A Meaningful Life (24 page)

“You sure look it,” said the boy hippie dreamily, and before Lowell could think of a good reply, they gathered up their groceries and cigarette papers and departed into the night with a faint ringing of bells.

“Heepies,” said the proprietor merrily. He was a round little man from the Canary Islands who seemed to have been born with a feather up his ass. As a result he was very popular, although not with Lowell, who disliked merry people and always suspected that there was something wrong with their heads. “Heepies,” giggled the proprietor again. “Heeheeheeheehee. What you say, eh?”

Lowell couldn't think of a good reply to that one, either. He gathered up his beer and left, feeling as though he was the object of some kind of minor conspiracy that was designed to make him look funny and feel bad without ever finding out what it was all about.

The next person he tried to befriend was a pretty young mother, relatively smart-looking and apparently not spaced out, whom he occasionally encountered on one of the major avenues, laboring under an incredible number of groceries and two small children. It seemed impossible that anyone so small and pretty would have to carry so many packages so frequently, but she did. There was something odd about it, something not quite right. Lowell supposed it was because she didn't have a car. On the other hand, neither did Lowell, and
his
wife never went around loaded down like a packhorse. Neither did the wives of any of the people he knew, most of whom did not have cars either. Under normal circumstances Lowell would have dismissed the whole thing as another little urban mystery that was best left alone, but these were not normal circumstances. Lowell needed a contact, even a strange one, and the girl was obviously part of the world he was trying to get into: she lived in a freshly painted, pumpkin-colored house on Greene Avenue, with a newly planted tree at the curb, a tiny but beautiful front garden, and a shiny brass number plate just like the one Lowell wanted to get for his own house. Anyway, if she really was a weirdo, he could always drop her after she introduced him to her friends. One thing could be said for all those sacks and bags and kids: she would be easy to catch.

Spurred on by his encounter with the hippies, he approached her the very next time he saw her, one bright day on Lafayette Avenue, where he'd gone to buy a box of brads. She was struggling with a full shopping cart and an immense bag full of canned vegetables and condensed milk. She carried one child in a backpack and dragged the other one along by means of a length of clothesline that joined her waist to his, like mountain climbers use. Her hair was in her face, and her eyes were kind of wild. Both kids were crying to beat the band.

“How do you do?” said Lowell in his most manly voice, stepping up to her with a confident smile. “I'm Lowell Lake. I just bought the old Collingwood place on Washington Avenue. May I help you?”

She looked at him as though he'd just offered to buy one of her children. Her pace quickened and she swept past him without a word, narrowly missing his shin with the hub of her shopping cart. “Mommmmeee!” screamed the older child. “We're going too
fast
again!”

Lowell gave chase and soon overtook them. “Are you sure I can't take your package?” he asked.

“I'm all right,” said the girl, her eyes darting about a little wildly. “Everything is okay. Everything is fine.” She began to walk even faster, the shopping cart fishtailing behind her. The older child fell into a stumbling trot beside her, and the baby in the backpack looked around with an expression of astonishment. “But ...” said Lowell. He made a feeble gesture, as though hopelessly begging for help instead of hopelessly offering it, and then he gave up. He just stood there on the sidewalk in the full blaze of noon and mutely watched the girl double-time off into the distance with her kids and freight like some weird kind of urban Mother Courage. He decided that she was crazy, and he never tried to talk to her again, although in the days that followed he occasionally sighted her in the distance, struggling along like some kind of ant. She was probably a tenant at the neat-looking house on Greene Avenue. She probably didn't have anything to do with the way it looked at all.

He occasionally saw the hippies on the street too, looking around them as though the world had turned some delightful new color. Sometimes they looked at Lowell. They seemed pretty pleased with him too, but not in any human way. After a while Lowell began to check the street before he left the house, to make sure they were nowhere in sight. He didn't like being looked at like that.

Lowell thought the matter over and decided that the situation was not normal. In the weeks since he'd first come to the neighborhood, he'd met a fag real-estate agent, two senile old people, a pair of stoned hippies, and a nut. (He'd also met, albeit briefly, a substantial number of Negroes and Puerto Ricans and one goofy grocer from the Canary Islands, but they were not the people he was looking for, and they didn't count.) Clearly such a collection couldn't be a reasonable cross-section of this or any other neighborhood. Therefore he had managed to meet the wrong people. Undoubtedly an opportunity for meeting the right people would arise in due time. Meanwhile, he decided not to worry about it. He'd worry about it when he got done with the house, and he went right upstairs with a couple of six-packs and set to work, attempting to pull a nest of old wiring out of the wall without electrocuting himself, shorting out the house, burning it down, or a combination of the three. Presently he began to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” or as much of it as he could remember, which was quite a lot more than he could remember when he wasn't drinking beer. It established a good rhythm for his work, made the time pass quickly, gave rise to thoughts of Darius Collingwood, and was fun. He was aware that he'd forgotten to eat again. It was a good thing beer was so nourishing.

