Legends of the Fall

by Jim Harrison

  That evening after a late dinner where they both drank too much wine Laura did a mock dance to the same De· bussy song she had danced to in the gym nineteen years before. He watched with his mind frozen in dread because he knew their marriage was over and she knew it and was perhaps unwittingly dancing a swan song. Her body had changed very little but the grace had somehow been tainted with an almost undetectable hint of vulgarity. He went into the bathroom and wept for the first time in twenty-seven years, the last incident being when his beloved dog bit a deputy sheriff ice fishing on the lake in front of their home and was blown into a snowy eternity with six shots from a service. 38. He dried his eyes with a towel that smelled of Laura’s body, returned to the bedroom where they made love nearly as passionately as they had in the green knee-high winter wheat with the hawk circling above, but it was the terrible energy of permanent loss that wound them together and made them repeat every sexual gesture of their lives together.

  That night was the final grace note of the marriage. It was three months before the divorce papers were filed (on the afternoon of the morning their daughter left for college). She had more money than he did, though not all that much more, and as an ardent feminist who took care of herself wonderfully she wanted nothing from him. He insisted for selfish reasons on paying the college bills (a fear of losing contact with his daughter) and they agreed to split the sale of the house down the middle. Certain necessary tortures were performed to insure the permanence of the divorce. Nordstrom was the simpleminded victim of these emotional barrages that accompany separation, the hacking of all the knots and threads that held the lovers together. He was told he was selfish, cold, calculating, intoxicated with his business success, with the toys that later decorated his life. During many wine-soaked summer evenings he heard ruminations about his midwestern infantilism, his self-satisfied ignorance of the real world, his insensitivity to the arts. Sometimes the ardor of the spleen was tempered by laughter or her ready admission that on a comparative basis it hadn’t been all that bad a marriage. Unfortunately his potency waned as she drew away from him. He sought out wrongs, even imagined ones that he could present, but came up with nothing of substance. He loved her and had always been utterly uncritical of her often sloppy nature. He only felt anger when she told him about her lovers, and not that he was a bad lover, only that she saw life as too exasperatingly short to know only one man. He felt flashes of the cuckold’s rage but his spirit had become too fatigued with sorrow to express himself. He invented a few infidelities but sensed she didn’t believe him and was being kind to his inventions. It was their daughter who kept them totally civil: she loved them both for childlike reasons but questioned their sanity when they proposed only a tentative separation. She understood her father’s nature, how while he could be lovable, he was also an introverted ignoramus, lacking even a touch of ease and spontaneity. She had known of her mother’s lovers since fourteen and was only mildly embarrassed, owning a woman’s matter-of-factness in sexual matters.

  So a nearly twenty-year period of Nordstrom’s life was over. After Christmas that year when he had tied up what he thought of as loose ends he moved to Boston where he had arranged a vice-presidency for another large book wholesaler. He was so dead to himself that the move actually constituted a way to keep at least cautiously near his daughter two hundred miles to the south. She even stayed with him for two months one year when she attended Harvard summer school. And that prolonged visit was what led to Nordstrom dancing alone. She had spent the two previous summers in Europe and now had a boyfriend at Harvard. They shared a mutually intense interest in art history and contemporary music, two subjects that seemed pleasantly impractical to Nordstrom. The young man was Jewish and this distressed him a little too until he spent an evening brooding about it and came up with nothing decisive one way or another. Laura had remarried and to a Jew; she was apparently quite happy, so perhaps it wasn’t surprising that her daughter picked a Jew. Brookline was full of Jews and though Nordstrom didn’t know any on a personal basis he rather liked them from a distance. He didn’t know that he was somewhat an object of comedy in the delicatessen where he took his morning breakfast. He mentioned one morning to the owner that his Formosa oolong tea had said on the packet “this rare brown leaf tea from the island of Formosa has the exquisite odor of ripe peaches” but he hadn’t smelled any peaches. This laconic form of midwestern humor escaped the delicatessen owner who sniffed the tea and said “so whadda I’m supposed to do.” Then several weeks later the short-order cook didn’t show up and Nordstrom called his office telling the secretary he’d be late. He looked a little absurd in the white apron with a J. Press shirt peeking out the top with a silk tie in a Windsor knot tightly in place. He cooked through the two-hour breakfast rush preparing basically simple orders—scrambled eggs with lox and onions, toasted bagels with cream cheese, a variety of omelettes, fried potatoes. When it was over and Nordstrom took off the apron and the owner wondered aloud what Nordstrom might like in return he said jauntily “just put something on a horse for me,” having seen the owner study the Racing Form. Later when his daughter had been in the delicatessen with him the owner had complimented him on the “beautiful piece of ass.” Nordstrom hadn’t had the heart to admit it was his daughter.

