That evening he asked Bisch about his life. For all his apparent formidableness, his cellmate was a gentle man (After all, Feldman thought, he’s a tailor, he makes men’s clothes), and he began to talk about his life as if he had only been waiting to be asked. Telling Feldman of his troubles, the gloomy man seemed to brighten. Feldman remembered the expression. He had seen it before, in his basement when people had come to him for his favors. He had not wanted their stories — only their demands, the swooped desperation of their terrible solutions. But nothing could keep them from talking. They became debaters, makers of speeches, articulating grievances as if they had been statements of policy, listing troubles like logicians posting reasons. On their faces too he had seen the same queer gaiety, the high hilarity of their justifications. It was not gaiety, of course, or even nervousness, but a kind of awe, as if, hearing what they said themselves, they were not so much touched by their griefs as impressed by them. They smiled as they spoke. It was the smile anterior to sin. Priests never saw that smile, policemen didn’t. All confessions were bawled, whined, whispered from trance. Trouble only sounded bold, choppy with detail like the breathless report of a messenger from a burning city.
“She had this infection,” Bisch said. “In her face. She’d get a fever. A hundred. A hundred one. It would swell. My wife’s beautiful face. The gums drained. In her sleep. One night she almost choked on it. It stank. I made her pillows in my shop. She slept sitting up. She wouldn’t let me sleep with her. She was ashamed of the way she smelled. I would wipe her lips in her sleep with a tissue. I flushed it down the toilet. I wanted her to think she was getting better. But I couldn’t wipe the taste out of her mouth.
“The doctor said it was sinus. That’s what they treated her for. But it wasn’t sinus. They gave her tests. All the tests. She was always in pain. She said it was like having cuts inside her mouth. Then they said she had to have all her teeth out. What was she — twenty-eight? She didn’t want to. They weren’t even sure, she said. It changed the face. She had a very beautiful face. The muscles collapse. Something happens to the jaw, the lips. The expression is different. It looks like spite.
“But I made her do it, and it was terrible for her. She was a beautiful woman.
“But she was right. It didn’t make any difference. She still had the fever after they pulled the teeth. They said it would go down when the gums stopped draining, but the gums didn’t stop draining. It was as if there was a fire inside her somewhere and they couldn’t find it. They couldn’t do anything.
“Her jaw was too small. The teeth they made her didn’t fit. I got her others. She couldn’t wear them. She said what difference did it make. I tried to kiss her, but she wouldn’t let me. We didn’t sleep together any more. One night I went to wipe her lips and I bent down to kiss her while she slept. It was soft — her mouth. I never felt anything like that before. It was as if there was just this soft skin over her and she was empty inside. I threw up. It was awful. I still taste my wife’s mouth.
“She couldn’t forgive me. She was always crying. I made her beautiful dresses. I always made her beautiful dresses, but these were even more beautiful. She wouldn’t wear them. She thought I was laughing at her. Laughing at her—Jesus!”
He killed her, Feldman thought. The poison flowed from the high ground of her fever and he couldn’t stand it and he killed her. He looked away from Bisch’s shining eyes. Why, he’s like a soldier, he thought. He serves his trouble. Feldman shuddered and nodded helplessly.
Bisch sighed, observing him.
Ghost stories, Feldman thought.
He went to the television room, where he saw a documentary on migrant workers and their families and a situation comedy about a little boy with divorced parents who goes to visit his father or mother on alternate weeks in the series. Feldman had seen the program before. The kid, obsessed, conspired to bring his mother and father together again, and tonight he shammed infantile paralysis. The news program reported white reprisals in Philadelphia for the attack of two fifteen-year-old Negroes on a nun. It told of cold war and plane crash and storm. Today the President, after a flying trip covering eight states, had declared seven new disaster areas. The governors in the Midwest had asked for only five. He knows, Feldman thought. He returned to his cell. Bisch, asleep, was groaning in a dream. Feldman wondered if he should wake him, wipe his lips.
Until now Feldman had tried to ignore his fellow convicts. He feared them, of course. They were hostile men and seemed to know more about him than he wished. The famous grapevine, he thought, and imagined a sort of demonic pony express. It’s all that talking out of the side of the mouth (he fancied a great hoarse chain of whispered intimacies). What was astonishing was their accuracy. Because they were accustomed to conspiracy’s low tones nothing was lost, and because they had no imagination nothing was distorted. So he kept out of their way.
Now, however, he was interested. Appalled by their horror stories, he wondered about them. (Wondering about them, he wondered about himself. Is this character? he thought.) He had none of their desire to gossip. Yet he discovered a quality in himself that he had been unaware of before. Surprised at their unhappiness—how unhappy? why unhappy? weren’t all men happy? — he wished now to know about other men, to ask them questions.
He thought it would be difficult, but it was easy. People were willing, even eager, to talk. There was in them, he supposed, a respect for his wealth, his differences from them. Then they were losers, and losers were accustomed to talking about themselves. They spilled the beans and exposed the linen to guidance counselors, juvenile parole officers, social workers, free psychologists, free psychiatrists, sob-sister reporters, and at last to their court-appointed lawyers. They would mourn to anyone who might help them, to anyone not in trouble who might get them out of trouble. Open not to advice but to miracle, they rattled away in any ear.
So he made it his business to find out about them. With their permission he peeked into their moneyless wallets, stared fascinated through the yellowing plastic windows at wives and fathers and sweethearts and mothers and sisters and sons and daughters, the human background of even the loneliest men. (Staring, he thought: Everyone has been photographed, everyone in the world; everyone, smiling, posing, has made the small, poor holiday before a camera, thinking: Catch me, hold me, keep me.) How thin they all were. Even in pictures, which normally added pounds, these people seemed light, foreign and a little like Indians. They looked to have frailty’s toughness and wiry strength, but they would not last, he knew. The children had the sharp vision of the poor, their clever legs. They could see long distances down alleys and run quickly through city streets, making fools of their pursuers, but they would not last either. What attracted Feldman most were the women — thin, hard-armed, hard-breasted, and with babushkas on their heads. Yesterday’s B-girls and waitresses and bench workers and bruised daughters, foulmouthed, pitiful and without pity, their suspicion misplaced and their trust too. Kid-slappers, Feldman thought, smokers in bed, drinkers in taverns while the apartment is burning, runners amok. Whew, whew, he thought, tricky in bed, tricky, tricky, too much for me—I wouldn’t last — clawers of ass and pullers of hair and suckers of cock.