Meeks Read Online Free PDF Page A

soothing them to sleep. As it was for Ben, it was for them: beneath the necessary intensity of mastering a bachelor skill churned the real restlessness, the great and thrilling imprecision of desire.
    Ben wanted to be home, at home in a warm, unregulated place, with the background family fountain of talk, little talk, talk, little talk, and orderly tables suddenly disorderly with the passing of plates. Until then: pushups, statistics, scrimshaw—enviable craft! Albert looked back to smile reassuringly—he looked so young. Ben was not as young as he once was. What if he had waited too long? He had been forced by duty to postpone things and now had to work from the disadvantageous location of a Bachelor House where illness could spread quickly through overcrowded halls and where the defeatist routines of ailing and luckless bachelors in adjoining rooms could demoralize, and even an ambitious bachelor might soon find himself falling into a malaise. At which point, a doomed man (not himself, Ben soothed, but someone else) might die very quickly, even suddenly, perspiring alone in his room, or at the hands of the police, or as a thrown-away man, a worker in the various factories by the waterfront that milled foodstuffs and pumped fresh water and slaughtered animals and electrified the night streets and who knew what else, horrible and communal, until one died of exhaustion or was yanked from the factory floor by the trailing teeth of some awful machine, as had once happened to a friend's unmarried uncle. A loveless, childless man chewed beyond recognition and what did it matter?
    A short, fat bachelor, seeing them pass, bounced up from his bed and swung out into the hall. “Hey there, Brothers! Can I give you a hand?"
    "We're good, thanks,” said Albert and took Ben's elbow, pulling him along quickly. “Hurry,” Albert whispered, “he's practicing."
    "What's his thing?” asked Ben.
    "To be the nicest guy ever,” said Albert snidely, and opened a door off the hall. “Here we are."
    Ben stepped into a small white room, the grooves of the molding softened and deformed by a thousand white-paint repaintings; through the square window he noted the desolate window box.
    "Toilet's down the hall, one per floor."
    Ben noticed another door in the room, the brass knob bent, the white paint around the knob smudged darkly with fingerprints. “Closet?"
    "No, no, no. Sorry—better leave that alone. It's another bachelor's room. Not ideal, I know, but under the circumstances . . ."
    "He has to pass through my room?"
    "Technically, yes. But he never goes anywhere, so I wouldn't worry too much. Finton—one of the old-timers. I think he moved in last summer and has hung on."
    "There isn't another room open?"
    "Nope. But you'll get used to it."
    Ben surveyed his new room, Albert's footfall retreated down the hardwood hall. The standard-issue bachelor's things: the battered armoire, the writing desk, the wooden chair, the narrow bed, the water pitcher. Not standard: the disconcerting door. Ben struggled to open the lone window, and then gave up, resigned to the stuffiness of the room, the heat of the days to come.
    He fished in the satchel for his honeybee cufflinks and set them side by side on the little desk. Symmetry was not the least pleasure. He unpacked the bundle of canvases and unrolled them on the bed. His paintbrushes and tins of pigment, which had been rolled into the canvases, he set aside. The canvases were stiff with the still-life paintings of his prewar days. He studied the old efforts with dismay: the beloved objects of his mind's eye deformed by his idiot hand. He despised them.
    At the center of each painting was his father's military cap, somehow salvaged from the shipwreck; the gold, honeybee cufflinks he had inherited from his mother's father; and a bowl of fruit—apples or mangoes or clementines or bananas—whatever he could bring to mind, the fruit being the variable he had permitted himself, the thing that