Death Is a Lonely Business Read online

  Listen to the detective, I thought.

  Jump.

  I was shaking so violently now that I couldn’t get the damn key in the lock.

  Rain followed me inside.

  Inside, waiting for me was …

  An empty twenty-by-twenty studio apartment with a body-damaged sofa, a bookcase with fourteen books in it and lots of waiting space, an easy chair bought on the cheap from Goodwill Industries, a Sears, Roebuck unpainted pinewood desk with an unoiled 1934 Underwood Standard typewriter on it, as big as a player piano and as loud as wooden clogs on a carpetless floor.

  In the typewriter was an anticipatory sheet of paper. In a wood box on one side was my collected literary output, all in one stack. There were copies of Dime Detective, Detective Tales, and Black Mask, each of which had paid me thirty or forty dollars per story. On the other side was another wooden box, waiting to be filled with manuscript. In it was a single page of a book that refused to begin.

  UNTITLED NOVEL.

  With my name under that. And the date, July 1, 1949.

  Which was three months ago.

  I shivered, stripped down, toweled myself off, got into a bathrobe, and came back to stand staring at my desk.

  I touched the typewriter, wondering if it was a lost friend or a man or a mean mistress.

  Somewhere back a few weeks it had made noises vaguely resembling the Muse. Now, more often than not, I sat at the damned machine as if someone had cut my hands off at the wrists. Three or four times a day I sat here and was victimized by literary heaves. Nothing came. Or if it did, it wound up on the floor in hairballs I swept up every night. I was going through that long desert known as Dry Spell, Arizona.

  It had a lot to do with Peg so far away among all those catacomb mummies in Mexico, and my being lonely, and no sun in Venice for the three months, only mist and then fog and then rain and then fog and mist again. I wound myself up in cold cotton batting each midnight, and rolled out all fungus at dawn. My pillow was moist every morning, but I didn’t know what I had dreamed to salt it that way.

  I looked out the window at that telephone, which I listened for all day every day, which never rang offering to bank my splendid novel if I could finish it last year.

  I saw my fingers moving on the typewriter keys, fumbling. I thought they looked like the hands of the dead stranger in the cage, dangled out in the water moving like sea anemones, or like the hands, unseen, of the man behind me tonight on the train.

  Both men gestured.

  Slowly, slowly, I sat down.

  Something thumped within my chest like someone bumping into the bars of an abandoned cage.

  Someone breathed on my neck …

  I had to make both of them go away. I had to do something to quiet them so I could sleep.

  A sound came out of my throat as if I were about to be sick. But I didn’t throw up.

  Instead, my fingers began to type, x-ing out the UNTITLED NOVEL until it was gone.

  Then I went down a space and saw these words begin to jolt out on the paper:

  DEATH and then IS A and then LONELY and then, at last, BUSINESS.

  I grimaced wildly at the title, gasped, and didn’t stop typing for an hour, until I got the storm-lightning train rolled away in the rain and let the lion cage fill with black sea water which poured forth and set the dead man free....

  Down and through my arms, along my hands, and out my cold fingertips onto the page.

  In a flood, the darkness came.

  I laughed, glad for its arrival.

  And fell into bed.

  As I tried to sleep, I began sneezing and sneezing and lay miserably using up a box of Kleenex, feeling the cold would never end.

  During the night the fog thickened, and way out in the bay somewhere sunk and lost, a foghorn blew and blew again. It sounded like a great sea beast long dead and heading for its own grave away from shore, mourning along the way, with no one to care or follow.

  During the night a wind moved in my apartment window and stirred the typed pages of my novel on the desk. I heard the paper whisper like the waters in the canal, like the breath on my neck, and at last I slept.

  I awoke late to a blaze of sun. I sneezed my way to the door and flung it wide to step out into a blow of daylight so fierce it made me want to live forever, and so ashamed of the thought I wanted, like Ahab, to strike the sun. Instead I dressed quickly. My clothes from last night were still damp. I put on tennis shorts and a jacket, then turned the pockets of my damp coat out to find the clot of papier-mâché that had fallen from the dead man’s suit only a few hours ago.

