A New Life (31 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: A New Life
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“Don’t idealize sex, Lev.”
“Not sex, you.”
After the fourth fruitless, songless time, one end-of-April night, Levin lay awake while she slept, grinding her teeth.
She had looked imperiled. He felt he had to do something to help her or this might get beyond her. Since it was almost certainly too late to start writing around for a new job, if he could get an assistantship somewhere, and Pauline a part-time job, things might work out. But making new plans worried Levin; it was as if those he had come West with had been wrong to begin with. If that was the case would he ever in his life make the right plans? Yet he felt for her a deep tenderness and dreamed of a decent life for them. When he awoke it was almost six-thirty and Pauline was frantic.
 
They were racing through a thick fir forest. Levin had said he would take her to the Easchester bus station where she could get a cab, and she had in silence agreed, her face calmly locked in fright.
“What will you do if he’s awake?” Levin asked.
“I’ll lie.”
“Could I go in with you?”
“No.
Above the trees the light brightened, yellow, then foggy gold. “‘Tis the rising, not the setting sun,’” he said.
“Who said so?”
“B. Franklin.”
“He was wrong.”
The fake forest, Levin thought.
As he was speeding out of it, a siren sounded behind them. A state trooper in an unmarked car waved the Hudson to the side.
Levin cursed. Pauline shut her eyes. Any minute he expected to see gray in her hair.
The trooper talked for ten minutes before handing Levin the ticket. Pauline stared ahead, her stomach rumbling. She bent to hide it but couldn’t.
Finally they were off again at fifty.
“I’d better go in with you.”
“No, please no.”
They parted at the Easchester bus station. She hurried into a cab, forgetting goodbye, Until We Meet Again, or even to wave. He watched the taxi turn the corner on a dull gray morning.
Afterwards Levin sweated it out in his room. He had visions of disaster for all, particularly himself. Yes, she loved him, but she also loved Gilley and she loved the kids. If she had loved Levin as he loved her, she would already have made up her mind to leave Gilley. To go on as they had been, would prolong the torture and destroy what was left of the joy of love. He stayed in the house Saturday and Sunday, waiting for a word from her but none came. Only Pauline lived in his thoughts. He thought of her as she had been when they were first in love and how worn out and unhappy she had looked lately. Levin struck himself for the harm he had done her. He promised that if, by some stroke of luck she had got in without Gilley knowing it, he would not see her till summer. The rest would do her good.
When he went to work on Monday morning, after his first desperate glance at Gerald, Levin knew Pauline had got in safely. Out of love he gave her up.
May sunbursts flooded the windows, making the mourner invisible; he sat, when he came in, unable to move, even a breath unsettling pain. He secretly waited for a word, a sign she loved him, would never let him give her up. She had once seized his flesh: “I’ll never let you go.” He waited for her to redeem the pledge. Through long days he waited, loving her, giving her up, trying to forget the last hours with her, memory repeating memory. But when she appeared—through Mrs. Beaty on guard, thick walls, a ring of flame, the salt sea—he sneaked her home past her husband at indecent hours; then in his mind (to save her from this) parted from her forever, the worst place to part from anyone. The landlady left a plate of oatmeal cookies at his door.
He secretly waited. She did not write or phone; nor appeared in the universe. After relief at her escape he ate himself
slowly; his heart like a vessel of pain against bare bones; the mourner attended his perpetual funeral. He had expected in the ruined aftermath a diminished misery, reason the shield, since he had himself brought the affair to its broken end; but a surgeon operating on himself does not excise the pain, and now he knew the majesty of his. Having betrayed his nature, his deepest need, he had surrendered something of life to death. In pain he mortified what he was attempting to kill, his short-lived love, self-created freedom. Ah, the soaring anticipation of Pauline Gilley; possessing her in feeling’s fullness; dreaming of what he had had. Dreams dead by suicide.
Silence burdened ache. Why had she not told him she had got in safely, knowing how intensely worried he would be? He could only explain it that she had given him up at the same moment he had abandoned her, breaking off before impossible got worse, ultimately relieved to be done with an unhappy affair. It tormented him that he had left her, in the end, unsatisfied. Why does the last event condition the quality of the past? In his most desperate moments he felt a hatred of her that relieved the fundamental pain, but with such frightening other effects he preferred the pain. In the midst of which, in some shaded place within, dwelt Levin’s Pauline, tender, lovely girl of the graceful shoulders and shapely can, their own fine art; the woman he had least expected to be in love with, source of his discoveries of her beauty (as when her hand or the wind touched her hair). Thoughts such as these made his loss unbearable.
