Time's Arrow Read online

  Another thing that seriously disappoints me about this life I’m living through: the reading. I drag myself out of bed each night to start the day—and with what? Not with a book. Not even with the Gazette. No. Two or three hours with a yelping tabloid. I begin at the foot of the column and toil my way up the page to find each story unedifyingly summarized in inch-high type. MAN GIVES BIRTH TO DOG. Or STARLET RAPED BY PTERODACTYL. Greta Garbo, I read, has been reborn as a cat. All this stuff about twins. A Nordic superrace will shortly descend from the cosmic iceclouds; they will rule the earth for a thousand years. All this stuff about Atlantis. Appropriately, it is the garbage people who bring me my reading matter. I haul in the bags—which emanate, it would seem, from the monstrous jaws, the industrial violence, of the garbage truck. And so I sit here gurgling into my glass and soaking up all that moronic drek. I can’t help it. I’m at Tod’s mercy. What’s going on—in the world, I mean? I wouldn’t know about that either. Except when Tod’s eye strays from the Kwik Crossword in the Gazette. Most of the time I’m staring fixedly at stuff like Opposite of small (3) or Not dirty (5). There is a bookcase in the living room. Beyond its dusty glass, the dusty spines, all standing to attention. But no. Instead, LOVE LIFE ON PLUTO. I AM ZSA ZSA GABOR SAYS MONKEY. SIAMESE QUINS!

  There are certain pluses now, though, as the years lurch past. The Reagan Era, I think, is doing wonders for Tod’s morale.

  Physically I’m in great shape. My ankles and knees and spine and neck no longer hurt all the time—or not all at once, anyway. I get to places much quicker than I used to: places like the far end of the room. I’m there before you know it. My bearing is almost princely. I sold that stick of mine long ago.

  Tod and I are feeling so terrific that we’ve joined a club and taken up tennis. Perhaps prematurely. Because—to begin with, at least—it made our back ache like a son of a bitch. Tennis is a pretty dumb game, I’m finding: the fuzzy ball jumps out of the net, or out of the chicken wire at the back of the court, and the four of us bat it around until it is pocketed—quite arbitrarily, it seems to me—by the server. Yet we leap and snort away, happily enough. We josh and kid: our trusses, our elbow supports. Pap say the rackets. Tod is popular; the guys appear to like him fine. I don’t know what Tod makes of them, except that his glands tell me he could do without any special attention, or any attention at all.

  Most of the time we sit around the clubroom playing cards. The clubroom is where I see the President, on the mounted TV. Yes, the old guys, the elderly parties with their freckles and fruit juices, they all get a big kick out of the President: his frowns, his bloopers, his world-class hair. Tod likes it in the clubroom, but there is a man here whom he hates and fears. The man’s name is Art—another gorilla of a granddad, with a murderous backslap and a voice of millennial penetration and power. Even I was terrified the first time it happened, when Art rolled over to our table, gave Tod a kind of rabbit punch that almost broke his neck, and said, incredibly loudly,

  “You eat them alive.”

  “Yes. What?” said Tod.

  He leaned closer. “Others in here might buy that shit, Friendly, but I know what you’re after.”

  “Oh, that’s been much exaggerated.”

  “Still chasing them?” Art shouted, and rolled away again.

  Every time we try to slip past Art’s table, there’ll be a pause, and then a thick whisper that beats its way right across the room: “Tod Friendly: had more ass than a toilet seat.” Tod doesn’t like that. He doesn’t like that one bit.

  Nevertheless, in the Superette, these days, it’s true, the eyes of Tod Friendly linger on the bodies of the local frauleins as they tug their carts. The ankles, the join of the hips, the inlet of the clavicle, the hair. It turns out, too, that Tod has a black chest with photographs of women in it. Gay old broads in party dresses and tan pants suits. Ribboned letters, lockets, the knickknacks of love. Deeper down in the chest, where Tod doesn’t often burrow, the women get appreciably younger and are to be seen in things like shorts and swim-wear. If this all means what I think it means, then I’m impatient. I really can’t wait. I don’t know how much sense it makes to say that I am tiring of Tod’s company. We are in this together, absolutely. But it isn’t good for him to be so alone. His isolation is complete. Because he doesn’t know I’m here.

