The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Loretta Elmore was showing the room to a prospective tenant. Kenny had spent much of the holidays helping to clean the room after Ogden’s belongings had been removed. (Ogden had left a will and had, despite his antipathy for his department, left all of his books and papers to the university’s Hillman Library). Now Loretta was showing it to an Oriental assistant professor of physics, Dr. Chou Wen-Tseng, who was tall, handsome, and wore a constant smile of affability and contentment: a striking contrast to the previous tenant. Kenny later told you that his mother had been very eager to “land” Dr. Chou, a real good old joe, but that, unfortunately, the man had a Pekingese toy bitch from whom he was inseparable, and the Elmores had a strict no-pets policy (which would keep you from fulfilling one of your three wishes, to have a cat).

  The next prospective tenant was a tautly muscled figure of swarthy cast, flat nose, and huge lips, named Roosevelt Smith, who had learned of the vacancy through his friend and former teacher, Edith Koeppe, now back from her sister’s; Dr. Koeppe was as eager to have Smith here as he was to live here, on the same floor with his friend and former teacher…albeit with you separating them. But despite Dr. Koeppe making herself increasingly visible and vocal for a change, in order to lobby for her protégé (“He can drink me under the table,” she declared in one of her rare attempts at humor, thinking it a qualification for the tenancy), the Elmores decided that Smith, because his dissertation (in criminology) was not completed and he was therefore, strictly speaking, despite teaching four sections of Intro Soc, still a graduate student, was not eligible to join the faculty on the mansion’s second floor. He would be welcome to have one of the third-floor apartments, but there were no vacancies this coming term, and none anticipated. Rest assured the Elmores had no prejudice against blacks.

  Two days before the winter term was scheduled to start, on the day that you would have celebrated, or that I would have preferred celebrating, in my young-manhood, as Christmas, you returned to the mansion from an hour of sitting in your office in the Biological Sciences Building, just sitting there, getting the feel of it and trying to rehearse your opening remarks to your students, and found this message from Loretta: E.V., There’s a man coming to look at the apt. this P.M., but I’m downtown on some business, and just in case I don’t get back, and if Big Kenny is not back from Hillman or Little Kenny is not home from Schenley, could you show the apt. to him? Here’s the key.

  Thus it was that Loretta, or Anangka, or, who knows, maybe even I, arranged for you to be the one to welcome into the mansion, and into your life, the dzhentlmyen who, in this tale, was, and was not at all, fated to become your agent, your deus ex machina, your “helper” (as your Vladimir Propp calls them): your conductor to your ultimate destination.

  How about if I call him Professor Agathon N.O. Dirndl? Would you buy that? Nor would I, but here is certainly a situation where the real name will not do. I’ve played around—I did this before, as noted below—with such ludicrous rearrangements of the real name as your fellow Svanetians might carry: Thornan Dlogdani, Handon Ingaldort, or Dorn Glonthadani. But he wasn’t Svan, though he looked it. Nor was he Norton Idhagland or Thogdon Inlandor. I like best of all Anthoni Gradlond, but that’s a real name and we don’t want to get ourselves into trouble.

  Twenty years ago I published (posthumously, of course) a novella called A Dream of a Small but Unlost Town, wherein this same person served some critical functions akin to the demanding but entertaining job I now had laid out for him. That was ostensibly a work of fiction, and, according to the accepted tradition, I did my best to conceal his actual name, calling him, finally and consistently, by a mere initial. I’m tempted to do the same here. It’s convenient and lends itself to collusion and allusion as well as delusion, to the sort of playing around that is so dear to you. But I can’t reveal (“reveil” is the meaning of that word: to replace one veil with another) the actual initial used therein, which was west of his real initial. So, to make a long veil short, I’ll just shut my eyes and pick the initial to the east of his real one. I.

