A Meaningful Life by L. J. Davis Read Free Book Online Page A

the other kind). He was really in for it now. Gone forever were the days when he could just stop coming by her dorm. He was going to be a grown-up now, and there was no stopping it.
    It was with this sort of nonsense jangling through his head like a burglar alarm in an abandoned grocery store that he turned and beheld his bride coming down the long aisle of the huge, nearly empty church, stepping on the wilted petals left over from a previous ceremony and not swept up. She was wearing a white dress he’d never seen before. With her (and apparently being supported by her arm) was Leo in a swallowtail coat and an immense ascot that was larger than his face, emitting a smell of naphtha and old trunks that seemed to hover almost palpably in the air long after he’d sat down. Once his wife had joined him at the altar, Lowell’s mind refused to photograph anything for his memory’s album until the awful pause that briefly ensued when Mr. Hogarth, blinking up a storm, asked for comments from the audience. Lowell was certain, absolutely certain, that his mother-in-law was going to do something outrageous that would haunt him for the rest of his days. When she failed to do any such thing, he felt himself kind of collapse inside, as if they’d told him they’d decided not to shoot him after all and he could take off the blindfold.
    â€œI almost embarrassed myself there during that pause,” Leo told him afterward. “That would have been too bad, but I managed to hold it in. In case I forgot to mention it, you can call me Poppa if you want. That’s what Betty calls me, Poppa. Personally, I’d rather you called me Leo, but what I’m trying to bring out to you is that you can take your pick. Call me what you want.”
    â€œThanks,” said Lowell dully, gazing almost without recognition at the bloated, stickily tear-streaked face that had risen over his father-in-law’s shoulder like some kind of diseased moon. “This isn’t what I wanted,” he heard it say. “This isn’t anything like what I wanted at all.”
    The reception was held at Lowell’s club. All his fellow members immediately went about getting drunk, especially the sophomores and a senior from Los Angeles that Lowell had never liked. Lowell’s mother and father said something to him in their fond, pleasant way, he couldn’t remember what. At some time or other (he couldn’t remember when) the information came to him that the white dress his wife was wearing had originally been her mother’s, and this little piece of information kept turning up in his thoughts for the rest of the day like the queen of spades in a long game of hearts, but he had the good sense not to talk about it. It occurred to him occasionally in later years.
    They spent their wedding night in a motel on Lombard Street in San Francisco, where they were well known. It was cheap and clean and you didn’t get the feeling that the rooms were bugged with cameras and listening devices like you did at places like the Holiday Inn. Lowell had the presence of mind to stop off first at a car wash in San Mateo and remove the suggestive, obscene, and, above all, informative messages from the hood, trunk, and doors of his car, and the motel keeper was never the wiser.
    First graduated, then married, Lowell finally crossed the two mountains that had loomed in his path for it seemed like years, smack in the way of having a life. Now he was over them, and he could get on with it. And what happened then was, after the bear went over the second mountain, things went downhill for a while, and then they went up a little and got flat, and they stayed that way.

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    Lowell and his wife had very few friends and they entertained virtually no one in their apartment except the cleaning woman, who would occasionally be found at the end of the day curled up in Lowell’s Eames chair, sound asleep with the television going full blast and