Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  This last is only momentarily unsettling to the stalled Pimletz, after which it blossoms into a full-blown anguish. Yes, there are a couple weeks to go on his leave, and, yes, he’s got a contract and the Newspaper Guild behind him, but Pimletz does not want to fall any lower on the Record-Transcript depth-chart than he already has. He wonders how deep a fathom is, or a league, or whatever measure people use to calculate an abyss. Whatever it is, he can’t see covering high school sports or taking personals over the phone.

  It’s late, late enough for Pimletz to be thinking of things other than the chances of completing his unlikely book project or jump-starting the business he had going with Petra Wood or reclaiming his place of indistinction at the paper. He goes from thinking nothing at all to everything all at once in the time it takes to scratch his head. Lately, when his mind wanders, it takes Pimletz to considering viable, four-headed groupings for the late-night talk show Politically Incorrect and wondering if there is any way to make money from this preoccupation. Alistair Cooke, Alannis Morrisette, Macauley Culkin, Madeline Albright. Iman, Pele, Madonna, Fabio. He tunes in, with nothing else to do, and watches with passing interest. The celebrity clusters keep coming to him, uninvited, just as they must keep coming to the show’s producers. Surely, it must be somebody’s job to put together these panels every night. Mike Nichols, Pat Sajak, Margaret Trudeau, Malcolm-Jamal Warner doesn’t happen by accident. He’s thinking, if things don’t work out with the book or at the paper, maybe he can give Bill Maher a call. He can do this shit, no problem. Warren Buffet, Jimmy Buffet, Buffy St. Marie, Sarah Michelle Gellar. Brad Pitt, Eartha Kitt, Katarina Witt, Slim Whitman. He trips up on the fourth. That’s where it gets hard. Three is a walk, but that fourth can be a killer. Robert Bork, Peter Tork, Michael York, Sarah Ferguson? Damn.

  He’s also thinking, you know, maybe he should try Hamlin, see what’s happened to his e-mailings. Been four or five weeks since the last diatribe, a couple dozen pages on the vagaries of Hollywood and the inconsistencies of fate. It was crap, but crap Pimletz could not recognize and certainly crap he could use. At this point, he’ll string random words together and see where they take him. Any thoughts but his own, that’s what he’s looking for.

  He picks up the phone. Hamlin keeps all kinds of hours. (Not Pimletz; he keeps only one or two.) Up here, after Politically Incorrect, the ABC affiliate has reached the end of its broadcast day and switched to paid programming, but, down in Boston, who knows what the fuck Hamlin is up to? Could be out on a story, even. Or a date.

  Hamlin answers on the first ring. “What?”

  “What happened to hello?”

  “What happened to not calling people after one in the morning?”

  “It’s me, Pimletz.”

  “I know who it is, diphthong.”

  Pimletz has to think about this one. Diphthong. Also, he has to think about directing this call back to where he wants it. If Hamlin gets going on him, Pimletz is done. Focus, he tells himself. Get in, get out. Don’t be a diphthong. “What happened with you and Terence Wood?” he tries. “You guys have a falling out?”

  “The fuck you talking about?” Hamlin says.

  “Wood. Your little e-mailings. Faxes. All that shit you used to cook up and send along.”

  Hamlin beams. “Oh. Those.” Beat. He’s remembering an early embellishment regarding Margeaux Hemingway and a large-mouthed bass. “You need another one? You called for another fabrication?” Hamlin makes his voice like a dealer’s. “You want another taste?” Then he goes exotic: “My American friend, he is desperate for another taste?”

  “The letters to his son, Norman,” Pimletz says, wanting to be sure he’s understood. “Those weren’t just stories. You know, the words. They cut right through me. The parts about how connected they were, even when they were disconnected. You know.”

  “What letters?” Hamlin says. “What cut right through you?”

  “You know.”

  “This a scalpel we’re talking about, or something that has jackshit to do with me?”

  Pimletz refuses to let Hamlin beat him back on this one, or push him from the point. “Come on, man,” he says. “Don’t make me beg for it. Those letters were my book. Wood to Norman. Wood to the world. They were fucking brilliant. They were, like, you know, half of what I had to work with.”

