Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) (9 page)

More pages on the floor. They cascade off at the slightest provocation. Maybe the table is slanted, the legs on one side shorter than on the other. I don’t know. I bought it used, it was quite cheap, and that might have been the reason. The people selling it probably assumed I was not going to notice until it was too late, assumed correctly, as it turns out, though I cannot assert in a factual way that I have noticed even now—I am merely guessing it
might
be slanted, as an explanation for why my pages keep sliding off without being nudged by anything that I can see, even something not at all obvious, a draft from an open window, for example, or the minute breeze I stir up removing a jacket or opening a closet door. I sit in my armchair, scarcely breathing, windows shut tight, no fan running, and still they fall off, striking the floor with a small dry rattle, which, though I really ought to expect it by now, never fails to startle me. That I have not noticed the slant, if there is one, probably means I have astigmatism. Or, equally plausible, the table is as it should be, all four legs are of equal length, I don’t have astigmatism, but the floor is slanted. If I had a marble, I could roll it and see.

Brodt wore brown trousers, a brown shirt with an American flag on the sleeve and the word “Brodt” in white script on the flap of a breast pocket, and black shoes. The writing on the shirt pocket is the reason I think of him as Brodt, as we were never introduced in the proper way. When I showed up for work the first day he did not glance up from his monitors, and after that of course there was no point. Well, perhaps there was still a point, but the possibility had slipped away. If one has failed to say, “Hello, my name is so and so,” right off the bat, it becomes impossibly awkward to go back and remedy it later. I never learned his first name, unless of course Brodt was his first name. In fact Brodt probably was his first name, since the man who came to empty our wastebaskets had “Larry” on his pocket. Brodt was not a communicative person; “a phlegmatic and awkwardly taciturn man” is how I might begin to describe him, were I writing a story. I never saw him excited or even slightly animated, except once a few years ago at the time of the explosion of the airplanes in New York. They had moved a television into the cafeteria, they were crowding around it, and I could see Brodt standing in front of everyone waving his arms and shouting. He
looked
like he was shouting at any rate. I saw him on a monitor, gesticulating, and he looked like the angry cop in one of Chaplin’s silent movies. When he left the basement room it was usually to stroll about in the lobby, make the rounds of the offices, go to lunch in the cafeteria on the second floor or the bathroom on the first, or eject someone from an office, if that person had refused to leave for some reason. When he left the room I could turn my chair around and watch his travels on the monitors. To get out of the room he had to open the small door in the partition and walk across my half, behind where I would be sitting or sometimes standing, to the larger door that opened into the garage. Now and then, when he was crossing behind me, I would hear his footsteps slowing, or even stopping, rarely. I could feel him peering over my shoulder, checking on my progress on a puzzle, and I would picture him fighting back a temptation to make a suggestion. He never did make a suggestion, and I never turned around at those times and never looked at him from anywhere but behind or saw anything but the back of his shoulders and head when he was in his chair. I glimpsed him from the front only when he got in my way, when I was trying to go someplace or other in the building and he was standing in the middle of the hall, obliging me to walk around him, or when his soda can fell and caused us both to swivel, as I mentioned. Now and then, if we were waiting at the bus stop together after work, I looked at him from the side and took the measure of his profile: low, back-sloping forehead, bulbous potato nose, rounded chin, barrel chest, protruding stomach, and so forth. He never talked to me, except occasionally when we were at the bus stop. I am not sure he was talking to me then either, as he did not turn his head in my direction when he talked, and I was careful not to turn mine in his, so as not to seem prying in case he wasn’t talking to me after all, and what with the noise of the crowd and buses and the fact that I was not facing him and often had my muffs on, I seldom caught more than a stray word or two. I had worked there for quite a long time before I went over and typed on his machine. Every morning and every afternoon he left the room to carry out his inspections and patrols. I could see him going from place to place on the upper floors and was not worried that he was going to walk in on me while I was typing. It seems strange that the only place in the whole enormous building where I was sure he was not watching me was in his own office. Though it is not odd if you think about it—the eye, after all, can’t see itself. I was not interested in typing anything protracted and did not sit down to do it. I went over and typed on his machine twice. The first time I wrote, “Why don’t you speak to me?” The second time, a few weeks later, I wrote, “Hello. Hello. Hello.” One day, a few months after that, I bought him a book at Barnes & Noble. I bought
Winesburg, Ohio
and placed it on his table while he was out. It sat there for weeks, until I went over and took it back. I seem to be making headway. “Edna is inching her way forward at last” is how it feels exactly. I like the word “headway,” one of those nautical terms we use all the time without ever thinking about their actual meaning—headway, movement ahead, as opposed to leeway, drift to the side. Toward the end, when Clarence had developed such a short fuse, I remember sitting at the breakfast table talking to him about something or other and having him suddenly slam a fist down on the table with such force the coffee in our cups sloshed into the saucers and shout, “
Will you get to the damn point!”
That happened, as I said, toward the end, and that, meaning the end of Clarence, is another item I am going to have to type up at some point, at some point before the end of this. Drift to the side is a problem, obviously.

