How
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Halvard Johnson
Uncollected
Stories
From
songs the conversation turned to poets; the Commandant remarked
that they were a bad lot and bitter drunkards, and advised
me, as a friend, to give up writing verses, for such an
occupation did not accord with military duties and brought
one to no good.
Pushkin,
"The Captain's Daughter"
.
I
To Lenny, Ben's story was
not a new one, but Lenny, over the years had grown used to hearing
the same stories in "somewhat altered versions," as was said.
In the course of telling one of his stories, Ben, Lenny's friend
and sometimes mentor of many years, rambled all over creation,
mixing up lies and truth in a shameless manner. When he'd reached
either an end or a stopping point, Ben would push himself back
from the table, rise, and say, with a wink or something verging
on a sneer, "Of course, that was all lies," as though anyone
who expected the truth from him ought, as a legendary Hollywood
figure once said of those who believe in psychoanalysis, to
have his head examined.
But at the beginning
Ben would say something like this:
"Let me tell you about
my first wife."
Ben's first wife–his
only wife with the papers to prove it–had been twenty, maybe
thirty, years junior to him when he married her, and had probably
put up with a lot before finally decamping. Her name, Lenny
knew, was Martha. And, when Ben married her, she had no money,
or any prospect of money. So, on the day she dragged her suitcase
through the streets of San Luis Obispo, heading for the bus
station, she wasn't worse off than when she had arrived. Older
by a couple years and a tad fonder of the bottle perhaps, but
no poorer, no richer.
Ben's lean, muscular
arm lay stretched along the back of booth, one of his fingernails
tracing the curve of a C someone had carved in the wood. Lenny
thought at first it was someone's initial, carved by one hand
and inked in by others over the years, but then later, when
Ben, engrossed in the story he was telling, leaned forward on
his flanneled elbows, Lenny saw that it wasn't an initial at
all, but rather the first letter of the word CUNT.
The bar, called Harold's,
stood kitty-corner from a gas station/grocery combo in one of
those little crossroads towns on the plains that seemed to consist
only of a bar, a grocery, and a grain elevator.
Above their heads,
grimy fans turned lazily and dingy, water-stained squares of
composition board still managed to soak up some of the clatter
and chatter from several farmers or ranchers or garage mechanics
at the two pool tables beyond the three or four tables between
the booths and the door to the gents' and ladies' rooms.
Ben
gazed for some moments past the backwards red-neon script of
the faintly humming Coors sign, out the grubby window, and beyond
his mud-encrusted, red pickup truck to where the two-lane highway
lay, with its whirls of dust that kicked up when some car or
truck passed by, and then turned back to Lenny, who was toying
absently with the zipper of his windbreaker.
"Ever been down in
Presidio, Sonny Boy?"
Lenny shook his head,
his long, brown hair.
"Well, it ain't much,
lemme tell you. It's pretty much due south of Marfa, down there
on the Rio Grande about halfway between El Paso and the Bend.
A real pisshole. But there's a nice Mexican town named Ojinaga
right across the river."
His eyes drifted out
the window again and across the road. Not much to see there
at the moment–just some crumpled beer cans, scraps of paper,
some heaped-up tumbleweed along a fence, an uncollared mutt
of some kind sitting on the shoulder opposite, looking first
one way and then the other. A guy in gray and white striped
coveralls holding a pool cue dropped a quarter in the jukebox
and some stompin' music came on. Lenny, younger and more impatient
than Ben, waited for more of the familiar story. Ben, having
finished his bacon cheeseburger, eyed Lenny's mostly uneaten
one, and then, reaching over, scooped it off Lenny's plate and
took a bite out of it that nearly finished it off. When Ben's
hand then reached out for some of Lenny's fries, Lenny lightly
batted it away.
"And? And?"
Lenny, tuning out the country music and the pool
table chatter, drummed the table nervously with his left hand.
"Well, to make a short
story long, Martha was working at a greasy spoon called Sancho's
there, just about the only decent place to eat in town. You
know, where you could get something besides enchiladas, tacos,
and beans. She'd come into town with some guy, and they were
heading vaguely for the coast, but he'd just taken off one morning
before she woke up, and she never heard from him again.
"So, she started waitressing
at Sancho's and saving her pennies. But the pennies came slow
and hard in that town, so she just had to start selling it."
"Selling what?"
Ben looked narrowly
at him. "Whatever you suppose she had to sell."
Lenny blinked. A new
wrinkle in the old tale.
"And?"
"And then one night
I was in there. I'd been down at the Bend camping in the Chisos
for a couple days, and was on my way to a teaching gig in El
Paso. Martha was sitting down and chatting with me since there
weren't many customers in the place, and this guy comes in–a
real valley redneck type–and starts in on Martha. He's drunk,
of course, so he doesn't listen to me when I tell him to back
off. So, he's pawing her and breathing on her, and I grab his
shoulder and pull him off. But he takes one swing at me, and
I'm out like a light."
Ben scrutinized the
landscape beyond the window again. The dog had vanished. A Greyhound
bus lumbered past.
"Well," and here Ben
leaned forward on this elbows, and Lenny saw over his shoulder
the word carved in the wood behind him. "Well, when I came to
I was in Martha's bed. She had a small room up over a feed store
there. She was holding a cold washcloth to my jaw, and my head
felt like it was about to explode. But my gut was exploding
too. I must've collected something from the water down by the
Bend because I was out for days in that little room. I'd wake
up with the sweats, and Martha would be cooling me off with
washcloths and towels and alcohol rubs. And then I'd wake up
with chills, and she'd climb into bed with me to keep me warm."
Now Lenny turned to
stare out the window.
"And listen to this."
Ben reached out and tapped the younger man's wrist.
"While I was there,
thrashing about in chills and sweats, you know what she did?"
Lenny shook his head.
He wasn't sure he wanted to know.
"She phoned up the
school in El Paso I was going to teach at and told them I'd
been taken sick and wouldn't make the first week of classes.
It was right at the beginning of September all this happened.
And they told her if I didn't make the first class at the beginning
of the second week to forget it. And that made her so mad she
told them to take the job and stuff it. And that's just what
they did.
"And what did you do?"
"Well, I was sick
enough I didn't do anything for a while, but when she finally
told me what she'd done all I could do was laugh."
"And then?"
"Oh, we just lived
together there in Presidio for a while. It was probably nearly
November before I was really over it."
"And she took care
of you?"
"Yep. I'd sort of been
counting on that job though. I had some money, but not much.
Enough to get us to the coast. I knew some people in Cruces
and Yuma, and she knew some in San Diego. That helped. You know,
they fed us and let us sack out at their places until we'd decided
where to go or what to do next."
"And when did you get
married?"
"We got married right
there in Presidio, believe it or not. In fact, that was the
only way I could get her to leave town with me, even as down
and out as she was."
Lenny's gaze drifted
out the window, and when he turned back to Ben, the older man
was smiling.
"Did you like that
one, Sonny Boy?"
He took Lenny by the
chin and shook it. "Well, it was lies, all lies, Sonny Boy.
And don't you forget it."
