Falling into a steady routine of work on Georgie Boy, leaping out of bed at the first proud crow of the qwich (who I was charmed to learn was called rooster), walking a couple of miles in the morning-fragrant, sunrise-fresh woods while waiting to help Diana make the breakfast of coffee, biscuits, bacon, eggs, and that quaint cornderivative called grits, then returning after it was eaten to my (or Dan’s) room, where I’d sit at my (his) little desk and first warm up the brain traces by browsing through one of the three volumes that had constituted Dan’s entire library: a Webster’s unabridged, an anthology of Elizabethan poetry, and a King James version of the Bible—Diana told me that Dan had “read” the dictionary as one would watch a movie, following a dramatic plot, and I sometimes attempted to do that myself, with limited success. Then I would pause, before letting myself be carried off to Moscow or Ishimbay, and reflect upon the security and peacefulness of my mountain hideaway, in such contrast both to Pittsburgh and to the settings of my novel.
One reason I think I was able to depict and characterize V.T. Bolshakov as “the most nefarious villain to appear in fiction since Faulkner’s Popeye,” as the Atlantic’s reviewer called him, was that I felt so safe from him. Much as I gave him credit for mobility, cleverness, subterfuge, and strategy, I did not believe there was any way he could find me in Stick Around. Bolshakov in the Bodarks? Inconceivable. Thus I felt absolutely free to malign him with a loaded brush, to slap the pigments of his delineation onto the canvas with vengeance and honest scorn, as if belatedly completing the insults that had freed me from him. The miserable son of a bitch.
Nights, I lay awake for only moments in Dan’s bed, listening to the serenade of night-courting insects and reptiles, before falling into a deep, snug, safe sleep, during which my unremembered dreams sorted out, classified, rearranged, and coded all the intricacies of the next day’s verbal art, and even my familiar dreams of climbing and descending an endless sequence of stone steps, concrete steps, iron steps, and wooden steps seemed to have a new symbolic significance to the work I was doing.
As I said in my interview for Paris Review, I consider myself not a novelist but an idyllist, even though the one work that first brought me to the world’s attention was not an idyll so much as a buskin, stamped with the thick-soled cothurnus imprints of the Soviet regime. If I’m granted half the chance, I’ll write an idyll about Stick Around, not in competition with Ingraham, whose territory it is, but in tribute to the pastoral life I was allowed there. But the difficulty is, it would have no plot, no story, no conflict, no tension. Nothing happened to me in Stick Around…except that I finished a novel.
One thing I’d explore in my idyll, which I can only mention here, is the lone stint of labor I performed to earn a modicum of wages, as if Anangka had taken over my accounts and knew when I was penniless and would need some money just to buy the essential necessities: writing paper, cigarettes, toiletries, vodka. In early June the hay harvest started and was threatened by rains (as it turned out, the last rains for months) and every available “hand” up and down the valley of the Little Buffalo River was recruited to help, and I abandoned my novel for five days of hard work that left me sunburned, scratched, blistered, sore, and exhausted, but remunerated sufficiently by the farmers who owned the fields to buy my needs for the rest of the summer. In Lisedi (where of course there were no landowners but only managers of the kolkhoz, or collective) I had always been a spectator at the annual haying and knew the difference between chem and neni, the kinds of hay, and men, the second mowing of hay. (There was to be no meri, or merry, in Stick Around because of the awful drought that year.) This was the first time I had actually helped at a haying, and it was sufficient to implant my engrams permanently with the smell of the new-mown hay, the feel of the lashings and stabbings of the stalks and strands, the straining of never-used muscles in my back, and the intensification of pleasure that the hard work gave to a simple pause for a glass of iced tea, or, at the end of the day, a “skinny-dip” in the creek.
Mention of this engrammatizes the picture of some of my coworkers and my first awareness that outside of Stick Around, in the hills and hollers that had once belonged to Anglo-Saxon and Scotch-Irish peasants, and before them to the Osage Indians, there now existed no small number of dropouts from society, people who, ten or fifteen years earlier, had been called flower children or hippies, and now were as outmoded as those labels but still carried flowers, or wore them, along with headbands, Indian-print fabrics, quilted things, and lots of beads. Day and Diana knew most of these people but had had their own brief fling, eleven years before, with the so-called counterculture in some other place, and now were resolved to share nothing in common with them except their devotion to back-to-the-land subsistence agriculture. Ironically, the only people I’d known in Georgia like these latter-day hippies were the bands of brightly dressed Gypsies, who had no interest in the land at all.
