by John Hersey
Mr. Medary, having waited eight years to unload this ill-bought consignment, is seen to experience a sharp letdown. Is that all?
Oh, Macaboy says, the company will be back for more, much more, later on.
Mr. Medary asks, “What is this for, anyway?”
“A door.”
“A door? But we have ready-made doors. All you have to do is hang them.”
“I know,” Macaboy says, “but our company specializes in custom-built doors.”
Mr. Medary shakes his head. “It’ll take us a while to cut them up. Want the waste pieces? We’ll have to charge you for them.”
“Indeed I do,” Macaboy says. “But if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to pick out the lengths and place the cuts.”
Mr. Medary stretches his wild-turkey neck out to inspect Macaboy’s ponytail, as if that might explain everything.
“Our company is exceedingly labor-intensive,” Macaboy says, grinning.
MR. Medary leads the way. The display room through which they walk rouses in Macaboy an abstracted rage. Oystershell plastic toilet seats, towel racks of metal about the same gauge as Reynolds Wrap, imitation ship’s lanterns, stagecoach weather vanes, knotty-pine plywood with fake wormholes, aluminum screen doors with openwork hearts and porpoises. He wonders: Is the flow irreversible? No matter. He is soon outside in the metal-roofed lumber sheds where he can smell cured sap and believe that he feels the warmth of the decades of sunlight stored in the long fibers of tree trunks. And then his hand lies flat on a twelve-inch-wide plank of solid walnut. “Unreal!” he says.
Chapter 5
RUTH Greenhelge came to what was called dinner. From around the corner Elaine had fetched a pizza with peperoni and another with The Works. And some really bad real Chianti—they couldn’t drink California grape because of Cesar Chavez’s grape-pickers’ strike.
After dinner they talked about Bennington days—Ruth had been a “pretty good” friend there—and at one point Elaine said, “Like a smoke? I stole a nickel of Colombian red of Greg’s.”
“God, Elaine, I’d be fired in a minute.”
“Fired? You expecting Professor Ultra-Logic to bust in the door or something?”
Greenhelge, Elaine could see, had walked a hell of a mile since college. She’d been a mad-ass SDSer there, working up the daughters of corporation lawyers and shrinks and twelve-tone-scale composers to become fire-eating Fidelistas, Tupamaros, Venceremos, Congs, you name it in a foreign tongue. Crazies had come from all over New England to hear Greenhelge’s speeches because she had fantastic legs. The radicals really dug the way the female hormones rippled in those incredible satin thighs quivering out of her working-woman’s denim cutoffs; the Movement was totally man-dominated in those days. When Greenie hollered out short-order omelets of Herbert Marcuse and C. Wright Mills and Norman O. Brown she emphasized her most telling arguments with her pelvis, and the Ivy League workers of the world cheered to see the seat of social change bumping and grinding before their very eyes. No matter that her incisors were dangerous-looking—“wood-cutters,” Greg had called them. From a middle distance Greenhelge could, as they say, start a riot. Now she was wearing pantyhose and talking straight New York Times Op-Ed page. The only subject she could sing the old tunes about was Yale policy on “affirmative action”—she cared about the hiring of women, not of minorities. She couldn’t believe that Elaine had not yet found upwardly mobile employment.
“I guess I’m going to have to do something,” Elaine said, to be agreeable. “I’m going kind of stir-crazy.”
“I’m glad you’ve at least left Greg,” Greenhelge said. “There was something—I can’t put my finger on it exactly—something seedy about him.”
At this judgment Elaine felt her first real pang of missing Greg. He could do such incredible imitations—Nixon and Chou En-lai toasting each other in the Great Hall of the Revolution in Peking, with an interpreter standing between them, taking all three parts in rapid flashes, with the most beautiful quick modulations of mouth and eyebrows, from Nixon’s look-ma-I’m-changing-the-world smile, higher on the left side of the mouth than the right, to Chou’s cool stare with a drawn-down upper lip, to the interpreter’s expression of “I better get this right or my ass is chop suey.” Somehow Greg could make Chou’s eyebrows seem black and heavy, while Nixon’s little ones looked as if the IRS would get them if he didn’t backdate them.
