It may still all be all right. I think I have found someone to spray my trees, and even someone to dredge the pond. All last night, an immense backhoe at rest towered over my house, and this morning it is at work, ringing and thundering out there. The contractor is unknown. I mean, no one around here seems to know him. It may all be more expensive than it might have been. That is, when the kind old professor came to visit, and suggested that, since I would have anyway to dredge the silt, I might as well at the same time construct a little island in the pond, he also said to be sure to have a man arrange things, because contractors are somehow disinclined to work as well or as honestly for women as for men; and when I told you what he had said, you agreed that it was so. After the dredging is done, I suppose, the place will really look much better, and the danger of floods will have abated. But I guess I also know that the time has come, and that I ought to sell my house. And there it is. Because if these were not failures of love, on your part or on mine, or failures of generosity, or at least of imagination or attention, well, of course, they were, and I didn’t want to know. And though I know my heart cannot have been broken in these things, these things of my house and of yours, no, it can’t have been, I’m sure it was not, I find that I am crying as I write, because, it cannot either, can it? have cost so much to say in some of these things, or in some others sometime, not grudgingly, and without reluctance, Yes.
Look here.
I know.
Would it have cost him all the earth, sometime in all those years, to take her to New Orleans for a week?
The world is everything that is the case. And in the second place because. And in the second place because is how the Nabokov story starts, and I hate the artifice, but it is a star turn. I mean, what a star turn, what a triple coup to begin a story thus, with “And,” when nothing at all has gone before, with “in the second place,” when there has been no first place, with “because,” when there has been no why and there will be no indication what, what thing, what happening, what act, what state of mind, will follow on account of that because. The world is everything that is the case, of course, begins the work of Wittgenstein, and more. So dry and flat, in its self-contained, almost impacted quality there is nonetheless a kind of rolling thunder. True, self-evident, beyond any doubt, it creates a terrible sense of what it is possible, what it might be worthwhile, to say at all. Language, thought, advancing like bulldozers, like cement. Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. Who could argue that the world includes things that are not the case, that some things that are not the case at all are hidden somewhere in the world? Only a specious poet or a trendy French philosopher, toying with metaphor, unworthy of the statement’s august truth. And yet, after the first flash of awe and admiration, the loss is inescapable. I mean, who wants to write specious half-truths. On the other hand, who wants to write cement.
The townhouse twins played the purest countertenor, on the stereo, also Germaine Montero singing Spanish folksongs. Men who sing like women, the super said, bewildered, and women who sing like men.
Here’s how it is in the city, on our street. For the eight years since I moved into this brownstone, they have been building a branch of the subway, to some obscure, unnecessary destination, no one seems to know exactly where. The project has meant, at least, those years of jobs for hardhats and of extra business for the deli. Hardly any inconvenience, apart from diminished parking spaces taken up by the large green structures in which the hardhats eat their donuts and drink beer. Hardly any noise, at least on our street. In deference to the block associations, which are strong here, the city agreed to muffle the nightly whistling and blasting, also, an expensive concession in this line of work, to save the trees. Inside, the first two floors are occupied by the landlady, one or both of whose late husbands must have said that what they loved about her was her temper. From time to time, she needs to throw an all-night party, with singing from The Fireside Book; at other times, though, far more frequently, she needs to provoke quarrels, pound on a tenant’s door, and scream. The house only has four floors. When I’m in town, I’m the tenant on the third floor, just above our landlady’s duplex. Brian and Paula, both young lawyers, both the first in their families to go beyond high school, are on the top floor, with Apple, their Afghan hound.
In the winter, right after New Year’s, our landlady likes to take a cruise around the world. She sublets her two floors for six months and goes. Whoever moves in then inevitably changes the character of the house to some degree. Last year, we had a banker and his family, who were the children and grandchildren of a war criminal. This year, all day on weekends and sometimes after school on weekdays, a child comes and endlessly picks out “Frère Jacques” on the piano. Pausing, hesitating, never getting it quite right, using sometimes one hand, sometimes two, alternating, though this month is March, with a few notes from “Jingle Bells.” One night, when Brian went to look for something in the basement, he encountered an armed man, whom he took to be a prowler. The man was a bodyguard. The family in our landlady’s duplex this year, it turns out, lives under a pseudonym. Their real name is Somoza. Today, this morning, someone is using a hammer and a blowtorch on a house across the garden. Apple has begun to bark. And Madame Somoza cowers behind her shades and draperies at this quantity of noise.
Very amusing, the rich Italians always say now when they’re here. Or else, Not very amusing.
By the time the old couple moved to the suburbs, she had become flatly, almost by reflex, ornery. He was a sort of engine of cliché. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he might say, over his brandy. And she would reply, without hesitation, “Yes it was.”
Maybe he won’t be there when I get back. Maybe I won’t either. Who would have thought that every time he had a choice he would choose the other thing.
Did it mean nothing, then, that he came to see her every day?
Oh, it meant a lot, a lot. And I don’t hold with saying, at every mood and moment, This is how I feel, this is what’s happening now to me. I know reticence has its depths. I really do. But you can go too far with the undone and the unspoken things. What it comes to in the end is that there’s only an ambiguous footprint, a hair that could be anyone’s, a drunken moment that I couldn’t actually swear to, though it held me for a few years longer, to say that there was ever a living creature there. And while I was moved to tears when you walked here in the night, with your flashlight and your dog — not to tears, I guess, but to a stillness of the heart — it was really with your dog that you walked in the moonlight and the woods, and I drove you home. A man I know used to speak of women as high or low maintenance. Since his world was city life, what he meant was that one kind of mistress requires furs, cars, constant small attentions; another kind asks much less. I guess I’ve been high maintenance in just this sense: that you’ve given me more time, on those rides, business travels, visits in the interstices of your life, than you ever planned to give. What you’ve done, though, is to arrange your life so that all the things with a little joy or beauty in them were the things in which I had no part. No, I don’t mean that. It is only that I didn’t think I set the price so very high. There wasn’t ever going to be a price. Yet here I am, after all, alone on Orcas Island. And it’s just that what happens now is just so bleak and ordinary, either way.