A Meaningful Life (14 page)

“You're not by yourself,” said his wife, starting toward the gate beneath the stoop.

The basement was inhabited, after a fashion. Its windows still had glass in them, and in the left-hand one there was a dimestore sign that said REAL ESTATE. Below the sign was a notary decal that had mostly flaked off. Lowell's wife marched up intrepidly and began to haul away at the locked gate, while Lowell remained limply behind on the sidewalk with a miserable expression on his face. After a while the rattling and clashing was answered by a blond young man who looked about sixteen years old. "Most people ring the bell,” he said, indicating a boldly lettered sign that said RING THE BELL and pointed to the button with an arrow. Lowell had seen the sign but had not been able to find words to tell his wife about it. "At least you didn't tap on the window with a quarter,” said the young man, unlocking the gate with considerable bad grace. "God, I can't tell you how that bugs me. Taptaptaptap. Sweet Jesus.”

“May I speak to your father?” said Lowell's wife.

“I am my father,” said the young man. "I fought in the Korean war and I'm old enough to be your uncle. Everybody makes the same mistake, and frankly, I don't care if you believe me or not. Come into the dining room.”

The room he led them to was an office with a desk and filing cabinets; it didn't look in the least like a dining room, and Lowell expected momentarily to be led somewhere else, but he wasn't. The preternaturally elderly young man went behind the desk and sat down moodily in a swivel chair. He was wearing tan chinos and a bulky-knit yellow turtleneck, both of them much cleaner than Lowell's clothes ever seemed to get. It seemed incredible that he'd been in the Korean war. He looked scarcely old enough to shave.

There was a loud thud somewhere in the upper reaches of the house, and a little shower of pulverized plaster sifted down through a crack in the ceiling, just like in a war movie. The young man paid no attention to it. He folded his hands on the desk and looked steadily at Lowell's wife.

“I can't remember what you came for,” he said. After a pause to let this information sink in, he added, "Houses or apartments?”

“I came for the ride,” said Lowell's wife. "It is my husband who has a purpose.”

Lowell was certain she was imitating some actress, and it bothered him that he couldn't figure out who. "Houses,” he said. "Are you the real-estate man?”

“Good,” said the young man. "Apartments are a pain in the ass. How much money have you got?”

Lowell reluctantly admitted to having about two thousand dollars, although not with him. "Who was the person I talked to on the phone?” he asked.

“That was my associate,” said the young man. "That's not enough.” He looked at Lowell wearily. Lowell allowed as how he might have a little more. He might even have another thousand, in a pinch.

“That's more like it,” said the young man. "I'll bet you've got even more than that. They always hold out on you.”

“
Three thousand dollars!
” squeaked Lowell's wife, her face aghast, indignant, and astonished in roughly equal measure. "We don't have three thousand dollars! If we had three thousand dollars we could have gone to France last summer! We could go to Aruba right now! Where did we get three thousand dollars? Saint Thomas! We could go to Saint Thomas! We just don't
have
that kind of money!”

Actually, the real-estate man was right and Lowell's wife was wrong. He was holding back, not exaggerating. The true sum was $8,322 and some odd cents. He had his bankbook right in his pocket. Except for food and rent and clothing, they never bought much of anything, and Lowell had been packing away the surplus for years. God knew why. It was just part of his monthly schedule. Anyway, this was the first he'd heard about a trip to France, much less Aruba. He wasn't even sure he knew where Aruba was.

“I guess we can look at something now,” said the real-estate man briskly, as though the squeaking and sputtering of outraged wives was all in a day's work. He picked up some file cards, flipped through them, and selected one. "Asking twenty, take eighteen, with a third in cash and a five-year balloon at seven and a quarter,” he said. "The more cash you've got, the lower the price.”

“I don't understand,” said Lowell, trying hard to sound forceful instead of bewildered, but not succeeding. "You're not the person we talked to on the phone, right? I mean, I'd just sort of like to get things straight in my mind.”

“That was Raymond,” said the young man. "He's working upstairs and can't be bothered to change his clothes, although I don't know what that's got to do with anything. Let's go.” He shrugged on his coat and herded them out the door.

“Don't even think about balloons,” whispered Lowell's wife. "Balloons are a trap.”

“What's a balloon?” whispered Lowell.