Hooo, time to get off that stick. Change the sub. “Speaking of your prof coming through the door, I got this phone call a few nights ago,” Elaine heard herself saying. “A locksmith. He wanted to come and hang a new door and install a burglar-proof lock. I almost took him up on it. He had such a sexy line. It was so sort of comforting, when you’ve moved to a strange city.”
“Sounds like a pitchman. Watch out, honey bun.”
“It was more than that. Greenie, remember how we used to talk about—.” Elaine broke it off in midsentence. She had been about to say “openness,” and she felt a sudden wrench—two violent contrary pulls, as if a parachute had just deployed over her to end a free fall. The downward pull toward sentimentality, fed by the memory of those sheltered days when choices were as easy to come by as balls of chewing gum in a penny vending machine; and the opposing force of sharp regret, of bitter loss, of clearer vision that saw nothing much good on the landscape. Where were the hopes of those days? Where the “openness”? Where, for that matter, the anger? Why, she suddenly wondered, was her account of the Safe-T Securit-E Syst-M phone call to Mrs. Calovatto so different from her version of it to Greenhelge? Was she trying to impress each of them in a different way? Didn’t she have a mind of her own? She wished she could talk to Greg.
“Oh, shit, Greenie,” she said. “What’s made you so stuffy?”
* * *
—
ELAINE sat in her rocker with her album open on her knees. She leaned forward to look more closely at the picture of the dazzling couple: he was in an Esso pumpwinder’s shirt, and she in a Mexican serape. Thus were lightly disguised a Dartmouth senior and a Bennington junior, leaning against a beat-up VW bug. God, she had a wigged-out way of baring her teeth whenever anyone flashed an Instamatic at her! As for Greg, he had crossed his eyes and puffed out his cheeks to show his full male beauty. Ha ha.
They met at the Ice Carnival. He was straight then. She began dating him. He organized art shows in Hopkins Center with an entrepreneurial flair, looked like a rampaging Visigoth on skis, trippingly spoke six languages, took long nightly baths in loud music—the fallout of burnt calories around him was as thick as the snow on Channel 7. Yet he was so gentle with children!—had the three-year-old daughter of a poli-sci prof on his shoulders half the time. He read all over the place: Iris Murdoch, Turgenev, Ken Kesey, Hawthorne, Isaac Asimov, Erich Fromm, Mark Twain. He had studied letterpress printing with Ray Nash; he carried wizard designs in his eyeballs, but when it came to popping them out on paper his intermediary fingers always got in the act, with subtle, creative distortions that make things wobble. He did a Krishnamurti poster, stunning in concept, that made you feel, as you looked at it, as if a slight earthquake were taking place. His hair was cut short in those days: he had been campaigning for Senator McCarthy that fall, Clean for Gene. He had small eyes, with an overhanging epicanthic fold that made him look slightly, he said, gooky.
He was funny. Everything was a laugh. Everything that should have been a warning was a ha-ha.
In freshman year he had borrowed his roommate’s briar pipe and had accidentally broken it while high. He was on scholarship. His father worked in a paper mill in Saco. His sister had fallen out of her tree on a bad acid trip at Bates, ha ha ha, and the cuckoo’s nest bills had cleaned the family out; they hadn’t started with much, certainly not with Major Medical. Greg was chipping in. He hadn’t a dime to spare. So for a replacement for his friend’s pipe he stole a meerschaum at the Co-op and was caught. College probation, ha
ha.
In sophomore year he and his roommate stripped their dorm room—nothing left but four pillows on the floor, a candle stand, an incense brazier, a vase with a single carnation in it most of the time: a décor that was like an electromagnet for campus cops who got off on narky games. Bust Pot and peyote in a duffel bag of Greg’s in the bedroom, just a nothing amount.
A double-breasted pinstripe lawyer whom the dean scraped up bargained Greg a misdemeanor plea. (Loud laughter.)
In junior year he took his stand on Vietnam, turned in his draft card, was reclassified 1-A delinquent, metamorphosed into a jellyfish, recanted, took his card back, and settled for a 3-S deferment. That, she realized now and wished she had realized then, was the beginning of the end of Greg. At the time, it was all part of The Big Joke.