“Losing one’s bearings” is another interesting phrase of that sort. Clarence and I once had a dispute about that phrase, he thinking it meant losing one’s
ball
bearings, until I showed him in a dictionary. He thought this, I imagine, because of growing up the way he had, with dismantled cars lying around in the yard. He told me there were always broken cars in the yard, several at a time, because once a car had broken down definitively there was nowhere else to put it, and of course ball bearings would have been falling out everywhere. He told me they used ball bearings as ammunition in slingshots, when they hunted squirrels and rabbits in that way. There was never a question of headway before I started typing again this time, no question of reaching a conclusion or finding a solution or anything of that sort, reaching a point, I mean, where I could stop turning things over; getting someplace was not the aim. If there was an aim in recent years, it was, as I said, just to pass the time until four o’clock, when I could go home, even though when I got there it was to go on doing the same thing, sorting and putting in piles, but doing it in the brown armchair. Maybe “thinking” is not the word for that; “woolgathering” is better. Of course if one keeps at it and continues drifting to the side long enough, or gathers too much wool, one can end up losing one’s bearings, losing them in a fairly agreeable way, possibly, and losing them
temporarily,
usually, I should emphasize, as opposed to losing one’s mind for good or being tormented by some terrible thought forever, some awful unshakable memory perhaps, or being actually lost at sea. “Willy-nilly” would be another way of describing how my thoughts came and went, wafting this way and that. In a sense I really was lost at sea, had got accustomed to just drifting, blown this way and that by the winds of velleity and memory, making it hard for me to push forward now that I am typing again. With the windows open wide, as they are now, and a rain-freshened breeze blowing in, I could almost be typing on a balcony. I hear sparrows chirping on the sidewalk, even over the noise of the ice cream machinery and the cars. This morning I took some half-stale bread from the kitchen and crumbled it as best I could—it was not quite stale enough to make genuine crumbs—and threw it out the window.

I have placed a book on top of my pages, the ones I have stacked behind the machine, to stop them from sliding off the table. I chose the first book at hand, just grabbing it from the bookcase in the hall on my way into the living room this morning. It turned out to be Peter Handke’s
The Weight of the World,
a book I remember liking quite a lot at one time, as it seemed to be saying many of the things I was thinking then, and the title now seems weirdly fitting, considering its new work as a paperweight. I am always startled and thrilled by coincidences like that—startled awake, even though, before they occur, I am not aware of being asleep. For a number of years, when I was much younger, I practiced eliminating causation from my world-view, in favor of coincidence, in order to wake up. The aim was to turn every moment of experience into an amazing accident, in order to break through the film of complacency and habit that I could, even at that young age, feel shutting me out from actual life, or from what I considered actual life at the time, like a glass pane placed between me and the world, something, though on a more spiritual level, rather like the plastic film that makes the things wrapped up in the supermarket appear so remote and dead. I worked at it quite hard for a time, and I reached a point in my practice where preparing coffee in the morning I would tip the kettle and be astonished that water came from the spout and that it poured down into the filter rather than up toward the ceiling—happily astonished, I should say. In fact I was only pretending to be astonished. I knew all along that the water was not going to fly up to the ceiling, even while I was assuring Clarence that it might. I would speak to Clarence, perhaps interrupting him at his work, and he would respond, maybe, and if his response had any bearing at all on what I had just said, I considered it a lucky break. Clarence said, when I was practicing all the time, that no one could live like that systematically. I told him there were no systems, only piles of accidents, that everything that is not strange is invisible. I think Valéry said that, or something like that. I didn’t tell Clarence that Valéry had said it, though, because it annoyed him when I quoted French authors. But after a while I got tired of the whole thing and went back to seeing the world as the same old place, worn by familiarity and habit almost too smooth to feel.

