Meeks (5 page)

"Albert."

Albert jumped, adjusted his collar in the mirror, beads of sweat rolling from his hairline, through the patchy beard and into the cotton collar of his shirt, already damp with perspiration.

"Morning, Ben.” Albert turned from the cracked glass. “Oh, my God—you're wearing that suit?"

"The other suit's not ready,” said Ben, his face suddenly hot.

"Do you know when?"

"Soon,” said Ben. “The tailor said it would be soon."

Albert pressed his handkerchief against his forehead and against the back of his neck. “Hope so. Let me know if I can help."

Ben thought immediately of
The Impostor
, the famous painting of a young bachelor lying dead on the stage, a violet thistle lodged in his throat.

Albert smoothed the lapels of his pale suit. “This was my father's suit,” he said thoughtfully. “The tailor took it in for me. Dad was an enormous man. What about yours?"

"He died in the war when I was a boy."

"Sorry. I meant his suit."

"They reassigned the house while I was away. Every-thing's gone."

"Then the Brothers of Mercy probably gave your suit to some other bachelor. If I was walking around, and I saw some random guy wearing my father's suit, personally, I'd want to kill him."

Ben stared, unable to think.

Albert continued, “But the tailor's working on a new suit, so you'll be fine. You're different. There are other men here who've given up, good as dead."

"But it's just the beginning of the season."

"Right, they're not dead yet, but they're
as good as dead
—that's the distinction I'm trying to make,” said Albert. “Obviously, they're still as alive as you and I, wandering the house, making sandwiches. But pretty soon, one or two will start to give off the stink of failure."

Ben stepped back, conscious of the smell of his dank underclothes, the faint chemical smell of his cheaply dyed suit. Albert went on in a conspiratorial whisper, “Yesterday in the park, I saw your roommate, Finton. He was a lying in the grass, barefoot, pants rolled to his knees, shouting at the sky. Poems, I think. Anyway, I gave him a piece of my mind—there's the reputation of the house to consider. And do you know what he said?
For it is better to suffer from the disease of life and die from it than not
. Poetry,” sneered Albert. “That's their answer to everything.” Albert shrugged and returned to the mirror. “
The disease of life.
What can you say to that?"

"Is there really not another room I can stay in?"

"Oh, he won't bother you—don't even worry about that. A part of me wishes they would just get rid of failed bachelors—I mean, really get rid of them. But then, I know, I know, who'll go on to the civil service. Still."

"Albert!” Ben and Albert jumped. Another bachelor joined them in the living room.

"Selfridge!” said Albert. “Selfridge, meet Ben."

Ben and Selfridge shook hands; Selfridge's hands were brutally huge and damp. One of the massive hands went to Selfridge's mouth; he picked absentmindedly at his chapped lips.

"Ben,” he said.

"Selfridge."

"Selfridge is new to the house, too."

"Nice suit, Ben."

Albert clapped Ben on the back, “Leave the poor guy alone—tailor's still working on his suit."

"Huh. And what do you do, Ben?"

"Selfridge does guns,” interrupted Albert.

"Does guns?"

"Guns,” said Selfridge. “I collect them, draw them, fire them—you name it."

"Were you in the war?” asked Ben.

"You challenging me?"

"No, I was just asking—"

"No. Not in army. Understand? I'm more of a
connoisseur
than an enlisted type. And you, Ben. What's your game?"

"Um, I paint—I mean, paintings."

Selfridge seemed to regard him with sudden deep antipathy. The door to the Bachelor House swung open; bachelors were swarming out into the sunny yard. Selfridge turned to go and knocked a marble egg from the mantel to the floor, shattering it. He stepped over the wreckage and pushed his way into the crowded hallway.

"He broke the egg,” said Albert sadly. “It wasn't mine, but still. I kind of liked it."

"It seemed like an accident,” said Ben.

"Maybe."

Ben followed Albert out into the streets. Hundreds of bachelors were strolling in loose formation toward the park. Ben wanted only to go home, to go back to his little room and lie still in the little bed and think, think clearly. His life's work was opening up before him, and he felt nothing for it. It had seemed so effortless in the abstract! Now here he was.

Albert ran ahead to tackle Selfridge, and Selfridge hurled Albert into the hedges lining the street. Ben stooped to offer a hand as Albert struggled to free himself. “These are nasty little branches,” he said, hairline scratches emerging across his face. “You go ahead. I'm good; I just need a minute to normify. I'll see you in the park."

