Edgar Doctorow - All the Time in the World

You what!

I mean, it wasn’t what you thought, was it? So why not?

Right. Why wouldn’t you invite him in, since I told him if he came around again I’d call the cops?

You should have invited him in yourself when he told you he’d lived in this house.

Why is that a credential? Everyone has lived somewhere or other. Would you want to relive your glorious past? I shouldn’t think so. And this is not the first time.

Don’t start in, please.

Husband says white, wife says black. The way it works. So the world will know what she thinks of her husband.

Why is it always about you! We’re not the same person. I have my own mind.

Do you, now!

Hey, you guys, we got an argument brewing?

Close your door, son. This doesn’t concern you.

Every time another man comes into this house you go berserk. A plumber, someone to measure for the window blinds, the man who reads the gas meter.

Ah, but is your man a man? Awfully fruity-looking to me. Wears his white hair in a ponytail. And those tiny little hands. What does the well-known fag-hag have to say?

He’s a PhD and a poet.

Jesus, I should have known.

He gave up his teaching job to travel the country. His book is on the dining-room table. He signed it for us.

A wandering minstrel in his Ford Falcon.

Why are you so horrible!

ARGUING IS INSTEAD OF SEX.

It has been a while.

This is better.

Yes.

I don’t know why I get so upset.

You’re just a normally defective man.

So we’re all like this? Thank you.

Yes. It’s an imperfect gender.

I’m sorry I said what I said.

I’m thinking now, with all three of them in school all day, I should get a job.

Doing what?

Or maybe go for a graduate degree of some kind. Make myself useful.

What brings this on?

Times change. They need me less and less. They have their friends, their practices. I carpool. They come home and stay in their rooms with their games. You work late. I’m alone in this house a lot.

We should go to the theater more. A night in town. Or you like opera. I’ll do opera as long as it isn’t Richard fucking Wagner.

That’s not what I’m saying.

You chose the suburbs, you know. I work to pay off the mortgage. The three tuitions. The two car payments.

I’m not blaming you. Could we turn on the light a moment?

What’s the matter?

There’s no moon. In the dark, it feels like a tomb.

THIS IS VERY EMBARRASSING.

What were you doing there at three in the morning?

Sleeping. That’s all. I wasn’t bothering anyone.

Yeah, well, the cops are touchy these days. People sleeping in their cars.

It used to be a ball field. I played softball there as a boy.

Well, it’s the mall now.

You don’t mind that I gave them your name?

Not at all. I like being known as a criminal associate. Why didn’t you just check into the local Marriott?

I was trying to save money. The weather is clement. I thought, Why not?

Clement. Yes, it’s definitely clement.

Is it the habit of the police to go around impounding cars? Because if they think I’m a drug dealer, or something like that, they will find only books, my computer, luggage, clothes, and camping gear and a few private mementos that mean something only to me. Very unsettling, strangers digging around in my things. If I’d stayed at a hotel, I’d be on my way right now. I’m really sorry to impose on you.

Well, what’s a neighbor for.

That’s funny. I appreciate humor in this situation.

I’m glad.

But we’d be neighbors only if time had imploded. Actually, if time were to implode we’d be more than neighbors. We’d be living together, the past and the present moving through each other’s space.

Like in a rooming house.

If you wish, yes. As in a sort of rooming house.

SO HE’S THERE. What — hitting on your wife?

No, that won’t happen. It’s not what he’s about. I’m pretty sure.

So what’s the problem?

He comes on like some prissy fusspot poet, doesn’t have it together, drives a junk heap, claims to have quit his teaching job but was probably fired. And, with all of that, you know he’s a player.

Yeah, I know people like that.

His difficulties work in his favor. He gets what he wants.

So what does he want from you?

I’m not sure. It’s weird. The house? Like I’ve defaulted on the mortgage and he’s the banker come to repossess.

So why’d you bring him home? He could sit in a Starbucks while they went through his car.

Well, he called. And I hang up and there she is looking at me. And I’m suddenly into proving something to her. You see what’s happening? I can no longer be me, which is to say to the guy, I don’t know you. Who the fuck cares if you lived here or didn’t live here? They’ll give you back your damn car and you can leave. But no, he works it so that I have to prove something to my own wife — that I am capable of a charitable act.

I guess you are.

So, like, he’s now some new relative of ours. This touches on the basic fault line in our marriage. She’s naïve in principle — she forgives everybody everything. Always excusing people, finding a rationale for the shitty things they do. A clerk shortchanges her, she imagines he’s distracted and just made a mistake.

Well, that’s a lovely quality.

I know, I know. Her philosophy is if you trust people they will be trustworthy. Drives me crazy.

So they’ll give him back his car and he’ll go.

No. Not if I know her. She’ll drive him to pick it up. The day will have passed, and she’ll ask him to stay for dinner. And then she’ll insist that he shouldn’t be allowed to drive off in the night. And I will look at her and sit there and agree. And she will show him to the guest room. I’ll give you odds.

You’re a bit overwrought. Have another.

Why the hell not?

WITH AGE, YOU SEE how much of it is invented. Not only what is invisible but what is everywhere visible.

I’m not sure I understand.

Well, you’re still quite young.

Thank you. I wish I felt young.

I’m not talking about one’s self-image. Or the way life can be too much of the same thing day in and day out. I’m not talking about mere unhappiness.

Am I merely unhappy?

I’m in no position to judge. But let’s say melancholy seems to suit the lady.

Oh, dear — that it’s that obvious.

But, in any case, whatever our state of mind life seems for most of our lives an intense occupation — keeping busy, competing intellectually, physically, nationally, seeking justice, demanding love, perfecting our institutions. All the fashions of survival. Everything we do to make history, the archive of our inventiveness. As if there were no context.

But there is?

Yes. Some vast — what to call it? — indifference that slowly creeps up on you with age, that becomes more insistent with age. That’s what I’m trying to explain. I’m afraid I’m not doing a very good job.

No, really, this is interesting.

I get very voluble on even one glass of sherry.

More?

Thank you. But I’m trying to explain the estrangement that comes over one after some years. For some earlier, for others later, but always inevitably.

And to you, now?

Yes. It’s a kind of wearing out, I suppose. As if life had become threadbare, with the light peeking through. The estrangement begins in moments, in little sharp judgments that you instantly put out of your mind. You draw back, though you’re fascinated. Because it’s the truest feeling a person can have, and so it comes again and again, drifting through your defenses, and finally settles over you like some cold, very cold, light. Maybe I should stop talking about this. It is almost to deny it, talking about it.