After that book came out, his version of the movement became gospel. He became famous. Everyone assumed I’d be grateful to have my name in the acknowledgements. Oh, thank you, Dennis, for saving me a spot on your raft of immortality! Don’t get me wrong. I still followed his career from afar, invited him to guest lecture at the university. I used him like he used me. He was a talented motherfucker but those books were as limited and brutal as he was and it was Marianne’s blood in those pages.
AMANDA
Everything I’ve gotten in my life has been acquired through persistence, hard work, and determination. My relationship with Dennis was no different. I am the kind of person who could have been an astronaut if I’d wanted to.
The motel I was staying in was near Times Square. It housed divorced dads and prostitutes—the kind of people who paid by the week. I got a doctor’s note from a disreputable osteopath that said I was suffering from distress and complications related to my lost pregnancy and this allowed me to go on leave from the university without losing my stipend.
I did not mope around. I busied myself by setting up interviews and meetings with Dennis’s friends, ostensibly for my dissertation. I developed a relationship with his sister, Rose. She seemed like she’d been waiting for a long time for someone to ask her opinions about the various events in his life.
I wanted to know everything, but most of all, I wanted to know what he looked for in a woman. I was sure that I could embody all those qualities. I knew already that he found me physically attractive, so that wouldn’t be a problem. We hadn’t slept together because of my surgery but we had been intimate.
After long days of interviewing people and visiting Dennis’s childhood haunts I would often be exhausted but unable to sleep. I wasn’t used to the noise of the city—the motel in particular had an active nightlife because of the prostitutes—and because I was so focused, wound so tight during the day, at night I found it difficult to relax. I would ride the subway or pace the motel hallways to try to lull myself to sleep. Sometimes the prostitutes had pot and they’d share it with me and that was nice because it helped me sleep.
The stipend I was getting from the university was not going very far in New York City and I had to charge the motel room to Barry’s credit card. Eventually Barry said that he wouldn’t keep paying for the motel unless I let him come visit. So he came over a long weekend, and I dutifully went with him to the opera and the Met and we “made love,” as he called it, and afterward I held him as he sobbed. That visit showed me that I was not much different from the other inhabitants of the motel. When he got in the cab to go to the airport, I waved to him from the sidewalk, so happy to finally be free of him. A week later my uncle died and left me a small inheritance, and after that I cut off all contact with Barry. I could’ve moved to a better motel, or even an apartment, but it didn’t seem necessary.
EDITH (1997)
The trees are thick on both sides of the highway. They pop out, illuminated by the headlights, then flatten, slip into darkness. For long stretches we are the only ones on the road.
Charlie is telling me about a woman he met in an abandoned subway tunnel.
“She had a whole apartment under there. A c-c-couch. A bed. A fridge. A bookshelf. She had more furniture than I do, and she was tapped into the p-p-power grid. It was basically an apartment underneath 7th Avenue.”
I turn away from the window and look at him.
“Was she beautiful?” I ask. An underground mermaid. Dirt in her long hair. My mother.
“The h-h-homeless woman?” He looks at me.
Was that a strange thing to ask?
“You just said she wasn’t homeless, that she had an apartment inside the tunnel.”
He nods. Then after a while he says: “No, she wasn’t b-b-beautiful.”
“I was just trying to picture her,” I say under my breath, and flip the radio on to cover my embarrassment. I turn the dial through the stations, backwards and forwards, but I don’t find anything. I leave it on static and turn it down until it’s very quiet, then lean back in the seat.
He smiles. “You like static?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know… It reminds me of being a little kid.” I look at his profile. “My mom would put Mae and me in front of the broken TV set.”
“White n-n-noise is very soothing. Sounds like the inside of a womb.”
“No.”
“N-n-n-no?”
“No. I mean, maybe it’s soothing, but that’s not why she did it.”
“Why then?” He yawns with his mouth closed. His nostrils flare.
“She’d make us watch the snow on the screen and tell her what we saw.”
“Like a g-game?”
“Yes.” It was. Mae would say it wasn’t. I guess there were times when it hadn’t felt entirely playful. I haven’t told Charlie yet about the mental hospital. I’d just said “hospital.” If he knew would he still call it a game?
“So, what kind of things d-did you see?”
“I didn’t see anything. I saw snow. But I made things up, described scenes from shows I’d seen at other people’s houses.” I could tell Mom wanted something and I was trying to give it to her. Trying and failing. “My sister would see things, though.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Visions. Strange stuff.”
“How do you know she wasn’t m-m-m-making them up too?”
“I don’t. But she would go into a trance. You could pinch her and she wouldn’t even notice. Also, the kind of stuff she saw wasn’t anything exciting. A snake slithering up a tree. A boy rowing a boat. Like if she were to make them up wouldn’t they be more dramatic? A man with a knife! That kind of thing. Why make up a boy in a boat?”
“She would stare at the TV set and s-s-s-see those things?”
“Yeah. Does that sound crazy?” I’m not sure what I want him to say. Yes, but if he were to say “yes,” I wouldn’t like it. She’d certainly been acting crazy in New York, but not like externally, not in a way I could explain to anybody else. It was the kind of thing where if I tried I’d be the one who sounded crazy.
