It’s all right to loll in a tub in a cold-water flat but there’s a problem with the head. The flat is so cold that if you stay in the tub long enough your head begins to freeze and you don’t know what to do with it. If you slip under the water, head and all, you suffer when you emerge and the hot water on your head freezes and then you’re shivering and sneezing from the chin up.
And you can’t read in comfort in a tub in a cold-water flat. The body submerged in the hot water might grow pink and wrinkled from the heat but the hands holding the book turn purple from the cold. If it’s a small book you can alternate the hands, holding the book with one hand while the other is in warm water. This could be a solution to the reading problem except that the hand that was in the water is now wet and threatening to make the book soggy and you can’t reach for the towel every few minutes because you want that towel to be warm and dry at the end of your time in the tub.
I thought I could solve the head problem by wearing a knitted skier’s cap and the hand problem with a pair of cheap gloves but then I worried that if I ever died of a heart attack the ambulance people would wonder what I was doing wearing cap and gloves in the tub and of course they’d slip this discovery to the Daily News and I’d be the laughingstock of McKee Vocational and Technical High School and the patrons of various bars.
I bought the cap and gloves anyway and on the day of no explosion I filled the tub with hot water. I decided to be good to myself, forget the reading and slide under the water as often as I liked to keep the head from freezing. I turned on the radio to music suitable for a man who had survived a nerve-wracking afternoon with a dangerous stove, plugged in my electric blanket and draped it across a chair beside the tub so that I could step out, dry myself quickly with the pink towel Alberta had given me, wrap myself in the electric blanket, put on my cap and gloves and lay on the bed cozy and warm. I watched the snow beat against my window, thanked God the stove had cooled by itself and read myself to sleep with Anna Karenina.
The tenant under me is Bradford Rush who moved into the flat when I told him about it on the midnight shift at the Manufacturer’s Trust Company. If anyone at the bank called him Brad he snapped at them, Bradford, Bradford, my name is Bradford, so mean that no one ever wanted to talk to him and when we went out for breakfast or lunch or whatever we called it at 3 A.M. he was never invited to join us. Then one of the women who was leaving to get married invited him to have a drink with us and he told us, after three drinks, he was from Colorado, a graduate of Yale and living in New York to get over the suicide of his mother who screamed for six months with bone cancer. The woman leaving to get married burst into tears over this story and we wondered why the hell Bradford had to hang such a cloud over our small party. That’s what I asked him on the train to Downing Street that night but all I got was a little smile and I wondered if he was right in the head. I wondered why he did clerical work in a bank when he had an Ivy League degree and could have been on Wall Street with his own kind.
Later I wondered why he didn’t just say no to me in my time of crisis, the bitter February day my electricity was turned off for nonpayment. I came home to give myself the peace, ease and comfort of a hot bath in the kitchen tub. I draped the electric blanket over the chair, I turned on the radio. There was no sound. There was no warmth in the blanket, no light from the lamp.
The water was steaming into the tub and I was naked. Now I had to put on cap, gloves and socks, wrap myself in an electric blanket with no heat and curse the company that turned off my electricity. It was still daylight but I knew I couldn’t stay in that condition.
Bradford. Surely he wouldn’t mind doing me a little favor.
I knocked on his door and he opened it with his usual grimness. Yes?
Bradford, I have a bit of a crisis upstairs.
Why are you wrapped up in that electric blanket?
That’s what I came to talk to you about. They cut off my electricity and I have no heat but this blanket and I wondered if I dropped a long extension cord out my window you might take it and plug it in and I’d have electricity till I can pay my bill which I promise you will be very soon.
I could tell he didn’t want to do it but he gave a little nod and pulled in my extension cord when I dropped it. I knocked on the floor three times hoping he’d understand that I was saying thank you but there was no response and whenever I saw him on the stairs he barely acknowledged me and I knew he was brooding on the extension cord. The Electrical Shop teacher at McKee told me an arrangement like this would cost a few measly pennies a day and couldn’t understand why anyone would resent it. He said I could offer the cheap bastard a few dollars for the great inconvenience of having a cord plugged into an outlet but people like that were so miserable anyway it wasn’t the money. It was the way they had of not being able to say no so that that no turned into acid in their guts and destroyed their lives.
I thought the Electrical Shop teacher was exaggerating till I noticed Bradford was becoming more and more hostile. He used to smile a little or nod or grunt something. Now he passes me without a word and I’m worried because I still don’t have the money for the bills and I don’t know how long our arrangement will last. It makes me so nervous I always turn on the radio to make sure I can take a bath and have the blanket warming up.
My cord stayed in his outlet for two months and then on a bitter night at the end of April there was an act of treachery. I turned on the radio, laid my electric blanket on a chair to warm up, put towel, cap and gloves on the blanket so that they’d be warm too, filled the tub, soaped myself and lay back listening to the Symphonie fantastique of Hector Berlioz and in the middle of the second movement when I’m ready to float out of the tub with the excitement everything stops, the radio is off, the light is out and I know the blanket will grow cold on the back of the chair.
And I knew what he did, this Bradford, pulled the cord on a man in a tub of hot water in a cold-water flat. I knew I could never have done that to him or anyone else. I might do it to someone with central heating but never to a fellow cold-water-flat tenant, never.
I leaned over the side of the tub and knocked on the floor hoping he might have made a mistake, that he’d have the decency to plug me back in, but no, not a sound from him and no radio, no light. The water was still warm so I could lie there awhile thinking about the villainy of the human race, how a man with a degree from Yale could deliberately take hold of an electric cord and yank it from the outlet leaving me to freeze to death upstairs. One act of treachery like that is enough to make you give up hope and think of revenge.
No, it wasn’t revenge I wanted. It was electricity and I’d have to find another way to bring Bradford to his senses. There was a spoon and there was a long piece of string and if I tied string to spoon I could open the window and dangle spoon so that it tapped against Bradford’s window and he might understand that I was up there at the other end of the string, tapping, tapping for the gift of electricity. He might be annoyed and ignore my spoon but I remembered how he once told me that a dripping faucet was enough to keep him awake all night and if necessary I’d tap on his window with my spoon till he could stand it no longer. He could have climbed the stairs and banged on my door and told me to stop but I knew he could never be that direct and I knew I had him cornered. I felt sorry for him and the way his mother screamed for six months with bone cancer and I’d try to make all this up to him someday but this was a crisis and I needed my radio, my light, my electric blanket or I’d have to call Alberta for a night’s lodgings and if she asked me why I could never tell her about Bradford plugging me in all these weeks. She’d get into a state of righteous indignation, the New England kind, and tell me I should be paying my bills and not tapping on people’s windows with spoons on bitter nights, especially the windows of people whose mothers had died screaming of bone cancer. Then I’d tell her there was no connection between my spoon and Bradford’s dead mother and that would lead to more disagreement and a fight and I’d have to storm out, back to my flat in the cold and the dark.