After he had endured all he thought he could, there was more; he had in a former existence lowered the threshold of heartbreak. Ah, sweet mastery of life—if only Levin could. The more he suffered, no matter how frequent or pure his resolutions to change himself, the more he suffered. For whatever unknown or unpredictable cause. He did not kid himself, he was his own bad cause, causing what caused him pain (“Which way I flie is Hell; myself am Hell.”); somewhere along the line he had erred, his life gone wrong, wronger. And
when Levin erred the result was serious, no matter how often he promised to take life more lightly, less frantic seeking of a hold to throw it with. He laughed seriously and suffered merrily, miserere.
The sorrows of Levin: his mouth thickened with thirst. He hid a brown bottle under the bed, then slept with it. Ache turned at teasing times to prurience (original original sin) within which he imaged a bearded billy goat chewing Someone’s pubic hair, the lady responding to the tickle and other jests in 167 satisfying ways. He plowed through the black pants she wore. Pricked with pins her bubless nipples. Clobbered her with sex, though she sobbed no, then begged for more, satisfaction levitating her a foot in the air. Amid such pleasures Mrs. Beaty’s white cat fell in love with him, laying a broken-feathered bird at his door, fat headless robin. He asked the landlady to keep the cat out of the house but pussy in love was faithful, finding more ways in than he could block off, depositing another bloody-breasted bird. “Eat my heart,” he cried and kicked the beast down the stairs. Ascending on three legs she delivered a mangled rat, then went into heat, her raucous cries sounding throughout the house. He considered taking off with packed bags, but to return where he had failed was failure. Depression dug a fast hole and in it he sat drowning. Alas, Levin, ever-drowning sailor. What had he done to his poor self? …
But time, though he hid from it, rained him in the face and change changed against the will. He rose once more to the surface, not the same man but who was? Apathy followed, worse yet. “A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,/ A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,/ Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,/ In word, or sigh, or tear.” This went on too long, till he was ready to secede from the world; until a fissure appeared in the windowless wall and he wriggled through. No-feeling, purged, left mildewed melancholy. Each day introduced its own variation and quantity of ache. He felt
sadness for every living thing. Even a tree, when Levin looked, looked sad. He was his own pathetic fallacy.
The bright flags of loneliness unfurled and flapped in the breeze. He knew it in every size and shape, hard, soft, black, blue, concrete city-type recalled; and woodsy-leafy country-kind. He had lived in dark small rooms in anonymous tenements on gray streets amid stone buildings crowding the sky; loneliness tracked him in the guise of strangers. In the country it dwelt in the near distance under vast umbrella skies. In the city, compressed; spacious in the country. Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise. God save Levin. He longed for her to share the burden of his incompletion, the cheat of being human; longed for a past that was now memory pickled in regret. The unhappy clever purpose of the disease was to compel him to expel it. It would never succeed. Despite all his exertions to forget her, Levin remembered and desired; the town was small and she lived nearby. He had one day seen Erik scraping the sidewalk in her long shoes.
To get away from what he could not escape he drove his car on dusty country roads leading nowhere. Sometimes he stopped and shouted in the stillness. Lonely crows flew up from the fields. White farmhouses and rain-stained barns were lonely, cows and horses, every living thing. Trees were lonely, fences, so was the horizon. That somehow was the worst. The dust blew up behind him as he sped home. He knew that the only way to fight his sadness of spirit was to be among people but he did nothing to be. Throughout these weeks he managed to teach students, then escaped his office. Though an occasional invitation to someone’s house came his way he did not accept, not to see her. He was certain she didn’t want to see him; this made him deathly lonely. He often doubted she had truly loved him. He was at times desperately moved to write her but wrote nothing. If she wanted it ended, he would keep it ended. He would help her resist him if she were resisting.
Levin resisted with the same arguments: She was, for the thousandth time, a married woman with a family. She had caused herself to love out of discontent, although her discontents were tolerable. Gilley was good to her; she had a better than average home, kids she loved. Maybe she was bored but she wasn’t desperate; she probably could go on living with him forever. If diversion was what she had wanted, a little love on the side, she wasn’t made for it, the pleasure butchered by anxiety and shame. She wasn’t the type who could give “all” for love. And he doubted he could inspire such love, the limits of her passion conditioned by the man he was. He might awaken love but not madness, although maybe it was mad to chance what she had chanced; maybe she understood he too was unwilling to give “all.” He had lived through too much, become wary to the frazzled ends of his nerves of too many “lessons.” He was, in love, not Seymour Gordon Lord Byron, but a modest man and would not complain if all he got was no more than he gave. He left to Casanova or Clark Gable the gourmandise, the blasts and quakes of passion. He wanted love like a fountain in the wind. He wanted in a woman loveliness and feeling, of course, but character, constancy. He wanted someone free to love so he could freely love.
