City (4 page)

3

On Friday, at 7:15, Gould's father telephoned to find out from Lucy if everything was OK. Gould said that Lucy had gone off with a traveling watch salesman she had met at Mass the Sunday before.

“Watches?”

“And other stuff, chains, crucifixes, stuff like that.”

“Christ, Gould. You'd better put an ad in the newspaper. The way we did the other time.”

“Yes.”

“Get the ad in the paper right away and then use the questionnaire, OK?”

“Yes.”

“But wasn't that girl a mute?”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell the watch salesman that?”

“She told him.”

“She did?”

“Yes, on the telephone.”

“People are unbelievable.”

“Right.”

“Do you still have copies of the questionnaire?”

“Yes.”

“Make some photocopies, just in case, OK?”

“Hello?”

“Gould?”

“Hello.”

“Gould can you hear me?”

“Now I hear you.”

“If you're running out of questionnaires, make some photocopies.”

“Hello?”

“Gould can you hear me?”

“. . .”

“Gould!”

“I'm here.”

“Did you hear me?”

“Hello?”

“This is a bad connection.”

“Now I hear you.”

“Are you still there?”

“I'm here . . .”

“Hello!”

“I'm here.”

“But what the hell's happening to . . .”

“Bye, Dad.”

“Are these damn telephones made of shit?”

“Bye.”

“Made out of shit, these teleph”

Click.

Since he couldn't come and do the interviewing himself, Gould's father had the applicants fill out a questionnaire that he had put together and mail it to him, so that he could choose a new governess for Gould based on the responses he received. There were thirty-seven questions, but it was very rare for applicants to get to the end. Generally they stopped around the fifteenth question (15. Ketchup or mayonnaise?). Often they got up and left after reading the first (1. Can the applicant reconstruct the series of failures that led her today, at her age, and unemployed, to apply for a job that is not very well paid and has obvious risks?). Shatzy Shell set up the photographs of Eva Braun and Walt Disney on the table, put a sheet of paper in the typewriter, and tapped out the number 22.

“Read me 22, Gould.”

“Really, you're supposed to start at the beginning.”

“Who said so?”

“That's No. 1, people always begin at No. 1.”

“Gould?”

“Yes.”

“Look me in the eyes.”

“Yes.”

“Do you truly believe that when things have numbers, and one thing in particular has the number 1, that what we have to do, what you have to do, and I, and everyone, is to start right there, for the simple reason that that is the number-one thing?”

“No.”

“Splendid.”

“Which do you want?”

“22.”

“22. Can the applicant recall the nicest thing she ever had to do when she was a child?”

Shatzy sat shaking her head for a moment and murmuring incredulously “had to do.” Then she began to write.

