All the Days and Nights (2 page)

I think it is generally agreed that stories read better one at a time. They need air around them. And they need thinking about, since they tend to have both an explicit and an un-spelled-out meaning. Inevitably, some of the stories I wrote, especially when I was young, are stuck fast in their period — or to put it differently, the material was not as substantial as it ought to have been — and I see no reason to republish them. When I was working on the ninth version of “A Final Report” I came on the seventh, in a desk drawer, and saw that it was better than the one I was working on and that I must have been too tired when I finished it to realize that there was no need to pursue the idea any further. On the other hand, “Love” came right the first time, without a word having to be changed, and I thought — mistakenly — that I had had a breakthrough, and stories would be easier to write from that moment on; all I needed to do was just
say
it.

The stories I have called “improvisations” really are that. They were written for an occasion — for a birthday or to be rolled up inside a red ribbon and inserted among the ornaments on the Christmas tree. I wrote them to please my wife, over a great many years. When we were first married, after we had gone to bed I would tell her a story in the dark. They came from I had no idea where. Sometimes I fell asleep in the middle of a story and she would shake me and say “What happened next?” and I would struggle up through layers of oblivion and tell her.

T
HE
sun rose somewhere in the middle of Queens, the exact moment of its appearance shrouded in uncertainty because of a cloud bank. The lights on the bridges went off, and so did the red light in the lantern of the lighthouse at the north end of Welfare Island. Seagulls settled on the water. A newspaper truck went from building to building dropping off heavy bundles of, for the most part, bad news, which little boys carried inside on their shoulders. Doormen smoking a pipe and dressed for a walk in the country came to work after a long subway ride and disappeared into the service entrances. When they reappeared, by way of the front elevator, they had put on with their uniforms a false amiability and were prepared for eight solid hours to make conversation about the weather. With the morning sun on them, the apartment buildings far to the west, on Lexington Avenue, looked like an orange mesa. The pigeons made bubbling noises in their throats as they strutted on windowsills high above the street.

All night long, there had been plenty of time. Now suddenly there wasn’t, and this touched off a chain explosion of alarm clocks, though in some instances the point was driven home without a sound: Time is interior to animals as well as exterior. A bare arm with a wristwatch on it emerged from under the covers and turned until the dial was toward the light from the windows.

“What time is it?”

“Ten after.”

“It’s always ten after,” Iris Carrington said despairingly, and turned over in bed and shut her eyes against the light. Also against the clamor of her desk calendar:
Tuesday 11, L. 3:30 Dr. de Santillo
 … 
5:30–7:30?… Wednesday 1:45, Mrs. McIntosh speaks on the changing status of women
.
3:30 Dr. F.… Friday 11 C. Get Andrea … Saturday, call Mrs. Stokes. Ordering pads. L ballet 10:30. 2 Laurie to Sasha’s. Remaining books due at library. Explore dentists. Supper at 5.
Call Margot …

Several minutes passed.

“Oh my God, I don’t think I can make it,” George Carrington said, and put his feet over the side of the bed, and found he could make it, after all. He could bend over and pick up his bathrobe from the floor, and put it on, and find his slippers, and close the window, and turn on the radiator valve. Each act was easier than the one before. He went back to the bed and drew the covers closer around his wife’s shoulders.

Yawning, stretching, any number of people got up and started the business of the day. Turning on the shower. Dressing. Putting their hair up in plastic curlers. Squeezing toothpaste out of tubes that were all but empty. Squeezing orange juice. Separating strips of bacon.

The park keepers unlocked the big iron gates that closed the river walk off between Eighty-third and Eighty-fourth Streets. A taxi coming from Doctors Hospital was snagged by a doorman’s whistle. The wind picked up the dry filth under the wheels of parked cars and blew it now this way, now that. A child got into an orange minibus and started on the long, devious ride to nursery school and social adjustment.

