The Early Stories (112 page)

It comes on every night, somewhere in the eleven-o'clock news. A
CHILD
runs down a
STAIRCASE
. A rotund
ELDERLY WOMAN
stands at the foot, picks up the
CHILD
, gives him a shake (friendly), and sets him down. There is
MUSIC
, containing the words “laughing child,” “fur-lined rug,” etc.

The
STAIRCASE
looks unexpectedly authentic, oaken and knobby and steep in the style of houses where we have childhoods. We know this
STAIRCASE
. Some treads creak, and at the top there is a branching many-cornered darkness wherein we are supposed to locate security and to sleep. The wallpaper (baskets of flowers, at a guess, alternating with ivy-wreathed medallions) would feel warm, if touched.

The
CHILD
darts offscreen. We have had time to register that it is a
BOY
, with long hair cut straight across his forehead. The camera stays with the
ELDERLY WOMAN
, whom by now we identify as the
GRANDMOTHER
. She gazes after the (supposedly) receding
BOY
so fondly we can imagine
“(gazes fondly)”
in the commercial's script.

The second drags; her beaming threatens to become blank. But now, with an electrifying touch of uncertainty, so that we do not know if it was the director's idea or the actress's,
GRANDMOTHER
slowly wags her head, as if to say,
My, oh my, what an incorrigible little rascal, what a lovable little man-child!
Her heart, we feel, so brims with love that her plump body, if a whit less healthy and compact, if a whit less compressed and contained by the demands and accoutrements of
GRANDMOTHERLINESS
, would burst.
GRANDMOTHERLINESS
massages her from all sides, like the brushes of a car wash.

And now (there is so much to see!) she relaxes her arms in front of her, the fingers of one hand gently gripping the wrist of the other. This gesture tells us that her ethnic type is Anglo-Saxon. An Italian mama, say,
would have folded her arms across her bosom; and, also, wouldn't the coquetry of Mediterranean women forbid their wearing an apron out of the kitchen, beside what is clearly a front
STAIRCASE
? So, while still suspended high on currents of anticipation, we deduce that this is not a commercial for spaghetti.

Nor for rejuvenating skin creams or hair rinses, for the camera cuts from
GRANDMOTHER
to the
BOY
. He is hopping through a room. Not quite hopping, or exactly skipping: a curious fey gait that bounces his cap of hair and evokes the tender dialectic of the child-director encounter. This
CHILD
, who, though a child actor acting the part of a child, is nevertheless also truly a child, has been told to move across the fictional room in a childish way. He has obeyed, moving hobbled by self-consciousness yet with the elastic bounce that Nature has bestowed upon him and that no amount of adult direction can utterly squelch. Only time can squelch it.

We do not know how many “takes” were sifted through to get this second of movement. Though no child in reality (though billions of children have crossed millions of rooms) ever moved across a room in quite this way, an impression of
CHILDHOOD
pierces us. We get the message:
GRANDMOTHER'S HOUSE
(and the montage is so swift we cannot itemize the furniture, only concede that it appears fittingly fusty and congested) is cozy, safe—a place to be joyful in. Why? The question hangs.

We are in another room. A kitchen. A shining
POT
dominates the foreground. The
BOY
, out of focus, still bobbing in that unnatural, affecting way, enters at the background, comes forward into focus, becomes an alarmingly large face and a hand that lifts the lid of the
POT
. S
TEAM
billows. The
BOY
blows the
STEAM
away, then stares at us with stagily popped eyes. Meaning? He has burned himself? There is a bad smell? The director, offscreen, has shouted at him? We do not know, and we are made additionally uncomfortable by the possibility that this is a spaghetti commercial after all.

Brief scene:
GRANDMOTHER
washing
BOY'S
face. Bathroom fixtures behind. Theme of heat (cozy
HOUSE
, hot
POT)
subliminally emerges. Also: suppertime?