"OK,” said Ben. “But I'll be there later—need to check on my suit first."

When he reached the park gates, Ben drifted away from the other bachelors and headed for the river, soundless and flat, blanketed in a layer of cold, rank air. The water was toxic—rotten, despite its breadth and depth. Ben felt his heart swell with affection for it, for the putrid smell, the mix of algae and trash captured by the black rocks against the shore. How could he love this grim, dirty stretch of the river, its unpleasantly chilly and fetid atmosphere? Perhaps one day he would have the same affection for the peculiar, bad smell of this cheap black suit, grow sentimental at the sight of Bachelor Houses, long for the days of important difficulty . . . strange feelings, but associations that were ever after his, therefore his possessions, something to be prized, no matter how perversely. He had missed the pitch of the city at full power—the rumble trucks, the bird fights, the mood-shattering keen of the ferry horns on the river.

A boy and his father sat at the river's edge. The father took a cigarette from his shirt pocket while the boy searched under the loose river rocks. The boy found a broken oar—left over from the days when rowing leisure craft upon the water was still ordinary sport, before the conversion of the river into a Restricted Zone. It seemed that the farther out they pushed the Enemy, the more powerful they made his local forms. For each acre of the Enemy's Territory they seized, the Enemy seized an acre of the citizen's mind. The boy held the oar like a rifle and fired rounds at the opposite shore; the father watched, trails of smoke streaming from his nostrils.

Ben followed the river into the heart of the park, sunny and in bloom—but
here
was beauty and affection, beauty and affection of the most natural order . . . the beauty of the natural world, the only love that ends neither in envy nor in satisfaction.

Bachelors, fit and ubiquitous in their tailored pale suits, napped in the golden light beneath the broad-leafed trees, or else they read intently (or seemed to), in the green folding chairs of the park. Young people, drowsy in light and linen cloth, suffused with sun, their hearts peaceful and warm as stones in beds of dry, sunny straw, their lungs as spacious as the vibrant tree branches through which the wind pushed and pulled.
There was nothing to fear under the warm wheat sun. . . .
Bachelors salted hard-boiled eggs and bit into them; young women carved the little roasted chickens. Cucumber slices were cool and clean circles on their plates. The wind picked up, threatening a hat, and a perfect hand reached out lazily to pin the brim along the soft trim of cool park grass. The sunlight hit Ben's face and head, drunkening him with the sense of boundless time and energy.

Ben could see the massive metal head of Captain Meeks peering out over the treetops, and he could discern the shadowy forms of the lesser statues scattered throughout the park: the Founders, the minor martyrs and soldiers and settlers, some burnished and gleaming in the cool green light of the trees, others degraded by graffiti lewd and bewildering, some seated on rocks, contemplating the earth, others pushed into the leaves by the height of their pedestals, faces locked in a moment of perpetual discovery and disappointment. There were those on foot and those on horseback; those studying the midair, the mild weight of a sealed former fate upon their smooth brows; those armed with guns and swords; those dragging broken chains; those slumped in grief; those with tiny hands and feet, beseeching, their childlike palms turned up to the heavens, to the tree branches, to the gossipy stir of leaves in spring, the gossipy stir of leaves forever, forever in judgment of them. Would their trials never end? Who were they, anyway? The statues made Ben forget; they induced a special forgetfulness in the shape of the person they should force him to remember.

Ben watched the opening of picnic baskets—the emergence of apples, green and red, salted pistachios bundled in handkerchiefs, dusted planks of bread, plate-sized rounds of cheese excavated clumsily by bachelors under the barely concealed disapproval of the young women in their company. A few bachelors rested their heads in the laps of the young women, who were talking or reading books while distractedly smoothing the hair of the sleeping bachelors, all of whom bore expressions of such profound peace, Ben imagined they would lie unperturbed if ferocious little animals dropped from the trees and commenced gnawing through the soles of their shoes. Ben longed to be among them—soon, he
would
be among them. Perhaps it wouldn't be so complicated after all, and he must remain optimistic.