His wife drew in her breath with a sharp sipping sound and refused to say more, leaving him feeling like a spy who'd given the wrong countersign. It was all gibberish, and he didn't understand a thing.

An early twilight was falling through the trees as the real-estate man led them toward Washington Avenue. Numbers of Negroes had gathered in silent, cold-looking groups outside the houses, apparently for the sole purpose of showing Lowell's wife how many of them there were, because they certainly didn't seem to have come outdoors for any other reason; they weren't even talking much. There was almost no place you could look without finding someone looking incuriously back at you from it. It was kind of eerie. The sky seemed unusually large and full of pollution, and there was no rest for the eye up there, either; it was growing grayer as the light failed, making everything look limp and dreary and drained of color, as if the whole neighborhood and all the people in it had been underwater for years. It was November. Over in Manhattan, Lowell never thought of it as being any special month-you just had winter, and you were glad when it was over, and then it got hot-but this was a real November he was feeling now, for the first time in years. It was a bad month in a bad season in a poor part of town. A cold wind was getting up and naked light bulbs had begun to shine from behind curtainless windows. Lowell wanted to go home.

“The neighborhood slummed up after the war,” said the realestate man in a cadenced, unreal voice. "Before that, it was by far the most fashionable part of Brooklyn, and only millionaires could afford to live in it. Just look at these houses. The vast majority, including the one I'm about to show you, are in sound basic condition and only need minimal repair, if I make myself clear.”

“Maybe you'd better go into it,” said Lowell's wife. "I wouldn't want anything left unclear in my husband's mind.”

“Well, you can't make a definite statement about that kind of thing,” said the real-estate man. "It varies a lot from house to house. You can't expect every house to be the same. Am I right, sir?”

“Guess so,” said Lowell. "I wasn't listening very closely.”

“Don't take my word for it,” said the real-estate man. "Look around for yourself. Look in all the rooms. I'm only here to help you, don't take my word for a thing.”

“Don't worry about that,” said Lowell's wife. "Not that it makes any difference. I'm just humoring my husband by coming out here. We have a marvelous apartment on the West Side, and I'm perfectly content to stay there for the rest of my life. How much commission do you make on a deal like this?”

Lowell walked beside them, a thoughtful outcast. It was clear what his role was: he was a kind of conversational convenience, to be used as a foil when the need arose, and the rest of the time to be apostrophized as a way of clarifying his wife's feelings. On the whole he was glad that nothing more was required of him-it was an easy part to play, it would be over soon, and then they could go home and forget the whole thing-but at the same time it made him feel worried and jealous. It was like the times in his childhood when the big kids would leave him out when they talked about sex, except that his wife and the real-estate man were talking business. Lowell knew about as much about business as he used to know about sex, and his wife's apparent grasp of the subject was disturbing. Not only did he wonder where she'd had an opportunity to learn about it, but it upset him to hear her discussing it with another man. It was as though she'd started talking to someone else about strange bed positions he'd never heard of. "Isn't it getting a little late?” he suggested.

“Here we are,” said the real-estate man, stopping before a mansion of such surpassing opulent hideousness that Lowell could scarcely believe someone was actually offering to sell it to him. It was just the kind of place he'd always really wanted with a powerful subconscious craving that defied analysis. "The townhouse of Darius Collingwood, foremost corporation lawyer in the Northeastern United States,” said the real-estate man. "Built between 1800 and 1885 of Philadelphia brick, brownstone, terra-cotta, and Runcorn stone, whatever that is.”

“Darius Collingwood,” said Lowell.

It had a turret and a mansard roof with a wrought-iron railing in a design of vines and flowers. The façade jutted forth in a great bay like the prow of a mighty ship, its windows decorated with panels of stained glass, its waist defined by a wide course of ornamental brickwork, interspersed with terra-cotta panels displaying a relief of urns and human faces. There were flat windows and curved windows, rectangular windows and oval windows with belts of stone. There was a lightning rod on the turret. The main entrance, on the right as you faced the house, and some twenty feet to the rear of the great aggressive thrust of the bay, was reached by a flight of wide brownstone steps and was framed by thick brownstone columns that supported a kind of porch or miniature fortress. The front door itself was deep in shadow.

“It's a rooming house,” said Lowell's wife.

“Delivered vacant,” said the real-estate man. "Very observant of you.”