When, at the end of the first day’s haying, after sundown, everybody headed down to the creek and eagerly divested themselves of clothing, and the girls too, wearing no brassieres, stepped out of their beaded moccasins as well as their bedspread dresses or embroidered jeans and plunged naked into the cool stream, I was obliged to join them. All of these girls—I should call them women because most of them had passed the age beyond which they had been advised never to trust anyone—had long hair, and I felt more self-conscious about my short hair (although it was long enough now that no one would know it had last been cut by a prison razor) than I did about my nakedness. On the riverbank there was also much lighting up and passing around of “joints,” and if one passed up one’s turn to pinch and pucker the smoldering roach, one was considered uncool, unhip, or at least unsociable. There were a few men, three or four, who made nuisances of themselves to me, attempting to “start something.”
The cultivation of marijuana was indirectly responsible for the one serious disharmony in the idyll of Stick Around: At least once a week, a helicopter would patrol the valley, officers of the law searching for illegal plots where the narcotic weed was grown, and the sight of this airship, not to mention the awful noise of it, ruined the day for me. My hosts grew none of the stuff themselves, nor used it, but for some reason the lawmen in the air seemed to think their property was an ideal location for shady raising, and they swept our airspace redundantly.
The helicopters disturbed the peace of the livestock more than that of the people, who at least understood the intentions of the disturbers. Day and Diana owned a number of goats, several pigs, a milk cow, and countless free-ranging chickens (in the course of my stay I taught Diana my best recipes for preparing chicken in the Svanetian manner), and a few minutes’ surveillance by the helicopter would leave these animals neurotic for several days.
Lara Burns, if she and her animals, including those in A Cat Arena, were exposed to the flight of the raucous whirlybird, would stand and defiantly raise a fist, at the top of which stood her middle finger. If I was with her, I’d join her in this gesture, and I did so on several occasions before she finally explained to me its origin and significance. That recent photograph of me in Time, lifting my hand and finger to make this sign, was inadvertent; the photographer was one of those paparrazzi who had virtually camped out at the Halfmoon in order to shoot me.
“I learned that signal, by the way,” Lara Burns told me, “from Dan Montross.”
IV
From June 8 until September 23 of that year, according to my journal, it did not rain a single drop in Stick Around. This, even more than the craggy heights of its snowcapped peaks, set Svanetia apart from Bodarkadia, because I had never in my life there known a drought; indeed, the annual rainfall in Svanetia is not only dependable and predictable but awesome. The event called by old-timers in Stick Around “a toad-strangling downpour” was a common summer day’s occurrence in Lisedi. That summer, I had not yet read any of Ingraham’s books, and I did not realize that severe droughts recur every dozen years or so. Along about the middle of July, wh
en Ingraham’s tomatoes, which I had transplanted and staked into a corner of Diana’s garden and had been weeding and watering whenever I volunteered this effort for the rest of the vegetables, began to wither and droop, I was told by my hosts to cease using the fresh water that came from the well and begin using, if any water at all, “scrap” water from our baths and clothes washings (we had been required to give up showers and take only tub baths in a few gallons of water). Ingraham’s tomato plants managed to bear a few misshapen fruit not living up to their varietal name, Big Girl, and I abandoned the notion I’d been tinkering with, to find his address in Rolla, Missouri, and mail him a few of the mature “love apples.” We ate them. Diana’s own tomatoes were not plentiful enough for her usual canning and freezing, and then in August the tomato vines languished and wizened beyond hope. For three months we had been eating marvelously, we three cooks (Day was himself no mean chef) vying with each other in succession, and using an abundant supply of homegrown vegetables, fruit, and meat, but from August onward there was a noticeable falling off in the fare. I had just had time to discover that treat, corn on the cob, when the corn gave out, much to the distress of our local distiller-by-the-light-of-the-moon, a young man I shall have to call “Jack Chisholm” because his operation, which I understand is still flourishing in nondrought years, is just as illegal as the cultivation of marijuana. I considered his product at least superior to the County Fair I once kept to serve to Knox Ogden, and it would do in a pinch when my vodka ran out and no one was going to the nearest liquor store, which was many miles away in the next county.