  Nor would Nordstrom admit that he was lonely. If the idea had arisen, which it didn’t, he would have insisted to himself that he was alone most of the time only so he could figure things out. At work he was cold and efficient, only perfunctorily social. In the three years in Boston he had quickly renewed his reputation as a hatchet man by firing ten percent of the firm’s two hundred employees and increasing efficiency and volume by more than twenty percent. There was a lot of muttering among the shanty Irish and the lower level Italian workers but never in Nordstrom’s presence. The fact of it was that Nordstrom was powerful to no particular purpose. If he were to walk into a bar and say “it’s raining” all the drinkers would nod attentively even though they could clearly see the sun shining through the windows. Perhaps, though, his preparations for his daughter’s summer arrival painted his solitary life accurately. The gestures weren’t at all conscious but more like an animal preparing for spring or winter, not really knowing which. He had the large master bedroom repainted a pale blue, bookshelves installed and filled with art books; he shopped for a stereo set and ended up buying two combination stereos that included tape decks. Her frugality at college had always depressed him, reminding him of his own bleak years. When he first met her young man in New York they were both wearing blue jeans, not even particularly clean ones, so Nordstrom had to cancel reservations at La Caravelle and they had ended up in the Village. He had noted to himself to return there at a future date because a particular waitress had caught his eye.

  At the beginning of the summer of 1977 Nordstrom wanted sex to go away. In the three years since the divorce he had proven himself in a few encounters to be utterly without versatility. Desire went away for a long while and he was relieved but recently it had surfaced again at odd moments: a photo in a magazine, the rare movie (the nurse in Cuckoo’s Nest, Louise Fletcher, gave him a momentary hard-on), an overweight waitress at the delicatessen, and most reprehensibly in his view, a girl across the courtyard from his apartment. She had just moved in and was in the habit of turning out all the lights and watching TV in the dark presuming herself invisible. But the blue light on her body was startlingly sexual and one evening her hand had moved down as if to massage herself and Nordstrom rushed from the apartment to find a prostitute. There were none to be had in the neighborhood bars and he ended up watching a Red Sox game on television, baseball being an effective nationwide soporific. But he brooded about his sexual failures, the dead feeling in his body as he watched the future disappear in nightly units full of odd dreams; dreams that brought the strange glandular rapacity of his marriage back so strongly that he half-expected Laura to be beside him when he awoke exhausted in the morning. He read widely on the subject but the reading was
like trying to translate a foreign language after one year’s study: his sexuality had been wonderful for eighteen years and then vanished. The books weren’t any good on the vanishing act as if it were an example of antimagic and too subtle to describe. Nordstrom didn’t know that he longed to fall in love. In his rage for order he began to keep a diary and the simple act of writing calmed him a great deal.

