The Return of Service

Birthday Gifts

In this dream my father comes to visit with a box of birds as a birthday gift. I am between birthdays so I ask if it is for the one past or the one coming up. “It is for one long forgotten, your seventh or ninth, the year I was out of my mind.” I have no recollection of the circumstance he describes and accept the gift as a token of something else. There are some visitors with him, six or seven celebrated figures, including our major living poet.

What have they come here for? “I want them to commemorate you,” says my father. “I want them to see what you’ve become.” They space themselves out in a row of hard-back chairs like an audience. “We’ve just come from seeing the movie, Rules of the Game,” the famous poet says in his New England southern accent. “I don’t see what all the fuss is about. It fails to meet the test of time.”

“Do you mean the Renoir?” I ask.

“It fails the moment ambition takes over,” says another.

I defend the movie, modestly at first, not wanting to offend.

“You’re making a bad impression,” my father whispers. “You argue in too loud a voice and on top of that you have no clothes on.”

It is true. They had come in on me before I had time to dress.

I excuse myself from the company to put something on.

When I leave the room — I am hardly out the door — I can hear them talking about me. “Who is he?” a voice asks. “Is he a friend of someone’s?” “I don’t know,” says another voice which sounds like my father’s.

They had come to see me celebrate a former birthday uncommemorated in its time. How can they not know who I am? Perhaps it is a metaphor. Perhaps they are asking who I am in the metaphysical sense. “It is one of the great movies,” I shout at them through the door to my room.

My birthday birds have gotten loose in my room, flying in a hectic flutter in all directions, pecking and chirping. What kind of gift is a box of birds? I put on my new suit, a hand-tailored dustgray linen, to show these visitors that I have clothes as fine as the best of them.

My return is heralded by a small somewhat perfunctory applause.

I look over the row of dissatisfied faces before beginning. “If you’re so successful,” I want to say, “why is it you’ve gotten no pleasure from your lives?”.

My father comes up on the stage to introduce me. “I’d like you to give this failure the kind of attention you’d give to one of your own.”

“What does he have to say to us?” someone calls out.

“If he has nothing to say, may he have the grace to say it briefly,” says my defender.

Before I can say a word, thinking of blowing my nose, a bird flies out of my pocket. The crowd laughs. “He’s funny,” says the famous poet to my father, “but is he serious?”

I mean to be serious and say so when two more birds fly out from under my shirt. “Now that’s more like it,” says the dean of American letters, snorting his laugh. I hold up my hands to silence the applause, explain again that I am the victim of accident, my birthday birds having gotten out of their box. I tell them of my unrealized vision, the heartbreaking disparity between the glowing achievement I intended and the anonymity I have come to accept as my lot.

“Too much bathos,” says the poet.

A bird drops its soft pellets on the shoulder of my linen suit.

“Ah the birds have the last word,” someone says, the one woman in the group, a grandmotherly crone. The audience claps with appreciation.

“Now that’s what I call a critic,” says my father, pointing to the feathered bomber.

I can see now that there’s no point in going on with my presentation. The crowd takes me for a fool and I tend to become the way others see me. I rush the row of chairs in a fury and make clownish faces in the face at the end of each turkey neck in the audience. “Who are you?” I ask them. They fall over at the slightest question. These celebrities are cardboard mock-ups, figures in a shooting gallery. I drive them out the door, my father first and last.

It is not my birthday. I celebrate whatever day it is alone.

I am slowly reading a book about the passage of time. The pages, which are heavy, turn themselves when they are done. This young woman, my wife, comes into the room to ask why I don’t do something of large imaginative possibility with my life, which is not, she wants me to know, going to last till the end of time. “I happen to be reading a book. Isn’t that enough?” Your friend, K, she reminds me, who is two months younger, has already made a quarter of a million dollars on subsidiary rights alone and won two major literary awards.

“But is K happy?” I ask her. She says, but are you. We are talking about K, I remind her.

Does she think I don’t care about K’s unearned success? I have plans not to say another word to him unless he admits that success has nothing to do with the inner man.

My wife, no longer young, goes out of the room shaking her head. I call after her, “It’s no sin to be jealous of K.”

“I make no judgments,” she says.

