Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) (13 page)

We used to read to each other. Going to bookstores, talking about books, and reading to each other were the things we did most together in the beginning. We took turns reading chapters; and when there were long stretches of dialogue or when we read plays, we took turns with the voices. We read mostly in bed, but also, especially in our early period, we read facing each other in chairs or side by side on a sofa, on a bench in a park, on the train going west and back. I don’t know why we stopped reading together, but gradually we were not doing it regularly, and then without realizing it was happening we were reading different books, and gradually we came not to care about the book the other one was reading, because it was not the book that we were reading, and we became bored and drifted off when the other one talked about his book. What we were doing, reading different books, was furnishing different rooms, constructing separate worlds almost, in which we could sit and be ourselves again. Of course those were rooms in which we each sat alone, and we gradually spent more and more time in them and less and less in the house we lived in together. When Clarence was gone I don’t think I became more alone than when he was home at the end. If I were to open the door today and by some miracle discover him sitting on the landing, it would of course come as a surprise, since it would, given the circumstances, be a genuine miracle, but leaving that aspect aside, it would not make any difference—he would be sitting on the landing reading something I am not interested in, I imagine, so we would probably not try to talk about that. What would we talk about?

I really ought to give away the books I still have, if I am not going to read them. Though I would have to contend with the empty shelves then. Imagine becoming dizzy on your way down a hall and having nothing to hold on to but some bare shelves. It would be like fainting in the subway.

I must have been pretty once, what I call pretty. “Oh she was pretty once,” I think they said, some people have said, seeing me now and thinking. The fact is I was never what most people would call classically pretty. I suppose I was homely. I had a domestic look, which infuriated me, because I knew that what was within did not correspond, as if I was prevented by my face from appearing as I was—I was coming out into the world, but my face stood in the way. Clarence stopped to talk to me, and it was not because I was especially pretty, I thought, but because he was able to see what was within. If this becomes a book I will want to put in a few words about my own appearance at that time. “Thin,” “stoop-shouldered,” “light-brown hair,” “large chin,” “hazel eyes,” “flat chest,” “intense, darting gaze” are some of the words I might put in, I suppose, if I put in any. I will also, in a book, want to describe myself at present more thoroughly than I have up to this point, and that will be difficult.

I have propped a small mirror against the coffee cup, so I can see myself while I type. I am now looking at myself closely: I see an eye. What is the eye like? It looks. I suppose it blinks, though I can’t see it while it does that. When I was a child I tried to see myself with my eyes closed. I wanted to know if my shut lids were little wrinkled pleats like the lids of my two small cousins when we squeezed our eyes shut in games or if they were smooth and blue-pale like Mama’s on hot afternoons when she was resting on a sofa. In the mirror I see a woman (is that important?) of indeterminate age, an older person; how old is unclear. Her hair is thin and apparently cut at home by its owner. A curved back (I can’t see that in this mirror), a bump in the upper spine, not quite a hump, a significant bulge. She often wears earmuffs, even on warm days, because of the noise of the traffic and the compressors. She will be glad, she says, when she goes deaf.

