First, Nate washes his hands carefully with the oatmeal soap Elizabeth favors these days. There’s something harsh about it, Scottish, penitential. Once she’d indulged herself in sandalwood, cinnamon, musk, Arabian fragrances, pastel and lavish at the same time. That was when she was buying lotions with exotic names and the occasional bottle of perfume. She hadn’t rubbed these lotions on him and it wasn’t for his benefit she dabbed herself behind the ears, though he could dimly remember a time when she might have. He could remember it vividly, he knows, if he wanted to, but he doesn’t want to think about it, those odors, that fragrant moth dance performed for him alone. Why tease those nerves? Everything is gone, the bottles are empty, things get used up.
So now it’s oatmeal soap, with its hints of chapped skin and chilblains. And, for the hands, nothing fancier than glycerine and rosewater.
Nate applies some of this to his own hands. He doesn’t usually dip into Elizabeth’s cosmetics; only when, as now, his hands feel clumsy and raw, abraded by the Varsol he uses to get the paint and polyurethane off them. There’s always a brown line left though, a half-moon around the base of each nail; and he can never quite rid himself of the paint smell. He welcomed this smell once. It said, You exist. Far from the abstractions of paper, torts and writs, the convolutions of a language deliberately dried so that it was empty of any sensuous values. That was in the days when physical objects were thought to have a magic, a mysterious aura superior to the fading power of, say, politics or law. He’d quit in his third year of practice. Take an ethical stance. Grow. Change. Realize your potential.
Elizabeth had approved of this move because it was the sort of thing that would infuriate her aunt. She’d even said they could live on her salary till he got started. Her indulgence proved that she wasn’t at all like Auntie Muriel. But as time went on and he did little more than break even, she’d been less and less approving. Supportive, as they said. This house, too small really, the tenants on the third floor, the workshop in the basement, were supposed to be temporary, she’d reminded him. Then stopped reminding.
It’s partly her fault. Half of her wants a sensitive, impoverished artist, the other half demands a forceful, aggressive lawyer. It was the lawyer she married, then found too conventional. What is he supposed to do?
Occasionally, though by no means all the time, Nate thinks of himself as a lump of putty, helplessly molded by the relentless demands and flinty disapprovals of the women he can’t help being involved with. Dutifully, he tries to make them happy. He fails not because of any intrinsic weakness or lack of will, but because their own desires are hopelessly divided. And there’s more than one of them, these women. They abound, they swarm.
“Toys?” his mother said. “Is that useful?” Meaning: all over the world people are being tortured and imprisoned and shot, and you make toys. She’d wanted him to be a radical lawyer, defending the unjustly accused. How to tell her that, apart from the sterile monetary transactions, contracts, real estate, most of the people he’d had to deal with at Adams, Prewitt and Stein had in fact been accused justly? She would have said it was only training, an apprenticeship he had to undergo to make him ready for the big crusade.
• • •
The Amnesty International newsletter still arrives every month, his mother’s copy, marked with asterisks to show him where to send his courteously worded letters of protest. Children tortured in front of their mothers. Sons disappearing, to surface months later, fingernails missing, skins covered with burns and abrasions, skulls crushed, tossed on roadsides. Old men in damp cells dying of kidney problems. Scientists drugged in Soviet lunatic asylums. South African blacks shot or kicked to death while “escaping.” His mother has a map of the world taped to her kitchen wall, where she can contemplate it while drying the plates. She sticks little stars on it, red ones, the kind the teacher used to dole out for second-best in printing. These innocent grade-school stars mark each new reported case of torture or mass murder; the world is now a haze of stars, constellation upon constellation.
Nevertheless his mother crusades, dauntless astronomer, charting new atrocities, sending out her communications, politely written and neatly typed, unaware of the futility of what she is doing. As far as Nate is concerned she may as well be sending these letters to Mars. She’d brought him up to believe that God is the good in people. Way to fight, God. Nate finds these newsletters of hers so overwhelmingly painful that he’s no longer able to read them. As soon as they arrive, he slips them into the wastepaper basket, then goes to the cellar to pound and chisel. He consoles himself by thinking that his toys are the toys the tortured children would play with if they could. Every child should have toys. To remove all toys because some do not have them is not the answer. Without his toys, surely there would be nothing to fight for. So he will let his mother, worthy woman that she is, compose the letters; he will make the toys.
Tonight he’s been finishing rocking horses; five of them, he finds it easier to do them in lots of five. He sanded them yesterday. Today he’s been painting eyes. Round eyes, expressionless, the eyes of creatures made to be ridden for the pleasure of others. The black eyeliner of the girls on the Strip. This isn’t how he intended the horses to look: he intended joy. But more and more, recently, the toys he makes have this blank look, as if they can’t see him.
He no longer tells people he makes handmade wooden toys in his basement. He says he’s in the toy business. This isn’t because cottage industry has ceased to be viewed as charismatic or even cute. He never thought of it as charismatic or cute; he thought of it as something he might be able to do well. To do one thing well: this was what he wanted. Now he does it well enough. He has a monthly balance sheet. After supplies and the gouge the stores take are deducted, he has money left to pay half the mortgage interest and to buy groceries, cigarettes, enough liquor to coast on. Elizabeth isn’t supporting him. She just acts as though she is.
Nate begins to shave. He lathers his throat, meaning only to trim around the edges of his beard, free his neck and the underside of his jaw of bristles; but he finds the razor moving upwards, circling the edges of his beard like a lawnmower circling a lawn. He’s shaved his beard half off before he knows that it’s his intention to destroy it. From behind the coarse dark hair his face emerges, the face he hasn’t seen in five years, pallid, blood-speckled, dismayed at this exposure. His hands have decided it’s time for him to be someone else.
He rinses his face. He doesn’t have any after-shave — it’s so long since he’s used it — so he rubs some of Elizabeth’s glycerine and rosewater over his new-mown skin. The face that looks back at him from the bathroom mirror is more vulnerable, but also younger and grimmer, the jaw clearly visible now, its furry wisdom gone. A man stroking his beard is one thing, a man stroking his jaw is another.
Before leaving the house he goes into his own room and scrabbles through the piles of coins on his bureau, looking for dimes. Then he changes his socks. He doesn’t expect to be taking his socks off this evening; it’s highly unlikely that he will. However. His feet are white and rootlike, the toenails greyish yellow from the cellar life they’re forced to lead. He sees his feet for an instant, browned and running, on sand, on sun-warmed rock. Far from here.