Timebends (24 page)

No sensible person could take Manny seriously—he loved to clown—but it was hard to remain unmoved by him, I suppose because an inch below his mad imaginings people sensed the common suffering that in his case never healed over with the customs of indifference. If it was typical of him to look up at me from his casino hand, with his shovel hanging in open view just behind his head in the garage, and say, “I don't have a shovel,” it was normal, too, and Lee and my father and whoever else was playing with him would never think of openly mentioning the obvious contradiction. Everyone knew that his solution for any hard problem was always the same—change the facts. And everyone took a certain delight in him, as though that was really what they would love to do themselves if only they dared. Beneath the general scoffing at him there was something like intense curiosity if not respect and envy for his crazy courage in turning away from the ordinary rules of sane intercourse. For me, I think, he also seemed to contain multitudes, subtleties of meaning and implication absent in everyone else; in his straightforward denial of owning a shovel, for example, he was actually implying the theme of his life, the competitiveness that drugged his mind. In effect he was saying, “Why don't your father buy his own shovel? If he's important enough to look down on me”—as he was sure conservative types always did—“then he's got no call asking me to lend him a tool. Is he too high-class to own a shovel? Is he such a success that he can go
around not even thinking of a shovel except when he desperately needs one, or his son does, and then he thinks you can just drop over and pick up mine? I've got money tied up in this shovel. So for the Millers I have no shovel.” But it went even further; in his mind's eye the shovel hanging behind his head had really ceased to exist at that moment.

Of course I learned from my father and Uncle Lee and the other men in the family to despair of Manny, but I could never keep my eyes off him either, nor could they. A gin game was only a gin game without Manny, half a dozen or more mildly bored people sitting around a table and talking in spurts about operations or pregnancies or the endless rain or lack of rain or who was likely to get elected or, above all, a fortune somebody had made or lost and how much Bing Crosby or Rudy Vallee made in a single week. But from Manny there was bound to come an assertion sometime in the first ten minutes, the announcement of a theme for the evening, like “Friend of mine in Providence tells me this Rudy Vallee guy broke all the records up there, they took in thirty million dollars in two nights.”

“Thirty
million?
”

“Thirty million not counting matinees.”

And they were off, figuring the probable number of seats in the theatre and dividing that into thirty million … But mercy softened them before anyone would declare the outright absurdity of the take, and anyway Manny had changed the subject with some joke, along with a certain self-confessing psychic wink that charmed his listeners into wondering whether he was really serious after all, and he managed to finish a card game with everyone's emotions having been stirred to outrage, laughter, and finally comradeship with this imp of a man who continuously slipped in and out of every category. Through it all, the fair skin of his wife, Annie, alternately flushed and paled as she dreaded and was relieved of the fear that he was making too much of a fool of himself, something she would have to pay for later, when with no audience to confirm his existence his agonizing uncertainty of identification flooded him with despair. If such black moods hung on, she would sit beside him all the way through New England in his little car, which in winter was barely kept above freezing by its primitive heater, and she would persistently talk him into sunnier thoughts. In those days, before the parkways and superhighways, he had to drive through every town, stop at every traffic light, and he carried a short-handled shovel in the trunk to dig his way out of drifts, since there were no
snow tires as yet and many towns only plowed their roads once in a storm.

It was the unpredictability of his life that wove romance around it. He was not in some dull salaried job where you could never hope to make a killing. Hope was his food and drink, and the need to project hopeful culminations for a selling trip helped, I suppose, to make life unreal. Fifty years later, in my Chinese production of
Death of a Salesman,
Ying Ruocheng, the actor playing Willy, was trying to imagine an equivalent to this romance of hope in some Chinese occupation, selling having always been a disreputable pursuit for Chinese, and certainly not something to be romanticized. He finally seized on the outriders who in the old times had accompanied caravans across China, protecting them from bandits. These hired guns had all kinds of adventures and formed a kind of bragging brotherhood, meeting in faraway places from time to time to trade tales of victories and defeats. With the coming of the railroads the need for their services vanished, and they ended up in local fairs firing at targets, swallowing swords, and drinking to forget (rather like our Buffalo Bill).

