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He returned to St. Jude in an executive car appended to an intercity freight run, and from Union Station he took the commuter local to the suburbs. In the blocks between the station and his house the last leaves were coming down. It was the season of hurtling, hurtling toward winter. Cavalries of leaf wheeled across the bitten lawns. He stopped in the street and looked at the house that he and a bank owned. The gutters were plugged with twigs and acorns, the mum beds were blasted. It occurred to him that his wife was pregnant again. Months were rushing him forward on their rigid track, carrying him closer to the day he'd be the father of three, the year he'd pay off his mortgage, the season of his death.
Entering the house through the kitchen door, Alfred saw chunks of raw rutabaga in a pot of water, a rubber-banded bunch of beet greens, and some mystery meat in brown butcher paper. Also a casual onion that looked destined to be fried and served with—liver?
On the floor by the basement stairs was a nest of magazines and jelly glasses.
"Al?" Enid called from the basement.
He set down his suitcase and briefcase, gathered the magazines and jelly glasses in his arms, and carried them down the steps.
Enid parked her iron on the ironing board and emerged from the laundry room with butterflies in her stomach— whether from lust or from fear of Al's rage or from fear that she might become enraged herself she didn't know.
He set her straight in a hurry. "What did I ask you to do before I left?"
"You're home early," she said. "The boys are still at the Y."
"What is the one thing I asked you to do while I was gone?"
"I'm catching up on laundry. The boys have been sick."
"Do you remember," he said, "that I asked you to take care of the mess at the top of the stairs? That that was the one thing—the one thing—I asked you to do while I was gone?"
Without waiting for an answer, he went into his metallurgy lab and dumped the magazines and jelly glasses into a heavy-duty trash can. From the hammer shelf he took a badly balanced hammer, a crudely forged Neanderthal club that he hated and kept only for purposes of demolition, and methodically broke each jelly glass. A splinter hit his cheek and he swung more furiously, smashing the shards into smaller shards, but nothing could eradicate his transgression with Chuck Meisner, or the grass-damp triangles of cheerleading leotard, no matter how he hammered.
:(
It was true that Al had asked her to move the jars and magazines, and there was probably a word for the way she'd stepped around those jars and magazines for the last eleven days, often nearly stumbling on them; maybe a psychiatric word with many syllables or maybe a simple word like "spite." But it seemed to her that he'd asked her to do more than "one thing" while he was gone. He'd also asked her to make the boys three meals a day, and clothe them and read to them and nurse them in sickness, and scrub the kitchen floor and wash the sheets and iron his shirts, and do it all without a husband's kisses or kind words. If she tried to get credit for these labors of hers, however, Al simply asked her whose labors had paid for the house and food and linens? Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn't need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly. In any rational accounting, his work canceled her work.
Three common measures of a material's strength were its resistance to pressure, to tension, and to shearing.
Every time his wife's footsteps approached the lab he braced himself to accept her comforts. Then he heard the game ending, and he thought surely she would take pity on him now. It was the one thing he asked of her, the one thing
(Schopenhauer: Woman pays the debt of life not by what she does, but by what she suffers; by the pains of childbearing and care for the child, and by submission to her husband, to whom she should be a patient and cheering companion.)
But no rescue was forthcoming. Through the closed door he heard her retreat to the laundry room. He heard the mild buzz of a transformer, Gary playing with the O-gauge train beneath the Ping-Pong table.
A fourth measure of strength, important to manufacturers of rail stock and machine parts, was hardness.
With unspeakable expenditure of will Alfred turned on a light and opened his lab notebook.
To the boardinghouse a few years after the war came a young steel engineer newly transferred to St. Jude to manage a foundry. He was a full-lipped thick-haired well- muscled boy in a man's shape and a man's suits. The suits were themselves luxuriantly pleated wool beauties. Once or twice every night, serving dinner at the big round table, Enid glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking, and made him blush. Al was Kansan. After two months he found courage to take her skating. They drank cocoa and he told her that human beings were born to suffer. He took her to a steel-company Christmas party and told her that the intelligent were doomed to be tormented by the stupid. He was a good dancer and a good earner, however, and she kissed him in the elevator. Soon they were engaged and they chastely rode a night train to McCook, Nebraska, to visit his aged parents. His father kept a slave whom he was married to.
Cleaning Al's room in St. Jude she found a much- handled volume of Schopenhauer with certain passages underlined. For example: The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.
What to believe about Al Lambert? There were the old- man things he said about himself and the young-man way he looked. Enid had chosen to believe the promise of his looks. Life then became a matter of waiting for his personality to change.
While she waited, she ironed twenty shirts a week, plus her own skirts and blouses.
AHHH
From the street, if you paid attention, you could see the light in the windows dimming as Gary's train or Enid's iron or Alfred's experiments drained power off the grid. But how lifeless the house looked otherwise. In the lighted houses of the Meisners, of the Schumperts and the Persons and the Roots, people were clearly at home—whole families grouped around tables, young heads bent over homework, dens aflicker with TV, toddlers careening, a grandparent testing a tea bag's virtue with a third soaking. These were spirited, unselfconscious houses.
Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact: it was the only fact.
The dream of radical transformation: of one day waking up and finding himself a wholly different (more confident, more serene) kind of person, of escaping that prison of the given, of feeling divinely capable.
"What is the reason you're so cold to me?" she said.
"There are reasons," Alfred said, "but I will not tell you."
"Why are you so unhappy? Why won't you tell me?"
"I will go to the grave before I tell you. To the grave."
"Oh, oh, oh!"
This was a bad husband she had landed, a bad, bad, bad husband who would never give her what she needed. Anything that might have satisfied her he found a reason to withhold.
Enid spoke first to her left-hand neighbor, Mr. Soderblad, a reassuringly ascoted and blue-blazered older Swede. "What's your impression of the ship so far?" she asked. "Is it really super authentic?"
"Well, it does seem to be floating," Mr. Soderblad said with a smile, "in spite of heavy seas."
Enid raised her voice to aid his comprehension. "I mean, is it AUTHENTICALLY SCANDINAVIAN?"
"Well, yes, of course," Mr. Soderblad said. "At the same time, everything in the world is more and more American, don't you think?"
"But you think this captures REALLY SUPER WELL," Enid said, "the flavor of a REAL SCANDINAVIAN SHIP?"
"Actually, it is better than most ships in Scandinavia. My wife and I are quite pleased so far."
Enid abandoned her inquiry unconvinced that Mr. Soderblad had grasped its import. It mattered to her that Europe be European. [...]
[...] "Folks," the tour guide urged, "just sit back and drink it in." But that which can be drunk can also drown. Enid had slept for six of the previous fifty-five hours, and even as Sylvia thanked her for inviting her along she found she had no energy for touring. The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn't understand antiques or architecture, she couldn't draw like Sylvia, she didn't read like Ted, she had few interests and no expertise. A capacity for love was the only true thing she'd ever had. And so she tuned out the tour guide and heeded the October angle of the yellow light, the heart-mangling intensities of the season. In the wind pushing waves across the bay she could smell night's approach. It was coming at her fast: mystery and pain and a strange yearning sense of possibility, as though heartbreak were a thing to be sought and moved toward. [...]