A New Life (2 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: A New Life
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“I’ll change in a minute once I have my suitcase.”
“Gerald’s pants will be less trouble.”
“They won’t fit. He’s taller than I am.”
“Roll up the cuffs. By the time you’re ready to leave I’ll have your trousers spot-cleaned and ironed. It was my fault and I’d feel much better if you both please let me work it out my own way.”
Gilley shrugged and Levin gave up. He changed into Gerald’s slacks in the bathroom.
While he was there Pauline tapped on the door.
“I forgot about your shorts, they must be damp. I have a clean pair of Gerald’s here.”
He groaned to himself, then said quietly, “I don’t want them.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
Before leaving the bathroom Levin soaped his hands and face, dried them vigorously and combed his damp whiskers. When he came out he felt momentarily foolish in Gilley’s baggy pants but the food, kept hot, was delicious, and he ate heartily.
 
My first night in the Northwest, Levin mused, sitting in an armchair after dinner. Who could guess I would ever in my life come so far out? He began to think about the past and had to press himself not to.
Gilley looks restless, he thought. I’d better give him back his pants and find some place to sleep.
“Stay a while,” Pauline murmured. She was arranging red roses in a Chinese vase on the table.
“Yep,” Gilley said. He was scanning the Sunday paper, one long leg resting on a hassock.
I could be wrong, Levin thought.
Pauline shut a window and rubbed her goose-fleshed arms. “Gerald, would you build a fire?”
“It feels like fall,” she said to Levin.
Gilley, grunting, got up. He stuffed several balls of newspaper under the grate of the fireplace, crisscrossed kindling, and topped the pile with two wood chunks with thick mossy bark.
“Burns most of the evening that way,” he said to Levin. “The heat of each oak piece keeps the other going. That’s the secret of it.”
He lit the paper and the blaze roared. The operation was interesting to Levin, even moving. He had rarely in his life stood at a fireplace, never before seen a fire made in one. If the room Gilley had mentioned had a fireplace he thought he would take it.
A door by the couch opened and two children who had come downstairs with the sitter entered the room. They had
been bathed and pajamaed, and when the boy saw the fire he ran to it. He was a red-head with a pale face. The little girl, blondish like the mother, had sores on her arms and legs. Though she barely toddled she carried a kitten.
“This is Mr. Levin, Zenamae,” Pauline said to the sitter. “He’s the new English professor. Zenamae Sonderson, Mr. Levin.”
Levin blushed. “Hardly a professor—” Pauline paid the girl and she left.
The boy, turning from the fire, took a good look at Levin and began to cry.
“Bet it’s the beard,” Gilley said.
Levin picked up a magazine and pretended to read. The child stopped crying. Pauline led him by the hand to the new instructor.
“Mr. Levin, this is Erik Gilley. Erik, Mr. Levin is a nice man all the way from New York City.”
He was grateful to her.
The boy said something that sounded like “Tory?”
“No,” said Levin in surprise, “I’m a liberal.”
Pauline laughed. “He wants you to tell him a story.”
Gilley grinned. “Gave yourself away that time, Sy.”
Levin, smiling in embarrassment, offered to tell the boy a story.
“Me,” said the little girl, letting the kitten go and coming closer.
“She’s our baby, Mary,” said Pauline. “Does she look like me, Mr. Levin?”
“Something like,” he said. “I’m no judge.”
She smiled and kissed the child.
“Better not bother with stories just right now,” Gilley said. “We’ll be leaving in five more minutes.”
“You promised.” Erik had climbed up on Levin’s knees.
“What kind of story do you want?”
“Funny.”
Levin tried to think what he knew that was funny. Pauline,
with Mary on her lap, sat on the hassock, attentive. Gilley had drifted into his den and had the TV on.
Levin, scratching a hot right ear, began: “There was once a fox with a long white beard—”
Erik chuckled. In a minute he was laughing—to Levin’s amazement—in shrieking peals. Levin snickered at his easy success, and as he did, felt something hot on his thigh. He rose in haste, holding the still wildly laughing child at arm’s length as a jet of water shot out of the little penis that had slipped through his pajama fly.
Gilley came into the room. “Stop it, Erik!”
Pauline set Mary down, grabbed Erik and ran with him, his fountain streaming in a high graceful arc, into the bathroom.
Levin stood there in Gilley’s pants, wet down his thigh, neither of them looking at the other. He felt desperate. I’ve got to get out before they hate me.
Pauline returned with wet mop and sponge.
“I guess you’d better change.” She didn’t look at him.
He nodded, depressed.
“I’ll get your bag out of the car,” Gilley said.
“There’s no need to,” said Pauline. “His trousers are dry. You can change in the bathroom again, Mr. Levin. Just drop Gerald’s slacks down the laundry chute. I’m awfully sorry.”
“Nothing serious.” Levin went to the bathroom and began to wash up.
Pauline tapped on the door. “I have a pair of Gerald’s French-back shorts for you. Yours are probably damp. They ought to fit if you use the third button.”
“I don’t want them,” he said.
“You’ll be more comfortable.”
“No.”
She burst into tears. Levin opened the door and reached out his hand. He took from Pauline a pair of her husband’s striped shorts.
When he left the bathroom, once more wearing his own
pants, in a good mood and ready to go, the room was in order, high and dry, both kids upstairs in bed.
Pauline had pinned a rose on her white dress and was crocheting on the couch. Gilley was tying dry flies.
“Won’t you have another cup of coffee, Mr. Levin?”
“Thanks, Mrs. Gilley, I’d better be off now.”
“Please stay a little longer.”
Levin glanced nervously at Gilley.
“Stay a while, Sy.”
“If you say,” he muttered. They were being polite out of embarrassment, he thought, and it annoyed him because he was worried about getting settled for the night.
But he stayed.
 