In the book I am reading it says, underlined in red pencil, “The time of the man who waits will come.” It strikes me that the author is making oblique reference to my own life. When I show the text to the woman who shares my life she says that it is a different kind of waiting to which the book refers. She turns the page before the page is ready to turn.

The next page is blank. What does it mean? We put our arms around each other and weep. When K comes in to complain about the unfairness of his last set of reviews his hair is white.

We put a place mark in the book about time and the three of us go out for a walk. It is one of the most beautiful days ever made, the breeze like the rustle of satin in a room of silken women. K remarks on it. “If I could make a day like this,” he says, “I would give up everything else.”

For moments, I am desperately happy. “Why are you smiling?” my wife asks. “I have never seen you smile like that before.”

I am desperately happy. “Is it because you love us?” she asks. K says he is tired and sits down on the running board of an abandoned automobile. He waves us on as if he were tending a road in the process of repair. “Someday we’ll see each other in a different light.” he says.

In his absence, K dominates our concern. “One of us ought to stay with him while he rests.” says my wife. “Is he waiting?” I ask her. She pretends not to know what I mean.

“I don’t mind if you go back,” I say, hoping that she will choose not to return.

“I can’t bring myself to leave you,” she says.

I finish alone the walk the three of us started together, The path, though giving the appearance of being straight, gradually winds back on itself, When I return home the book I have been reading on time is gone, K has borrowed it, she says. His bowels are stuck without a diverting book to read, “Besides,” she says in a voice like an avalanche of feathers, “he is dying.” (Of what?) “His life is killing him. He is dying of loneliness and ennui. He is incapacitated by an inability to love.” She covers her face with her hands.

“Isn’t that true of everyone?” I say.

“It is even more true of K than of everyone,” she says. “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to show that man that the world is not empty of genuine trust and affection.”

“How are you going to do that?”

She is, before I can ask the question a second time, gone. The door closes behind her. “What about me?” I ask, calling her on the phone. “You’re not so bad,” she says. In her absence I revise my life. I take in cats off the street. My hair grows long in the back and on the sides, recedes gracefully in front. I no longer wear a tie except when I leave the house.

She calls me to say that K’s white hair has turned black.

In the mirror, the face of experience opposes me with eyes that burn with unannounced losses. Everything I have ever been separated from, including a penknife I lost when I was nine, hides in those bleak hollows. In my eyes, in their reflection in the mirror, I can see the book on time that used to keep me company. It is the same book, though apparently also somewhat different, an earlier or later edition. Every page is the page I had been reading last. And on that same page there is the same sentence repeated over and over until abridged at the bottom by the limits of the page. The time of the man who waits will come. The time of the man who waits will

I lie down on the rug to wait for something new to be written.

My life has run out of words.

I have just killed my first woman. It has been that kind of day. Slow. Slower than the New York subway system on a slow hot summer Sunday morning.

My first shots took out the red-rimmed headlights of a fiftyish alcoholic, a former winner of the Prix de Rome. I was testing my sights when he staggered into range as if looking for someone to dispel the myth of his immortality.

When I woke up this morning I thought I would have a breakfast of cereal and fresh fruit and just oil my gun. The fruit has gone rotten overnight. That shouldn’t have happened.

On the Today show, Barbara Walters was interviewing the first dog ever to publish a cookbook. “That dog earns more money than you,” my wife said. It was after that that I thought I’d look out the window to see if there was anything to shoot.

In the afternoon I get a call from someone whose voice I’d never heard before. “You the guy been shooting things out the window?”

“Wrong number,” I say quickly. “I happen to be the dog that wrote the best selling cookbook you may have seen interviewed on the Today show this morning by Barbara Walters.”

“‘Look, whoever you are, I’m not the kind of guy wants to get you in trouble,” my caller says. “So I would appreciate it if you would do me this favor. In about twenty, twenty-five minutes my old lady is coming over for a visit. She’s got short fluffed-up white hair and is a bit stout. She’ll be going into the building almost directly across from your window, the number is 167, and you’ll be doing me a favor if you pop her one as she goes in.”

“I can’t make any promises,” I say. “I’m a spontaneous, indiscriminate, free-fire assassin. If she strikes my fancy, fine. Otherwise, I just couldn’t squeeze it off.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says in a bullying voice dimly familiar, “because if she doesn’t get popped, you may have a policeman ringing your bell the next thing you know.” He hangs up before I can ask him his name.