They'd known each other
for less than a month when Ben first regaled Lenny with a version
of this story. Years later, after Ben had disappeared and all
that, Lenny sat talking with one of Ben's fans, a writer from
the East Coast, somewhere in Virginia maybe, who was compiling
a collection of interviews of people, other writers mainly,
who had known and cared for Ben and/or his work. They were sitting
in Lenny's pay-by-the-week motel room on the outskirts of Pueblo,
Colorado, where, after shifting piles of books and papers onto
the top of the dresser, they'd pulled a rickety writing table
away from the wall and placed chairs on either side of it. On
the table between them were two glasses, a bottle of Kentucky
straight corn whiskey, a bowl of ice cubes, and a Sanyo tape
recorder–a postmodern still life.
Lenny, over the last
couple years, had grown tired and wary of interviewers. In fact,
he'd stopped giving interviews about Ben altogether, but Karla,
for some reason or other, had urged him to talk to this one–Art
Gilmore, a short, slightly overweight man with dark brown hair,
who was loosening Lenny up for the formal interview. The tape
recorder wasn't running yet.
"I'll just begin by asking
you about how you met Ben, and we'll go on from there. Does
that sound okay?"
Lenny looked up from the frayed,
mustard-colored carpet near the French doors. "Fine with me."
Lenny wasn't very worried.
Gilmore had seemed genuine when he promised to send a transcript
of the interview for Lenny's approval. That was standing operating
procedure for interviews of this sort, although in the years
since Ben disappeared Lenny had been badly burned once or twice.
They heard several long, loud
blasts on the horn of a diesel engine and then the clangorous
passage of a long chain of boxcars moving up the long, slow
incline across the highway from the motel. The noise was so
loud that, for a several minutes, they just sat, watching and
listening, shrugging their shoulders and smiling small smiles
at each other.
Then Gilmore, when it was
quieter, looked across the table at Lenny and said, "Ready?"
Lenny nodded grimly.
Gilmore leaned over the table,
punched a button on this tape recorder and spoke loudly and
clearly into the machine's built-in microphone: Art Gilmore
interviewing Leonard Reed, Nov. 8, 1990, Carson Motel, Pueblo,
Colorado.
Then he sat back, took a couple
ice cubes from the bowl, dropped them into a glass and poured
over them a few fingers of amber fluid from the bottle. He pushed
the glass across the table to Lenny and poured another for himself.
Gilmore sniffed at what he called "the corn," and then took
a delicate, slow sip and cleared his throat.
Gilmore: Tell me, please, about how you met
Ben.
Reed: Ben and I shared
an office at UN-Reno back in the sixties. That was long before
it was UN-Reno, of course. Back then that campus was the University
of Nevada.
Gilmore: Right. Reno
was one of Ben's first teaching jobs, wasn't it?
Reed: Yeah, well, there
were a couple gigs before Reno that didn't amount to much. He
told me about one in Omaha, where he was teaching at a convent,
one of those orders where you weren't supposed to see the sisters,
and where they weren't supposed to speak.
Gilmore: Quite a challenge.
Reed: Yeah, Ben had
to teach his first class twice.
Gilmore: Twice?
Reed: Well, he got
there an hour early and didn't know it. So, he did his thing
and left, sort of amazed at how quiet they all were. And then
the Mother Superior or someone comes running after him outside,
hollering, "Mr. Garrison, Mr. Garrison, where are you going?
Your class begins in five minutes."
Gilmore: Great story!
Reed: Yeah.
Lenny was thinking,
Yeah, there's probably not a word of truth in it. Though, God
knows, he'd heard Ben tell the story often enough. Much more
elaborately, of course, and with the sort of variations in detail
he'd come to expect of him. But, facing Gilmore, he was suddenly
amazed that until that very moment it hadn't occurred to him
that the entire story might be a lie. Ben still, it seemed,
might have a trick or two up his sleeve.
Gilmore: Do you remember
your first meeting?
Reed: Sure! I'd been
given the number of my office, and when got there the door was
open so I just walked in, and there he was. He was a long drink
of water. You could tell that even when he was sitting down.
He was sitting, of course, with his boots up on the desk–almost
on my desktop; our desks were back to back. He was wearing a
brownish-gray polyester suit, a white shirt, a perfectly horrible
string necktie, and cowboy boots. He stuck out his hand and
said, "Hi! I'm Ben Garrison, your lord and master. Welcome to
Reno, the Biggest Little City in Storey County."
He acted as though
he'd been there forever at first, but we were both new hires.
He'd just made it a point to get to the office first. He took
the better of the two desks, the larger one, the one with the
view out the window. He'd filled most of the bookcases with
his books, seen to it that he didn't have to get up to answer
the phone, and so on. Typical.
Gilmore: [Chuckles]
So you two hit it off right away.
Reed: Like oil and
water, you might say.
Gilmore: Really, did
it take long? Most of the people I've interviewed talk about
how easy it was to like him.
Reed: Ben was a shit
and a liar. No, I'll probably want you to take that out. But
let's leave it in for now, though.
Gilmore: Okay.
We can take it out later, no problem. Anything else about those
early days?
Reed: Just the
lord-and-master stuff, I suppose.
Gilmore: What
do you mean?
Reed: Well, just that
he meant it. He did seem to believe he was my lord and master.
I was the poet, and he was the real writer. He didn't have much
use for poetry in those early days, though he did come to try
his hand at it toward the end.
I was the poet, so I got the smaller desk,
the one with only a view of him and his feet. And he'd been
published too. He'd had stories in a few of the littles, and
even had nibbles from Esquire on a couple of things,
though nothing had panned out there yet for him. I, on the other
hand, had been hired on the basis on one little chapbook of
poems and a master's degree plus some hours from the University
of Toledo. Not even that. The guy they'd originally hired for
my job had been killed in a car crash on his way over from California,
and I was the only one they could find who could fill in on
such short notice. Even though there were more jobs than teachers
in those days. It wasn't like it is now.
Gilmore: So, he lorded
it over you?
Reed: To the max. I
was Sonny Boy to him, even at the end.
"Why don't we take
a little break? Stretch our legs for a while."
Gilmore turned off
the machine, and they both stood up.
"Good idea," Lenny
replied. He was trying to figure out why this little guy from
back east was touching a nerve with him, when all those other
interviewers hadn't. It wasn't the questions he asked, or the
way that he asked them. It wasn't anything in the way he acted.
"Anyplace decent to eat around
here?"
"Well, there's a diner called
Mom's down the road a bit. No guarantees though. Remember the
old line? 'Never eat at a place called Mom's, never play cards
with a guy named Doc, never sleep with a woman whose troubles
are . . .'"
"Sounds fine to me,"
Gilmore said. "It's on me."
Lenny began to protest. "No,
no . . ."
"I mean it's on my publisher."
"Well, that's different!"
II
What was bothering
him, Lenny realized during lunch at Mom's, was that Gilmore
had been sent to him by Karla. That's what he couldn't figure
out. Ever since Ben's disappearance, Karla had been guarding
his reputation, certainly his literary reputation, with a vengeance,
never letting any but his first-rate (and perhaps some top-drawer
second-rate) work see the light of day. Why would she send Gilmore
to him? She knew he wouldn't lie to the man, certainly not about
Ben, not to save Ben's proverbial skin, or even her own.
What Lenny hadn't mentioned
to Gilmore, but what he assumed Gilmore already knew was that
he and Karla had been married when the two of them arrived in
Reno. In fact, they'd been married ever since their grad-school
days in Toledo a few years before.