Ben found a small hill safely removed from a gang of rambunctious bachelors who were laughing and tackling each other and calling out filthily to women as they passed. Mostly ignored, Ben noted, but not entirely. He sat cross-legged in the grass, plucking blades and folding them along their vertical seams and flicking them absentmindedly just beyond his knees. He looked down and took note of his hands: not exactly the hands of a young man. Hands perhaps too frightening to lay upon another.

A serious-looking young woman sat nearby in the grass to eat her lunch. She was alone, he was alone. If only he weren't the prisoner of this cheap, dark suit, the things he might say to her.
For I wore the pale suit and the bees sought out your hair, drawn gently in by the smell of flowers sleeping. . . .
Then the things she might say to him. It was an ideal day for a picnic: the ground was green, the sky was blue, the sun was yellow, the flowers were full and pink.

The young woman glanced up at Ben; he smiled at her and then looked away. He was thinking of what to say. He watched the legs of a spider turn the dark grains of soil between shoots of grass. He was thinking of what to say next. He could hear the sound of birds rustling their wings in the branches of the park trees. Ben stood—she would ask about the black suit, and he could touch stoically on his loss, his grief, an excellent place to start: with the sympathies of a young woman.

"My grieving friend!” a voice boomed out; Ben jumped. “We couldn't help but notice your heartbreaking suit, Brother!” Ben tried to ignore the voice, but it was already too late. He was soon surrounded by Brothers of Mercy, three of them, scrubbed clean, shirtfronts pressed into unbreakable boards of cotton, the childish talcum smell of them.

"This isn't a good time,” said Ben.

"Brother,” sighed one, “I think it is a good time. Grief can't be postponed, put off until it's most convenient. We're only here to help you, to listen to your troubles. Tell us about your pain, Brother, your broken heart."

Ben watched as the young woman wrapped up her lunch hastily and hurried out of the park, back into the city.

"Brother, we can help you. What have you lost? A mother? A father? You're all alone in this world, aren't you?"

Ben shoved past them and walked toward a general milling in the heart of the park, and as if he had plunged back into a corridor of oxygen, he was calmed by the crowds now parting on either side of him. Married men in bright ties and light sweaters, policemen in uniform, laborers in their grays smocks . . . bachelors, bachelors, bachelors. He stopped. Where were the other men in black suits? Did no one else in this city have to mourn? He stepped off the path and settled again, a few feet back, in the grass. I am grieving too hard and too deeply, he thought.

Meeks

I woke up beside the statue of the Captain, the gun requisition forms folded neatly in my pocket, a bag of apples by my head. I had been dreaming about the man in the black jacket. I had last seen him at the hospital, on a night long, long ago, or so it seems, though the human mind is surely the weakest instrument available in the study of the passage of time. We were at the hospital. The lights were out throughout the city for a Vigilance Drill. The attending Brothers of Mercy carried their blue-hued medical lights through the ward. I had climbed into bed with my mother, and I cradled her head against my chest. Her arm was draped over my knees, her hand dangled over the edge of my leg. I could feel the damp heat of her skin and thought: I won't feel this much longer, and then . . . I will
never feel it again.
The air was still, my grief imprisoned somewhere in my brain. I waited rationally, coolly, for Mother to tell me where to find my inheritance. I pictured a locked metal box, ice-cold in the soft, blind earth of the park.

The man in the black jacket watched us. A devoted son soothes his ailing mother, while a person of some eminence or intimacy looks on—this scene repeated itself up and down the ward. The apparent normalcy of our quaint tableau enforced by the presence of the Brothers, the presence, fading, of my mother. I believed her death should mean everything to those who were witnessing it. Brothers glided past us like sharks in the blue light, as if drawing strength from the air without breathing it, turning their ancient resignation in my direction: As for your suffering, it's all been done before. The man in the black jacket leaned back in his chair, his face falling out of the circle of blue light in which Mother and I resided. He was silent, every now and then making marks in a notebook that he held open on his lap.

We stayed like that for hours; the Brothers sometimes paused at the foot of the bed with their blue lamps swinging from rusted metal handles. The man in the black jacket sketching, filling up the pages of his notebook. Mother and I, her dying, me grieving, waiting to grieve. The Brothers walked on, down the row of beds, soaking the crisp, white sheets in the blue light of the medical lanterns. I wondered when and how Mother would communicate the location of my inheritance with all of these people listening and watching. I knew she had provided for me, but I didn't know how to proceed toward these provisions without her there as my guide.