— III —
He had blundered through his life. He often thought of all the people he had known: those he had touched briefly, those he had loved or hated, those whose names or faces he clearly remembered, their voices. He considered how these people had not managed to ease or simplify his life, his way through life, perhaps, was the more accurate phrase, save for a moment here or there. But what had he expected, what had he wanted? It was, he knew, certain, that had he not known, in any way, all the people he had known, but had, instead, known as many wholly different people, his life, such as it was, would have been the same in its vast panoply of error and carelessness. He had indeed blundered through his life, as he would have blundered through any life given him. Had he been born anywhere at all — he knows this — he’d still be standing at a dark window, alone, wondering who, through the years, precisely he was. “Or who I am.” It was going to snow again.
— IV —
Three windows look out on a cold, sunless street. A toy metal zeppelin, silvery in color, with a rigid vertical fin, rests on the floor on two bright red wheels. There are people in the room, there is laughter and conversation, a Christmas tree in the corner, situated so as to be seen from the street, projects its insistent multicolored lights into the room. A two-year-old boy sits on the zeppelin so as to ride it, to push it with his feet across the floor to where his mother sits with a highball, talking to another woman. The boy slides backwards on the zeppelin and feels a sharp pain as his buttocks strike the sharp fin. Blood seeps through his short pants and he begins to cry, holding his hands against the hurt. The blood runs down the boy’s legs and into his socks.
His father jumps up from his place on the couch where he has been talking, quarreling, really, with his father-in-law, his highball spilling on his trousers. He steps toward the boy, his arms thrust out. His face is white.
— V —
The party was in a very dark apartment. It wasn’t much of a party. There might have been twenty people there, or many more. There was a drone of what seemed to be conversation. There seemed too a drone of music coming from the walls. Sam was looking for his wife. She had gone into a little room off the living room with some people whom she apparently knew. Sam didn’t know them. He knew one of them. He left the apartment and went down the stairs to the ground floor. His wife was at that party, he remembered. In the kitchen. He knew her friends. Or one of them. The door to the apartment was open. The apartment was just as dark as the other one. He went upstairs and got his coat. The cab was waiting right in front of the building. Somebody called down the stairs to say that it was only Saturday. His wife was sitting in a leather armchair. She was smoking a cigarette. Her coat was across her lap. He knew she wanted to leave. This woman was not his wife. She didn’t look like his wife. She was wearing his wife’s clothes. There were six people sitting on the floor in front of the woman. Their backs were to her. They looked at him with amusement. His wife began to emit a low drone. She wasn’t his wife but he knew she was.
— VI —
Most of his friends were dead or far away, staggering into the apathy and complaint of old age. He was, that is, virtually alone, his wife dead for many years, his children distantly attentive, formally so, but no more than that. When he thought of his youth he could scarcely believe that his memories had anything at all to do with the absurd life he was now living, an observation, he knew, that was far from original. Somehow, he had thought that his old age would miraculously produce finer, subtler notions of — what? — life? But he was no better, no cleverer, no more insightful than any shuffling old bastard in the street, absurdly bundled against the slightest breeze.
He didn’t know, or knew but refused to believe, that the celebrations and joys, the razzmatazz, so to speak, of his youth and young manhood, were perhaps perversely, yet precisely, what had brought him to this disquiet, this discomfort, this hidden and unacknowledged longing for oblivion. Had his youth been another sort of youth…. But it had not been, it had been his and his alone, and its clichés and blunders had led, almost sweetly, to the clichés and blunders of his senescence. Time to go and leave the world to the young, happily wallowing in the mess he’d left as a small part of their general inheritance.
— VII —
The girls are on the beach at about three o’clock on a sunny but cool July afternoon. Carol and Marsha and Sheila. Berta and Minna, Nina and Ellie, Bea and Diana and Natalie, Sydelle, Gloria, Margie, Marianne, and Lona. They are all, this summer, in love, first love. They look wonderful, they look pretty; they’re beautiful. Young and bronze and almost perfect in their absolute lack of experience, their innocence that they think of as secret, unique knowledge. They think that they have lived, but life is waiting for them just beyond the beach, just past this particular summer, life with its loss and disillusion and tears, its disease and pain and death. They are beautiful and fading into oblivion.
He stands in the shade of a birch tree on the little island separated from the beach by a shallow and fast-moving rill of water, and he looks at the girls in their varied glamour: he sees them. He sees, too, the girl with whom he is in love in this disappearing summer, and who is in love with him. He will not say her name; he has his reasons, demented though they may be: he has his reasons. She, of course, is the most beautiful of all the girls and will always be so, he mistakenly thinks.
— VIII —
He gets up at 6:00 every morning and turns on the radio, so that he can listen to the news, concerning which, he cares nothing. He makes instant coffee and toasts a store-brand English muffin, which he slathers with peanut butter, eats and then lights a cigarette, one of the five or six he smokes every day, despite his doctor’s warnings about the early signs of emphysema. After he clears the table and washes his few dishes, he goes into the living room, sits in his easy chair, and waits. He waits for news that the world will be ending by noon, that the president has fallen off a horse and broken his neck, that the mighty of the earth have all been vaporized. He waits to hear that Jesus has returned and has been married in Las Vegas. He waits, the radio blathering and droning, on and on.
His wife is dead, his children estranged, all his friends dead, too, or dying, or living in grim sunny places without sidewalks far away. Far away from what? he sometimes laughs, remembering the old story of the death camp survivor. He waits for everything to what? To get tired, to disappear, waits for all the filth to disappear, every mean fucking cold-eyed bastard to disappear, to be obliterated along with their victims, along with the dogs and cats and whales and showgirls, along with all the mothers and sisters and priests, along with all the money, the computers, the radios and the television sets, the news, the news, the news. BOOM.
— IX —
Each day, he’d sit at the kitchen table looking out the sliding glass door at the little patio that he had slowly grown to hate, he had no idea why. He’d sit and drink coffee and smoke and wait for the phone to ring with someone, anyone on the line to give him some news, good or bad or meaningless, it didn’t matter. But the phone rarely rang, and when it did, it presented a message so empty, so anonymous, that it was merely a form of quiet noise.