Time Travail (38 page)

I returned and locked the front and back
doors. I wedged chairs under the knobs. I had the feeling that I
was barricading myself in rather than barricading intruders out. I
went upstairs and without looking inside I closed the guestroom
door. I changed the sheets of the
cama de matrimonia
in Beth’s bedroom. To get rid of the last
of Hanna I opened the window wide. Like the guestroom window it
gave on the west. It too was in the nineteen-inch zone and me with
it. For a moment there I believed him, didn’t have time to reason
that he had no landmarks to be able to determine the exact degree
of coincidence between the old house and the new, certainly not to
the inch.

I pulled back fast and went downstairs. I
took the half-empty bottle of whisky and a glass and sat in the big
armchair in front of the TV. I didn’t dare turn it on. They could
come that way too, I knew, like insects on the screen. I was
invested everywhere. When most of the whisky was gone I tried to
sleep on the living room sofa, dressed except for my shoes, as for
a solitary tenderness session.

Lying there on her sofa I couldn’t help
thinking that Harvey must also be lying, collapsed, on his sofa in
the dead room. He’d be imagining his strategically positioned
machines in the space of this house with their time-prying lenses,
pumping in old scenes for reactivating. The scenes ended by coming
to me that way, imagining what he was imagining.

I tried to keep a bit of my mind lucid. By
now I knew the price of complete surrender, the reverse-ratio of
time involved in pathological dedication to memory,
machine-assisted or not, cheated out of my impoverished stock of
future. Time-travail was like hard-drug addiction. The dose
increased endlessly in the desire for something more authentic,
maybe blotched and flickering, untouchable and dumb at first but at
the end couldn’t your blown mind supply those missing elements too
as Harvey’s had with color and dimension and joy and the jackpot
time-ratio, lifetimes there, time practically conquered? At the end
imagine joyous recognition on their part, response to touch and
words and you babbled insanities and explored the night with a
yardstick and a compass, ready to sequestrate maybe even to murder
to return integrally to all that?

Finally I struggled out of it at half-past
three in the morning. Wasn’t this an emergency? I searched for the
dollar-bill with the number Beth had given me. I must have left it
in the guestroom. I labored upstairs and forced that door open
against the pressure of the wind. The doorknob trembled in my hand
as I stood on the threshold watching the curtains pouring into the
room like smoke or concentrate of moonlight. The room was stark
with moonlight and opaque shadow. I went in.

The door slammed shut behind me. At a safe
distance from the window I saw through the fence the shadow of the
elm in Harvey’s rank garden, branches and twigs alive in the
blowing high dead weeds. The wind launched inky clouds against the
full moon. The sky reminded me of the time on the beach with the
dead dog.

As I picked up the dollar-bill from the floor
where the wind had blown it I saw a watch lying just beneath the
window. He must have lost it when I’d grabbed his wrists hard to
prevent him from toppling out of the window. I hesitated and then
went over there. I bent down to pick it up and felt dizzy as though
I were going to pitch forward and down into a black chasm, the
forbidden space the maniac had invented, a trap, I was able to
think (a saving crazy thought), baited by his Taiwanese watch with
its merciless non-volatile memory, constructed as I wasn’t for deep
descents.

I got out of the room, clutching the
dollar-bill, and escaped downstairs. I sat down in front of the
phone in the living room and looked at my watch. It was almost four
in the morning. I also saw the date and realized with a sinking
feeling that it was finally Beth’s birthday. I looked at the other
watch, Harvey’s, almost expecting an earlier time, an ancient date,
but got confirmation of now-time. Almost four, her birthday, and I
had no gift, not even one to announce. She’d told me not to ring
her anyhow. I went back to the whisky.

After a while I felt there wasn’t enough
light in the room. I got up and fiddled with the wall-switches. By
accident I turned on the electric fireplace. I remembered what
she’d said about it. Sometimes when she had the blues she sat in
the dark and stared at it. It was very calming. I switched off the
other lights. The room rocked with flames. I extinguished them
instantaneously. I switched the lights back on and stared at the
soiled margin of the dollar-bill.

I got a hotel desk. I thought it was a wrong
number and checked. It was the right number. I asked for Mrs Beth
Anderson. Her room phone rang and rang. Finally I got her blurred
voice. I said, Beth, Beth, like the last time.