  “Brilliant?” Hamlin bounces back. He’s never heard the word used to describe something he may or may not have written, and he is charmed by it, although he’s not sure it means all that much in Pimletz’s estimation.

  “What?” Pimletz says, sensing he’s crossed some kind of line. His antennae are pitched to where he picks up a transgression. “It’s too strong? Brilliant is too strong? I mean, if it’s all that brilliant, I should be paying you for it, right? You want to be cut in on the book deal, is this what you’re saying?”

  “I’m not saying anything,” Hamlin corrects. “This is all you.” What he means to tell Pimletz is the day he wants in on his book deal is the day he shits quarters through his ears, but he’s too tired to rip into the bastard with his usual enthusiasm. “You’re the one doing all the talking,” he says instead. “Do you hear me talking?”

  “You mean, other than now?”

  Hamlin doesn’t respond, and Pimletz gets his point soon enough. “Okay, so it’s not brilliant,” Pimletz allows. “Strong, though. It’s definitely strong.”

  “I don’t care what it is,” Hamlin says, “and I’m no closer to giving a shit.”

  It begins to register to Pimletz that his hard-to-figure friend does not, indeed, have any notion what he’s talking about, that these most recent electronic mailings from Terence Wood to Norman Wood have been originating someplace else. But where? And, if Hamlin didn’t write them, who did? Pimletz doesn’t have any idea or the first idea where to begin looking for one. No one else comes immediately to mind. Shit! he thinks. Shitshitshitshit. Then he thinks the letters could be something Wood maybe wrote and left behind for his kid, maybe formulated his server to send them out on a kind of time-release program. Pimletz doesn’t know enough about high technology to know if such a thing is possible. Maybe what he’s tapped into is a genuine record of communication from father to son, from grave back to cradle, a reaching out of book-length proportions, the real deal. (The fatherlode?) The missing piece to the confounding puzzle of Terence Wood’s compressed life and times. Or maybe it’s just some stream of Internet consciousness, cooked up by some unknown hands, out there, in the ether.

  “You’re shittin’ me, right?” Pimletz tries one more time. “This is one of your yanks?” He gets back nothing. “Hamlin?” he says. “You still there?”

  “Still here.”

  “And this isn’t you, these letters?”

  “Like I said.”

  “Jesus,” Pimletz says, his voice trailing his thoughts.

  “Probably not Him either.” Hamlin permits himself a creased smile beneath his aggravation, but then he goes soft. He doesn’t see the point in smiling if Pimletz can’t see it. This surprises him, this turn. There was a time—just the other day!—when Hamlin could have laughed his ass off at something Pimletz had done (or, more likely, hadn’t done) and not given a plain shit if the guy understood his humiliation. And, suddenly, this. Hamlin doesn’t know how it happened or why, but, where there was once joy in his Pimletz-busting, there is now shame. Well, okay, it’s not quite shame, but he does feel a little shitty about all his jerking around. Dirty. Maybe it’s the late hour, or the utter hopelessness of Pimletz’s situation, or the leverage he always feels in relation to his mediocre friend, but something gets to him, finally, leaves him thinking he’ll ease up, just this once.

  “You can source them, you know,” Hamlin says, meaning to help, meaning to tell Pimletz there’s a way to figure where his phantom messages are coming from. “Like tracing a call.”

  This is news to Pimletz. Everything is news to Pimletz, but this comes with a banner headline. “No shit?” he says, incredulous.
One of the nice things about the computer, he’d always thought, was that you could hide behind it; to go online was to go underground in anonymous search of useless information and idle chatter. He could be a fourteen-year-old cheerleader from Topeka, Kansas, a technodrone from MIT, a Hollywood producer, and nobody could smoke him out. He was like an ostrich in these ridiculous chat rooms; he couldn’t see anyone else, so no one could see him. “Who else knows about this?”

  “Who doesn’t know?” Hamlin says. “Come on, Axel, get with the technology.” He refers him to a registration service known as InterNIC, and an internal search program called WHOIS, and he walks him through the commands he’ll need to access each. He talks slowly so Pimletz can write it all down. Then he walks him through a second time, and his patience thins to where it’s nearly transparent, to where he’s about ready to resume his yanking.