Erik wandered down the stairs and asked his father to go back up with him.
“All right,” Gilley said to Levin. “And after that we’d better scoot over to Mrs. Beaty. Shell be wanting to get to bed.”
“Agreed,” said Levin.
Erik went to him and raised his arms.
“He wants to be picked up,” Pauline said.
Levin, after hesitating, picked up the child.
Erik tugged at his beard. “Funny man.”
“That’s enough of that,” said Pauline.
Gilley took Erik from Levin and carried him upstairs.
“There’s no telling what next,” she said.
“I had no objection.”
She was silent. He inspected the book shelves and drew out a book.
She crocheted a while, then asked what he was looking at.
“
The American,
Henry James.”
“Oh?” She got up, searched on the bottom book shelf, and came up with a reprint from an academic journal, which she handed Levin. Gilley’s name was on the cover of a short article on Howells.
“He wrote it in graduate school,” she said. “He was a teaching
assistant and I was one of his students. Gerald was the only person of his year to have an article in
PMLA
, during his graduate career. I hoped he’d go on with scholarly papers but he says they’re a bore.”
“Is that so?”
She smiled almost sadly. “He’s done a few textbook reviews here and there, but not much else. Gerald is an active type, too much so to write with patience. And there’s no doubt he’s lost some of his interest in literature. Nature here can be such an esthetic satisfaction that one slights others.”
Levin instinctively shrugged.
“Life is so varied and what happens so often unexpected,” Pauline said with a glance at him. “There’s so much to do—to be done. I find myself—” She inspected the strip of lace she had crocheted, then went on, “If Gerald were among more people who were doing literary research and writing, I think he would too. Of course Dr. Fabrikant, in the department, is a scholar, but they don’t take to each other for too many reasons to go into, and Gerald feels anyway that at Cascadia College—the kind of place this is—the emphasis should be on teaching. He’s quite a popular lecturer.”
“What kind of place–?”
“—He does many things and gets a lot of pleasure out of his life. He fishes—this is the country for it if you’re interested; he’s a wonderful dry fly fisherman, and I’ve seen other fishermen stop what they were doing to watch him. He also hunts pheasants and ducks and loves to watch athletic events. I never thought I would myself, but you’d be surprised how exciting these games can get. We generally have very good football and basketball teams, though not as high-powered as those in California. And Gerald is also an excellent photographer. He’s very talented at candid shots and has won all sorts of prizes in almost every category. Last year one of his pictures won a first prize at the State Fair. Let me show it to you.”
She slid open a door at the bottom of a bookcase and got out a thick picture album which she brought to the sofa.
I’m in for it now, Levin thought.
Pauline turned to an enlarged photograph of an old farmhouse that looked like an upended shoe box. “‘Pioneer Farmhouse,’” she read. “He’s done a series of these all over the state. We go camping in summertime—I hate it but it’s good for the kids—and he likes to hunt out these places and snap them. Gerald is in love with Americana. This is the sixth prize he’s won with this particular subject.”
“Very nice—”
She turned to the middle of the album. “Here he is with his sister when he was a boy in knickers in Abilene, South Dakota. Notice how alert he looks. Here’s his father, a retired merchant. I take to the mother. They were here to see the children this summer.”
She flipped back several pages, pausing at a portrait of a dignified-looking man with pince-nez and a grayish beard. “Papa,” she said. “A wonderful man—very affectionate and maturely generous. He was a physician and literally lived the Hippocratic oath. Once when he was sick he got out of bed to attend a patient. The patient lived but poor Papa died. He was only fifty. It killed my mother.”
“Ah—” said Levin.
“I lived afterwards with Papa’s brother, in San Francisco. They’re a wonderful family.” She wiped one eye with a slender finger. He looked secretly but saw no dew.
On the next page, age twenty, she stood, in unearned innocence, on a hilly city street, shoulders touching a young man’s with an expressionless face. She looked unhappy and wore a mousey fur coat and felt hat with an off-the-face brim.
“After your father died?” Levin asked.
“A year and a half. This was a boy I was engaged to for six months, before I married Gerald. He had won a Guggenheim and was off to Europe to study medieval history but I knew he was tired of me and I wouldn’t see him again. I never did.”
“He looks a little stupid to me.”
“He was a nice boy. I guess I hadn’t much to offer at that time. I’m one of those people who developed slowly.”
She put the album aside, removed one shoe, then the other, and raising her legs drew them close to her body. She had pinned a rose to her poor chest. Why not two, he thought, one for each flat side? Was this why the medievalist had gone to Europe, to escape the American prairie? It did bother a bit, the observer conscious that nature had cheated where it hurt most. Yet she was attractive, he thought, with shapely legs if big feet, the long boats on the floor the indisputable evidence. And her face, compared to the girl’s in the picture, was a mature improvement over age twenty. Studying her, though pretending not to, Levin thought her, despite her longness and lacks, an interesting-looking woman. She had large dark eyes in a small face, much helped by a frame of thickish straight blonde hair that touched her shoulders. The lips were well-formed, her nose, as if sniffing expectancy, touched on long and in flight. She was wearing pendant earrings; he realized she had put them on and changed her shoes, since coming home. Levin guessed she was for sure a good ten years younger than her husband. He had thought that when she told him she had been Gilley’s student, but now the sense of her youth surprised him.

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