Giamatti has telephoned again. I told him, soon. And I have posted a new note: Feed the Fish. I taped it where I can see it while I am typing, just above one I wrote years ago, in tiny letters in red marker on a lined index card that has now turned dun with age, the ink so faded I would not be able to make it out if I did not remember what it said: “Thunder suddenly sprang again outside with a clap and bang, slithering.” I put it up there because it is one of the best short sentences I know. Maybe not one of the best I know period, but one of the best short ones I know about Mexico. I put new batteries in Potts’s flashlight, and shining under the furniture I found the snails, all of them, I think, wedged in the crack between the wall and the plywood back of the cabinet the aquarium sits on, all the way down on top of the baseboard. They looked dried out. They had set out, I suppose, in search of greener pastures, thinking (sort of) there might be a nice weedy pond just over the horizon. It is interesting the way human folly extends all the way down through the animal kingdom to snails—they behaved, I want to say, just like Clarence. I tried to pull the cabinet away from the wall, to get at them with a broom handle, but it was too heavy, because of the weight of the aquarium, and the slot was too narrow for the broom handle, which got stuck when I forced it. Unable to pull it back out, I have left it there, the whiskery part of the broom sticking up and pressed flat against the wall back of the aquarium. I took a glass and scooped water out of the aquarium and poured it down on top of the snails. I don’t know at what moment Clarence decided to become a writer. Not as early as I had, surely, since I was older and my background was more advanced than his.
Advanced
is probably not the exact word for what it was—rich in cultural opportunities is how a magazine might describe it. By the time we met I had been writing for many years already, while he had nearly finished pharmacy school before he finally decided. I say finally decided, because that is how he used to tell it, how he told it to me on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum the day we met. He always phrased it that way, despite the fact that, having finally decided, he did not then do anything to change the way he was living, did not let writing get in the way of his life, which was still quite ordinary and, to hear him describe it, industrious and humdrum. He did, I think, add a couple of English courses to his schedule at the university, and he tried to read books like
Ulysses
that people had told him were difficult and important, and he began to talk about himself in a new way, as a writer, which was foolish, since he had not written anything to speak of, but also important, because it set him up to do it, like a wager on his future. Clarence actually believed that he
ought
to read books like
Ulysses
and
Don Quixote
and
Tristram Shandy
even after I had explained how ridiculous that was if he didn’t
feel
like reading them. He was sincere in believing things of that sort, and that he
ought,
as he said, to become informed about art, and his sincerity was what I found moving in those days. But he did not sit down and write yet, the moment he decided, because he was worried about money and wanted a way to make a living while he was getting established, “getting established” being another of his phrases. I have mentioned already how depressingly practical and calculating in a mercantile way he sometimes was, due to his background and his anxiety about becoming poor. When we met in New York he was living (I nearly wrote that he was
insisting
on living) in a parsimonious little one-room flat in the Bronx and working as a pharmacist at a drugstore in Yonkers, while trying to write short stories, where “trying” in those days meant sitting at a typewriter as I did and typing things one never finished.

I lay down, thinking I would rest a while. It was past four when I awoke, and for a few moments, before the room came into focus, I did not know where I was. I heard myself saying “hello, hello,” the way I used to, when I would wake up late and wonder if anyone was home—anyone being Clarence, of course, except for a brief time after he took up with Lily, when anyone was Steven. Steven didn’t last, and we never came close to the point where I would wake up and expect him to be there. I must have forgotten while I was napping that I live by myself now, and when I woke up and discovered it all over again, like a brand new fact, it came as a shock. The reason I almost wrote, a while ago, that Clarence
insisted
on living in that miserable place in the Bronx is that that was how it struck me at the time; I couldn’t help suspecting that he was doing it on purpose, because up to that time I had not known any people, as friends, who were genuinely poor. I had known several people who were living actively in squalor, but they were doing it because they were bored with money, and poverty impressed them as chic and interesting, and all of them, except for two who died in an apartment fire, went back to being wealthy after a time. Clarence did not know anything when I met him, and that made him diffident. He was able to become enthusiastic about something only if he had permission, because he was afraid of making a mistake. He had joined a shabby little writers’ group, and their opinions were all he had to go on, and since he was never quite sure what to admire, he admired what other people admired, and of course that was fatal. Sometimes, though, he was not diffident enough. He once carried on extravagantly about Modigliani in front of a group of my friends from that epoch, when we were first together as young writers in New York, before he had a clue, and one of the girls, whom I stopped speaking to afterwards because of it, egged him on to say guileless and ridiculous things. I happened to walk in on them, and he was talking about Modigliani and Lautréamont, though he did not know the first thing about Lautréamont. I strolled over and turned the radio up, to drown him out, but that caused him to talk louder, so I pulled him to his feet and made him dance with me. Later, though, he developed a whole set of opinions and stuck to them even after I had told him they were boorish and common. During our first year or so he was always excited about his writing, even though it was not any good yet, and by that time I was already tired; I was twenty-six and thoroughly tired. In college I had already become tired of the things that people group under youthful pursuits, despite not having actually pursued any of them except for a few weeks at the beginning of my first year, and now I was tired of adult things as well. It was partly because I was already tired, I think, that I was attracted to Clarence, drawn by the fact that he had no notion of fatigue of that sort. People said that I had allowed my life to be “subsumed” by Clarence (at least that is what I guess people were saying, what I suppose now they were saying then), when in fact the opposite was true: I possessed everything Clarence wanted, possessed, I mean, in my background and culture. I could divide the book into two parts: Edna Ascendant and Clarence Ascendant. Or I might call the second part Edna Descendant, that being more poignant and better capturing the feel of it, the way the slope downward felt to me, from my side, where it seemed ineluctable and inexplicable. A philodendron (I think it is) seems to be dead.