I could write an idyll about Jack Chisholm, who was, for his youth, one of the very last of the real Bodarkadians and lived ‘“way back around up in there” in some remote aerie. But I have taxed my reader’s patience with these notes about Stick Around when it is another town, Arcata Springs, that serves as a far more important setting in my life. Let us head that way, with a backward glance that regrets all that has been omitted from this chapter. I see I have made no mention whatsoever of that grandson of Lara’s, my friend Sharon’s “kid” brother, who is currently attracting much attention because of his campaign for governor. Over the years, I have made three promises to Ingraham: one, to keep my hands off Danny, I’ve already affirmed; another was that I’d leave Vernon as Ingraham’s “property” for some future novel.
But I don’t like giving the impression that I didn’t even know Vernon those months in Stick Around; we played many a game of chess together, and he beat me on occasion. He told me several stories about his ancestor Jacob Ingledew, who foreshadowed him as governor. And it was Vernon whose knowledge of the Osage Indians’ long tenure of that valley not only helped me to identify some of the projectile points I found while searching (both ways) for mushrooms but also prepared me for that one great sally into truthful prose, Dawn of the Osage. I don’t think it will hurt his candidacy for governor if I confess, in this memoir, that of all the grown men I have known I found Vernon Ingledew the most attractive.
His wife, or mistress (does it matter?), Jelena, I did not come to know as well as I would have liked, although, in this world where everybody had an announced “best friend,” she called her best friend my hostess, Diana Stoving, who reciprocated by announcing that Jelena was her best friend. But another woman living in a geodesic dome near Stick Around also claimed Jelena as best friend, although it was not reciprocated at all, and this other woman, whom I shall have to camouflage as “Lillian Sparrow” because a lawsuit is still pending, was one of those full-fledged (with many feathered garments), outworn hippies, whose very talk was still sprinkled with archaic cant—groovy, dig, and outasight—and who had waist-length hair and a hat that made our Cathlin McWalter’s seem a pillbox, and who supposedly held ice cubes to her nipples to make them protrude beneath the gauzy cotton of her ankle-length dress. She happened to have a son, sired in a one-night group grope thirteen years before by one of those rock-stoned smackhead electrical guitarists, a boy who had been afflicted with a name of stunning synthetic cuteness that I regret I must transform here into “Ashram Tarot Atman.” I saw Ash, briefly, from a distance, not more than twice—once when his mother came to visit Diana and brought the boy to play with Danny, who to his credit did not like the kid but felt sorry for him. Watching them from my upstairs window as they attempted some tagging game in the yard, I studied the kid only long enough to determine that he held no attraction whatsoever for me.
Ash is now twenty-three years old and is sitting on death row in the state penitentiary for having shot a convenience-store clerk. Lillian, his mother, has told anyone who will listen (and many tabloids and even respectable newspapers have listened) that on that afternoon while she visited Diana I took her son on a mushroom hunt (but the woods were parched and the only things growing were chiggers, ticks, and copperhead snakes) and instead of uncovering mushrooms I uncovered his penis, which I subjected to such a variety of tactile, lingual, and venereal manipulations that the boy became almost instantly corrupt, spoiled, and delinquent.
That kind of falsehood, which would have confirmed Bolshakov in his convictions that we none of us can tell the truth, was going to be just part of the price I’d have to pay for becoming famous.
18
I
If people are permitted in this world to have a “best friend,” then Sharon Ingledew Brace is mine. As I’ve shown, my girlhood in Svanetia was singularly without playmates of the same sex; in college at Tbilisi there was that roommate I despised, and later, at Leningrad, those other roommates I tolerated but did not like; and the inmate at Ishimbay whom I have called Evgeniya was a wonderful companion who probably helped me preserve my sanity after those terrible episodes of SHIZO, shtrafnoy izolyator, solitary confinement. But Evgeniya was a sister, perhaps, or even a partner, not a “best friend.”
To be your best friend, the other woman must not only observe the golden rule but live it without being aware of it: doing, acting, thinking, and speaking toward you as if you were herself, keeping nothing from you, wanting you to keep nothing from her…and being totally comfortable, natural, and unforced in this ingenuousness.