  Let it stand, as it will, for Irresponsible, for Incognito, for Inept, for Indiscretion, for Inebriated, or for Idhagland, Inlandor, Ingledew, Ingraham. Just never, please, dear Kat, let it stand for I, meaning me, your phantom lover. You’ll have to endeavor to keep us apart.

  Chapter twelve

  Waiting in dread that the man might show up before Loretta or one of the other two Elmores returned, you began to convince yourself that this would indeed be the expected Bolshakov at last, although probably he’d known where you were all along and was just waiting for the right moment to move in next door to you, to inhabit (appropriately) a dead man’s room and to haunt your days and nights from that proximity, to taunt your “pretense” of being sane, to flaunt his warped sense of “reality,” to daunt your efforts to know what is true, to want your body finally and fully. You had never yet told Kenny about Bolshakov, though you had wanted to; you hadn’t been sufficiently confident that your English was adequate to explain to Kenny just who Bolshakov was, not confident that Kenny was old enough to comprehend just what Bolshakov had done to you. But you realized now that part of your motive for desiring so urgently to tell Kenny was to inform him that you intended to kill Bolshakov if you ever saw him again, and precisely why, and to ask Kenny if he knew where he could “snitch” a gun.

  Waiting, you told yourself it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that cunning Bolshakov might have found you. All the time you’d known the man, he had boasted of his mobility, calling himself “the best-traveled psychiatrist in the Soviet Union.” He was free to come and go as he pleased, and several times each year he attended conferences in England, Italy, Germany, even the United States.

  You could not wait in your apartment listening for the downstairs doorbell to ring. You paced the mansion’s foyer, pausing to look out the front door’s sidelights at the driveway. The mansion’s driveway, now covered with snow, cut in abruptly from the busy avenue, climbed slowly in front of the mansion, made a loop around the building, and gained the spacious parking lot behind the mansion, where at least half of the building’s tenants kept their cars, along with the two belonging to the Elmores, in spaces that Kenny had to keep shoveled free of the snow. You expected to find Bolshakov arriving by rented car.

  Thus, because a Hertz or Avis vehicle is usually clean and shiny and new, the vehicle coming up the driveway fooled you. It was a truck, or some kind of trucklike vehicle, with a white hard-plastic top or cover over a body of rust-cankered metallic blue. It was, in fact, although you had no familiarity with American vehicles, a seven-year-old Chevrolet Blazer, a four-wheel-drive car good for back roads or bezdorozhye, roadless areas, and snow and middle mountains. You watched it pass the front entrance; it seemed to be loaded down with stuff: boxes, clothing on hangers, rolled-up things. It had an out-of-state license, from one of the New England states, with what we in this country call “vanity” plates: personalized words or messages or names, this one six capital block letters: BODARK. It did not look at all like the kind of vehicle Bolshakov might have obtained, and thus you were taken aback when it stopped and he got out of it.

  Yes, he was wearing a trench coat! You wanted to run out the mansion’s rear exit and keep running. But no, this trench coat had a fur collar, and Bolshakov had never worn one of those. Walking up the front steps, the man appeared also to be much taller than Bolshakov, and he was not wearing a beard as disguise, simply a mustache that might have been his own. He rang the doorbell. You continued studying him, at close range, through the door’s side window. He saw your face behind the glass. He watched you studying him. He studied your study. He attempted a smile, failing as miserably as Bolshakov would have failed.

  You took a deep breath and opened the door. His mustache was real: the center of it was well seasoned with nicotine, and it was grizzled like his hair, which was too grizzled to reveal its original shade of berry brown. He wore glasses, one lens thicker than the other. Protruding from hi
s ear appeared to be an immature mushroom, perhaps Amanita phalloides. You could not take your eyes off the mushroom.

  “This is a mansion,” he observed in a booming bass voice. “Are you sure you’ve got an apartment for rent?”

