A Meaningful Life (21 page)

The note was propped up against the coffeepot; Lowell reflected that another woman, with another kind of husband, might have rolled it up and put it in the barrel of the family gun. On the whole, he supposed he would rather be a coffee drinker, although he doubted that it made much difference in the long run.

“I have gone to my mother's,” the note said simply, exactly like the little missives they used to leave for each other when they went down to the newsstand or the delicatessen when the other one wasn't home. For a moment the laconic, familiar wording made him think that it was all a mistake that she'd only gone for the evening, at most the night, and would be back soon. Then he remembered that she'd taken all her clothes, and his little spark of hope went out like a light.

When his coffee was ready, he took the cup to the phone and dialed his mother-in-law's number. His mother-in-law answered. “Is my wife there?” he asked.

“That depends,” replied his mother-in-law in a voice so flat that it had lost all trace of an accent.

“On what?”

“On who you are,” said his mother-in-law.

“Don't be ridiculous. You know very well who I am.”

“Do I?”

“Stop playing games. This is Lowell, and I want to talk to my wife.”

“Lowell who?”

Angry but not confused, Lowell opened his mouth to speak, not the rest of his own name, but hers; to utter it like a rebuke and at the same time remind her of the bond that existed between them, whether she liked it or not. His mouth remained open for some seconds, and then it closed on empty air. He didn't know her name. Maybe he'd known it once—he must have known it once, it wasn't possible that he hadn't known it once—but he sure didn't know it now. He didn't even know what letter it began with. It was a ridiculous situation, and partly his own fault, but this insight did not help him, at least not now. It probably wouldn't help him later, either. There was

still one solution. He could call her “Mother.” Lots of people did it. It would stop her in her tracks. He had only to utter the word, and victory was his. Unfortunately, the very thought of doing so stopped Lowell in his tracks, too. He was hoist by his own petard, and there was no way down. He sensed that he wasn't doing very well. Meanwhile, the silence lengthened.

“Listen,” Lowell said at length with as much snap as he could muster, which was not as much as he would have liked, “I'm your son-in-law.”

“Is that my fault?” asked his mother-in-law. “Believe me, if I had my way, you'd be nothing but another name in the phone book, but I ask you, who listens to a mother? What's a mother?”

With difficulty Lowell restrained himself from answering her question. “See here,” he said.

“
I'll
tell you what a mother is!” his mother-in-law suddenly shouted. “A mother is someone who was
right!
”

“Are you going to let me speak to my wife or not?” demanded Lowell without putting the phone back to his ear.

“Don't take my word for it, ask any psychologist. Ask the biggest men they got. You know what they'll tell you?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER!” his mother-in-law bellowed faintly as Lowell hung up the receiver. “That's what they'll tell you!”

Somehow, as he threw on his coat and made sure he had his keys, Lowell had the feeling that she hadn't been taking to him at all.

“Good evening, Mr. Stone,” said the doorman as Lowell raced past him in the lobby. Uttering a strangled cry, Lowell hurled himself into the night.

It was incredibly dark. Something had happened to the street light again, and the sensation of emerging from the soulless fluorescent glare of the lobby into profound darkness was like suddenly being afflicted with blindness while drunk. For a moment Lowell was simply unable to think. He'd never imagined it could get this dark in the city; he couldn't even remember it getting this dark in the country. There was always a moon or something. Although he was standing on his own street, in front of a building where he'd lived for years, there was a moment when he couldn't remember where anything was, and all at once he thought:
My God, what am I doing here?
It was almost as though someone else had spoken in his ear. Then he lunged off in the direction of Broadway, with his hands held slightly before him, like a blind man who had lost his cane.

