From the Kenyon Review, New Series, Winter 1989, Vol. XI, No. 1
The long, looping syntax of things, the way they wind together then un wind, the feel of the light in your mouth, the sound you make while touching it, the slant of the sunshine precisely the angle it arrived at yesterday, only not now, not through the same set of trees or at the equivalent instant, not this minute of the watch he fails to wear—yet keeping watch—not needing radium strapped to a wrist, the reminder (as if anyone needed reminding how time itself is circular and deadly not least because dull, the measure of man’ s metronomic regularity—this man’s, at any rate, who soon enough would be patted and fed and prepared) of our dutiful segmenting declension, the habit of a hierarchy, compassed degrees: fifty-nine to sixty, twelve subordinate to one—and the sun where it was once and would be routinely, as if fifty-nine and sixty are and should be parallel, as if it matters, is of consequence, the sun and dial and generation rising but to fall, his brothers dead or dying or co-opted or corrupt, his actual cousin doing just fine, thank you, a C.P.A. south of Glen Falls; it’s not what we’d planned for, this split-level, says Georgy—he cannot help it, thinks of him as Georgy still, would introduce him even now as Georgy, even at seventy-eight, if ever they might meet once more or furnish introductions—but Georgy worked for General Electric in Fort Ed ward, and retired there, and the likelihood of such a meeting now again is slim; it’s not so bad, he used to say, good benefits, time off for good behavior, he liked to go hunting and sailing, they have this camp on Lake George (and Bindy, George’s second wife, never failed to make a joke of it, a point that she points out by laughing, lifting her arms, her chin, the single dimple on her right cheek creasing, George bought this place before we married so they named the lake here after him, they’re sweet to put it on the map and put up all those signposts so even after too many Manhattans we can’t lose our way. How many, he asked, is too many; she lifted her hands to him then, two, six, who’s counting, you can find us in the dark), and long ago he, Martin, had done so and sat on the rock outcrop while his cousin snored within, and watched the slate gray water beneath its mist-sleeve, rising, thinking how the Indians had split that surface earlier, deer swimming in front of them, startled, the inlet not too wide to ford—imagining what deer must feel, wet panic, the waterlogged forelegs unable to leap, the long snouting hollow birch behind it implacably, hissing, no camouflage in water where your head remains outstretched like his own above the rocker pillow, pinioned, and then the bow and hatchet man, the shadow, the uplifted arm, the stench of mortality nearing-he shut his eyes and saw not his housekeeper but Bindy, pulling her negligee over her knees, crossing her hands there, smoking, flicking the ash at the water, asking him is something wrong, is there something we or anyone can do?
He told her, or tried to, about regularity, our brothers corrupted as three day drowned game: you can make the same turn ninety times, coming out of the same driveway; you could make it nine hundred, nine thousand times, can make it till the brake pads fail while sun slants through the frost-rime that you failed to bother wiping, till the road goes slick and a pickup with a driver fiddling with the radio, his right hand at the dial and left hand just touching the wheel, his sleep this past night troubled, his daughter not back until three (and though he’d waited in the living room, watching football from the coast, nodding off, dozing with the long day done and what the hell’s the point, it’s now or later, sooner or never, giving her time and rope and falling asleep at the two-minute break, waking as she tiptoed past, the screen a blue haze only, ready to tell her the things that she does, the way she worries him, her mother too—yet something in the way she walks, some aspect of her high-hipped gait, the care she takes to let him sleep, the way she pushes the knob in gently, and the blue glare contracting till blank, the streetlamp light in her disarrayed hair, some at tribute of beauty that he has not seen in her before and knows will not remain, will tarnish from this newly minted precious thing, this coinage called womanhood—something of that stayed his hand and held his tongue and kept him in the armchair while she tiptoed up the stairs), and therefore he broods now, dialing, inattentive, and does not notice the car nosing out, the intersection that had been a driveway entrance only, threatless, abandoned or at least unoccupied, the way what was habitual now shifts. And if that is the case for a driveway, how much more true of highways and the crossroads of a nation, the inside lane on 1-80 by Moline when diesel rigs explode—the air is wet, he drops his head as if to dive, as if the wind were liquid, he can hear as clearly as if clicking stones across that inlet, as if Bindy spelled it out, I’m dying of boredom, of your good cousin, of life beside that snuffling hulk and Hudson Falls and Glens Falls and Fort Edward and the Library Committee, stripping with a single gesture, arms out, and diving splay-footed into the lake, the length of her swirling, submerged; I dare you, Bindy offers, what’s wrong with it anyhow, why not, he’s sleeping, and anyhow he’ll never know, and anyhow he wouldn’t mind, and what did you come here for otherwise, why?—the start of the visit, the knee raised, the instep, the startled beginning again.
