Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) (2 page)

Last November, I think it was, I got a letter from Clarence’s original publisher, from a woman who works there, whose name I have now forgotten, telling me of their plans to reissue
The Forest at Night,
since next year will be its fortieth, a thing, she said, that is hard to believe, and would I like to write a short preface? Her name was Angelina Grossman. I thought for a moment that I would write back and remind her of one or two painful things, painful to me still, I planned to say, and I trusted also painful to them, the people at Webster and Davis, now that they have had time to reflect. A dismissive scrawl, in pencil probably, on one of those plain postcards they sell at the post office, not a picture postcard. And then I thought that I would not write after all, just not respond, express in that way my indifference and contempt, and I dropped the letter in the wastebasket. Then I took it out of the wastebasket and considered. And then I tore it up. In the process of going back and forth and then trying to fit all the little torn bits together, with the tape wanting to stick to the wrong pieces, I became thoroughly worked up, distraught really. It occurred to me that if I refused they might ask Lily to do it, ask her out of spite, because of the unpleasant things I said about them at the time. Of course they have to be aware that she is not in a position to write anything, they have to know this, but I imagined them making her talk into a tape recorder, taking down her version of Clarence, a one-sided and completely truncated version, and then hiring someone to dress it up in grammatical English. That, of course, is an absurd idea, and the fact that I was able to entertain it shows how worked up and addled I was. In the end I sent Grossman a postcard with a picture of a bear on it. I told her I could not (I underlined
not)
write a short preface but that I would consider writing a long introduction or even, I said, a separate book (I underlined
separate
twice), and while there would be a lot about Clarence in it, it would not be just about him but also about my life before and after, as one could not pretend to understand Clarence without that. If that is the reason the typewriter is now on the table, it took a long time to take effect. I pulled the machine from the closet in January, I think it was, after I had practically forgotten all about the letter, which, as I mentioned, arrived in November or even October, and now it is April.

I was eating lunch this afternoon, when suddenly the doorbell rang. Not strictly eating, not actively chewing, just pushing food around on the plate—lentils from a can I opened a few days ago and forgot about until I discovered them in the refrigerator when I was looking for cheese. I ate a biggish piece of cheese while heating the lentils, and then I was not hungry anymore. I say
piece
of cheese instead of
chunk,
which is what it actually was, because
chunk
possesses a jolly ring that does not fit the atmosphere that reigned while I was eating it, which was subdued and a trifle mournful, stirring lentils at the stove. It was cheddar cheese. I don’t know the brand, since it came without a wrapper from the Bread of Life Center, where I sometimes get food when I have used up my stamps. I often just take cheese when I visit the center, as I don’t eat processed food, which is what people normally give to food pantries, because, I suppose, that is what poor people typically eat. It feels natural to them, I imagine. I cannot recall a time in my life when it could be said that I ate with gusto. I lack vital energy, is what Clarence used to say; lack the will to live, was how he put it. On second thought, I am the one who said that and Clarence just agreed. He nodded, is what he did, sitting beside me on the bed in the yellow-papered house after I came back from Potopotawoc. If this ever becomes a book I am going to have to say something about Potopotawoc. And I ought not to have said that the doorbell rang suddenly. After all, how else
could
it ring? Unless it were outfitted with some sort of crescendoing device that would let it gradually work its way up from a tinkle. I ought to have said that I was not
expecting
the doorbell to ring, because it had not rung for a long time, months and months, I am sure, and I was startled when it finally did, and a door
buzzer
is what it strictly is, not any sort of bell. My first thought was not to answer. A long time ago, when I was still typing seriously, I was capable of doing that, and I did not answer the telephone either, and everyone remarked how resolute I was, and they were admirative too and not at all piqued even when it was their phone call I had failed to answer, despite the fact that answering machines had not been invented yet and if a person did not answer you had to call back again and again until finally they did, perhaps wasting a good part of your day. And all the while you had no idea if they were not answering because they were just awfully busy, as in my case, or were terribly ill or were so depressed they could not bear the sound of a human voice. You could not tell if they were actively shunning you personally or were simply not home, as often happened in the case of people like Clarence, who were always on the go. The phone calls were usually for Clarence anyway, and that was another reason I did not answer them. Though I am now busy again, busy with typing, I have still not got into the swing of it, into the habit of being busy and feeling busy, so I don’t have the other habits that go along with it such as not responding to buzzers. I sometimes regret that the door to my apartment is not equipped with one of the little holes you can peep through and see who is out there. Of course whoever is there could always put a finger over it, but that by itself would be a clue: it would say, for example, that the