Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) (18 page)

Of course Poole might not have picked up his typewriter from the store at all; he might, in his distress, have forgotten he had left it there. How would I feel, if one day I decided to commit suicide and could not find my typewriter? Desperate, I suppose. I cannot imagine a situation in which I would forget where I had left my typewriter. The squeak is worse. I hear it even with my muffs on:
yeep,
whir,
yeep,
whir,
yeep,
whir.

I have taped the lion photograph back up on the window. If one bears in mind that it was taken in nineteen sixty-four, it says something else about Clarence, different from what I suggested earlier, when I observed how true to life it was, being a picture of him with a drink in his hand. In nineteen sixty-four Hemingway had been dead for years and nobody but Clarence was still shooting lions, and that, I think, was the tragedy of his life, that he was, in a sense, left to shoot lions alone, having made his appearance onstage at the moment they were closing the theater. I say tragedy, but it was also comedy: the lights have come up, the audience has left the building, women in kerchiefs are vacuuming the aisles, and someone is still up there on the stage. He is wearing laced boots and a cartridge vest and is earnestly performing a role that he learned in school, though with increasing weariness as time passes. He pauses now and then to nip from a flask. The tragedy was that his position in life had become comical, I mean, and he had failed to notice.
Shooting Lions Alone,
I think, would make a good title for a book. For a biography of Clarence, of course—it could not be the title of a book Clarence himself might have written, because he could not be ironic about himself, and he did not like it either when I became ironic about things that he took seriously. Oddly, the one thing I was never ironic about, which was my typing, he was ironic about, calling it “Edna’s remembrance of everything past.” Despite his consuming desire to be the next new thing, there was something old-fashioned about Clarence, even quaint—I say that, knowing how it would have piqued him. And to make matters worse, it is impossible to consider someone like Clarence quaint without being ironic. Perhaps
old-fashioned
is not the word—I mean conventional: the B-movies he worked on, and the outdoor stories that people said were wonderful when they appeared but rapidly forgot about, and the stuff he published in the little literary magazines. He was not always proud of being the sort of writer he had become, and now and then he would still send something off to places like
Esquire
and the
New Yorker,
though he always got preprinted slips in return, as I had warned him was bound to happen. In my opinion, when they reissue
The Forest at Night
no one will even notice. Shooting lions alone: because after a while I was not, speaking metaphorically, able to shoot lions with him anymore, or I was not willing to. I was unable to be willing after a point is how it was, a psychological spring or some such thing having become broken. I used to say to Clarence, when he was expatiating on something, with statistics, or reporting conversations from one of his literary drinking parties, that we were witnessing the end of civilization, and of course I meant our civilization, the one that has a place for people like us, like me and like Clarence some of the time. After typing the previous sentence I happened to glance over at the tank: Nigel’s eyes were bulging. If I were to write a children’s story, I might begin, “When the rat saw what she had written, its eyes bulged with astonishment.” Can one write a children’s story if one doesn’t care much for children? I suppose I could make it frightening, it being easier, probably, to frighten things one doesn’t care much about.

Sunday morning, and I don’t hear the Connector, though the windows are wide open, or I barely hear it if I strain, when I hear the compressors also, and birds as well, and the voices of people on the sidewalk. One of the birds, which must be a robin, I hear even over the keystrokes, it is so loud, or a wren, maybe. It is the first time I have heard a wren here, if it is a wren. People passing in the street below can hear me typing, I am sure, and that makes me think of Capote’s remark about Kerouac’s book: “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” He would say the same about this, presumably, if he were still alive and had a chance to read it. I suppose he meant that Kerouac’s writing went on and on aimlessly. As if there were some other way in which one possibly could go on and on. This morning I became dizzy again, carrying my coffee from the kitchen. It seems to have become a habit. “Chronic” is the medical word for that kind of habit. I grabbed on to the bookcase and in the process spilled most of the coffee. I sat in the armchair awhile and then made another cup, which I have now allowed to get cold, sitting here sorting through the items I intend to type today; sorting in my head, as I said earlier. It is instant coffee, which I became accustomed to drinking when I had to save time, when I was still going to work—I was chronically drinking it—and I would also brush my hair on the bus, because I was always running late no matter how early I got up; did I explain about that? When I was late Brodt would write on a scrap of paper and then fold the paper up and slip it in his shirt pocket. I have an urge to toss things overboard, superfluous things and things that strike me as burdens and things that are not sanitary, like books. I have already mentioned mold, probably, but in case I have not, that is what I am referring to, as making books unsanitary. Of course, there is a sense in which this actually is a children’s story, being all about what happened to Clarence and me as a consequence, in part at least, of having been the sort of creatures we were as children, of the lives we lived before we became ourselves, when it was too late to do anything about it. I am going to lie down now.