He shrugs. “It sounds c-creative. My parents never invented games. If our TV broke they would fix it. They wouldn’t see it as an opportunity to nurture my c-c-creativity. They had no sense of h-humor. They weren’t unhappy, just very practical.”
I guess that’s what she’d been doing, nurturing our creativity. I yawn. The clock on the dashboard says 3:52 a.m. It’s been a very long day.
“It’s like those M-Magic Eye books,” he continues.
“What?” I ball up a jacket and use it as a pillow.
“You know. Those p-p-p-picture books that look like abstract art, but if you stare at them and unfocus your eyes, or actually more like f-f-f-focus on some point in the distance, a 3-D picture emerges. A l-l-lion’s head, or a house, or w-w-whatever. You’ve never seen a Magic Eye book?”
I close my eyes. “No, I’ve never heard of them.”
“Yeah, I l-l-like that,” he says after a while, out loud but to himself.
I’m drifting off. My body is heavier but my brain is lighter.
“That s-seems like something your mom would do,” I hear him say through the haze of sleep.
I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen, water is overflowing from the sink. How would Charlie know what my mom would or would not do? I’m asleep. The whistle of the teakettle wakes me up. It’s dark out. I am alone. A train is going by outside the truck. We are parked on the edge of an empty field. Charlie is not in the driver’s side. He abandoned me here. The train is very close, maybe he jumped on one of the cars. Hadn’t that been one of the stories he told me? He rode the rails out to Ohio after his mom died. I roll down my window and squint through the darkness hanging over the field. The air feels very still and wet. I turn and look back and there he is: stretched out in the bed of the truck, asleep.
MAE
I’d hoped t
hat Edie’s departure would bring Dad and me closer, but it didn’t. Not at first. He was distant and his mind was often elsewhere.
It was hard not to take it personally, but there were probably other things at play that had little to do with me or Edie. He was under a lot of pressure to produce his next book. I followed him to a meeting with his editor at an Upper East Side restaurant and when he caught me, he let me tag along, maybe because he hoped I would serve as a distraction. The editor was an older gentleman with a gray mustache who questioned me about my hobbies and interests through the drinks and appetizers, but once the entrees were brought out, he shifted into business mode and told Dad in no uncertain terms that if they had to push back the delivery date on the manuscript one more time, the deal would be null and void and Dad would have to return the advance.
Dad was silent on the walk back from the restaurant. It was unseasonably warm so we cut through Central Park, which was crowded with people rollerblading and walking their dogs. I couldn’t stand seeing him upset. I begged him to return the advance if that’s what he wanted. I told him that I’d be happy living in Central Park under a rock as long as it was with him. Who was that Mothball to tell us what to do? We didn’t need that stupid Old Mustache’s money. Dad smiled wanly and rumpled my hair and bought us both fudgsicles from a cart. The truth was that we did need the Mothball’s money because, among other things, it was paying for Mom’s hospital bills. I hadn’t realized until then that Dad had been supporting us financially in Louisiana. Mom had never mentioned it and I had never given much thought to where our money came from.
Soon after that meeting, Dad began writing. He wrote all day, and often into the night. The typewriter he used was very loud. At night I’d lie in bed, listening to him pound on it. I’d try to decipher what he was typing by the sounds.
He never left pages in the typewriter. In the mornings when he was still sleeping, I’d slip into his room and check. Sometimes I’d lie down next to him and stare at his face. If I unfocused my eyes a certain way and the light was dim enough I could see the man from the mugshot. There were traces of this buried face around the corners of the mouth, the cheekbones. When I’d get tired of that game, I would tickle his nose with the tip of my braid until he woke up, then I’d make us coffee and sit with him at the kitchen table, waiting for him to say something nice to me, to acknowledge and love me.
RlVKA
I was in my back room, looking at a delivery from a new artist, a deaf mute who paints magnificent landscapes of food. The show was about The Bottomless Hunger, something that exists inside each of us. I was lost in thought, watching my assistant unwrap the canvases, and so I was startled to find a strange woman standing next to me.
“You are not allowed in here,” I told her.
“Rivka Procházková,” she’d said. “I was hoping we could talk.”
I froze. Her voice, its intensity—I still remember the feeling it gave me. Ice inside the heart. I thought: here is the moment I’ve been dreading. My daughter has found me. I had only been a teenager when I left her in the Prague orphanage.
For a long time I thought I wanted my daughter to appear so that it would be over and done with. So that any time a woman of a certain age looked at me, I wouldn’t feel faint. Eventually I came to realize that I wanted my daughter to appear for other, more sentimental, reasons. And then finally, I started thinking about it so often that I decided to track her down, and this became a very sad story. But it has nothing to do with the woman in the gallery. That woman was not my daughter. She was writing some kind of book about Dennis. I think she said she was a student or was it a journalist? I was still catching my breath as she explained.
