“Come on, Alexandra,” my mom said, yanking me in the opposite direction.
The whole ride back I mouthed, “They’re gonna beat your butts,” to myself, reverently. “Time will SEE!” It didn’t even make sense. It was incredible.
Bertram took full advantage of this power. Some nights, you could get a word in edgewise only if he decided to visit the restroom. I was mesmerized.
He sat there with his carnation in his buttonhole, one hand on his cane, holding his audience spellbound. Admittedly, the audience consisted of maybe five people, two of whom had been trying and failing to interrupt his flow all evening, and one of whom was my mother, who thought Bertram was full of it, but one of them was me, and I was riveted. I wanted to do that someday.
His specialty was twofold: 1) sweeping and slightly controversial statements about people, supported by one or two vivid but apocryphal anecdotes, and 2) insisting that current or historical events that people had heard of were better explained by other historical events that no one but Bertram had heard of. “The thing about the financial crisis,” he would say, “is that really it resembles parfaitement what happened to a man named Herr von Bulow in 1654 in Holland.” (I’m making this up. He generally wasn’t, although we didn’t quite have Google then, so you tended to take his word for it.)
• • •
Growing up, every year, I clamored to go to his birthday party. If there was anything stranger than Bertram himself, it was the people who invariably showed up at his birthday parties.
The first year, the hostess was a lady by the name of Elaine who kept going around the party reintroducing herself to everyone under weird aliases. “Hello, I’m Elaine!” she would say. A few minutes would pass, and she would come back around the circle. “Clara!” she’d yell. “It’s a pleasure.”
Her entire home was covered in blown-up pictures of Bertram at various stages of life. Like the pictures, he had gradually increased in size as time went on. He was holding court in the corner of the party talking about eighteenth-century sailing mishaps, paying no attention to Elaine except at one point in the evening when she wandered over to him and introduced herself as Alice.
“Don’t like your hair!” he snapped. “Too yellow!”
She devoted the rest of the night to following us around the house trying to force books on us and then taking them back. My father and I had finally, reluctantly, accepted a book of drawings, only to find her chasing us down the street screaming, “I CAN’T BEAR TO PART WITH IT!”
Strange as these parties were, they were nothing compared to Thanksgiving, one year.
In attendance were Bertram, my parents, myself, my father’s college roommate, his daughter Katie—who cared a lot about animal rights—and my mother’s friend, who had done some work for the Humane Society.
The evening didn’t start too badly. Bertram was in fine form. “The killer wabbit who pursued Jimmy Carter has indeed been, ah, historically substantiated,” he was saying. “But never mind All the King’s Men. World Enough and Time is truly the greatest of the books of Robert Penn Warren.”
We were all listening dutifully. Bertram Wittington was a raconteur, and he was going to racont whether you wanted him to or not.
But as we sat down to dinner, the plot thickened.
Bertram had to pause for air from telling us about Bavarian vicomtesses. So the lady who worked at the Humane Society decided to mention her work to Katie.
“Oh,” Katie said, stiffening perceptibly. “The Humane Society. How do you feel about killing millions of innocent puppies and kitties every day?”
This was not quiiiite accurate, and I was going to say so, when Bertram jumped in.
“Well, that’s nothing compared to what the Bavarian gentry used to do!” he responded. “They used to put eight thousand head of cattle in an enclosure and fire on them with a cannon! Five hundred dead was considered a good day’s sport!”
“I don’t think that’s anyone’s idea of sport,” said Katie.
“Well, it certainly wasn’t the Spanish gentry’s!” Bertram said. “They used to hunt gypsy women! With their dogs!”
Bertram paused and became reflective. “But, you know, it wasn’t any fun. The gypsy women didn’t put up much of a fight, just fell over and died. So do you know what they did?”
Silence. Utter, complete, brittle silence. The only one who didn’t notice that everyone was frozen in mortification was Bertram.
