Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  “What’s that?” Norman says, noticing.

  “No hug? No how are you, dear mother? What the hell kind of sewer were you brought up in?”

  “Nice, Mom,” he says, collecting her for a hug, helping her to set down her package. “This is the way you talk around your Nilsy?”

  Anita smiles at him like they’ve both been caught smoking. This is her new thing. The tension between Nils and Norman has troubled her since the beginning, and it’s worse since Wood’s gone. Lately, she’s chosen to play it from both sides. She doesn’t want to get into it, and so she dances around it on the theory that if it isn’t there, it isn’t there. When she’s with Norman, she adopts a kind of conspiratorial tone, as if she would like to acknowledge that her new husband is about an inch short of ridiculous, but would prefer it if she and Norman could just keep this fact to themselves. When she’s with Nils, she’s a little too quick to join him in his subtle castigations. They are hard on Norman together; they worry what to do about him. “He’s got this thing about casual profanity,” she says, back in us-against-him mode. “Nils. You know that.”

  “Too well, mother dear,” Norman says, hugging still. “Too fucking well.”

  “Norman!” She slaps him on the butt, playfully, the way a mother would her teasing child.

  “Enough of this shit-chat,” he says, emphasis front, pointing once again to the oversized package. “What’s in the bag?”

  “What’s in the bag is just a little something,” Anita announces. “Plus, it’s not a bag. It’s a package. You’re just like your father. It wouldn’t kill you to be a little more precise.”

  No, Norman thinks, but maybe it’s what killed him. He doesn’t know what this means, except that it is something to think. Certainly, the Woodman was never known for his precision. There was nothing exact about his father that Norman can call to mind.

  Anita leans the bagged package against the wall. “Been lying around the house,” she explains. “Thought you might like to have it.”

  Norman slips the taut string over a corner of package and struggleslides the loop down its length. Then he tears at the brown paper wrapping, and from underneath the tear—from, like, before he’s even got the paper all the way ripped off and bunched to the ground—he catches his father’s eyes staring back at him, and the immediate effect is that he’s being watched, as ever. It hits him like one of those forgettable Vincent Price horror movies, the ones with the long-forgotten family portraits hanging over dusty mantels, the eyes moving predictably about the room, catching everything.

  He is momentarily alarmed.

  “Here,” his mother says, reaching for the package to open it the rest of the way. “Let me.”

  Norman has to step back a couple paces to take it all in. There, behind the promise of Panavision, is the Woodman himself, as advertised, in a lobby poster for These Things Happen, a fairly unnoticed Paramount effort with Sebastian Cabot and a young Ann-Margret. Norman tries to figure the date from the fine print, but it’s laid out in Roman numerals, and he can’t get much past the MCM. They didn’t teach Roman numerals in his fancy-ass school. Something something something. Early 1970s, he thinks. Whenever.

  In the picture, Wood played an Indy race car driver, Trim Tompkins, whose broken-down car couldn’t quite handle the drill, and the drive of the movie was the way Trim kept patching his vehicle with spit and hope and plugging on. The Little Engine That Could with fast cars and too-tight jeans and early-1970s sex. Ann-Margret played the love interest, the daughter of some motor oil executive whose company was sponsoring Trim’s car, and Sebastian Cabot the pit boss. What stayed with Norman, other than the incongruity of seeing his beloved Mr. French in garage overalls, was the way this Trim Tompkins refused to be beaten down. It was so unlike his father, a man who would have kicked and screamed and somehow managed to trade his broken-down race car for a new set of wheels just before the starting gun. He was never the type to shoulder his rough circumstances and hope for the best. He was the loud asshole at the front of the line getting what he wanted, never the shrinking sap at the back willing to acquiesce.

