“This has to be the ultimate in pleasure,” she says, “the ultimate. Forget all else.” And she gazes down at her baby boy, whose head below the curve of her breast is like a small moon rising behind the planet Milk.
THE FIRST NIGHT Ellie was gone Walter had thought he might not manage. He had spent two days in a hotel so as not to be around while Ellie packed. It was her suggestion, he had offered to help. But she had been right—it was hard for her to hide her excitement. When he got home he was tired, and part of him hoped against hope that he would open the door and find Ellie in the kitchen, pots of things simmering on the stove. “I changed my mind,” he hoped to hear her say. “I must have been crazy.” But instead he came into a quiet apartment. When he looked around at first everything seemed the same. She hadn’t taken anything off the tables. A few books were missing and one rose-colored chair from the window. He went into the bathroom. Her toothbrush was gone and her shampoo. She’d left behind her dusty box of cotton balls. In the bedroom her bureau was bare and her closet empty. He had sat down on the edge of the bed and put his head in his hands. But then he had pulled himself together and poured himself a scotch. Looking for ice he saw she had bought him milk and orange juice and a new box of cereal. He sat at the table with his drink and looked around. It seemed impossible that he would have to live like this. Time was thickening all around him. He couldn’t imagine getting through a single night this way, let alone the rest of his life. He dialed the number she had left pinned to his pillow but hung up after the first ring.
“Did you just call?” Ellie rang him back two seconds later.
“I didn’t mean to,” said Walter.
“I knew it was you. Go to sleep. Try and get some sleep.” And she had hung up.
He hadn’t slept that night, at least not that he’d noticed, but he had gotten up early and looked out the windows the next morning and the Mexicans had been on the roof of the hotel, singing. It was the first time he’d seen them and Walter had nearly wept with gratitude. “Look at that,” he’d whispered. “They’re making music.”
Some weeks later he had pointed them out to Julie. “They’re drinking, Dad,” she’d said, looking briefly out the window. “In half an hour they’ll be throwing each other off the roof.”
AT NOON WALTER is on a bench on the median at Eightieth and Broadway. He has a bunch of daisies from Hector’s (Walter never fails to bring flowers to his mother), a warm bagel in a paper bag on his lap, and a cup of coffee. Walter takes a bite of bagel, a swallow of sugary coffee. “You’re a stick-in-the mud,” Ellie had said to him, not always with humor in her voice. The fact is, Ellie wanted a change. He understands that now. Perhaps his rut had gone so deep he could no longer see over the sides.
At twelve-thirty Walter is opening the door to his mother’s apartment, calling out as he enters, “Hello, Mom, Mrs. Tristen,” and he walks into the living room, where his mother is already sitting in her wheelchair. (He could walk here in the dark too.) Walter’s mother is dressed in a black blouse and a pair of black silk trousers. Her hands rest gracefully on her knees and on her head she wears an old-fashioned straw hat, a boater, he thinks she used to call it. Mrs. Tristen gets up from the green chair that had once upon a time belonged to Walter’s father. “Mother is having a quiet day,” she says, taking the flowers from him. There are more and more days when the old lady refuses to speak. It is as if a wire has gone down. He pictures such a wire, and the birds on it, and the birds taking flight somewhere inside her head as the wire goes down.
Walter thinks he could spend whole days without speaking too.
“Hello, Mom,” he says anyway, reflex action, “hello, Mom,” and he bends down and takes one of her hands, warm and papery in his. She turns her face away but covers his hand with her other one. “I think we will go out for an ice cream this afternoon,” he says. “I think we have time before it rains, don’t you, Mrs. Tristen?” He looks around the living room, the chintz chairs, the rose-colored rug, the filmy white curtains. He knows this room so well, the lamps, the small delicate tables with legs like fawns. Nothing has changed in fifty years. His father’s seersucker bathrobe still hangs on the back of the bathroom door.
“Mother,” he says, “we will go for our walk now. Are you quite ready?”