We do not witness supper. We are back at the
STAIRCASE
. New actors have arrived: a tall and vigorous
YOUNG COUPLE
, in stylish overcoats. Who? We scarcely have time to ask. The
BOY
leaps (flies, indeed; we do not see his feet launch him) upward into the arms of the
MAN
. These are his
PARENTS
. We ourselves, watching, welcome them; the depth of our welcome reveals to us a dread within ourselves, of something morbid and claustral in the old
HOUSE
, with its cunningly underlined snugness and its
lonely household of benevolent crone and pampered, stagy brat. These other two radiate the brisk air of outdoors. To judge from their clothes, it is cold outside; this impression is not insignificant; our sense of subliminal coherence swells. We join in the
BUSTLE OF WELCOME
, rejoicing with the
YOUNG COUPLE
in their sexual energy and safe return and great good fortune to be American and modern and solvent and fertile and to have such a picture-book
GRANDMOTHER
to baby-sit for them whenever they partake of some innocent, infrequent
SPREE
.

But whose mother is
GRANDMOTHER
, the
FATHER'S
or the
MOTHER'S
?

All questions are answered. The actor playing the
YOUNG FATHER
ignores
GRANDMOTHER
with the insouciance of blood kinship, while the actress playing the
YOUNG MOTHER
hugs her, pulls back, reconsiders, then dips forward to bestow upon the beaming plump cheek a kiss
GRANDMOTHER
does not, evidently, expect. Her beaming wavers momentarily, like a candle flame when a distant door is opened. The
DAUGHTER-IN-LAW
again pulls back, as if coolly to contemplate the product of her affectionate inspiration. Whether her tense string of hesitations was spun artfully by an actress fulfilling a role or was visited upon the actress as she searched her role for nuances (we can imagine how vague the script might be:
“Parents return. Greetings all around. Camera medium tight”
), a ticklish closeness of maneuver, amid towering outcroppings of good will, has been conveyed. The
FAMILY
is complete.

And now the underlying marvel is made manifest. The true
HERO
of these thirty seconds unmasks. The united
FAMILY
fades into a blue cartoon flame, and the
MUSIC
, no longer obscured by visual stimuli, sings with clarion brilliance, “
NATURAL GAS
is a Bee-uti-ful Thing!”

A
MAN
, discovered in
BED
, beside his
WIFE
, suffers the remainder of the
NEWS
, then rises and turns off the
TELEVISION SET
. The screen palely exudes its last quanta of daily radiation. The room by default fills with the dim light of the
MOON
. Risen, the
MAN
, shuffling around the
BED
with a wary gait suggestive of inelasticity and an insincerely willed silence, makes his way into the bathroom, where he urinates. He does this, we sense, not from any urgent physical need but conscientiously, even puritanically, from a basis of theory, to clear himself and his conscience for sleep.

His thoughts show, in vivid montage. As always when hovering above the dim oval of porcelain, he recalls the most intense vision of beauty his forty years have granted him. It was after a lunch in New York. The luncheon
had been prolonged, overstimulating, vinous. Now he was in a taxi, heading up the West Side Highway. At the Fifty-seventh Street turnoff, the need to urinate was a feathery subliminal thought; by the Seventies (where Riverside Drive begins to rise), it was a real pressure; by the Nineties (Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument crumbling, Riverside Park a green cliff looming), it had become an agonizing imperative. Mastering shame, the
MAN
confessed his agony to the
DRIVER
, who, gradually suspending disbelief, swung off the highway at 158th Street and climbed a little cobblestone mountain and found there, evidently not for the first time, a dirty triangular
GARAGE
. Mechanics, black or blackened, stared with white eyes as the strange
MAN
stumbled past them, back through the oily and junk-lined triangle to the apex: here, pinched between obscene frescoes, sat the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Or would ever see. It was a
TOILET BOWL
, a
TOILET BOWL
in its flawed whiteness, its partial wateriness, its total receptiveness: in the harmonious miracle of its infrangible
ens
, its lowly but absolute beauty. The beautiful, it came to him, is no more or less than what you need at the time.