Some moments after his last words a woman much like the woman he describes bobs like an apple into my sights. It is a question of retaining my independence. Although I could easily shoot her — she has, I might say, a certain flair as a target — I let her go by.

She has hardly gone when there is a heavy knock at the door.

My wife answers. I listen from under the bed behind a locked door.

“We have a complaint that someone is shooting people from a window in this apartment.”

“I’ve been in the kitchen all morning,” she says, “and I can’t hear a thing when the dishwasher is running.”

“Is there someone else in this living unit, a husband or a loved one?”

I couldn’t hear her answer but apparently it was no because I heard the door close a few minutes after.

I dry off my palms, which are reddish (perhaps from the stain on the gun barrel), before returning to my station. Later, my wife comes in and pleads with me to give up the sniping business.

It is a calling, I tell her, which is, for someone who has never had one, something hard to understand.

She shakes my shoulder, making me miss a shot I had particularly relished. “You could give it up if you really wanted to, Jack. Everything we do is a matter of choice, and you know it.”

I offer a compromise: one more killing and then I give it up.

One last one and I will never look through the sights of a gun again.

“All right,” she says, a grudging compliance, “but you have to let me pick out the last one for you. Do you agree?”

This is the first show of interest she has ever given my line of work. We spend the morning and afternoon looking out the window together, waiting for her to make her choice.

“How about that one?” I suggest from time to time.

“Are you kidding?” she would say. “You can’t possibly be interested in that one. That one’s all wrong for you.”

The light is gone so we quit for the day, have a dinner of our usual leftovers and go to bed. (Did I remember to clean the gun?)

The next day. Before I can finish my breakfast of stewed prunes, poached eggs on toast, and tea, she is at the window with my gun fixed into her shoulder, studying the cityscape like a born assassin. “I think I see someone for you,” she says, but when I get there whoever she has in mind for me has evaporated.

Later, the morning wasted in inaction — nothing exactly right — she asks, “Would you mind if I took a shot?”

“At what?”

“Oh, at anything. I just want to see what it feels like.”

“Do you know how to aim?”

“You look through this thing, don’t you?”

“You aim at something in the sights then squeeze the trigger exceedingly gently so as to keep the gun from jumping as it fires.”

She nods then pulls the trigger off in a blind rush, shooting the horse out from under a mounted policeman. “That was easy.”

She brings the gun, which had squirmed like a baby at the release of the shot, back into firing position. I try to get it away from her but she holds tight.

“One more,” she says. “What’s fair for you is fair for me.”

I say no, and ask once again in a reasonable tone for the return of the gun. “Killing is addictive,” I remind her.

My empty hand out is ignored. She fires three leaping shots in ripe succession, pinning the policeman to the flanks of his horse.

I go out and come back, sit around reading old newspapers, waiting for her to give it up. There are none of the anticipated opportunities. The gun visits the bathroom when she does. She wears it in a sling over her shoulder at the dinner table.

My opportunity will come, I think, when she goes to sleep, which is something she’s done every night for as long as I’ve known her.

At two minutes after midnight she is still at the window with my gun.

What I do, which is hard to do when you are genuinely tired, is pretend to go to sleep. She lies down next to me and without warning screams, “The police are coming for you,” in my ear.

I groan in my pretended sleep. “Are you asleep?” she asks again and again. When I say, “Yes,” she rolls over on her side, sighing like a cat.

There’s no need to detail here the process by which I cut away the rifle strap from around her shoulder while she sleeps and slide the gun out from under her nightgown without waking her. It is done. Although I am fond of the gun — it is one of the objects of my affection — I am resolved for my wife’s sake to dispose of it before she wakes. I think of reducing it to its parts and burying it in a cemetery or dropping it with weights around the barrel into a river.

She is awake and calling my name before I am out the door.

Before I can reason with her we are in a tug of war. The gun goes off. She falls in a fragment of blood like the missing section of a jigsaw puzzle.

It is not my idea of married life.

I am walking with the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.

“What are your chances?” I ask him.

We are walking down the steps of the Pentagon. “They could be better and they could be worse: He has, it is characteristic of him, the saddest smile. “If pushed to the wall, I would say two to one.”

