Becky does a good Jean Arthur. It’s her best. She has lines down from all the Frank Capra movies. I suppose it’s something that happens when you watch movies by yourself for too long.
For my part, I was a little numb. Suddenly, I was embarrassed. I don’t know why. Or, I do know and figure it’s not worth trying to figure. I had just been told that two women loved me. I hadn’t heard that from any one female for about twenty years. That is, not counting my daughters.
I could deal with that. The thought made me laugh. Out loud, before I stuffed it back. Becky was confused by my reaction.
What I did then was try to move the subject line back. “Why don’t you think she would have just disappeared—or walked away?”
She had an answer for that. “Because—you big lug—why do you think? Because women don’t fall in love and then walk away. Especially not when they’re over thirty. At least not the way I understand it.”
Now I was confused.
“Jesus Christ, God Almighty,” my grandfather liked to say that in key moments of confusion, so I said it. Becky shook her head at me and raised an eyebrow.
She just answered, “Something’s happened. Something serious.”
I went home on the early side. I wasn’t feeling so much blue as numb. I was tired enough to fall asleep without a whole lot more unnecessary thinking.
I told Detective Wise all this, pretty much in detail, Friday morning, but with less emphasis on the love triangle. He picked up on that all by himself. He had one bit of additional information though. They had tracked Desiree’s credit card from the bar tab I had directed him to. She had not used that card again since the end of October.
20. The whale in the room
A couple of days later, Becky was not so happy to see me. It was in her face and eyes.
She said, “I can’t. I have another appointment at three.”
I said, “I’ll wait. I’ll wait if you’ll talk to me.”
She had nodded at that and closed her door.
Connie has a couple of regular gigs signed up for us all the way through January. One is keeping an eye on an actor who is making a film in Boston. The weekend after Thanksgiving was non-stop. I had done a twelve-hour shift for Connie on Friday, following this guy around all over the city. Saturday he’s shooting one scene in the same place in Charlestown, all day long. A grip tells me it’s less than 60 seconds of script. I was bored stiff. There’s a good pizza place there and I ate too much of that. I already knew Becky was running some sort of special project that had to be done before Christmas break, so I left her alone. I got to sleep in on Sunday morning, but Sunday afternoon I was out at Logan Airport again where they’re doing establishing shots for the film, with this same clown walking up ramps and opening doors. All things considered, it was marginally more interesting than sitting around somewhere checking I.D.’s. Watching people pretend can be entertaining only if you keep your cynicism in your pocket. And it kept my mind off other matters.
The real matter was that Detective Wise had gone by to speak with Becky on Monday morning and I suppose he might have been a little rough with her. I assumed as much. He had been pretty blunt with me in his investigation, more than once. I accepted it as necessary, but I didn’t think Becky had ever been through an interrogation before. Desiree had been missing for more than four weeks and finding her would not be getting any easier.
Wise had called me early that morning and asked, “Do you think your friend the Professor had a reason to hurt Miss Perry?”
I said, “No. She’s not like that.”
He said, “You sure?”
I said, “Yes.” But, of course, I wasn’t. I wasn’t sure of anything.
Should I have said outright that I thought it was absurd to even consider the idea that Becky might have hurt Des over me? Over me!
So, Monday was actually the first chance I had to see Becky since Thanksgiving. She had not answered my phone messages.
After she put me off at the office, I waited for her by wandering through the Museum of Natural History next door. This is an old habit and comforting to me. If Becky had one more student to see, the hour could not be better spent.
As a kid, I had mused whole Saturdays away while there when my mother visited with her friend Mrs. Gerry, who lived only a few blocks away. My brother always refused to come, which made this all the more sweet. As if the place were mine alone.
They have cleaned the dust from the corners since then, but the exhibits are much the same. Just like a kid, I was still taken in by the great arching bones of the whale. Such an unbelievable beast. So difficult to imagine as anything less that a fallen god.
At some point in my childhood, my Dad had given me a copy of the Roy Chapman Andrews book for kids, All About Whales. This had singularly defined my appreciation of the subject for years. There was no political correctness to it. No pretense. Andrews had gone whaling himself and understood the nature of his subject firsthand. It was all just a matter of fact coupled with scientific wonder. Naturally, there was some preordination then to my later discovery of Moby Dick in high school.
I have a special affinity for Melville. Even more so as I’ve grown older. I think of his misery sometimes as if it’s my own.
I know. Very grand of me, to see myself in the same light as Melville. But I do. So that’s that.
Back when—back about 2003, when Mary Ellen and I were beginning to have a really rough time of it (more me than her, I thought then), I read Moby Dick again for about the third time. It might have only been an attempt to find refuge in that safe haven of my past. I can’t tell you now why I had gone back to it, given the way they tried to kill the book in college—dissecting it in a clumsy attempt to cut the soul out with their dull academic knives.