  He did not sound at all like Bolshakov! And you decided, because of his great height, his deep voice, and the fur trim on his trench coat which up close seemed to be very—what was Kenny’s word?—very grungy: seedy, grimy, threadbare, manifesting a complete lack of neatness that Bolshakov could never have brought himself to permit, even for disguise), that he was no threat to you. Months would pass before you discovered that although he was not Bolshakov he had in common with your nemesis a total misunderstanding of “reality.”

  “Yes. Yes,” you said. “Do come in.”

  You led him upstairs and unlocked Knox’s—you’d have to stop thinking of it as his—unlocked the vacant apartment. He did not spend a long time looking around.

  “Why all these mirrors?” he wanted to know.

  “The better for see yourself,” you observed, “and proof you exist.”

  “Pardon?” he said. He pointed at the mushroom in his ear. “I’m extremely hard of hearing.”

  “So is Dr. Elmore,” you told him, thinking it a qualification for his liking it here, as a drunkard might like a house with other drunks in it.

  “Are you Mrs. Elmore?”

  “No, I am but living here. That is my room, next door down hall.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t hear a word, I’m afraid.” You started to repeat yourself, louder, but he held up his hand. “No, it’s a matter not of volume but of clarity. You have a luscious mouth, but I can’t read your lips.”

  “I am not Mrs. Elmore,” you tried, and whether or not he got it, you could not tell. You decided you’d better demonstrate the sleeping apparatus, and silently you opened the mirrored doors, pulled out and down the murphybed. “Behold,” you said.

  “Hey!” he said. “How about that!” He lay down on it, to try the length of it, which was too short for him. But if he slept slanticularly, it would do. He got up. “Well, I’ll take it,” he declared.

  That was quick. But how did you explain to a deaf man that since you were not the landlady you didn’t have the authority to rent it to him? The owners did have some standards to be met.

  “Do you have pets?” you asked.

  “What?” he asked. “Bats?”

  “Pets,” you said, and pantomimed the stroking of the ghost of the beautiful cat you could never have.

  “Mats? Do you mean mattress? I’ll need my own mattress, is that it? No, but I could get one.”

  “Dog,” you enunciated carefully. “Cat. Goldfish. Monkey. Parrot. Budgerigar.”

  “Oh, pets!” he said. “No. No, I don’t. Just me.”

  “Do you finish dissertation?”

  He took a bunch of cards out of his shirt pocket, common three-by-five index cards, unlined, blank. He took out his ballpoint pen. You thought for a moment he intended to finish his dissertation on the spot. “I could understand you a lot easier if you’d just jot down a key word or two,” he requested.

  You took a card and the pen and wrote, Dissertation?

  He read it and said, “Many years ago, at Harvard, my dissertation adviser read the first draft and told me I ought to be writing novels instead, so I gave it up.”

  “But you are faculty?” you asked, and wrote down the word Faculty? “Not simply graduate student?” And you wrote down, Graduate student?

  “Oh, I’m a student all right, and graduated,” he said, “and I’ll always be a graduated student. But right now, starting day after tomorrow, for one term only, I’ll be teaching.”

  “What do you teach?” it was not a test question; you were simply curious and wanted to get to know as much as possible about your next-door neighbor. You wrote the question down: What do you teach?

  Maybe he should have written down his answer, because now it was your turn to misunderstand. “Riding,” he said, or you thought he said; his pronunciation was not of the best. If he’d said “Riding,” then that explained his appearance and his grungy coat: He had just come from the stables.

  You had only one more question, which was not a test so much as an effort to see how he would fit into the climate of the mansion. “Do you drink?”

  You started to write it down, but he apparently had understood you. “Why, thank you!” he said. “Don’t mind if I do. Would you happen to have any bourbon and branch?”

  You decided against trying to make the effort to clarify your question. “On the rocks?” you asked, and once again he heard you, and he nodded, and you went next door and got the rest of the bottle of County Fair you’d kept for Knox Ogden, and you made a drink for this man, who was clearly not at all Bolshakov, and another drink of the same beverage, for conviviality’s sake, for yourself.