Sure enough, when the two
men sat down again at the table in the motel, the question of
Karla was what came up first.
Gilmore: Would you
tell me, please, about you and Ben and Karla?
Reed: Surely you know
all about that, don't you? I think the whole world does.
Gilmore: I'd like
to hear you tell your own . . . side of it.
He almost said "version,"
Lenny thought.
Reed: Okay then.
Lenny thought back.
After grad school, Karla and he had both worked various teaching
jobs around Cleveland, but when Karla was diagnosed with emphysema
her doctor told her not to spend another winter in Cleveland.
So, they'd both started firing out letters to practically every
school on the West Coast and in the Southwest, and just about
when they had given up and resigned themselves to another Cleveland
winter there was a phone call from Reno. The school couldn't
hire them both, but somebody coming in to teach poetry writing
had been killed in a car crash and could Lenny take the job?
No guarantees about a second year, of course, but there'd be
two full terms (with benefits), maybe something during the next
summer, and a good chance of having his contract renewed.
So, with Karla jumping up
and down beside him, her blonde ponytail flying up and down,
Lenny had said, "When would I have to be there?"
"We start classes on September
9. If you get here a couple days early, we can get all the paperwork
done and help you find someplace to live, maybe in faculty housing."
A week later they were on
the road, their black VW beetle pulling a rented trailer that
held everything they owned. Their black Lab named Grendel was
in the back seat, running back and forth from one side of the
car to the other.
The road? US 6, naturally.
What other road for two writers, the image of Jack Kerouac burned
in their brains, standing for hours in the rain near the Bear
Mountain Bridge in New York, dreaming of a ride that would take
him all the way to California on US 6. Of course, Kerouac had
wanted to do US 6 all the way west, but never got farther than
the Bear Mountain Bridge and so took a bus down into New York
City and started again from there. And US 6 wouldn't get Lenny
and Karla all the way to Reno, but it would get them well into
Nevada before they'd have to take US 50 over to Reno. Close
enough, they thought.
Gilmore: So you arrived
in Reno, and Ben pulled his lord-and-master routine. What next?
Reed: That first term
was a killer. I was doing a poetry writing class and about four
sections of comp. The bastards hadn't told me about those. And
Karla was going crazy from nothing to do. Reno wasn't Cleveland,
by a long shot, or even Toledo, and it wasn't much warmer as
it turned out. It was drier, though, and that helped with her
breathing. But Karla was bored as hell. And the faculty wives
. . . well, enough said.
Ben was soon bored
too, and started drinking pretty heavily. I don't know if that
was the beginning of his drinking problem or just a new chapter
of it. Probably the latter.
Gilmore: From what
I hear it might have been the beginning, though some of his
problem might have been genetic.
Reed: Anyway, he started
drinking a lot, and his being lord and master and all didn't
stop him from coming around at all hours. Luckily, at first,
there were a number of people he'd drink with. But when he started
coming around at four or five in the morning on some sort of
crying jag, doors began to get slammed in his face, and he ended
up doing most of his crying with Karla and me.
Gilmore: That must
have been rough.
Reed: Well, I would
have slammed the door too, but Karla wouldn't let me. She sort
of adopted him, took him on as a project, I guess. I tried to
talk her out of it, said I had to work, needed sleep. She said,
"Go get your sleep. I'll sit up with him," And she did–couple,
three nights a week sometimes.
Gilmore: He was writing
some of those great early stories that winter, wasn't he? You
know, "The German Problem," "Small Changes"–stuff like that.
Reed: Yes, those are
two of my favorites. But God knows when he had time to write
them. He was doing as much comp as I was, and he didn't slack
off on the papers either. I saw some of them, just covered with
notes and suggestions, little arrows running here and there.
He never did a public
reading there in Reno. Not in those days anyway, though he maybe
did later.
Gilmore: At least three
that I know of. In fact, I was at the last one in '87. He read
"Small Changes" too, and they loved it.
Reed: Uh-huh, they
would love it now, but they wouldn't have loved it then. You
can be sure of that.
Gilmore: You mean because
of his send-up of that dean? What was his name?
Reed: You got it. His
name was . . . I forget now too. Same guy that told me I was
being hired to replace a corpse.
Gilmore: What did he cry about?
Reed:
Oh, it could have been anything. Sometimes it was Martha. Sometimes
it was his parents. Sometimes it was somebody he knew in the
service–you know, in Korea. Sometimes it was just the sad state
of the world.
Gilmore:
You never knew Martha?
Reed:
No, but I heard enough about her from Ben, and later from Karla,
who met her once or twice. Most of the stories Ben told me about
her were probably lies. That's just the way he was. Ben told
me they'd met in Texas somewhere, but Karla later learned for
a fact that they'd met each other someplace in California–San
Luis Obispo maybe, or Chico. I don't know.
Gilmore:
Tell me more about that first year in Reno.
Reed:
Well, it was more of the same, mostly. Ben went off somewhere
during the Christmas break. We never knew where. But, to our
surprise really, he was back for the start of the spring term.
The
drinking began again though and got worse rapidly. He didn't
make it to spring vacation. When he started missing classes,
they just fired him on the spot and kicked him out of faculty
housing.
Gilmore:
He did have a contract, didn't he?
Reed:
Yes, but they paid him off for the rest of the term, and on
top of that they gave Karla one class to finish up and divvied
up the rest among the four of us who were already teaching comp.
Gilmore:
Quite a load.
Reed:
Yes, but all of us thought it was worth it to be rid of him.
Gilmore:
Still not friends?
Reed:
No, not then.
Gilmore:
When did things begin to change?
Reed:
Well, it wasn't until that summer.
Lenny
relaxed a bit, took a sip of corn whiskey. That was the summer
Ben showed up at the door of their house in a brand-new pickup
truck. God knew where he'd gotten the money or the credit to
buy it, but somehow he had. And Lenny and Karla had just about
resigned themselves to a hot, dusty summer in Reno with no courses
to teach, no money to spend, and no car to run around in. Their
VW had just about killed itself pulling that trailer two-thirds
of the way cross the country, and didn't make it much past winter.
So,
Ben showed up, and Karla ran out and flung her arms around his
neck. Even Lenny was delighted to see him. And, better yet,
he was entirely sober. Lenny kept a wary eye on him, but there
were no bottles hidden away in his suitcase. After the first
night, Ben checked into a nearby motel and they didn't see much
of him for a few days. But then he showed up again, beaming.
"Well, it's finished. But I don't have a title for it." He held
up a sheaf of stories. "This is it," he exclaimed. "The first
book."
Karla
grabbed the MS out of his hand and flipped through it. Many
of the stories there were entirely new, but some were ones she
knew. "How about 'Houselights'?" she suggested.
Ben, after a moment's thought said, "Yes, indeed. That should
do it."
III
Gilmore: When did you know
that he'd come back for Karla?
Lenny
reached over and turned off the machine. "You're the interviewer
from hell, aren't you?" He stood up and walked away from the
table.
"Calling it quits?" Gilmore
asked, without getting up.
Lenny
thought for a moment, tempted. But then he said, "No, but let's
call it a day. You got someplace to stay around here?"
"I'm right across the
way there–number 15." And Gilmore gathered up his bottle and
his tape recorder and left.