All the cabs on Broadway seemed to be going in the wrong direction. Lowell stood and watched them for a while, and then he decided he didn't want a cab tonight anyway; he was not in the mood to hear about what the mayor and the Negroes had done wrong this time, either separately or in collusion, although he supposed that in a certain sense a New York cab driver would be an appropriate prelude to the kind of visit he would no doubt have with his mother-in-law. It was like a 1930's urban movie gone mad, the same characters but a different script, a whole myth turned vicious and the actors believing every word. Lowell didn't want to be part of a movie. He never had. He stood and watched the cars go past for a few more minutes, and then he turned and walked toward the subway. If concrete took a print, he supposed he could have seen the path he'd made over the years from his building to the station. He'd be willing to bet that it wouldn't have been more than three feet wide, at the widest.

He waited on the platform for half an hour. When the train came it was full of smoke. He got on it anyway and rode to Brooklyn.

At night his in-laws' neighborhood looked like nobody really lived in it. Lights burned behind most of the windows, but they seemed to have been turned on only to create a realistic effect, like the lights in the windows of the little buildings on a model railroad. Lowell walked the streets without encountering another person, surrounded by a kind of bleak municipal tidiness where the sidewalks were cleaned and the shrubs trimmed and the grass cut by people who did it solely because it was their job and they got paid for it, like steelworkers. The cars were neatly parked at the curbs, the people were neatly tucked away in their rooms where they belonged, and there wasn't a speck of litter or a scrap of imagination anywhere to be seen. It made Lowell feel exceedingly strange and completely out of place as he raced along to rescue his wife, almost as if activities of that sort were not allowed here and he was going to get away with it only as long as someone didn't spot him.

“There's not a psychologist in the world who doesn't have a mother!” announced his mother-in-law when she opened the door of her apartment, momentarily stunning Lowell with a sense of warped time and insanely fixated purpose, although she was actually speaking over her shoulder to someone in the room behind her. “What do
you
want?” she demanded, suddenly turning on Lowell with suspicion but without much apparent recognition. It was like being addressed by a creature from another dimension, and for a moment Lowell was at a loss for words.

“I want my wife,” he finally said, somewhat less forcefully than he would have liked.

“I think we talked about this before,” said his mother-in-law.

“Never mind about that,” said Lowell. “I know my wife is here and I want to see her.”

Down the hall the door of another apartment opened a crack. Lowell was aware of being watched from a new quarter. It was not a good feeling. All his life he'd hated being conspicuous, and he would often deliberately lose an argument to avoid making a scene. He could scarcely do that now.

“Why don't we talk about it inside?” he suggested.

“We can talk about it out here,” said his mother-in-law. “I'm not particular.”

“I want to see my wife.”

“So you said.”

“Now, you listen to me ...” said Lowell.

“There's no need to shout,” said his mother-in-law, calmly folding her arms. Although almost two feet shorter than he was, she somehow gave the impression that she was looking down at him. No doubt this was what other men meant when they said they felt emasculated, but Lowell didn't feel emasculated, he felt as though he'd never had any balls and his mother-in-law had just found out about it. Down the hall another door opened and a man came out in his stocking feet and stood beside it nervously. He was about fifty, and he succeeded in neither looking directly at Lowell nor taking his eyes off him for a minute, a feat which gave him a severe facial tic. He conveyed the impression that he was ready to spring back into his apartment at the slightest provocation and place an anonymous call to the police, disguising his voice and putting a handkerchief over the receiver. Lowell found it hard not to hate him on sight, especially because the man's appearance only proved that he really had been shouting. “This is crazy,” he heard himself saying. “Absolutely crazy.”

“
This
is crazy?” said his mother-in-law in tones of mild amazement. “Am I hearing right? This is the opinion of the big-real-estate tycoon, the Zeckendorf of Bedford-Stuyvesant?
This
is crazy?”

“Mother,” said Lowell's wife from somewhere in the apartment. Lowell was glad to hear her voice. It meant that something different might begin to happen—not necessarily something better, but different. It might even get him out of the hall.

