What I Need Don't Come in Suitcases

A Story by RALPH MALONEY

AT THE bottom of the heart ‘s awful pile there is a place cold and durable as a clam that stares out of the oddly circular eyes of the stacked inmates of Auschwitz and of men being swapped at Panmunjom; stares out of old, grainy AP photos of — what are they? — bone-skinny little-boy manikins with stringy malnutrition beards. This cold place in the heart, the clam under discussion, is tough to get to and lousy when you get there, but it is imperative to come close to it at some time in one’s life.

Closer, anyway, than the women behind the rimless glasses in the right front seat of recent Plymouths who have been staring flat at me these past few weeks. Squinty, hateface, staring at me boldly, understanding no peril, until actually it is I who looks away. Little old hubby-daddy at the wheel is afraid of me and pretends to scan the bay; but she stares. They paid nine sixty the couple to ride the ferry to this island I’m on, and there is nothing here to do or see, so they drive around very slowly all day, and they look at me two or three times, and my privy.

(“What’s that little house right next to that shack, Elliott?" she asks, who never saw indoor plumbing until the Rural Electrification Act.

“Prolly some kyna storehouse,” says Elliott, bathroom uneasy.) Come closer, too, than Elliott, who didn’t see anybody dead until he was twenty-six, when it is too late — and then the body was under a tarpaulin next to an automobile salad, which was no help at all, connected death to nothing. He was born amid great noise, earned a high school diploma at home, never did a goddamned thing in his life, and now he is retired. That’s it, you see. It is all right to do nothing always and die. But he is not dead. He is retired.

(There is a theory that prolonged isolation alters the very chemical structure of the brain. I am learning why solitary confinement is a punishment. Bear with me.)

The funny thing is, I like Elliott. He shares with me all kinds of awkwardnesses and uncertainties. We fear different things — he is afraid of Itralians and debt, and as will become apparent I am afraid of insanity and dying — but we are equally afraid. We like pretty much the same things, man talk no matter what it’s about, the golf on television. I like things harder, more, than Elliott; but that’s no virtue on my part nor is it a failing on his.

But old sanitary hateface at his side — I mean to say I don’t like her. She is a mother-in-law now, and celebrated in cartoon and story as weak, vindictive, unforgiving, and loud. Quite true, you say on brief acquaintance, but what’s funny about that? The answer is Nothing is funny about that. She is a waste of fresh air and orange juice, a waste of clean cotton underwear, any landscape she ever looked at, and a waste of frog’s legs if she ever ate a frog’s leg. She stares me down unrelenting, the light making bright flashing squares of her glasses. If a man looked at me with such an absence of esteem, I would break his face or die trying. But she can peer at me in any way she wishes because she is not simply unconquerable, she is unassailable in a world I have somehow inherited. I can’t touch her, which, of course, is why I hate her. I am afraid. Why else hate?

Everybody who lives on an island is a litde bit crazy. That’s why Manhattan was so much fun before everybody commuted to the mainland. It is unnecessary at this juncture in our narrative to report that the resident loony of Ocracoke Island (speaking) has a stability problem, but believe me, it is not my fault at all. Because what it comes down to is this aforementioned cold clam place in the heart, and mine has been reached too often and too well lately, and I see those PanmunjomAuschwitz eyes in the mirror and I say Yes, this is insanity, but there seems to be no choice, no alternative. After you know that there is not a hell of a lot left to learn.

For many years I sent a wire every spring to Tom Yawkey, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, offering him a power-hitting third baseman with a magician’s glove. Then Frank Malzone came up to play third base for the Red Sox, having been delayed two years by a real good hit in that clam place I’m talking about when his kid died, and I decided I was not a third baseman anymore but a right-handed middle-innings reliefer with a world of savvy, knows the hitters, and I wired Yawkey about that every spring for many more years. I never got an answer. I asked a Red Sox front-office man why I never got an answer (not an invitation to try out, for heaven’s sake, just an answer). We were at the bar of a first-rate restaurant on Fast Forty-eighth Street in New York, having drinks before lunch, and when the front-office man opened his mouth to explain things to me, he threw up all over himself.

I tell that dreadful story to divert myself and to spare you how lousy things are. But if I am resolute for a moment, perhaps I can creep up on how things are. Listen: I once interviewed on camera three winos sitting in a doorway on the Bowery. It was for British television. The winos all had jobs and wore clean chinos, and their idea of a good time was to drink thirty-seven-cent sneaky pete in a doorway and talk. Crazy, right?

At any rate, I told them the junk they were drinking would kill them quicker than anything they could drink without lye in it, and the lush on the left stood up and said, “You think I’m afraid to die? I ain’t afraid to die. Why do you think they got fences around graveyards? Keep the people out!” I thought that was great and bought them some wine, but when we got back to the studios it turned out some four-hundred-dollar cameraman had been “two stops out,” whatever that is, during the filming, and it all had to be reshot or thrown away. At great expense to the management but no extra cost to you, I took a camera crew back to the same doorway the next day, and the same guys were there. I tried to get the lush on the left to tell me again about fences and graveyards and people, and he shook his head No. They were none of them at all camera-shy, and it bothered me that this man wouldn’t perform one more time. “Yesterday you told me you weren’t afraid to die,” I said. “You said the reason they have fences around graveyards is to keep the people out.”