  I touched the pieces with my fingernail, exhaling. I knew what they were. But I wasn’t ready to face up to it yet.

  I am not a runner. But I ran …

  Away from the canal, the cage, the voice talking darkness on the tram, away from my room and the fresh pages waiting to be read which had started to say it all, but I did not want to read them yet. I just ran blindly south on the beach.

  Into Lost World country.

  I slowed at last to stare at the forenoon feedings of strange mechanical beasts.

  Oil wells. Oil pumps.

  These great pterodactyls, I said to friends, had arrived by air, early in the century, gliding in late nights to build their nests. Startled, the shore people woke to hear the pumping sounds of vast hungers. People sat up in bed wakened by the creak, rustle, stir of skeletal shapes, the heave of earthbound, featherless wings rising, falling like primeval breaths at three a.m. Their smell, like time, blew along toe shore, from an age before caves or the men who hid in caves, the smell of jungles falling to be buried in earth and ripening to oil.

  I ran through this forest of brontosauri, imagining triceratops, and the picket-fence stegosaurus, treading black syrups, sinking in tar. Their laments echoed from the shore, where the surf tossed back their ancient thunders.

  I ran past the little white cottages that came later to nest among the monsters, and the canals that had been dug and filled to mirror the bright skies of 1910 when the white gondolas sailed on clean tides and bridges strung with firefly lightbulbs promised future promenades that arrived like overnight ballet troupes and ran away never to return after the war. And the dark beasts just went on sucking the sand while the gondolas sank, taking the last of some party’s laughter with them.

  Some people stayed on, of course, hidden in shacks or locked in some few Mediterranean villas thrown in for architectural irony.

  Running, I came to a full halt. I would have to turn back in a moment and go find that papier-mâché mulch and then go seek the name of its lost and dead owner.

  But for now, one of the Mediterranean palaces, as blazing white as a full moon come to stay upon the sands, stood before me.

  “Constance Rattigan,” I whispered. “Can you come out and play?’

  It was, in fact, a fiery white Arabian Moorish fortress facing; the sea and daring the tides to come in and pull it down. It hat minarets and turrets and blue and white tiles tilted precariously on the sand-shelves no more than one hundred feet from where the curious waves bowed to do obeisance, where the gulls circled down for a chance look, and where I stood now taking root.

  “Constance Rattigan.”

  But no one came out.

  Alone and special in this thunder-lizard territory, this palace guarded that special cinema queen.

  A light burned in one tower window all night and all day. I had never seen it not on. Was she there now?

  Yes!

  For the quickest shadow had crossed the window, as if someone had come to stare down at me and gone away, like a moth.

  I stood remembering.

  Hers had been a swift year in the Twenties, with a quick drop down the mine shaft into the film vaults. Her director, old newsprint said, had found her in bed with the studio hairdresser, and cut Constance Rattigan’s leg muscles with a knife so she would no longer be able to walk the way he loved. Then he had fled to swim straight west toward China. Consta
nce Rattigan was never seen again. If she could walk no one knew.

  God, I heard myself whisper.

  I sensed that she had ventured forth in my world late nights and knew people I knew. There were breaths of near meetings between us.

  Go, I thought, bang the brass lion knocker on her shorefront door.

  No. I shook my head. I was afraid that only a black-and-white film ectoplasm might answer.

  You do not really want to meet your special love, you only want to dream that some night she’ll step out and walk, with her footprints vanishing on the sand as the wind follows, to your apartment where she’ll tap on your window and enter to unspool her spirit-light in long creeks of film on your ceiling.

  Constance, dear Rattigan, I thought, run out! Jump in that big white Duesenberg parked bright and fiery in the sand, rev the motor, wave, and motor me away south to Coronado, down the sunlit coast!

