Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism Read online

  The return trip sloped slightly uphill, which made it seem longer and more obstructed. The distance to the stop in Wenrich’s Corner where he and his mother could most conveniently alight was now two miles away, less than fifteen minutes; but minutes and miles can seem infinite to a child, and nausea was creeping up from underneath the grooved and blackened and throbbing floorboards, the ozone mixing with the tastes of bacon and pistachio and the oppressive monotony of shuffle one, shuffle two.

  His mother was watching his face grow paler. She squeezed his hand, so he felt how damp his palm was. “Only seven more stops,” she promised him.

  “Seven,” he repeated. The number had no end to it, it had curves and plateaus within it, which doubled and redoubled.

  Amid his discomforts was a wish not to spoil this outing for his mother. He felt her life had few pleasures, and a Saturday excursion to Alton was one of them. He was eight, nine. She was, he realized now, herself young. The hand of hers not holding his rested gracefully in her lap, wearing its thin gold wedding ring. It was sad, he thought, the way she never bought anything in the stores. There was a poverty in her life that pained him.

  (Years later, Farnham’s first wife was told by a doctor that she suffered from depression. This, too, pained Farnham. They were not poor, and he could not imagine any other reason for depression.)

  The trolley car struggled and swayed. Shapeless nameless trees, houses with drawn front curtains, front yards he would never play in crawled past in fitful starts that he timed with held breath, willing the contents of his stomach to stay down. The air on the outside of the window grate seemed a precious clear fluid, the transparent essence of freedom. The things to see inside the car—the sun-faded curved advertisements and the old faces of the other passengers and the pale-green pamphlets the trolley company gave out free from a little tin box behind the motorman’s head—had all become a kind of poison; if he rested his eyes on them even a second, he grew sicker.

  (Years later, the idea very slowly grew upon him that he might be the reason for his wife’s depression.)

  There was a long wait at a turnout while the motor throbbed like a trapped thing. The woman beside him kept glancing down at the side of his face, and her concern joined the other pressures afflicting him. The worn straw seats repeated and repeated their pattern of tiny, L-shaped shadows in the sunlight that slanted in through the dust; her wedding ring glinted in her lap.

  (Yet when he first suggested the possibility of separation her reaction had been fear and tears.)

  His trolley-car stomach now was riding high in his chest, and swallowing only made it bob lower for an instant, like a hollow ball in water. His whole skin under his clothes was sweating like his palms.

  “Just four more stops,” his mother said brightly. “See—there’s the poorhouse lane.”

  Four: the number multiplied within him, enormous, full of twos. The idling motor throbbed. Farnham stared rigidly at the motionless world outside, a kind of paradise that could be attained only through dishonor. Beyond the poorhouse lane, the grassy open acres of the school grounds began, and it was possible to get off here and walk diagonally across them the half-mile to his home. Each trip, each Saturday, the boy vowed not to make his mother get off the trolley car early.

  The motorman, the back of his neck in thick folds above the sweat-blackened collar of his uniform, pounded the floor gong and swung a burnished brass handle back and forth in a fury. The long inside of the car lurched, and the other passengers lost their faces. The smell and the throbbing and the vow to hold on had rubbed them out.

  Her voice tugged at him gently. “Willy, let’s get off here. We can walk across the school grounds.”

  “No. I can make it.”

  But she had decided. She had become girlish and animated, insisting, “Come on, I want to. It’ll be good for us.” She pushed the bell. The old trolleys did not have pull cords; instead there were porcelain buttons like doorbells above each seat.

  The double-hinged door flapped open. The little step magically flopped down. His feet firm on the concrete road, Farnham inhaled real air. His relief overwhelmed his guilt. The trudge across the fields, with their cinder track and wooden bleachers and the bucking sled for the football players, was long enough for his stomach to settle and his color to return. He put away his mother’s hand as something he no longer needed, and raced ahead. When, having reached the hedge at the bottom of their own yard, he turned, she seemed a distant stranger, a woman walking alone.

