Herovit's World, page 14
The buzzer lets out a moist burst of static, much like a yelp. “That’s them,” she says gratefully. “That’s the movers. I warn you, you say one word to them or try and stop me in any way and I’ll do something—well, I’ll do something drastic.” She does not like this anticlimax, he can see. She shakes her head as if at her own failure of rhetoric; he knows the feeling. “I mean it,” she says and leaves the room.
Kirk leans on his elbows, hovers over Natalie, inspects the baby. In the fat little cheeks, the cast of her eyes, he can see some resemblance to Janice and maybe to himself, but it is nothing spectacular. He would like to be moved but cannot. Fathers were supposed to have strange, complex feelings when they looked at their infant children—weren’t they?—but he has never had them.
Staring at the child, who lies blank under his gaze, Kirk can now see Herovit’s problem, feel a tug of that depression which undercut his predecessor. The child, at least seen in this way, is so utterly without charm. She is so corporeal, so self-assured in her helplessness. “Aren’t you?” he asks. “Isn’t that right?” Natalie gives one gurgle, fixes her eyes (slightly crossed) back on him, and then begins to scream.
Well, he cannot stand it. He backs away quickly, the child’s sounds fading. It is not fair to feel this or to think it, but having looked at the baby in this way, Kirk can even sense a tug of loathing. Unfair, of course. The child hardly asked to be brought into this world.
But neither did Herovit or his wife. Kirk had, but that was of a different order. Most people did not want to be born into this world, and on that basis then, he can hardly excuse the child from culpability. She is responsible for her existence, as responsible as any. She must pay the penalty.
“What penalty?” he asks the baby. “Well, I’ll think about it and let you know. Anyway, I want you to realize that I’m not blaming myself for this, and you can’t. I am not responsible. I was not the agent of your birth—except biologically speaking, and even that could be argued.” Natalie screams again, carefully. It all seems a little beyond her comprehension, as well it might be, although she kicks her little legs willingly enough and fixates her gaze upon him.
“Oh, just forget it,” Kirk says. “Forget the whole thing. I’m sorry I brought it up.” He could take custody of the child—certainly he could, who would stop him?—but no, it wouldn’t work out. Herovit might be able to do it, being so conditioned by defeat as to take on this kind of life, but it is hardly for Kirk. Kirk is active; he is functioning; he could hardly get things in order if he had the constant obligation of baby care.
Then again, this might have been Janice’s problem too, but he will not think of this. Give her no sentiment or understanding; what has she given him? Nothing, not even the chance to explain, and if she will detach herself from him he must do the same to her. “I said forget it, damn it!” he shouts. The child laughs at him. He risks a tentative gesture and finds, as he should have suspected, that Natalie has wet her diaper.
The hell with it. It is Janice’s life, Janice’s problem, Janice’s baby—let her take care of the situation. One way or the other she always has, hasn’t she? “I’ve had enough of this,” Kirk mumbles. “Mack Miller wouldn’t have to put up with this shit.” But Mack was not only a virgin, but childless.
Janice enters, followed by three marginally depressed young men with mustaches. They look like poets or guitar players, but then that is the style nowadays; the cabdriver had looked like an aesthete himself. “Take those,” she says, gesturing at the suitcases. “Take everything in the room that doesn’t move except him, and I’ll take this,” and she picks up the baby, making a sour expression as she notes the wetness.
“Leaving your husband, lady?” one of them asks.
“Something like that.”
“Very common these days. Most of our rush cases turn out to be something like that. Don’t worry; it’ll probably be the best move you ever made. A far, far better thing and so on.”
“Don’t be too sure of anything,” Kirk says. “Just don’t step in and start to analyze situations, huh?” He is at a disadvantage and disconcerted, to be sure, but he will not give them the satisfaction of leaving the room. He will not. He will hold his ground. This is his apartment.
