"The Book of Disbelieving" When Paul Sorser's wife died she left him with a hodgepodge of books and clothes, some house plants, the box of recipe cards on the shelf, the floppy disks from her project on cab drivers begun long ago, and her collection of artifacts from her family's past. Paul was a doorman, a loyal employee for 18 years, and they gave him a week of leave. He insisted on two and they said, with regrets, that one week was allotted by the union but he could take a second if he was willing to forgo pay. The management sent an arrangement to the service and after a week he returned to work. He had few friends who were not Alice's friends, or husbands of Alice's friends, and in the weeks that followed her death he resisted their offers of commiseration. She had possessed such leisurely ferocity. She could transform boredom into the most pleasant idleness but though he had known what to do with leisure in her company, he did not know what to do with it now. He sought some way to keep busy and he found himself going through the boxes of her family's artifacts with the intention of passing them along to her relatives. There were newspaper clippings of her great-grandfather's breakthroughs in agriculture; there were the ribbons and medals earned by more than one ancestor in more than one war; there were diplomas from universities and napkins on which were scribbled the genesis of profound ideas; there were photographs and sketches and portraits and eulogies; there were newsletters providing updates on the Thorntons' whereabouts and accomplishments; there was a knife carved from soapstone as fine and light as a feather and a scroll seventeen feet long--but the only thing Paul found that he wanted to keep was the sword from the War. He couldn't remember to which relative it had belonged nor its political significance (though the story had been told dozens of times) and he didn't care. The sword seemed out of place in the city and now, without his wife, he felt out of place, too. His character was not suited to the city and without her fondness for its ways or skill overcoming its inconveniences he felt robbed of purpose and usefulness. He knew how to work with his hands. Outside the city he might apprentice himself to a furniture maker or some other craftsman but he was past fifty and the country was vast and to leave this apartment would be to expose himself to unknown risks. He kept the sword and sent the rest to his wife's Aunt Jude. Three weeks later he received a package from Aunt Jude with a note--Thank you but I cannot keep this, fascinating as it may be. It was a book with a stiff cardboard cover, bound in brown check cloth, of large, square bulk with a ribbon bookmark; he must have assumed it was another scrapbook. But there were no pictures or clippings just the uninterrupted flow in ink of his wife's small hand. Each entry was dated and of the same approximate length. How had his wife managed to keep such a meticulous journal without his knowledge? She was secretive, but she maintained secrets only on matters of little importance. It had been almost a decade before he'd discovered that she hated the color red. Only recently had she revealed that she kept her hair long out of homage to a certain folk singer. These secrets, she admitted, she harbored not to sow discord between them but to protect some part of herself from inquiry. On momentous matters she was always frank: she'd confessed her affair the day after it was begun and made no secret of her aversion to his mother. So this journal, he concluded, must be of little consequence--a memento of those quiet, private moments one finds like small marvels hidden in the day. He expected to read about a luna moth clinging to the window screen or the Easter lily's fragrant blooms or the kind words she heard at work. He started to read somewhere at random and was startled to discover that the journal was about him. He doesn't know if the problem is with the regulator or the siphon so he sketches the valve and takes the sketch to Harbin's who suggests tempering the regulator and he tries it and it works. Sam Borger tips him thirty even though he saved Sam a trip from the plumber and one-fifty at least. But it's the biggest tip Paul's gotten since he put out the fire on the Draytons' grill. He bought two Polish dogs with extra kraut and ate them on the Wideners' terrace. They've been out-of-town since Monday. This was an entry from almost fifteen years ago, before he'd been promoted from janitor to doorman. He had no memory of the incident but it all sounded plausible--except for the part about the Wideners' private terrace. He didn't believe he was the kind of fellow who would do something like that. And he didn't reveal details like these to his wife--not because, like her, he wanted to keep a part of his life secret but because none of it was worth remembering. Where the heck did she learn about tempering regulators? The Hogans' son-in-law--Paul couldn't remember his name--was taking away some of the furniture and put too much on the cart and when he got the cart on the sidewalk the meter maid arrived to write him a ticket. He didn't get a ticket but left to move the van, leaving Paul to wheel the cart back into the lobby and the glass dome on a pendulum clock fell off and shattered. Marilyn Cantwell arrived with her spaniel and complained about the glass and Paul got in trouble with the super. The son-in-law isn't a bad fellow but he only comes twice a year, he's cheap, which Paul doesn't mind, but he's in a hurry, which Paul minds very much. That was an entry from near the end of the volume, nine years ago, only a few weeks before he was promoted to doorman. Paul remembered the son-in-law very well, though he couldn't remember his name or an incident with a cart of furniture. He closed the book, put it down. He was not easily agitated, but the book unnerved him. Had she found some way to watch him? To monitor him at work and record his activity in her book? It was a feat that verged on the supernatural and he couldn't escape the feeling that if she had found some way to watch him then, she might also be watching him now. Paul didn't believe in spirits just as he didn't believe in unicorns or minotaurs or other myths from a superstitious age. He preferred to think that his wife was at work when she was at work and that she was buried in the ground when she was buried in the ground. It was only early afternoon but he opened a beer. He stood at the window watching the