Authors: Jonathan Raban
“Which part
do
you like best—the washing or the waxing?”
“Have you seen my car? I don’t wash it. I hate car washes, period.” She gave a dismissive, ponylike shake of her head. Pins tinkled on the plates below.
Sally’s voice had kept the dry, sandy tone of the Midwest, but it was a voice that had been places. She’d gone to college first in Philadelphia, then on the West Coast. She spent weekends in New York. Her $220-a-week job in her hometown was a stopover between planes, and she was fizzing with impatience at St. Louis. Technically speaking, she was twenty-seven, but she managed to slip, at almost every sentence end, from being seventeen to thirty-four and back again. She liked to keep things fluid. The rush and scatter of her talk left me limping behind, feeling elderly and slow.
“
God
, no—that wasn’t on the kib
butz;
this was in the Chinese restaurant in San Francisco …”
In leaps and swoops, we covered the world. I learned how she’d broken with her last “guy” six months before, how she’d rowed with her Catholic boss that morning, how she’d backpacked through France and Italy, how she hated going into bars alone, how she got “dizzy” on wine, how her mother was having difficulty selling luncheon tickets for the forthcoming visit of Isaac Bashevis Singer to the local Hadassah. Just occasionally, I found a couple of bits of the scrambled jigsaw that did fit together.
When I lit her cigarette for her over the cheese board, she cupped her hand around mine to steady the flame. Two days later, following the tracks of several hundred thousand St. Louisans before me, I moved west; into Sally’s apartment in Clayton.
It was a magical transformation. Seen from this new angle, from out “in the county,” St. Louis was changed as effectively as if a wand had been waved over it. I, too. Repatriated to domestic life, I took to it with the gratitude of a shipwrecked man rescued from a desert island.
In Clayton, estates of half-timbered Tudor houses, gloomy with conifers, stood behind tall wrought-iron gates. As streets in Clayton went, our own street was mean and ordinary; a long avenue of rippling
leaves and gabled villas. Women in our neighborhood went shopping in little British sports cars. The neighborhood laundry sold spray cans of Mace for blinding rapists and muggers—the one reminder that another, nastier world lay just a few miles off beyond the trees, that our own safe green exile might come under attack one day. Our country lanes, broad lawns and leaded windows had the special preciousness of things we’d won against the odds from the ugly city at the wrong end of the highway.
Sally’s three-room apartment was a little out of phase with Clayton. It didn’t feel precious. It had the temporary air of a motel cabin from which she was about to move out at any moment. Nothing in the place looked as if she had deliberately chosen it. Her possessions seemed to have happened to her by accident. There were a foot-high replica of Rodin’s
Thinker
, a Buddha, an African girl in fake ebony, a mildly repulsive wall clock made of petrified wood from Arizona, some tired potted plants with candy-striped bows tied around their necks, a glass cylinder of heart-shaped candies. She had papered the walls of her kitchen with a design, terrifying in the early mornings, of black feet on a blood-colored ground. She said that she’d thought “it looked kind of cute,” but the emphasis was on the past tense. I wondered whether she had been given the other objects in her life, or whether, like the wallpaper, they were all the results of some long-ago passing impulse, tolerated now because Sally had ceased to notice them. I wondered, with a premonitory spasm of disquiet, where I fitted in. Was I kin to the Buddha, the wall clock and the potted plants? I half-suspected so, and rather warmed to them.
The bookshelf in her living room didn’t give much away, either.
The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette
stood at one end; Joseph Heller’s
Good as Gold
at the other. In the middle,
The World According to Garp
had
The Shikse’s Guide to Jewish Men
as its next-door neighbor.
“You want to put a record on?”
I went through the rack. Most of the records there had been put back in the wrong sleeves. Dave Brubeck had landed inside Folk Songs from Israel, Miles Davis inside Dave Brubeck. No detective searching her apartment could have fingered Sally on this sort of evidence. She had contrived to keep herself to herself and all her options open.
Sally had embraced the adventitious as a sort of moral good, and it enabled us to improvise an instant common life. Within twenty-four hours, we fell into a routine that felt as set as if we’d been following it for years.
