A Meaningful Life (10 page)

“Wednesday,” said Lowell. Putting his mind to it, he realized that he could not, in fact, remember buying a paper yesterday; that is, he couldn't remember the act itself in the specific context of yesterday. He could remember the act well enough, but when he tried to recall doing it yesterday, he discovered that he couldn't even remember if he'd left the room except to hunt in the garbage for his birth certificate. Yet he always bought a newspaper; along with eating, going to the bathroom, and writing his book, it was one of the few things he did every day. He tried to remember if he'd gone to the bathroom yesterday. He was pretty sure he'd eaten. His wife would have seen to that. “Saturday,” he said. “Yes, of course. It slipped my mind. I mean, I was sleepy. I'm okay now.”

“Good,” said his wife. “Why don't we take a walk before it gets dark?”

Lowell numbly put on what clothes he could find, and his wife more or less led him outside. Undoubtedly because of his earlier confusion, he had the absurd impression that several buildings had been put up in the urban-renewal area since the last time he'd looked in that direction, but he put the thought right out of his mind.

That night, nothing he wrote made any sense. It didn't make any sense at all. The forms of words had overwhelmed their functions, and his head was filled with meaningless babble. It was like pronouncing “Ethiopia” too many times, until it became an intricate but purely arbitrary arrangement of sound. It happened to every word that came into his head. Hammer away as he would, all he could get down on paper was a kind of impervious nonsense; he couldn't even decide whether to use a conjunction, a semicolon, or start a new sentence, not that it mattered much. Every new sentence was as meaningless as the last. He erased holes in his paper, he inserted fresh sheets and began again, but it was as though his mind had gotten itself plugged into some kind of shortwave band where all you could get were interminable propaganda broadcasts in obscure Central European languages, alternately faint and loud, incessant. After a couple of hours of struggle, exhausted, Lowell climbed into bed with his clothes on and fell instantly asleep. He dreamed of rocks and cold oatmeal and woke up far earlier than usual, although without the clean sensation of stepping from sleep into consciousness. It was as though his shortwave had been turned down during the night, drumming away just on the threshold of audibility while he dreamed, and now it had been turned up again. It was a horrible, swarming feeling.

His wife was in the kitchen, wearing odd bits of clothes and underwear as she went about preparing her breakfast. Lowell tried to remember the last time he'd made love to her. It seemed like months, but it was hard to be sure.

“The least you could do,” she said, regarding him without pleasure or surprise, “would be to take off your shoes before you come to bed. I'm just about kicked black and blue.”

Lowell looked down. It was true. He was wearing his shoes in bed. His feet felt enormously heavy as he swung them to the floor. “I'm sorry,” he said, trying to tuck in his shirt while sitting down, not having much luck at it.

“You should be,” said his wife. “What a stupid thing to do. How did the writing go?”

“It's coming along,” said Lowell. He stood up, small change and keys falling to the floor from various folds of his clothing. He felt heavy. “What time is it?” he asked.

“Eight o'clock,” said his wife. “You finally kicked me out of bed about a quarter of an hour ago. The one morning I really get to sleep. You want some breakfast?”

Lowell nodded mutely, rubbing his face with his hands. His skin felt oily and soft, like some kind of substance in a nightmare.

After breakfast he went down to Broadway and bought the Sunday
Times
. “Jesus,” said the news vendor, “you sure lost weight. You been sick or something?”

“I'm fine,” said Lowell.

“No offense,” said the news vendor. “You sure you're strong enough to carry that paper? It's nothing to be ashamed of, a lot of my customers can't manage it, it's a big paper. Maybe you should take out the sections you don't need. You know, like travel and the want ads. Some of my customers do that. It cuts down, believe me. Here, I'll do it for you.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” said Lowell, snatching up his newspaper and nearly falling over with it. It seemed to weigh as much as a bowling ball. He clutched it to his chest and staggered away, stumbling over his own feet, acutely aware of how wild and feeble he must look. He hadn't shaved, and his clothes were rumpled from being slept in.