  In the poster, there’s Wood underneath a store-bought frame in racing gear, working his pretty boy smile, a helmet crooked under his arm. He was never much of a matinee idol, Terence Wood, but, for a while in there, also early 1970s, the studios were on him to make like Paul Newman and Ryan O’Neil, only he never could manage it without seeming like he was on the knowing side of an inside joke. They kept handing him these shit pictures, and he kept looking like he could just choke on the charm, like he knew something the rest of the planet couldn’t possibly imagine. It wasn’t him, but no one seemed to notice, or care, or think it was up to them to say anything about it. This poster, this Trim Tompkins, this isn’t him, but Norman takes it in as if it might have been. He loses himself in his father’s put-on smile and wonders what his life might have been like if the Woodman had been more conventionally Hollywood, on screen and off, more conventionally glamorous, but then he remembers what happened to Ryan O’Neil’s kid and thinks maybe he didn’t have it so bad. Least he’s never been in rehab. He wonders what his father was thinking when they took the shot, if he was thinking what it would be like to do good work again, what it would be like to have a kid, to matter.

  “I thought, you know, the title,” Anita says, tentatively, trying to pull her son back into the moment. “These things happen.” She pauses to get Norman to consider the deep meaning of the phrase. “That’s one way to look at it.”

  “Oh, Mom, please,” Norman says.

  She throws up her arms as if she doesn’t know what else to do. (She doesn’t.) “Excuse me for trying to make this make sense,” she says.

  “It doesn’t make sense. That’s the whole point.”

  “No, Norman. It has to. It has to mean something, his not being here.”

  “Dying, Mom. The word is dying.”

  “Fine, dying. It has to mean something.”

  “Okay, then,” he challenges. “What does it mean? Go ahead. Enlighten me.”

  Anita hadn’t thought things through to this point. She came to New York knowing only that they should talk about Wood’s death, but not knowing what to say. With Nils, at home, she gets to play it at the surface, but she wants to reach down deep when she’s with Norman. She’s talked about this with Pet. She wants to let Norman know the ache she feels for him, for what he’s lost. Hell, for what she’s lost, too, but a lot of that is tied up with what Norman’s going through. She wants to put it in a place where it will touch her without leaving her spent, hopeless, obscured. Still, she can’t think what to say. “Why does everything have to be so confrontational with you?” she finally manages.

  Now it’s Norman’s turn to have nothing to say. He crosses the not-quite vestibule to his mother and collects her once again in a hug. He’s never liked to see her upset, now especially. Hugged, he helps her out of her coat and then he folds it, inside out, and rests it on the floor. (He’s got no closets.) Then he takes the framed poster in one hand and his mother in the other and leads her to the not-quite living room, where he searches his cluttered walls for a spot to hang the poster. He wonders if his mother sees any irony in gifting to her only child a poster of his dead father dressed in racing gear, about to don a helmet and step into a defective car and drive off at great speed to an uncertain fate. He wonders if she makes the connection, if it’s even worth mentioning.

  Harlan Trask, sleeping, takes up more room on Grace’s bed than there actually is. Or maybe it just seems that way. Or maybe it’s just how when he’s bushed, he drops onto the mattress at whatever angle he can most easily manage. However Grace looks at it, the man takes more than his share, and she sits at what’s left of the foot of the bed cataloging new ways to accommodate him. Don’t get her wrong, she’s not complaining or anything, but when she’s working late at the coffee shop, closing up, and he knocks off early after his shift at the park, she comes upstairs and there’s, like, no room.


  It’s just a full, Grace’s bed, and even when it was just her, it sometimes felt a little too confining, so she’s willing to take that into account, but now that she’s got company long-term, it’s a serious crapshoot, getting comfortable. It’s out of hand. When they go to bed at the same time, if they’ve both been reading or messing around a bit or something, then it’s easy to drop off together before either one stakes out too much territory. Then it’s no problem because then she doesn’t have to worry about Harlan’s crazy angles, and anyway there’s always spooning, like normal people, even though they’re each about one hundred pounds north of normal people and their spooning is more like ladling.

