“Here,” Pet says, emerging from the front hall closet, handing Pimletz a pair of Wood’s sheepskin mittens and his flap-eared woolen hat. “It’s cold.”
“I’m okay,” he says, pulling on his own parka. “Shouldn’t be too bad.” He doesn’t like the idea of wearing other people’s hats. He especially doesn’t like the idea of wearing dead people’s hats. Slippers, he doesn’t mind; he could even see his way into a coat; but there’s something about a dead guy’s hat leaves him queasy. He opens the door and steps one foot across the threshold. “See,” he says. “A regular day at the beach.”
In truth, it is cold—about six degrees when they got up this morning—and there’s a dusting of snow to cover the few fresh inches they had the day before yesterday, and neither one of them is dressed for it. Pimletz is determined to make like it doesn’t matter, and what does Pet know about winter? She’s a California girl. She looked outside and announced that a walk would be a good idea. Through the frosted panes of the kitchen window, the woods seemed like something out of a storybook, and she thought she could use a good story. She ached to be out in the swallowed-up silence of the fresh snow. Anyway, it’s been a while since anyone picked up the mail in the box at the end of the road, and she thought they could maybe make a special trip out of it.
“Cold enough for you?” Pimletz says. It’s a stupid thing to say, but he’s got nothing else.
“Maybe just a short walk,” Pet suggests, stepping all the way out the door. “To the mailbox and back.” Right away, her ache shifts to wanting to be back inside. This looked good, all this softsilent snow, but the coldness cuts through her. All she’s got on, really, is a T-shirt and a sweater and a fleece pullover. She could use a couple more layers, a pair of proper boots, maybe some thermals. The knit hat and scarf she pulled from the top shelf in the closet seem mostly for show; she wonders if maybe they’re Anita’s or one of their weekend guests’. Pet certainly doesn’t remember buying them; there are enough holes in the pattern to test the theories of insulation through negative space; she wraps the scarf around her neck three or four times, like she’s winding a yo-yo, and she leaves enough play in the wrap to slip it up around her mouth and nose and cheeks, and then she tucks what’s left of the scarf’s loose end under its middle. Her ears she can just forget about. No way is this hat keeping her warm.
“Least there’s no wind,” Pimletz says. Again, it’s all he’s got.
“Like at this temperature, it really fucking matters.”
“Move around,” he suggests, hopping up and down as they start to walk so that he gives the appearance of being in a sack race. “Get the circulation going. Warm you up in no time.” His breath, when it leaves, turns to ice against his upper lip.
Pet is not about to hop up and down the length of the drive, a half-mile or so, to the mailbox and back. She’d rather get frostbite, or hypothermia, or whatever people get when they’re too long in the too cold. She doesn’t want to look ridiculous, even though she realizes her wrapped-around scarf is no help in this regard; the hopping business would just increase her ridiculousness exponentially. She’d rather lose a toe and look ridiculous in the privacy of her own home. “Let’s just get this over with,” she says.
“You make it sound like it was my idea.”
“Sorry,” she says, “but this wasn’t what I had in mind.”
“I can run up ahead? Save you the round trip?”
She’s too cold to answer.
“You can start back without me.” He doesn’t wait for a response. He darts ahead, slipsliding over the mostly packed snow. Last night’s dusting has barely covered the packed, iced-over driveway leading out to the road. It looks good on the trees, but it doesn’t offer any traction, and with his seventh or eighth step, he is on his back, his legs tripped out from underneath like a drunk on a log. The snow collects him with a resolute crunch. “Shit,” he says, fallen, but he scrambles to his feet and shakes off the loose snow and continues to the road. He doesn’t look back to see if Pet noticed his falling, but when he’s down in the snow and scrambling it occurs to him that the thing to do is pretend nothing happened. The thing to do is press on.
He wills himself to not look back. It reminds him of a game he used to play on himself, as a kid, when he left the apartment for school each day. They lived in a Storrow Drive high-rise, same place his mother lives now, and she would walk with him through the meandering streets of Beacon Hill on down to the Common, after which it was just a straight shot across the park to his school. He always tried just to leave his mother there without looking back or waving or checking to see if she was still watching, but he could never make it all the way without turning over his shoulder. She was always still there, matching his gaze, waiting for him to disappear inside the safety of the school. He used to hate that he had to look, but he couldn’t help himself. If he’d been thinking of something else, he would have been fine, but he laid out this test like it was important. Or maybe it was a test for his mother, to see if she loved him enough to keep her watch, or maybe to pinpoint the day when she stopped loving him enough to keep her watch. He tries now to remember the day he made it across for the first time without looking back, because eventually, of course, he started walking to school on his own, except now he figures he must’ve gotten to that point by degrees because he can’t recall that first day. He wonders if there was triumph in it, for him, or if mostly it was tinged with sadness, or if maybe he didn’t notice it at all. Maybe it was just a day, like the one before.
Today, though, he makes it. It bugs the shit out of him, not to look back to see if Pet is watching, but he makes it, and he wonders if this signals a kind of growth or just that he’s finally learned a measure of control. There is no triumph in his reaching the mailbox without turning around. There’s no sadness. It just is.