But this was a stroke of luck, after all. I was too young, the first time I read it, to appreciate anything but the spirit of the book. Afterwards, in college, I had approached Melville’s great humor, and done my paper for that class on similarities between Melville and Mark Twain. The professor—or his stand-in graduate student who read my effort, was not convinced. And then, for no reason at all that I can remember, there in the midst of my failing career as a teacher, I read Moby Dick the third time with the wonder of a kid—just as it joined to the raw edges of my own life. Right from that first sentence. It all made sense to me, finally, but not just the book. Myself. I was Ishmael! Certainly not the heroic lost son Queequeg. I was not driven by my search for the whale like Ahab, but compelled to watch. This was not the role I wanted, but the one I was better suited for.
I did not want to be an observer, I thought. I wanted to be in the pursuit!
I first understood then, as much as Ishmael is Melville himself, standing at the threshold of his own life and looking out onto the vastness of his own ignorance, he is also the very intentional character that Melville has made for us to face that abyss. Ishmael is a foolish man. A fatuous man. Just as Melville sees himself. . . All right, that is supposition. I don’t know how Melville saw himself. But I bet he did! I can feel it in his words. But he can’t say it outright. Why would anyone waste time reading the words of a self-confessed fool? Like Becky said, you have to display self-assurance even when you have none.
And Melville is a conscious and practiced writer. This is not his first creative effort. He knows he has to win the reader over to looking at the world through the eyes of his everyman, and then keep those eyes open to seeing what most people have already closed their minds to. Ishmael is an innocent, but he cannot be without character. Melville makes him the credulous observer—the bigot, the chauvinist, but the observer to the bitter end.
Think of those wonderful portions of the book that so many editors cut away in a clumsy attempt to render the precious oil—supposedly to shorten the reader’s burden—and thereby cut away the flesh which gives it shape and makes it mighty—depriving the story of its driving power so that few students who read it ever comprehend the larger context. Think,
for instance, of the chapter where he defines the species of whale in terms of book sizes. That alone is the sort of Swiftian genius that makes the gift of the rest of the tale wholly deserved.
The book size metaphor is so apparently fatuous, silly, and absurd that it must be dismissed out of hand. Yet, there it is, and we must deal with it, not in passing, but in great detail. Such a fine and deliberate act. Whales are not mammals, Ishmael declares, they’re fish! They must be categorized by size alone, as folios, or octavos, or duodecimos, but not quartos—why not quartos, I wonder?—all because their insides are simply too complicated to catalogue or understand. Shades of every librarian who forgets the very cause and reason for their own existence in an orgy of call letters and budgetary fulfillments.
The ghost of Procrustes!
Such foolishness is colossal and not incidental. The truly ignorant editor who expurgates the flesh from the pages has only proven themselves oblivious to their own stupidity. Isn’t true stupidity a refusal to admit your own ignorance? They’ve lost their chance to understand the rest of the book! With the skeleton bare and gone to a museum, they’re left to cobble braces from scraps of scripture and jury rig allegorical tales as if old Melville knew some twentieth-century professor would someday need a handle to grasp what they themselves had become too small minded to understand.
Melville was only addressing his audience! He only wanted to entertain them enough to sell his book by word of mouth. Those people knew their Bible and their Shakespeare and didn’t need a professor to instruct them on the power of the sea. Forcing such a text today on children who’ve never been endangered by the necessities of daily toil, nor dreamt of adventure beyond the push of a button on a video game, nor stood witness to a death or a birth, is a true waste of sentiment. Brine and tar and the sour breath of rot mixed with the sweet perfume of whale oil rendered in the pots cannot be digitalized any more than the unexpected heave and toss of a deck beneath your feet.
Of course, I knew little enough about all that myself. But at least I could take what Melville had to say at face value and forget about transposing it and trimming it to a modern template of artificial deconstruction.
What was the missing flesh to all of this, then? What about the matter that had confounded me now? I had found more than a few scattered bits here and there without a good plan. Becky would know about that. She would tag each piece and label it. She would see it in place before moving it to a more convenient context and making assumptions. She would be slow and deliberate. I had rushed in and grabbed at what was obvious. But then, I had thought that time was of the essence. If something had happened, I needed to know as soon as possible.
Nearly a month was gone now. If Desiree was dead, as I was beginning to believe, my time would be better spent in a more careful study.
A few days before Thanksgiving, I had gone to see James Crockett. I was thinking about my novel just then, not about Desiree. I was looking for a match to light a fire.
He’s an impatient bastard.
He was not sitting in his usual spot at the bar, and I almost left, assuming he was not there that night. Then someone else moved, and I caught sight of him with his feet up and braced against the bar so that his chair leaned far enough back to see the television. He was practically lying flat. It was comic. It made a visual display of his short stature and I assumed the inconvenience would have him in a bad mood, but I was only right by half.
“What the hell do you want?”
My guess is that he had finished his usual quota of bourbon and was into later rounds.
I said, “I need some help.”
He didn’t look at me but kept his eye on the screen above. “You are a waste of time. You don’t listen to anybody. I’m busy. What’s the capital of Liberia?”
“Monrovia.”
“Bizzzt. Wrong! You’ve got to put it in the form of a question. What good are you?”