When I was little the nicest thing was to go and see the Ideal Home Exhibition. It was at Olympia Hall, which was an enormous place, like a station, with a cupola-shaped roof. Enormous. Instead of trains and tracks there was the Ideal Home Exhibition. I don't know if you remember, Colonel. They did it every year. The incredible thing is that the houses were real, and you walked around as if you were in some absurd town, with streets, and street lamps at the corners, and with the houses all different, and very clean, and new. Everything was in place, the curtains, the front walk, and gardens, too—it was a dream world. You might have thought it would all be cardboard, and yet the houses were built out of real bricks, even the flowers were real—everything was real. You could have lived there, you could go up the steps, open the door. They were real houses. It's hard to explain, but as you walked into the middle of it you felt something very strange, a sort of painful amazement. I mean, they were real houses and all, but then, in actuality, real houses are different. Mine was six stories tall, and had windows that were all alike, and a marble staircase, with a little landing on each floor, and a smell of disinfectant everywhere. It was a beautiful house. But those houses were different. They had odd-shaped roofs, and fashionable features like bay windows, or a front porch, or a spiral staircase, and a terrace or balcony, things like that. And a light over the entrance. Or a garage with a painted door. They were real, but not real: this was what bothered you. If I think back on it now, it was all in the name, the Ideal Home Exhibition, after all what did you know then about what was ideal and what wasn't. You had no concept of
ideal
. So it took you by surprise, from behind, so to speak. And it was a strange sensation. I think you would understand what I mean if I could explain to you why I burst into tears the first time I went there. Seriously. I cried. I had gone because my aunt worked there, and she had free tickets. She was tall and beautiful, with long black hair. She had been hired to play a mother working in the kitchen. You see, every so often the houses were animated, that is, there were people who pretended to live there, I don't know, a man sitting in the living room reading a newspaper and smoking his pipe, or maybe even children, in their pajamas, in bed—they were bunk beds, marvelous, we had never seen bunk beds. The idea was always to give that impression of the
ideal,
you see? Even the characters were
ideal
. My aunt played the
ideal
in the kitchen, looking elegant and beautiful, in a patterned apron: she was arranging things, opening the kitchen cabinets, and she opened and closed them continuously, but gently, all the time taking out cups and plates, things like that. Smiling. Sometimes even film stars came, or famous singers, and they did the same thing, while photographers took pictures and the next day the pictures were in the paper. I remember one woman, all in furs, a singer, I think, with diamond rings on her fingers, who gazed at the camera while she ran a Hoover vacuum cleaner up and down. We didn't even know what a vacuum cleaner was. This was another great thing about the Ideal Home Exhibition: when you left, your head was full of things you'd never seen before and would never see again. It was like that. Anyway, the first time I went with my mother, and right at the entrance there was an exact replica of a mountain village, with meadows and paths, it was something. Behind it was an enormous painted backdrop, with mountain peaks and blue sky. My head began to feel very queer. I would have stood there looking forever. My mother dragged me away, and we went to a place where there was nothing but bathrooms, one after another, bathrooms you wouldn't believe. The last was called “Now and Then,” and there were a lot of people watching—it was like a play, on the right you saw a bathroom from a hundred years ago, and on the left the identical bathroom but everything was modern, very up to date. The incredible thing is that in the bathtubs were two models, no water but two women, and here's the clever part, they were twins, you see? Two women, twins, in the exact same position, one in a copper tub, the other in a white enameled one, and the really crazy thing is that they were
naked
, I swear, completely naked, and smiling at the public, and they held their arms very carefully so that you could get a peek at their tits but not really see them, and everyone was making serious remarks about the bathroom fixtures, but the fact is their eyes were continually darting away to see if by chance the twins had moved their arms just a bit, just enough so their tits were visible; the twins, by the way—you see the odd things that one ends up remembering—were called the Dolphin sisters, although now, thinking back, I suppose it was a stage name. I'm telling you this story about the bathroom because it has something to do with the fact that I burst into tears at the end. I mean, it was a whole combination of things that disconcerted you, from the start, a stratagem that wore you out and predisposed you, so to speak, to something special. Anyway, we left the naked twins and entered the central hall. There were the Ideal Homes, one after another, all in a row, each with its yard, some antique, or old, and others more modern, with a sports car parked out front. It was marvelous. We walked slowly, and at one point my mother stopped and said Look how lovely this is. It was a two-story house with a front porch, a peaked roof, and tall red-brick chimneys. There was nothing extraordinary about it—it was ideal in a very ordinary way— and maybe that was why it struck you. We stood there looking at it, in silence. There were so many people passing by, chatting, and so much noise, the way there always is at the Ideal Home Exhibition, but I began not to hear it any more, as if, little by little, it were all fading from my mind. And at some point I happened to see through the kitchen window—a big window on the ground floor, with the curtains open—I saw the light go on inside, and a woman came in, smiling, with a bunch of flowers in her hand. She walked over to the table, put down the flowers, got a vase, and went to the sink to fill it with water. She did all this as if no one were looking at her, as if she were in a remote corner of the world, where there was only her and that kitchen. She picked up the flowers and put them in the vase, and then she placed the vase in the center of the table, nudging back a rose that was escaping from one side. She was blonde, and her hair was held in place by a headband. She turned, went to the refrigerator, opened it, and reached in for a bottle of milk and something else. She closed the fridge by giving it a little shove with her elbow, because her hands were full. And although I couldn't hear it, I distinctly felt the click of the door as it closed, precise, metallic and slightly warm. I have never heard anything so exact, and definitive, and redeeming. So I looked at the house for a moment—at the whole house, the garden, the chimneys, the chair on the porch, everything. And then I burst out crying. My mother was frightened, she thought something had happened, and in fact something had happened, but what she thought was that I had wet my pants, it was something that often happened, when I was a child, I'd wet my pants and start to cry, so she thought that was what it was and started dragging me to the bathroom. Then, when she saw that I was dry, she began asking me what was wrong, and she wouldn't stop. It was torture, because obviously I didn't know what to say, I could only keep saying that everything was fine, that I was fine. Then why are you crying?

“I am not crying.”

“Yes, you are crying.”

“No, I'm not.”

