Time Travail by Howard Waldman Page A

vieux ” meant,
was less sure about “ salaud ” but could guess. Dirty water?
Certainly nothing favorable. It was a bad sign when Marianne lapsed
into French. I had learned that. She added that everybody knew the
real reason for my so-called retirement.
    I got into the car rapidly. As I pulled away
I said: “I’ll send it to you first thing, also a letter to explain
things a little more in detail.” It was no way to say adieu. I gave
her a little wave and regretted it. Seen from her point of view,
standing there in the middle of the sidewalk, things sort of
snatched out from under her, it must have seemed nastily breezy. I
hadn’t meant it that way.
    I felt terrible about it for half an hour. I
would have felt even worse and for longer if the whole scene hadn’t
seemed a little unreal like everything else since I’d emerged from
Harvey’s cellar the day before. Her voice had seemed distant and
distorted. So had Mrs Philips’. In my head I still heard the cellar
voices. They seemed far more real. So did all the scenes they’d
summoned up, more real than the buildings and crowds at the moment
they appeared framed in the windshield of my car. Then they rushed
by and dwindled in the mirror. They vanished into the permanence of
the past.
     
    I soon discovered that there were lots of
strings attached to the job. Practically every week I tripped over
new ones radiating out. After a while I began picturing those
strings as a spider-web and it’s easy to guess where and what I was
in relation to it in my picture.
    In the letter he’d promised me $500 a week,
then in the night of the old voices $700 and finally $1,000. What I
actually collected, in humiliating circumstances, was a measly
$350. He assured me “the balance” (he didn’t specify if the balance
was $650 or $350 or just $150) would be regularly deposited in a
special account in my name and in exactly a year’s time I would get
all the money.
    It was only later that I began to wonder if
getting the contents of that account wasn’t contingent on my
sticking it out with him in that decaying house for a year. Or at
least till the predictable end which, in all sincerity, I can say I
didn’t wish for.
     
    At the beginning I did very little at
Harvey’s to justify even the little money I was drawing. I found it
hard to cope even with the elementary business of getting settled.
I spent a good part of the first week flat on my back on the bed
staring up at the dirty cracked ceiling. It was a screen for the
images the radio voices had resurrected.
    It was strange allowing myself to go back
like that. I’d learned long ago to resist that indulgence.
Indulgence in the sense of giving way to desire. In a religious
sense indulgence also means remission of punishment. No punishment
was involved in visiting the past. Not yet it wasn’t. There was no
loss of control, no feeling that you couldn’t emerge from past
things if you wanted to. I didn’t really want to, as long as the
things were early and harmless. The present was a cracked ceiling
with nothing much better in the other rooms and in the streets
outside.
    It was a kind of pleasant paralysis. Then one
day the memories stopped coming. I felt loss. That should have been
the alarming part only I didn’t realize it at the time. That
suddenly blank ceiling was like the screen in long-ago Saturday
popcorn matinees when the film broke in the projector. Except that
now in my solitary movie-house I couldn’t join in with the rest of
them and jeer and whistle the images back.
    So I was able to get up and throw myself into
the present. I created islets of comparative cleanliness in the
house. I scrubbed my bedroom and painted it. I managed to unjam the
window. Like a teenager in his first room away from home I even
scotched up Van Gogh beach scenes and seascapes. They provided
better views than the window did. I sprinkled roach-powder in
strategic spots. I screwed the chinning-bar in the bathroom
doorframe and had