“That's enough, Mother,” said his wife. Her face, determined and cool, suddenly appeared over her mother's shoulder. She stared intently at her mother's profile. Her mother, meanwhile, continued to look hard at Lowell, who was gazing supplicatingly at his wife. They stood there like that for a long moment, their eyes not meeting and totally different expressions on their faces, a sort of invisible Möbius strip of conflicting but strangely congruent purposes. Then, without warning, his mother-in-law began to back into the room like a bank robber backing away from the scene of a crime, alert, slow, ready for anything, her eyes never leaving Lowell's face. Lowell followed right along, closing the door behind him. His wife and mother-in-law continued to move backward at a stately pace, until they reached the middle of the living room, where they stopped cold. Lowell's wife was looking at him now, too. God knew how long they might have stood there like that, each of them waiting for one of the others to make a move; if it had been up to Lowell, they would have stood there all night. He couldn't think of a thing to say. He was even afraid to open his mouth for fear that the movement would be seized upon as a pretext for something.

“What do you say, let's have some coffee?” broke in Leo's voice with a quavery, fearful brightness. Lowell looked over and discovered him sitting in his chair with his feet far apart and his hands resting limply in his lap, like he was paralyzed from the neck down and an unimaginative nurse had arranged his limbs for him. He looked inoffensive but not very lifelike, and there was a weak, hopeful little smile on his face. “How about it, what do you say? Coffee? Nice hot coffee for everyone? Maybe with a little cake?”

“If you want it, go make it,” snapped his wife without taking her eyes off Lowell's face. Leo got up from his chair as though afraid his knees were about to suddenly bend backward like a flamingo's. He made a hesitant movement in the direction of the kitchen, looking around the room to see if one of the others would call him back. When no one did, he sort of sidled jerkily away, as though being manipulated by an unusually clumsy puppeteer.

“Maybe we ought to sit down,” suggested Lowell when Leo was safely out of the room.

“Not on your life,” said his mother-in-law. “You might decide to stay.”

Lowell's wife went over to the window and stared out of it. Lowell looked at the narrow hunch of her shoulders, her bowed head, and he felt the last remnants of fight go right out of him. He hadn't known he had any left. “Will you come home with me?” he asked.

“Home!” cried his mother-in-law, causing Lowell to start violently. “Home? Where is this home you speak of? An apartment without a husband in it? A falling-down rooming house in Bedford-Stuyvesant? These are homes? And you could have married Ira Miller!” she continued, apparently to her daughter. “Look where Ira Miller is today. A Park Avenue practice and a home in Forest Hills,
that's
where Ira Miller is today! One of the biggest men in his field, and you had to turn him down. Who cares about a few pimples? Anyway, they cleared up. I ask you, would Ira Miller have moved to a slum? You should live so long, believe me. Ira Miller has spent his whole life moving
out
of slums. I forget if I mentioned that he lives in Forest Hills. Tapestry brick.”

“Huh?” said Lowell, both stupidly and despite himself.

“Tapestry brick,” repeated his mother-in-law. “His house is made of tapestry brick. Only yesterday his mother was showing me some pictures.”

“Oh,” said Lowell.

“Listen, you want to know something about that neighborhood where you bought a house with my daughter's trip to Antigua?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Don't get smart. Our people moved out of that neighborhood twenty years ago. Twenty years!”

“I don't think your people were ever allowed to live there,” Lowell heard himself say musingly. He hadn't known he was going to say anything like that. It just sort of came out of its own accord, like “soul food.” It was followed by a lengthy silence during which Lowell and his mother-in-law looked at each other almost speculatively, like a pair of philosophers mulling the implications of a fresh concept.

“So,” she crooned at last, smiling poisonously. “So, now it comes out. Finally, it comes out. How long it took. Nine years.”

Lowell opened his mouth to speak, but once again closed it without uttering a sound. Denial would be useless, and explanation would only be viewed as a cover-up. His mother-in-law had made up her mind and planned her scene, and she could no more have been deflected from her purpose than fate. She'd lived for this moment for too many years. It occurred to Lowell that if he'd overheard their conversation as an outsider, he probably would have been on her side, but the thought did not make him feel very bad. He regarded the bag of shit that was about to fall on him with a kind of fatalism. He'd always known this was going to happen. He'd always known it was going to be his fault. He only hoped they could get it out of the way quickly so they could get on with their real business.