It was a kind of
piercing, painful amazement.
I don't know if you know, Colonel. It's rather like looking at toy trains, especially if there's a model landscape, in relief, with the station and the tunnels, and cows in the fields and lighted signals at the grade crossings. It happens there, too. Or in a cartoon when you see the house where the mice live, with matchboxes for beds, and a painting of the grandfather mouse on the wall, and bookshelves, and a spoon that serves as a rocking chair. You feel a kind of comfort inside, almost a
revelation,
that opens your soul, so to speak, but at the same time you feel a kind of pain, the sensation of an absolute, irremediable loss. A sweet catastrophe. I think it has to do with the fact that at those moments you are always
outside,
you are always looking in
from the outside.
You can't go in and get on the train, that's a fact; and the house for mice is something that's on television, while you are inescapably
in front,
all you can do is look. That day, you could go inside the Ideal Home if you wanted, you waited in line for a while and then you could go in to see the rooms. But it wasn't the same. There was a whole lot of interesting stuff—it was weird, you could even touch the knick-knacks— but you no longer had the same sense of wonder as when you saw it from the outside. It's a funny thing. When you happen to see the place where you would be
safe,
you are always looking at it
from the outside.
You're never in it. It's
your
place, but you are never there. My mother kept asking me why I was sad, and I would have liked to tell her that I wasn't sad; on the contrary, I would have had to explain to her that it had to do with something like happiness, the devastating experience of having suddenly glimpsed it, and in that idiotic house. But how. Even now I wouldn't be able to. There's also something a little embarrassing about it. That was a stupid Ideal Home, which had been built just to con people, it was a big stupid business of architects and builders, it was a deliberate trick, to tell you the truth. As far as I know, the architect who designed it might be a complete imbecile, one of those guys who on their lunch hour wait outside schools to rub against the girls and whisper Suck my dick and stuff like that. Besides, I don't know if you've noticed this, but generally, if something strikes you as a
revelation,
you can bet that it's bogus, I mean, that it isn't
true.
Take the example of the toy train. You can look at a
real
station for hours and nothing happens; then just glance at a toy train and,
click,
all sorts of good things start up. It doesn't make sense, but it's the damn truth, and sometimes the more idiotic the thing that grabs you is, the more it sticks, with its wonder, as if there had to be a dose of deceit, of deliberate deceit, as if everything had to be false, at least for a while, to succeed in becoming something like a
revelation.
It's the same with books, or films. Any more bogus than that and you'd die, and if you go to see who's behind there you can bet that you will find only solemn sons of bitches, but meanwhile inside you see things that, walking around on the street, you dream of but in real life you'll never find. Real life never
speaks.
It's a game of skill, you win or you lose, they make you play it to distract you, so you won't think. My mother used that ploy. When I didn't stop crying, she dragged me over to a machine that was all lights and signs. It was a lovely machine—it looked like a slot machine or something. It had been set up by a company that made margarine, and had been very carefully designed. There were six cookies on a plate, some made with butter and some with margarine. You tasted them, one by one, and every time you had to say if the cookie was made with margarine or butter. In those days margarine was rather exotic, people didn't really know what it was; they thought it was healthier than butter and basically gross. That was the problem. So the company came up with that machine, and the game was this: if you thought the cookie was made with butter you pressed the red button, and if it seemed to taste like margarine you pressed the blue one. It was fun. And I stopped crying. No doubt about it. I stopped crying. Not that something had changed in my mind: I still had stuck inside me that sensation of piercing, painful amazement, and in fact I would never again be without it, because when a child discovers there's a place that is his place, when
his
home flashes before him for a second, and the
meaning
of a Home, and, above all, the idea that such a House
exists
, then it's forever, you've been screwed to the very end, there's no going back, you will always be someone who's passing through by chance, with a piercing, painful sense of amazement, and so you're always happier than others and always sadder, with all those things to laugh and cry about, as you wander. In this particular case, anyway, I stopped crying. It worked. I ate cookies, I pushed buttons, the lights went on, and I wasn't crying anymore. My mother was happy, she thought it was over, she didn't understand, but I did, I understood it all perfectly, I knew that nothing was over, that it would never be over, but, still, I wasn't crying, and I was playing with butter and margarine. You know, there were so many times, later, when I felt that sensation inside again . . . It seems as if I'd never felt anything else since. With my mind somewhere else, I stood there pressing blue and red buttons, trying to guess. A game of skill. They make you play it to distract you. As long as it works, why not? Among other things, when the Ideal Home Exhibition was over that year, the margarine company announced that a hundred and thirty thousand people had played the game, and that only 8 percent of the contestants had guessed right about all six cookies. They announced it rather triumphantly. I think that was more or less my success rate. I mean that if I think of all the times I tried to guess, pushing the blue and red buttons of this life, I must have hit it right more or less 8 percent of the time—it seems to me a plausible percentage. I say this not at all triumphantly. But it must have gone more or less like that. As I see it.