“Martin, it’s too cold out here.”
He straightened.
“You have to come in.”
He blinked. He licked his teeth—the uppers, left to right.
“They’ll be coming for the photographs in half an hour. That nice man from the interview. You were sleeping. You messed up your hair.”
Mrs. Thompson’s voice, he thought, might have been gentle once. Now it sounded like mosquitoes in his ear.
“We’ve got to get you ready. We’d better come in from the porch.”
Is there a word, he asked himself, for many mosquitoes at the same time? Are they a cluster, gaggle, pride; would mosquitoes be a swarm?
“Up we go now, Martin. Easy does it. Up.”
Strange, he thought, that she should call him Martin whereas he, her employer, her elder, spoke of her as Mrs. Thompson—did not think of her as Kate. She had been his housekeeper for eleven years.
“That’s better. In we go.”
The maple leaves cascaded where he watched. There had been an early snow. The birch were finished, and the beech, and the oak tree at the driveway’s edge stood sere and bare and brown. He must remember, later, to check the variorum on “bare ruin’d choirs”; what did “choirs” mean, and what sort of church allowed birds? “Where late the sweet birds sang” made sense, but “choirs” was a puzzle, music merely; he’d puzzle it out.
And she was right, his chittering chorus, his shrew: it had been growing cold. He lifted his arms, rolled his neck. She collected his lap rug and mug. She steered him to the door. The newel post and railings needed paint. His rocker, weightless, abandoned, rocked. “What time is it?” he asked.
“Three-thirty. Almost four. That nice young man’s coming at four.”
If it had been a woman, she would have been less eager—more protective, more solicitous, more watchful of his privacy. If it had been a pretty woman—and most journalists have flair, at least, and television women have a scrubbed gleam about them, and the young girls writing now are not, he knows, uneager—then heaven help the visitor. Mrs. Thompson would be dusting. Mrs. Thompson would be fluffing up the pillows and making significant noises and pointing to her watch. The last one, she’d thrown out. The girl had brought all Martin’s books for him to sign—a selection anyway, a baker’s goodly dozen—and she told him they were wonderful and meant everything to her, and always had, and sat beside him on the couch with no bra and pert little nipples and so much perfume he had sneezed, her red hair flicking his shoulder as he bent to write. “You’re cold,” said Mrs. Thompson. “You must be tired, Martin. Maybe we can send them with suitable inscriptions when he’s feeling better.”
“But I drove here all the way from Portsmouth,” said the girl.
“Then you can drive right back. Just leave me your address and postage.”
“I’m all right now,” he said. “I’m fine. Why don’t you bring us a drink?”
Sniffing, she had gone to make the tea, and he had had ten minutes and reached for the redhead and she drew back from him, shocked—pretending shock, he was certain, playing hard to get, playing for time. “We don’t have much of it,” he said, and fell on her bare legs, and squeezed. He was a strong man still, and heavy, and she lay beneath him, rigid, while he told her of King David and Abishag the Shunnamite and how the old King needed warming and what he would require. “Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t.” That was one of the things he required, the wriggling protestation, the heart beating under his fist, and it would have worked, was working, her hair in his right hand, her knee at his left, when Mrs. Thompson came back in—to ask, she told him later, if their guest took milk and sugar—and cried “Oh no, oh not again,” and the girl jackknifed beneath him and stood and that was that. Mrs. Thompson had bundled her out. Then she had bundled him up. Then she had bundled him into the daybed in the library. Prepositions are as various as women, he had writ ten, their minute alterations of language—”up, out, into, in, around”—their manipulative meaning like the skeined tune and tone of the skin.