Between junior and senior years, Elaine and Greg went with a Slavic-studies group to Yugoslavia, Rumania, Russia. Greg loved quoting Pushkin and singing “Ochi chorniye” and crying with Russian kids they met. He told one bunch of natives on a street corner on Nevsky Prospekt in Leningrad that his group was from Mongolia and ate babies. He tried to enroll as an acting student at the Vakhtangov Theater in Moscow but was told he would have to spend a year with a lot of dusky third-worlders at Patrice Lumumba University getting sanitized, but he said, “I ain’t up for living with furriners right now, it’s the Russkies I like.”
Elaine thought of him as Mr. Magic and had begun having intercourse with him just before the snapshot was taken beside the VW. That was why the expressions in the photo were so interesting. Her parents thought of them as “going steady” until about a year and a half later, when they got wind of the mechanical termination of her pregnancy. They were unable to put into clear language what they thought after that.
In the fall of his senior year Greg ran for president of the student body, but his printed campaign fliers were vague—spoke of universal love, of government ownership of the means of production of mary jane, and of his having seen the Living Theater once in Boston. His opponent, one Stanley Clapper, had a well-thought-out program for tearing down the university brick by brick. Greg wouldn’t pat people on the back; he preferred going to the library and pulling down Mandelstam and reading reading reading. Clapper won going away, best laugh of all.
It was not so funny “living together” separately, in Hanover and Bennington, especially when Greg began expanding his consciousness chemically, and had a field of vision much taken up with whizzies, halos, and black holes. Elaine began to be aware of his flaw. He couldn’t go all the way with anything. He wore costumes—the Andover student peeked out from under the Indian headband. He talked about moving off campus but never did. He extolled the Yippie revolution of style, but obscenities were like too-hot baked potato in his mouth. His caution could not save him. Even with drugs his conviction was tinged by affectation: he talked about people who shot up with crystal and came down with smack, and he kept a plastic marijuana plant in a clay pot in his room, and he called grass by what he said was its South African name, dagga.
It was even less good together in Boston later.
In Philly after that it was a horror show. It turned out that Mr. Magic produced rabbits out of a top hat with a false crown, and he really did saw Elaine in two.
She rocked in her rocker. She wanted so much from life. Her hair fell forward like a fringe around the album. The light grew dim on the couple leaning against the dented bug.
* * *
—
SHE woke up with a certainty that she had flown into a hawk’s territory. She had heard click click click click nearby. In her living room? Her heart, hooked up to a compressor chisel, would have broken up concrete pavement. Her ears grew bigger and bigger, until they flapped in the dark like an elephant’s ears. Still they could not hear breathing, or even plastic articulations. All they could hear were the heavy rigs shifting gears for the northbound speedup on I-91. In the morning she decided she must have dreamed the stealthy movements of a prosthetic limb.
Chapter 6
MRS. Calovatto was as good as her word. After supper on Friday evening she took Elaine downstairs to meet the Plentaggers. Their apartment was a clearing hacked out of a rain forest Everything was savannah green. Huge leaves spread themselves on all fabrics. Innumerable botanical prints made the vertical surfaces seem upended garden plots rather than walls. Elaine listened for Rima’s bird-voice. The only thing that was missing from the living room was a sprinkler.
All this tropical greenery, sunstruck by a profusion of hundred-watt bulbs, made Mr. and Mrs. Plentagger look liverish, malarial. They were brimming at least with mental health, for they said yes sure they were up for taking Elaine under their wing a pleasure. Elaine felt a stab of panic. Mrs. Plentagger wrote their phone number on a lettuce-green memo pad and told Elaine not to hesitate to call.
“If we’re out you’ll get a recording,” Mr. Plentagger told her. “It’s sort of a commercial. Says”—and his voice dropped an octave—” “ ‘This is your Supalgran man. Little plant pests hate me. If you hate them you’ll love me. Please leave your name and number when you hear the signal.’ ” He looked receptive to applause.
“That’s clever,” Elaine said. “Isn’t it?” she asked Mrs. Calovatto, really needing to know.
“Homer’s such a card!” Mrs. Calovatto said.
Merle Plentagger broke into wild baritone laughter, apparently at the mere thought of some of her husband’s witticisms. “He’s poisonous!” she finally managed to croak.