The butler died and no one replaced him, the gardener was let go, the animals in the hedges vanished into thickets of unpruned branches, pine trees and oaks sprouted from the flowerbeds. Schoolboys kept the lawns more or less mowed, and my father could still spend hours out there whacking at golf balls in all sorts of weather. I could hear the whacks from inside the house, on and on, a row of sharp cracks like rifle fire, a long silence while he walked to the end of the lawn and picked up the balls, and then more whacks when he knocked them back the other way. Sometimes a ball crashed against the side of the house or sailed through a windowpane. Papa really didn’t care about broken windows, and if the weather was warm he just left them that way, and at night insects swarmed through the holes and buzzed in desperate circles around the lamps—sometimes it was impossible to sleep because of the mosquitoes inside the house. In winter he blocked the holes with pieces of corrugated cardboard, but he never bothered doing that in summer, despite the insects, and one of the first things I would do on my visits home was walk through the house, count the holes, and hire someone to fix them. The iron fence did not receive a fresh coat of shiny black paint in the spring as before and turned brown with rust, staining my clothes if I brushed against it. The tips of Papa’s beautiful mustache, which in younger days had jutted like tusks, hung limply down the sides of his pendulous jowls. Not just his face, his whole body expanded and settled downward like sand in a sack—he became big-bottomed and florid and hitched his pants when he walked. When the roof began to leak, he sold off the slate shingles and replaced them with rolled asphalt. He had a partition built across the staircase, to save on heat, and slept in the study downstairs. Splotches of mildew blackened the wallpaper. I was young, I was trying to step forth, and all around me were deterioration and decay. I went home less and less often, and when I did go Papa seemed perplexed, and I wasn’t always convinced that he knew who I was. Knew at first blush, that is—he always figured it out once we got talking. His sense of humor grew unstable as well, unhinged practically, veering from hearty and vulgar to bizarre and gnomic at the drop of a hat. He tended to lag a few paces behind me when we went out for a walk, and I could hear him back there chuckling. He began to employ the self-referencing third person, speaking of himself as “this one”—“this one,” he would say, “is going to fix himself a gin and tonic”—and he would address me as “you one.” I am not sure that he did this to be funny. He became belligerent when people failed to get one of his jokes, and almost no one ever got any of them, since they rarely made sense. One day we were thrown out of a restaurant in Philadelphia because he was shouting at a man who had failed in that regard. I spent my days there reading or making meals for Papa or just wandering about in the garden. I liked it better now that it was in ruins. I slept on a sofa in the drawing room, and my father’s gigantic snores flew out of the study and mingled there with the buzzing of the insects. Had I been a child still, I might have floated off somewhere, to one of the countries I discovered on my stamps. Instead, I lay shackled to the sofa, rigid with anxiety, and pressed cushions to my ears against the unrelenting assault of Papa’s snores (I had not discovered earmuffs yet). At times I became completely frantic, and then I would escape to the bathroom and type until morning. I think that was when I learned to use a typewriter in this way—so as not to become frantic. It is easier not to feel alone when one is typing, even in the presence of the desolation of the
Concerto for Orchestra.
If this were a book with chapters, I would call this one “The Desolation of my Father Snoring.”