Martin Peterson, the novelist, had been “promising” and then was “ac complished” and now was “distinguished”; this year marked half a century since his first book appeared. There were citations, celebrations, a festschrift from his publisher, a renewed campaign to win the Nobel Prize. It wasn’t his idea. He didn’t have much hope. He had won what he earned and given good weight and been translated into more languages—he lost count at seventeen—than a normal man might speak. Once, in Singapore, he had taken an airport taxi and complimented the driver on his excellent command of English; “I speak nineteen languages,” the driver had announced. He remarked this without undue pride. It turned out that he spoke English and eighteen Malay dialects; inflection is what matters, the taxi driver said.
Martin and his third wife stayed in the Raffles Hotel. The manager received them. He was waiting on the steps. There are too few serious people these days, he said; the businessmen all stay in something recent, something modern; they have not even heard of Somerset Maugham and don’t even know why they should. We are honored that you’re with us, sir, he said.
He had traveled with Margit, the year before she left. She had had enough, she said, of his needy preening; she needed a life of her own. She wanted to have children with a husband, not a husband too arrested to want children in his life. “Your phrases turn less nicely than your ankles,” he had said. “You should save your mouth for what it’s good at.” But that evening, in the Raffles, she was pure compliance. He could remember the hooded look she gave him as she stepped into the shower long after he forgot the details of divorce; he could remember the small of her back, but not the name of the lawyer or who settled for what; he remembered the rum and the fish and the long-fluked fan and palm trees in the courtyard and the pool. She had been more beautiful than anyone, but her small hands were not beautiful; he rinsed them free of soap.
And it was like this often now, a half-remembered turn of phrase, the echo of another’s work he thought of as his own—the detail that, enlarging, fills the frame. He remembered someone’s teeth and someone else’s laughter, this one’s habit of clearing his throat, that necklace on a bureau—its rumpled glinting, the purple scarf, the gold watch and mother-of-pearl cuff links from his father, the fragment from the Greek Anthology he used as an epigraph once. ” ‘In my nineteenth year,’ ” he recited, ” ‘the darkness drew me down. And ah the sweet sun!’ ”
Then there was the epitaph for a sailor lost at sea. ” ‘This gravestone lies if it says that it marks the place of my burial.’ ” That was all. That was it in its entirety. He remembered, for instance, a diner—the blue formica counter, the white coffee mug and sugar doughnut and the napkin dispenser and ashtray and salt shaker in a perfect parallelogram when he rearranged the mug—remembered how the waitress had strawberry marks on her forearm, how she knew the customer beside him and was saying, “What I think is, if she don’t want to roller-skate that’s fine. Why pay for all them lessons and them broken teeth, why make her do something she’s too scared to do?”—remembered how the man at his right smiled, nodding, dipping his cruller in milk—but could not for the life of him imagine why he had gone to the diner or what he was doing there or when.
Bindy would be dead perhaps and certainly not swimming. George would weigh 200 pounds. He had used them in his book about the love affair with that Peruvian who married someone else and rented out canoes. While Mrs. Thompson readied him—the washcloth at his neck, his mouth, the brush, the shirt button, the cuffs—he remembered his heart’s darling, the lilt of her laughter, the falling of her arms.
At four o’clock the car arrived. He could hear it in the driveway, then the engine closing down. The boy had sandy hair. He wore blue jeans and a leather vest and a blue shirt with white collar—like a stockbroker slumming or a doc tor on vacation. Hauling stiff black boxes and cameras and shoulder bags and a tripod, he made several trips from the car. Martin watched this from the couch. He moved confidently, easily; his boots were cowboy boots. He was whistling, adept at the work. Mrs. Thompson, too, enjoyed it; she held the screen door open while he carried in the lights.
Then she introduced him. “Martin, you remember Peter.”
“No.”
The boy advanced. “It’s good to see you, sir.” He held out his hand.
“We’ve met?”
“Last Thursday, sir, remember? And you invited me back.”
“I don’t remember. No.”
“Well anyway, I’m here,” the boy said breezily, and started connecting the lights.
“What’s he here for?” Martin asked.
” ‘The usual.’ To bother you. That’s what you said last week.”
Mrs. Thompson giggled. “I told you he has brass. He asked me if you want to look like Frost or Hemingway this time. He says he can do either.”
“Get me a podium,” the writer said. “Give me a president first.”
“Excuse me, sir?” said Peter—rolling the hooked rug away, setting the tripod in place.