As he pushes the wheelchair toward Broadway the sun shines. Walter is wearing a short-sleeved shirt. His mother would have criticized this a few years ago. “A gentleman does not wear short sleeves on the street,” she would say, frowning, or, “A gentleman never wears brown.” He looks down at the top of his mother’s straw hat. Something about the way she sits so properly in the wheelchair moves him terribly and his eyes and nose prick with tears. He stops at the corner of Columbus and Eighty-sixth and reaches down to pat her shoulder. “It’s a beautiful day, Mother. We’re out on a beautiful day.”
Walter stops at the Häagen-Dazs ice cream store and buys his mother a single scoop of vanilla in a cup. He sits himself down on the bench outside, drawing his mother’s wheelchair up close so that their knees are nearly touching. Slowly she eats. He holds her paper cup and places the napkin in her right hand. She opens her mouth and Walter carefully, delicately deposits a spoonful inside, and then she closes her mouth. She doesn’t move her jaws. She doesn’t change her expression. A full minute goes by and then she opens her mouth again. There is a serenity about her these days, and her face is beautiful, softer. As a mother she was rather remote, she was solemn and upright, she had dignity and taste, she read history and played the piano. She never liked Ellie, not from the very first. “She won’t do for you, Walter,” his mother had said. “She is not one of us and she won’t have your best interests in mind. Mark my words.” Walter wonders if his mother had been right after all, right, but for all the wrong reasons. “I love her,” he had said, “and she loves me.” They had been sitting at the breakfast table, his mother buttering toast. “Piffle,” his mother had replied. “Love is a detail, Walter. There’s a lot of life to get through and love is only part of it. A detail. A scrap of ribbon.”
Walter leans forward. He has been gazing into space, the ice cream melting on the silver spoon he always brings along, carefully wrapping it in a napkin for the trip home in his pocket. Mother always despised the taste of plastic. It will be her birthday soon. “My mother sails into her ninety-sixth year,” he thinks, “a sleeping ship.” Her skin is whiter than flour, her eyes enormous, milky now, and he is not certain what she is seeing when she looks at him. But today she suddenly says in her old cracked teacup of a voice, “I love you,” with such a fervor that it brings tears to Walter’s eyes. “I love you too, Mother,” he says, and pats her hand where it rests on the arm of the chair and she seizes his with the uncanny strength she sometimes still displays, pressing his hand to her cheek. “I love you,” she says again.
“I love you too,” he repeats, eyes brimming. Grateful to whatever it is that allowed him to love her at long last.
• • •
HE: Forgive me if I continue to bother you with questions. I’d like to get back to needs and purposes. What possible needs could you have, what possible purposes?
IT: Let me tell you about needs first. Since we have no material ones and no religious beliefs, our needs are all self-created and might be called in your terms intellectual and emotional. The main thing, the thing that provides most of our drive, is curiosity. Although we know everything in general, the world is much too complex to be known in any sort of detail. It’s of such unimaginable richness that it would take an infinite Being to know it all. So we are always being surprised, often very surprised, at what we find in our explorations and in each other. We want to be surprised, and need to be. Further than that— and doubtless due to our animal origins— we are social Beings and need to be with other Entities. Without each other it would be an intolerably dull universe.
WALTER LOOKS AT his watch. Ellie expects him at five. He decides it wouldn’t hurt to shave again. He puts on his pale blue shirt (a bi
rthday present from Julie last year, worn once) and the bow tie (a birthday present from Ellie four years ago, worn never). When he goes into the subway the fact that the train has just pulled in he takes as a good omen.
Ellie’s small apartment is a third-floor walk-up. He rings the downstairs buzzer now, and when she buzzes him in he climbs the wooden staircase, which smells musty and makes him feel young again. He is ready for anything, he thinks. He is ready to receive his wife back into his life, with bells on. That is what he has planned to say. “Would you like me to come home?” he has imagined Ellie asking. “With bells on,” he has declared in his mind.
Ellie answers the door with a distracted air, her hair in disarray. She is wearing an old sweater over a pair of jeans. Her feet are bare. He bends to kiss her but she avoids his mouth. “I’m smoking again,” she explains. “You won’t approve.” He feels instantly uncomfortable in his bow tie.
“Come in, come in,” she says. “Don’t mind the mess.”