punks on the corners five stories below and the children gathering trash and throwing it down a grate and the vendor with his boxes of t-shirts and unsavory fruit and the occasional pedestrian passing by without interest. The vendor was equally disinterested in his wares. He slouched against a newspaper rack and shouted trifles at an old man in a window and his bitter grin revealed his wish to be elsewhere. Paul wrapped the book in the newspaper in which it had been shipped and returned it to Aunt Jude's box and placed it carefully under the bed. He was not a sentimental person. He didn't talk to the image of his dead wife or imagine what she would be thinking or indulge in reminiscences or thumb through old photographs or revisit old haunts. It didn't occur to him to remember the past or think what might have been had a doctor discovered in time the weakness in her heart. On days when he felt lonely, he attributed it to lack of sleep or frustration with the management or the rudeness of a tenant. He went for long, slow walks with his hands in his pockets as he had always done and he marveled at the self-importance and ingenuity of city people as he had always done. Since reading the excerpts from his wife's journal he was having trouble getting her out of his mind and his work and tenants seemed alien to him as if in need of the interpretation his wife offered in the book. For an entire evening he eschewed gin or beer to devote himself to the task of remembering and finally came up with the memory that he required. Out from under the bed he pulled the book and unwrapped the newspaper carefully as if he were removing the bandages from a wound. There were hundreds of pages and they were fine like the leaves of a Bible and the date of each entry was hard to discern. Finally he found it--their tenth anniversary. On that day, he remembered, the Finnicums on the fourth floor asked him to come up to investigate a rat but when he arrived with a box of poison and some no. 5 steel wool they surprised him with an anniversary card and a slice of homemade pie. He read Alice's entry for that day but found no mention of the incident, only a description of the activities of a team of restoration specialists called in to remediate a burst pipe. Did this prove that his wife's account was fictional? The incident she described on that day sounded convincing. It might have occurred in addition to the anniversary card from the Finnicums. Again he wrapped the book in newspaper and put it away. The next day he called Aunt Jude. But once she came on the line (this took some time as Uncle William had to retrieve her from the sewing machine in the basement), Paul couldn't figure what to say without revealing his suspicion that either his wife or his wife's aunt was deceiving him. Aunt Jude asked after his health and suggested a program at the zoo for widowers that she'd read about in the paper. He asked Jude if she had any interest in a book he'd just found under a stack of cookbooks, full of old family recipes that his wife seemed to have copied by hand. Yes indeed, Jude said, what an absolutely marvelous find--she was certainly interested. And she informed him what a wonderful person his wife was for taking such care in preserving her family's memories. "But I don't need to tell you about the importance of memories," said Jude. "I know you won't mind but I did read a few pages of your journal, I couldn't help myself. I never could have imagined that the chores of a custodian would be so interesting! And how kind of Alice to transcribe it for you. Her penmanship was exquisite and yours is dreadful." Who writes a book about someone other than themselves? Alice had not been a selfless person. She was not one of these wives devoted to her husband's every need. She was devoted to the needs of her clients from 9 to 5. Otherwise in her spare time she worked hard at making sure she was not stressed by trivial concerns nor those of her husband. He had no resentments on this score. But where the devil had she found the impetus or inclination to compose this chronicle of the dreary business of his life? And why had she stopped the journal shortly after he was promoted to doorman, when she'd been dedicated to it for over ten years? It was possible there were other volumes but he searched every closet and box and found none. He called her sister but her sister was a drunk and knew nothing of any journal but lamented at length Alice's departure. He didn't look at the journal for a week then pulled it from under the bed and unwrapped the newspaper and began to read starting on the first page and he kept reading through the night and into the next day and beyond the time he was meant to man the door for work and all the day, ignoring the phone calls from the super and reading one entry after another, all the entries, which were written in the same careful, unrushed hand, with the same pen, it seemed, which apparently never ran out of ink, it was as if the book had been composed in a single sitting and he read it in a single sitting; how, in his early days, like the tenants with dogs, he was only allowed to take the service rather than the glossy elevator with its brass and mahogany; how the bags of trash split on impact at the bottom of the chute and how he drove away rats with a stick; how he polished the brass rails with Frausto's Spangled Cream which smelled like bacon grease and made the skin under his nails burn; how a tenant left an old pinball machine in the basement and he fixed the plunger and flippers but the super got rid of it for more storage; how he retreated into the old ice box for cigarette breaks until he gave in to management complaints and quit smoking at work; how the realtors didn't bother to introduce themselves and how certain solicitors would contrive to sneak in through the basement and, if caught, would try to foist onto Paul their card; how it was possible, staring at the surveillance monitor for hours, to imagine hiccups in the rhythm of infinity; how the sound of the door buzzer made him feel as if he were the subject of some mean experiment; how he concocted pranks to play on the tenants, such as putting racy lingerie into the wash of the philandering family men, none of which he enacted; how he once slept an hour slumped at his station and though no one complained he woke with a note in his fist that read: You owe me. Excerpted from The Book of Disbelieving by David Lawrence Morse All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
