A Meaningful Life by L. J. Davis Page B

though your back was glued in place with sweat. Beneath the plastic the upholstery was pale and washed-out, as though it had been under water for a long time. There was a very little color anywhere in the apartment, and the floor was covered with spotless pale linoleum. There were no rugs anywhere. “It’s because they were born on the East Side,” said Lowell’s wife. “That’s why.” Lowell couldn’t have cared less.
    â€œNegroes look different nowadays,” Leo told him. He was sitting on his electric Relaxacizor pad. It was making him vibrate faintly, as though with a mild palsy, especially when he nodded his head. “It’s all this intermarriage.”
    â€œHmmmm,” said Lowell, muscles tense from the effort of keeping himself in place. He got up and sat down again. It didn’t do any good. Out in the kitchen his mother-in-law’s voice droned on and on like a nasal radio.
    â€œThey used to look like monkeys,” said Leo. “I guess that was before your time. You can take it from me, they looked just like monkeys with big white teeth. It isn’t like that anymore. How we used to laugh. They stir them up now.”
    There was a long pause. “Who does?” asked Lowell at last. If you watched Leo vibrate long enough, he began to go blurry around the edges, like a picture that was going slowly out of focus.
    â€œThe agitators,” said Leo. “The agitators stir them up. Outside agitators. They’re moving in now.”
    â€œThe agitators,” said Lowell. “I see.” He wondered how long a man could put up with this sort of conversation before he went out of his mind.
    â€œNo, no,” said Leo, leaning forward in his chair. “The agitators are stirring them up. It’s the Negroes who are moving in. The agitators aren’t moving in. You’ve got it backwards.”
    Out in the kitchen his mother-in-law suddenly stopped talking, as though her voice had been cut off with a pair of shears. Leo was waiting anxiously for Lowell to say something again, and there was a peculiar moment of silence that was disturbed only by the low muttering of Leo’s machine. Everything, for some mad reason, seemed to focus on Lowell with crushing intensity. It was kind of unnerving. “That’s too bad,” he managed to say.
    â€œListen, they’re coming in like flies,” whispered Leo, as though you could hear some of them now, making a characteristic noise. Out in the kitchen his mother-in-law began talking again at exactly the same rate and exactly the same tone, as though the arm of a record player, having been raised for a second, had come back down on the same spot.
    â€œIt’s been going on for years,” Leo continued in the same hushed, urgent tones, with a look of mingled intimacy and fear. “Years. You know what I mean?”
    Lowell agreed that he knew what Leo meant. He always felt a little drunk at his in-law’s place, and afterward he had a funny hung-over feeling, as though they had put something in his coffee. Actually, they never put anything in his coffee, and he was lucky if he got any at all. When he did get some, it came in a different kind of cup from everybody else’s. He wondered if his mother-in-law kept the cup in a special place, wrapped up in a plastic bag. Drunk was not quite the way he felt; he felt like he’d watched too many girders flash past on the subway.
    Lowell’s visits always came to a barren end, somewhere near the fulcrum of the afternoon, when out in the real world the real people were clearing the Sunday paper off the floor and getting out the cocktail shaker and others were putting on their hats and going out the door.
    â€œWell, so long, Lowell,” said Leo in a false voice, shaking his hand as though still attached to the Relaxacizor. Lowell wondered if Leo thought he could make Lowell like him by shaking his hand that way. “I certainly