This Is Not for You (18 page)

Already in that incredible apartment were two refrigerators, a hot plate, a grand piano, and a double bed mattress, things forceably left behind by the previous tenant who had not paid his rent and finally, the legend went, shot it out with the FBI. There were bullet holes in the wall. Space the place did have. There were a large living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and two baths. The rent was fifty dollars a month, which was too much. I don’t know what floor the apartment was on because I was never able to figure out the basic structure of the building. It sat just behind a row of shops with an outside staircase, at the bottom stone and then metal and then wood, which didn’t open onto all levels. Most of the windows of the apartment opened onto something between the fifth and sixth floors of a hotel on the other side of the block. One of the problems was that not only the windows opened that way but the whole wall of the shower in one of the bathrooms. There simply wasn’t an outer wall, but you weren’t troubled because there was another bathroom to use. The kitchen must have been twenty feet long, but it was only three or four feet wide. Opening the door of a refrigerator completely shut off one end of the room. That was convenient. You could leave the door open to shut off the area that became your study, at the end of which was a stained-glass window. There was no heat, and the roof leaked, but you had dealt with both these problems in London where the climate was not nearly so kind. Space was what you wanted, the kind you didn’t have to worry about, and no one had ever worried about this. You had running water and electricity. These were all you needed. You left the piano and the double bed mattress in the larger of the two bedrooms, tucked the single bed into the smaller one (which was really no more than a storage space under the eaves to be shared with the spiders), furnished one end of the living room with chairs, table, and bookcases, and left the largest space for your work.

Soon after you were settled you enrolled in several courses, not at the university but at the trade school where you intended to learn to use power tools. Before you had been settled a month, you had permission from the landlord to install heavier wiring to accommodate your new collection of drills and saws and soldering irons. Questioned about the noise, you explained that the young man just below you was a composer of electronic music and not only didn’t mind but was delighted by the opportunity to extend as well as demand patience. Sound, you said, was your new dimension, and you bought a motorcycle. The costumes for these new skills were elaborate. You had half a dozen kinds of helmets, variously inarticulate gloves, boots of several heights and resistances. But even in these alarming garments, you were never a dykish terror. You were a little girl playing Buck Rogers with the humorless intensity that belongs to an imaginative child.

If I had ever hoped for a haven of escape from my own decorous madhouse, this was not it, but I went there often enough just the same. I never climbed into your apartment without for a moment thinking that you were in the process of moving. It was simply not the sort of mess I could get used to. One day the furniture would all be piled right at the head of the stairs, perhaps because you had decided to scrub the floor and then forgot about it or had been interrupted by something more important; or you were making room for a large building project; or you were having a party. When the furniture was in place (a loose idiom for how objects ever lived with you), there were large piles of scrap metal, wood, glass. One day I found all your clothes on top of the piano because you had temporarily turned the closet into a darkroom for a friend.

Most of the people you discovered came first to the apartment below you, which was even larger than yours and not quite as disreputable because the young man in it seemed to have a number of ex-wives who occasionally cleaned the place up. I suppose most of those visitors were harmless enough or grew up to be. I might not have taken them so seriously if you hadn’t. I probably wouldn’t have taken them at all. But I have never chosen my human environment. I have always borrowed it from someone like you or Monk or Doris. I should, therefore, try not to complain.

They all seemed to do a lot of talking. The vocabulary resembled our own in some categories. More of the proper names were French and many more of the superlatives were improper. Their subject matter was different. God had only negative things to do with it. They were interested in a kind of petty criminality that they called freedom. Stealing was a basic act, but there were individual rules about it. One stole only food he didn’t need, another only food he did. Some bought nothing but materials for their work; others stole nothing but. Some restricted their victims to people they knew, others to strangers. One would not take anything for himself. Another sold all he took. What mattered was the existential rule-making, the creative morality. You and I began to argue about it when you began to defend it, and that happened almost immediately.