  We’re picking up new habits all the time. Bad habits, I’m assuming: solitary, anyway. Tod sins singly.… He has acquired a taste for alcohol and tobacco. He starts the day with these vices—the quiet glass of red wine, the thoughtful cigar—and isn’t that meant to be especially bad? The other thing is this. Not very enthusiastically, and not at all sucessfully either, so far as I can ascertain, we have begun doing a sexual thing with ourself. That happens, when it happens, the minute we wake up. Then we stagger to our feet and pick our clothes off the floor, and sit and drool into our glass, puffing on a pensive perfecto, and staring at the tabloid and all its gruesome crap.

  I can’t tell—and I need to know—whether Tod is kind. Or how unkind. He takes toys from children, on the street. He does. The kid will be standing there, with flustered mother, with big dad. Tod’ll come on up. The toy, the squeaky duck or whatever, will be offered to him by the smiling child. Tod takes it. And backs away, with what I believe is called a shit-eating grin. The child’s face turns blank, or closes. Both toy and smile are gone: he takes both toy and smile. Then he heads for the store, to cash it in. For what? A couple of bucks. Can you believe this guy? He’ll take candy from a baby, if there’s fifty cents in it for him. Tod goes to church and everything. He trudges along there on a Sunday, in hat, tie, dark suit. The forgiving look you get from everybody on the way in—Tod seems to need it, the social reassurance. We sit in lines and worship a corpse. But it’s clear what Tod’s after. Christ, he’s so shameless. He always takes a really big bill from the bowl.

  It’s all strange to me. I know I live on a fierce and magical planet, which sheds or surrenders rain or even flings it off in whipstroke after whipstroke, which fires out bolts of electric gold into the firmament at 186,000 miles per second, which with a single shrug of its tectonic plates can erect a city in half an hour. Creation … is easy, is quick. There’s also a universe, apparently. But I cannot bear to see the stars, even though I know they’re there all right, and I do see them, because Tod looks upward at night, as everybody does, and coos and points. The Plough. Sirius, the dog. The stars, to me, are like pins and needles, are like the routemap of a nightmare. Don’t join the dots.… Of the stars, one alone can I contemplate without pain. And that’s a planet. The planet they call the evening star, the morning star. Intense Venus.

  There are love letters—I know it—in that black chest of Tod’s. I tell myself to cultivate patience. Meanwhile, sometimes, I fold up and roughly seal and then dispatch letters I haven’t written. Tod makes them, with fire. Over in the grate there. Later, we stroll out and pop them in our mailbox, which says T. T. FRIENDLY. They are letters to me, to us. For now, there’s just this one correspondent. Some guy in New York. Always the same signature at the foot of the page. Always the same letter, come to that. It reads: “Dear Tod Friendly: I hope you are in good health. The weather here continues to be temperate! With best wishes. Yours sincerely …” These letters arrive annually, around the turn of the year. It wasn’t long before I started finding them both repetitive and bland. Tod feels differently. For nights on end, before the letters come, his physiology speaks of alerted fear, of ignoble relief.

  The moon I actually like looking at. Its face, at this time of the month, is especially craven and chinless, like the earth’s exiled or demoted soul.

  2

  You have to be cruel to be kind

  These developments all came one

  after the other. A new home. A

  career. The use of an automobile.

  And a love life. What with all the activity and everything, I’ve hardly had a moment to myself.