Her questions about Dennis were personal. I don’t know why I answered her so obediently. I must have felt like I owed her something, carried over from the misunderstanding. She asked how Dennis and I had met, and I told her we had shared a table at an awards dinner. She asked if I had pursued him, and I said that I had. She asked how he had been as a lover, and I said he’d been good, very good. I’d had many lovers, but he’d been particularly memorable.
“Why is that?” she asked.
I told her that most people think being a good lover means relief, however temporary, from The Bottomless Hunger, but Dennis understood that it was quite the opposite, that we had to become the Hunger. She didn’t like this answer. It was too abstract. She wanted to know what his sexual preferences were. I told her she’d have to ask him. Did I crawl to him on my knees? She wanted to know. Did he piss on my face? Her persistence took me aback. I told her that I had nothing else to say. My assistant escorted her out, then locked the door and led me into the back room where he fucked me on the floor among the newly arrived canvases. He is a man who enjoys hearing me talk about my relations with other men.
MAE
I’d be bored out of my mind, listening to Dad type and crumple pages all day and night. I’d play with the cat, choreograph a dance to the rhythm of the typewriter, open up a book and start reading from the middle. None of these distractions could really hold my attention because I was so completely focused on him—I couldn’t concentrate on anything else.
The highlights of my day would be the mealtimes, when he’d come out of his room. For lunch he’d take me to either the Thai restaurant around the corner or the Greek Gyro place across the street. Often, though, he’d be lost in a haze, and it hurt my feelings that he preferred the alternate reality of his book to spending time with me. He had not acted this way when Edie was around.
It was at the Thai restaurant, after an entire meal had gone by without him saying a word, that I finally couldn’t contain myself any longer. “You love her more than me,” I said as he stared off into space, our empty plates between us.
“Who?” he’d asked, blinking several times, momentarily brought back to me.
I had meant Edie but I could see then that he was thinking about someone else.
I was upset. I pouted and gave him the silent treatment all afternoon but I don’t think he even noticed. When he’d pass me in the hallway on his way to the bathroom or to the kitchen, he’d look at me without really seeing me. Maybe this is how Mom had felt when she’d been with him. I understood how it could drive a person mad. I’d do stupid things to get his attention. I’d cut myself on purpose while slicing vegetables for our salad. He’d bandaged me up, but so what? The tug of whatever was in his mind was much stronger than the scenes I was making. It’s like he was in an underwater cave, and I was splashing in the bathtub. If I wanted to be with him, I would also have to descend into that cave. And eventually that is what I did.
EDITH (1997)
I wake up and we’re driving through the mountains. They’re beautiful. God, I feel good. I feel like yesterday was a cocoon and today I’ve emerged from it as my true self. I must have been asleep for a long time, because the light coming in through the windshield is yellow. Afternoon light. The best kind, according to Mom. Mom, I will be seeing you in a matter of hours.
I watch Charlie drive, his mouth hanging slightly open, hair falling over his forehead, eyelashes glowing in the sunlight like little halos. He looks so normal when he’s not stuttering, so handsome. I think about the way his lips and chin tremble when he talks. Mae’s right, it’s repulsive, but it’s also kind of fascinating. I picture his trembling mouth on top of mine. His tongue seizing up against my tongue.
“Good m-morning,” he says. He’s noticed me watching him.
I yawn and stretch. Yawn again. He’s squinting at the road, so I reach over and lower the sun visor on the driver’s side, and he looks at me like it’s the kindest thing anybody has ever done for him. I take a sip of lukewarm coffee from his paper cup. The clock on the dashboard reads 5:47 p.m.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“West Virginia. Are you h-h-hungry?”
The billboards along the side of the highway interrupt the view of the mountains. They are counting down to a diner that serves breakfast all day. T
he eggs glisten, the sausage glistens, the pancakes look like you could take a nap in them face down. We decide to go there. I feel giddy. Giddyup.
In the parking lot, the air is warm. It smells so nice. I grab Charlie by the sleeve of his plaid flannel.
“Do you feel that?” I ask him, lifting my face up to the sky, into the wind.
“W-w-what?” We left spring and entered summer.
“The air. It’s already Southern.”
He laughs. “You s-s-smell that you’re closer to home. Like that dog who always f-f-f-finds its way back.”
“Are you calling me a dog?” I ask, shaking him by the sleeve, laughing. “Are you calling me a fucking dog?”
Our laughter follows us into the diner, invades the hum of the fluorescent lights and the scraping silverware. I ask for the scenic booth facing the mountain, and let go of his sleeve only when we sit down.
“It smells like a swimming pool,” I say.
“They j-just mopped the floor.” Charlie points to a bucket and mop, left out and leaning, in the corner of the room.
The fat waitress brings us water. The skinny one argues with someone in the kitchen through the little window.
“What are you getting?” I ask, unsticking the laminated pages of the menu. There are photos of all the dishes.
Charlie points to a picture of a Jell-O salad and I laugh at this familiar game—find the grossest thing on the menu. “The l-l-l-local delicacy,” he reads.
I flip through to the entrees and point to a picture of a gray slab of meat on a bed of spaghetti. The washed-out colors of the print job make it look particularly gruesome. “I’m gonna go with the crime scene photo,” I say.
The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish Page 11