  No one revved a motor, no one waved, no one took me south to sun, away from that foghorn that buried itself at sea.

  So I backed off, surprised to find salt water up over my tennis shoes, turned to walk back toward cold rain in cages, the greatest writer in the world, but no one knew, just me.

  I had the moist confetti, the papier-mâché mulch, in my jacket pocket, when I stepped into the one place where I knew that I ad to go.

  It was where the old men gathered.

  It was a small, dim shop facing the railway tracks where candy, cigarettes, and magazines were sold and tickets for the big red trolley cars that rushed from L.A. to the sea.

  The tobacco-shed-smelling place was run by two nicotine-stained brothers who were always sniveling and bickering at each other like old maids. On a bench to one side, ignoring the arguments like crowds at a boring tennis match, a nest of old men stayed by the hour and the day, lying upward about their ages. One said he was eighty-two. Another bragged that he was ninety. A third said ninety-four. It changed from week to week, as each misremembered last month’s lie.

  And if you listened, as the big iron trains rolled by, you could hear the rust flake off the old men’s bones and snow through their bloodstreams to shimmer for a moment in their dying gaze as they settled for long hours between sentences and tried to recall the subject they had started on at noon and might finish off at midnight, when the two brothers, bickering, shut up shop and went away sniveling to their bachelor beds.

  Where the old men lived, nobody knew. Every night, after the brothers grouched off into the dark, the old men dispersed like tumbleweeds, blown every which way in the salt wind.

  I stepped into the eternal dusk of the place and stood staring at the bench where the old men had sat since the beginning of time.

  There was an empty place between the old men. Where there had always been four, now there were only three, and I could tell from their faces that something was wrong.

  I looked at their feet, which were surrounded by not only scatterings of cigar ash, but a gentle snowfall of strange little paper-punchouts, the confetti from hundreds of trolley line tickets in various L and X and M shapes.

  I took my hand out of my pocket and compared the now almost dried soggy mess with the snow on the floor. I bent and picked some of it up and let it sift from my fingers, an alphabet down the air.

  I looked at the empty place on the bench.

  “Where’s that old gent—?” I stopped.

  For the old men were staring at me as if I had fired a gun at their silence. Besides, their look said, I wasn’t dressed right for a funeral.

  One of the oldest lit his pipe and at last, puffing it, muttered, “He’ll be along. Always does.”

  But the other two stirred uncomfortably, their faces shadowed.

  “Where,” I dared to say, “does he live?”

  The old man stopped puffing. “Who wants to know?”

  “Me,” I said. “You know me. I’ve come in here for years.”

  The old men glanced at each other, nervously.

  “It’s urgent,” I said.

  The old man stirred a final time.

  “Canaries,” murmured the oldest man.

  “What?”

  “Canary lady.” His pipe had gone out. He lit it again, his eyes troubled. “But don’t bother him. He’s all right. He’s not sick. He’ll be along.”

  He was protesting too much, which made the other old men writhe slowly, secretly, on the bench.

  “His name—?” I asked.

  That was a mistake. Not to know his name! My God, everyone knew that! The old men glared at me.

  I flushed and backed off.

  “Canary lady,” I said, and ran out the door to be almost killed by an arriving Venice Short Line train thirty feet from the shop door.

  “Jackass!” cried the motorman, leaning out and waving his fist.

  “Canary lady!” I yelled, stupidly, shaking my fist to show I was alive.

  And stumbled off to find her.

  I knew her address from the sign in her window.

  canaries for sale.

  Venice was and is full of lost places where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls, hoping no one will buy.

  There is hardly an old house with unwashed curtains which does not sport a sign in the window.

  1927 NASH. REASONABLE. REAR.

  Or

  BRASS BED, HARDLY USED. CHEAP. UPSTAIRS.

  Walking, one thinks, which side of the bed was used, and how long on both sides, and how long on both sides, and how long never again, twenty, thirty years ago?

  Or VIOLINS, GUITARS, MANDOLINS.