“What’s happening down here?” he asks. There are boxes everywhere, stacked against the wall. The bookcases are empty. He looks at her. “Ellie?”
“Walter. Oh Walter,” says Ellie, and she sinks down onto the blue couch. “Christ. I don’t know how to tell you.”
“Is everything all right?” he asks, sitting next to her. “Are you ill? Is Julie all right? What’s wrong? Ellie, tell me!” He is suddenly terrified. His heart is beating quickly and he feels light-headed. Something in her face is frightening him.
Her voice is unfamiliar because it is shaky. “Walter. I’m moving.”
“That’s not funny. You’re kidding, aren’t you?” He pats her hand, smiling and looking at her, but she shakes her head.
“I knew this would be hard. Walter, I’m moving to Brooklyn. I may be getting married again.”
“You’re what?”
“Oh, Walt.” And Ellie begins to cry. Shaken,Walter reaches for the handkerchief in his pocket and hands it to his former wife, his old friend.
“Ellie. This is such a surprise. Are you certain? Just the other night I thought—”
“I know, I know. I wanted to tell you then but I couldn’t.” Her face is blotchy and her eyes turn red at the rims and her mouth quivers. “I just couldn’t.” He doesn’t know what to say so he hugs her and she trembles in his arms. “I never meant this,” she says. “I didn’t plan this to happen.”
“But are you quite sure? I mean, Ellie, have you thought this through? Who is it? I thought you wanted to be alone,” he says.
“So did I.”
The surface of Walter, his skin, seems to be registering the exact temperature of the air, which is warm, but underneath he has turned cold.
“He’s nice,” Ellie is snuffling and saying. “He likes your book.”
“I’m gratified to hear it,” says Walter. Really, it is amazing, he turned cold is exactly right. There must be some evolutionary advantage.
“Walter, you’re my oldest friend. Try to be happy for me.”
“And you’re mine, Ellie. Are you really doing this?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I think so.”
“I don’t want you to.” Even now help must be bobsledding to whatever part of Walter most needs it.
“It might be a disaster. It probably will be a disaster,” she says.
“I would like that. I don’t want you to go.” Walter repeats himself, looking at her urgently. “Does Julie know?”
Ellie nods.
“And?”
“She is worried about you.”
“Have you given any thought to our, you know, joining forces again?”
At first Ellie doesn’t speak. “We’re friends, Walt. That’s what we are. We’re friends.”
He picks up his jacket from the back of the chair.
“Where are you going?” she says, getting up.
“I am going to go home now and try to absorb all this news.”
“Walter?” he hears her calling down the stairs after him but he is gone.
WALTER IS STANDING outside the bookstore again. His bow tie is in his pocket. Georgia is still there; her right hand rocks the little chair where Lorenzo sleeps, the other twirls her hair as she reads. There are no customers. He can’t go in, how can he possibly go in? After all, what would he say? Could I hold your child a moment? He wants to remember Ellie with the geraniums behind her again. Where did all that go? Not nowhere, it doesn’t just disappear, does it? If he closes his eyes he can have it all back again, however briefly, the curtains blowing a little, everything still to come.
Inside the store Georgia stretches and looks at her watch. Walter steps away from the window. Another image comes. A row of his black socks, skinny as cigars, hanging over the shower rod. The first time he’d filled the sink with soapy water he’d been astonished by how insubstantial a man’s sock got when it was wet.
Walking home, Walter waits for the light on Broadway and 108th. A fire engine comes screaming by and a middle-aged woman standing next to him jumps. When the truck has passed she shakes her head and says, “Edith. Get ahold of yourself.”
“Walter,” thinks Walter, “get ahold of yourself.” The woman named Edith walks out against the light. She is wearing a black hat with—what? cherries?—on the brim.
WALTER IS SITTING in Julie’s room, a cigarette in one hand. In his life Walter has smoked parts of six cigarettes, and this is his seventh. He coughs horribly. How can anyone do this, he wants to know. On his lap is a shoebox full of snapshots. Julie at four, speaking to the waves on a beach, in her red, white, and blue bathing suit, her hair curly and tousled by wind. A close-up of the bottom of Walter’s left foot, lying on a beach towel, taken probably by his daughter. Ellie hunched over a Thanksgiving turkey, his own mother and father, looking impossibly young, sitting on either side of her, Julie in his mother’s arms. Strange sounds are coming from Walter.