“
I said, the downstairs door was open
” roared a voice from somewhere as Lowell was trampling down the vineyards for the third or fourth time. Lowell broke off and peered around him as though squinting through a dirty windshield. He discovered a short, Assyrian-like man in the doorway, regarding him with a belligerent expression suggestive of unredressed grievances and unpaid bills. He had greenish-brown skin and comic-book blue hair, and his suit appeared to have been tailored for an oil drum. Lowell had never seen him before in his life and could only stare at him drunkenly, a bundle of live wires clutched in his hand.

“I wouldn't do that if I were you,” barked his visitor.

Lowell examined his wires. They looked all right to him. “Why not?” he asked.

“Leave the door open,” said his visitor with obvious exasperation and contempt. “I wouldn't leave the door open. That was what I meant. I meant the door.”

“Oh,” said Lowell.

“My name is Warsaw,” the man went on. “I'm a lawyer.”

“How do you do?” said Lowell, wondering if he was about to be presented with a summons. He couldn't imagine why, unless his wife was divorcing him, and she hadn't said anything about it. “I'm Lowell Lake,” he added. “I'd come over there and shake your hand, but I have this bunch of wires.”

“We bought our house on Saint John's Place six years ago,” Mr. Warsaw snapped out. “That was three years before anybody.” He jabbed toward Lowell with his index finger. “What have you done?”

Lowell searched his mind frantically for something he might have done.

“What rooms have you finished?” demanded Mr. Warsaw, allowing Lowell to know what he was talking about while keeping his reasons for asking the question hidden. Lowell wondered if Mr. Warsaw's conversational style had been permanently effected by cross-examining recalcitrant witnesses, but he couldn't decide whether they were having a conversation or not. Maybe he was really being cross-examined. “I can't remember,” he said. “I mean, we haven't finished any. No rooms are finished. Not one.”

“I see,” said Mr. Warsaw.

“I'd show you around,” Lowell explained, “but I have this bunch of wires.” He held them up.

“In that case, I'll look around by myself,” said Mr. Warsaw, turning abruptly on his heel and striding up the stairs like a policeman. A moment later Lowell heard him walking around overhead. Lowell suddenly felt very silly, standing there in the empty room with his wires. He also felt wrong. He decided maybe he'd better go upstairs too. That seemed best. He carefully put down his wires and went upstairs.

Mr. Warsaw was darting from room to room like a man desperately searching for a lost wallet, flicking on lights as he went. Lowell stood on the landing and watched him. Soon all the lights were on and all the doors were standing wide open, even the closet doors. Mr. Warsaw came out of the last room, looked around in a harassed and disorganized fashion, did not seem pleased by what he saw, and hurried down the stairs, brushing past Lowell with no more regard than if he were some kind of especially uninteresting piece of hallway furniture. Lowell followed at a discreet distance, marveling.

“That's a coffin niche, did you know that?” said Mr. Warsaw suddenly, indicating a recession in the wall where the staircase took a turn.

“No,” said Lowell. “I didn't.” He wondered why it was called a coffin niche and what it had been used for, but he decided not to ask about it.

Mr. Warsaw reached the bottom of the stairs and immediately scurried into the parlor. He popped back out of it a second later. “What's the matter with the lights?” he demanded. “The lights won't go on; what's the matter with them?”

“I'll bet you got the wrong switch,” said Lowell. He went into the parlor and turned on the right one. Mr. Warsaw dashed past him again and immediately took up a central position.

“My wife and I,” he began, striking an attitude, “bought our house six years ago.” He'd asked so many questions that this utterance of a simple declarative sentence sounded extremely strange, as though he'd begun to read aloud. “No one else had bought in the neighborhood when he arrived. We were the first. Our house was built in 1873. The Pouch family owned it. Some of the original furniture was still in the basement.”

“That's interesting,” said Lowell. “Our place was built by Darius Collingwood.”