“Get me a podium, and then I’ll look like Frost.” It came to him, however, that the boy would have worn diapers at the Kennedy Inaugural—or maybe was not even born. “All right.” He glared at Mrs. Thompson where she held the electrical cord. “How long does this vaudeville take?”
“It’s important, Martin. It’s the cover photograph.”
“One word is worth a thousand pictures. You know I say that, always.” He never had said this before. He was feeling ornery, did not like how his housekeeper had organized the session, how she and the boy were in league.
“I couldn’t agree with you more.” The boy was being charming. “I did read your trilogy, sir, as you suggested last Thursday. It’s wonderful. I loved it.”
He doubted this. “What was their name?”
“Sir?”
“The woman in the second book—the one who gets pregnant—what’s she called?”
“Ariel, of course,” said Mrs. Thompson. “Everyone knows that.”
“He didn’t.”
“Ariel,” the boy said. “I loved what you did with her. Smile.”
So then they settled into what he did know and could do, and Martin sat there smiling and then serious, looking straight ahead, then left, then right, then down and at his books. He allowed himself to drift. The way the light falls glancingly across an upraised palm, his father’s love of marmalade, the thick-cut bitter taste of it on toast, wisteria by the garage, systole and diastole, this improbable adherence to the surface of the earth, so that falling one falls down and dying by water drifts up; his mother’s ring embedded in the flesh behind the knuckle, her tennis racket in its press, his dream of Margit early on, the way she would enfold him, so passionate, so pleasing, the smell of brie on biscuits and the taste of shrimp—we do not leave this easily, not cease the circuit’s spasm, the pain at the knee when one kneels, the tang of apples in the autumn, wood smoke, ceremony, hillocks, the horn, the split-leaf maple flaming, dog snuffling at a groundhog’s hole, that gathering tightness prior to sex. He shut his eyes, then opened them. The shuddering release, the phone left unanswered, and doorbell, the taste of prosciutto on melon, rain on a tent flap, the first sight of the Parthenon, or Stonehenge, or the World Trade Center, the second subject of the first movement of the Schubert Quintet in C major-the feel of her hand in his, gripping, convulsive, her bed a harbor where he beached: he blinked. There are bills to pay and objects to acquire and the long diurnal round of meals and sleep and argument and manners and disease; there is music, oxygen, barbed and chicken wire. What seemed unimportant becomes important, critical; he would rectify the slave trade, violated borders and dispossessed peoples and forced labor camps and drug addiction and penury and sickness and starvation in the four dark corners of the earth.
“I’m afraid he’s not himself. I told you he gets tired.”
“Fifteen more minutes,” said Peter. “That’s all I need.” He changed film.
“Are you awake?” she asked. Martin made no answer. Mrs. Thompson neared him, looming. “Would you like tea?”
He let his mouth hang down.
“Since the operation,” she confided. “He just hasn’t been himself.”
“How long ago was that?” asked the photographer. He was back behind the tripod. He was adjusting the lights.
“It’s not the operation, really. That was a success. It’s what happened to him afterwards.”
“What happened,” Martin said, “is he allowed his housekeeper to talk too much. Yes, tea.”
She colored; she patted her hair. She made for the kitchen, retreating.
“I did read those novels,” Peter said. “Her husband’s name was Sam. Her sister was called Marjorie. You dedicated them to someone called Yvonne.”
“Yvonne.” That had been his first wife. She died, he learned, last month. She came to Martin nightly and he covered her with kisses: he woke rigid, drenched in sweat. The smell of her stayed on his hands. He hesitated to wash. He needed her far more than he had recognized, or told her, more than he had known. This lack of knowledge on her part tormented him. He told her nightly, as she faded, while he woke. She rose from the pillow. Her arms were damp, her ribs pronounced. He needed her to scold him for survival. She would be a crone, she had warned him, one of those women with no extra flesh and breakable needle-point bones. What are needle-point bones, he would ask—incurious, needing only to keep her in conversation. Her hand had been translucent, lifting.