  The house move was a perfectly symmetrical ope
ration: lucid, elegant. Big men came, and loaded all my stuff onto their pickup. I rode with them in the cab (we tossed the one-liners back and forth)—to our destination. Which was the city. Down Route 6, south of the river, over the tracks, beyond the stockyards and their rusty corsetry, their spinal supports, their arthritic suspenders. The new property is smaller than what we’re used to: terraced, two up two down, with a modest backyard. I’m delighted with the place, because what I’m after, I suppose, is human variety, and America’s pretty pluralism, and there’s even more of that here. But Tod is in two minds about it. He’s confused. I can tell. For instance, on the day we moved, while the men were still lurching around with their crates and cardboard boxes, Tod slipped out into the garden—the garden on which he had worked for so many years. He lowered himself to his knees, and, sniffing hungrily, richly … It was beautiful, in its way. Dewlike drops of moisture formed on the dry grass, and rose upward through the air as if powered by the jolts in our chest. The moisture bathed our cheeks, deliciously, until with our tickling eyes we drew it in. Such distress. Why? I assumed at the time that he was crying for the garden and what he’d done to it. The garden was heaven when we started out, but over the years, well, don’t blame me is all I’m saying. It wasn’t my decision. It never is. So Tod’s tears were tears of remorse, or propitiation. For what he’d done. Look at it. A nightmare of wilt and mildew, of fungus and black spot. All the tulips and roses he patiently drained and crushed, then sealed their exhumed corpses and took them in the paper bag to the store for money. All the weeds and nettles he screwed into the soil—and the earth took this ugliness, snatched at it with a sudden grip. Such, then, are the fruits of Tod’s meticulous vandalism. Greenfly, whitefly, sawfly are his familiars. And horsefly. He seems to summon them to his face with a slow flick of the wrist. The muscle-bound horseflies retreat and return; they rest, rubbing their hands together in anticipation and spite. Destruction—is difficult. Destruction is slow.

  Creation, as I said, is no trouble at all. Like with the car. One of the first things we do, after settling in—we show up at this little garage or car cemetery a few blocks south. I’d call this place a hole-in-the-wall operation. But there’s no wall to hack a hole in. The buildings around here are right down on their knees. That’s evidently the thing with the contemporary city. You might want to work in it. But no one is seriously expected to live in it. Content, meaning and content, are all stored uptown, in the notched pillars of the skyscrapers. Well, the car seemed okay. It seemed like any other car. But Tod looked at it with real feeling, with the dull heat of—I don’t know—thwarted love. The garage guy soon joined him, wiping an oily rag with his oily fingers. Next, Tod goes and gives him eight hundred bucks. The man counts the money and they argue for a while, Tod saying nine hundred, the man saying seven, then the man saying six while Tod holds out for a thou, and so on. Left alone with the car, Tod ran his fingers along the bodywork. Searching for what? Scar tissue. Trauma … Tod was blue that morning anyway, as I recall. In the afternoon he’d attended a funeral, or just accidentally witnessed one, hanging back, rather, in the mournerless churchyard, where the graves were flush with the earth. He crossed himself and slipped away quickly. We rode the bus back, and buses take forever and are full of drunks and screaming children.… Cars are the thing. Cars. Every day we went back to the garage; and every day that car of ours was in sorrier shape. Eight hundred dollars? And you could actually see them at it, the grease monkeys, with hammers and spanners, about their long chore of patient wreckage.

  Needless to say, by the time we went along to claim it (elsewhere: uptown), Tod’s car was a regular bedpan. We weren’t in top form either. The transaction included a most unwelcome preliminary. Hospital. That’s right. A look-in at Casualty. We made our own way there (somehow Tod knows this town backward) and we didn’t stay long, thank God. You do what you have to do: you take your shirt off and get prodded and tapped, but you keep your head down; you don’t want to know about the stuff they do in there. It’s not your place to speak out. It’s none of your business. The paramedics eventually drove me uptown to the scene of the accident. There was my car, like a mad old hog caught in midspasm, its snout and tusks crushed and steaming. And I didn’t feel too good myself as the police officer helped wedge me into its driving seat and tried to shut the warped front door. Thereafter I sat back and let Tod handle everything. There were all kinds of people staring in at us, and for a while Tod just stared stupidly back at them. But then he got on with it. He rammed his foot down on the brake and sent the car into a fizzing convulsion of rev and whinny. With a skillful lurch he gave the bent hydrant on the sidewalk a crunchy shouldercheck—and we were off, weaving at speed back up the street. Other cars screamed in to fill the sudden vacuum of our wake.

