A Meaningful Life (3 page)

So it was that Lowell went to Stanford. He had a good time at the university and never gave another thought to how he came to be there; things had always had a way of working out for him, one way or another. (Two years after Lowell graduated, Judge Crosby was surprised by his political enemies with his hand in the till and arrested, whereupon he immediately—and profusely—confessed to being a homosexual too, which pretty generally amazed everyone and ended up causing quite a little rumpus.)

At Stanford, Lowell majored in English. It had always been his best subject and it didn't commit him to do anything specific in later life, which was just fine with Lowell. He had no idea of what he was going to do in later life and the very words lacked meaning when he tried to apply them to himself. He thought he might go ahead and get a Ph.D., but he couldn't see much farther than that, and even it was dim. Sometimes it seemed to him that all the grown-ups he'd ever known had been old and calm, the sort of people who made up their lives the same way they made up their beds, neat and clean and tight at the corners and no nonsense about the spread, and although Lowell supposed it must have been very nice for them, it didn't seem to have a whole lot to do with him. Whenever he thought about the future, he vaguely supposed that things would go on much the same as they always had, and that when he left college (provided he ever left college) it would be to take up an existence much the same as the one he'd always known, where people gave him tasks to perform and praised him when he did them well. He did them well consistently, if not with much originality, and he was more conspicuous for his highly developed sense of responsibility than for any keenness of intellect; in his eating club, he was the chairman of the committee that cleaned up after parties.

He met his future wife at the beginning of his sophomore year and immediately nicknamed her Tex for reasons that were obscure even to himself, but the joke, whatever it was, soon wore off and eventually he came to call her by no name at all, or at least none he could use in public. When he wanted to attract her attention in a crowded room he usually called her “dear,” which admittedly was a pretty lame expedient and one that always embarrassed him. Her real name was Betty and she came from Flatbush. Lowell couldn't bring himself to believe that there really was such a place as Flatbush, any more than he believed in Allen's Alley and Wistful Vista, and he could no more picture himself marrying a girl named Betty from there than he could imagine himself marrying a horse from Kentucky. As far as Lowell was concerned, her life began the day he met her and it took place exclusively in places that he knew. When vacation came and she went back to Flatbush and became Betty again, it was almost as though she had ceased to exist for a while, like a well-loved character in a favorite book that he'd momentarily put aside. For some reason, he began to feel the same way about himself whenever he went back home to his parents' motel, and after the Christmas of his sophomore year he no longer did so. He told his parents that he couldn't afford it; they believed him and didn't offer to help out. His mother kept in touch with one letter every month, in which she gave exhaustive descriptions of the weather and the state of his father's health, and advised Lowell to wear a tie whenever he thought he should. Lowell liked his parents and was always glad to hear from them. He never failed to write back promptly.

Two days after graduation, Lowell and his wife were married with nonsectarian pomp amid the gold-leafed, erotic splendors of Memorial Chapel. The place looked like a cross between a Byzantine whorehouse and a Victorian ladies' parlor, and Lowell was somewhat at a loss when he tried to comprehend the vision of heaven that had inspired it. He'd always wondered what it would feel like to be married there, and when his future wife suggested it, he figured that it was as good a time as any to find out.

“I'm not sure I like this,” said his future mother-in-law grimly as he took her on a tour of the premises the day before the ceremony. In the course of a very few hours she had managed to convince him that there really might have been somebody named Betty from Flatbush. Betty from Flatbush was the daughter of this woman; she was also nobody Lowell had ever known. He was still getting used to being a Bachelor of Arts, he was presently about to become the husband of the girl he loved, and naturally he was a little confused about things, but when it came to contemplating becoming this unpleasant woman's son-in-law, his mind went completely blank. It wasn't anything he knew about, and he simply couldn't imagine it at all. “I don't know if I like this,” she repeated, staring unblinkingly into some middle distance where nothing seemed to be. It was a habit she employed whenever she spoke to either Lowell or her husband, and in a very short time it had come close to driving Lowell mad. It made him feel ridiculous and hard-put for a reply, and it worked every time she did it. They continued down the aisle toward the altar, with great gleaming butterscotch columns rising all around them. “I don't know,” she said. “What do you think, Leo? Let me just say that, for myself, I definitely don't know.”