He pictured her in Mexico and Point Barrow and Versailles; she had told him of these places and the way they made her feel. He followed her. He ad mired her street slang in Cuernavaca, the brilliant glance of her big-irised eyes. She squeezed herself against him while he slept. She could describe the ice-rime on a field of snow at Christmas, or the “honey-bucket” they used for plumbing in Alaska. She returned. Always she appeared before him, legs scissoring his, an intervening presence where he walked. She wanted competence, space for herself; she wanted the vistas of Point Barrow in midwinter, with only a seal at the edge of her vision and maybe one conical cloud. She could last forever on one box of crackers and a pound of tea; she needed him, wanting him tonguing her collarbone and there, darling, there in the small of my back.
He had picked a four-leaf clover for her by the barn. He bent and, in a single motion, collected and offered it up. She had never found a four-leaf clover and was gratified. A white-tailed deer leaped past them, bounding for the tamaracks. “It’s perfect,” said Yvonne. Once when they were thirsty on the beach a man approached them, saying, “I’ve got a headache. I shouldn’t drink this. Here”—and offered them a bottle of white wine. Once while they were making love a bee settled on her arching neck; by the time he reached to brush it off, she had been stung. He reconstructed that. Of such stuff were his memories made.
By the time the tea would cool sufficiently to drink, she had arrived. He could not keep her out. Yvonne lay on the beach or stood by the car or studied a cluster of leaves. Her shadow fell across the picket fence. She inhabited the bathroom mirror or the faucet or the butter dish; she left her fingerprints. He wanted to powder the room. There was a dust that fingerprint experts used, and usage would show everywhere; there would be thumbprints on the walls and floors and cabinets and towels. Her palm would be emblazoned on the ice box door. It adhered to his knee and arm and shoulders. Her flesh had flaked minutely and drifted by the sink.
“What I liked about it,” Peter said, “is how you make them history. Historical convergence is what I noticed there.”
He roused. He licked his teeth.
“That’s what you were saying, right? In the interview, I mean, last Thursday. About the way the past gets present, since the present is ‘no country for old men.’ And if I understand you, that’s why we’re always young. How we stay in touch with history.”
“Something like that,” Martin said.
“What you said was—I checked the transcript—’It doesn’t help the body but it mightily comforts the mind.’ ”
Mrs. Thompson brought them tea. “Are we finished?”—he turned toward her, querulous. “How long does this go on?”
“Do you need?”—she tilted her head to the hall.
“Yes.”
“Excuse us,” she told Peter, “we’re off to the little boys’ room.”
He remembered going with his sisters and his father for the Christmas tree. They would make a journey of it, jostling for position; they would drape a drop cloth in the open flatbed of the truck. “You want that tree to rest easy, don’t you?” their father would ask. “You wouldn’t want it to scratch.” He and his sisters would nod. They could have cut a tree behind the house or from the fence-line by the overpass—but they went every year to George Fellers’s farm.
George Fellers knew the family, he liked to say, since back before the flood. He had a yellow mustache. His hair was white, and what colored his mustache was nicotine; his teeth were brown. He had difficulty seeing when they pulled into the driveway. Dogs surrounded them. He would fumble with the door latch, then step into the mild December air as if it were true winter, shivery, wearing gloves; he carried a hatchet and saws. George would invite them in for tea, but he and his sisters would fidget so their father said, maybe later when we’ve cut the thing, all right? “I’ll put the kettle on,” said George. “You don’t want to keep them waiting.”
Then they would trek to the ridge. It was important not to spot the tree too soon. He never could distinguish between scotch and white pine, Fletcher fir or Douglas or balsam or spruce. Fellers planted stands of each, and their father would always say, well, what do we want this tree to be, what kind this year, how big? In the corner of his eye Martin saw the one he wanted, knowing by its contour just how perfectly the tree would fit, how the others would agree, would say his choice was beautiful, this is the perfect one. Sometimes, however, the perfect one would prove on closer scrutiny to have an imperfection-a bend in the trunk, a clutch of missing branches where it had been crowded by the next pine in the row.
At some point while they wandered their father would say this is far enough in, we don’t want to drag it a mile. Then they would double back, assessing and discussing and finally determining—at that point where impatience took over, where desire overmastered caution—which tree to cut. They would take turns with the saw. They each could take five strokes. He had been the youngest, and therefore he went first. Their father took the original cut, establishing the point where Martin continued, and the angle, and he would guide his hand.