With the windows open wide I can hear the Connector clearly. It is louder on days like this one, with clouds, I have noticed, because the noise strikes the clouds and bounces back. Even though I know that to be true it still strikes me as strange—the idea of something invisible like sound bouncing off something soft like clouds. It is cooler today, but I am not closing the windows yet, because then I will have to look at how dirty they are, have to type in the dirty light coming through them. “An oldish woman is typing her life up in a room filled with dirty light” is how I might begin the book. I don’t know why I am suddenly bothered by the windows, since they have been getting dirtier for a long time now, a little dirtier each day, I imagine, molecule by molecule, for years, plus the fact that I have covered so much of them with paper. Window washers are beyond my means. I am referring to the people, of course, not the instruments, which are really just a bucket, a squeegee, and a couple of rags, as far as I can tell. The instruments are not beyond my means, at least not in a pecuniary sense, though they are probably beyond my means at this moment, meaning this month, and the next one too, probably, unless something happens. But they are at any moment, meaning forever, beyond my means in the physical sense—I cannot imagine hanging out of a window in order to wash the exterior, where most of the dirt is, thirty feet above the sidewalk with my knees hooked over the sill. I expect the windows will go on getting dirtier, while the world, the building across the street, and the sun, become blurred, vague, and less cheerful. “Molecule by molecule her world grows dim” is how it will be, probably, and that might be the second sentence, by way of setting the stage for what is about to happen, or not. People will look up at my windows and see a shape moving on the other side of the glass, and they will not be able to tell if it is a man or a woman.

Clarence was quite good-looking in a rough way, a masculine way, it seemed to me even then, though the real masculinity did not come out until later, after he had put on flesh and grown a Clark Gable mustache. By the time he was thirty he was stocky and truly impressive in that masculine way. It was almost an Emiliano Zapata mustache at one point. When we met he was already masculine, of course, but in an ethereal direction, if that makes sense, slender and boyish, with startled eyes, so one did not see the tendency to become heavyset and brutal; and it was that startled quality, the feeling that he was seeing the world new, as if it had just come into being before his eyes, that drew me to him, because of the fatigue I mentioned, and it vanished completely in later years. The first thing he published—we had been together for three years already—was a short story, a memoir, really, about hunting squirrels when he was a boy, the minutiae of hunting them with a small rifle, and the importance of squirrels as food in those days, and in that way he brought in his childhood deprivation and suffering. He sent the typescript off to three or four literary magazines, which held onto it for months before turning it down without explanation. It was his good looks in that masculine way that finally got it published, in a national hunting magazine, because he went up to their offices in person after he had mailed it in to find out what they thought of it, and they took one look at him and what they saw made what he wrote seem authentic. It was an epoch when being authentic seemed important to people. It is interesting how things that seem obvious and are even part of the atmosphere of a certain epoch become incredible later—now, it seems, something or somebody can be blatantly fake and nobody cares. The deprivations of his childhood made what he wrote seem authentic and significant, but they also made him narrow-minded and intolerant of my life, because he thought that if one had not suffered in a crude and obvious and really external way, in the way he had suffered, and his family had suffered for generations, then one had not truly suffered at all and was just acting up or pretending. “Neurotic misery” was the phrase he liked using, to make it sound fake, and he thought, though he never dared say it, that if you had not suffered in that obvious external way, then what you wrote could not be authentic and significant either. That was a terrible mistake on his part and led him to include things in his stories—war, murder, rape, and the like, a great many adulteries and divorces, even the Jewish genocide once, and a famine in Africa, as a setting—that he regarded as significant events, in the belief that they would make the stories significant also, but of course all they did was make them ordinary. I told him it was not up to the events to make the story significant, but the other way around, but he was never able to see it that way. In the refrigerator this morning I found the grapes I bought some time ago, as I think I mentioned, and forgot about, wrinkled but intact otherwise, and I ate the whole bag while working on the crossword puzzle I took from Starbucks. I was not able to get all the answers. There was a time when I regularly got all the answers, but that has become impossible now that so many of the clues refer to television shows and celebrities one could become familiar with only by watching television—watching a large amount of television, it seems to me. In recent years even the puzzles in the
New York Times
have become like that and are now unworkable by people like me, literary people without television. Reflecting on it now, I suppose that is the reason I didn’t bother writing my usual warning on the newspaper the other day, about the crossword puzzle having been torn out: because I don’t feel a connection to the sort of people who are able to work the puzzles these days. I look at the puzzles, and at the people in the cafés with computers on the table in front of them, staring, and I think, Who are these people?