This worries him terribly. Is that all she’s going to say?
“Why?” she asks.
“What do you mean why?” he grunts. He can feel his face tightening up; his stomach hurts. He shoves his left hand in his pocket and mashes the ball of her hair.
“Why does he deserve what he gets?”
Moses hates admitting it, but it’s a damned good question. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he says.
“Well, you should. Wilthauser always says, ‘Tell me something I don’t already know. And then prove it to me.’ So you need to say why he deserves to die in Venice.”
“Well, because he’s a puff and he can’t leave that kid. He stays around too long. Look, let’s face it the guy doesn’t know when it’s time to leave. You’d never want to invite him to a party.”
“Do you think his desire for Tadzio was merely sexual?” Lila asks. She quickly blushes at the word. It stops Moses, too. A word like sexual has never had an opportunity to bare itself in all their discussions about literature. The words have always been sandpaper dry, purposely chaste. “I mean, it’s not just Tadzio that he doesn’t want to leave. He doesn’t want to leave Venice. He can’t stand that this will be the last time he sees the place. I think…Well, Professor Wilthauser pointed out to us that isn’t it possible that maybe he’s afraid of death? And he’s holding desperately onto youth through his affection for Tadzio?”
Moses looks at her in awe. This is it! This is what he loves about Lila. About the stories they read. That he gets to have this conversation. “So you’re saying he is afraid of death?” Moses asks.
“Yes. And by holding on too long, he does get what he deserves. You’re right about that, I think.”
Right at this moment Cavanaugh comes in. Interrupting. Ruining. Fat Cavanaugh sidles up to Lila’s worktable and she quickly leaves Moses. Cavanaugh’s pants are busting. He’s fatter than ever. Moses wonders what kind of a woman would have an affair with him. Cavanaugh doesn’t look over at him. He looks concerned with Lila. She hands him a letter and he opens it, reads it and shakes his head. He smiles at her and laughs. He leans down, elbows on the counter, big ass to Moses, and speaks in a voice not at all audible on the other side of the low wall. Lila looks soft and happy. She whispers something back to him. Her body close to his.
Moses doesn’t believe what he’s seeing. Not Lila. He laughs to himself out loud. If Cavanaugh thinks he has a chance with a woman like Lila, he’s got another thing coming. But then he hears Lila giggling. Responding. Giving in to him. “I have a question,” Moses says.
They both turn without letting on that they have been close to one another.
Moses knows this job, even the parts that are hers, but he holds up a letter anyway, waves it and waits for her to walk to him. She looks like she doesn’t trust him, suddenly. She comes swiftly. She is cautious and guarded and stands farther from him than she usually does. “What’s the problem?” she asks courteously.
“Maybe Aschenbach betrayed his true nature and that’s why he got what he deserved.”
“Maybe,” she says. “Do you have a problem with a letter?” she asks tight and full of formality.
“Can’t read if this is a D or a B. Is it Darman or Barman,” he says politely smiling at her.
“Where are your glasses, Moses?” She points to them in his breast pocket. “Put them on.”
“That’s not a good idea. Can you just read it for me?”
“Moses, if you can’t read, put on your glasses.”
“Listen to the lady, Moses,” Cavanaugh says picking food from his teeth as Lila’s workstation holds him up.
“That’s a B, I think,” he says.
“Hey, put ‘em on,” Cavanaugh commands.
“He must be a new inmate,” Moses says, resisting. But he looks at the ground and shamefully takes out his glasses. An arm is missing. She read the Rules and Responsibilities of Glasses Ownership, too, and knows that there are consequences if it can’t be recovered.
“Give it to me,” Lila says. “I’ll check in the system.”
He takes his glasses off quickly and puts them back in his pocket. He hands her the letter. Without looking at him, she takes it and walks back through the swinging door over to her counter. She pulls up a stool and sits in front of her computer and begins to type quickly, the keys popping loudly. She leans over to Ed and whispers. He turns toward Moses and smiles and looks arrogant.
“It’s a B,” Lila calls to Moses.
“Thank you,” Moses says, humbly.
“What happened to you? Walk into a door?” Ed smirks. “You better watch out. These doors have a way of giving you a good pounding every once in a while.”
Moses returns to his letters. To the menial. To the mundane. To the miserable tasks of the mail. Where he once found pleasure and pride, he now only finds insult. Writing that paper, reading “Death in Venice,” talking about it with Lila as if he too were a student, the little nibble of a student’s nourishment, have ruined him for the simple pleasures of his life. What he’s always wanted was to prove his smarts. He has a good mind.
He sorts his letters, prepares his satchel for his route, and he can hardly understand how he ever found any of this satisfying. He wants to think about ideas. He wants Ed Cavanaugh to disappear. For Lila to take back her coy gestures. Her batting lashes. Her sweet hip-bend. Her come-closer whispers.
Moses swings his satchel over his shoulder. “That was a beautiful compact of your grandmother’s. Was it quite old?” he asks.
Lila turns. “It was. I’m very sad about it, though. I’ve lost it, Moses. Last I remember I had it here. I don’t know what happened to it, but it makes me sick just to think about it. You didn’t see it by any chance?”
“No,” he says. “Too bad you lost it.”
On his route he’s burdened by the mail. The bag is heavy. His limbs feel weak and leaden. The halls, always a dank and dungeonous journey, are particularly foul this late afternoon. It’s dark as night, despite the lights. There is a smell that sometimes erupts on wet days when the hundred-year-old sewer backs up, reminding them that they are little more than rats. The problem with his conversations with Lila is that they make him sensitive. They expose him to everything. Every detail of his day is infused with the meaning of his life, so this smell of shit, this occupies too much of his thinking about himself, as he wanders aimlessly into the deep of D block.
He passes Corn with his bucket and his mop on his way to push dirt around the mailroom floor. Corn says, Howyadoin, Moses? Moses ignores him. He is consumed with the angst of art. What Corn passes without comment or even notice takes on huge meaning for Moses. A spider. A web. The sound of the big metal doors opening, some by machine, others by crank. The sound of those doors shutting. The sound of his demise. He’s being dramatic, but why, he wonders, would she give a rat’s ass about Cavanaugh? Why would she turn away from him in the moment of revelation of the true meaning of the story? Why at that crucial high note would she pull the arm of the phonograph, screeching the conversation to a halt?
Each keeplock he passes looks more menacing, more violent, more disturbed until he gets to the very last cell in row five. In it sits a man Moses tries to avoid at all costs. It would figure that today he’d have a letter to deliver to him. The man sits at a desk. He is neatly dressed. He is reading from a book. Moses thinks it’s always the same book, but he doesn’t know which one it is. He’s sure it’s not the Bible because this man is as much a devil as any he’s ever known. The man is fairer than fair. His skin sees no sun. He’s lived most of his life in the hole. He is freckled and the sharp contrast of the