“Don’t get nasty,” another mover says. They not only look but talk the same: high, uninflected voices suitable, Kirk supposes, for folk ballads. “It’s probably your best move too, for sure. Any time you come to the point of a split, you got to go ahead and make it. I’ve been through this myself.” He hoists a suitcase, lifts another, struggles from the room.
“I don’t want the furniture,” Janice calls to him. “That’s staying.”
“The others are the furniture men; you talk to them.”
“All right,” another mover says, “you talked to us already. Just suitcases, okay.” He takes a pair, the other does as well, and they leave grunting. Natalie squeals, Janice hikes her up.
“You know,” he says, “you’re really being impulsive about this. If you’d only give me a chance to discuss—”
“No. Never again. I wouldn’t ask you for your name.”
“Let me tell you my name,” Kirk says earnestly. “That could be a start, because you see everything has kind of turned around recently—”
“Don’t you understand? I don’t ever want to speak to you again once I leave this apartment. If I ever do speak with you or even hear your name mentioned I know that I’ll be traveling in the wrong circles and I’ll bail out. Who would know your name? The only people who would know your name would be the kind I look forward to spending the rest of my life away from. And that’s definite,” Janice says. “That is very definite.” Nevertheless, she does not leave the room. There is an expectant look on her face. Obviously she wants to be cued for a more effective exit line.
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, I am sure. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”
“Then go,” Kirk says. The hell with it. The scene is becoming circular.
“I am,” Janice says, somewhat disappointed. He can tell. “I very definitely am.” She leaves the room then, dangling the child from the crook of an elbow. Natalie seems to be making a tentative bye-bye, but Kirk would not like to be unduly sentimental. Not anymore.
The movers reappear as Janice leaves, whispering to one another about the latest opening in the Yale Series for Younger Poets contest, and get the remainder of the suitcases, waving at him. Simple, so simple: two loads of suitcases for three movers and she is out of the apartment. How little there must have been to the marriage if five minutes of work will take out everything she feels she needs from it. Still, it is not really his fault.
He follows them awkwardly to the door, peeping into the dining area where they are now loading all of the cases on a large, rubberized dolly. A pedantic urge overcomes Kirk. “This really wasn’t necessary, you know,” he says, feeling somewhat like a television commentator. “If you only knew the real factors here you’d see—”
“It’s for the best,” a mover says. “You get into this line of work, you find one of these situations a week, and it shouldn’t bother you. Just statistics, you know? Don’t feel you have to apologize or justify; there’s nothing to explicitly rationalize, and besides, the quicker we can work the quicker we’ll have the lady out and start you on the way to feeling better.”
“She doesn’t even know why she’s leaving! If she’d only admit—”
“They never know. But they think they know, which is just as good as the real thing—at least that’s my theory. Am I right?” The other movers say that this is probably right, although one of them has qualifications.
“They’re deeper than we are,” he says, putting up the last suitcase, “and I don’t think that you can really analyze these situations.” The dolly is trundled to the door and then, with a few maneuvers, out of it. Kirk follows them into the hall. Damn it, he deserves to get his point across.
“I have rights,” he says, “which are being violated here. If only someone would let me explain—”
“Why?” one of them says. Pity that they are indistinguishable; if Kirk were writing a novel he would have a hell of a time dealing with a set of identical characters. You have to do something to individuate—otherwise the scenes drag, become muddled and jumbled—but what can he do here? A stutter, a limp, some hint of effeminacy whisked into place to define the movers would certainly be necessary, but life (Kirk agrees, standing and looking at this) does not duplicate art and is not even on speaking terms with it, and the movers, sad to say, interchange. “What does it matter what we think of you?” the mover says. “All we are is like minor characters in the five-act play of your life. We walk on and then return backstage, we got almost no lines or involvement, and besides, we’ll never be back again. If this were a play we wouldn’t even be there for the curtain calls. What do you think we are?”
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter. Man, you have got the wrong attitude about this thing if you think that we have anything to do with you at all. No one has anything to do with you; this is your life and you’d better have a look at your priorities.”