The
summer in question was one of the best/worst in Lenny's life,
one during which he acquired a friend who made enemies seem
superfluous, and lost a wife to him–at least for a while. Lenny
never knew for sure whether anything had happened between Ben
and Karla during those first school semesters in Reno, but there
was, he remembered, some point during their travels together
that summer at which he knew clearly that Karla was, for the
first time, more with Ben than with him.
Crammed
into Ben's red pickup, the two men shared the driving, and Karla
functioned as navigator and tour guide as they explored the
Wild West. They began with short excursions out of Reno–over
to Tahoe City on the California side of the lake, north to Pyramid
Lake and the Indian reservation there, southeast to Hawthorne
and the Excelsior Mountains. They explored little towns like
Fallon and Wadsworth and Lovelock. When the excursions grew
longer, they bought sleeping bags and a tarp and would, weather
permitting, just stretch themselves out under the stars at night.
They'd eat out of stores, or at truck stops or small dusty restaurants
along the highway. The three of them would wrangle for hours
about stories and poems and writers. Ben thought that Lenny
should stop writing poetry and get into fiction "where the action
is." And Lenny would nod, as though he agreed.
"Nobody
reads that stuff anymore," Ben would say, and Lenny would nod
and smile, this time in genuine agreement. But he'd keep on
scribbling on a steno pad he always carried around with him,
and he would occasionally show them something.
When he did, Karla,
who'd never liked poets or poetry much until meeting Lenny,
and still did not by and large, would be surprised that she
didn't dislike it more than she did, and Ben–well, Ben would
just scratch his neck and shake his head.
Since
Ben's enforced departure from Reno, he'd taken to wearing blue
jeans and plaid shirts, along with a leather cowboy hat he'd
picked up somewhere.
"I
just don't get it," Ben would say, "–why a talented guy like
you would spend his life nibbling around the foothills when
there are peaks out there to climb."
"You're
mixing your metaphors, Ben," said Lenny, annoyed suddenly at
the folksy westernisms of this guy who'd been west of the Mississippi
barely longer than he himself had.
"Oh,
fuck my metaphors. Why don't you just listen for a change?"
"Take
it easy, Ben," said Karla, the Peacekeeper.
"Butt
out," said Ben, annoyed with Karla now.
And
Karla would sit there looking glum while the two of them clubbed
each other over the head with theories, debating points, and
so on, until they were both so exhausted they could hardly see
or talk straight.
The
story, Ben argued, was where the real world hit the page, where
real people reached down into themselves and dragged up the
tattered remnants of their souls for all to see. Lenny had no
argument with that, but would claim that the poem was way out
in front, out where language gave birth to itself.
"Fuck
that," Ben said, reaching for Karla's crotch. "This is real.
You're just jerking off."
Gilmore:
Was that when you knew?
Reed:
No, Karla just laughed and swatted his hand away. But there
was something in the way she did it, something that told me
she didn't really mind being Ben's touchstone of reality.
Gilmore: And when did the actual breakup occur?
Reed:
Oh, a week or two later. We'd been back in Reno for a couple
days, and she just came into my study one morning and said,
"Lenny, I'm going with Ben for a while."
I
said, "What?"
And she said, "I'm going away with Ben for
a while."
Gilmore: And they left? Just like that?
Reed:
Just like that.
Gilmore:
You know Ben's story called "Saturday"?
Reed:
Of course.
Gilmore:
Would you give me your thoughts about that?
Reed:
You're a real asshole, you know? The guy steals my wife and
then writes a story about it from my point of view. What do
you think I think about that?
Gilmore:
Just thought I'd ask.
IV
There's
a story by Ben Garrison called "Lacrymosa" that is about two
men and a woman who go camping together in the Mogollon Mountains,
just west of the Gila Wilderness in southwestern New Mexico.
The area is a wild one, and they've been traveling on old logging
roads for three or four days, and they haven't seen other human
beings but themselves. The story is told from the woman's point
of view.
In
the story, they've been traveling together all summer, and the
woman is painfully conscious of being in the process of leaving
the younger man for the older one. The older man, whose name
is David, has been prodding her in this direction for some time
now. The younger man, whose name is Les, is not quite aware
of what's going on yet.
The
climax of the story occurs on one of those cold mountain nights
that can come even in mid- or late summer in those desert mountains.
We
came down off the mountain to a flat, grassy place near the
bank of a stream. It was nearly dark when we stopped and began
to set up camp. I'd swear the temperature dropped twenty degrees
the minute the sun dropped behind the mountain.
Les and Dave put
up the tent, while I started gathering wood for a fire.
"Let's get all the
deadwood we can find before it gets any darker, and we'll make
us a big one tonight, one that'll last all night long."
I began to drag branches and brush and stuff into the center
of the clearing, near where the tent was going up, and when
Dave and Les had all the pegs hammered in they joined in the
collecting of firewood.
First,
we made a small fire just for cooking, and after we'd eaten
our beans and corn we started piling on heavier stuff. Sparks
and smoke flew up to the treetops and disappeared into blackness.
The guys were jubilant, excited by the roar of the blaze. Somehow
that day I'd made a decision. I wasn't sure when or how.
Dave shouted to Les across the crackling fire, "Let's throw
on everything we can lay our hands on. It might really last
all night then."
The
fire they made was so big, so hot we couldn't get within ten
feet of it at first. So we stood back away, stamping our feet,
and blowing into our hands–hot and cold at the same time.
I let the guys take the tent, and laid my bag on a tarp on the
ground outside, where I could watch and be warmed by the fire.
High above the fire were sparks mixed with stars.
I thought about
Les, and I thought about David, and then I slept.
During
the night, I awoke every so often to see, each time, the fire
growing smaller, weaker, less bright. In the early morning,
an hour or so before dawn, I heard, far off, a woman crying–great
wrenching sobs that seemed to be coming closer.
At breakfast, David
said, "Did you hear that mountain lion last night?" Les hadn't
heard it, but I said yes, as though I'd known what it was. And
to me it was still a woman crying–for Lester, for David, for
all of us.
V
Before leaving
Pueblo the next morning, Gilmore promised he'd send Lenny a
transcript of his interview with Martha Landridge as soon as
she'd okayed it, which, Gilmore thought, should be a matter
of days. But it turned out to be more a matter of months. In
the meanwhile, Lenny finished up the workshops he was teaching
in Pueblo and moved on to another gig. Karla had exploded, of
course, when she learned of the Landridge interview, just as
Lenny had thought she would. In fact, she'd reneged on her many
commitments to and agreements with Gilmore, and absolutely refused
to let him use the interview he'd done with her as long as he
went ahead with his plan to use the one with Martha.
Karla
also tried and failed to pressure Lenny into withdrawing from
Gilmore's project. Lenny stood firm. "Why the fuck did you send
him to me if you didn't want me to talk to him? This doesn't
make any sense, Karla. What difference does it make whether
he talked to Martha or not?"
"Well,
if you don't understand, Lenny, I'm just not going to explain
it to you." And then she hung up.
"Women,"
Lenny muttered to himself as he fixed another drink.
At the time of Ben's disappearance, Lenny and Karla had indeed
intended to remarry, but time and events worked against that.
A document turned up among Ben's papers that made Karla the
legal executor of his estate, which involved a considerable
amount of money Ben had made during those last couple years.