I knew that someone had to say something. “What?” I asked.
“They tied their babies to them!”
“I have to leave,” Katie said.
“But that was nothing compared to the Roman emperors,” Bertram confided to me. “They used to feed their eels on used slaves.”
“Ah,” I said.
The following year, Bertram was the only one of those guests to return.
• • •
When I was younger, mistaking Bertram for a Figure of Some Literary Eminence, my father told me to give him everything I wrote. When I wrote what I thought was my first novel, I printed it out and placed it reverently in his hands. He returned half of it several months later, covered in soup and unintelligible scribbles.
After graduating from college, I gave him my undergraduate thesis, a verse translation of Aristophanes’ Frogs. For whatever reason, I could not mail him the copy, nor did he have an e-mail address. Instead, he instructed me to drop it off at a Thai restaurant.
“Bangkok Bistro,” he said. “They know me there.”
I showed up the next morning. “I have a package to leave here,” I began, nervously. The man minding the desk looked at me. “For Mr. Bertram?” I said.
“Oh, Mr. Bertram!” the man said, looking reassured. “Sure, sure.”
For months thereafter he routinely telephoned my office and said cryptic things like “The Serpent Messenger, perhaps?”
As a kid, I thought of Bertram as a figure like Santa Claus, if Santa were real and showed up at the house twice a year to drop off used books. My father had mentioned I was a Civil War buff, so every few months Bertram would heave his enormous bulk up our front steps, looking like Moby-Dick in a dinner jacket, ring the doorbell, and hand over a large brown paper sack filled to the brim with relevant books, some a little damp.
“He reads everything. That’s how he comes to know so much,” my father said.
And maybe he did. Every subject I managed to learn about, it seemed he already knew. Whenever I managed to dominate even a small segment of the conversation at dinner, I felt elated. Bertram’s conversation veered and leaped so wildly that it was hard to stay on the whole time. If you managed to contribute something to the discussion of the Schleswig-Holstein question, you were left empty-handed when Bertram moved on to the enema that had once been administered to Louis XIV (Bertram had it on good authority). And if you were still on the bucking horse of his conversation even after that, well, he had naughty stories about the recordings that had been made of Martin Luther King Jr. talking about Jackie Kennedy’s lips. He generally ladled these opinions out over dessert, as I sat silently, rapt, hoping not to be dismissed from the table to my room upstairs.
“Tell about the killer rabbit,” I insisted. “And Jimmy Carter. Tell about Rasputin. Tell about the eels.”
His decline and the rise of the Internet coincided nicely. There was not room for both of them.
• • •
In the past decade or so, Bertram and I haven’t seen each other much. But it’s been enough to know that I was right.
Most people seem like characters only from a distance. You get to know them and the mist evaporates and you’re left with a person just like all the other people you know. But not Bertram.
He really was larger than life.
He even had a show on the History Channel, for a brief time, telling his famous stories from the depths o
f an enormous chair.
Not that he wasn’t also a person. He was. He had numerous friends. I was proud to be on the roster. I went to another party in his honor—a luncheon, a few years ago—and there was a whole long table full of people who wanted to thank him. He’d edited their books or had rescued them from tight spots with his armada of facts or had gotten them through difficulties of one sort or another. The most improbable people always turned up at these parties. (No sign of Elaine this time, but there was a woman (he’d either flooded or unclogged her sink; I can’t remember which) who insistently pressed a CD of her attempt at traditional Indian drumming into my hands. Her instructor, she told me, believed she was the reincarnation of a famous fifteenth-century drum master. If so, she’d lost a little in translation.)
So many things from childhood seem bigger than they are. There is a kind of magic that clings to things when you don’t know their backstory. That armchair has always been there. That is the Big Serving Spoon. This is What We Do on Sundays. Things take the definite article. This isn’t just a chair. This is the chair. This is the grandmother. This is the house.