“It's hard to say,” said Leo, Lowell's future father-in-law. He was a little, bald, chickenlike man, and Lowell didn't know what to make of him, either. At the airport, shaking Lowell's hand, he'd said furtively, “Hi. I'm Leo. I guess I'm going to be your father-in-law. That was sure some plane ride, let me tell you. Up and down all the way. Ha, ha, some of the passengers really looked worried about that. You can call me Leo.”

At intervals throughout the day he continued to remind Lowell to call him Leo, like a little kid trying to get someone to address him with a nickname he'd just thought up for himself. “I don't know whether I told you, but you can call me Leo even if I am your future father-in-law,” he would say, right out of the blue. “You can call me Leo when I'm your father-in-law too. I mean, you can call me Leo anytime. Everyone does, you don't have to be shy. I don't remember if I told you before.”

“Right, Leo,” Lowell would say. “Sure thing.” And they would march on, with Lowell's future mother-in-law (who never asked him to call her anything) beating near-perfect time with her voice, like a drum that yakked instead of boomed. She talked all sorts of aggressive nonsense, but for some reason although Lowell disliked her, he did not feel strange about her; he was used to women who did that sort of thing, mostly on television. It was Leo that made him feel strange. Leo was a puzzle; Lowell had never met anyone remotely like him, at least that he could remember. Most of the men Lowell knew strove either to be tough and mean or tough and nice, and even the weak little men that had come his way had cherished a Henry Fonda of the spirit and rode tall in the saddle in their dreams. Leo, on the other hand, actually seemed to be struggling to project a deliberate image of himself that was about as craven as humanly possible. Whenever there was an opportunity to cringe, he cringed. Sometimes he didn't even wait for the opportunity. It was amazing without being pleasant or very interesting, and after a while it began to get on your nerves and make you snappish, which in turn offered Leo wonderful fresh cringing opportunities. Lowell could see how it would be easy to get locked in a cycle with him, a cycle that would last for years and years. Lowell decided right then that he didn't want to do that. Leo didn't even try to bully, hector, or needle people younger, poorer, less articulate, or more polite than himself—any of that bookkeeper's vast constituency of the ego. He didn't seem to think that he was smarter, cleaner, or better bred than anybody, and Negroes openly terrified him. Apparently he was meek and craven through and through, the kind of man who would always strive industriously to remain beneath any situation that might arise or sort of creep up on him, the kind of man who went through life continually ducking his head. Lowell got the disturbing impression that if somebody finally came and told him it was time to go to the gas chamber, he would hop right into the truck, asking them to call him Leo.

“I'm not sure,” said Lowell's future mother-in-law, planting herself squarely in front of the altar and standing there as though waiting for the crucified Christ to make a move for his gun. “I don't think I like it, but I'm still thinking it over. Tell me what you think, I'm open for suggestions.”

“We don't have to have it in church,” said Lowell. “We could have it anywhere. We could have it in your church....I mean ...”

“When I want your opinion, I'll ask for it,” she snapped, without taking her eyes off the altar. “You can just keep out of this. I wasn't talking about that, so shut up.” Then she burst into tears.

“Excuse me,” said Leo. “My wife is crying.”

Lowell wasn't exactly sure what was going on, but his future mother-in-law was carrying on pretty loudly, and he looked helplessly about the church, alternately hoping that no one would see him and that someone would come and help him.

“It's okay,” said Leo to his wife, standing beside her with fumbling, incompetent gestures, patting her like a city boy trying to make friends with a cow. “Look, if it doesn't work out, she can divorce him in a couple of years, it's not like it's forever or anything. Who knows, maybe it will work out. Personally, I think it will work out.”