Quick cameo mug shots of Plato, Aquinas, Santayana, and other theorists of beauty,
X
'ed in rough strokes to indicate refutation.

Brief scene:
MAN
brushing teeth, rinsing mouth, spitting.

Cut to
MOON
, impassive.

Return to
MAN
. He stands before the bathroom cabinet, puzzling. He opens the door, which is also a mirror. Zoom to tiny red
BOX
. What is in the
BOX
? Something, we sense, that he resists because it does not conform to his ideal of healthy normality. He closes the door.

He sniffs. As he has been standing puzzling, the odor of his own body has risen to him, a potato-ish, reproachful odor. When he was a child living, like the
CHILD
in the commercial, with adults, he imagined that adults emitted this odor on purpose, to chasten and discipline him. Now that it is his own odor, it does not seem chastening but merely nagging, like the pile of
SLIT ENVELOPES
that clutter the kitchen table every afternoon. Quick still of
ENVELOPES
. Replay of
CHILD
running down
STAIRCASE
to awaiting arms. We are, subliminally, affected.

Shuffling (in case he stubs his toe or steps on a pin), the
MAN
returns from the bathroom and proceeds around the
BED
. The
TELEVISION SET
is cold now. The
MOON
is cold, too. As if easing a read letter back into a slit envelope, he eases himself back into
BED
beside his
WIFE
. He sneaks his hand under her nightie and rubs her back; it is a ritual question. In ritual answer, the
WIFE
stirs in her sleep, awakens enough to realize that the
room is cold, presses her body tight against that of the
MAN
, and falls again asleep. Asleep again. Again again. Asleep.

Now his half of the
BED
has been reduced to a third—a third, furthermore, crimped and indented by oblivious elbows and knees. The
MAN'S
eyes close but his
EARS
open wider, terrible auditory eyes from which lids have been scissored, avid organs hungry for the whispers and crackles of the
WORLD
. He buries his
EARS
alternately in the pillow, but cannot stanch both at once. He thinks of masturbating, but decides there is not enough room. And there is the problem of the
SPOT
on the
SHEET
.

A radiator whistles: steam heat, oil-fired. Would natural gas be noiseless? A far car whirs. Surf, or wind, murmurs; or can it be a helicopter?

Now the
CAT
—a new actor!—mews a foot below the
MAN'S
face. Svelte and insistent, the
CAT
wants to go out. The
MAN
, almost gratefully, rises. Better action than inaction, he thinks—in this a typical citizen of our unmeditative era. The
CAT'S
whiskers, electric, twitching, tingle like frost on the
MAN'S
bare ankles.

Together
MAN
and
CAT
go down a
STAIRCASE
. No oaken knobs here. The style is bare, modern. The
MAN
touches the wall: chill plaster.

The
MAN
opens the front door. G
RASS, TREES, SKY
, and
STARS
, abruptly framed, look colorless and flat, as if, thus surprised, they had barely had time to get their outlines together. The
STARS
, especially, appear perfunctory: bullet holes in a hangar roof. The
CAT
darts offscreen.

We are back in the
BED
. The
MAN
turns the pillow over, to explore with his cheek its dark side. Delicately, yet borrowing insistence from the
CAT'S
example, he pushes his
WIFE'S
body toward her side of the
BED
, inch by inert inch. Minutes of patient nudging are undone when, surfacing toward consciousness, she slumps more confidingly into him. Does she wake, or sleep? Is her reclamation of two-thirds of the
BED
an instinctive territorial assertion of her insensate body, or is it the product, cerebral enough, of some calculation scribbled on the shifting, tricky, flesh-heated marital ground between them? Here the
MAN
, our inadequate hero, seems to arrive at one of those fumbling points that usefully distract the brain with the motions of thinking while the body falls into thought-free bliss. Hopeful pits and bubbles and soft, stretching aches develop within him, forerunners of sleep's merciful dissolution of the tensions and desires of the day.