Mrs. Calovatto joined in the guffawing. “He sells poison,” she shouted to Elaine between waves of laughter.
Mr. Plentagger, looking gloomy, said, “Mary tells us you have terrariums. With terrariums you can keep pretty good control, though it’s possible—I say possible—to have white fly, spider mite, mealybug. It’s possible. Mildew. Mold…”
“You better let Homer look them over,” Mrs. Calovatto said.
“My fittonia wilted,” Elaine said. “But I think it was my fault. It didn’t like me talking so much to my calathea.” No one laughed at her little joke. She felt a need for a shift of ground. “Mary,” she said, calling Mrs. Calovatto by her first name for the first time, “where are you staying on St. Thomas?”
“Place called Bluebeard’s Castle.”
“I know that place. In Charlotte Amalie. Groovy. But look, you have to go up to the outer end of the island to a place called Cinnamon Bay. For at least a day and a night. The sand is like talcum powder.” Elaine had a sudden impulse which she could not fight down. “I got my ears fucked off on that sand. Remember the abortion I was telling you about? That they used the vacuum aspirator suction method for, like I was telling you? I bought the ticket to it on that sand. Don’t miss it, Mary. Get Giulio out on that sand.”
The pesticides man cleared his throat hard, as if it were all clogged up with aphids and cockchafers.
* * *
—
AFTERNOON rays poured in her living room window through a gauze of grime. She sat looking out on pretension and its obverse. She could see, off to the sun side, a cut through to Court Street, which had been, in her opinion, renewed till it hurt: the streetway was a mall, with planting up the middle in massive concrete boxes, and the façades of the houses were tricked out in bright colors, like the faces of clowns. Elaine had walked there and didn’t like it. It was too rendered, too like a display of the latest office equipment or kitchen appliances. She much preferred the backyards she could now see on either side of the gap: rickety, cluttered, put out of mind—fine places for cats to howl and kids to pretend.
From time to time she got up to change a record; first she’d played some bluegrass, with banjos and whiny fiddles, and now she had on some high sweet gospel. Odd: she wasn’t a country girl, her farming was all in glass jars; and she certainly wasn’t churchy—the rebirth she awaited was not to be for Jesus. Of that, if of nothing else, she was s
ure. She remembered one of Greenhelge’s speeches, from way back then. How rock was man’s bag. Male supremacist energy, bang bang and not even thank-you-ma’am. All it had to say was that a good woman belonged under a man. Look at the stars, Greenie had shouted. Ever hear of boy groupies? Try to name some female instrumentalists. Two horns with Sly Stone, and two drummers, Ruth Underwood with Hamilton Face Band and Maureen Tucker with Velvet Underground. And what about the songs? Nothing but raging hard-ons, if you analyzed them: “Man and a Half,” “Born to Be Wild,” even “Do Right Woman.” “What b.s.!” Greg had said after the meeting was over. “That chick’s arbor grows sour grapes.” The stuff he used to like to hear. Led Zeppelin. The Yardbirds. B. B. King. Steppenwolf. Joe Cocker. Jeff Beck. Frank Zappa. Jefferson Airplane. Elaine’s taste had drifted away from thumping and smashing, toward more reflective sounds. She sat now by the window, pedaling her rocking chair, cantering through the universe. The yellow disk beyond the gauze didn’t seem to be in any hurry in its measurement of her assigned time.
* * *
—
THEN suddenly it was Monday, the day the Calovattos were to leave. Downstairs the other evening Mary Calovatto had said, “The Plentaggers are going to drive Giulio and I to our plane at J.F.K.” Elaine had had a restless night and had arisen early and was taking a walk under the trees in the square. As she swung to the edge of the loop toward Academy Street, she saw Mary Calovatto and Merle Plentagger walking up the sidewalk with packages in their arms. Mrs. Calovatto was looking brand new in her semitropical Ionojet slacks suit—very daring, Elaine thought, for a skirty woman. Elaine ran across the grass to the iron railing and called out, “Mary! Hey, Mary! You look great! Have a wonderful trip!”
The women’s faces whipped toward the source of the shout. Elaine saw them glance at each other for a moment. They scanned the sidewalk, up and down: there were three or four pedestrians going about their business. The two women ran very fast across the street toward Elaine, frowning up a hurricane.