Whenever Levin saw Gilley he thought of his treachery to him; it was wrong to have continued to see his wife under the circumstances. Sneaking love in his room, in motels; the hiding and guilt had hurt them both. He would have done better to have kept his door shut against her; only if she were willing to give up Gilley was the way. If she were, there might have been no problem. If she were that willing he might have run from her, over the hills and far away; at least tipped his hat and backed off. In the street they would nod to each other, a lanky lady and a bearded gent, and hurry by. He would not then have been incapacitated before her husband when there was an issue to fight for, a principle to defend. Somebody should have fought for the retention of the short story anthology; he was the coward in that affair. Now, if he expected to be of any
help to Fabrikant he had to quit wanting to duck whenever he saw a red head in Humanities Hall. That was no career for a man with a future, future as man.
Morality—awareness of it—perhaps in his reaction to his father’s life, or in sympathy with his mother’s, or in another way, had lit an early candle in Levin’s. He saw in good beauty. Good was as if man’s spirit had produced art in life. Levin felt that the main source of conscious morality was love of life, anybody’s life. Morality was a way of giving value to other lives through assuring human rights. As you valued men’s lives yours received value. You earned what you sold, got what you gave. That, if not entirely true, ought to be. Our days are short, thought Levin, our bodies frail. The universe is unknown, remorseless. We have no certain understanding of Nature’s intentions, nor God’s if he intends. We know the meagerness, ignorance, cruelty of too many men and too many societies. We must protect the human, the good, the innocent. Those who had discovered their own moral courage, or created it, must join others who are moral; these must lead, without fanaticism. Any act of good is a diminution of evil in the world. To make himself effectual Levin must give up Pauline, or what was principle for? The strongest morality resists temptation; since he had not resisted he must renounce the continuance of the immoral. Renunciation was what he was now engaged in; it was a beginning that created a beginning. What an extraordinary thing, he thought: you could be not moral, then you could be. To be good, then evil, then good was no moral way of life, but to be good after being evil was a possibility of life. You stopped doing what was wrong and you did right. It was not easy but it was a free choice you might make, and the beauty of it was in the making, in the rightness of it. You knew it was right from the form it gave your life, the moving esthetic the act created in you.
I must give her up, he thought, if I haven’t.
He had for half his life in wintertime yearned for spring. In the East, as early as February he woke sniffing the breeze for the first vernal fragrance still locked in a future month. Yet when spring burst into life he continued to hunger for it as though it weren’t there, secretly knowing that what he desired did not grow on trees. In the Northwest this year spring had leapfrogged over winter’s back before habit could rouse the spirit’s hunger. And when he became aware of spring he was already involved with Pauline and spring made little difference. But now the green and floral season overwhelmed him, for with all its beauty it could not return to him an iota of the happiness he had lost. Sitting in his room on the very day they had parted (an act in aftermath) he watched the cherry tree blossom outside his window. In the morning sunlight a single moldy branch broke into flower and by evening the whole tree wore white. Up the block the hawthornes surprised: a flood of rose-hued blossoms capped the tiny dark-green leaves. And the chestnuts raised their white flambeaux. Everything was in flower around the corpse; and the corpse flowered in desire. Unable to resist the beauty of this spring night, love still tormenting despite all his exertions, he left his dreary room and walked in the direction of Pauline’s house.
He had seen her downtown that day, a slim, pale woman with a distracted lovely face. Torn by the sight of her he had turned away, dizzied, drunk from seeing, desiring her from every pore. He ached beyond belief, famished, struggling to steel himself before he was overwhelmed. Levin cursed his particular body, inept apparatus; nothing brought relief. He prayed the night would, but it appeared in profuse beauty, a perfume of new flowers stirring pain. As he walked, a tree came alive with chirping birds. Bullfrogs were noisy in the distance; beyond that, the lowing of a cow. Realizing how close he had come to where he wasn’t going, Levin halted. Was a man no more than a pawn to the season’s mood? Why had he suffered if not to be his own master?
A woman in a light dress was coming toward him in the dark. Good God, it’s Pauline. What will I do?
He waited for her to approach, or on recognition run the other way, but it wasn’t Pauline … . It was Avis Fliss, her baggy chest stiff in a pink cotton dress stained by sweat around the armpits. She looked as lonely as he felt. Have I invented her? Levin thought.
“Why, good evening, Seymour. I almost didn’t recognize you without your beard. Congratulations, if I may. If you hadn’t been staring at me I would have walked right past you. Isn’t tonight out of this world?”
They had returned to first names after being thrown together at people’s houses during the winter, the old maid and lonely bachelor. She had lately shown signs she had forgotten her irritation with him.
“Are you enjoying an evening stroll?” Avis asked.
He nodded, watching her like a hawk, suspecting she was waiting to see which way he would go. He had noticed, when she was present at parties, Avis’ livening of attention when he had stood near Pauline or their hands had brushed in passing.

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