  1982

  YOUR LOVER JUST CALLED

  A Playlet

  Adapted from the Short Story of the Same Name for an Evening of Fifteen-Minute Plays at the Blackburn Theatre, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on April 10, 1989

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Richard and Joan Maple, in their thirties

  SCENE 1: An upstairs hall, Friday morning, ten o’clock

  SCENE 2: Same place, next day, same time

  (Stage set: A table with a telephone on it. Chair. Door left leads to bedroom.)

  PHONE: (Rings. Rings twice. Thrice.)

  RICHARD (sniffing, coughing, in pajamas, emerges from bedroom door): Hello? (Listens, then sings musically) Hello hello? (Hangs up. Stands there puzzled.)

  JOAN (coming upstairs, carrying a blanket, a jar of vitamin C, a glass of apple juice, a book): Richard, you must stay in bed if you want to get well enough to entertain Mack tonight.

  RICHARD: Your lover just called.

  JOAN: What did he say?

  RICHARD: Nothing. He hung up. He was amazed to find me home on a Friday.

  JOAN: Go back to bed. Here’s an extra blanket, some chewable vitamin C, a glass of apple juice, and that book you wanted from the library. It took me the longest time to find it. I didn’t know whether to look under “L” for “Laclos,” “d” for “de,” or “C” for “Choderlos.”

  RICHARD (taking book): Great. (Reads title) Les Liaisons dangereuses.

  JOAN: How do I know it wasn’t your lover?

  RICHARD: If it was my lover, why would she hang up, since I answered?

  JOAN: Maybe she heard me coming up the stairs. Maybe she doesn’t love you any more.

  RICHARD (after blowing his nose): This is a ridiculous conversation.

  JOAN: You started it.

  RICHARD: Well, what would you think, if you were me and answered the phone on a weekday and the person hung up? He clearly expected you to be home alone like you always are.

  JOAN: Well, if you’ll go back to bed and fall asleep I’ll call him back and explain what happened.

  RICHARD: You think I’ll think you’re kidding but I know that’s really what would happen.

  JOAN: Oh, come on, Dick. Who would it be? Freddy Vetter?

  RICHARD: Or Harry Saxon. Or somebody I don’t know at all. Some old college sweetheart who’s moved to West Gloucester. Or maybe the milkman. I can hear you and him talking while I’m shaving sometimes.

  JOAN: We’re surrounded by hungry children. He’s sixty years old and has hair coming out of his ears.

  RICHARD: Like your father. You like older men. There was that section man in Chaucer. You and he were always going out for coffee together after the lecture.

  JOAN: Yes, and he gave me a C for the course. C for coffee.

  RICHARD: Don’t try to change the subject. You’ve been acting awfully happy lately. There’s a little smile comes into your face when you think I’m not looking. See, there it is!

  JOAN: I’m smiling because you’re so ridiculous. I have no lover. I have nowhere to put him. My days are consumed by devotion to the needs of my husband and his numerous children.

  RICHARD: Oh, so I’m the one made you have the children? While you were hankering after a career in fashion or in the exciting world of business. You could have been the first woman to crack the wheat-futures cycle. Or maybe aeronautics: the first woman to design a nose cone. Joan Maple, girl agronomist. Joan Maple, lady geopolitician. But for that patriarchal brute she mistakenly married, this cl
ear-eyed female citizen of our milder, gentler republic—

  JOAN: Dick, have you taken your temperature? I haven’t heard you rave like this for years.

  RICHARD: I haven’t been wounded like this for years. I hated that click. That nasty little I-know-your-wife-better-than-you-do click.

  JOAN: It was some child, playing with the phone. Really, if we’re going to have Mack for dinner tonight, you better convalesce now.

  RICHARD: It is Mack, isn’t it? That son of a bitch. His divorce isn’t even finalized and he’s calling my wife on the phone. And then proposes to gorge himself at my groaning board.

  JOAN: The board won’t be the only thing groaning. You’re giving me a headache.

  RICHARD: Sure. First I foist off more children on you than you can count, then I give you a menstrual headache.

  JOAN: Darling. If you’ll get into bed with your apple juice, I’ll bring you cinnamon toast cut into strips the way your mother used to make it.

  RICHARD: You’re lovely. (Kisses her brow, takes blanket, pills, and juice, and goes into bedroom. She turns to head downstairs.)