“Dad! What are you doing in here?” Julie is standing in the doorway but he is afraid to look at her because he is so weepy. How did he not hear her come in?
“Catching my breath,” he says, the first thing that comes to mind.
“So she told you, huh. I told her she had to. It wasn’t fair.” Julie comes into the room and sits down on the bed. “It sucks, doesn’t it, Dad.”
“No, not at all, not at all. This is a good thing for your mother. I take my hat off to her, in fact. A new life. How are you taking the news? Are you all right? You know you always have a home here with me.”
“I know that, Dad. I wasn’t worried.”
“I’m absolutely fine, by the way. Really fine.” He smiles and reaches over to pat her knee.
Julie takes a deep breath. “So you’re not going to be lonely? You’re not mad at Mom?” There is such relief on her face. Walter hesitates.
“Did I tell you I have a date?”
“Get out! You do? Why didn’t you tell me? Who is it?”
“A very nice woman in the publishing business. I remind her of Ronald Colman. We’ve become friends in recent weeks. I am taking her out to dinner next week.” As he speaks Walter realizes such a thing is actually possible.
HE: And what about Purpose? Don’t just say that it’s not possible to explain it to me. You are a Superior Being, you know me inside and out, surely you can find a way of conveying at least the possibility of a Purpose.
IT: Well, I’ll try. Perhaps it’s easier to start with what our purposes are not. They certainly don’t include maximizing things like power or pleasure or even “happiness.” We try to go on existing, though none of us in our right minds thinks that there is any intrinsic meaning to our lives. (By the way, there are those of us that are not in our right minds.) The creators of our particular entities were very aware of the problems of purpose, having suffered from it themselves for untold ages. So they did two things: they amplified to an extreme degree the animal striving for survival and they added a new instinct of comparable force. The closest thing in your experience to the ne
w instinct is the sense of beauty. These new sensibilities, extraordinarily diversified and strongly reinforced by the already powerful curiosity of our species, provide a motivation which almost never fails for most of us. Those for whom it does fail do exist, and often they go mad or turn themselves off. These sensibilities enable us to create works of “Art” that are extraordinary even by our own standards. They may be material objects, mathematical ideas, even literature of a kind. And that is the basis for our social life; we trade these things among ourselves, communicate with each other about them, in some way even judge them.
HE: I don’t find that so hard to comprehend, but I’d hoped for a little more satisfying solution.
AT THREE WALTER is up again, eating his cornflakes. He walks around the apartment in the dark, his bowl of cornflakes in one hand, his spoon in the other. Julie is asleep, he has already looked in on her. Under his bare feet he feels the floor go from wood to the worn red rug and back again. The linoleum of the kitchen is smooth and cool. He makes his rounds in the dark, touching things. He stops to take a handkerchief from his bathrobe and blow his nose. Out the kitchen window on the fourth floor across the street the light is on as always. He has checked. A plant light maybe. What if it is? Plants are beautiful. He thinks of his mother’s African violets growing out of their pots. He thinks of geraniums.
The light is on now in Walter’s bedroom. He sits at the chair by the window, his feet on the radiator cover as he writes, and chews his pen and writes some more. He looks up from the page. The sky above the city is that violet purple he loves. The red beacon is blinking on and off in the distance. The rest of the city is dark. Perhaps someone will see his light and take heart. He hopes so.
At dawn Walter stretches and rubs his eyes. He stands and looks down from the window again. There on the roof he sees a man and boy emerge from the blue door. Father and son? Walter thinks so. They carry a big sack between them and a long cylinder of what turns out to be brown wrapping paper which they unroll on the roof, kneeling down, weighing the corners with bricks. Next they reach into the sack, withdrawing small misshapen red things. Walter squints to see better. Boiled lobsters? Ridiculous. Crabs? Now the man looks up at the sky, which is cloudless and already warmer than yesterday. The boy spreads more of the strange red things on the paper. Walter squints. Red peppers. Of course! They are drying red chili peppers on the roof across the street.