’ll recall all of them?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Jesus. Of course.”

  WITHIN A WEEK they discontinued the screws, with a suggested alternative at somewhat higher cost. A manager at Bydex a few months later called me to ask why he couldn’t reorder the old ones. “Are you crazy?” I said.

  No one had bothered to tell anyone at Bydex to take all the screws out of their guidance systems. “They’re in planes,” he said. “They’re gone.”

  “You have to get ’em back,” I said.

  “Who’s you?” he said. “Not me. I’m not the one. And, with all due respect, no one’s going to do it just because Owen the salesman said so.”

  IT WAS THEN I understood the muck I was standing in. I had sold those screws so well, I had pitched them so intelligently. We all knew where the planes were, didn’t we? The white skies of Asia. I wanted to go at once to Pearl, waiting at home for Lincoln’s letters, and kneel at her feet, to flatten myself full-length and touch my forehead to the ground three times. In Siam once a year the senior monks begged the youngest monks, with prostrations, to forgive them for ever misleading them. I had tricked myself, I had tricked all of us.

  THERE HAD TO BE records of which planes had the screws in them. Every company had a whole department of bean counters who kept track of those things. It wasn’t impossible to hunt down the rotten screws and just screw in better ones. The drama of this heroic effort could make the company look good. U-Screw goes to the ends of the earth! The phrases for this plan grew in my head—I thought I could sell it, and I wrote a detailed, persuasive letter to the CEO of U-Screw, who was in Schenectady. I consider correction imperative, I wrote, as a veteran myself.

  An attorney for the company sent a brief, friendly response, praising my concern and explaining how thoroughly everything had already been handled—a fully corrected screw is now available, to meet market needs—and suggesting no further thought on the subject was necessary from me. I wasn’t tuan here, that had
never been clearer. What was I, then? A cog in a corrupt machine, and what was the big news about that?

  AND I WAS STILL going to work every day, driving the highways in my silver-blue Pontiac. I had a new sample case, brown cordovan. I had never been a showy salesman, but it was hard to present even the most basic facts now (facts, my eye). I sounded decrepit and mumbling, or I whipped myself into doing better and I spoke like a souped-up jackass. A man has to make a living. I had only to keep my head down and just put one foot in front of the other, but I wasn’t as good at it as I might’ve thought.

  The problem was the television. It showed too much of the war. To the rest of the country the rain pouring down on rice paddies looked like the set for a movie called the war, but to me it looked like a place I knew. Once when the camera showed a gathering in a village, women and children squatting under a lean-to thatched with palm, I caught myself looking for Noo Kiang. Who would be a grandmother now anyway. It didn’t help when I turned off the TV either. I had my own silver screen of the brain, my own beams and pulses and signals.

  AND HOW HAD IT HAPPENED, that a company let screws that lethally crappy be put on the market? Someone must have known or guessed—my trial by motorcycle couldn’t have been the first sign. I spent a lot of time thinking through the chain of steps. Engineers in the company must have known—not right away, of course, but they knew. Maybe they said it would take another six months to figure out the problem, and somebody in management thought that was too long, the product was already listed or already selling, and anyway probably (the manager thought) it would be okay. The more he thought of how far things had gone, the more he distrusted the prissy obsessiveness of engineers and the surer he was that the screws would be fine. There were more and more men like that, who really, really didn’t want trouble and whose reasoning was habitually abstract.