  Minutes later: the first installment of our love life. Which was quite a coincidence. We came home, Tod flooring the accelerator to bring about a violent halt. He didn’t pause to admire the car (the car seemed like new: great!) but hurried inside, flinging off his coat with a hot gasp and making a lunge for the phone.

  I tried to concentrate. I think I got most of it. It went like this.

  “Goodbye, Tod.”

  “Wait. Don’t do anything.”

  “Who cares? It’s all shit anyway.”

  “Irene,” he said.

  “Yes I am. Tod, I’m just this terrible old lady now. How’d it happen?”

  “No you’re not.”

  “No I’m not. I’m going to kill myself.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “I’m going to call the New York Times.”

  “Irene,” he said, with a new heat in his voice. And a new heat all over his body.

  “I know you changed your name. How about that! I know you ran.”

  “You know nothing.”

  “I’m going to tell on you.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “You say it in the night. In your sleep.”

  “Irene.”

  “I know your secret.”

  “What is it?”

  “I want you to know something.”

  “Irene, you’re drunk.”

  “Piece of shit.”

  “Yes?” said Tod boredly—and hung up on her. He put the phone down and listened to its ringing—its machine persistence. And then its silence. His feeling tone was blank, was clear.… Well, after that, I suppose, things can only improve. I wished Tod would go and dig out that black chest of his, so that I could get a proper look at this Irene. But he didn’t, of course. Fine chance.

  * * *

  Maybe love will be like driving.

  “Pop? Your driving days are over.” So said the mechanic in his oily dungarees. So said the hospital orderly in his stark white smock. But they were wrong. On the contrary, our driving days have just begun. I think Tod must be hankering for the old house, over to Wellport, because that’s where most of our trips end up. He’s kept a key. We go in and move from room to room. It’s all empty now. He measures things. It’s done with love, this measuring. More recently we’ve started inspecting other properties in the Wellport area. But none of them is worth measuring, like our old place. Back down Route 6 he slowly rolls.

  We’ve started finding love letters, in the trash, letters from Irene. He looks them over with his head at an angle and stuffs them in a drawer somewhere. Maybe love will be like driving. When people move—when they travel—they look where they’ve come from, not where they’re going. Is this what the human beings always do? Then love will be like driving, which doesn’t appear to make much immediate sense. For example, you have five reverse gears and only one for forward, which is marked R, for Reverse. When we drive, we don’t look where we’re going. We look where we came from. There are accidents, sure, and yet it all works out. The city streams and pours in this symphony of trust.

  My career … I don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to hear about it. One night I got out of bed and drove—very badly—to an office. I then had a par
ty with all my new colleagues. At six o’clock I went to the room with my name on the desk, donned a white coat, and started work. What at? Doctoring!

  As life speeds up like this I move among the urban people, in the urban setting, the city’s metal and mortar, its sharper interactions, with more grit and bite in the gears. The city—and there are bigger cities than this (like New York, where the weather, I learn, continues to be temperate)—the city does things to the people who live in it. Does most things, perhaps, to the people who shouldn’t be in the city. Not now. They are the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Irene shouldn’t be in the city. Tod’s at home here, in some ways. He has stopped driving out to Wellport but I bet he misses our time there, its vigorlessness so safe and morally neutral, when he wore the passive uniform of old age. The old aren’t cruel, are they. We don’t look to the old, to the stooped, for cruelty. Cruelty, which is bright-eyed, which is pink-tongued …

  This is more than city. This is inner city. And despite his newfound professional status, Tod lives among the underclass. Under, inner—how do these conditions express themselves? Jesus, how do cities get here? One can just about imagine the monstrous labors of the eventual demolition (centuries away, long after my time), and the eventual creation of the pleasant land—the green, the promised. But I’m awfully glad I wasn’t around for the city’s arrival. It must have just lurched into life. It must have just lurched into life out of a great trodden stillness of dust and damp. My colleagues at work, they tend to reside, prudently and intelligibly enough, up on the Hill or in the eastern suburbs, toward the ocean. But perhaps Tod Friendly has need of the city, where he can always drift among others, where he is never considered singly.