He nodded. “That was yesterday,” he said.

But I’m still walking around it as though it were a beached ray, prodding it with a stick to see if it’s still alive, watching the wicked tail. Or perhaps it’s this way: In “Big Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway fishes upstream until he reaches the headwater marsh and the cattails standing tall in the ooze, and he can’t force himself to go any farther. And that is where I stand now, but I’m going farther.

I was once desperately loved by a plain and intolerably rich girl named Lee. Nobody who has not been in that situation can know what a bore it is. She kept a split case of Gordon’s and Dewar’s under the bathroom sink because being adored can make one insanely nervous, and I needed all the help I could get. But even that didn’t really do it, and after a while I had to get out. One afternoon when Lee was downtown telling Cartier where to get off, I packed my two grubby Samsonite suitcases and was standing like a refugee at the front door when she walked in. She was a very nice girl, and her face was so bad when she saw what I was doing that I stayed. I couldn’t cause any more pain that day. She got into the scotch pretty bad later on, and she said, “I can’t stand the thought of you with anybody else. You’re so beautiful.”

Absolutely without cruelty, without rudeness even, I laughed in her face, her nice, plain face.

I know what there is of me, and if there is one thing it ain’t, it’s beautiful. Finally I got Lee to lie down and then to sleep. I left without the suitcases — traveling light, and what I need don’t come in suitcases. On the sidewalk I heard Lee call, and I looked up and saw her standing on a four-inch ledge three stories above me. I talked her back through the window because I could not then abide the prospect of her head hitting the pavement. I went back upstairs and put her to bed.

Later, when my nerves were truly gone and I had left Lee, I saw her at a formal dinner party of all of our friends. I was with a pretty girl who held me in light regard. Lee walked in the door in a gown that surely cost a year’s salary for a UAW mechanic ($4.50 an hour, last time I looked), and her face collapsed in pain when she saw me. I could not have hurt her more if I had hit her with a tire iron.

That’s what pain is. Just before my youngest brother died an auctioneer on the West Side took his last fourteen dollars for a watch that had no insides, and bullied him out. To stay with the family for the moment, let me demonstrate that the more traditional hurts really don’t matter. When Moms died 1 carried her to bed and took off my necktie to tie her jaw shut, and I decided to take two new bridges out of her mouth for the gold. The nurse stopped me, saying, “Her face’ll look all sunk,” and I said, nineteen then, “Easy come, easy go,” and stuck the bridges back in. Didn’t hurt at all.

But here it is. I am homing on it now. A friend of mine was wintering in Bavaria in 1045 and9 heard male voices speaking in German behind a cement bunker. Some whiskey-in-a-jelly-glass rebel covered him, and he crept to the bunker and took a grenade from his belt. He meant to tuck the grenade in there and when the fragments settled, go in and shoot up what was left. In the movies they pull grenade pins with their teeth, but a grenade pin is a cotter pin and you might try tomorrow to bite one off your kid’s bike. While my friend, Pete, was trying to flatten the cotter pin he heard women’s voices, and then children’s voices, and he held the grenade and bellied down the slope and saw two fat krauts playing some noisy game for the last cigarette and two young women herding perhaps eight children. “ Americanishe!” the kids cried on cue. “Chocolat!”

But me, I can always get the pin out of the grenade. Ocracoke Island is spooky and full of legends and working pirates and wild horses. A hot wind blows always and things go bang in the night and there are footsteps. If you wake up in the middle of the night, don’t wake me. Even the sunsets — a hundred miles wide and twenty high — spook me. So I walked, scared at twilight, to one of those aluminum cubes somebody sold the telephone company for isolated outdoor booths, and called home collect. One kid got on each phone, and we told lies to each other about how marvelous things were. When we had talked for quite a while my wife came on the phone and said, “What are we supposed to do for money?”

“Little attention-getting device, right?” The cotter pin was flat, moving out nicely.

“The telephone company called. And you know that smell when you’re at the bottom of the propane tanks?”

“Borrow from your mother.” The cotter pin was out. Soon I had only to lift my thumb and the grenade would be armed.

“My mother doesn’t have any money.”

I could see her standing with her silken shoulder blades almost touching in outrage. Exquisite. Take my word. “You mean little old rimless hateface nana-mommy is broke?” I said. “Pawn her Timex, her motel towels. Sell her back issues of Arizona Sunsets and Presbyterian Life.” I was frothing like a horse named Red I once won considerable money on at Suffolk Downs. Solitude alters one. “Stand around the corner your mouth in a pout. Swing your purse under a streetlamp, you want some money.” The grenade was exploding all around all of us.

“Are you crazy?” Excellent question.

“Will you accept a collect call from a Mr. Baloney in Ocracoke, North Carolina?” a voice said.

“Operator The call has already been placed!”

“No,” my wife said, and hung up.

“They don’t answer,” the operator said, to spare me rejection.

“The world is in a state of chassis,” I said, and I hung up.

I stepped out of the curious aluminum cube somebody sold the phone company into the spooky Ocracoke twilight with the unending and strangely uncooling wind. I had thirteen cents in my pocket and could not pay for a call home. I walked around the parking lot where the phone booth was with my hands on my hips like a halfback kid after practice, knowing what I had done wrong all day, all year, but hurting now, and too tired to change a thing.