After a while she mumbled: “You woke me up.
Why are you phoning? What’s the emergency?”

“It’s your birthday. I almost forgot. Happy
birthday, Beth.”

But I still had no gift.

Silence. She had trouble focussing mentally,
because of the barbiturates, probably. She mumbled again: “That’s
no emergency. Not for you. Why wake me up to remind me of that? Why
are you phoning me at … at ten past midnight, Jerry?”

Panic at that. I’d just seen the time and
knew it was ten past four, even by his watch. Was I getting her
voice from four hours in the past? Was she there too? The infection
was spreading. Then I said:

“I forgot about the time-zone. What are you
doing in a hotel, Beth? I thought you were staying at your
sister’s.”

Another long silence. Had she fallen asleep?
“Beth?”

“Long story. Too tired. It’s … four in the
morning where you are. Why are you phoning me at four in the
morning, Jerry?”

I’d told her. But her question was like a
challenge. It had to be more than words of congratulation, more
than the vague promise of a gift to justify breaking into her sleep
at midnight with something she didn’t want to hear anyhow. It had
to be something tremendous, better even than Harvey’s garden which
she’d rejected.

Suddenly the answer came like a sunburst,
triumphant, something she couldn’t possibly reject. How can you
reject the rising sun?

“It’s about your present, Beth. I couldn’t
wait to tell you. A tremendous present, Beth.”

“You’re yelling again. Aren’t you feeling
well, Jerry? God, I feel so awful too.”

“Not well at all, Beth. Till I had this great
idea. It’ll make you feel like yelling too. First tell me when
you’ll be back.”

“I don’t know. Maybe in a week. Maybe
more.”

That long? I thought. It wasn’t possible to
stay in this house another day, no more than in the other house.
Did she remember, I said, how once I’d asked her as a game what
she’d do with $200,000? I’d forgotten what she’d said but whatever,
it wasn’t the right answer. What she should have said and I should
have said too was a house near the sea for both of us. Not for a
two-week vacation, paying rent to strangers, but ours, for as long
as we lived. You didn’t need $200,000, half that amount was enough
and I had it, I said. Practically: almost one hundred thousand,
with maybe more later.

Which was her birthday present: a house far
away from here and just for the two of us, near an empty beach,
there must be a few left. I tried to create it all for her distant
ear, that lovely pink seashell. An acre or two of land for all the
flowers and vegetables she liked, why not a small farm for
self-sufficiency while we were at it? Couldn’t she just picture it?
Great skies and surf. Pink seashells. Driftwood fires on the beach.
Driftwood for lamps too, maybe open a driftwood-lamp shop, I’d do
the wiring-job and she’d do the varnishing. We’d lie down each
evening, our minds busy with tomorrow’s projects in common.

I went on and on. It was an act of creation.
He’d said the future didn’t exist but he was wrong for once. It had
color, dimension, sound, smell, everything. I was creating and
fortifying it with every word. What I held in focus now was
integral reality. Facing in that right direction I could
practically feel the sand trickling out through my funneled hands,
smell washed-up seaweed in the sun, hear wheeling gulls. You
weren’t in blur and silence as when you faced in the wrong
direction. Embracing was possible and reciprocated.

It was so real that at one point I thought:
I’m there on that beach in reality and this, standing in this room
at 4:00 am talking about it far from her in this nightmare of a
room is another time-trap I’m going to have to struggle up out of.
But then I told myself that on that beach – those firm shining
sands – there’d be an end to time-traps.

A sunburst inside. The night was behind me.
She must be feeling the same. I wanted her to participate in the
creation, authenticating it by give and take, collaboration, making
it a shared vision, it was for the two of us, inconceivable
otherwise.

“Beth, that’s your present. What do say,
Beth?”

I waited for participation but nothing came.
She wasn’t saying anything.

I said her name again. Again, louder. Yelling
again?

She came back, saying that she’d dozed off,
she’d had a long day and that I should go to bed now.

I tried to generate the lyricism for a repeat
performance but was too tired. I’d had a long day too, a long
night. It would be better as a total surprise anyhow.

I said I loved her. Did she love me?