  Chapter thirteen

  By the time the Elmores came home, the new man had already moved in. Pausing after each trip to swill his drink, he had made a dozen trips out to his Blazer to carry in his stuff. You had offered to help in some way other than merely keeping his drink refilled, and he had let you carry in the lighter stuff, some of his wretched shirts, on hangers, odds and ends from the corners of the back end of the vehicle. He had carried in the heavy things: his big black electric typewriter, his boxes of books, his two suitcases, his grocery bag full of liquor bottles. By the time the Elmores came home, the carrying in was completed, and you had had several drinks together, and, although you had declined his offer of a handshake (because it had not yet been two hours), you had exchanged some basic information, your names and your places of origin; where you’d grown up. On a card, you had written your name for him in three languages. First in English:

  EKATERINA VLADIMIROVNA DADESHKELIANI

  and beneath that, in Russian:

  Екатерина Владимировна Дадешкелиани

  and beneath that, in Georgian:

  He had wanted to know how you would write it in Svanetian, and you had had to explain that Svanetian has no written language, no alphabet, that it is, like the American Indians’ languages, entirely a spoken language…which did not mean, as Bolshakov had insisted, that you had only “imagined” it. It existed, as Svanetia did; a mountainous country, a mountainous language. Right then and there you and I. began to discover some things you had in common. On one of the trips down to the parking lot, he had explained his vanity plate: BODARK referred to that area of mountains in middle America from which he had originated. Later, over drinks, you wrote on one of his cards, What do you miss most about the Bodark Mountains? and he got glassy eyed—or maybe it was just from all the drinks he’d had or all the driving he’d done—and he answered that what he missed most was the smell of tomato plants, the particular acrid tang of their leaves. And you had written on a card for him: That is exactly one thing I am missing most about Svanetia. And he said, “You must tell me all about Svanetia.” And you wrote: You can be sure I shall.

  When the Elmores came home and you went to tell Loretta about him, she said, “What? Already? How does he spell that name? E-I-G-H or A-Y-E or E-Y-E or A-I or what?”

  “Just I., I think,” you said.

  “What department is he in?”

  “Equestrian Department,” you said. “He is riding master.”

  “PA!” Loretta yelled into her husband’s ear, “HAVE WE GOT ANY HORSE PEOPLE AT THE SCHOOL?” But she had more trouble getting across to him than you had had with I., and without the advantage of note cards to write upon. You realized one thing you liked about I.: The necessity of writing things down was good for you; you could communicate better in written words than spoken ones.

  “No pets,” you assured Loretta. “Also, he drinks like fish.”

  “Well, I guess I’d better run up and say hello,” she declared, and took her glass of bourbon with her.

  You remembered your own first night at the mansion, how the E
lmores had fed you, or rather Kenny had: the simple cheeseburger with fries. You assumed that I. would be in no condition to prepare his own supper, even if he had groceries. He had told you he’d been driving all day in the snow, sometimes in blizzards. You assumed he’d probably want to go out for supper to Burger Chef or some such; none of his clothes were good enough for a nice restaurant. It occurred to you to offer him something that Kenny had not wanted, or had not shown much interest in: a real Svanetian supper of chikhirtma soup, chicken tabaka, and eggplant salad, with hot khatchapuri bread. You got busy in your kitchenette. You hoped that I. would not think you were making a play for him, trying to lure him, trying to find your way to his heart through his stomach. You hoped he would understand you were only being neighborly and considerate of his first weary night here and that you did not intend to do it again. And you hoped that the coziness of having supper together would not make him want to use a familiar name for you prematurely.

  But his first question upon sitting down at your table, as you began to serve the chikhirtma, was, “What can I call you?”

  You wrote down on a card for him the information that in Georgia, as well as in Russia, unless you know somebody very, very well, or unless somebody is clearly your inferior (and how are you to know?) you could not use a nickname; you should use both the full first name and the patronymic. But Loretta, you told him, had taken to using just the initials of your first two names, which she had converted into the nickname Evie.