She was fairly well off. And very, very busy.
But
they stayed in touch by telephone, and Lenny supported her in
every way he could, though he wouldn't let her push him around.
When the transcript caught up with him, Lenny was halfway through
the spring term in Fort Collins, Colorado–living at a motel,
as usual, and–not as usual–involved with a redhead in his senior
poetry workshop who had managed, much to his amazement, to revive
his interest both in sonnets and in sex.
The
transcript arrived in a hefty manila envelope with Gilmore,
56 Ransome Road, Roanoke, Virginia, in the top left-hand corner.
Lenny tossed it onto a pile of papers on the chest of drawers
and let it lie there for a couple days while he waited for a
good time to read it, but then a newspaper got tossed on top
of it, and then something else, and between sex and classes
and some pretty heavy drinking, it might have disappeared entirely
if one night Sharon, the redhead, naked and damp and pink from
the shower hadn't idly started looking through the heap on the
dresser.
"What's
this, Len?" she asked, waggling the envelope at him.
Lenny, half-drunk and
sleepy from sex, narrowed his eyes, tried to focus. Finally
succeeding, he saw the name Gilmore.
"Oh,
that's the interview with Martha."
"Who's
Martha?" asked Sharon.
"Nobody
you'd know," said Lenny, immediately regretting the tone.
"Come
on, Len. Who is she? Some old flame of yours?" She'd seemed
to ignore the tone in Lenny's voice.
"Not
a girlfriend, no. Just a friend of a friend. A former wife of
a former friend, actually."
"Who's
the friend?"
"Ben
Garrison," Lenny replied. "Know his stuff?"
"You
knew Ben Garrison?" Lenny wondered for a moment if she was putting
him down. But Sharon seemed simply delighted. "I think I've
read everything he ever wrote."
"Not
everything," Lenny said. "Not everything he wrote has been published."
But Sharon didn't hear him. She was away in memory land. And
when she returned she said, "He read here in Fort Collins back
when I was a freshman. He read that story called 'Houselights.'
Do you know it?"
"That
was one of the great ones." Lenny found her slipping out of
focus.
"Yes,
he read that and some poems, but the story was the thing."
"That's
what he was good at. Did you sleep with him?"
Sharon
smacked Lenny's naked rump with the flat of her hand.
"Can
I read it?"
"What,
the interview?"
"What
do you think?"
Her
finger was already into the envelope, tearing the flap away
and destroying the entire envelope in the process of opening
it.
"Well,
why not? Why don't you read it out loud?"
Lenny
poured himself a bourbon and dropped an ice cube in it.
"Want
a drinkie?"
No,
thanks. I'm going to have to drive, looks like."
So,
they settled back on the bed, and she began.
"There's
a letter here. Want me to read it to you?"
"Sure.
Go ahead."
"It
says, 'Dear Lenny, Sorry to be so long in getting this to you,
but Martha took longer with it than I expected. It's still a
bit rough around the edges, but she finally approved the gist
of it.
"'As
you probably know by now, Karla's pulled out of the Garrison
project. When she heard that I was going to use Martha's interview,
she just called it quits. I reminded her of her agreements with
me, but that didn't do a bit of good. She just refuses to have
her interview appear in the same book with Martha's. And I,
of course, couldn't back down. The Martha material is important,
as you'll see.
"'Quite
frankly, I don't know what Karla's problem is. If you have any
idea, maybe you'd let me know. I doubt, though, that Karla will
change her mind. She seemed quite adamant.
"'Thanks
for your cooperation on this, by the way. The book will be much
better because of it.
"'Keep
in touch. Yours, Artie Gilmore.'"
Sharon
looked over at Lenny, who was slowly shaking his head from side
to side. He held out his glass, and she reached for the fifth
of Jack Daniels on the nightstand. She poured him a drink and
then passed him the bottle. "Here, put it on your side."
"Oh,
my. Oh, my," Lenny said, mournfully.
Sharon
stretched herself out on the bed, her body returned from pink
to freckled white. Next to her, Lenny felt tan. She fluffed
up the pillows behind her head and began once more to read.
Lenny watched her for a while, saw how the fingers of her right
hand, the hand not holding the transcript, continually ran up
and down her body, over her breasts and rib cage and stomach
to the mound at the top of her thighs, where they twisted themselves
into curly red hair, even redder than the hair on her head.
But after a while, he rolled over on his back and stared up
at the ceiling.
Art
Gilmore interviewing Martha Landridge, October 15, 1990, Cielo
Vista Hotel, Owensburg, California.
For
several months, Martha Landridge refused all my requests for
an interview. Our conversations would be by telephone, and they
were invariably short. I'd give her reasons, and she'd refuse.
She never talked publicly about Ben Garrison. That was it. She
said.
Then,
just as I was about to give up hope of ever putting questions
to her, I met, just by chance, a Los Angeles painter who'd known
her during the two or three years she lived in LA back in the
early eighties. The painter offered to intercede with Martha,
and the result was that Martha agreed to meet me for half an
hour at the Cielo Vista Hotel in Owensburg, California. I promised,
as is customary, that she'd get to check out the transcript
of the interview and make corrections and changes. I also promised
her that no photographs of her, from whatever source, would
appear in the book or in any publicity for the book.
So, that's how things stood. Our conversation on October 15,
as you will see, ran considerably longer than half an hour.
Gilmore: Do you remember the first time you saw Ben Garrison?
Landridge: As though it were yesterday. I was thirteen going
on fourteen, and he was about a year older. We lived in Schenectady,
New York, and were both going to the same high school, and one
fall day he just started to chat after school and wound up walking
me all the way home.
Gilmore:
You know, people have told me over and over that Ben was twenty
years older than you.
Landridge:
Well, that's just nonsense. We were about a year apart; he was
a sophomore when we met, and I was a freshman.
Gilmore:
Why would Ben lie about that? And what about Presidio?
Landridge: Well, that's just the way Ben was. He'd bend the
truth a bit, to serve his own purposes, or often just for fun.
And Presidio?
Gilmore:
Yes. According to Ben, you were waiting tables there, and he
got in a fight over you, got knocked out by some redneck, and
wound up being nursed back to health by you.
Landridge:
Right. And I climbed into bed with him, to keep him warm when
he had the chills, right?
Gilmore:
That's what I was told.
Landridge:
Have you ever read Tolstoy? "Master and Man"? Well, two men
in that story, a Russian nobleman and his servant, get caught
in a raging blizzard, and the servant uses the heat from his
very own body to keep his master alive through the night. And
have you read Hemingway? A Farewell to Arms? Remember
Lieutenant Henry and Catherine, his nurse? Well, there you are–two
of his favorite stories when he was in high school.
And
you know what else? He told that Presidio story of his to some
writer from Chicago, who used it himself, only in his version
it's a sixty-year-old man climbing into bed with his eighty-year-old
father to keep the old man from pulling the tubing out of his
arms so that he can die.
[Laughs]
Ben never let go of a good story, and he didn't mind spreading
good stories around either. Never got mad when somebody cribbed
something of his.
Back
in the sixties, know what he'd do? He'd take one basic story,
dress it up in various ways, and send it out to six or seven
magazines all under different names. He loved to do that. Do
you remember "In the Thicket"?
Gilmore:
Of course.