“I see your parlor has two fireplaces,” said Mr. Warsaw. “So does ours. It was a common feature of the larger houses.” He was looking at Lowell with eyes that did not seem to register another human presence. It was as though he'd been told that there was an audience in that direction, and he'd decided that his voice would carry better if he faced them. “You'll probably find that yours are Carrara marble. Ours are slate, which is extremely rare. Carrara marble is difficult to keep clean. It stains.”

“I don't think they're Carrara marble,” said Lowell. “I scraped off some paint, and it looks like something else.”

“Our house is virtually completed,” said Mr. Warsaw. “The parlor floor is completely restored.
The New York Times
Sunday
Magazine
came and took pictures of it. Come by some time and take a look at it.” He whipped a tweed cap from somewhere, suggesting that he was preparing to leave now that he'd finished talking about his house. “I have to go visit some people,” he explained in a way that somehow managed to convey that neither he nor Lowell were people. He drew on a pair of kidskin gloves and looked at Lowell expectantly. “Well,” he said sharply, “aren't you going to show me out?”

Lowell showed him out. Mr. Warsaw scuttled away down the street without a backward glance, like some kind of immense bipedal rodent. Lowell waited on the stoop for a moment, half-hoping to hear the sounds of a violent mugging, but no such good thing happened, and he went back indoors. He disliked Mr. Warsaw, and he had an imaginary conversation with him while he drank another beer and finished untangling his wires.

A few days later, however, he tried to pay the Warsaws a visit. He had decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. This was easy to do because Lowell had drunk a great many more beers that night and as a result he had no confidence in his memories when he reviewed them the following morning. He remembered that he hadn't liked Mr. Warsaw, but on the other hand, he'd been drunk. This was a powerful, and possibly conclusive, argument in Mr. Warsaw's favor. Lowell always retrospectively loathed himself when he'd been drunk in someone else's presence, even if they were drunk too. He was certain he'd disgusted them, although this was seldom the case; in actual fact, people almost never realized he was drunk even when he was bombed out of his mind, possibly because he never did anything conspicuous or odd (usually he just went to sleep), and they were always surprised and a little annoyed when he made his apologies afterward. Sober people had a great advantage when there were drunk people around: they were sober. It really gave them the upper hand. They knew what was going on.

Viewed in such a light, it seemed far less important to Lowell that he hadn't liked Mr. Warsaw than that Mr. Warsaw probably hadn't liked him. It would go far toward explaining his behavior: instead of being peculiar and compulsive, he could have been pissed-off and disgusted, in which case Lowell had blown another opportunity to make meaningful contact with his neighbors. It was like trying to contact the
maquis
. Lowell began to feel pretty paranoid and unhappy about the whole thing, and he set out on his visit in an unusually humble and disturbed state of mind.

The Warsaw house would have been easy to spot even if Lowell hadn't bothered to look up the number in the phone book beforehand. It stood out like a prince among beggars. With its mellow sand-blasted brick facade, its tastefully painted cornice and trim, its immaculate windows, polished oak door, and tubs of flowers, it gave the impression that it was the only inhabited building on the block, despite the fact that it betrayed no signs of life while all the other buildings were visibly teeming with humanity. Here and there along the street broken windows had been replaced with sheets of warped, unpainted plywood. Half the front doors appeared to be off their hinges, all the brownstone facings were flaking in a way that unpleasantly suggested rotting teeth, and naked light bulbs could be seen burning weakly in bare and garishly painted rooms beyond cheap and often ragged curtains hung from sagging bits of string. Despite the coolness of the weather, people hung from the upper windows of the houses like shapeless lumps of laundry, dry, their elbows cushioned with pillows, and down on the street small groups of drunken men stood around on the sidewalk or sat on the stoops, wearing the remnants of ancient suits with trousers too wide for their legs and belted too high on their bodies, passing bottles back and forth in crumpled paper bags. The scene was so hyperbolically poverty-stricken that it didn't look real; it looked contrived, like a set for some kind of incredible squalid version of
Porgy and Bess
. As Lowell walked down the street—conspicuous, he was aware, not so much by his clothing and color as by his air of purposeful, energetic activity—a pack of children streamed past him from nowhere, yelling and screaming and running and waving their arms more frantically than seemed biologically possible. They raced to the end of the block, then turned and raced past him again to the other end of the block, where they fell upon one of their number, apparently chosen at random, and began beating him unmercifully.