When the season was over they took out the tree. This too was ritual. There would be days after New Year’s when the needles fell in clusters to the carpet underneath, and their mother said, we don’t want to burn down the house. Wouldn’t you say, Martin, it’s getting to be time? At length he would agree. He and his sisters would dismantle all they’d hung judiciously, taking hours to arrange: the balls, the ornaments, the popcorn and gingerbread men. Their father cut the strings with which he had steadied the tree. It tilted. They carried it out of the house.
Birds eat the dying needles, George Fellers had explained: you stand a pine tree in the snow, and if there’s nothing else around a sparrow can live off the sap. It’s nice to know a tree keeps being useful once it’s cut. Martin picked off what tinsel he could. They carried it toward the brush pile by the fence.
Then, in the weak slanting light, the lawn came alive with silver—strands of tinsel that blew free. They lodged in the flagstone paving. They worked their way to the fence. They lifted in the breeze and winked at him, as if the whole garden were precious, dew lasting all the bright day. His mother told him to pick up that trash, but he left the tinsel alone.
What he meant to tell the boy was not convergence, confluence, was how time is a trickle that feels like a river to swimmers, and then it trickles out. Man cannot step in the same stream twice. Except he, Martin, was doing just that, was chewing the past like a cud. While Peter packed and was dismissed and said he’d send the proofs along, or maybe bring them by if Mr. Peterson felt up to it, he tried to formulate a phrase about the son as father, Peter Peterson, the way they mirrored each other orthographically somehow, child and man, how orthograph and autograph and author graphically linked.
But it made no sense, made nonsense, and he was too tired. He wanted his dinner in peace. This was the time of day he loved, the lengthening shadows, the low brilliant light. Mrs. Thompson would turn on the television news. They were blowing up the tankers in the gulf. They were hoping that prosperity would trickle down. They were knaves and fools in Washington, and all the more lamentable for meaning what they said. They had hired an ac tor to work in the White House, and he mouthed their lines.
It came to Martin, suddenly, there had been pigeons in Hajia Sofia; they roosted in the eaves and swooped and ululated and shat with impunity there. So that kind of church did host birds. Those particular bare ruined choirs made a museum now. Margit had worn her slate blue suit, and they stayed in the Pera Palas. He remembered the barman—brown, compact, wiping the counter carefully—saying with great satisfaction, “Brandy, I have.” Their shared history, he saw, could be plotted by hotels—the grand relics of the grander past where Martin felt at home. She gripped the bedpost rattlingly and rose on her knees in the bed. They had reached Istanbul the night before some sacred feast, and the streets were clogged with sheep. All night he heard the sounds of bleating, the muezzin at his window. In the morning there had been no sheep, and the gutters ran with blood.
She brought him his one scotch. She had added water, and no ice. “He’s a pleasant fellow,” he said to Mrs. Thompson, placatory. “You were right.” There were floaters in his eyes. The window framed a photograph. The meadow appeared to sprout snow. He thought of those two-dollar paperweights you shake to make a squall. A hut on a hillside would find itself buried, a green tree go white. The deer would look like reindeer till the flakes settled again. Yet the shift in seasons altered nothing else; the glass would not grow cold as it registered winter, the hunter did not shiver or take off his coat with the thaw. Such systems were protected, a synthetic storm.
Then the telephone began. They called about the prize—the Pulitzer? the National Book Critics Circle?—and wanted to know his opinion of this year’s recipient. “Never heard of it,” he said. “But Mr. Peterson,” they protested, “you’re in the jacket copy. You’re credited with having sponsored this novel when nobody would publish it.”
“Nonsense.”
“So you feel justice has been served?”
“Don’t quote me,” Martin said.
“You don’t feel justice has been served?”
“Servus.” He hung up.
They called about the reading in his honor at the Library of Congress, and if he could attend. Mrs. Thompson told them he would try. The documentary about him was being shown that Saturday; they called for his opinion. He told Mrs. Thompson to tell them he was pleased, extremely pleased; in every particular, really, it improved on the original. The house they showed, for instance, was so much more appropriate than the one he had really been born in. He loved it all, them all.
Mrs. Thompson brought his dinner. She was a jolly old soul. He tasted what she set before him, but it had no taste. He invited her to join him. She would eat no lean. She used the remote control to turn on the TV. There were girls in bikinis, on water skis, and a ship’s captain with gold braid on his uniform. There were happy couples promenading, and a black man with a trumpet.
“What are we eating?” he asked.