Landridge: That was
in Houselights, his first collection back in '65 or so.
Remember?
Gilmore:
Yes, I do. It was a fine story.
Landridge:
Well, "In the Thicket" must have been in about twelve different
magazines, and some of them biggies too. You know, The Paris
Review and such like. He used to call "In the Thicket" his
All-time Champion (capital A, capital C). Later, I think he
played the same game, but stopped keeping score.
Gilmore:
When did you and Ben get married?
Landridge:
March 10, 1962, in Westminster, Maryland. He'd been off to college
and even out of college for two years before we ran into each
other again.
Gilmore:
What were you doing during those years?
Landridge:
Me? Oh, this and that. Mostly working as a dorm counselor in
a private girls' school in Virginia.
Gilmore:
And how did you and Ben get together again?
Landridge:
Would you believe, he came to that school on a teaching gig.
There's a short, four-week term they squeeze in there between
the fall and spring terms, and he'd been hired to replace some
Israeli writer who'd canceled out at the last minute because
he needed a prostate operation. Ben was hired to teach poetry
writing. Can you imagine? They must have been desperate. [Laughs]
Gilmore: Well, poetry wasn't his strong suit back in those days,
was it?
Landridge:
You know, he thought it was.
Gilmore:
No, did he?
Landridge:
I think he found poetry easier at the time. He was antsy in
those days, and didn't like to commit the large blocks of time
that fiction writing demanded. Poetry he could toss off and
come back to whenever he had time or was is the mood. He told
me once about writing a poem at the same time that he was hectoring
a freshman comp class about comma splices or some such thing.
I mean, literally writing it out while he was talking about
something else.
Well,
I did my best to talk him out of it.
Gilmore:
Out of what?
Landridge:
Out of writing poetry! I really hated poetry (and poets too)
in those days. Couldn't stand the stuff. It was all so prissy
and precious and yucky. And the poets! All that too-sensitive-for-this-world
stuff–I really hated it.
Gilmore: And now?
Landridge: [Laughs] Well. I've found one or two I can stomach,
believe it or not. In fact, I've been living with a poet for
the last couple years. [Laughs again] Maybe I'm just going dippy
in my old age.
But,
more seriously, one reason I wanted him to stop writing poetry
was that poetry writing left him with too much time on his hands.
And I figured that if we were going to make it together he'd
have to cut down the amount of time he had available for drinking
and womanizing.
Gilmore:
Did it work?
Landridge: You know
the answer to that one. It did for a while, long enough for
him to crank out some really good work. But when he started
making money at it, the money started buying him time, and we
were back at square one. I went through two or three cycles
of that with him and then I got off the merry-go-round.
Gilmore: That was in
'74, when you got divorced in Vegas.
Landridge:
Well, Vegas was where we split up, but we never did get divorced.
Gilmore: Come on, I
don't believe it! Divorces are a matter of public record.
Landridge: Have you
ever checked it?
Gilmore:
No, but I could easily enough.
Landridge:
Go right ahead, my friend. But you'd be wasting your time.
Gilmore: You could have been divorced anywhere.
Landridge:
Then you'd be wasting even more time, wouldn't you? Why don't
you just take my word for it? Why would I lie?
Gilmore:
Why would he lie? About that?
Landridge:
Just for the fun of it, most likely.
Gilmore:
That means that . . . Do Karla and Lenny know?
Landridge:
I seriously doubt it. They will, though, when this comes out.
Won't that be fun? Gilmore: But if you're still legally married
to him, what about the money, and his "literary remains" so
to speak?
Landridge:
Oh, pish, Artie–I've never needed Ben's money, and Karla's doing
just fine with his remains. She'll hold the banner high, if
anyone will.
Gilmore:
What about "Night Life in the Desert"?
Landridge: Did Karla show you that? It's never been published,
you know.
Gilmore: It's coming
out in Esquire next month.
Landridge: Wouldn't you know. Well, more power to her. Anyway,
the gist of the story is true, but not the part about the divorce.
And did Karla tell you about the title of that story?
Gilmore:
No.
Landridge:
Well, the original title was "Flamingo." Ben talked the manager
of the Flamingo Hotel down in St. Pete into paying him about
five hundred dollars to use the name of the hotel in the title
of his story. Can you believe that? And then, just before the
story was published, Ben changed his mind, and for years afterwards
he joked that the hotel had probably put a hit man on his trail.
[Laughs]
Sharon
laughed to herself and began to ask Lenny if he thought that
might be true, but Lenny, she saw, was asleep, even snoring
lightly.
She
kissed him lightly on the forehead and climbed out of bed. Gathering
up her clothes from here and there on the furniture and floor,
she went in the bathroom and dressed. She used the toilet, washed
her hands in the washbasin, finger-combed her long red hair
at the mirror, and then back out to the bed, where Lenny was
still asleep, his thin, graying hair disheveled, his mouth wide
open, a slender trail of drool making its way down from the
corner of his mouth.
The
transcript of the interview lay on the bed where she'd left
it. Sharon picked it up and began to read again, but not aloud
anymore. Then she, glancing at her watch, she tossed the transcript
onto the dresser where she had first found it, and went out
to her car, a sporty red number with Colorado plates that said
"2 SWIFT."
She
turned the ignition key and sat quietly staring off into the
darkness for a minute or two, the engine purring softly. Then
she hopped out of the car, slipped quietly back into Lenny's
room, took the transcript from the dresser and went out again,
pulling the door quietly shut behind her. With the transcript
beside her on the empty bucket seat, she drove off into the
night, already excited at the thought of reading it alone–at
home, in her own bed.
Rebecca
Kavaler
His
father made it sound as wholesome as cooked cereal in the morning.
"There's nothing like fresh air and country living,"
said the powerful figure effulgent in summer suiting as he hoisted
Boone's duffel bag onto the luggage rack.
Exactly what he had said the night before when Boone
announced he didn't want to go. To which he had added (Boone's mother venturing
to suggest ten was too young, a great-uncle and great-aunt too
old) that it would be a valuable learning experience. None of which made four weeks on a farm sound
like much of a vacation. Good
Humor trucks, stickball in the streets, firecrackers in the
park, hand-to-hand combat with wet towels along the slippery
edge of city pools, the jerky stop-and-stop wending homeward
from the beach on traffic-jammed Sundays–those were the proper
treats of summer.
Almost in tears, Boone sought to wave goodbye
from the window of the slowly gliding train, but his father
had not stayed, was even then being borne
aloft at a stately but inexorable pace.
Years later, studying the Greeks, Boone was to recognize
the machine that lowered and raised the god on stage as the
Union Station escalator.
To
any child the first trip from home is an interplanetary journey,
and in fact Boone's remembrance in those later years could have
been mistaken for a lunatic recounting by some crackpot claiming
to have been abducted by a UFO.
A world of purple trees and yellow sky.
Weird beings with metal objects sprouting from their
heads. Aunt Flo was reduced
in time to that: steel-grey hairpins popping out of steel-grey
hair. And Uncle Eban
to a porkpie hat. But the house, the house he remembered in all
its Queen Anne glory, a result no doubt of all those hours spent
lying on his back in a field that seemed a level plain when
he stood erect but which betrayed a definite declivity when
he threw himself supine–a saucer on whose rim were aligned all
the taller structures of the farm. There the barn, whose cool interior smelled
half of stable, half garage.