The walk back to the apartment with the newspaper exhausted him again, and he collapsed into one of the chairs. Not only were his clothes rumpled, but the trip outside under the watchful eyes of passersby had made him conscious of how baggy they were. Even his shoes felt too big. He guessed this must be what it was like to be at the end of your rope, when you went to sleep in your clothes and they were too big for your body, when a newspaper was too heavy to carry and your brain had been taken over by a Bulgarian radio station. It couldn't go on.

“It sure can't,” said his wife, giving Lowell another nasty start. He hadn't realized he'd spoken aloud. “I'm glad you're finally coming to your senses,” she added, although that was not an accurate description of how he felt. He felt as though he was losing his senses, not coming to them, just kind of fading out like the pattern of a cheap fabric that had been through the wash too often. “This is awful,” he said.

“You bet it is,” said his wife. “I wish we'd gone to Berkeley.” She sat down on the bed and opened the drama section of the
Times
. She leafed through it for a while, rattling and snapping the pages sharply. “Are you just going to sit there?” she asked without looking up.

Lowell opened his mouth, made a little sound, and closed it again for fear that nothing would come out but gibberish. His shoes began to feel funny again, and he suddenly found himself wondering if he had them on the right feet. With a strangled cry, he sprang upright in his chair and stared down at them, but thank God they were okay.

“Can I get you something?” asked his wife in a strange voice, looking at him with an expression that was hard to decipher. It came to Lowell that he had just given a convincing imitation of a person who has just seen a tiny little man dart out from beneath his chair on a wee little pony, and then dart back again. Or, for that matter, a man who suddenly wonders if he's been wearing his shoes on the wrong feet for thirty hours. No wonder his wife was staring at him like that. Had she really thrown out his birth certificate? Who could blame her if she had? “The magazine section!” he croaked desperately. “I was looking for the magazine section. I thought I saw it on the floor.”

Without taking her eyes off him for an instant, his wife slowly reached behind her and wordlessly produced the magazine.

“Thanks,” whispered Lowell. It had Oriental soldiers on the cover. He lifted it up and held it in front of his face.

“Don't mention it,” said his wife.

They spent the next couple of hours barricaded behind walls of newsprint, warily passing fresh sections back and forth as the need arose, and doing their best not to meet each other's eyes. The last section to come before Lowell's face was the want ads. It was a moment before he realized what he was looking at. He wondered how it had come into his possession. Had he picked it up on purpose? Had his wife deliberately placed it where he could reach it? Was he absolutely certain his shoes were on the right feet?

He folded the paper and looked across the room at his wife. She immediately got up from the bed and stormed out into the kitchen, where she began to take apart the top of the stove, throwing the knobs and reflectors and prong things into the aluminum sink with a noise that went straight to Lowell's teeth. Lowell picked up his manuscript from the table. Curiously enough, although he had written it, he couldn't recall ever reading any of it, but he knew approximately what he would find. He also knew what he would think of it. The first page was awful. The second page was a little worse, and the third was a little worse than that. It was a perfect counterfoil of his life these last few months, starting with good intentions and no talent and going steadily downhill, page by page, day by day, as though someone was slowly turning down the lights and slowly turning up the sound. He regarded this fact with a feeling that was utterly flat, as if something heavy had rolled over it.

“I'm going to get a job,” he said.

“It's about time,” said his wife. She turned the water off in the sink with a furious motion, turned around and glared at him for a moment, and then stalked off into the bathroom, first slamming, then locking the frail door behind her.

“It doesn't have to be forever,” said Lowell with the eerie and quite accurate sensation of having played exactly this same scene before, although in different clothes. This time he had the good sense to shut up and wait, and presently his wife emerged with a resolute face, and they ate a huge meal and planned their life, and both of them went to bed at bedtime.

“When did I grow this moustache?” Lowell asked, turning his face from side to side in the mirror.