The moment I turned the corner, I saw the store was not there anymore. A sign in the window read Ethel’s Hair & Nails, and someone had cleaned the window glass. A girl with a silver ring through one eyebrow was standing with her back to me when I entered, behind a chair in which an older woman was seated, doing something to that woman’s hair, cutting it perhaps, though I don’t recall scissors. When I came in they both looked at me in the mirror. “Can I help you?” the girl asked, talking to my reflection. She did not turn her head, so I looked away from the girl standing behind the chair with her back to me and spoke to the one facing me in the mirror. I told her I was looking for the man who used to run a typewriter repair shop in that building. The reflection said it did not know anything about that. “Maybe Ethel knows,” it said. But Ethel had left for the day. I asked if there was a number where I could reach her, and added, “It’s a long trip for me, I’m not sure I can come again.” The girl said, “I’m not authorized to share that number,” and then, speaking to the customer in the mirror: “So that’s what it was. I saw all them old typewriters and I thought this must have been like a pawnshop or something.” I said, “Typewriters? Where?” The real one turned to face me. “Around back. They’re gone now, though.” At the side of the building was a small parking lot—puddles of water in the broken pavement, clouds in the puddles. I walked across it and around to the back. Nail-studded boards, broken sheetrock, empty paint cans, and other trash were piled against a wall. A bundled sheet of paint-splattered plastic spilled water on my shoes when I pulled on it. The sheetrock was sodden and pulpy and came apart in my hands, and my shoes and dress were soaked and filthy by the time I had shifted enough trash to get a good look at the typewriters underneath: a dozen or so lined up against the shop wall, quite ordinary machines for the most part, all of them badly rusted. Steadying myself against the wall I pushed on the keys of one with the toe of my shoe—they failed to budge. The IBM Selectric was not among them, but the antique Underwood I had noticed before, that had belonged to a person with a long name I couldn’t remember then, was. I turned the tag over with my foot—it was Mary Poplavskaya. I knelt next to that one and slipped my hands underneath, took a deep breath, and clambered to my feet, staggering, and struck my shoulder hard against the wall. The typewriter wasn’t heavy, as typewriters go, but it was heavy for me, considering. Essaying it on my hip and then on my shoulder, I found that hugging it to my abdomen was best, though it forced me to walk with a broad waddle. I had to stop and rest twice on the way to the bus, sitting on the curb, and the second time a woman came out of a shop to ask if I was all right. The bus was not crowded, and I placed the typewriter beside me on the seat. When I reached home I practically threw it on the kitchen table, heaved it up on top of the breakfast dishes and broke a plate with a rabbit on it. My hands, my dress, and the insides of my arms were brown with rust. When I showered, the rust-tinted water swirling around the drain at my feet reminded me of the murder scene in
Psycho.
There are no Poplavskayas in the phone book.

My shoulder is still painful. I am not going to type today. This was typed with my left hand, slowly.

Ravel, Prokofiev, and several others, I believe, wrote left-handed pieces for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in the war. That would be the First World War. He was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brother. I don’t know which battle he lost his arm in—on the Eastern Front, maybe. I don’t know the names of any of the battles on the Eastern Front in that war, though I know the names of a few of them in the next war: Kursk, Smolensk, Stalingrad.

