Jack (Gilead #4)(51)
Reverend Hutchins was a serious man, which placed Jack under a kind of obligation to be honest with him. This was the best interpretation he could make of his own behavior. He had heard himself telling, as if to his father, the very things he would never tell his father. Well, Hutchins did seem to be shaped by and for discretion. His vest was close, not tight, not new either, a sign of self-discipline persisted in for years. He was one of those people who look away when you speak to them, as if watching a story or an idea form under his gaze, ready to laugh or to add something or to ponder the sadness of a tale that was now as much his as it was the teller’s. A respectful man. And Jack would go back the following Sunday to prove he was not dead, which seemed fair in the circumstances.
When he reached the rooming house and went upstairs to his room, he found the clerk and some friend of his looking at his geranium, fists on their hips, which means, more or less, What the hell?! The clerk turned to him. “A flower?”
“One. No harm in it.”
“Nobody brings flowers in here.”
“It’s a geranium,” Jack said, pointlessly.
“Who gives a damn what it is?”
Unanswerable.
“Anyway, it’s too damn clean in here. Expecting company, I suppose. This is a respectable house, remember.” It wasn’t, but there was no point getting into that. Jack could feel the flush rising in his face that meant he would sweat. His whole miserable plan, already given the worst possible interpretation just because he’d put a blasted flower on a windowsill. He thought this as he also thought how ridiculous he’d look delving around in his pockets for his handkerchief, or wiping his face on his sleeve, or just standing there sweating. The clerk looked at him, almost smiling, and said to the other guy, “We’ve got work to get to,” and they left. A joke, but a warning, too. I can humiliate you if I feel like it, with this company of yours here to watch.
Jack did not linger ten seconds over the thought of homicide. Suicide crossed his mind, but he really had forsworn it. That was true. There remained to comfort him an unformed plan to slip down the fire escape and abscond when the rent came due. He had thought through this plan a hundred times, or a thousand, as often as a man with no violent impulses might let himself dream of retaliation. If the bed where he lay was its center, then the area around it in which he might encounter the defrauded clerk on the street was the radius that determined the circumference within which he had better not find another room. Beyond lay all St. Louis and the world. There was the cemetery, but there was also a limit to how long he could stand to go without shaving. A day or two. He hated sleeping in his clothes. Neither would be practical for someone employed as a dance instructor, in any case. He spent an hour or two attempting to ponder how gross disproportion, incommensurability, could be a structural principle of Creation. Mighty hostility pitted against harmless fantasy. The cosmic disorder. The disorder of things. There were no books with these titles, so far as he could discover, and he had looked.
So here he was, buffeted like Satan, falling through the billowing voids. He could not stop himself from thinking that trivi ality added to triviality however many times should finally have some of the qualities of nothingness, nonbeing. But instead, a plan he would no doubt never act on, but which seemed somehow to consecrate his shabby life ex nihilo, a pleasant anticipation that seemed as real as daylight, could collapse into the nothing it always had been because somebody made a cheap joke. He and the clerk were alike in that neither of them mattered at all. Absent either of them, no one would look at the universe and say, Very nice, only one thing missing. This being the case, why could his mind create a demi-paradise, and the clerk destroy it, creating and de-creating like warring gods? At least this is how it seemed to him at the moment. Meaninglessness was no refuge. Giant miseries and giant hopes can carry on their wars in the merest cranny.
Then the door opened partway and the clerk tossed a small cat onto Jack’s bed. “Dames like cats,” he said, and closed the door. This was conciliatory. Jack could think of no other way to interpret it, though he was, of course, cautious. It was a passable cat. Gray with darker gray stripes. Or the other way around. It did not limp or cough. Eyes, ears, and tail were all intact. If there was a trick involving the cat, there was nothing obvious about it. It curled up against his side. When he touched it, it purred.
Whatever was pleasing about the plant was much enhanced by the cat. Here he was, again imagining Della stepping into his room, quietly, tentatively. She would glance around to see what kind of room it was, and be charmed by something, reassured. At first it was the stack of library books on his dresser, all of them poetry. Then it was the flower and the books. He put the little picture of the river on the dresser, too, then put it back in his suitcase, because if the clerk noticed it, he might steal it, literally or in effect. But the cat sleeping in the sunlight by the geranium—he would have to look at her face, the way it brightened and softened when she saw something that charmed her. And then he would ask her to sit down, but she would go to the window first and, say, touch a sleeping paw, make an ear flick.
Sardines ought to please a cat. He picked it up, hand under its belly, and carried it downstairs, alert but unresisting, an animal for which the world was no longer a matter of the somber urges and competences it had felt emerging in its sinews and bones, urges that sent it prowling among the unstartled sparrows and cold-eyed gulls scavenging at the same garbage cans it did. Jack slipped it into his pocket for the moments he spent buying a box of crackers and a tin of sardines.