The elevator door swings open with a thick wheeze. “See what I mean?” the mover says somewhat obscurely, looking inside. “This whole thing is metaphysical. It isn’t on the reality plane of things at all.”
They push the dolly into the elevator. Unfortunately, there is no functioning service elevator in Kirk’s building, and a fat woman, trapped now in the back by the dolly which rolls ominously right up to her stomach, gives Kirk a look of rage. He thinks he might recognize her as a dog-feces protester from a recent tenants’ meeting, but then again he may have never seen her before. Most fat women look alike, and after all, relationships in this city of alienation are so fragmentary that there is no contact. “You bastard,” she mutters to Kirk. He can hear this distinctly.
He shrugs. “Not my fault,” he says. “It was my wife’s. Talk to her.”
This seems to make little impression upon the passenger. Her mouth works subtly; she seems to be mouthing out curses.
“See what I mean?” the metaphysical mover says with a wink. “That’s another part of it. It’s just a situation that can’t be resolved by, like, the more conventional means. Isn’t that right, lady?”
“Drop dead,” the woman says, and the mover makes some remark about J. D. Salinger as the door whisks closed. The elevator falls. With some timing it might at last decide to give leave to its supports and fall to the basement, but then again it probably will not; this is fated only when Kirk is in it. Even if it did collapse, though, this could hardly be construed as luck. The passenger would sue for enormous damages on the basis that it was Kirk’s movers and the weight of his possessions which caused the elevator to lose cabling, and she would probably win the suit. In criminal court. He always had suspected somehow that he would die impaled on a fat woman. For that reason all of his adulteries had been thin.
Now with an overcoat, Janice comes out of the open apartment carrying the baby. It is her dress coat thrown loosely over her shoulders; underneath that she has changed to a white sweater which does as well for her breasts as what she had on before. Small threads of perfume seem to drift from her and a hint of cosmetic delicate on the upper cheekbones. Really, she has not looked so well in years. Flight, collapse, disaster, desertion have made her gay, as all of his blandishments have not. She presses the call button and stands at peace, silent, waiting. Natalie reaches over her shoulder and caresses his cheek.
Well, at least the baby cares. Doesn’t she? Too young to have been taught hatred, she can reach trustingly for Kirk. Then he feels the little nails digging in and wonders. “Cut it out, goddamn you,” he says, backing away. The baby smiles. So much for sentiment.
“You might as well talk to me,” he says to Janice after a time. “This is ridiculous, walking out on a man without even giving him a chance to explain. I’ve tried to tell you—”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she says, “your telling me.” The elevator comes back, the door opens; the car is now empty. “Your telling me things,” she says. “Do you know something, Jonathan?” she says, entering gracefully and pivoting to look at him for her last shot. “You are a very dangerous man. You could be a killer.” She waits for the elevator door to close but cunningly he has put his finger on the button, a secret trick known only to certain tenants as a way of tying up service. “You could be a killer,” Janice says more doubtfully and then sees what he is doing. “Let that go,” she says. “Now, damn you, just let it go.”
“Explain what you mean,” Kirk says. “Come on, finish it. What are you saying?”
“Let it go!” Furious, Janice has lost her timing. Like old Mackenzie she is not at her best under pressure. “I’m through with you. I’ve said all I’m going to say. Now you let that door go or—”
“Or what?”
“Please. Please let it go.” Yes, indeed, how quickly she can be reduced.
“You’re starting to plead now. You go very quickly from accusation to beggary, don’t you? Have you thought about this problem?” Kirk feels the meanness percolating within, small bubbles of revulsion as invigorating as anything today, even the sex. His cells liquefy in those bubbles, begin to flow. “Have you?”
“Let it go or I’ll take the stairs.”
“No, you won’t,” he says, extending his free arm to demonstrate that she is trapped. “That’s a bad idea entirely.”