Lowell's future mother-in-law made a kind of strangled noise and struck out at her husband. “All right,” she said. “All right. After all, what do I know? Who am I, after all? Only a mother. Who listens to a mother? Just remember, my blood is on your hands.”

Lowell couldn't tell whether this incredible threat was directed at himself, Leo, Christ, or some combination of the three of them, but evidently it meant that they were free to go. Moving as though balancing a plate on her head, his future mother-in-law turned and marched up the aisle without so much as a backward glance.

“I don't know if I told you,” Leo remarked as they followed her out of the church, “but I'm a cutter.”

Lowell wondered if it was an occupation or a pathology. Nothing could surprise him anymore, not even if Leo were suddenly to strip off his shirt in the middle of the quad to show him his collection of self-inflicted wounds. Maybe it had something to do with organized crime, a sort of job title like “torpedo” or “goon.” The only kind of cutters Lowell had ever heard about were Coast Guard boats and horse-drawn sleighs, and he was in no condition to think very clearly about anything right now. No matter what it was, if it had anything to do with Leo or his wife, Lowell didn't want to know a thing about it. He never wanted to see them again as long as they lived. All he wanted to do was marry their daughter. These outrageous people seemed to live in a world entirely different from any he had ever known, a kind of bizarre parallel universe that had somehow overlapped our own. Once when Lowell was a little kid, he got the idea if you held your breath and squinted your eyes a certain way, the sky would turn red and everybody would have six legs, among other things. Leo and his wife made him feel like he had finally pulled off the trick, although in a much worse way.

“You hadn't mentioned it,” he said, when it became evident that Leo would continue to look at him inquisitively until he made some comment, even if it took hours.

“It's not much,” said Leo at once. “It's a living. Don't think I'm proud of it.”

“That's too bad,” said Lowell, looking steadfastly in another direction.

They crossed the quad in a blaze of sunlight, Lowell's future mother-in-law clumping along ahead of them, looking neither to the right nor to the left. Behind them rose the immense, hideous Sunday-school mosaic on the face of the chapel, the Apostles looking down from it like a dozen Edwardian fags in biblical drag. Lowell had always thought it was a funny mosaic, but now he hated it. He hated everything in sight, the palm trees, the gravel, everything. He began to understand why some people chose to live in sin. It was so they wouldn't have to get married and invite their parents to the wedding. He even began to wonder a little about his own parents. What did he really know about them? The last time he saw them, he wasn't even old enough to drink. Maybe his parents had a whole life he didn't know about, strange proclivities that would suddenly become horribly apparent now that their son was about to get married. He had a sharp, quick vision of his father whipping out a pack of pornographic photographs and passing them around during the ceremony. He wondered why it didn't seem so implausible as it would have a couple of days ago.

“A lot of Puerto Ricans are coming into it now,” Leo was saying. “I've been thinking of getting out. It's the only thing I know. I guess if I got out, I'd just sit around the house and watch television. What do you think, should I get out or not? It's hard to know what to do. All the Puerto Ricans coming in and everything. I think about it a lot. I heard on the radio the other day that Mickey Mantle broke his leg. I wonder if it's true. You never know what to believe these days. I'll bet if Mickey Mantle really broke his leg, you'd never hear about it. They'd hush it up, what do you think?”

Lowell was afraid to open his mouth for fear of screaming in the little man's face. He wasn't even certain he was hearing any of this. He'd never heard anything like it in his life, except once when he was delirious with pneumonia and everybody seemed to be talking about fish.

“Let's elope,” he told his future wife that night when they had parked up by the lake in his blue Ford hardtop. They were sitting in the back seat with their clothes off. “Let's run away to Nevada and live in the desert.” He was only joking, except that he really wasn't. He really did kind of want to run off to Nevada and try his mettle among all that desolation and vast manly silence.

“You're being silly,” said the soft warm girl in his arms. “Yum, that's why I love you. Anyway, my parents will be gone soon, and it'll all be over. If you think you're having a hard time now, just remember that I had to put up with them for years and years. God, years and years. Let's never be parents. Let's have children but not be parents, what do you say?”