  And in the window ancient instruments strung not with wire or cat-gut but spiderwebs, and inside an old man crouched over a workbench shaping wood, his head always turned away from the light, his hands moving; someone left over from the year when the gondolas were stranded in backyards to become flower planters.

  How long since he had sold a violin or guitar?

  Knock at the door, the window. The old man goes on cutting and sandpapering, his face, his shoulders shaking. Is he laughing because you tap and he pretends not to hear?

  You pass a window with a final sign.

  ROOM WITH A VIEW.

  The room looks over the sea. But for ten years no one has ever been up there. The sea might as well not exist.

  I turned a final corner and what I was searching for was there.

  It hung in the sunbrowned window, its fragile letters drawn in weathered lead pencil, as faint as lemon juice that had burned itself out, self-erased, oh God, some fifty years ago!

  canaries for sale.

  Yes, someone half a century ago had licked a pencil tip, lettered the cardboard and hung it to age, fixed with flypaper adhesive tape, and gone upstairs to tea in rooms where dust lacquered the banister in gums, choked the lightbulbs so they burned with an Oriental light; where pillows were balls of lint and shadows hung in closets from empty racks.

  canaries for sale.

  I did not knock. Years before, out of mindless curiosity, I had tried, and, feeling foolish, gone away.

  I turned the ancient doorknob. The door glided in. The downstairs was empty. There was no furniture in any of the rooms. I called up through the dusty sunlight.

  “Anyone home?”

  I thought I heard an attic-whisper:

  “… no one.”

  Flies lay dead in the windows. A few moths that had died the summer of 1929 dusted their wings on the front screens.

  Somewhere far above, where ancient Rapunzel-without-hair was lost in her tower, a single feather fell and touched the air:

  “… yes?”

  A mouse sighed in the dark rafters:

  “… come in.”

  I pushed the inner door wider. It gave with a great, grinding shriek. I had a feeling that it had been left unoiled so that anyone entering unannounced would be given away by rusty hinges.

  A moth tapped at a dead lightbulb in the upper hall.

  “… up here....”

  I stepped up to
ward twilight at noon, past mirrors that were turned to the wall. No glass could see me coming. No glass would see me go....

  “… yes?” A whisper.

  I hesitated by the door at the top of the stairs. Perhaps I expected to look in and find a giant canary, stretched out on a carpet of dust, songless, capable only of heart murmurs for talk.

  I stepped in.

  I heard a gasp.

  In the middle of an empty room stood a bed on which, eyes shut, mouth faintly breathing, lay an old woman.

  Archaeopteryx, I thought.

  I did. I really did.

  I had seen such bones in a museum, the fragile reptilian wings of that lost and extinct bird, the shape of it touched on sandstone in etchings that might have been made by some Egyptian priest.

  This bed, and its contents, was like the silt of a river that runs shallow. Traced now in its quiet flow was a jackstraw litter of chaff and thin skeleton.

  She lay flat and strewn out so delicately I could not believe it was a living creature, but only a fossil undisturbed by eternity’s tread.

  “Yes?” The tiny yellowed head just above the coverlet opened its eyes. Tiny shards of light blinked at me.

  “Canaries?” I heard myself say. “The sign in your window? The birds?”

  “Oh,” the old woman sighed. “… Dear.”

  She had forgotten. Perhaps she hadn’t been downstairs in years. And I was the first, perhaps, to come upstairs in a thousand days.

  “Oh,” she whispered, “that was long ago. Canaries. Yes. I had some lovely ones.

  “1920,” again in the whisper. “1930—1931—.” Her voice faded. The years stopped there.

  Just the other morn. Just the other noon.

  “They used to sing, my lands, how they sang. But no one ever came to buy. Why? I never sold one.”

  I glanced around. There was a birdcage in the far north corner of the room, and two more half-hidden in a closet.

  “Sorry,” she murmured. “I must have forgotten to take that sign out of my window....”