She said, yes of course she loved me and hung
up.

***

Nineteen

The next afternoon I was vacuum cleaning
the honored guestroom, sunny and harmless now, singing along
with
Calm Sea
and Prosperous Voyage
,
imperfectly reproduced on my new hi-fi, when I got a call. The
woman thought she had the wrong number when she heard my voice. She
wanted to speak to Beth Anderson. I identified myself as the
next-door-neighbor. I was watering Mrs Anderson’s plants. I’d
promised to do that once a day for as long as she was away. Away?
Did I know where? And for how long? I said I’d understood it was an
emergency. Her sister had been hospitalized.

“Oh, you got it wrong, thank God. To my
knowledge I’m the only sister Beth has and I haven’t been
hospitalized. Not this year, touch wood. That happened last year.
She’s supposed to come over next week like she does every summer. I
just wanted her to confirm. As soon as she comes back could you
tell her Martha phoned? Thank you.”

There had to be a clue somewhere in the
house. I ploughed through her things, from top to bottom, riffled
all the drawers and shelves in the house, riffled her books and
chucked them on the floor, burrowed into the blue and pink sheets
in the closet, left everything in turmoil.

I finally found the answer in the imitation
18th century jewel-box with the shepherdess and the swain. The tube
of Valium was gone. I unfolded the crazy leaflet and read the
scribbled flight number with take-off time and the destination and
also the hotel reservation.

I phoned the hotel every half-hour for five
hours. Just as well she didn’t answer. I needed arguments to
preserve my future defined in the terms I’d defined it the night
before. I couldn’t give up that forward-looking vision, so couldn’t
give her up. Strangled bellows of rage, little sounds of hurt and
grief and prostrated silence were no arguments. Something had to be
salvaged from this.

I took a sheet of paper and started listing
the points to be made, trying not to let a deadly insight focus.
Why this act of treachery? I scrawled. Act of sabotage. Like
smashing rudder of ship. Crippled ship could stay afloat in fair
weather but weather was cyclic too. When it blew foul, ship would
sink. I would sink, go down and down. Black abyss. Help. Help.
Return and rock my head instead of this betrayal. Betraying me that
crazy way: revelation of our basic incompatibility. Oh no, Beth,
not incompatibility, cross that out. But betrayal, yes. Had
flagrantly violated tacit contract that exists between all
couples.

Suppose she asked about the terms of our
contract? I put the pencil down and pondered. That my craziness
took precedence over hers, that I was fundamentally the nursed, not
the nurse? No, no. But it was true I’d been dependent on her to
pull me out of the quagmire of time past. Help. Help.

Help? The deadly insight focused now. She too
was caught in those same slow sands to the quivering nostrils, in
her own selfish past with no reference to mine. We were sinking
together, side by side but light-years apart, unable to help each
other. But anyhow: help, help.

It began to take shape, sheet after sheet,
structured with roman numerals, capital letters, small-case
letters, numbers. Scribbling away I almost forgot my woe in the
semi-creative act of accurately outlining it on paper. My despair
and rage were finally laid out like a classical French garden. I
reached for the phone. I’d have to be careful not to monopolize
things, not to read the seven sheets like a lecture, punctuated by,
“You’re listening?” “You’re not dozing off this time?” I dialed and
dialed.

Finally at about 3:30 am, my time zone, she
answered. I glanced at the first sheet, rejected the violent
introduction, chose the quiet one. I said quietly:

“How come you’re in that hotel, Beth? I know
it’s a long story and it’s late but I’d like to hear it
anyhow.”

She didn’t know where she was and who I was,
barely who she was. I identified myself and repeated the question,
a little less quietly. A long pause.

“Oh, that. No reason to wake me up for that.
Terrible story. Don’t even like to think of it, much less talk
about it. All right, if you insist. I can’t stay at Martha’s
because of Larry. My brother-in-law. Knew each other before he met
Martha. Used to be in love with me. Not love really, something
awfully … carnal, animal almost. Didn’t like the idea of staying in
the house alone with him. Then I thought, okay, with Martha in the
hospital, my own sister, for heaven’s sake, no danger. But he
started in as soon as we got back from the hospital. Brutal. Can’t
tell you what he asked me to do.”