Much more than a single model would ultimately go into Willy Loman. Indeed, since I saw so little of Manny he was already, in my youth, as much myth as fact. But there are images of such defined power and density that without offering concrete information to the writer they are nevertheless the sources of his art.

Actually, a friend of his, another salesman whom he had brought home at the end of one of his trips, was more vivid to me than even Manny. One evening he was sitting in the Newman kitchen when I suddenly came on him, no doubt on one of my expeditions to see what was going on in that feverish household. I remembered him well from one of his previous visits, but I was certain he would not recall a kid like me. I started to pass him to go into the living room when he said, “Hello, Arthur, how are things?”

I stopped and turned back to him. He had two vivid distinctions for me: although middle-aged, he was unmarried, and he had a wooden leg, which at the moment was propped across the seat of a chair. Unlike Manny, he was a listener, a quiet and unsmiling man with quizzical brown eyes, sparse hair, and a reflective air. Imagining his stump, I felt some of his pain and wondered if it was what gave him his somewhat tired and thoughtful look. I also knew that he was unable to drive and had to move by train, wrestling bags and dealing with porters, valiantly pressing his way across the country like a wounded soldier. Like any traveling man, he had to
my mind a kind of intrepid valor that withstood the inevitable putdowns, the scoreless attempts to sell. In a sense, these men lived like artists, like actors whose product is first of all themselves, forever imagining triumphs in a world that either ignores them or denies their presence altogether. But just often enough to keep the game going one of them makes it and swings to the moon on a thread of dreams unwinding out of himself.

“I'm fine,” I said, flattered. And not knowing what to do next, I stood there waiting as his tired eyes searched my face. Actually, I was feeling tense from trying to keep my eye from lingering on his fascinating artificial limb, its shoe stiffly pointing to the ceiling from the seat of the chair it was resting on.

“You've changed, haven't you?” he said. “You've gotten serious.”

With one sentence he had handed me the dignity of a history of my own. Until that moment, like everything else around me, I had simply been inevitable, as enveloped by time and as helpless as a leaf on a river's surface. “Changed” meant I was not as I had been before. Somehow this was hopeful, but why I could not imagine. For days and weeks afterward I replayed this moment in my mind, trying to understand how I had “changed.” I studied my face in the bathroom mirror, looking for some sign of my “seriousness” and trying to recall what I had looked like before I gained this little distinction. If I ever knew that salesman's name I forgot it long ago, but not his few interested words that helped crack the shell of suffocating subjectivity surrounding my existence.

Manny had managed to make his boys into a pair of strong, self-assured young men, musketeers bound to one another's honor and proud of their family. Neither was patient enough or perhaps capable enough to sit alone and study, and they both missed going to college. Buddy joined the Seabees during the war and welded landing mats for aircraft on Pacific islands, married an older woman who had her own children, and died at forty of cancer, an entrepreneur at last, serving aircraft workers sandwiches from a small fleet of vans he had managed to buy or lease. Abby fought with the infantry at Anzio, one of the worst-conceived landings of the war, his outfit pinned down on the beach by German artillery fire from surrounding heights. He said he had lost his mind, finally, and had climbed out of his foxhole and walked around on the exploding battlefield as though nothing were happening, and was never even grazed. Like everything else he ever recounted, this story had some holes in it—certain dates he dropped seemed to place him elsewhere than at Anzio—but the possibility was very
great that as a Newman he had indeed turned his back on reality and gone for a stroll on a battlefield.

