Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) (20 page)

Someone was pushing the door buzzer. Or better: someone was buzzing at the door, that sounding more the way it felt from inside, from inside the apartment, I mean, the doorbell buzzing, the dour buzzer bellowing, and there was a buzzing of voices without. Now they are knocking. My thought is not to answer. I am not going to answer. It is Giamatti, I am sure.

I went to the window to see if I could catch a glimpse of whoever it was as they were leaving. I did not see anyone. I Can’t see the portion of the sidewalk that is right next to the building unless I lean far out, and I am reluctant to do that. Perhaps they didn’t leave. I suppose it might have been Potts. If it was Potts and she went into her place after knocking, I would have heard the door opening and closing. I don’t normally hear Potts when she is moving around inside her apartment, but I always hear her going in and out. Anyway, it is too soon for Potts. I am going to have to change a lot of this, and I will want to leave Potts out.

I was standing at the window looking down, when I felt that Nigel had died. “Edna was invaded by an impression of sudden death behind her” was how it was. I turned around to see. He was inside the plastic tube with, as always, a portion of his tail protruding. I tapped on the glass but he did not stir, the tail did not twitch. I reached in and lifted one end of the tube; his head slid out the other end. His eyes were shut, mouth agape, incisors manifest. I lifted the tube higher in order to peek inside, and he slid most of the way out, dangling from the end of it. I dumped him directly from the tube into a Ziploc. Under the impact of his weight the bag slipped from my grip and struck the floor with a thump, a dull thud, I want to say, as of a dead thing, and he fell out. Using the tube and the edge of a foot I worked him back inside. He is in the freezer now, in the door to the freezer, as I don’t want him on top of the vegetables.

At the agency yesterday, filling out more forms, running into more problems. They asked, “Where do you live?” And I said, “In hell.” And the girl asked, “Where’s that, ma’am?” I tapped my chest and said, “In
here,
in here.” Ditto for occupation: they always have a blank for that one. I used to write “none” but discovered this suggests to them that I am unemployed, which is so far from the truth it is laughable. I tried to get around it by writing “waiter” instead, but that did not work either: they wanted the name of my employer, and when I said, “self-employed,” they were incredulous. They had thought I meant a waiter on tables. They wanted someone to accompany me home, but I said no. I wanted to say to them, “When I had nothing …” I could picture myself with nothing, but the fact is I have always had a little bit. I have never had the courage to have nothing, to be nothing.

If lives had chapters, the final chapter in Clarence’s life would open in a house with yellow-flowered wallpaper and close outside a sawmill in Georgia. We had driven south, almost to the Gulf, a rented trailer hitched to a our station wagon carrying everything we owned swaying wildly behind us. At one point during the trip, Clarence compared going down there, which is where he came from, though not that particular region of it, to an animal going to ground, a thing one normally says about hunted animals, when they go into a hole to hide. We unloaded at a small farmhouse with asbestos siding, yellow wallpaper, and a front porch that had collapsed on one side, belonging to the owner of the pharmacy where Clarence had found a job. Surrounded by pine woods, where there had once been fields, it was not a farmhouse anymore. There were no farmhouses anymore anywhere around, because the soil was exhausted, Clarence said; just widely scattered, insubstantial, and generally run-down dwellings inhabited by people who drove long distances to work every day. The pine woods were hot and dusty. The trees were not tall and they grew close together, stunted big-leafed oaks and gums mixed in with the pines. The woods smelled of dust and resin, and at night the insects were deafening. Abandoned farm machinery—I am not sure what kind of machinery, incomprehensible shafts, wheels, and teeth—lay scattered at the edge of the woods, vine-wrapped and rusted, with small trees growing up through the interstices. Every weekday morning Clarence put on a white coat and drove twenty-three miles to work at a drugstore in town, where he made the acquaintance of Lily, who worked at the drugstore also and dressed in blue, because she was not a pharmacist. The wallpaper was pale-yellow with deep-yellow flowers, the same in every room. When we moved in it was hanging off the walls in places, and Clarence pulled on the loose pieces, kept pulling until they broke and left tapering torn streaks down the walls. He lived in that house for several years, with me at first and then with Lily, and then, when I came back from Potopotawoc, with me and Lily. He stopped being a writer there and died between the house and the town, when he ran off the road and hit a truck in the parking lot of a sawmill. When just the two of us lived there, he was still calling himself a writer and would show people his book and the magazines with his stories, but I don’t think he really believed that he would become one again. I don’t remember typing there. I have wondered sometimes whether he went on calling himself a writer after I left, or was he doing it only for my benefit, still. He probably did, though, since there was no one around who could know it was not true. I am not sure if Clarence died in the car or in the hospital. I am certain that at some point he was dead in the hospital. I might call it
The Book of Suffering.
I am referring now to Clarence’s suffering. If he could read this, he would say “Are you trying to be funny?” He would mean, of course, am I trying to be ironic.

