Time Travail (13 page)

“My husband took those pictures. He was a
photographer. He’s a monk now.”

“A monk. Oh yes.”

“Well, a sort of monk. Not a Catholic or a
Buddhist monk. He’s a Second-Degree Illuminated in The Golden
Galaxy.”

With her hand on the doorknob she waited for
me to pick that up. When I didn’t, she resumed the tour.

She stopped before another door and hesitated
as she hadn’t before the others. It was covered with a life-size
cutout of Uncle Sam with frosty blue eyes and an imperious
forefinger and a hand-printed legend which made him warn: Keep out!
This means YOU!! She pushed the door open timidly.

In a different mode the room was as
conventional as the others I’d just visited. There were the
universal posters of thuggish rock-stars, Marilyn Monroe goosed by
the updraft and she and her skirt joyous about it, James Dean with
his arms draped crucified on his rifle, Albert Einstein, the old
teddy-bear demagogue, sticking his tongue out. A guitar on the
wall. Drums in the corner. Her gauzy blue handkerchief removed
invisible dust. She was like a museum curator, dusting but not
touching.

Suddenly she asked me, “Have you finished
reading his poems yet?”

I’d completely forgotten that blue box. The
five-pound hammer had driven it out of my mind.

“His poems? Naturally I’ve read his
poems.”

The forcefulness needed to make it sound like
the truth she probably took for enthusiasm. Radiant, she asked me
to tell her all about it in just a minute.

She closed the door softly on the memorial.
Automatically I turned left for the last of the rooms at the end of
the corridor. It was probably to stave off the moment of untruth.
“No, that’s just an old guest-room,” she said. We turned our backs
on that one unopened door and went down the stairs.

She steered me into a shining plastic dinette
where she’d set the table with bamboo place mats. Few TV repairmen
had ever been greeted like that. In cut-glass dishes there were
Ritz crackers, peanuts, cheese-cubes and anchovy-stuffed olives
impaled with toothpicks. There was a bottle of port and an unopened
bottle of single-malt. She said she couldn’t remember the brand I
drank and hoped I liked this one. She looked at me anxiously as I
sipped it. I smacked my lips and raised my eyebrows appreciatively.
It tasted like a cross between cough-medicine and a peat bog.

We talked for a while about brands of whisky
and port and then about the cold spell and flu. Finally she leaned
forward a little and said:

“So what did you think of them?”

I said that I found some of the poems quite
remarkable.

She interrupted me with her face shining
and said, yes, they were, weren’t they? particularly the one
entitled
Spring Morning in the BMT
. Didn’t I think that was the best one?

Things were taking a dangerous turn so I said that I
hadn’t had time to read very many of the poems what with Harvey’s
health problems and that in any case I didn’t read poems that way,
like the morning newspaper. I liked to savor them, I said. I would
prefer to read them all before discussing a particular poem.

“Savor them. Oh what a day today. Nothing but
good things. You’re so nice to say that.” Her voice broke a little
on the word “nice”.

“Other good things?” I asked, to get her to
talk about something else.

“
They’re taking me on full time at
Dave and
Tom’s
. They’re the
florists I work for. It’s a great honor. I’m the only woman there.
Full of gorgeous men.”

She giggled a second then breathed:

“You savored his poetry. I can’t tell you
what it means to me to hear you say that. I mean I’m his mother and
all, so of course I’m prejudiced in his favor, but an expert like
you … Gee, I wish I could have attended one of your literature
classes. Just sit in, I mean, I’m not bright enough to be a real
student.”

I saw my nine o’clock classroom, Mondays and
Fridays, a certain lovely attentive face. I surprised myself by
saying: “I wish I could sit in on one of my classes myself.” I
thought it was safely obscure to someone who’d just defined herself
as not bright but she said immediately:

“You miss those classes, don’t you?”

“
Oh m
i
ss …”
I accompanied the disclaimer with slightly fending hands and a
tolerant smile at that idea, her idea. She blinked as though aware
she’d gone too far. Then her face became radiant again as she
returned to the big thing.