  PHONE: (Rings.)

  JOAN: Hello … yes … no … no … sorry.

  RICHARD (shouting from behind door): Who was it?

  JOAN: Somebody wanting to sell us the World Book Encyclopedia.

  RICHARD’S voice, after pause, with obscure satisfaction: A very likely story.

  (Blackout to indicate lapse of time. Next morning.)

  PHONE: (Rings.)

  JOAN (entering from downstairs in tennis dress): Hello … oh, pity … don’t worry about it … I’ll be there.

  RICHARD (coming out of bedroom still in pajamas): Who was that?

  JOAN: Nancy Vetter. Francine has had to take little Robbie to the orthodontist this morning because Harry’s plane got fogged in in Denver. So our tennis won’t be until eleven.

  RICHARD: Mmh (the noise indicating slight surprise: not Hmm or Humph). One good thing about a hangover, it makes a cold feel trivial.

  JOAN: I don’t know why you drank so much. Or why Mack stayed until one in the morning.

  RICHARD: It’s obvious why. He had to stay to make sure there were no hard feelings.

  JOAN: Why would there be? Just because you were sneaking around outside your own kitchen windows and saw him giving me a friendly peck?

  RICHARD: Friendly peck! That kiss was so long I thought one of you might pass out from oxygen deprivation!

  JOAN: Don’t try to be funny about it. It was shockingly sneaky of you, and we were both embarrassed on your behalf.

  RICHARD: You were embarrassed! You send me out for cigarettes in the dark of the night, and stumbling back through my own backyard what do I see all lit up in the kitchen but you two making like a blue movie!

  JOAN: You could have coughed. Or rattled the screen door or something.

  RICHARD: I was paralyzed with horror. My first primal scene. My own wife doing a very credible impersonation of a female spider having her abdomen tickled. Where did you learn to flirt your head like that? It was better than finger puppets.

  JOAN: Really, Richard, how you go on. We were hardly doing anything. Mack always kisses me in the kitchen. It’s a habit, it means nothing. You know for yourself how in love with Eleanor he is.

  RICHARD: So much he’s divorcing her. His devotion borders on the quixotic.

  JOAN: The divorce is her idea, you know that. He’s a lost soul. I feel sorry for him.

  RICHARD: Yes, I saw that you do. You were like the Red Cross at Verdun.

  JOAN: What I’d like to know is, why are you so pleased?

  RICHARD: Pleased? I’m annihilated.

  JOAN: You’re delighted. You should see your smile.

  RICHARD: You’re so incredibly unapologetic about it, I guess I keep thinking you’re being ironical.

  PHONE: (Rings.)

  JOAN: Hello? Hello? (Hangs up, stares at him.) So. She thought I’d be playing tennis by now.

  RICHARD: Who’s she?

  JOAN: You tell me. Your lover. Your loveress.

  RICHARD: Honey, quit bluffing. It was clearly yours, and something in your voice warned him off.

  JOAN (with sudden furious energy): Go to her! Go to her like a man and stop trying to maneuver me into something I don’t understand! I have no lover. I let Mack kiss me because he’s lonely and drunk! Stop trying to make me more interesting than I am! All I am is a beat-up housewife who wants to go play tennis with some other beat-up victims of a male-dominated society!

  RICHARD (studying her as if for the first time): Really?

  JOAN (panting): Really.

  RICHARD: You think I want to make you more interesting than you are?

  JOAN: Of course. You’re bored. You left me and Mack alone last night deliberately. It was very uncharacteristic of you, to volunteer to go out for cigarettes with your cold.

  RICHARD: My cold. I feel rotten, come to think of it.

  JOAN: You want me to be like that woman in the book, in the movie. The Marquise de Whatever. Glenn Close. All full of wicked schemes and secrets.

  RICHARD (putting hand to forehead): I think I do have a fever now.

  JOAN: When I’m really, sad to say, that other woman. Poor Madame Something. Too good to live.

  RICHARD: You are? You’re Michelle Pfeiffer?

  JOAN: Exactly. Without you, I’d just go back to the convent and curl up and die.

  RICHARD: Feel. (Puts her hand to his forehead.)