There the longer, lower shed that stank
of pure cow. There
the wooden silo, a listing barrel that had burst its staves.
There the metal one, nosing the sky like a rocket on
a launching pad. And there the house.
Long
after the features of Aunt Flo and Uncle Eban had become an
amorphous blur, he could recall every aspect of that jumbled
pile, every scallop, filligree and furbelow, every crazy angle
of separate pitched roofs varying in direction of their axes
according to the whim of each new generation.
And rising above them all, the topmost little roof, fitting
like a conical cap–the crow's nest with its oval eye of colored
glass.
That
was such a place from which a child plucked from the civic hearth
and perched on high might witness the great and unspeakable,
initiand to Eleusinian Mysteries.
"Did
you have fun?" his father asked, forcefully as was his
wont, when Boone returned looking, as his father said, fit as
a fiddle, covered with wholesome scabs and scratches.
"No,"
said Boone. After so long an abstinence, ambrosial was the
smell and taste of take-home pizza.
"There weren't any other kids around, they don't
even have TV."
"It's high time you learned to manufacture
your own entertainment," his father said, and his mother
nodded yes, yes, yes. Boone
had never thought of fun before as a skill to be learned, like
tying shoelaces.
Stretching
out then tonguing up the rubbery strings of cheese, Boone wondered
if he should tell his parents the kind of entertainment people
manufactured when they didn't have TV. The game Aunt Flo and Uncle Eban played of an
evening was mostly picking him apart, vying with each other
at finding fault. Don't
tell me that's all you eat at home, you'll never reach a man's
full growth. Don't tell me your ma just packed you shorts,
bare legs won't do for walking through them fields. Don't tell me you just had your hair cut, you'll
be taken for a girl. Don't
tell me you don't go to church--We was just funning, Aunt Flo
explained, when he broke down and cried.
"And did you learn to milk a cow?" his
mother asked. The way
she leaned forward, elbows on the kitchen table, both hands
spread to cup her pointed chin, lent great importance to the
question. Boone shook his head, shame-faced admission
to a failing grade. He
had gone into the cowshed only once, didn't like the smell.
His
father laughed. "I don't remember much of my one summer
on that farm, but I do remember that–they made me clean it out."
Boone
lavished all attention on the last morsel of his pizza as if
he doted on burnt crust. No reason he could see to admit that Uncle Eban
had tried to make him do the same, but he had hidden until they
gave up looking, gave up calling.
Either the crow's nest was forgotten or it wasn't worth
the climb.
The
little round window was of colored glass. Yellow and purple It was midday but through that window the light
was forever a dying afternoon's.
From his eyrie, Boone looked down on the squashed porkpie
hat, never doffed indoors or out.
Uncle Eban was cleaning out the cowshed by himself.
The usual overalls, flailed into pale blue lifelessness
by Aunt Flo's laundering, had been replaced by the old shirt
and trousers kept hanging in the shed for just such jobs.
The one time he went inside, Boone had brushed against
them, jumped back in alarm, not recognizing them as clothes
to be worn. On his uncle,
mounding the manure into a dark volcanic cone, they seemed made
not of cloth but of some old dark metal, heavy and durable as
iron, as seasoned in their way as the cast-iron skillet on Aunt
Flo's stove.
It
was Aunt Flo's entrance that gave the scene a disconcerting
turn. She was wearing
a too-large raincoat of smoky transparency, strange suff that
reminded Boone of the isinglass windows on the ancient car rusting
in the barn. Why a raincoat, was the puzzle. Boone peered up. Not a cloud in the yellow sky. Not a shadow of a cloud near the purple sun. Squeezed tightly under her arm, a plump chicken
squirmed. Its beak took
chopstick bites out of empty air.
A frisson of terror–or was it delight?–rippled over Boone's
skin. He knew, even as the chicken seemed to know,
what came next.
I'll
wring your neck. Her customary expression of mild annoyance.
You track mud over this floor just once again, boy, I'll
wring your neck.
Boone
remembered back to breakfast, what she had said.
Not for you to watch, don't even let the other chickens
watch, she had said. All Boone heard from Uncle Eban was a contemptuous
expulsion of air through the hairy marshland in his nose, but
shut up, Aunt Flo commanded, taking a steel hairpin out of her
hair and glaring across the table as if she meant to plunge
it into Uncle Eban's heart, stuck it instead into another part
of her scalp. It's not
like the boy's brought up to it, she said.
Take me, it's been my chore since I was eight years old,
when Ma got her bursitis. My
sister Edna now, she never done it till she was married.
You should have seen her, boy, that first time, she left
her new husband high and dry, with no supper on the stove, come
crying home to Ma and me, all covered with the blood.
We thought at first Billy done beat her–with all that
carrying on you couldn't make head nor tails of what she said.
Uncle
Eban addressed a snort to "your sister Edna," but
Aunt Flo's patting of her thick grey hair, her groping for the
lethal hairpin was purely automatic. Hers was the foolish out-of-focus smile that
grownups wore when remembering good times past. Poor Edna, she had laughed.
Poor
chicken. Boone heard the furious pounding of the tiny
heart under the feathered breast.
It took the silent mouthing of the figures far below
to make him realize the heartbeat was his own.
They were yelling. The
mouths spat and twisted and opened wide in silent roars.
He could hear nothing, he was missing all the fight.
He wiped the stained glass porthole with his shirttail
as if cleaning wax out of his ears.
Uncle Eban flung his shovel to the ground and yelled
again. One hand still
binding tight the chicken's legs, Aunt Flo used her other to
tear into her hair, jerking out, jabbing in the pins, her mouth
working away. When it
happened, it took Boone completely by surprise.
Reversing her hold, its head now in her hand, she began
to whirl the chicken around and around, the way he whirled his
model planes into flight. Oh ho, he's going to get it now, Boone laughed
to himself, as silently as those titans cursing each other below–she's
going to throw it at him. And
so she did.
The
chicken took off straight for Uncle Eban, but its head stayed
in her hand. Boone saw
the reason for the raincoat then. Uncle Eban was soaked with blood, stunned with
blood. Aunt Flo's head
was far back, her mouth open, drowning in laughter.
The chicken kept on going, floundering about the bare
yard, a geyser of blood spurting from the open neck, its wings
flapping vigorously as if still convinced it could escape in
flight. He did not see
Uncle Eban plow his shovel into the manure pile but he heard Aunt Flo's scream, faint and shrill
as a train whistle miles down the track.
Uncle
Eban dripping with blood. Aunt Flo, buttoned up in her raincoat as if
forearmed against droppings from the sky, drowning in that other
stuff. In her hair, plastered to her face, oozing from
her mouth. And the chicken
careening around them both, its blood now jetting in a finer
spray, a lawnsprinkler wetting the thirsty earth in a time
of drought.
"I
learned how to kill a chicken," Boone said to his mother,
who had shown her disappointment that he hadn't learned to milk
a cow. He felt resentful
when she made a face. It
was a learning experience, he would have thought.
His
father took it more in stride.
"Okay, so you can kill a chicken, hot stuff.
What else did you learn?"
Boone
opened his mouth to tell them, then shut it tight.
There is no child so young he does not know what happens
to those who witness the unspeakable and bring back a report.