“You actually savored Ricky’s poetry …”

Her chin trembled. I was afraid she was going
to weep with joy and then of course with despair. That would have
been terrible. I wondered how I could change the subject but she
changed it herself by leaning down to pick up a pink paper-napkin
that had fluttered to the floor. Maybe it was to hide her face.

As she straightened up one of the fine
chains around her neck caught on the edge of the table and
broke.
“Damn! Excuse me.”
I picked the pendant up for her.
It was a silver five-pointed star soldered to a
crescent-moon.

She said that it was an Indian good-luck
charm. She didn’t really believe in it. She hadn’t had all that
much luck until today. Maybe you had to be Indian. Maybe it was a
sign, the fact that she broke the chain just when good news came.
“I won’t wear it anymore. I have enough things around my neck.” She
had a pretty neck for a woman of that degree of attrition.

She caught a quick breath and advanced her
chest a fraction of an inch like a jeweler’s tray with objects for
appraisal. Between her small breasts there was a gold crucifix and
a zodiac sign and a massive blob of gilt plastic incrusted with
bits of colored glass. It was out of place, cheap-looking, like the
things you used to get from Omar the Mystic – a kid’s serial Harvey
could have pulled in from the thirties that night – by sending in
ten box-tops of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes plus twenty-nine cents. She
touched it.

“My husband. Pretty, isn’t it?”

“Lovely.”

“A little expensive, though.”

“Lovely gift,” I persisted.

“Oh it’s not a gift. I bought it from him.
Two hundred dollars.”

It was another invitation to explore a weird
relationship. I didn’t take it up. I went on quickly to the other
objects. The crucifix wasn’t much of a conversation piece so I
peered at the zodiac sign and said: “Ah, a zodiac sign.”
“Sagittarius,” she said and asked me when I was born. “The month
and day I mean, of course,” she added quickly. Had my face reacted
to that question? I told her the month and day. “I wouldn’t have
thought Capricorn,” she said, pouring more port in her glass, all
the way up.

She didn’t drink in the lady-like way I’d
imagined. Port was a sippy lady’s drink but she gulped it down like
a man. She’d already put a dent in the bottle. So had I in mine. We
had something in common after all.

By now she’d lost her shyness. She got up and
put the broken chain on top of the spotless refrigerator. She
returned to the table, a trifle unsteadily maybe, and said: “What
were we talking about?”

“Your good luck.”

She looked confused a second as though she
had trouble associating Beth Anderson with good luck. It may have
been the port.

“Your full-time job,” I prompted.

“Yes, that. Also you savored his poetry. Also
he’s with a nice girl now. A nice girl can make all the difference.
Maybe this time it’ll work. It’s not easy. You wouldn’t know. You
saw once but you don’t know.”

I didn’t correct her. I felt it coming on and
wished she wouldn’t. There must be something in my face that brings
out life-stories. I never do it myself. I always attribute to
others my own carefully masked indifference. Or is it squeamishness
at the exposure of sores and stumps? Or maybe fear of expected
reciprocity?

“And having to cope all by myself after Jack
left. Jack was my husband. He still is.” She unconsciously moved
her left hand forward a little as though to provide the
corroboration of the diamond ring. “Just at about the time Ricky’s
problem started Jack discovered the Golden Galaxy and became a
Second-Degree Illuminated. Like I said before, a Second-Degree
Illuminated’s a kind of monk. They shave their heads and have this
thing about women, what do you call it?”

“Celibacy?”

“That’s it. So he couldn’t go on living here.
He said I was too much of a something temptation. A carnal
temptation. That was nice in a way but I had to cope all by myself.
That was two years and three months ago. I don’t know where he is.
He sends me lots of literature on the Golden Galaxy. It’s almost
like getting letters from him. I took it awfully badly at first.
Sometimes I still do. I try to understand. Like he says, it’s
spiritual development and all that but sometimes I think it was
cowardly to run off like that. What do you think?”

She took me for a universal repairman. I
hadn’t contracted for personal as well as for TV problems. Only
partly to console her, I said that we men tended to cowardice. That
was as close as I would come to confession myself. Women were far
stronger, I said. Look how women lived ten years longer. It was a
reward, maybe.

