Time Travail (2 page)

But I’m wandering. This is probably
symptomatic. At least I’m lucid about my growing befuddlement. I
began by saying that after my short-term victory over dust I went
down for the mail. I came back with a double handful, a real
harvest. Reading the mail, all of it, while breakfasting and
electric shaving had become a ritual. If somebody asked me: “What
is the major symptom of advancing age?” I would say: “Instead of
dumping it all unread into the garbage-pail, the pre-senescent open
and meditate over every piece of junk-mail.”

That morning I got a color-catalog of
Taiwanese watches. They are enviably shock-resistant with
non-volatile memories, show the time in five capitals I’ll never
visit now, calculate solar and lunar eclipses till the useless year
2025, beep Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
to
wake you, even in winter, with spring or summer. They are proof
against deep descents and provide automatic countdown. That morning
there was also a gardening handout featuring a sale on tulip-bulbs.
Just pop them into the earth in fall and up they pop as flowers in
spring. There was also an advertisement for old-age incapacity
insurance. At each turning point in your life you get on a mailing
list or off one. I didn’t get advertisements for X-rated
videocassettes any more.

The next letter, from Mary, my second
ex-wife, was as impersonal as the others. She got to the point with
a minimum of verbiage. I owed her three months’ alimony, it seemed.
Deadline: next Friday. If the matter had to be placed in the hands
of the law it would cost me much more. I sincerely believe that if
the roles had been reversed, I she and she me, I’d have recalled
moments of tenderness and wouldn’t have let grievances completely
stifle compassion. After all she got the house, didn’t she? And
damn close to getting my audio system as well.

After meditation over the timepieces I dumped
all the communications into the garbage-pail. I was trying to cope
with Lesson Ten when the landlady knocked on the door. She was
holding a letter. She listened to the intensely alien sounds behind
me.

“
Oh Professor Weizman: Hungarian!
Do you know Hungarian
too
? My father
was Hungarian.” I tried to pretend I was glad to see her. I’d been
avoiding her of late.

“Mrs Philips,” I stammered, “any day now I’ll
take care of the three months’ rent I owe you.”

She sounded almost offended at that. “Three
months? It’s just two months’ rent.”

Of course. Two months was for the rent, three
months for the alimony arrears. More mental confusion.

“There’s no hurry, Professor,” she
comforted.

All of Mrs Philips was in that answer. No
deadline with her. I suspected she knew of my axing. Sometimes I
found myself fantasizing about a twilight third marriage with a
woman like Mrs Philips, with Mrs Philips herself, to tell the
truth. She was youngish and of boundless goodness and patience:
this is what I badly needed. A good cook too, judging by what I
sniffed at mealtimes going past her door up to nuked pizza. It
would have been an elegant end to rent-arrears as well.

One thing was sure. If it didn’t work out
she would never hound me for impossible alimony. As for the age-gap
– she couldn’t be much over forty – couldn’t cultural prestige
bridge that? Moreover, I am (or was)
astonishingly well preserved
and can (or could) generate
vestigial charm in case of necessity. She had a plain but kind face
and a pleasant body. Probably too demanding, that body. Besides,
she no longer had her Hungarian maiden name. Her husband was
taciturn and muscular.

“Don’t you worry about the rent,” she said.
“I just wanted to give you this letter. You must have dropped it. I
found it on the staircase.”

The envelope was addressed in a crabbed hand
to “Assistant Professor J. Weizman.” The belittling precision of
“assistant” was unusual. It’s true I’d been an Assistant Professor
for a long long time till I finally made it to Associate Professor,
but in the days when I got meaningful mail, correspondents nearly
always conceded full professorship to me on the envelope. I didn’t
like being demoted retroactively even if I was nothing at all
now.

I pulled the letter out and a check fluttered
to the floor. Kneeling to it I made out as in a dream one thousand
dollars to the order of myself (still defined as an assistant) and
signed, in the same crabbed hand, Harvey Morgenstern. The name
transported me back, unwillingly, thirty years and more. So he too
had survived. But not in a furnished room stooping for a check, you
could bet.