“Have you been a good girl?” George inquired lovingly, through the closed door of the unused extra maid’s room, where the dog slept on a square of carpet. Puppy had not been a good girl. There was a puddle of urine — not on the open newspaper he had left for her, just in case, but two feet away from it, on the black-and-white plastic-tile floor. Her tail quivering with apology, she watched while he mopped the puddle up and disposed of the wet newspaper in the garbage can in the back hall. Then she followed him through the apartment to the foyer, and into the elevator when it came.

There were signs all along the river walk:

He ignored them with a clear conscience. If he curbed the dog beforehand, there was no reason not to turn her loose and let her run — except that sometimes she stopped and arched her back a second time. When shouting and waving his hands didn’t discourage her from moving her
bowels, he took some newspaper from a trash container and cleaned up after her.

At the flagpole, he stood looking out across the river. The lights went off all the way up the airplane beacon, producing an effect of silence — as if somebody had started to say something and then decided not to. The tidal current was flowing south. He raised his head and sniffed, hoping for a breath of the sea, and smelled gasoline fumes instead.

Coming back, the dog stopped to sniff at trash baskets, at cement copings, and had to be restrained from greeting the only other person on the river walk — a grey-haired man who jogged there every morning in a gym suit and was afraid of dogs. He smiled pleasantly at George, and watched Puppy out of the corner of his eyes, so as to be ready when she leapt at his throat.

A tanker, freshly painted, all yellow and white, and flying the flag of George had no idea what country until he read the lettering on the stern, overtook him, close in to shore — so close he could see the captain talking to a sailor in the wheelhouse. To be sailing down the East River on a ship that was headed for open water … He waved to them and they waved back, but they didn’t call out to him
Come on, if you want to
, and it was too far to jump. It came to him with the seriousness of a discovery that there was no place in the world he would not like to see. Concealed in this statement was another that he had admitted to himself for the first time only recently. There were places he would never see, experiences of the first importance that he would never have. He might die without ever having heard a nightingale.

When they stepped out of the elevator, the dog hurried off to the kitchen to see if there was something in her dish she didn’t know about, and George settled down in the living room with the
Times
on his lap and waited for a glass of orange juice to appear at his place at the dining-room table. The rushing sound inside the walls, as of an underground river, was Iris running her bath. The orange juice was in no hurry to get to the dining-room table. Iris had been on the phone daily with the employment agency and for the moment this was the best they could offer: twenty-seven years old, pale, with dirty blond hair, unmarried, overattached to her mother, and given to burning herself on the antiquated gas stove. She lived on tea and cigarettes. Breakfast was all the cooking she was entrusted with; Iris did the rest. Morning after morning his boiled egg was hard enough to take on a picnic. A blind man could not have made a greater hash of half a grapefruit. The coffee was indescribable.
After six weeks there was a film of grease over everything in the kitchen. Round, jolly, neat, professionally trained, a marvellous cook, the mother was everything that is desirable in a servant except that, alas, she worked for somebody else. She drifted in and out of the apartment at odd hours, deluding Iris with the hope that some of her accomplishments would, if one were only patient, rub off on her daughter.

“Read,” a voice said, bringing him all the way back from Outer Mongolia.

“Tonight, Cindy.”

“Read! Read!”

He put the paper down and picked her up, and when she had settled comfortably in his lap he began: “ ‘Emily was a guinea pig who loved to travel. Generally she stayed home and looked after her brother Arthur. But every so often she grew tired of cooking and mending and washing and ironing; the day would seem too dark, and the house too small, and she would have a great longing to set out into the distance.…’ ”

Looking down at the top of her head as he was reading, he felt an impulse to put his nose down and smell her hair. Born in a hurry she was. Born in one hell of a hurry, half an hour after her mother got to the hospital.

L
AURIE
Carrington said, “What is the difference, what is the difference between a barber and a woman with several children?” Nobody answered, so she asked the question again.

“I give up,” Iris said.

“Do you know, Daddy?”

“I give up too, we all give up.”

“A barber … has razors to shave. And the woman has shavers to raise.”