The last I saw of Abby was a number of years before he died, in his early forties, like his mother, of hypertension. He had invited me to his bachelor apartment in Manhattan after I phoned him. I had not seen him since before the war. Wearing blue silk pajamas and slippers, he ushered me into his small living room overlooking lower Lexington Avenue. It was a late Saturday afternoon.
All My Sons
was running on Broadway,
Focus
had been published a year or two earlier, and I had a wife and two children. What he had came out of his bedroom on two pairs of spike heels, two startlingly beautiful young women who dashed over to him where he sat and kissed him on each cheek, pausing only long enough to nod to me as he introduced me with a display of pashalike satisfaction. Buttoning up blouses and straightening stockings, they hurried out of the apartment. They were late, they said, for work. “I love it with two,” he chuckled as the door slammed shut.

He very much resembled our long-dead uncle Hymie the shot-spitter, with the same aquiline nose, the brown eyes witty with lust, the thick wavy dark hair, and the straight white teeth. He had always looked oiled. Had he arranged this demonstration of his sexual powers to stoke my envy? He certainly succeeded. We had made our date three days earlier, and he would have had time to attend to the staging. His face as he sat there smiling at me seemed to declare his superior potency. I realized that absurd as it might seem on the level of reality, on a deeper path we had been jostling one another for a very long time to see who would lead. And that was why I thought he had timed the girls' presence. He must have deeply resented my success, as he doubtless saw it, with a prize-winning play. In short, he couldn't write but he could certainly fuck. Of course his face showed nothing but his sweetly imagined superiority, which, however, I knew to be fragile. As always, his lifelong narcissism made me uneasy with him; to remain friends with such people one has to be false to oneself, since they must always be praised. The only mystery is why one bothers. But of course one doesn't in the end.

I had a purpose here that I had not told him about. Before very long we were talking about the war and his outbreak of temporary irrationality at Anzio. “They took me out of the line as soon as we broke through, and I made lieutenant in the military police. We were trying to track down missing freight cars full of tires that kept disappearing below Rome around Foggia, and I finally traced a
whole new track these guys had laid out—the cars were driven off into a forest and unloaded and then put back on the main track.” He laughed his gutty laugh. “There was plenty of dough to be made, but naturally I didn't.” By which I was to understand that he had come out of the war with money in his pocket, and simultaneously that he was far too honorable to accept bribes. In the delightful Newman physics two things could occupy the same space with ease. What the reality was only God knew, but in any case his basic message was clear: he was a success.

And now, with a sudden turn toward philosophical unhappiness: “I don't think I could ever stay with one woman. How can you do it?”

“Who says you have to?”

“I don't know …” He glanced disconsolately out the window. “I might want a kid sometime.” He turned to me, joyfully unhappy. “Can you figure it out?”

“Not really. Once in a while everybody wants both.”

“I don't know if I could ride it out, though. I mean if I began to get bored … What do you do if she bores you?”

“Wait till it passes.”

He sighed. “That's what I figured.”

But he did marry and have a child before he ended.

“What did your pop want?” I asked him. This was what I had come for.

I was obsessed these days by vague but exciting images of what can only be called a trajectory, an arched flow of storytelling with neither transitional dialogue nor a single fixed locale, a mode that would open a man's head for a play to take place inside it, evolving through concurrent rather than consecutive actions. By this time I had known three suicides, two of them salesmen. I knew only that Manny had died with none of the ordinary reasons given. I had also totally forgotten that ten years earlier I had begun a play in college about a salesman and his family but had abandoned it. I would only discover the notebook in which I had written it some nine years hence—long after the first production of
Death of a Salesman
—when my marriage broke up and I had to move my papers out of my Brooklyn house.

“I mean if you had to say the one thing he wanted most, the one thing that occurred to him most often, what would it be?”

My cousin Abby, big, dark, filled with the roiling paradoxes of love for me and competitive resentment, of contempt for his late failed father and at the same time a pitying love and even amused
admiration for the man's outrageousness—my cousin sitting there had also entered my dreams not long before, and possibly it was the dream that had caused me to ring him up after so many years.