person whose finger is plugging the hole intends to surprise me, perhaps going so far as to shout “surprise!” the instant I crack the door open, assuming I would crack it open for someone who has plugged the hole. I was dwelling on this thought, on what would prompt me to open or not open and whether there are times when I might become so desperate that I would open even for someone who had a finger over the peephole, on the off chance that it was an old acquaintance being playful, when the buzzer went off again. It occurred to me that it might be a delivery person with a package for me, though on reflection that seemed farfetched as well. “It was without expectation that Edna inched the door open and discovered Potts from the flat below,” was how it finally was. Of course I knew all along that it had to be either Potts or the landlord, Potts being the only other person currently living in the building, and the landlord would be coming about the rent, which I have not paid in full since I stopped going to work. It could also have been someone from the agency, I suppose, in a pinch. I am not going to discuss the agency now. My apartment is on the top floor, the uppermost of three, and Potts lives in the flat below. Nobody lives on the first floor. When I came here an insurance company had offices down there, but it closed after a few years, and then a political campaign had headquarters there, briefly, but it has been empty ever since. Empty of people, that is; Giamatti, the landlord, stores things there. Potts has lived in this building almost as long as I have, first with her husband and then, after he died years ago of galloping cancer, alone with a great many potted plants, an assortment of monstrous bug-eyed goldfish, and a domesticated rat. Even so we have not become friends. There is a dearth on my part of fondness for Potts, even the trifling fondness of neighborly feeling. Solitudes, I have noticed, do not attract. We do each other small favors, try not to grate on each another’s nerves, and avoid needling. Potts is squat and square with large brown protuberant eyes, a small mouth that she opens and closes between sentences, as if sipping, and a short neck. With her stump-like body and quick movements she emits an impression of compact solidity, like a small appliance, a sturdy toaster. She used to possess the thoroughly un-American skill of hands-free smoking, a smoldering cigarette dangling from her lower lip at every moment, even while she talked, blinking through smoke-watered eyes. It lent her a raffish slatternly charm that vanished the instant she kicked the habit. She is leaving in a few days to visit her son in California, or maybe Texas, I don’t remember, Utah possibly, where he is a petroleum engineer. I had promised to look after her plants, promised it months ago, and then forgot. She has several sons, I am not sure how many, and carries on about them with relentless fervor whenever we bump into each other, on the stairs usually, or in the little grocery store at the corner, when I make an effort to pay attention, straining. I lift my earmuffs and try not to bob about or fiddle with the merchandise while she is talking, if we are in the store, or slide my hand up and down on the stair railing, if that is where we are, but I have not managed to form a clear picture of any of them. That might not be my fault—they might just be amorphous people. I have known people with such vague personalities that a hazy picture of them is the best one can hope for. Mr. Potts was like that, and he might have passed the trait on to his sons. I called the one in Texas, if it
is
Texas, a petroleum engineer, because Potts calls him that, though I have not the vaguest idea what a petroleum engineer actually is or does. When I typed those words I was in fact typing something that for me personally is practically meaningless. Which goes to show how simple it is to think nonsense, especially when one is typing, how easy it is for language to get away from us and go off on its own, as it seems to have gotten away from the young ones. We used to talk about the fete of language, but it is really just a brawl. We had Joyce and Proust and the curious Mr. Waugh to keep us straight; now it is all comic books and dragons. And I don’t know what possessed me to say a pretentious thing like solitudes do not attract. I have no idea whether they attract or not. I am not sure what kind of cancer it was that carried off Mr. Potts, since I didn’t visit down there while he was sick, and then he was gone, and it seemed crass to inquire about medical details at that point. I am still curious, though, as he seemed to go from hale and hearty to defunct in an amazingly short span—short for cancer, that is: a person can die of a heart attack at the drop of a handkerchief, obviously. With Potts on vacation I will be the only person currently living in this building. She was holding a cardboard carton full of “perishables” (was how she put it)—cheese and celery and such, bananas with brown spots on the skin, milk, an open box of cornflakes. I tried to take the carton from her, but she held on when I pulled at it. She clasped it to her chest and scurried into the kitchen. I waited out on the landing. I picked at the bits of paint peeling from the walls and put the pieces in the pocket of my skirt, a black skirt with small pockets on the side. The walls are painted yellow above and brown below, dating from a time when children lived in the building, probably, in order not to show handprints, and the paint is dirty even where it is not peeling. Through the open doorway I could hear Potts in the kitchen taking things out of the box and setting them on the counter, the refrigerator door opening and closing, followed by a silence in which I seemed to hear her peering into things. She came whirring back, having popped up a perfect slice, and we went downstairs together to have a look at the plants.