Terence Wood’s mail is bundled and waiting. Up here, rural route deliveries are only twice a week, and the mail comes bundled in thick rubber bands. (If the locals need their mail on a daily basis, they can pick it up at the post office.) Pimletz collects the half-dozen bundles, and he can see without sorting that it’s mostly circulars, some bills, magazines. In the whole pile, there are only a few pieces of real correspondence. He doesn’t see the point in collecting a dead man’s mail, especially when the temperatures are in the single digits and the mail is mostly circulars, but this is what Pet wanted. He wonders what she’ll do with it.
He turns back with the few bundles cradled in his arms, and he notices Pet halfway down the drive, about where he left her, only she seems to be doing more than just standing still, or less. She seems to be not moving at all, frozen, and as he quickens his pace he notices she’s stuck with one arm up in the air and the other at her hip. This strikes him as the kind of strange he might need to do something about. “Pet,” he calls out, racing back. “Pet.”
She makes a noise, but Pimletz can’t make it out.
“Pet,” he says again.
She makes the same noise, and Pimletz strains to hear it. He’s just a few yards away, and then he’s on her, and then she says it again. Her lips, far as he can tell, are not moving behind the wrapped-around scarf. What he can’t tell is she’s smiling.
“Oil can,” she squeaks, in her impression of a tinny voice. She’s gone from being too cold to breathe, to just being cold, to thinking it’s really not that bad out, once you get used to it. She’s out here, she’s cold, she might as well have some fun. She holds her pose like a statue. “Oil can.” It comes out sounding like oyolkin, oyolkin.
“What?” Pimletz says. He’s not catching on.
“Oil can,” she squeaks again. Then, in a stage whisper: “You’re supposed to get me an oil can and lube up my joints and get me moving again. Tell me you’ve never seen The Wizard of Oz.”
Pimletz, wanting to please, pantomimes the getting of an oil can and the lubing up of joints, which allows Pet to pantomime the gift of movement after a rust or a thaw. “Better?” he says, playing along
.
“Better.” Pet goes into some elaborate stretching, and then she laughs, and then she pushes Pimletz playfully in the chest with both hands—a you-don’t-say! gesture that catches him off guard and knocks him back down to the snow. He clutches the bundles of mail as he falls, doesn’t think to break his own. “You just can’t seem to keep your feet,” she says. “You’re like the scarecrow.” She laughs again, and races in a zig-zag toward the cabin.
Pimletz scrambles back up and goes to catch her. He has to think about it, though. He has to think if this is what he’s supposed to do. He’s not used to such playfulness. He’s not used to getting other people’s jokes—not on just the first or second pass, anyway. He’s thinking, at last, a Hollywood reference he can understand. The Wizard of Oz he knows. He’s also thinking he’s got no playfulness of his own to contribute to the occasion.
Petra Wood is not thinking at all. She’s no longer cold. She’s beyond cold. She’s to where the temperature is accepted. There are other things. She’s lost in what she’s doing and in what she’s lost. She did this, once, romped in the snow with Wood. It was warmer, but they were out here on these same grounds, making snow angels, laughing, ducking behind trees, throwing snowballs, running around like they were the only two people on the planet. She wants to reclaim that moment, to taste it again and measure how it is now against how she remembers it. She wants to put her life on rewind and see how it looks on second viewing.
“Norman,” Terence Wood writes into the ether. “There are some things I need to tell you.”
He is hunched, uncomfortably, over one of the user terminals in the electronic room of the Bar Harbor Public Library, just a few beats after having gotten over the fact that there even is such a place. The library he knew about, but the electronic room is a revelation. He wandered in, thinking he might thumb through some magazines, maybe read the flap copy on some of the new celebrity autobiographies, check out the indexes, see if he’s mentioned, and he stumbled on all these Packard Bells. Without even thinking about it, he logged on to one and started writing. It was something to do, a place to put some of the things he’s been thinking, and it was almost as if it happened without him. Once he got going, he couldn’t stop; it was like he was being pulled under by the riptide of what’s happened. He didn’t think it through to where it was about saving what he writes, or printing it out, or sending it out to be read. He didn’t think it through to where it was about thinking it through. All he wanted was to not be swallowed up by it. All he wanted is for what he had to say to find its way out of his head and down through his fingers and out into the world. He continues:
There’s no easy place to begin, except to say I’m here. Still. Yup. How the fuck about that? Okay, so that’s a start, right? I’m still here. Boom. Big opening scene. Roll opening credits, right?
But really, Norman, it just kicks the shit out of me I haven’t been able to reach out to you until now to tell you, you know, what I’ve been doing, what’s behind what I’ve been doing. I’m not even sure I know myself, except to say it might surprise you. Surprised the shit out of me, that’s for fucking sure. Still does. Every day. Surprises the shit right out one end and back in the other. Surprise, surprise.
