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

a bottle of Lowell’s gin beside her on the floor. She kept the apartment as neat as a pin, was utterly reliable, and did not ask for much in the way of salary; in view of these virtues, neither Lowell nor his wife considered her drinking a major failing. Once at Christmas they tried to give her a bottle of Hankey Bannister in a gift box, which offended her so much that she almost quit and was sullen for a month. It was very difficult to know how to treat her. From time to time, with every indication of pride, she would present them with some small horror or other that her son had been forced to make at school: a plaster impression of his hand, painted gold; a green ashtray made of some crumbly, flammable compound; a plaster impression of his other hand, painted red. Although Lowell and his wife dutifully displayed every gift that came, they would always return one night to find that the cleaning lady had quietly removed it from its place and thrown it away. Anyway, she didn’t get drunk very often.
    Lowell’s best friend was the heroically moustached art director of a tobacco magazine that published in the same building where Lowell worked at plumbing. His name was Harry Balmer, and despite the evidence of his moustache he was nervous, compulsive, and wracked with small fears. He looked his best from across a wide room; the closer you got to him, the more he seemed to fall apart into a mass of twitches and gnawed fingernails and the clearer it became that his big, smart-looking moustache was a kind of bush he was trying to hide behind. Every once in a while he and Lowell would go down to McSorley’s after work and get drunk together on ale. Lowell didn’t really know if he liked Harry Balmer or not—his feelings about him were vaguely mingled and not very strong, one way or the other; he never spent much time with him except at McSorley’s, and afterward he could never remember very clearly what they’d talked about.
    â€œI’ve got it figured out,” he told Balmer one night as they sat with their mugs near the old cast-iron stove.
    â€œGood idea,” said Balmer. A group of students were making a lot of noise and falling down in the next room.
    â€œIt came to me one morning,” said Lowell. “I’m not having a meaningful life. It came to me just like that.”
    â€œBachelorhood,” said Balmer. “The only answer. Who needs a wife? Take it from me. Firmly committed. Firmly.”
    Lowell shook his head from side to side in an effort to clear it. He was certain that they’d already had Balmer’s half of this conversation before, perhaps several times, and he had the queer feeling that he wasn’t getting through. It was like trying to have a conversation with a tape recording.
    â€œMarry late, live long, see life,” said Balmer. “Marrying late does a lot for you. Take me, for example. Free as a bird. How come you’re looking at your watch? You’re worried about the time, aren’t you? Got to be on time. The old wife. Not me. Did you say something?”
    â€œI said, I’m not looking at my watch,” said Lowell.
    â€œSome fucker filled this ashtray with beer,” said Balmer, picking up his hopelessly sodden, half-smoked cigarette and examining it as a nerve fluttered madly in one corner of his eye.
    From time to time Lowell also went out to lunch with members of the staff, but he never drank enough to tell them anything important about himself.
    Lowell and his wife had a good time living with each other, and they seldom quarreled. Their apartment was spacious and basically comfortable despite being strangely designed, and except on weekends they were never in it during the day, when you could see the place in the living-room ceiling where the plaster was badly patched and it became evident that pale green was not the color for the bathroom. Lowell generally returned home from work about half an hour before his