Each morning, the alarm went off at some dreadful time in the dark. Sally, trailing around the apartment in blouse and panty hose, would lose things—keys, bras, tape cassettes, skirts—and I would retrieve them for her. I burned the coffee and listened to the tinny squawking of the radio. At 6
A.M
., the announcer sounded quite mad, his tidbits of news like the delusions of a fever victim.
“Scientists at New Mexico State University have recovered twenty-nine particles of antimatter from the upper atmosphere. Balloons were used for the ascent, and the particles were found at a height of 120,000 feet. This proves …”
“What the hell is a particle of antimatter?”
“I dunno. You seen my other shoe anyplace? I guess it’s kind of like … Oh, God … my goddamn shoe.”
At six thirty, we joined the slow shunt of suburban traffic down Route 40 in Sally’s blue Volkswagen, our headlights slowly paling in the grubby half-light. On the final, looping stretch of elevated section, we’d see the Arch, an ellipse of tarnished silver framed between factory walls.
“You know,” Sally said, “I
like
it. It gives me a kick to see it’s still there every morning.”
I was taken aback to realize that, as a resident of Clayton, looking in on the city from my fastness in the suburbs, I liked the Arch too.
Sally worked in a shiny black skyscraper. Outside it, we kissed decorously, I moved into the driver’s seat, Sally was lost behind the uniformed doorman, and I joined all the other wives and homemakers who made up the convoy of cars returning to Clayton, Ladue, University City, Westwood, Richmond Heights and Frontenac.
I liked being a housewife. I didn’t want my consciousness raised. I was sluttish over the morning’s
Post-Dispatch
. I scribbled letters to friends on Sally’s monogrammed notepaper. I dusted the Buddha, watered the potted plants and made a show of pushing the vacuum cleaner around the carpets. At ten, Sally would telephone from her office, and I’d hang on the details of her working day. She had an interview to do, a script to write, a tape to edit, a press conference to attend. I was appalled that anyone should have been able to buy Sally’s electric busyness for $220 a week; I could hear her over the phone, being four people at once and trying to be a fifth to me.
I drove to our local supermarket, and came back with groceries in brown paper bags. I pored over Sally’s only cookbook, a mint copy of
The Jewish Gourmet
. I worried a lot about how to make soufflés rise. In the cupboard under the sink I found a hoard of strange machinery.
There were electric mixers, whisks, choppers, slicers, graters, mincers, dicers—all still in the plastic cases in which they’d been packed at the factory. I fitted a plug to one of these objects, and succeeded in turning half a dozen egg whites into snow. “God,” said Sally. “What’s
that?
”
“White of egg. Where did you get all this stuff? Don’t you ever use it?”
“Oh … they were gifts.”
“They must have cost a fortune.”
“I hate to cook. Like, I can boil eggs, you know—”
By afternoon, I would sometimes remember why I was supposed to be in St. Louis. I went to the Museum of Art, where there were three river paintings by George Caleb Bingham:
Jolly Flatboatmen in Port, Raftsmen Playing Cards
and
The Wood Boat
. I stood, rapt and critical, in front of the pictures. Once I had used Bingham as raw material for a dream of the Mississippi. Now I was able to match his river against mine on something close to equal terms. He had exactly caught the way the current twitched and folded over on itself, the leaden sheen of the water and the ruffled lights of the wind on it. I could steer a safe course through his paintings, watching where the river quickened over a submerged sandbar and made a swirling eddy in the crook of a bend. I had seen the faces of the men, too. They were still on the river, in a change of costume. The only picture that struck a really discordant note was
Jolly Flatboatmen in Port
. The surface of its paint was more chipped and cracked than that of the others, as if it had had to make more of a struggle to survive intact. In it, a barge was moored off-channel, by the warehouses of La Clede’s Landing; and the St. Louis waterfront was dense with steamboats, skiffs and rafts. I could redraw the whole thing, square inch for square inch. It would show fungoid green mud, broken cobbles and a convention of undertakers discussing (as I had found out) the problems of transportation involved after the mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana.
When Sally finished work, I collected her from the lobby of her skyscraper looking drained and wan, the exhausted breadwinner. Our route home took us past the front of my old hotel. Who, I wondered, was up in the 1800s now? I guessed he had a copy of
Playboy
instead of
The New Yorker
… bourbon on the rocks from Room Service … Nooter Boilermakers and Crunden Martin out the window … six-o’clock panic with an empty evening ahead … my almost-double, the poor guy.