He looked at her over the top of his half-glasses, wondering what ancestor was responsible for that reddish blond hair.

“That’s a terribly funny one, Lamie,” he said. “That’s the best one yet,” and his eyes reverted to the editorial page. A nagging voice inside his head informed him that a good father would be conversing intelligently with his children at the breakfast table. But about what? No intelligent subject of conversation occurred to him, perhaps because it was Iris’s idea in the first place, not his.

He said, “Cindy, would you like a bacon sandwich?”

She thought, long enough for him to become immersed in the
Times
again, and then she said, “I would like a piece of bacon and a piece of toast. But not a bacon sandwich.”

He dropped a slice of bread in the toaster and said, “Py-rozz-quozz-gill” — a magic word, from one of the Oz books. With a grinding noise the bread disappeared.

“Stupid Cindy,” Laurie remarked, tossing her head. But Cindy wasn’t fooled. Laurie used to be the baby and now she wasn’t anymore. She was the oldest. And what she would have liked to be was the oldest
and
the baby. About lots of things she was very piggy. But she couldn’t whistle. Try though she might,
whhih, whhih, whhih
, she couldn’t. And Cindy could.

The toast emerged from the toaster and Iris said, “Not at the breakfast table, Cindy.” The morning was difficult for her, clouded with amnesia, with the absence of energy, with the reluctance of her body to take on any action whatever. Straight lines curved unpleasantly, hard surfaces presented the look of softness. She saw George and the children and the dog lying at her feet under the table the way one sees rocks and trees and cottages at the seashore through the early morning fog; just barely recognizable they were.

“W
HY
is a church steeple —”

“My gloves,” he said, standing in the front hall, with his coat on.

“They’re in the drawer in the lowboy,” Iris said.

“Why is a church steeple —”

“Not those,” he said.

“Why is a —”

“Laurie, Daddy is talking. Look in the pocket of your chesterfield.”

“I did.”

“Yes, dear, why is a church steeple.”

“Why is a church steeple like a maiden aunt?”

“I give up.”

“Do you know, Daddy?”

“No. I’ve looked in every single one of my coats. They must be in my raincoat, because I can’t find that either.”

“Look in your closet.”

“I did look there.” But he went into the bedroom and looked again anyway. Then he looked all through the front-hall closet, including the mess on the top shelf.

Iris passed through the hall with her arms full of clothes for the washing machine. “Did you find your raincoat?” she asked.

“I must have left it somewhere,” he said. “But where?”

He went back to the bedroom and looked in the engagement calendar on her desk, to see where they had been, and it appeared that they hadn’t been anywhere.

“Where did we go when we had Andrea to baby-sit?”

“I don’t remember.”

“We had her two nights.”

“Did we? I thought we only went out one night last week.”

She began to make the bed. Beds — for it was not one large bed, as it appeared to be in the daytime, but twin beds placed against each other with a king-sized cotton spread covering them both. When they were first married they slept in a three-quarter bed from his bachelor apartment. In time this became a double bed, hard as a rock because of the horsehair mattress. Then it also proved to be too small. For he developed twitches. While he was falling asleep his body beside her would suddenly flail out, shaking the bed and waking her completely. Six or seven times this would happen. After which he would descend at last into a deep sleep and she would be left with insomnia. So now there were twin beds, and even then her bed registered the seismic disturbances in his, though nothing like so much.

“We went to that benefit. With Francis,” she said.

“Oh … I think I did wear my raincoat that night. No, I wore the coat with the velvet collar.”

“The cleaner’s?”

“No.”

“I don’t see how you could have left your raincoat somewhere,” she said. “I never see you in just a suit. Other men, yes, but never you.”

He went into the hall and pulled open a drawer of the lowboy and took out a pair of grey gloves and drew them on. They had been his father’s and they were good gloves but too small for him. His fingers had burst open the seams at the end of the fingers. Iris had mended them, but they would not stay sewed, and so he went to Brooks and bought a new pair — the pair he couldn’t find.