Potts’ apartment is the same shape as mine exactly, with a bay window like mine, but it does not produce the same sensation—it is closet-like and oppressive, not luminous and airy like mine. After a few minutes I become thoroughly desperate down there, because of the crowding-in furniture (lots of upholstery and carpets and dark things with knobs) and the potted plants and breakable knickknacks everywhere. Trapped and running out of air is how it feels exactly. I don’t think she ever throws anything out, except, naturally, leftovers and garbage and the like, and worn-out clothes, I imagine. Mr. Potts’s personal items are still scattered about. Even the sports magazines he obsessively read are still in an untidy stack on a little three-legged table next to his upholstered rocking chair, as if he had just stepped outside for a smoke. Last year when my toilet was clogged I went down to use the bathroom. The plaid robe he wore when he descended to the street to fetch his newspaper in the morning was still hanging from a hook on the inside of the bathroom door, and I noticed one of the pockets bulging with balled-up Kleenex. I would not like to have Clarence’s stuff lying all over the place. I can just imagine coming home, in the dark perhaps, with my arms full of groceries, and tripping over his shoes. I am sure I would not think, “Oh dear, there are Clarence’s shoes on the floor in the middle of the room again.” That is the sort of thing I might have thought at one time, when he was in fact leaving his shoes all over the place. By “at one time” I mean all the time we were together—there was just no changing him when it came to his shoes. But if after he was gone I had kept his shoes lying around the way Potts has with Arthur’s things and tripped over them then, I would think instead, “Oh dear, there are Clarence’s
empty
shoes.” And then, of course, I would get a pang. When I moved to this place, I did not bring anything that had belonged to Clarence. I looked in every one of our books before packing, and if he had signed his name on the flyleaf, as he invariably did when he bought a new one, I left it behind. Opening a book and finding his name, you can just imagine the pang.

We stood side by side in front of the aquarium, while Potts talked about the proper way of feeding the fish—strange deviant goldfish with short egg-shaped bodies, bulging eyes, and long drooping tails. They swam diaphanously back and forth. Climbing on a stepstool and inserting her arm up to the elbow in the water she demonstrated the correct method of removing algae from the glass with a little scraper she had purchased just for that, for me to be able to do that in case the algae becomes too much for the snails to handle, while the fish darted frantically this way and that. They did not dart, actually. Their thick bodies and overdeveloped fins made impossible anything as swift as darting, or as graceful as swimming either; they jerked themselves forward, looking like bright tadpoles trailing scarves. When she had asked me if I would water the plants, weeks ago that must have been, she did not say anything about fish; I would remember had she mentioned fish. She had written out a page of instructions about the plants and another about the fish and posted them on her refrigerator with magnets. We faced the refrigerator and read them over together—she read them aloud, and I followed with my eyes, nodding, I mean, not that we read them in chorus. I could not understand a word. We walked around the apartment, Potts in front with short quick steps, a toy that had been wound up and let run, chattering about the plants, and I a few paces behind, straining to listen, bent. Being taller than Potts I couldn’t help noticing a bald spot on her crown, a salmon-colored circle the size of a half dollar on the apex of her dome. She must have developed it recently or I would have noticed before. I could not stop my mind from drifting to it, wondering what it was a symptom of and whether I ought to mention it to her, in case she had not noticed yet, or not mention it, in case it was something she was doing to herself, neurotically tugging, for example. I paused to peer into the rat’s cage—not a cage, really, just an ordinary aquarium with a wire lid, like the fish tank but larger—a terrarium, properly speaking, or perhaps a vivarium. It looked empty at first, until I noticed the depilated tail protruding from a white PVC tube lying on its side in the wood shavings. “Nigel’s asleep,” Potts said. She tapped the wire top of the cage. Nothing moved. “He had a busy night.” “I am not taking care of the rat,” I said. She brightened: “Oh no, dear, a friend from the Rat and Mouse Club is taking him over to
his
house. Nigel
loves
meeting new rats.” The plants needing the most water she had placed in the bathtub, filling it entirely. I can spray those with the hand shower, she said, and demonstrated the correct method, spraying water on the floor. Even with so many in the tub, there were still plants on every surface, on tables, windowsills, the back of the toilet, the counters in the kitchen. As we drew abreast of each one she told me its name and an anecdote or two, about the store she had bought it from, the time she had almost killed it with too much fertilizer, and so forth, soliloquies delivered while staring fixedly at the plant in question, as if addressing it, never up at me. It was impossible to listen to her. We ended the tour in front of a titanic fern, feather-like fronds erupting in a fountain from a large pot of shiny black ceramic, the tops reaching almost to my shoulder. This was, she said, Arthur’s ultimate present to her, purchased on the last day that he still felt well enough to get about, and
it,
she explained, in addition to regular watering in the usual way, would have to be misted twice a day. She brandished a plastic spray bottle. “Important, important,” she said, wagging the bottle like an admonishing finger. It was her idea to carry the plant up to my place—to spare me trips up and down the stairs, was how she put it, though of course she was thinking that I am unlikely to remember to spray it twice a day unless I am tripping over it. I am not a practical person, I am sure she knows that, and I am not oriented to nature. She gave me a geranium once, many years ago, shortly after she and her husband had moved here. I set it down someplace and forgot about it until several weeks later when I was dusting in my bedroom and noticed a pot full of dirt and twigs on the dresser. Clarence and I never stayed anywhere long enough to have plants, besides cut flowers, except at the end, and at that point no one bothered. We might have not bothered by then because of the wallpaper in the last house, which was alive with flowers. The wallpaper, that is, was alive with them; it was a flower-pattern wallpaper. They were yellow roses.