Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“So what do you think of Henry Miller?” He had seen my book.

“He’s good. He’s funny,” I said. “He’s got a great vocabulary.”

The man smiled. “He employs sesquipedalian verbiage,” he said, and eased the meatballs into the bread with the heel of the ladle.

I was fascinated that a drunken Italian in a paper hat would say something like this.

“But his best books are banned because of our procrustean laws,” he said. “Know what I mean?”

“Something like procrastinate?”

He shook his head — no. He was spooning chopped onions and tomatoes.

“Procrustes was a robber in Greek legend who had an iron bed. It was a certain size. He made people lie on it and if they were too tall for it he cut their legs off. If they were too short he stretched them to fit the bed. Procrustean. It means ruthlessly inflexible.”

“What if they were the right size — what if they fit?”

“No one ever fits,” the man said, and handed me my meatball sub. “He was killed by Theseus. You owe me thirty-five cents.”

He said he was a writer and I was sure he was telling me a secret. He was writing a play set in Leipzig. Had I thought of writing plays? I said yes, telling him one of my secrets. He said he hoped to see me again, the next time I wanted a sub. His name, he said, was Sal Balinieri.

That night I wrote a Henry Miller letter to the Maldwyn Country Club and used the word “procrustean” in it.

The next day I went to the MDC pool on the Charles River, across the road from the Mass General Hospital, and I was hired as the third lifeguard. The other two were Larry McGinnis and Vinny Muzzaroll.

Larry said, “A position just became vacant this morning. It’s kind of a strange story. See, Arturo Lopez, the other lifeguard, was a member of a street gang on Harrison Avenue. About five of the guys jumped a woman around midnight and dragged her up to the roof of a building, where they took turns raping her. When it was Arturo’s turn, and he was about to bang her, he saw it was his mother, and he jumped off the roof. Which is why we have a vacancy.”

I was on the point of saying It’s like a Greek tragedy when Vinny Muzzaroll piped up.

“Don’t believe him,” Muzzaroll said. “Lopez joined the army. It was the only way he could get back to San Juan.”

Still, I kept thinking of the story. It made no difference to me that it hadn’t happened. As he had spoken I had vividly imagined it, and I knew I would never forget it.

We took turns on the lifeguard chair. The pool was a stew of thrashing swimmers. Larry said, “It’s impossible to watch them all. Every night when we clear the pool I expect to see a stiff on the bottom that’s been there all day.” The pay was better than at the Maldwyn Country Club, the hours were shorter, and no one minded if I read on the job, providing the book wasn’t obvious.

“The only reason Muzzaroll doesn’t read on the job is he can’t read,” Larry said.

I found it very relaxing here. It had been a strain to work among people who had money and no brains. Except for Mrs. Mamalujian, they had seemed dreadful people; and I did not know which was worse, the way they had ignored me or the way they had stared. Thinking about them often made me angry. One lunch hour I called Kaloostian. Reuben had baffled me one day by telling me that this man was an Assyrian.

I said, “You didn’t reply to my letter.”

“I didn’t realize you wanted one. It’s not the kind of letter that’s easy to answer.”

“That would have been the polite thing to do,” I said. “I guess it’s not an Assyrian custom.”

He went silent. It was probably a mistake to refer to his origins.

“I think Mattanza’s out of his mind,” I said. “I think he’s a feeb.”

“We understood that from your letter, but we can’t give you your job back.”

“I don’t want the fucking job back — I want an explanation.”

“So do we. For example, we were wondering what happened to a twenty-five-pound bag of potatoes that vanished from the kitchen.”

“Don’t ask me.”

“And how they ended up in the parking lot, stuck into the exhaust pipes of the members’ cars.”

I had been so angry about his not replying to my letter that I had forgotten about that. I was glad we were on the phone, so that he could not see me smile.

“Noreen Dorian had a sick mother. Naturally she couldn’t visit her. I understand the poor woman was beside herself. Putting a potato into someone’s exhaust pipe is a pretty heartless act.”

Hearing him say it that way made me laugh, but I put my hand over my mouth.

“Some of those cars are still not working properly.”

“It’s got nothing to do with me,” I said. “I’m not interested in those cars. All I want is an answer to my letter.”

Kaloostian wasn’t apologetic. He said, “Know what I’d like to do? I’d like to keep that letter and show it to you in about twenty years.”

“What for?”

“Just to see what you’ll say. I think you’ll be ashamed of it.”

“I won’t! I’ll be proud of it. In twenty years I’ll say the same thing.”

“About ‘pernicious little tyrants in Bermuda shorts’?”

“Yes, all of that. I won’t forget it. I want you to know one thing. I will always remember that you and your friends will never get hemorrhoids, because you’re perfect assholes.”

I hung up, banging the receiver hard.

There was a snicker behind me — a girl suppressing laughter; but when I saw her I laughed too.

“I’m glad you weren’t talking to me,” she said.

“That was the president of the Maldwyn Country Club. He let me down. I have no mercy.”

She was slim, pinch-faced and blonde. She had a biggish nose and small breasts. Her dark blue bathing suit made her seem paler than she was, and she had alert intelligent eyes. I liked her lips and the way her hair was tangled. She had the bad posture that I associated with shy girls — sort of pigeon-toed as she stood there. She was carrying a book. Anyone with a book interested me. Hers was On the Road , the hardback.

“Can I use the phone?” she said.

“Go ahead,” I said, and realized that I had been staring at her.

I went back to my post, which was a tall steel chair at the edge of the pool. I put my leg up and tucked The Henry Miller Reader just behind my knee. I had thought the crowd and the noise — all the running and screaming — would make this pool a hard place to work. But my reading took the curse off it. The swimmers didn’t create problems, but the others did — they fought, they tripped and fell, they bruised themselves and cracked their skulls. Muzzaroll did the bandaging and then kicked them out. That made it easy: if someone didn’t behave we sent him home. If only I could have done that at the Maldwyn Country Club.

There were solitary men here who never swam, but only lurked and watched the little girls with hot eyes. Some kids did nothing but chase each other. Others hung on the fence like monkeys. On good days the nurses from the Mass General came over for a dip.

My back was turned to the Charles River. Sometimes I glanced around and saw the people in sailboats, the racing eights, the lovers in rowboats, the yachts making their way to Boston Harbor. But the view from the lifeguard chair was of the pool, and behind it the bathhouse, and across Memorial Drive the Mass General — people in pajamas at the windows, staring with chalky faces, looking upset.

I discovered that I could read amid the screams, the honking traffic, the running feet, and Muzzaroll’s announcements on the loudspeaker: We have found a purse. Will the owner please come to the office and identify its contents? They played radios, they yelled, they sang. The factory whistles blared across the Charles, and the MTA trains rattled on the bridge to City Square.