Robert Vivian BachelorsIn the dwellings of old bachelors, you can sometimes see heartbreaking new ways to hang clothes. They lope over the backs of dusty chairs, or hang limply on doorknobs like dry sea grass. They hang wherever they can, wherever they must, in attitudes close to napping, on a shoetree or pewter lamp, a window latch or an open cabinet door swinging back to a road trip to Chicago, or a brief fling in the Virgin Islands. It’s all right here, the missed appointments, the raucous laughter, the drunken sleep.

I have seen and marked their fading interior lives, their evaporating plaids, their tired tweeds. Where are the dyes that made them new? Where are the ironed creases that limned out the confidence of a new beginning, in an office or the fine upholstery of a new car?

Many years ago my ex-wife and I stayed with her father, a man who’s been a bachelor for over thirty years. The wooden floor of his 8th story apartment in downtown Denver was strewn with toenail clippings and old newspapers, like a ghost town exhaling invisible vapors. Dust was everywhere, and of such a rare fineness and delicacy that you could ponder its silt-like consistency for hours, as if it had been flown in from the moon and sprinkled on a whim.

All of this did not impress me very much one way or the other: I simply took it at as one of his idiosyncrasies, a who-the-hell-cares kind of attitude that I actually admired. I was young enough to ignore anything that did not immediately affect me, anything beneath the shelf of the obvious and my own selfishness. My ex-wife was different. She often cried after our Denver visits, ashamed and worried for him. How can he live like that? she kept asking over and over, a refrain that would echo down over the years. How can he live in that mess? That her post-visit keening would commence two hundred miles outside of Denver never struck me as strange; that she turned her beautiful, graceful face to the window and wept seemed a necessary stitch in the very fabric of their relationship--compounded because they were the last of their kind in the world, her father’s only child after six marriages, divorced from her mother when she was five years old. She understood that the threadbare circumstances of his apartment also reflected a deeper aspect of him, something essential and broken-down, something beyond caring.

It was not the decay of his place that upset her; it was the way he took his teeth out at each night and put them in the same filthy and bacteria-laden water. Or the knobby rubber hound-dog on his desk, the one that looked as if it had endured stifling heat under a cracked windshield, only to freeze again in the trunk, moved from place to place. It was the pile of jazz records stacked like hubcaps on the floor, and the old record player she had seen in other apartments and condos, other rooms. It was a hundred and one things that moved her to tears, his piss-stained carpet around the toilet bowl, or the ring of grime in the bathtub beyond scrubbing. It was his whole transient, bachelor way of life that made her cry, his seeming indifference to the way he lived.

So one morning, in the middle of one of our stays, I woke to the sound of scrubbing. It was a rasping sound, fine-grained, like furniture being sanded down. I let it play in my head awhile before I got up to investigate, its artificial waves a strange kind of comfort in that place. I got up and went into the kitchen. Her father had left to get his morning paper and roll. She was in her bathrobe on her hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor. I watched her for a long time, as if her circling motions had induced a kind of trance. I didn’t say anything. The strained effort in her features did not broach comment. She was not angry or sad, not self-righteous or disgusted. She was simply cleaning, and the swath of her rag showed a surprising brightness beneath the grime, like the sudden promise of a new day.

I went to the sink and started washing the dishes, first letting hot tap water run over the bowls of hardened milk. We didn’t say a word, except to ask for another sponge or scrub brush. We waded into the filth around us, clearing it inch by inch. Suddenly our cleaning took on a momentum all its own, rising and falling like a hymn. When he came in a half-hour later, he sat down as usual to read his morning paper. But something had changed. A pall was lifting, turning into light. You could smell it in the air as we opened the windows, see it working its way through the newly burnished objects in the rooms.

How can he live that way? she kept asking. How can he just let it all go? Those long drives back to Omaha were the working out of a salvation for him that only she could know, as she counted all the ways it could be different if only he just cared, if only he had the self-made dignity of a clean home. Thereafter, we knew without saying a word that each time we drove out to see him, we would clean up a bit, vacuum his floors, wash his sheets, polish the furniture.

Was this the real purpose of our visits? Were we trying to rescue him from himself? We’re divorced now, and everything is different. He lives in Indianapolis, supported by his wealthy nephew; everything is taken care of for him. He no longer lives in legions of his own patriarchal dust, nor do his shirts hang as if they were wrung out by hot and cold winds, by the failure of so many busted commitments. But he still sleeps on this strange foam rubber cushion that he puts on top of his king-sized bed; he still goes days and weeks without emptying the ash trays. He still projects an aura of hasty retreat, of leaving in the middle of the night, of giving up the chase and moving on in a moment’s notice. Now his clothes are draped on wooden hangers, beautiful to behold in their paisley splendor. I saw them once. And my ex-wife and I still talk about him once in a great while, laugh at his peculiarities, even as we face our own lives moving away from each other.        

We always had him in common, the three of us going to restaurants, drinking, laughing, everything had promise: we thought we knew what we wanted. We thought it was all mapped out for us, hanging just at the tip of our fingers like a ripe, exotic fruit. I can still see him staring out the window, looking into the troubled past. For now wherever he is the clutter has been contained, the linen hung neatly; someone comes in and does it for him. I know it’s just an interval, and like all intervals, must fade out and die away, more or less in total silence, away from the jazz and the smoke. We each have our own mess of confusions and contradictions now, those rare moments of peace, moving toward our real lives that can no longer be avoided.

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