  “You’re sure about this?” Pimletz says.

  “I’m not sure about anything,” Hamlin says. “I’m not sure why I even bother.”

  “But this works?”

  “Most of the time, this works. Institutional systems, banks, libraries, schools, government offices, you can pretty much trace everything back unless they put a block on it, but most places don’t think to block it out.”

  “And regular people?” Pimletz asks. “Some asshole in a cabin like me?”

  “Some asshole in a cabin like you?” Hamlin considers. “Well, then you’re fucked. If that’s what you’re dealing with, you’re fucked.”

  This kind of feeling doesn’t usually find Grace, and, when it does, she usually knows to chase it back to the place in her head where other people’s wonders don’t register as her own. There’s just no room for this way of thinking, and, where there might be room, there is no precedent. Her father used to tell her she was built to work, whatever that meant. “Girl as big and strong as you, won’t be breakin’ too many hearts,” was how he indelicately put it once, and the truth of what he had to say became a part of her. She was built to work, to take care of her father, to feed his steady stream of hungry fishermen even after he had given up on them. Lord knows, she wasn’t built for happiness.

  Always, she sees herself through the eyes of her father and her regulars, Lem and Chester and those others. What she sees is a good-natured, big-hearted, essentially middle-aged woman with too many mouths to feed, too many extra pounds to carry, and too many years in the rearview mirror to be taken seriously in the broken-hearts department. Too this. Too that. Too too too. That’s been the way of it, and the way it still is. Yes, still. Harlan Trask can’t change it. Terence Wood. Whatever he wants to call himself, he can’t just breeze into town and lift her from her life and drop her back down onto some other way of being. That’s not how it goes. How it goes is he touches down, and she is momentarily transported to where she starts to think how her life might have been, but it can never be more than a supposition. She has so fundamentally worn through her routine it can no longer absorb change. She reflects it, really. That is about the best she can manage. It bounces off of her, change, and transforms the people around her. Like with Harlan. He comes into her coffee shop and collects her in his reinvention, but the way she thinks of it is she was sent to him, to help loose the cobwebs of the way his life was going, to see him to the other side of what he’s looking for.

  She wonders at how the same thing can look two different ways to two different people. Forget the way it looks—it can be two different things. It comes down to perspective. She could be watching a movie of her life and thinking, you know, this is fairy tale princess time, this is the happyhappy ending, with the way she wins the heart of the big old movie star who wanders into town unannounced, unattached. But from where she sits—at her lunch counter, on her two stools, working her receipts, and recovering from the breakfast rush—it’s not that way at all. She’s won the heart of the big old movie star, apparently, but he won’t cop to who he is. More than that, he won’t lift her from the way she is or the way she sees herself. He won’t, or he can’t, or she won’t let him. And besides, the apparently gets her. In the movies, it’s never unclear, the way the characters fall for each other; in the movies, there is no apparently, but she can’t keep from qualifying Harlan’s feelings. He’s only apparently fallen for her, and, if he truly has, then there must be some explanation.

  Oprah’s on. They run it twice, the station up here, only the morning show is a repeat of the afternoon before. The idea, she guesses, is you catch people on different schedules, but they’ve got it so the times fit right into the two quiet pockets of Grace’s day, so she is made to watch it twice, once for real and once on the rebound. It’s not so bad. She’s got all this other stuff going on, and sometimes she’s only half listening, so it works out. You take the half listening from the afternoon and the half listening from the rerun the next morning, and it adds up.

  Just this morning, not incidentally, she read in the paper how Oprah’s considering ending her long run in the talk show business and moving on to other things, and this moves Grace to think how she relies on her little routines. She can’t imagine a time without Oprah, and yet she knows from the article Oprah’s only been on the air for fourteen, fifteen years. Something like that. First she wasn’t there, then she’s always been there, and soon she’ll be gone. Grace imagines she’ll look up one day from these same doings and wonder what ever happened to her old friend Oprah, to her routine.