  She’s watched that show Roseanne for years, and now that it’s in reruns she’s watching it all over again. She’s never once noticed how Roseanne and Dan sleep in a full-size bed. Until lately. What’s that all about? They’re six hundred pounds between them, easy, and the producers have got them squeezed onto this tiny mattress, only Grace never paid good enough attention until she got this thing going with Harlan. Now she watches those bedroom scenes with Roseanne and Dan and fills with sympathy. They’re always in there talking about their kids or whatever problems they’re having; it’s, like, one of their regular sets, and now that she’s noticed, she can’t get past it. How can people not notice something like that?

  Maybe they think it’s a blue-collar thing, the producers, this sleeping on a full-size mattress, or maybe it’s a queen, hard to tell on the television, but the way Grace sees it, it’s a logistical thing. It’s making the effort to make the change, it’s moving away from something old into something new. No way it’s a money thing, she’s thinking. The difference between full and king is probably no more than, like, fifty, sixty bucks.

  They did a Sally Jesse on this, once. They had on this one big-sized couple, and they were saying how there wasn’t enough floor space in their bedroom for a bigger bed. And how, anyway, they were trying to hold back on any major expenses because they were trying to get enough of a stake together for a down payment on a house, and how it was just something they’d gotten used to. But she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t see how people would choose to sleep this way. Once in a while, you know, okay. She can even deal with it for a short period of time, but she’s pretty much to the point where a new bed is a mandatory thing, only to bring it up, to bring herself to make a change, would be to bring up all kinds of other stuff. Getting a new bed now would tie in to whatever’s going on between them.

  But maybe they do need to take a look at this thing long-term. It’s, like, way past indefinitely already. She loves her Harlan, but she needs her sleep. And so does he. That’s the thing. She can’t deny him that. She steps from the foot of the bed and lifts his feet by the ankles, lovingly, but also purposefully, and walks with them so that his whole body pivots to a right angle with the headboard. There, she thinks. That’s a little more workable. Then she slips his feet from the red furry pant legs the poor baby didn’t bother to take off after work. She moves like a mother doting on her child.

  Then she pulls an afghan from the chair by the bed and covers him with it. She’s tried, on other nights, to slip the tucked-in sheets and quilt down from under his butt and then draw them back up and tuck them in again around him, but she doesn’t have the effort in her tonight. Plus, you know, it’s pretty nice out, not too cold, she’s got the windows cracked and everything. He’ll be fine with just the afghan.

  Then she slips out of her own clothes, drops them in the pile on the floor of her closet, pulls from the pile the extra large Maritime Merrytime night shirt she’s worn now for a couple nights running, and slides away the hangered clothes to get to the videos she keeps stacked on a shelf in the back. Something she hasn’t seen in a while, she’s thinking, something to take her back. She thumbs through her library of mostly store-bought titles, although, for a while, she was pretty good about keeping blank tapes in the apartment, studying the TV Guide, and dubbing some of those hard-to-find old movies straight from the cable. She bought the tapes six to a box, sometimes ten, whatever was on special down at Blockbuster. Turned out to be a real money-saver. She pulls out a few of the store-bought tapes to read the thumbnailed storyline and reviewers’ comments on the back, but settles finally on one of her homemade dubs that definitely could stand another viewing. It’s been a while. Then she slides back the clothes, closes the closet door, crosses to the big-screen television, and presses the videotape into the VCR.

  Usually, she likes to keep a couple months cushion between her repeat viewings. Any longer and she loses the familiarity she cherishes; any shorter and it’s like a broken record. There’s a fine balance. She wants to feel connected to the movie, like the characters know her, but not to where her knowing them gets in the way. She likes to space it out so that she doesn’t remember the dialogue, or the subtle plot twists, or who might turn up in a supporting role, or whatever. She knows what happens, but she doesn’t want to know what happens. She likes to be surprised in her own small way, and, tonight, in her own small way, she surprises herself.