It just hit me, is all, how it started. That night, in the rain, on that road. Boom. Exit, stage left. Remember that cartoon we used to sometimes watch when you were a kid? The one with the tiger? One of those Hanna-Barbera pieces of shit. I think it was a tiger. Maybe a lion. Some big cat. “Exit, stage left.” What the hell was that tiger’s name? Some great character actor did the voice. Guy I worked with once. Why am I not thinking of this asshole’s name?
Bah. Here’s a better question. Who cares? Better to talk about my presumed death, right? About what the hell was going on with me. Is.About what the hell IS going on with me. This is why we’re here. Okay, so what can I tell you? It just seemed the thing to do, to check out like that, because Jesus, things were just shit. I mean, you know. You know the kind of shit I was in, the kinds of pictures I was doing, the people I had around me. There was all that shit going on with Pet. And there was your mother, and that asshole Swede, and that whole thing.
I was miserable. I thought I’d never be happy again, and I probably wouldn’t have been, that’s the truth. I probably would have developed some expensive drug habit, or started drinking again, or found some new way back to one of those fucking clinics, but not before I made such a public ass of myself that I became a running joke on Letterman, or woke up in a pile of my own piss or vomit, or was arrested at some airport for carrying a gun through the security gate, or something pathetically ridiculous. Me and Robert Downey Jr., right? Me and my cry for help. And then, when Betty Ford or whoever the fuck it’d be decided I was okay to check out, I’d have been on the cover of People or the National Enquirer, one of those magazines, telling how it was just a miracle that I made it through, thanks to all these good people at the clinic, and to my fans, and to the love of my family, or some fucking shit like that. I’d have to hire a publicist to smooth out my image. Or maybe I would have found religion. Now that’s a sorry fucking thought: me and organized religion getting along. But that’s what I would’ve become, the poster boy for hopeless desperation, that’s where I was headed. I was so out of the fucking loop, my agent would have killed for me to be a running joke on Letterman.
Pathetic, right? Let me tell you, I was for shit. When was the last time we spoke before that night? I can’t even remember. I was just plugged out. You were off at school. We left messages for each other, but we hardly spoke. I was hooked up with some piece from one of those reality shows on MTV. She was closer to your age than mine. (Shit, she was probably younger than you, now that I think of it!) So there was all that, and Pet was out of her fucking head about the divorce. She hired these fuckwad lawyers who barricaded me from the house. Did I ever tell you that? I don’t think so, but they actually had her change the locks, can you believe it? They had her freaked. It was over, but it wasn’t over, and it was still a let’s-leave-the-door-open kind of thing, but there were all these suits around telling her to grab what she could before I pissed it all away. There was no prenup, I didn’t have the balls to ask for a prenup, and they had her thinking she should clean me out. On her own, she was thinking, you know, maybe we could work things out, get back together, find a way to patch. I don’t think she knew about the MTV thing, I hoped not, but they’re on the phone filling her head with how she needs to make a complete financial disconnect, how I’m no longer a bankable property. These are actually quotes. A complete financial disconnect. No longer a bankable property. I mean, shit. And I look at the way she’s carrying on now, I’ve seen the interviews she’s given in some of the papers, the way she’s playing at the grieving widow thing. She was on Good Morning, America, couple weeks after that night talking about how she wanted people to remember me. Did you see that? Jesus.
So it wasn’t the money. You can understand that, right? I’ve got no fucking idea myself, what it was truly about, but I don’t want you thinking this was about the money. (I certainly don’t want Pet thinking this was about money; I don’t want her thinking anything; far as she should be thinking, I’m just gone.) So, no, it wasn’t money. I’ve had no money before. I’ve got no money now. You’d shit to see the way I’m living since that night. So it wasn’t that.
Maybe it was the principle. Maybe I was just tired and needed a long fucking rest. Maybe it was that she let these assholes in to submarine whatever we had left, that she didn’t trust it enough to find out, that she didn’t trust me to take care of her if it didn’t. Maybe it was that even these fuckwad Hollywood lawyers thought my career was for shit. Forty years, I’d been making pictures, and I was no longer a bankable property. They weren’t even born when I started making pictures. Pet wasn’t even born. What the fuck did they know? They had her poisoned against me, that’s for fucking sure.
Then there was this other picture I was signed to do next, this futuristic piece
of crap down in New Zealand. We were supposed to begin production in a couple weeks, that was a whole other thing I had weighing down on me. They had me fitted for a codpiece, can you believe it? Me in a codpiece? And there was that book I was supposed to be writing. Did that ever make it back to you? That I was writing a book? Jesus. I mean, I didn’t even read the shit my partners had me optioning, back when I had my production company, remember? S.O.S. Shit on a stick. People were always asking if it stood for anything, our production company, or if it was just another actor’s inflated ego cry to be taken seriously. S.O.S. That was before you, by a little bit. We didn’t produce a fucking thing. I just read the coverage. Once or twice a week, I’d go in and see what everyone was reading on my behalf. Like I said, I didn’t read. My reviews, maybe, sometimes, and scripts when they were a done deal, but that’s it.
Mourning Wood Page 23