“Maybe punishment,” she said and then
apologized. It was very impolite and a bore to think out loud like
that to someone, the same old thoughts. They went round and round
like a merry-go-round only not merry.

She brightened determinedly. “Have another
drink with me, Professor Weiz… Oh there I go again with
‘Professor.’ We never seem to get off the ground, you and me, just
a few inches and then bang, down again.”

Did I scowl at that? After what had happened
a month before in her tulip-bed I found the bang-on-the-ground
metaphor tasteless.

“Like, for a while I called you Jerry and you
called me Beth and bang I went back to Professor and you went back
to calling me … nothing, actually. Even if you get angry at me,
keep on calling me Beth, huh? Can I say something a little
personal, Jerry? I really admire you for sticking it out with Mr
Morgenstern with the roaches and the noise and that awful, awful
woman and all. You’re a good person. I admire people who are true
to friends through thick and thin. It’s rare, you can believe me.
Hey, I forgot all about the TV. Wait till you see this. Take your
glass.”

She took hers. We went into the living room.
“Look,” she said, switching on the TV.

The image was perfect.

“Wait,” she said. “I’ve got the wrong
channel. That’s what surprised me last night. Usually when I get
interference it’s like a kind of herringbone pattern, blue and red
and on all of the channels. Last night it was just on one channel,
black and white and gosh it was … Wait, you’ll see.”

She selected the right channel and we
waited.

Waited and waited while actresses simpered,
actors viriled. I was spending my days as well as nights waiting
for things that didn’t materialize on TV screens. A quarter of an
hour went by. I began casting quick glances at my watch. She
wondered what was wrong with what was wrong.

Now the scene shifted from a passionate
embrace in a swimming pool to a room in a maternity hospital. The
woman in the bed, passionately embraced seconds before, had just
given birth. She looked as if she’d stepped out of a beauty parlor.
She handed the impossibly mature baby to the good gray middle-aged
husband who lacked only visible horns. Now you take him, Larry, she
said with a knowing look to a brilliantly handsome young man with
an elaborate coiffure.

Just as the baby was being passed to the
third summit of the triangle a tiny figure emerged from the lower
left-hand corner of the screen and started walking jerkily over the
baby’s head. It was distorted, flickering and gray, a woman.

I remembered where I was sitting, over what
burned-out foundations and looked away, at an aquarelle of a
bouquet hanging above the TV. The ghost progressed, in persistence
of vision, over poppies and daisies now. Beth Anderson uttered a
little cry of triumph and turned to me and said that I looked as
scared as she’d been the first time she saw it, not that, but
something like that. Spooky, wasn’t it?

Now I recalled that the machine was in the
cellar of the other house, pulling things out of that other living
room, the harmless one. I forced myself to look back at the
screen.

Harvey’s mother, dead fifteen years, was
heading for the woman in the bed who took the baby back with a
little smile and another knowing look.

I justified my whiteness (I felt white) by
the surprise. I couldn’t look any more. She hadn’t been like that.
It was as if she’d been recalled not integral from the past but
from the grave and what time had done to her there. Leave her the
way she’d been stored in my brain, forgotten but available and now
summoned up: faded, that’s true, but life-size and human, not
reduced to a thing jerking across a screen. Leave her in peace. I
wanted to get out of Beth Anderson’s house. Out of the other one
too.

I said I’d talk to Harvey about the
interference. Maybe he had ideas.

On the threshold of Harvey’s living room I
heard a faint whirring and saw the lens of one of the sensors
tracking. The others must have been tracking too, a crossfire. I
stepped back. Instead of going down to the cellar I took the
phone-directories up to my room.

I did figuring. Not counting the money Harvey
owed me in that mysterious account (I didn’t even know how much it
amounted to), I had about $5,000. I wouldn’t get very far with
that. I opened the yellow pages to “Employment Agencies” and found
the three agencies that specialized in teaching positions. I
sneaked down to the corridor where the phone was.