I let Lily sit in front the first time we all three rode in the car, because she was the guest, though later, when she was denizen and I interloper, it became customary for me to sit in back. I chose to sit in back, I think, because I did not like Lily’s head appearing over the seatback next to me, when she leaned over to talk to Clarence while he drove. She talked to him almost constantly when we were driving places. Riding in back I sometimes listened to them talking to each other, but usually I looked out the open window at the exhausted soil, their voices drowned by the wind, or I stretched out on the seat bench and slept. Because the yellow-papered house was in the middle of what Clarence called the dullest place in America, they fell into the habit of taking road trips out of there, and sometimes I went with them and sometimes I stayed behind. Montgomery, Chattanooga, and Savannah are some of the places they went without me, as I recall. They would send me a picture postcard and be back before it arrived. Clarence would bring the mail in from the box on the highway and say, “Well, what do you know, Edna has a card from Savannah,” if that was where they had been. Once when I went with them we drove down to the Gulf and went swimming in the ocean, if the Gulf of Mexico is an ocean. A gulf is part of an ocean, of course, though it would be bizarre if I said we went swimming in part of the ocean, as if anyone could swim in a
whole
ocean. On the way back we stopped for gas somewhere north of Panama City. Across the highway from the filling station was a sort of backyard theme park called Jungle Adventures or some such thing, and Clarence insisted on walking over there. He was fascinated by things like that, tawdry, run-down things, because of his childhood, which was full of them, heartbreaking things that he was not able to forget about. We bought tickets from a teenage boy sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck parked at the entrance. Clarence later said the boy reminded him of himself when he was that age, though I failed to see the resemblance. The theme park consisted mainly of half-a-dozen life-sized African animals, several dinosaurs, and some picnic tables scattered about under the trees. The animals were made of a smooth hard material, plastic or fiberglass, I suppose, that rang hollow when you knocked on their sides. At the edge of the park, practically on the shoulder of the highway, mounted on a large plywood sheet supported at the back by a series of slanting two-by-fours, was a life-sized painting of a big-game hunter, quaintly Edwardian in khaki plus fours, high socks, and pith helmet. He was clasping an enormous, still-smoking gun, which Clarence thought was a .416 Rigby, and resting a foot on the head of a lion with a lolling purple tongue. There was an oval hole in the plywood where the hunter’s face would normally be and that made the whole thing look like a painting by Magritte. The idea was to stand behind the plywood sheet and stick one’s head into the hole and be photographed. First Lily and then Clarence put their head through while I snapped pictures of them. At this moment I can look up and see the photograph of Clarence that I taped to my window, in which he has a foot on an actual lion. I don’t have the picture I took of him with his head in the cutout and a foot on a fake lion, but if I did I would tape it up next to the other. That would be ironic.