“It isn’t just a game,” you insisted. “It’s a philosophy, a serious philosophy. I mean, have you really read Gide?”

“I’ve been even more experimental than that. I’ve stolen light bulbs and American flags and road signs, but not since I was ten.”

“There is innocence in it,” you said thoughtfully.

“You know, conversations around here are beginning to compete with Mother’s.”

“You can’t want everyone to accept your reality, Kate.”

“It’s not
mine.
There’s an objective difference between hallucination and fact.”

“But is there a moral one? What’s art?”

“I’m not talking about morality. I’m talking about sanity”

“Sanity’s a convention,” you said.

So it may be and one that hasn’t found easy acceptance since the Victorian period. I could not argue that I lived with insanity and knew what you did not. You still came often to the house, bringing Mother sawed, soldered, and wired objects, and you went on learning the names of her dead relatives and imaginary companions and torturers just as you went on learning the names of the friends of your downstairs neighbor.
You
didn’t have to deal with stocks and bonds, nurses, servants, and old friends of Mother’s who were still alive. Those were the realities or conventions you chose to ignore.

I cannot say that the “sanity” of the old ladies who did occasionally come to call was any comfort to me. Their propriety and sympathy sometimes seemed more grotesque than Mother’s violence of imagination. When she was obviously out of her mind, I didn’t let them upstairs to see her. I would invite them into the living room for tea, all of us carefully avoiding the chair Mother habitually sat in, and I would ask them questions about their grandchildren and their clubs and their travels, letting them punctuate the conversation occasionally with, “She’s much the same, is she?” and “It’s such a pity.” But on the days when she was calm and rational enough to receive guests, I always waited with a terrible tension for one of her disconnected comments. The old ladies did not humor or argue or engage with Mother at those moments. They ignored her. The sins against good behavior she committed did not exist. She did not even have to be forgiven. And so she became, like their own passing of wind, unreal to them. It took an age I didn’t have to so discipline nose and heart. Perhaps all of us have trouble admitting what we have no control over.

My own sanity had to lie outside both households. I attended summer session, and in September I committed myself seriously to completing the masters degree requirements in economics and government. At about the same time you made another kind of important decision.

“I want to tell you, Kate, that I’ve decided to take a lover.”

“Oh? Anyone I know?”

“You may have seen him around. His name is Christopher Marlowe Smith. He’s married, but he didn’t have enough money on his grant to bring his wife and child west with him. He’ll go back to them in a year. We’ve made a perfectly rational agreement. He has needs and so do I.”

“Is he going to live here?”

“More or less. He’ll keep his other address for a while, but he’ll move in on Tuesday after I’m fitted for my diaphragm.”

“You’re not at all in love with him or anything like that?” I asked carefully.

“He’s an intelligent person. He’s attracted to me. That’s all, but we’ve agreed that that’s enough, all either of us wants right now.”

“What if you find you’re getting more involved than that?”

“I won’t,” you said simply. “I’m going to treat it as something like a training period, a learning experiment.”

“Sex and cooperative living,” I said.

“Yes.”

You were nervous. You were trying not to be defensive. You were trying not to ask either my permission or my blessing. You did not even risk the suggestion that I would like this Christopher Marlowe Smith. I made some attempt not to treat him like an invention or a joke, though either of those was preferable to considering him as a fact. I postponed that trial for over a week.