“Then I’ll throw the baby at you,” she says, her face losing its fine lines and becoming blurred, amorphous, more like the Janice he has known. “I swear to God I will.” She holds up Natalie; the child looks at him impassively. “Then I’ll tell the police that it was all your fault. I don’t care. I don’t care what happens, I’ve got to get away from you so badly.” She cries. “I don’t care for you anymore. Can’t you see that? How long must this go on? Won’t you let me alone?”
“All right,” Kirk says, “I hear you now.” He steps back a pace and slowly lets go of the button. Like feeding the first page of a novel into the typewriter: the same trepidation, the same loss. The door slides closed. In the emergent dark porthole he can see his wife’s face, tiny, trapped in cameo as the elevator collapses downward. An archaic look to her—she might be hanged and dead. He looks at the cameo for an instant; then it falls from him as if held to the wall by cheap, frail glue.
The elevator makes its sounds as it works its way down. He presses his shoulder blades into the plaster of the wall opposite, listening. Disconnection oozes through him; Kirk wonders what he is doing here. He should not have come, should have left it to Herovit then; it is his wife, his problem. Ironic that Janice left him before giving him a chance to talk (but would his explanation have helped at all—she would merely have thought him insane), and inevitable.
Not easy. None of this is easy. How could he have thought it would be? Herovit had had almost twenty years to louse it up; how could Kirk come in and pick up the pieces?
“No way,” he says. “No way. The hell with it.” He walks through the open door of the empty apartment and closes it. If he was looking at this sensibly, Janice’s departure should fill him with relief, but he can take no comfort. Silly bitch. Damned silly bitch. Sadness, sadness. Everything, then, was too late.
He locks the door, wanders into Herovit’s office and goes to the scotch cache in the medicine cabinet above the basin. Conveniences of working in a maid’s room—one could be self-sufficient. He takes out a fresh half-pint and examines it.
Well, this is against his policy, of course. It runs counter to everything he had planned to do. But what can he do now? There are excuses. Besides, what could a couple of belts this late in the day do to him? Herovit has conditioned the corpus to a high tolerance level for alcohol, the one useful bequest given him. Kirk lifts the bottle decisively and finishes off the half-pint as if he were drinking a can of beer.
Radiation, flushing, heat, palpitation as he flings the bottle into the wastebasket, but he has held it. All of the scotch is inside; Herovit’s constitution is strong. “It isn’t my fault,” Kirk says to the typewriter, “and I’m not saying this because I’m drunk; the liquor hasn’t even had a chance to hit me yet. No, that’s the truth of the matter—I cannot be blamed for this one. I came into sequence too late, and writing is no damned preparation for life anyway. Let me tell you. What the hell could have been expected?”
The typewriter, a middle-aged IBM on which forty-three of the Survey novels have been typed, does not answer. It would not be equipped by its history to deal with questions this abstract. “Fuck yourself,” Kirk says mindlessly and wanders off to the living room. He has the vague idea that he will now strip off his coat and in shirtsleeves and ragged pants go striding manfully through all of Manhattan, showing the bastards on the pavements and in the streets that they cannot beat Kirk Poland—no sir, no one, nothing can beat Kirk Poland—but midway toward the door the idea arrests itself like a benign disease. He falls in place.
“This is ridiculous,” he says and orders himself to at least get back to the couch if he is going to act like a damned fool (that traitor Herovit had no capacity after all; why had he not remembered that?) but the order gets sidetracked and he rolls in place, babbling, frantic. He cannot move. He has been overcome. Was the scotch poisoned? So what if it was; what could he do now? Too much trouble. Everything is too much trouble. He allows the scotch to overtake him like a straitjacket. Kirk sleeps.
20
Dreaming again. How many times has he dreamed, and how has the quality of this shifted? Kirk does not know. Now he dreams that he has indeed come to the science-fiction conference at Lancastrian University, and after a day of brief interviews with local press and disjointed outpourings to enormous audiences filled with people whose language he does not know, he is now in a motel room, making violent love to a co-ed whom he must have picked up somewhere between the cocktail party and this moment.