  Things change, Grace realizes, but she doesn’t catch them changing. Flowers bloom. Hair grows. Governments topple. Even the planets realign without her knowing. This is a new one on her. She grew up thinking Pluto was the furthest planet from the sun; it was drilled into her. There was even a little poem thing she committed to memory to help her remember the order: My (Mercury) very (Venus) energetic (Earth) mother (Mars) jumped (Jupiter) sideways (Saturn) under (Uranus) nine (Neptune) planets (Pluto). And now she’s got kids coming in to the coffee shop after school and they’ve got textbooks saying it’s Neptune that’s furthest from the sun. Out of nowhere, without any kind of warning, it’s Neptune. That’s a major deal, she thinks, for the planets to switch places without her knowing, but it happens. The butt-end planets realign, you’d think there’d be a story on it, somewhere. They’ve interrupted her favorite shows for far less. The stock market drops one hundred points, there’s a bulletin on Geraldo Rivera. (She used to watch him too.) But there’s nothing on the planets realigning. Then she read in one of the textbooks how they’re supposed to flip-flop back to how they were after about twenty years, Pluto and Neptune, only in her case she’ll probably miss out on the switch a second time. She’ll probably just be getting used to Neptune being furthest from the sun, she’ll have learned a new little poem thing to keep things straight, and then it’ll be Pluto’s turn again, and she won’t know until way later. The flip-flop won’t make the news either.

  So, yeah, things change. Very definitely. But it has to do with degrees. Perception and degrees. Pluto and Neptune don’t switch places overnight, and Oprah doesn’t disappear from the airwaves, and cities don’t get new area codes, and Grace herself doesn’t connect with this mysterious stranger in such a manner that it reconstitutes her entire way of looking at the world or her place within it. Maybe someday, you know, she’ll think in terms of being happy, of allowing herself to grab at something she has not yet known, but she has to get there by degrees so that she doesn’t notice. Or maybe she’s already there and just doesn’t realize. Maybe she needs to look at it differently. Maybe if she looks back at how she was, and holds it up to how she is, she can see the contrast. Maybe this is what happy looks like on her.

  On Oprah, they’ve got these three women from somewhere in Indiana, these three neighbors. They started up an investing club and turned a few thousand dollars of pinched pennies and cookie-jar money into a six-figure portfolio. Grace listens to this one woman with big, hooped earrings go on about her investment strategy and wonders if she’ll ever get to the place where what she owns
could be looked at all at once and considered a portfolio. She’s got some money put away in CDs, and—oh, yeah!—she’s got those zero coupon bonds Walt Jamesly sold her back when he took that brokerage-type job down in Bangor. She’s got her interest in the coffee shop and her little Subaru Brat pickup truck, which she owns outright, but she wouldn’t exactly call these things a portfolio. Her furniture. Her big screen television and home entertainment center. These are just things she has.

  She doesn’t hear the truck pull up outside. She’s lost in what she has, and she’s not paying good attention to any one thing. Underneath the dissonant noises of the television, and the two Lennys in the back, and the few customers left lingering over coffee, and the general traffic sounds from the street, she manages to miss the pulling up of a big white truck with the initials ATQ stenciled on the door panels and a New York City phone number. She doesn’t notice her Harlan pull up behind the truck in her Brat and step out of the pickup and around to the truck bed and start helping the overalled truck driver with his heavy lifting. She doesn’t turn her head until the overalls lift the truck bed door and slam it shut, and then she turns to the direction of the noise and sees her Harlan straddling a huge, rectangular cardboard box resting on its edge on the sidewalk out front.

  She assembles the picture in her head and tries to understand it. Harlan’s got his feet pressed tight against the edge-up box as if he doesn’t want it to wobble and fall over on its side, which, in fact, he does not. The driver is back in the lock box on the truck bed, fumbling with tools. There’s a ladder in the bed too, and soon he goes about sliding it to the street as well.

  Grace is pulled toward the window with the commotion, and then out the door.

  “Aw, shit,” her Harlan says, when he sees Grace emerge from the door to the street.

  “Aw, shit, to you too,” Grace says back.