  May 77: Sold some stock today to cover an August rental of a house on the water in Marblehead. It was extravagant but it has occurred to me this will be the last chance I have to spend much time with Sonia. Also noticed that when the decorator and painters finished with the room I had made it look like a huge room we had at the Lotti on the Rue de Castiglione in 1967 when she was eleven. Sid from the deli asked me to go to the Red Sox-Tigers game tonight, then to a stag party for his brother’s fiftieth birthday out on Revere Beach. He said there would be plenty of bimbos, floozies and coochy-coos” in addition to food and movies. When Sid is dressed up he behaves like Kojak on TV right down to the slightly vulgar tailoring. Wondered why I said no? I might have been able to let off some steam though I doubt it. After twenty years of studying them I am no longer able to read newspapers. Why? It’s because they no longer reflect the world I perceive. I will have to go along with the way I see it even if wrong. And if they are right, it lacks interest. Broke up a fight between two stockboys in the alley slugging it out over a rather attractive filing girl. Whole shipping department watching and the girl crying rather too dramatically. Good punchers but I got an old-fashioned wristlock on one. Everyone thought they would be fired but I hadn’t the heart for it. In high school I thought it grand to fight over a girl and these emotions swept over me. Perhaps I am becoming juvenile. Anyway the workers talked excitedly about the fight all afternoon. One said the boys were “pussy struck” which is an odd term from years ago, a dormitory kind of colloquialism as young men talk all sorts of filth and then when they’re with girls they quote snippets of popular songs and become utterly dopey. Girl they were fighting over caught me looking at her, wet her lips and smiled. A stringy tart. Wangled lobster mousse recipe from Locke-Ober’s to fix for Sonia on Sunday with asparagus vinaigrette and that Fetzer fumé blanc she likes. Know she’s coming Saturday but spending evening with her young man. Must make her understand that it’s fine if he stays with her on occasion or I won’t see much of her. She’s twenty. It’s usual to ask where the years went but I know very well where they went and sloppy sentimentality never did anyone any good. Dad wrote to say because of his bad heart and cholesterol he had to give up herring, fried salt pork, cheese, bacon and eggs, fried pork and onion sandwiches—his favorite. This is a sad thing. On Thursday we would go to the basement together and clean the salt herring and pickle them for Saturday night supper. Mother did not like to reach into the barrel. She saw a snake in the root cellar and screamed. He can still eat lukefist. Certain older men at work are always telling moronic jokes which must mean something. Read a Knut Hamsun novel to see what Norwegians could do (not much). The book made me quite unhappy and reminded me of certain dreams of Laura: once when she returned from one of her movie parties that I left early and she was very drugged up on cocaine and wanted me to make love to her which I did for a long time. Once in front of the mirror but in the dream the man in the mirror wasn’t me. A bit scatterbrained of late. For instance I looked up earth, fire, water, and air in the Brittanica. Also radio as I had quite forgotten the principles on which they work. Certain other disturbing things are: why am I continuing to work? My wife is gone who ironically never needed what I made and my daughter is going and my parents well cared for. I am no longer torn to pieces by the collapse of my life but I have no idea what should come next. Perhaps nothing. My mother always closed her letters by saying “you are in my prayers” but I’ve never put much stock in religion, believing that prayer is trying to make a special case for yourself.

  CHAPTER

  II

  Nordstrom’s summer with his daughter went splendidly, so happily in a bittersweet sense in fact that he thought that it might mean that he was going to die. He was breathing more deeply and took to laughing at odd times. He thought that one ought to die when things were going particularly well rather than badly, then the deathbed would be without the usual accumulation of terror that Nordstrom thought was anyway fraudulent. He fashioned himself without superstition or imagination, though mostly because people always told him he was without either. Laura was his chief and most convincing accuser. During the lengthy and expensive period when she visited a psychiatrist on a daily basis Nordstrom asked her what on earth did she find to talk about so extensively, adding that she must be making a lot of it up whole cloth. This had caused a great deal of anger wherein Nordstrom had been told that he didn’t have enough imagination to have valid mental problems. This hurt a bit so he had been delighted years later when Laura’s . psychiatrist had been arrested for jacking off in public on Rodeo Drive. But then the psychiatrist had spent a year in Colorado getting his “head straight” and it was business as usual with his old clientele including Laura returning to have their griefs further exhumed.