Sharon was the fifth daughter of John Henry Ingledew and Sonora Dahl, Lara’s only child. Sharon’s father, like so many fathers, had wanted a son desperately and had kept trying, and when Sharon was born he was not only ready to give up trying but also ready to make Sharon’s childhood miserable for her having failed him. She was known as Little Sis, which everyone called her in preference to Sharon. She felt not only estranged from her father but unwelcome to her four older sisters, who also considered her unnecessary or superfluous.
The major difference between my girlhood and Sharon’s was that I had no playmates of the same sex; Sharon was surrounded by them but they would not play with her. Which of us, therefore, was the more deprived?
She understandably had some bad experiences with men, trying to find one who would give her the love her father never gave. At the age of sixteen she eloped with a Stick Around man, Junior Stapleton, twelve years her senior, who was one of those chronic losers so intimidated by the rest of the world that they have to take out their frustrations on their wives, and who regularly slapped, punched, and mauled Sharon. She related to me, with a wry smile, that the only time her father ever showed her any attention was the one occasion when he accosted Junior, after her husband had broken one of her arms and left her jaw needing to be wired, and “beat the living shit” out of him, leaving Junior in the hospital, from which he never returned to Stick Around.
Sardonically, Sharon Ingledew Stapleton kept her married name and monogram, sis, for several years after the marriage had been dissolved and she had left Stick Around and gone to Chicago to see if a big city might have a few good men in it. She worked as a waitress to put herself through the nursing school of Northwestern University, and she took a degree in nursing and worked for a few years in a hospital. She met a great variety of men among the restaurant customers, medical student
s, doctors, and patients, and she went to bed with anyone who asked her, including a few of her patients, which cost her the job in the hospital; she did not reapply at another hospital.
But one of those patients whose bed she entered was a young professor from the University of Chicago, Lawrence Brace, recuperating from a simple operation on one of his knees, which had been damaged in a game of touch football. He was not able to move his leg or the lower part of his body, and he told Sharon after she made love to him that nobody had ever made love to him like that before, in that superior position, and some weeks later, after he had abandoned his crutches and was mobile again, he returned to the hospital to find her and ask her for a date but discovered she had been fired. He spent months searching Chicago for her, and of course Chicago is a big place. Perhaps she had her own Anangka, or he his, because he happened one day to take his stereo turntable to be repaired at a shop where she was working in sales. He invited her to move in with him.
Sharon and Larry lived together almost two years. He was an assistant professor in English at the university, and, like some English professors I have known, he drank too much. He excused his immoderate consumption on the grounds that some of the greatest poets (he was a specialist in modern poetry) had been boozers. But when he drank too much, he did not listen very carefully to anything Sharon had to say, and in time she discovered that she was talking to herself. She cultivated the ability to have conversations, aloud, with herself. She became such a stimulating and witty self-conversationalist that Larry, sober enough on one occasion to eavesdrop, became jealous. He listened long enough, and carefully enough, to determine that she found herself a more entertaining talker as well as listener than he, and he wrote to her a long and sarcastic poem (this was in the days when he had not yet abandoned the creation of poetry for the criticism of it and was publishing a few poems himself) in which he so much as accused her of being in love with herself. It was a difficult poem, and she was never certain she understood its allusions, but she got its message. Writing him a short, angry note in response, she stole his car, intending to drive it home to Stick Around. En route, her Anangka arranged for the car, a decrepit Ford Fairlane, to break down in Arcata Springs, where a day later her Anangka arranged a pileup of two trucks, three cars, and a passenger bus on a treacherous curve of scenic U.S. 62 to overtax the employees of the Arcata Springs hospital, who gave Sharon a temporary job that became more permanent, at least until she found herself once again unable to resist the invitations of male patients to climb into their beds. When I first met her, Sharon had been living in Arcaty (as she and they, and now I, call it) for four years, working at a number of different jobs after being fired from the hospital, most recently as the desk clerk at the Halfmoon Hotel. As often as she could, she “went up home” to Stick Around, ostensibly to visit her grandmother, her brother, and the one sister who still lived there, but actually to talk to herself about her childhood in relation to certain scenes of memory in the village, certain buildings that had special significance for her, or certain trees and turnings of the creek and secret glades. She had long since returned the Ford Fairlane to Larry in Chicago, parted amiably and civilly from him, and obtained for herself a used Chevrolet Camaro for the trips “up home,” although the rugged roads south of Acropolis were terrible for that sporty vehicle.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 21