Then as you get older you realize that there is no particular magic to any of these items. There was nothing special about this chair. It came from a catalogue. It didn’t matter that you had pot roast on Sunday. Those rituals held no special potency. There are no characters, just more people. You see the strings behind the puppets. The movies that once terrified you leave you bemused, at best.
But Bertram was different. If the lines of people waiting to thank him and hanging on his words at long tables attested to anything it was that people had noticed he was something out of the ordinary. He didn’t shrink with time, not really.
Yes, he grew older and quieter. He switched to orange juice. He had health problems. Time eats people, always.
But he kept telling stories. Even diminished, he was formidable.
He knew the best way of getting away with being yourself. You could be as odd as you liked, as long as you had something to offer—in his case, a whole arsenal of stories, anecdotes, odds and ends of fact. Once he started to tell a story, nothing could touch him. Not awkwardness, not the silence around the table, not even the thing that might or might not be crawling out of his collar. With him the silence wasn’t awkward, just a vacant space to pour a story in. He was a snake charmer of conversations. It was, I realized, possible to live like this.
Awkward? Awkward wasn’t in his vocabulary. Sthenolagnia was. Awkward wasn’t. He was above all that, floating over the conversation in his luminous cloud, leaving everyone else to scramble below. He just was. And maybe, someday, if I learned enough stories, I could make my way up there too.
And one of the first stories that I was able to tell was about him.
One day a girl on my volleyball team announced that she had seen a strange man on the bus.
“Did he have a carnation in his buttonhole?” I asked.
She nodded. “You know him?”
“I know him,” I said. “He comes to Thanksgiving every year.” I smiled, warming to my theme. “He’s a real character.”
It’s a Trap!
As a general rule, I advise against trying to pick up men at Star Wars conventions.
I know it sounds like a great idea.
Conventional wisdom states that a single woman going to a Star Wars convention is like an egg cell saying, “Screw it!” and hopping on a plane to go hang out wherever all the sperm cells happen to be. The odds in your favor would seem to be something like 3720 to 1.
But conventional wisdom doesn’t know what it’s talking about.
Trust me.
• • •
Most people have one thing they’re deeply, deeply weird about. The moment you find your thing, your world shifts. Something in it just strikes a chord in you. You walk through your whole life like a sleeper agent waiting for someone to whisper the code phrase that activates you, and then you awaken and everything changes: your habits, your priorities, whether or not you have Obi-Wan Kenobi on your toothbrush.
Star Wars was mine. My dad took me to see A New Hope in theaters in 1997 when the reissue came out, and from that point, the course of my life was set. I put away former pastimes (good-bye, Wizard of Oz. It was a nice run) and set out to dedicate my life to the service of this new god. It got so bad that when we bought a new VCR my parents made me sign a contract promising not to watch the trilogy more than thirteen times a year.
Even as it was, I watched the whole trilogy well over two hundred times, until the VHS tape creaked and groaned. Special Edition, 1997, gold box set. I knew certain things about it were lies (Han shot first) but it was the version whose rhythm crept into my bones. I always dutifully and unblinkingly watched all three movies in sequence with all the lights turned out everywhere else in the house, frantically shushing my parents if they tried to interrupt the trance. The outside world did not exist. I was on Tatooine. I was on Dagobah. I was in an X-Wing navigating straight down this trench toward a target shaft just two meters wide. And not once in all this time did I ever skip through the Director’s Intro to the Special Edition, so not only do I have the whole trilogy memorized, but I also know every comment Ben Burtt makes about the difficulties of optically compositing snowspeeder cockpits on a white surface so the black line isn’t visible. (“It’s a constant trade-off. How transparent can we make the cockpit? At what point is the black line more objectionable than the transparency?”)
As I said, everyone has something he or she is deeply weird about. This is mine. Maybe you’re lucky and yours is football, in which case the whole world is set up to cater to your preferences, or Marvel superheroes, in which case you had a few rough years early in life but now every movie that comes out for the next hundred years is already planned to suit your dearest wishes.