Edith
Konecky
The Cocktail Hour
(From View To the North, Coming
November, 2004)
My
mother and I are having our first preprandial drink in what
they call the den, though it's no snug and private retreat,
merely an area of a vast green ambience that also includes the
formal living area, rarely used, a card nook, and the dining
area, all more or less open to each other and arranged upon
a meadow, a grassy lea of sculptured green carpet that yawns
from wall to distant wall where windows frame trompe l'oeil
views of sea and sky in colors so improbable that they can only
be real. As Angie said, there's a lot of bad art in nature.
But
there is more bad art in art, examples of which hang on these
walls, chosen by my father whose eye for style fails him beyond
the boundaries of the garment district where he so successfully
labored for much of his life. There are three paintings of tropical
beaches, purchased on a trip to some Caribbean paradise, white
sailboats on the horizon painted in day-glo colors. The dominant
painting is of a bowl of wax fruit, a still-lifeless, Angie
called it, or nature double-morte. It reminds me of the apartment
Angie and I shared, the one I fled for New Hampshire, whose
ugly little lobby was decorated with a fake fountain ringed
with artificial flowers, changed seasonally by the superintendent,
daffodils and tulips in spring, roses in summer, mums and dahlias
in autumn. In the winter it's bare, except at Christmas when
a frosted white plastic tree appears with blinking electric
candles. Art and artifice. Angie loved it. The one brief time
she was down here with me she loved these paintings, too, remarking
that what was so exciting was that the perpetrators were sincere,
as my father was, or so she assumed, and that like books, whether
they're literature or entertainment, they all say something
about the society we live in. The difference is in the long
run. Like the fake flowers, entertainment needs constant renewal.
"But what about these pictures?" I asked. "My parents are permanently
satisfied with them."
"They
hung them and never saw them again," Angie said, "and, besides,
the long run takes longer."
Angie's
studio is three flights up in an old warehouse off Hudson Street.
It's what she calls The Serious Place, and, unlike anywhere
or anything else of hers, it's surprisingly neat and well organized.
There she's in complete control. She knows where everything
is and every space has its reason. A good carpenter, she built
handsome off-the-floor cupboards and stalls for her finished
work, and shelves for her supplies, and movable wall-sized panels
where she hangs the more recent paintings, those she's working
on and the finished ones she still needs to have around her.
A toilet and sink stand unenclosed in a corner, and next to
the sink a small table with a hotplate, and on the hotplate
a red enamel saucepan, and off in another corner a cot with
a blanket and three pillows, and these, and the separate receptacle
for emptied wine bottles, are her only concession to her non-painting
self.
It's
a large square room with good light, but the light can hardly
matter since when she is what she calls "inside the painting,"
she sometimes paints all night, and if the electricity were
to go off, she would paint by candlelight. One blizzardy February
morning, because she hadn't come home all night, I stopped by
to make sure she was all right and to bring her some breakfast.
She was completely absorbed in the painting she was doing, that
she'd been doing all night, despite the fact that the heat had
failed. She wore layers of sweaters under her coat and her fur-lined
snow boots, a knitted hat pulled far down over her ears and
a muffler wound around her neck. Only her hands were bare and
they were two shades of blue, one from the cold. She looked
as if she could barely keep hold of the brush, but the face
she turned toward me when she was aware of my presence, was
haggard and feverish with excitement. And what a painting it
was!
"I can't stop now," she said in a faint, breathless voice, dismissing
me.
Later, during our summer in the Montana Rockies, I saw that
Angie's colors were all out of those landscapes of her childhood,
though the landscapes themselves, the mountains, trees, lake,
snow, aren't recognizably there. The paintings are lyrical and
mysterious, almost mystical, but they have the depth and movement
of those landscapes with their winds and waters, weathers and
seasons.
Angie,
Angie. She was christened Evelyn-Angelica, with the hyphen.
Only her mother ever called her by that given name, and never
with love. She was a strict, rigid woman of German stock, hardworking,
demanding, unimaginative, and severe. "Every Monday the furniture
was polished," Angie told me. "Every Tuesday dinner of my early
life was split pea soup. Every day of the week was like that,
with its appointed chores and unchanging menu. I can't hear
the word Thursday without smelling its smells and hearing its
sounds. Thursday smells of cabbage and ham hocks and sounds
of carpets on a line being whacked with a carpet beater."
"What's a carpet beater? What are ham hocks?" I asked, loving
her. "God, Angie, you're so exotic!"
"And all around us the most improbably beautiful scenery in
the world." I hadn't seen it yet. "The towering snow-capped
mountains, the great, tall, looming firs, the vast cherry orchards
sloping down to the shores of the huge lake with its changing
colors, its moody surface; the wild sunsets, the endless sky."
Her father, an engineer, was on his way to a job in California
when the scenery stopped him in his tracks. He took a job with
the national parks service as a forest ranger, never making
it to the coast. Her mother was a schoolteacher. The teachers
were shamefully underpaid. "We're paid one third in dollars,
two thirds in scenery," they said. "Though I doubt my mother
ever said that; she was humorless. Anyhow, the contrast between
that wild and powerful landscape and our rigid narrow domestic
life was impossible to reconcile. It's why I'm incapable of
doing anything I'm supposed to do, or in the way I'm expected
to do it. I hate schedules, routines. I can't have my meals
according to the clock, or go to bed because it's supposed to
be bedtime, or get up because somewhere a cock is crowing."
I had just finished setting the table. There were candles and
fall flowers and I stood back to admire the festive look of
it. It was seven-thirty. Acting on a compelling familial urge
left over from my recent past, I'd spent the last four hours
making a turkey dinner with, as they say, all the trimmings.
It was our first Thanksgiving together, my first ever without
blood relatives of any kind. Jed was with Herbie for the long
weekend, Nick was in school way out west, too far to come home.
I wasn't exactly lonely, but I did want a semblance of something
like roots, tradition, a small pocket of warmth and ceremony
in the improvisational schemelessness of our time together.
But Angie wasn't having it. She was sipping burgundy and reminiscing
and the apartment was full of rich, delicious smells that were
making me mad with nostalgia and hunger.
But the turkey was drying out in the oven. The marshmallows
had long since melted into the sweet potato casserole, and the
gravy had a skin on it. My beautiful dinner. "Damn it," I said,
"it's Thanksgiving, the only holiday I like. Think how hard
I've been working to provide some semblance of normal home life."
"There's no such thing."
". . . a lovely, traditional occasion. Just this once, if I
promise never to do it again, couldn't you make an exception?"
What I hadn't yet learned was that, like most alcoholics, Angie
wasn't hungry.
"The
magic, the mystery," she said, lifting her hands, opening them
out like a Balinese dancer, as if shaping the contours of a
vase of exquisite, ghostly blooms. She talked a lot about magic
and mystery, two things of which I was the murderer. Angie put
down her glass and came and stood on my feet. She was smaller
than I and didn't weigh much, and she was barefoot and she liked
to stand on my feet, her arms around my neck.
"I'm
standing on your feet," she said.
"I
know."
"You
can't be mad at someone when they're standing on your feet."
I laughed. Angie laughed. We began to dance that way, with Angie
standing on my feet. Earlier, we had made love and we still
smelled faintly of each other. I was overcome with love. And
I was hungry.
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