He was watching a game show on the television above his head. I pulled a stool over from the wall.
“I have a question of my own.”
“Just a minute.”
He stared more intently at the screen in an exaggerated attempt to ignore me. Alex Trebek, the game show host, asked the next question, “Numerical equation popularly used to describe border dispute between U. S. and Britain in 1846.”
I said, “What is fifty-four, forty or fight?”
James turned at me in disgust. “I was going to say that. You didn’t give me a chance. That was an easy one for you. I never liked history.”
I said, “Do you have time for a chat?”
He waved me off with a single word, “No,” bending his knees enough to bring his chair forward so that he could grab his nearly empty glass. “What do you want?”
“I’m not getting anywhere with the story. I need some advice.”
He jerked his head to the side and looked at me over the broad expanse of his right cheek. “You don’t listen to advice.”
I said, “If it’s good, I will.”
“I don’t give bad advice. That’s why I sit in bars watching Jeopardy instead of going home to Patrice.”
I liked Patrice. She was a children’s book editor at Houghton Mifflin.
“How’s Patrice?”
“She’s getting married.”
The cause for his worse than usual mood was explained.
“Sorry.”
James looked for the bartender now. “Yeah. I told her to stop waiting, and she did. That was good advice. She finally took it.”
“Give me some good advice. I’ll take it too?”
“For free?”
“I’ll buy you another bourbon.”
He didn’t miss the beat. “Okay. What do you need?”
I started in, “Becky turned up some new sources for me. My whole theory about the father killing Mary Andrews is out the window—”
“Defenestrated. They just had that word on Jeopardy.”
“Defenestrated. But that’s okay. I have other ideas. It’s a better story now, as far as I’m concerned. Only, it doesn’t feel like a story anymore. It feels like history. It feels like research. The narrative is boring.”
“Yeah. You’re good at that. That’s why I told you to put some sex into your Civil War epic. Remember?”
“You don’t let me forget.”
He pushed his glass forward for the bartender to notice. “Because you wasted my time. That’s why. You had something there. You lost it.”
“Will you read what I have now and tell me what you think? Tell me what you think I need?”
He shook his head. “No. I’m busy. I’m missing my show. But I’ll tell you what you need, anyway. I’ll tell you what I thought about it when I read the first version, and I didn’t tell you because I figured you’d just go the other way. You need a whale.”
“A whale?”
“Yeah. You need an Ahab and you need a whale.”
“There are no whales in this story.”
“Don’t be dense! Now go away and let me watch my show.”
That’s James. I felt sorry for Patrice. I thought she loved him. I had met her more than once. James believes he’s a freak and anyone who loves him must love freaks. And he doesn’t like people who like freaks. Simple logic. Only Patrice probably loved him because he is a very funny and generous guy.
I wanted to speak with Becky about all of this. In the end, I assumed she would understand about my telling Detective Wise that she had gone to see Des. I had to do that. But my motivations were more selfish than that. I was as incapable of comforting her over Des as I was myself. What I needed was someone to talk to about my story. After all, Melville had his love, Elizabeth—his dear amanuenses, if never truly his muse. I had not wanted to discuss my story with Becky over Thanksgiving because I wasn’t settled on it then at all.
But James was right. He’s usually right, but not always. He needs Patrice. And I needed an Ahab. I already had my whale.
Writing is a very selfish
pursuit. And it is a pursuit, after all.
On Monday, as soon as four o’clock came, and after wandering around the museum and thinking all that through one more time, I knocked at Rebecca’s office door.
There was no answer. I tried the knob. It was locked.
21. What I said
I wiped my hands and answered the phone by the third ring. Mary Ellen did not say hello.
She said, “What did you say to your daughter?”
I said, “Which one?”
“The only one who listens to you.”
“That’s not true. Susie listens to me. She just disagrees with everything I say. She takes after you in that regard. And I had a pretty good conversation recently with Sarah about her plan to go to Europe next summer.”
“What did you say to Matty?”
“When?”
“When you went to breakfast with them on Thanksgiving morning.”
“I don’t remember. We talked about a lot of things. Her sisters were there. Why don’t you ask them? They listen. They seem to remember every adjective that comes out of my mouth.”
I was assuming she had already asked the girls what I said, of course.
“Susie said you told Matty she was old enough to make her own decisions now. Is that what you said?”
“Yes. Exactly. Precisely. I don’t remember. If Susie says so. She’s an excellent journalist.”
“What the hell were you thinking?”
“What was I thinking? Maybe I was thinking that Matty was thinking that very same thing already and nothing I said to the contrary would make any difference, so I basically made it clear to her what it meant—what being old enough meant. Consequences. All of that. I’ve had the same conversation with each of the girls over the years. Sarah thought that it was all very funny. She said I used a lot of the very same words on her. Both Susie and Sarah sat there and listened without a peep. And they agreed, I might add. They both seemed very supportive.”
Mary Ellen paused in her assault. I could tell she was walking as she spoke. I heard traffic.
John Finn Page 21