  She’s been too long away from this one, and she wonders why. Actually, she knows why; she just wonders. She listens to the lone violin at the start of The Half Shell. The simple melody has rarely left her head since the first time she saw it back at the Tivoli, back when there were lightbulbs on the marquee, back when you couldn’t hear the loud action from the movie playing in the theater next door because there was no such thing as the theater next door, and on through the years, when the only way to see it was at the revival house in Bangor, or on late-night television, cut up by Ginsu knives and time constraints. When the rest of the orchestra comes in behind the solo, and the theme song swells, and the opening credits roll, she looks over toward her too-small bed and her sleeping hulk of Harlan Trask and wonders when he’ll get around to telling her.

  What It’s Like

  Pimletz can’t get over it. Really, stuff like this never happens to him, and it’s been so long in not happening, he’s begun to think it never really happens to anyone else, either.

  What it is, though, he isn’t sure. How it started is about the best he can do. How it started was one afternoon, day after she arrived, this Petra Wood person began inching a little too close for polite conversation. Closer and closer, to where Pimletz could almost taste her breath against his lips. She was all amazing looking and good smelling, and it’s possible he was reading more into her behavior than she was putting out, but he didn’t think so. It was a little obvious, even to Pimletz, a man to whom a double-talking politician might seem a surprise. That she was like something out of one of those lingerie catalogs he keeps around his apartment didn’t help, but even if she’d been plain, his imagination still would have managed to get ahead of him. At his depth, he can’t rule anyone out.

  It started right away. Subtly, but right away. Or maybe not so subtly, but still. First it was just Petra Wood touching her hands to Pimletz’s face to show how cold it was. But then it was leaving the bathroom door ajar while she was toweling off after a shower, leaning over Pimletz while he was at his desk, not writing, in such a way that her breasts were made to brush suggestively against his head. It was Petra telling him her heart was beating super fast after lifting a wicker trunk filled with old magazines and pulling his open hand to her chest so that he might feel for himself, sharing unsolicited intimacies regarding Terence Wood’s sexual prowess and her appetite for same. (“You need to know this,” she kept saying, “don’t you, Axel? I mean, for the book?”) It was Petra asking if he kept any C batteries in the cabin because she’d brought with her a small bedroom appliance, she claimed to be embarrassed to admit—her little joystick, she called it; said she never travels without it—which seemed to be running out of gas. “Even us grieving widows need a poke every once in a while,” she said, playing at sheepish, holding out her rebatteried dildo like it was medicine.

  She decided she’d stay a couple days, long as she’d made the trip
, long as there was nothing else doing, and there was plenty of room. Pimletz assured her she wouldn’t be in the way, but, in truth, he wasn’t sure he could get past the distraction. Jesusmotherfuckingchristalmighty, it’s not like you have to beat him over the head with what’s going on. He jerked off twice, maybe three times, the morning after the business with the cold fingers against his face and kept up the routine as Petra Wood kept up her temptations. He was determined to drain himself, to guard against the likely possibility of shooting his wad the moment she finally reached for him—a defensive maneuver he’d had to employ his entire pubic life, to be ready by not being ready.

  For Pimletz, age and an extremely limited experience have done nothing to diminish the response time between sexual thought and dick-preparedness, and since there’s never any time between sexual thoughts, he is constantly prepared. He’s always reading these letters in the advice column in Playboy from these guys who can’t get it up, or hearing some talk radio caller with the same problem, or catching some episode of Montel about related dysfunctions, but, with him, it’s the other way; he can’t keep it down. He’s hard all the time, for the slightest reason, for no reason at all. He gets hard watching those Nice ’n Easy, Tender Loving Care shampoo commercials, or Tipper Gore giving a speech, or Dominique Moceanu straddling the balance beam at the Olympics. He gets hard watching Jessica Rabbit—a fucking cartoon! And it’s not just a naked-woman-in-the-shower type thing, or the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, or a finely drawn piece of animated ass; it’s the idea of any physical contact that gets him going. Apparently, it doesn’t even have to be human.