For me, Sally’s office was a running soap opera in which I lived
vicariously. For the ten miles along the darkening highway, I pestered her for the gossip of the day. I learned the names of her colleagues. Mildred and Bob and Harry and Jean became brilliant two-dimensional characters, with the exaggerated reality of people in
As the World Turns
. Life at the top of the black skyscraper was exciting stuff, with smoldering enmities, clandestine affairs, intrigues, conspiracies and sudden bolts from the blue. I lapped it up.
“So,” Sally said, beginning the sad question that all working husbands have to ask all stay-at-home wives, “what did
you
do, hon?”
“I went to the art museum.” I told her about the Binghams. As material for anecdote they were, if anything, a little flatter than my morning journey around the supermarket. In any case, Sally’s interest in paintings was scant. Had she ever been made to confront the hoary question of grandmother versus Rembrandt in burning house, she wouldn’t have hesitated for a second in putting her foot through the Rembrandt on the way to rescuing the grandmother. There was a framed print of Grant Wood’s
American Gothic
propped against the wall by her dressing table, and a meaningless geometric abstract over her bed; and between them they made up as much art as Sally cared to handle in her life. She now lay stretched out in the passenger seat, blowing smoke rings at the sun visor.
“God, I ought to take you around to these friends of my family’s. They got this art collection … Like, I mean to say, they’ve got sort of ten Picassos in every bathroom, you know?”
“What happens when the steam gets to them?”
“I dunno. What d’you reckon? Wilt. I guess.”
At home, I mixed the drinks. I brought her little bowls of peanuts and raisins. Sally’s face was scrunched in thought. Finally she said, “Plus:… oh, I dunno.”
For days the fall wind, hot and wet, blew down our street like a monsoon. It came in gusts of fifty and sixty miles an hour, shredding the last leaves from the cherries, sycamores and maples. It croaked and chirruped in the metal fronds of the air conditioner. It made stoplights toss on their overhead wires; street signs shuddered on their poles; the knee-high swirl of leaves on every road gave Clayton the appearance of a lake city on stilts. One early morning, I made a detour around Wharf Street to inspect the river. It looked like an enormous fleece, with a single towboat struggling upstream in a caul of spray. If things went on like this, my own boat, locked away, off the river, wouldn’t be launched again until the spring. Even without the wind,
one could feel the press of coming winter. For the last week, the television ads for snowblowers had been falling thicker and faster between programs. On the day that I had collected my new set of charts for the Lower Mississippi from the Corps of Engineers, I had bought myself an Eskimo’s quilted parka. I hid both it and the charts in my suitcase and said nothing of them to Sally.
Our weekends were snug and sociable. It occurred to me that my river charts might turn out to be like Ed’s old railway timetable in Muscatine; out of date, good for nothing except grist for some fleeting annual fantasy.
Sally took me to the house where Picassos were rumored to be languishing on the bathroom walls. It was near Washington University, a pretty cottage in the St. Louis-Tudor style. From the outside, it looked like the sort of residence a woodcutter in Sussex in the 1540s might have been proud of; inside, it was more suggestive of the private quarters of a Medici prince. The owners were away in Europe, collecting more treasure, but Sally and I were let in by the light-skinned black maid.
A Monet, vast and blue, was hung over the chintz sofa in the sitting room; and the walls were checkerboarded with masterpieces. I couldn’t take them in. Instead, I found myself looking at the leftover clutter of family life; the open books on tables, overshoes, half-emptied bottles, ashtrays, papers, coats and hats. Beside these ordinary things, the Picassos, Braques, Matisses, Courbets, Duchamps had the alienated splendor of exiled royalty in a seaside boardinghouse.
Embarrassed at finding my eye so numbed, I asked the maid which picture she liked best. She pointed at a big angular Picasso from the 1920s.
“That’s my favorite. I like all the straight lines. I ain’t so keen on his figures.” Like me, she found the paintings themselves difficult to come to terms with. Her face lit with real enthusiasm only when she explained how the house had been wired against burglars. “You know, you only have to touch a window, just light, like that, and the alarm goes off down in the police station? It’s
wonderful!
”