Reading him or listening to him you’d never
guess Harvey Morgenstern was a genius, one of the mid-century
pioneers of advanced cybernetics. He’d also calculated
intercontinental ballistic missile trajectories onto populous
targets and, as it later turned out, succeeded at enormous effort
in inscribing a few faint scratches on the mile-thick time-barrier.
He didn’t verbalize gracefully had always been the problem. Now he
had others.

Hi Jerry,

Not kicking all that much but am
still alive. Long time no see – in the flesh, that is.
(What does that mean: “in the
flesh”?)
Still knocking the broads flat on their backs right and
left? But hey, you’re getting on. Can you still get it up? It’s all
a memory for me and I’m beginning to lose that too. But I think it
can be beaten. Memory problems I mean. I don’t want to say anything
more about it in case this letter gets into the wrong hands. I
think you can guess what it is. Remember the blue mouse? Rounding
off, 209,880,000 times better than that. If you remember the blue
mouse figure it out yourself.

Now the thing is I need help, the way you
used to help me in the old days. Remember the old days way back
when we screwed around with the induction coil and the X-ray
machine and gassed mice and shocked the shit out of the Polacks? I
have bad memory problems because of the treatment (I’ll tell you
about that when I see you) but I do remember the Polacks. This is a
good day for memory. And boy do I remember you sweating away on the
Static Electricity Machine bike although to be honest I had help
with that particular memory. Don’t make me say more.

Anyhow this is my proposition. I
want you to come out here to Forest Hill. You must have plenty of
time on your hands now
(how did he learn about that?)
and maybe the money would come in
handy. I can offer you five hundred bucks a week as my
collaborator. You’d come and live here with me rent-free – separate
rooms, of course, I know you’re not that way. Free meals too. You
should just taste Hanna’s cooking. We could talk over old times.
The check is to prove this is no gag and to cover your moving
expenses. Why not try it out for a month? Whichever way you decide,
yes or no, you’ll be two thousand dollars to the good. I’m quite
ill and can’t handle all of the work myself.

I’m really ill, Jerry. I haven’t
got all that much time. It’s something very big. Now what I want
you to do is this: I want you to give me a buzz and say you’re
coming right away because I haven’t got all that much time to wait
around. But if what I’m working on works out I’ll have all the time
in the world. So will you. I ain’t forgettin’ my old pal.
(Pal?)

See you soon, OK?

Harvey Morgenstern

In a postscript he gave me his phone number
and asked me to bring all the old photos of Forest Hill in the old
days. Above all, photos of Rachel. He’d asked for photos of Rachel
maybe thirty years ago and I’d never answered. Did I remember who
Rachel Rosen was?

One thing was sure. Memory loss wasn’t the
worst that had happened to his mind. All my life I’ve attracted the
mentally unbalanced. I like to think it’s the attraction of the
dissimilar, something like positive and negative magnetic poles.
I’m scared of them, the way they look into your eyes and assume a
secret congruence. Normally I pull back fast. But there was a check
in this case and more to come. Didn’t the proposition at least
deserve careful reflection? I gave it a second’s worth and grabbed
for the phone.

As the other phone thousands of miles
eastward buzzed away in my ear the four monomaniac walls about me
with their reiterated large purple flowers fell away. I felt
buoyant, ten years younger, as though I’d conquered time. It was a
premonitory feeling although of course I didn’t know it then. If I
had I’d have hung up. I allowed myself to realize how sick I was of
all those attempts to fill the vacuum with push-ups, chinning,
jogging and junk-mail, sick of half-thawed pizza, sick of banging
my forehead against the chinning-bar at midnight, sick of
plainchants and contrapuntal prayers for the dead. I felt sorry I
wouldn’t see Christine (Mrs Philips) any more. But it would never
have worked out. I thought of all those Long Island beaches. I
hadn’t seen the sea for years.