Lowell hadn't known that it was a rooming house. He looked at it closely, but he still couldn't see why it was a rooming house.

“What's the C. of O.?” asked his wife.

“Class B roomer,” said the agent.

Lowell didn't know what they were talking about.

“The house on the right,” continued the agent in his reading-it-off voice, indicating a three-story frame structure in bad repair, "is occupied by a number of elderly Irish ladies.”

As though alerted by a concealed microphone, an elderly Irish lady appeared at an upper window and regarded them suspiciously.

“Hump,” said Lowell's wife.

“The place on the left,” continued the agent, pointing to a narrow brick house that was separated from the mansion by a narrow alley piled high with discarded beer cans and burst bags of garbage, "is owned by an old man. Shall we go inside now?”

The real-estate man led them down the walk toward the porch. Halfway there he stopped, picked up a weatherbeaten mop handle that was leaning against the house, and banged loudly with it on the window above his head. "Henry!” he called. He paused with a look of impatience and then banged again. "Henry! Henry, you home?”

An elderly Negro man in a tattered undershirt pushed aside the curtains and sleepily heaved open the window. His eyes were bloodshot and foggy, and his face beneath the grayish stubble of beard had a kind of bruised, soft look, like some kind of dark, spoiled fruit. He looked down at the agent and swayed a little. "Man can't get no sleep,” he said.

“These people want to look at the house, Henry,” said the agent.

“I do my job,” said Henry. It was difficult to tell how he did anything at all, his eyes were so cloudy; the brown irises seemed to be dissolving. "Got a nice apartment. Fix it up all nice. Work all fucking day long. You come back tomorrow. I got to sleep.”

“You can sleep later, Henry. Mr. Grossman wants you to show these people the house now.”

“Shee-it! You go tell Mr. Grossman he can goddamn well go and fuck his goddamn self. I ain't no fucking horse. I got to sleep, I'm a working man. Now, you just get off my sidewalk and leave me alone.”

“We'll see you at the door, Henry,” said the agent. "We go through the same scene every time,” he explained to Lowell and his wife. "It's just a big act.”

“Don't you go doing that!” shouted Henry. "Don't you go talking about me when I'm standing right here! Ain't you got no fucking manners? Shee-it! I done told you before, you got something to say, you say it to me. Ain't never worked a fucking day in your life, waking up a man like that, talking about him when he standing right here, goddamn it, you stay away from that door, hear?”

“Let's go in,” said the agent, climbing the steps. He took out a ring of keys and began trying them in the lock one by one. Other windows had gone up in the house, and Lowell saw faces peering down at them indistinctly in the dusk.

“I think maybe...” he said.

“You all get away from there!” shouted Henry, leaning perilously out of his window and waving his arms clumsily. "You hear me? I said get away from the goddamn door! People is trying to eat their supper!”

“Here it is,” said the real-estate man, turning a key in the lock and pushing open the door. It had once been inset with a tall oval of glass, but a sheet of battered tin covered the place now. "Don't pay any attention to old Henry. He always carries on like that. He'll be here in a minute. Perhaps you'd like to take a look at the back parlor while we're waiting for him.”

“Why not?” said Lowell's wife brightly. "Let's look at everything.”

They were standing in a kind of lobby. The floor was filthy and the walls had been patched frequently but not well with huge handfuls of plaster. A staircase wound up into the darkness on the right. On the left were a pair of tall doors, and a short corridor behind Lowell's back terminated in a pair of equally tall doors, presumably the ones through which Henry would issue when he put on his shoes and got out his knife, or whatever he was doing. Everything in sight had been painted a peculiar and utterly depressing shade of pale green, which had then apparently been thickly sprayed with a mixture of soot and old cobwebs. They were the dirtiest walls Lowell had ever seen, and he instinctively shrank from touching them. The floor was so dirty it was impossible to tell what it was made of-a sheet of slightly flexible cardboard over an abyss, it felt like-and the only light came from a dim fluorescent ring high up on the ceiling, flickering off and on and nearly buried in another crude plastering job. There were water stains everywhere, and dim racks and banks of pipes went this way and that, up the walls and across the ceiling, festooned with a gray fur of dust and soot. The air smelled strongly of stagnant water and burned wood. Upstairs someone opened a door and spoke a word, then closed the door again. Somewhere a toilet flushed.