“Grilled cheese,” she said, “and tuna.”
“Is there celery?”
“Pickles.”
A blonde, glistening with the pleasure of the swim, emerged to smile at the new member of the crew. She shook her hair, exuding packaged animality. Then there was an advertisement for maxipads, and one for cereal, and one that took him some time to decipher: a brunette looking out of a window, getting dressed, descending to a car which snouted up into the alley where she lived. Men stared at her, and then the driver glided off, and Martin asked, “What are we watching?”
“Nothing. An advertisement.”
“Tomorrow I’m planning to work.”
She looked at him.
“I don’t suppose you take dictation.”
“No. ”
“What was her name—the one who did? The one who took dictation?”
“Irene. She’ll be here tomorrow, Martin. Tomorrow’s the morning she comes.”
“That’s good.” He ate a pickle. “That’ll be fine.”
“You have a pile of mail.”
“I’m writing tomorrow. Not letters.” He shifted his potato chips. He did not want them near the pickle juice.
“Your women,” Mrs. Thompson said, “the ones who take such care of you, who always have—Irene, for instance. You forget she takes dictation.” She pressed a button; the TV went blank.
“I wouldn’t forget you.”
She sniffed. “And there’s the night nurse coming soon. Mrs. Mirabelli.” He was the messenger again, the emissary, the one with the white flag. “It’s only that I want to work.”
“Go right ahead,” she said. “Don’t let me interrupt you. I’ll finish the dishes. You work.”
So then he settled down to write, the language inching up the shale like water in a tidal pool, filling slowly where he sat, the voice in the well of the throat, the story of his second wife, the story of apprenticeship, the way she hurtled home from market, so gladly, so dark-eyed, her arms full of fruit—the hard first spate of study, night classes, the old men telling stories, the cordwood he cut (and remembered walking, years ago, past men with beagles and duck hunting gear. They were drinking by a duck blind, wearing orange caps. There were half a dozen of them, bearded, overweight. One of them wore waders. He hailed Martin, asking, “Hey buddy, which way’s town?” Another said, “What town is it?” as if this were a joke. They laughed and slapped each other’s backs. They burbled hilariously, repeating, “You call that a town?” Teal beat overhead. They wheeled and shot and stumbled, while the dogs tore in circles. He continued, feeling what he felt again now, himself the target, leaving . . .) then sound enlarging into shape, a paragraph, a page, a chapter, library, Alexandria in flames—contending, however, contending with water. He dove.
The scotch was unblended, Glenlivet. He swallowed, cautiously, sipping. But ah, the sudden soaring lilt of it, those words by which he lived—the brute beast of the air, the island full of music, the white whale and train wreck and still vexed Bermooths, the astonishing regalia of his titles on the shelf: and how had he come to this pass? There had been some injury, some consequential rupture, some way in which he lost what he had worked so long to find—the sheaf of script with which he started in his nineteenth year, the notebooks, the letters, the light on the page that the pond at midday, refracting, might cast, and endurance, the carousel cowboy—his mother, his father, the pattering trill of gossip, rain on the windows on Sunday, the decanters on the sideboard and the lilac by the door, his wives, his friends and professors and sisters and critics and associates and place of my burial and editor at Scribner’s, all death undone, so many, their strange eventful history, the raindrop that falls farthest on the pane . . . .
What was difficult to tell was if he dreamed or wrote them, those men and women huddled in the corners of the room. He had been in such rooms, often. He was unimpressed. He had described them enough. They edged towards the canapes and eyed each other joylessly and spoke of book contracts and paper back sales and foreign sales and auction floors, the ways of the publishing world. It had been his trade. He made a living from books. But it was strange to Martin still that art should be a business, that there was profit in it as well as certain loss. The ballyhoo, the over-praise, the cultivated jockeying, venality, the fool’s gold blurbed as real—or, conversely, true talent ignored—this sub-sided near him, lately, and went dim. There was a stuffed polar bear in The Explorers’ Club. There was a boy on the porch. He could not hear what they were saying—who was in, who out, who promoted, who bypassed, who wielded the tin gavel in which parliament of fowls. He did not try to hear. “The parliament,” for instance: had he written that, or meant to; was it a short story or the tipped cap to Chaucer—the bard he’d named his Newfoundland in honor of, beloved, 150 pounds of panting slavish sweetness, the black noble head, the pink tongue? So when he thought of Chaucer now he thought not so much of pilgrimage or Canterbury as a pet. He was writing his memoirs. Women were doing calisthenics with water wings strapped to their arms. He completed the third volume while they lounged about the pool.