  Actually it was a matter of what is faddishly known as “communication”: Nordstrom’s nature was deeply private and there never was an occasion to express what he believed on certain matters. For his seventh birthday he had been given the twelve volume Book House, edited by Olive Beaupre Miller, who had assured her young. readers that “the world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be happy as kings.” Approaching age forty-three, it would still be difficult to convince him that a Norse girl didn’t ride a polar bear on a long journey, or that Odin didn’t exist on some rainy northern taiga, dressed in reindeer skins and warmed by a huge fire fed on human marrow with the music of the cries of the dying floating across a misty lake. Merlin was real and so was Arthur; in twelfth-century Japan there was a madman who painted pictures of mountains and rivers by dipping his hair in ink and whipping his head over the paper. Sometimes he painted with live chickens. Why wouldn’t certain ghosts live at the bottoms of lakes and express themselves through the voice of a loon? In his eleventh year Nordstrom shot a crow and Henry, an Ojibway Indian who worked as a carpenter for Nordstrom’s father when he wasn’t drunk, wouldn’t speak to him for months, after telling Nordstrom that any fool “knows that a crow is not a crow.” By fall Henry had become pacified and that early winter for a Christmas present he built Nordstrom a small rowboat out of white pine. Late the next spring Nordstrom found a baby crow in the woods fallen from its nest and nursed it to health with earthworms. The crow learned to fly and he left his bedroom window open so the crow could visit when it wished. He asked his father if it was a boy or girl crow and his father said it didn’t matter to the crow, just as it doesn’t matter to a dog. Nordstrom pondered this mystery. He surprised and delighted Henry though when he appeared at a building site with a crow perched noisily on his shoulder. The crow would sit on the backseat of the rowboat as Nordstrom rowed on summer mornings, squawking at his curious brethren in the sky who would circle at a distance and sometimes the crow would join them. Typically Nordstrom named his crow “Crow.” The bird disappeared late in the fall and returned for three springs in a row. Then he didn’t return and Nordstrom dug a small grave, then paused before returning the earth to the empty hole. He always remembered how excited the crow had been when they had watched a watersnake swallow a small frog. For two days he imagined himself turning from solid flesh into liquid in the belly of a snake.

  But perhaps it was this largely secret imagination that gave Nordstrom his self-possession, hence his success in business which only recently he had come to consider valueless. Businessmen who are so good at passing off bung-fodder as a necessity can scarcely be thought of as witless, or unimaginative, he thought. Laura had been raised in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago some three hundred miles south of Rhinelander, but really another part of the country as far as humor or imagination. Nordstrom would laugh at
the cat sleeping on the diving board above the pool in the backyard. He also thought it extremely funny when show people took to wearing Indian jewelry and French denims; other objects of humor were traffic jams (even when he was trapped in them), homosexuality (something to be given up by fourteen), politics and the evening news, including the fact that a great number of people still didn’t believe we had reached the moon. The French were truly funny, except the food was wonderful: Nordstrom’s repertory of jokes included only one, and that was about two Frenchmen meeting on the street: First Frenchman: “My mother died this morning at ten o’clock.” Second Frenchman: “At ten o’clock?” The general unpopularity of this subtle joke led Nordstrom to reflect on the nontransference of ethnic humor. Duck feet looked funny to some but to the Chinese they were a delicacy. When he and his father fished on summer evenings and were overtaken by a thunderstorm they would continue fishing in the rain because they hadn’t wanted it to rain. This made them laugh as did ice fishing on a twenty-below day with a thirty-knot wind, where after interminable hours of cold his father would decide it was a “bit chilly.” When he shot his first deer at thirteen, a doe, his father and uncles while cleaning the deer had plastered the bloody cunt to Nordstrom’s forehead. It stuck there for a few moments then fell to his lap as he sat there mournfully on a snow-covered stump. They assured him it was a blooding ritual, then laughed for days at his gullibility.