Another of our extravagances, after the Africa trip, and after Mexico, was a year in France, when we lived all winter in a gigantic house in an absolutely tiny village. I might have already said something about that house, which was so big we started out by writing in separate rooms. We each had two rooms, one for the morning sun and another for the evening sun. It was early autumn when we came. A few weeks later the weather turned icy cold. The house had no heating system at all, just fireplaces, and by late December we were spending most of our time huddled next to the fireplace in the kitchen, a long room with a vaulted ceiling and a little window at one end. It was like living in a cave. Clarence stopped typing and wrote in longhand, with mittens on, and every afternoon, unless it was pouring rain, we took long walks through the countryside. In my memory we did not see the sun again after winter set in, but that can’t be true. When I recall our walks, there seems always to be fog or drizzle. The countryside was fantastically bleak once the leaves had fallen, a dull-brown planate expanse, nothing resembling a proper hill, the fields bare and brown after the harvest: acres of clumped and furrowed earth without a trace of vegetation, separated by narrow woodlands of scrub trees and thickets. We never walked in the fields except to cross them in order to reach the woodlands beyond. At the edge of the village, visible from the kitchen door, stood a white cement signpost bearing the name Château-Thierry followed by number of kilometers. I have forgotten how many kilometers exactly—forty or fifty, I think it was. Seeing the name Château-Thierry every day when we were living there made me think a lot about the war, because of the monument on the hill perhaps, where I saw the name for the first time when I was just learning to read and where I finally understood that it was a place where a large number of people had suffered and died in wretched circumstances. “It was ghastly,” Clarence said, referring to that war. He had books of photographs of that war. More ghastly than the images of dead soldiers, blasted trees, and dead horses, were the stunned and staring faces of the living. We sometimes walked across a field to reach the woods on the other side. The mud was gluey and tenacious; it clung to our shoes, more with each step, until we were compelled to stop and scrape it off with a stick. I rested one hand on Clarence’s shoulder to keep my balance while I scraped. When the mud dried on the boots of the soldiers it became as hard as plaster of Paris. Sitting on the floor of the trenches they chipped at it with the points of their bayonets. If they fell facedown in it when they were struck, the stretcher bearers, when they turned them on their backs, did not know who they were. Huge rats were everywhere in the trenches, feeding on the dead and the wounded. Clarence told me that rats crawled under the greatcoats of the dead soldiers and chewed tunnels through the frozen bodies, and when they lifted a corpse to bury it a dozen rats might tumble out. We did not have rats or mice in France, because the house came furnished with two cats—a gray female called Chatte Grise and a black male called Chat Dingue. Chat Dingue means Krazy Kat in French. The mud never dried the winter we were there, though sometimes it froze, and on the coldest days we were able to cross the fields without sinking. The whole time we lived in France that winter I thought about the suffering of the soldiers, which was so different from the way I suffered. I did not know how to compare it to my suffering. I did not know how to measure either of them.

There is an incongruity. Maybe events in the world are too big for words. War is too big. They, the words, are like tiny insects banging against a windowpane (the “window of the mind”) trying to get out, and outside is the big tumultuous world. Or maybe it is the other way around: it is the words that are too big; some words are too big. The word “love” is too big. Maybe the word “Clarence” is too big as well. I used to think the mute, incoherent daily suffering of ordinary life was too big for words. Now I think the words are too big for it. There are no words trivial enough to say how terrible it is.

Yellow police tape surrounded the site, but people were lifting it and walking under. I walked right up to the edge of the hole: a rectangular cement-lined crater, twisted iron pipes projecting from the walls. Except for the pipes it could have been the roughing-in for a swimming pool. Concrete steps descended into the hole on one side, but I did not try to go down them. There were several other people there, standing about vaguely or taking pictures. There was nothing to see, just the hole with a great heap of debris at one end of it and a small bulldozer next to that. The bulldozer was not running. I didn’t see anyone who looked like he belonged there. Some of the neighboring houses had plywood sheets blocking the windows, trash and debris littered sidewalks and lawns, and the street gutters were full of ashy mud. A tall man came and stood beside me. He said, speaking to no one in particular, “Not much to see, is there?” I made a small noise. I was turning to go, and he handed me a flyer: I was invited to visit the Tabernacle of Praise Church of God in Christ. If this city were bombed, there would be thousands of holes like that one. I have, despite myself, formed a picture of Henry Poole: standoffish, weird, late-night walker, a big man, probably, people remarking on the smallness of his dog. He was a prolific writer of something, I think, owning such a large, expensive typewriter; of letters, most likely. “Ungainly fifty-two-year-old lonely TV repairman” sums him up, I suppose, for the rest of us. A stooped, overweight man with a hanging lower lip, is how I picture him. He had lugged that heavy IBM Selectric typewriter all the way across town to be repaired, because he had something important to write, I imagine. Concealed in his character were aspects of the artist, revealed by this determination to finally set it all down on paper, to confide it there. The fact that his note was not going to survive the explosion would not have troubled him, the fate of what he wrote did not, I think, even interest him. If he ever spoke of his desire to set it down—to whom would he have spoken of it?—he would have used the phrase “get it all out,” I think. He wanted, finally, to get it all out. He would not have thought of himself as an artist, though, and would not have been weighed down by the feelings of responsibility one gets when one thinks of oneself in that way. He would have been amazed to learn that I once wanted to be famous. Nigel won’t stop squeaking his wheel, despite my shouts.