By the time I did call, dressed in dark linen and looking rather like the local social worker come to make a report on the moral and sanitary conditions of the building, Christopher Marlowe Smith was as well settled as anyone could be in that tangle of used auto parts, pianos, and refrigerators. He was not much older than you, had a broad-faced, ordinary handsomeness, an uncertainly loud voice, a way of rubbing his hands together as if he were going to make a meal of whatever was put before him. At that time he had not yet got over his surprising good fortune, and his laughter had a startled, self-satisfied tone that was not unpleasant. He obviously thought the whole thing was quite a lark, though his own cliché for it was “fucking great,” in military manliness. He’d served his year otherwise innocently. You looked a little tired, a little bewildered by the amount of human noise after living with nothing but drills and saws, and you were mildly embarrassed by his frank and expressive enthusiasm for your tits, cunt, tail, in fact every four-letter part of you but your mind which there had not, admittedly, been time to discover. I generously considered the possibility that you had lost it anyway. Yet who but a hardy, insensitive, cheerfully argumentative, simple-hearted sponger could have lived with you like that? If I wasn’t kind in my private summary of your Christopher Marlowe Smith, I was kind enough to him. And he was to me, too. As long as no one asked for money and offered it freely, he worked on the buddy system with everyone.

“Here’s our Katie,” he’d say, giving me a one-armed hug, “with a case of beer and the second best-looking legs in town. And I’ve got that paper for you, though old Charlie claims it isn’t worth its weight in shit. Why don’t you just once stay for dinner? Ah, I know. Mom. Well…”

Blurred. You were. I was.

“So Charlie knocks on the door, and I say, ‘Look, Charlie baby, we’re at it just now, having a lesson, so why don’t you come back in an hour, eh?’ So he goes back downstairs and turns up the volume on the most God-awful, I mean erotic machine noises. That man’s got an inhuman sense of humor.”

The lessons weren’t going all that well, you admitted with no more than hopeful concern.

“I’m slow, he says, but I’m getting a bit better.”

Progress. The same thing could be said for Mother. The housekeeper and maid suggested that we didn’t need the day nurse. I was home enough during the day to keep an eye on things, and I would still be free to go out in the evening. I decided to ask Mother herself about it.

“As long as it doesn’t interfere with your work, dear, but it’s true, I don’t have many needs. I could have my bath after four.”

I had learned not to count on the permanence of the smallest agreement. I knew explanations might have to be made over and over again, but so great a step forward was encouraging to me and would be to Doris, too. The night before the new routine began, I spoke to Mac about it.

“You can just check out with me in the morning.”

“And you’re not interested in my opinion.”

“The doctor’s agreed. He thinks it may be a morale booster for Mother.”

“Mmmm.”

“Well, anyway, we’re going to try it.”

I tried to sleep at once in order to be fresh in the morning, and, of course, I couldn’t sleep at all. I heard the clock in the downstairs hall strike five before I finally napped. I woke startled at what I thought was the striking of nine. My own clock confirmed it. Damn Mac! I fumbled into my robe and rushed into the hall. There at the other end of it stood Mac in the door of Mother’s room, talking to the housekeeper.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“I was near the end of a good murder,” she said.

“Is everything all right?”

“Fine.”

I looked into Mother’s room, and there she sat tidily enjoying her breakfast tray.

“Good morning, Mother.”

She looked up, paused, and then said, “Katherine, you haven’t combed your hair.”

“I overslept,” I said, grinning.

“It’s not like you.”

“No.”

“Well, go make yourself look like yourself, dear. I don’t like shocks with my breakfast.”

By the time I had washed and dressed, Mac was gone and Mother was watching television. The maid was in her room dusting. I went down for my own breakfast in the dining room.

“That wasn’t a very good beginning,” I said to the housekeeper.

“Miss Hanser didn’t mind. She said she could always stay over a bit if you were having a sleep.”

“Well, she won’t have to again. It was nice of her, but she should have called me.”

“Doesn’t hurt to learn to take a little along with the giving, Miss Kate.”

I knew that Mac and the housekeeper had had a nice, long chat about just what would be good for me. I couldn’t resent it. In fact, I felt more in charge of the household that morning than I usually did and could even indulge myself a little in their concern. When the housekeeper told me she had a number of “sit-down” jobs that morning and wouldn’t need me to be with Mother at all, I went to my own work without protest. I didn’t see Mother until lunchtime. She was serene and attentive.