The phone buzzed on and on until finally I
got a woman’s voice. It was shrill and querulous. Right off the bat
she wanted to know what I wanted. It was dislike at first hark. I
said that I wished to speak to Mr Harvey Morgenstern. She actually
snapped: “Who are you?” I requested her to kindly inform Mr
Morgenstern that my name was Professor J. Weizman. I had received a
letter from him that morning asking me to contact him.

“Oh Jesus, the letter. Listen, Mr
I-didn’t-catch-your-name, if it’s the letter I think it is, he sent
out twenny of them. I know, I had to mail them. Even had to pay for
the goddam stamps. Those letters weren’t serious.”

“Mine must have been. There was a check in
it,” I said, a childish fall from dignity. I wanted to hold on to
my sudden wealth with the promise of more to come and an end to
vacuum. For the second time (and not the last time as it turned
out), I wondered if Harvey wasn’t a mental case. Maybe there’d been
checks in the other nineteen letters too, phony, like mine.

“A check? How big a check?”

Her alarm was encouraging. I actually told
her the amount. Maybe Harvey wasn’t the only mental case.

“
A th
ou
sand
d
o
llars?! What
did you do with it?”

“What one generally does with checks. Mr
Morgenstern, please.”

“You mean you deposited it? That wasn’t
honest. He’s a very sick man. I try to protect him from people like
you, not that I get any thanks for it. Look, I know what my uncle
wrote you about, that thing down in the cellar. Jesus, the
electricity bills we run up and what for? You’d be wasting your
time coming out here, Mister.”

His niece must have read the letter. Niece?
Harvey had no niece.

She broke off and started talking to someone.
Then that characteristic deadness of a hand over the receiver.
Finally I got another voice, between a whisper and a croak, barely
audible and totally unfamiliar. Am I confusing this with a later
thing? I seem to remember that hearing that voice for the very
first time my mind compared it to a flickering distorted image.

“Hi pal. Glad you. Phoned. Can you. Make it
out here. Today?” He said something else but I didn’t get it
because his voice started going. It went out.

“Hold on.” It was the woman again. I held on
for minutes.

“You still there? Listen, my uncle can’t
talk. I tole you. He wrote something. He wants me to read it. Here
goes.”

She chanted it slowly like someone little
accustomed to the written word.

“Sorry Jerry voice troubles don’t let Hanna
scare you off. She … Hey, you can’t make me read this …”

Hand-over-the-receiver deadness again. Then
she was back with a weepy voice:

“
He says sorry Jerry voice troubles don’t
let Hanna scare you off he says he says she’s not a bad girl just
men-menopause problems that’s not
true
you sonofabitch. He says don’t worry she knows what side
her AT&T shares are bu-buttered on how can he say that?” She
started sniffing then finished reading. “When can you come?
Expecting you today. That’s what my uncle wrote. He wants an answer
now.”

I told her to tell him I was glad to hear
from him but I would have to think over his proposition. I would
ring back that evening at the latest. I hung up fast. The purple
flowers welcomed me back.

I tried to return to the Hungarian lesson. I
could still hear that hoarse whispered claim to friendship in my
ear as though from some cavern 2000 miles deep and the sullen voice
of the woman forced to insult herself to a stranger. I switched off
the recorded voice. The inside ones went on. I changed into my
jogging things. For some reason I slipped Harvey’s letter into the
jacket-pocket. Outside in the fresh air the voices faded.

I turned left at the end of the street
instead of right as usual, I didn’t know why, and started jogging
down Ambrose Avenue. The letter rustled in my pocket. Without
realizing it I began taking great strides, practically leaping,
like a superannuated ballet-dancer. I bounced, puffing, into view
of my bank between a record-shop and a fancy shoe-store. It was as
though my foolish feet had commanded me. I suddenly found myself
depositing Harvey’s check and withdrawing practically all my
savings: seven hundred dollars. I told myself that if I deposited
the check it was either to pay good long-suffering Mrs Philips or
else to make a minimum gesture to my second ex-wife. I would
carefully choose the beneficiary.

But my jubilant feet directed me to shops
just yards from the bank and I bought ten-year-old single-malt,
English shoes and numerous CDs of penetrable music. I had just
about enough left for the plane-fare to New York.