“What did you say?” asked his wife from the bedroom.

“I can't remember when I grew this moustache,” Lowell repeated. “I can't remember why I grew it, either. I don't even like it. It's the silliest thing I ever saw.” Viewed closely, it seemed to be losing its hair, if such a thing was possible. It had never been much of a moustache to begin with. You could see right through it, and from a distance it gave the impression that his upper lip was hairless but a little dirty. The only reason he didn't cut it off this instant was the thought of the chaos such an act would cause in his relations with his wife and his employer. It would perplex his wife endlessly, and Crawford would be alarmed.

“I think you grew it in 1967,” his wife called. “Sometime around there,” she added, as if 1967 was a sort of street corner. “How come you want to know? Has this got something to do with the funny way you've been acting lately? I don't know what's gotten into your these last few days. How come you want to know when you grew your moustache? What kind of a question is that?”

“Nothing, dear,” said Lowell mildly. “Nothing at all.” He returned to the contemplation of his face. His hairline was receding, but instead of making his forehead look high, it made his face look as though the top of it had been cut off. His teeth were fragile, and his chin was small. His nose resembled less a majestic blade than a small, pale berry. The pure and innocent blue of his eyes had never been muddied by corrupt and secret knowledge, had never been blurred by sorrow or sharpened by command; he was thirty years old, and his eyes were still the color of flowers. He knew exactly who he looked like. He looked like a youthful Henry Tremblechin. He looked like a minor public official in a town where the Republicans have always been in power. He looked like a weakling, and you wanted to kick him right in the face.

“Are you through yet, or do I still have to wait?” asked his wife from the bathroom door. She was wearing a skirt but no blouse, and her hair was going every which way. It occurred to Lowell that except for a few minutes in the morning between breakfast and work, he never saw his wife fully clothed; the rest of the time she was either putting on garments or haphazardly taking them off. “You're not even shaving,” she said. “What are you doing? Don't tell me if it's something disgusting. Please hurry up with it, whatever it is. I've got to do my hair, and it's almost time to go.”

“I was looking at my face,” said Lowell, stepping aside from the basin. His wife shot him a nervous glance and began to tear at her hair with fingers and comb, staring into the mirror with anxious intensity. It was not a good time for Lowell to remain around, and he gently slipped away.

In the kitchen he drank coffee until it was time for the war to be over on the radio, and then he switched it on for the weather. It didn't really make much difference what the weather was—he faced only short corridors of it, spaced at long intervals throughout the day—but he was reassured by hearing the temperature and precipitation data, and he liked to know the forecast. Then he could plan his weather gear with some care; it always pleased him to be the only man in a flash rainstorm to have an umbrella. At home his father had listened to the weather report every morning, and presumably still did; from it, he could predict with uncanny accuracy which of his friends he would meet when he drove downtown, and where he would encounter them.

The day was cold and windy and freezing rain was falling intermittently, although it was expected to turn to snow by midmorning. The temperature in Central Park was twenty-seven degrees and precipitation probability was one hundred percent for the rest of the day and night. Lowell got out his wife's heavy coat, her gaily flowered plastic slicker, her fur hat, her red umbrella, and her tall fur-lined boots, and arranged them on the sofa in the living room. Cries of dismay rose from the direction of the bathroom, accompanied by the patter of a box of bobby pins maliciously upending itself in the washbasin. Lowell thought for a moment and then replaced the heavy, warm boots with a pair of shiny off-white English ones with a cuffed top and zipper back. Then he got out his own garb—overcoat and tweed cap, Drago galoshes and push-button umbrella, cashmere muffler and deerskin gloves—and tossed them onto the overstuffed chair by the baby-grand piano that his wife could play but never did; it had been left by the previous tenant, no doubt because the only way to remove it was through the window by means of a derrick on the roof, at fabulous expense. The piano was just another thing that got in the way and didn't belong to him, tripping him in the dark, taking up space where he could have put his Eames chair.