Martin had discomfort but no pain. He shifted in his seat. The light was fading, westerly; he watched. The point of entry is the center of a circle. The circles are concentric, and at the pond’s perimeter they double back, contracting.
“Have we been being gloomy?”
“No.”5
“Your nose.” She gave him her handkerchief. He used it. “That’s better.”
“How are your children?” He lifted his head. “They’ll be coming east for Christmas, am I right?”
“Why yes they will.” She studied him. He would not cry. “How nice of you to remember.”
“And little Kate? The youngest? Jane’s daughter, isn’t it?”
“She’s wonderful.” Now Mrs. Thompson grew expansive. “She’s a hellion, that one. She whistles through her teeth. She’s got her front teeth missing, and she points her finger there and gives me this enormous smile and says, ‘Gammer, my gap!'”
He shook his head to clear it. “I want to go back to the porch.”
She checked her watch. They compromised. “Just for a little?”
“A little.”
“Don’t you love the weather, though? Don’t you wish it was always like this?”
“I do,” he admitted. She opened the door. She helped him through. The rocker had his blanket. “I’ll sit here just a little.”
“Tomorrow we do letters,” Mrs. Thompson said.
Correspondence: he mocked it, it bored him, was boring, was pat, no more than a comes-around-goes-around tag line remaining with him nevertheless to come around and go around and fail to fade, no matter how he sat quiescent, how the swallows flashed fluttering by, and now the bats—recurence: this momentary certainty that everything suspended falls, that motion accretes inertia, inertia motion, and all things inflated collapse—from the balloon, the tire, from the bullfrog’s calling, the rubbery pneumatic flesh of its throat distended to croak, then convulsing, glut glut, from the way his own flesh grew tumescent, emitted, collapsed, from the way the economy inflated, the black band of blood pressure circling an arm—everything examples it, the trees are an instruction, rain, the hospital bill, the credit system, the heat engendered by decay, and everything is circular that once argued causality, the arc, the sudden shattering (that time he was thrown from a horse, that time he missed the second step on the staircase descended habitually, these months, that time the maroon Dodge pickup with the tailgate rusted out, the right front fender painted green, boxing gloves slung from its mirror, swerved to avoid him and skidded and went down the embankment by the driveway where he’d braked; when he got out and went to help and clambered down the frozen slope he heard Sinatra crooning “Autumn in New York” on the truck radio; it’s nothing, the man said, my daughter, that sumbitch, the ice, just give me a hand with this winch—the jolt or rearrangement, Bindy near him at a party, presenting cheese, whispering how could you do it, how, why to me, why last night you bastard, what did you mean?—the way the veil of what we call propriety is rendered transparent by need, the surface of the pond by trout, the air by dumdum bullets, so when will I see you, I need to discuss it, we have to . . .), remembering that time he waited on the tree stand three days into the season and a man and woman walked into the clearing underneath, holding hands, he dark-haired, she blond, she wearing leather boots and silver fur and with no coy preliminary or any of the actions of seduction leaned against a maple trunk and raised her coat and raised the dress while her lover dropped his pants, she wearing nothing underneath, he jockey shorts, then entered her, her long legs taut, the two of them absorbed beneath him, not looking up, not around, not saying anything while Martin watched (with what even then he recognized as an aroused dispassion) this buck and mating shudder and slap of flesh on flesh, all of it so quickly done that he barely saw what he was seeing before they straightened, steadied each other, replaced their clothing with a negligent attentiveness and, holding hands, walked off; it is diversion, all of it, a way to pass the time, to move from fifty-nine to sixty, twelve to one, not serious the looping components of subject and object, clause upon clause—and if even such diversion might depend or signify, might produce a child or marriage or gonorrhea or divorce, her ass as pert beneath him as the white tailed deer, retreating (the silver box, the apple tree, the trusty oak, sans teeth, the days of courting . . .) then why not break the pattern, smile at this night nurse who’s taking his pulse, Mrs. Thompson departing, materialized, and what he did not manage but might again, again.