  JOAN: A teeny bit warm.

  RICHARD: Would you …?

  JOAN (sharply, on her mettle): Would I what?

  RICHARD: If I went back to bed would you come tuck me in before you go off to tennis?

  JOAN: I’ll tuck you in. No toast, though.

  RICHARD: No nice sliced cinnamon toast. It’s sad, to think of you without a lover.

  JOAN: I’m sorry. I’m sorry to disappoint you.

  RICHARD: You don’t, entirely. I find you pretty interesting anyway. (They move toward the door and through it. From behind the door.) You’re interesting here, and here, and here.

  JOAN’S voice: I said I’d just tuck you in.

  (Silence. Empty stage.)

  PHONE: (Rings. Twice. Thrice. Four times. Stops. Then a little questioning pring, as when someone in passing bumps the table. Then, perhaps, more rings, as many as the audience can stand, unanswered.)

  MEDIA

  Being on TV—I

  I WELL REMEMBER my first experience of being on TV. It was in 1962, and I had contributed to a book of five boyhood reminiscences; the other contributors were a revered playwright, a best-selling writer, a celebrated cartoonist, and an esteemed critic.* I was the youngest of the five. Thanks no doubt to the celebrity of my elders, a group interview was arranged at a New York station, for a half-hour live show. There was a dry run; while the others, especially the cartoonist and the best-seller writer, irrepressibly sparkled and effervesced, I sat there demurely in my chair, wondering at the shabby, cluttered surroundings from which our electronic marvel was to emanate. A break was declared before the real broadcast, and the cartoonist and the writer excused themselves and visited, it turned out, a bar on the street downstairs. When they returned, and the cameras began to roll, the two were companionably silent, and sat back in their chairs with imperturbable smiles. It dawned on me that theirs had been the opposite of a dry run, that a conversational vacuum had been created, that air time was rushing by, and that I must talk. I opened my mouth; words came out, any words. They sounded good. I gestured with my hand, and I could see the gesture flicker on a half-dozen monitors. The klieg lights were burning brighter than midday, and, as the cameras rolled, little red bulbs glowed above their great lavender lenses like rubies in the brows of dragons. They were feeding on me; I was being lapped up and broadcast into thousands and thousands of sets. I was on TV.

  The feeling was scary and delicious, of an impalpable multiplication and widespread scattering of the self. Stammer, warts, miscombed hair, crooked neck
tie—out it all went, over the airwaves. From within this messy room, with its floorful of snaking gray cables and its invisible scurry of behind-the-camera technicians, reality was being reprocessed and reborn; millions of jittery images, refreshed thirty times a second, flowed from my face, my voice. It was as if I had spent all of my life previous to this moment in a closet, and at long last proper attention was being paid.

  Americans, once a shy and dry-voiced race away from the intimacy of their own work sheds and back porches, have certainly, in these last thirty years, become better at being on TV. Game shows turn hundreds of them into momentary stars every week. On the news, witnesses to shootings, victims of floods, debunked economists, and freshly traded quarterbacks all now gaze into the camera levelly and speak in shapely sentences. Golfers are expected to have a few words for the camera between shots, and do; local police chiefs never know when they’ll have to supply a twenty-second statement for the national news, and when their moment comes they enunciate as sonorously as Raymond Burr playing Perry Mason, if not John Housman urging the praises of Smith Barney. Television has so interpenetrated our daily lives we are no more shy of it than of the family cat. It comes into our homes, and our homes go into it. During the last hostage crisis [TWA, Athens-Tunis-Beirut, July 1985], families were shown on television watching television, where the kidnapped were being interviewed by their kidnappers, and then were in turn, the families, interviewed by the local television news team.

  We love being on TV. Passersby mug and wave behind the on-the-street reporter. Spectators go to sports events wearing funny hats and purple hair to court their death-defying second of electronic multiplication. People in ballparks drape banners from the railings to attract the camera to themselves. “The wave”—the successive standing up of section after section—is folk art invented for television, a stadium full of hams performing as one huge telegenic creature. Television need not focus any longer on the famous; its focus is fame, and throughout the Western world the nightly news commentators are better known and more trusted than the political leaders.