You can tell how mainstream the thing you love is by whether the Big Event You Attend in order to celebrate it is called a “convention” or not. You can tell, too, by how relieved you are when you finally get to turn yourself inside out and wear your deepest passion on your sleeve.
• • •
I used to think I could pass. Even if, on the inside, I was a large, sluglike Hutt, I could slip into the guise of a passable-looking young lady before anyone spotted me. No one could tell, just by looking at me, that for a while I had contemplated getting a C-3PO tramp stamp. (A friend was going to get an R2-D2. Fortunately we decided against it. Also the tattoo shop shut down. It’s amazing what good decisions you can make when you have no alternatives!)
I floated this hypothesis to someone and she started to laugh. “No,” she said. “I think people know. You have Empire Strikes Back bedsheets. You sleep on those bedsheets under a Darth Maul comforter, underneath a painting of C-3PO in a tweed jacket that you bought off the Internet.”
I shrugged. “Mere circumstantial evidence.”
“Whenever anyone says Star Wars in a restaurant, no matter how far away or how softly they whispered it, you go running over there shouting, “WHAT WHAT TELL ME WHAT THE STAR WARS THING WAS.”
I pshawed. “Please. Everyone does that. My point is, I could pass. Take away the sheets and what remains?”
“What about your watch?”
“Take off the watch.”
“Everything you say and do.”
“Well, other than that.”
• • •
I love Star Wars for so many reasons.
One, because there was never a moment when Star Wars hadn’t sold out. There are some things you can get a little indignant about when they go commercial—like if there were a big neon madeleine floating in the air just outside the Proust House and an amusement park ride called Trip Down Memory Lane—TASTE! the tea and the madeleine! FEEL! the passion for Albertine! EXPERIENCE! the magic all over again—I guess people might get just the slightest bit upset about it. But part of the char
m of Star Wars is that Princess Leia has always been on your shampoo bottle. Luke has always been on your bedsheets. Darth has always graced your toaster. You have always been able to get Galactic Bubble Mint toothpaste with Obi-Wan Kenobi on it, brandishing a lightsaber. As I speak I am staring at one of my most prized possessions, a ceramic serving plate for, I guess, chips or dip, on which C-3PO reclines sensually, one arm up, other arm akimbo. They made these things because we bought them!
• • •
You can, I guess, map my evolution as a human being as my favorite Star Wars character evolved.
First my favorite character was Darth Vader. How could it not be? He was all that I asked for in a man: tall, dark, and breathing.
Then it was Luke. Luke was never cool, but, in a way, that was his charm.
“I’m in it for the money. I expect to be well paid,” Han tells the Princess as they escape the first Death Star.
“You needn’t worry about your reward. If money is all that you love, then that’s what you’ll receive,” Leia retorts. Luke comes in, and she tells him, somewhat pointedly, “Your friend here’s quite a mercenary. I wonder if he really cares about anything—or anybody.”
“I care!” Luke says.
Yeah, Luke’s not cool.
And then I moved on to C-3PO.
I love C-3PO. I love him in part because he’s completely useless and very talkative and in a committed relationship with another robot, but also because the one consistent theme of the entire trilogy is that no one ever tells him anything and that no one cares about his problems.
“Secret mission? What plans? What are you talking about? I’m not getting into there,” he asks in the opening scenes of the original, as R2-D2 tries to get him to escape the Tantive IV, Princess Leia’s starship. “I’m going to regret this.”
His first lines in The Empire Strikes Back consist of telling R2, “Well, don’t try to blame me. I didn’t ask you to turn on the thermal heater. I merely commented that it was freezing in the Princess’ chamber. But it’s supposed to be freezing! How we’re going to dry out all her clothes, I really don’t know! Oh, switch off!”
A Field Guide to Awkward Silences Page 18