Potopotawoc was mostly a time without typing, except for copying, and later, when I came back from there to the house with flowered paper, that was nearly a time without typing. With Clarence gone all day in the car and the woods too hot and dusty to be pleasant to walk in, one might assume that I would have typed a great deal there, before going off, but I don’t recall typing anything then either. I must have typed some, though: had I not typed at all during the summer we moved to the wallpaper house, I would remember it as a dry period. I don’t remember it as a dry period. In the place where I live now, as I must have stated at the outset, I went several years without typing a word, when the typewriter sat in the closet, and those years are marked in my mind by the absence of typing, and I do think of them as the dry years. When I came back from Potopotawoc, though, I am sure I did not type. I stayed in the flower-papered house with Clarence and Lily. I stayed in bed a lot of the time, though I was not ill. I listened to them in the yard shooting cans with pistols, competing. It was winter and the house was cold. On sunny days I took long walks along the shoulder of the highway, because I did not like walking in the woods, which had been fields so recently they were more like thickets of small pine trees than a proper forest. I came back from Potopotawoc at the end of one summer, and I left again at the end of the following winter. Clarence and Lily stayed on; they remained with each other, as we agreed they ought, and I went away.

I can see myself in the past, as if I were standing outside my life, an observer with a camera. I can see myself, for example, with a group of friends running down the steps of Founders Hall at Wellesley or sitting across from Clarence in the dining room of the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi. I can see from my expression that I was happy at those moments, I have no doubt that I was happy, but I am unable to
refeel
the happiness. The fact is, I cannot imagine it.

I am going to buy a red pencil. Red pencils never have erasers. They are for people who are certain.

I have not typed anything for days and days. Days and nights, I should say, because I sat at the typing table sometimes late into the night without typing. Something must be wrong with the compressors; they have grown suddenly louder, while I can scarcely hear the traffic in the street below. I am not sure that I want to type anymore.

A little while ago I was standing at the window when fire engines passed, and I did not hear the sirens, even without my earmuffs. Why am I saying this, when what I mean is, I did not hear them
loudly?
Because my thoughts are roaring, probably—roaring, I want to say, as loud as compressors on the roof of an ice cream factory. They are screaming, actually. “Edna’s thoughts are screaming like moths.” I don’t know what they are screaming about.

Ineluctable undeflectable leeway. Hopeless helpless drift to the side, of a woman talking, talking, because there is nothing else left. I could ask why. Of course somewhere on some plane of existence there is always nothing left. Most people do not reside there, though. The question is, how did she get there? And why does she stay there? She puts food in her mouth, gets dressed, breathes. Is the world slipping from her? Is it getting small as if seen through a long tube? Is it becoming dark?

Report on her current condition: reflective, freighted with souvenir, lachrymose.

I have spent the last penny of what I had to live on this month. On a pastry and a latte at Starbucks.

“Not another word,” I tell myself. No more typing. And no scribbling either, or smearing, or jotting. From now on silence. This is the last you will hear from me. O.K. Good-bye. I think the fern is quite thoroughly dead. If I were old-fashioned British, like the hunter on the cutout, I could say it was beastly dead, which would be amusing, said of a plant.

Roaring. And above the roaring, knocking. Of course I am not off my rocker—
that,
one could say, is the whole problem.

The point is to keep on talking, where by “talking” I mean typing.

It is not even solitude, it is worse than solitude, it is a mind full of items.

All my life my bonnet was full of bees.

Knocking again, accompanied now by several voices, a woman’s, not Potts’s, louder, saying “Edna, I want to talk to you.” They can hear me typing. It seems pointless to pretend I am not here. I am going to pause now. I suspect the next blank space will be the biggest. I am going to pause, answer the door (they are still there), but first I am going to wind a clean sheet on the platen. If this ever becomes a book, that will be the last page. Perhaps before I open, or after I open, with the help of whoever is out there, I will gather up all my pages from the floor. They will make a respectable pile, I think. Clarence would say, “That’s quite a stack, old girl,” probably. And then when I come back I will bring a red pencil. I will carry the stack over to the brown chair, and I will take some things out and put a lot of other things in, I suppose, and then I will see.

COLOPHON

Glass
was designed at Coffee House Press, in the historic Grain Belt Brewery’s Bottling House near downtown Minneapolis. The text is set in Fournier.

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