The answer makes no sense to me, though I let it pass. I tell him that according to my sense of the national vibration, he’s going to win the election, time on his side. The election, insofar as I can remember, is two or three months away. It was or is. Such facts of time are unreliable.

He talks about loyalty and betrayal, asks if I would support a man who had no chance to win. If he was the best man, I say.

I reach for a handkerchief. A Secret Service man grabs my hand before I can get it inside my pants pocket, removes a gun I didn’t know I had.

“It is easier to trust people,” says the candidate with painful regret, “when you make sure they have nothing about them to distrust.”

How can I explain the secret possession of a weapon? “I use it for hunting,” I say. “That is, I used to hunt. It is now just a token of former days.” I offer half a dozen self-conflicting explanations.

“You don’t want me to win, do you?” he says sternly, his face closed to interpretation. “What you want is to commit yourself to an occasion for defeat.”

I insist that it is not true, offer to do whatever I can to help bring about his election.

“How far would you go?”

“Try me.”

“There is something we desperately need at this time in our history, but to be frank I doubt that you’re the right man for the job.” Our latrines are beyond the pale.

I defend his behavior to myself as an aspect of his distraction.

I volunteer my services. “With all due respect. sir,” I say, “I believe I, can write better speeches than the ones you’ve been using.”

“Maybe so. Maybe so.” He walks very quickly, irritated with me or perhaps with himself, a pigeon flying out of his back pocket. He is not the man I imagined he was, if still the best of two practical alternatives.

Dreaming of time is dreaming of being too late.

The next time we meet he does not remember our earlier interview. I joke with him. “Has anyone cleaned out the latrines for you yet?”

He clamps thumb and forefinger to his nose. “My friend, you wouldn’t believe how high the shit has risen. We’ve had to move our headquarters on three separate occasions just to escape it.”

“The last time we talked I asked you what you thought your chances were and you gave me a concise and somewhat cryptic answer. I’d like to ask you what your view of your chances is today.”

“Same view. Same chances.”

He has the look of a man who has spent all hope, his face even more saintlike than I remember it under the strain of lost cause. I ask for an elucidation of his remarks.

He shakes his head in a convulsive way a number of times.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Jack, I’m late for a hell-raising dinner. I guess we can go along together and talk if that suits your plans.”

I share a taxi with him to the Grand Hotel. As a campaign economy, I let sit on my lap one of his entourage, his interpreter of questions and labor problems, a skinny dark-haired woman named Winnie. The cab has its radio on, making it difficult to hear ourselves talk.

“Sometimes the measure of, a man,” says the candidate, “is how he bears his losses.”

I remind him that it was he who had accused me of defeatism in the early days: The interpreter on my lap says, “Shhh.” There is something on the news she wants to hear. The static as we rush through traffic is almost impenetrable, “We’re winning,” she says, “according to the early returns.”

“Is she kidding?” I ask him. “The voting hasn’t taken place yet, has it?”

“Winnie has a way of cutting through all the gunk,” he says, “to the heart of the message.”

“You’ve taken Idaho and the Philippines,” she reports.

“I suppose,” the candidate says in his weary drawl, “I’ll have to give them back.”

“What will you do, senator, if you win?”

“First of all, I’ll give up prophecy.”

Everyone in the cab laughs.

“Can this man walk on water?” asks the cabdriver. “The traffic don’t budge, it don’t budge. So where are we?”

“Just take your time,” says the candidate. “They can’t do anything until we get there.”

“What’s the latest?” I ask the interpreter.

“They’ve stopped voting,” she says. “Everything’s at a standstill.”

The candidate makes a personal appeal to his followers not to panic. His eyes close out of weariness. A crack appears in his forehead above the right eye. He says in a whisper, “Now you see from the inside, Jack, what this campaign’s been like.”

“There have been,” someone says, “thirty — nine attempts on his probity.”

For no reason, for nothing I’ve done, the interpreter turns around and kisses me. “Have you ever thought of politics?” she asks. The candidate’s crowd of supporters clap politely and call for a speech.

“I’m getting old,” says the candidate. “Someone’s going to have to take my place.”

When no one is looking, unable to fulfill their expectations of me, I sneak out the door of the cab and, unsure of the direction, run for my life.

An angry crowd, a mob it would seem, appears out of a blind alley to block my way. “Surprise,” they shout in one voice. “Many happy returns.”