She called the Camaro Camilla and personified it, and she talked to it almost as she did to herself. Cam was her best friend until Kat came along. Often, when she unexpectedly pulled into her grandmother’s A Cat Arena, she would find Lara and me sitting together in the breezeway, and she would join us, occasionally in time to hear our most recently remembered ghost story. Once, a Saturday morning in October on one of those hikes of hers to a favorite glade on a hillside, she encountered me searching for mushrooms in the aftermath of the rain that had broken the drought. We exchanged greetings, made comments on the end of the drought, and then Sharon said, “How’s the book coming?” Day and Diana, for the most part, had never betrayed any great curiosity over the novel I was writing, but on a couple of occasions Diana had asked, politely, “How’s the book going?” Now, before answering Sharon, I meditated on the difference between coming and going. (In Russian, idyot can sometimes mean either, or both.) I am sure that Sharon did not intend any connotation different from that of Diana, but I have been struck with the way English uses come for the orgasm as well as for the male by-product of same, and Lara Burns had explained to me how come is what happens to milk in a churn when it turns into butter (Lara makes her own butter come). Pondering Sharon’s question, I saw my months of labor on Georgie Boy as like the hard manual plunging of the churn dasher in cream, about to make it come but not yet turning the cream into butter. So I answered Sharon, “I’m poking the churn stick as fast as I can, but she aint come yet.” I think I may even have captured some of Lara’s intonations. Then I waited to see if Sharon would get it.
Sharon smiled. “Don’t ye know,” she said, doing a good imitation of her grandmother too, “that it aint the hurry that does it?” She made a fist of her hand and began jerking it up and down; it might almost have been wrapped around an imaginary male member. “It aint the hurry but the regularity.”
That was when I decided, for the first time, to ask Sharon’s advice. I had never asked anyone, not even Ingraham, for suggestions on how to create the “realities” of my story. Now I needed suggestions, from a fellow female, on how best to construct the climax of the story, wherein the bogeyman, Bolshakov, is demolished. The basic question I put to Sharon—What would she do if she really wanted to humiliate a man?—intrigued her so much that she could not answer it right then, but promised me she’d think a lot about it and tell me the next time she came to Stick Around. “Better yet,” she said, “why don’t you come to Arcaty and visit? You like the place, don’t you?”
Oh, I liked it! And I had been feeling shut off from the world, all those months in Stick Around. Day and Diana did not own a television set (they claimed the reception was too poor, but Lara’s son-in-law, Sharon’s father, John Henry Ingledew, supposedly was capable of erecting antennae good enough for clear pictures), and the infrequent occasions we made a shopping trip to the county seat, “Jessup,” or to the larger and better markets at “Harriman,” the only real city in that part of the Bodarks, were not sufficient to provide me with a sense of the comforts of civilization such as I had known in Tbilisi, Leningrad, and Pittsburgh. I know it will come as a shock to those readers who have pictured me as a rural, nature-loving ascetic (the Washington Post’s critic recently called me, after my true sex was at last revealed, “Russia’s answer to Annie Dillard”…and of course I am not from Russia) if I reveal that I prefer towns to the countryside, that I am suffocated by a constant exposure to nature, that the woods sometimes (even without their chiggers, ticks, and copperhead snakes) frighten me or at least make me uncomfortable. Given the choice, as Anangka (and the book-buying public) has given me, I’d prefer to dwell neither in a city like Pittsburgh nor in a village like Stick Around but in a town of modest size, of about three or four thousand people, with all of the amenities of restaurants, shops, interesting architecture, a weekly newspaper, a hospital, a drugstore, a movie theater, a courthouse, a bath house, many steep sidewalks for hiking, a colorful history (and a record of it in a historical museum), and of course a first-rate hotel. In short, Arcata Springs. By early November, I had the stunning conclusion to Georgie Boy and a place to live for the winter, both courtesy of my friend Sharon.
II
It does not trouble me to confess that Sharon gets the credit for the ultimate comeuppance to Bolshakov in Georgie Boy. The beauty of it is that her solution for an ideal retaliation against the man for all those years he’d abused me mentally was not very far removed from what had actually happened. But it was far enough removed to provide that little transmutation that turns life into art, “reality” into fiction, or, as Ingraham taught us, penises into neckties, and it keeps Georgie Boy, as the better critics were quick to notice, from being merely a glorified roman à clef.
Sharon had a spacious, sunny, well-furnished apartment in one of those Arcaty houses—a carpenter-Gothic Victorian with multibalustered porches reminiscent of homes in my Georgia—that, like so many Arcaty houses, have their entries on street level but need two or three basements to let their back doors adjust to the slope of the mountain. The spare bedroom Sharon gave me for my own, much larger than my room in Pittsburgh had been, was actually level with the street, although its eastward windows were three stories above the backyard.
My first objective was to find a job. My second was to begin the translation of Georgie Boy from the Georgian in which I’d written it into English. The first objective was hampered by the off-season of the Arcaty tourist trade; that resort’s major volume of traffic occurs in the summer months and the early autumn; in winter, it almost shuts down, except for a spurt of shoppers around Christmastime. I had sent my resume to the state’s major university, in a city only two hours distant, but their mycologist appeared to be entrenched. The community colleges, as well as the three so-called “universities” within commuting distance (assuming I could learn to drive and bought a cheap car), did not teach mycology at all and had no vacancies for botanists. Anangka preserved me from throwing myself upon the charity of Sharon (although Sharon had insisted, “I’ll be glad to tide you over until your book finds a publisher”) by finding me a position as a housekeeper for one of the wealthier widows of the town. It appeared that much of Arcaty’s permanent year-round population consisted of retired people, older people, widows and widowers, and a “Mrs. Clements,” who had another of those charming hill-slope Victorians within easy walking (or climbing) distance of Sharon’s house, hired me to come in five days a week (Wednesdays and Saturdays off) to clean her house and cook for her, and the wage helped me pay half of Sharon’s rent, pay for half of the groceries, and, the next spring, pay for a typist to make a clean copy of the manuscript of Georgie Boy.
On Wednesdays and Saturdays, and most nights until bedtime, I sat at my desk with Daniel Lyam Montross’s old unabridged dictionary (a Webster’s Second International), a “going-away” gift from his daughter, Diana, and the Roget’s Thesaurus I’d bought originally (and annotated) as Cathlin McWalter. There was not, or if there was I couldn’t find one, any such thing as a Georgian-English dictionary, or even an English-Georgian dictionary. But at least Georgian is written, whereas Svanetian is only oral, and while Georgian lacks Russian’s nuances and infinite shadings it is more liquid, more flowing, and more comfortable. So I had composed the “rough draft” of my first novel in that language, and now I had to “recompose” the draft in an English that, although it was going to require much work from a sympathetic, hardworking editor as well as a whole team of copy editors, was readable.
That unabridged dictionary was a magical book, almost as if its words were still haunted by the spirit of Dan Montross, who, I kept remembering, supposedly had been able to “read” it as if it had a plot. Often, using it, I had a strong sense of his being in the room with me, trying his best to help me find the right word. There were even situations in which I would be stumped for finding the English equivalent of some Georgian word, perhaps a word like mdgómaréoba, “situation,” and I would eerily feel that Dan was making m
y fingers turn to the exact page of the dictionary where I would find it. But how could he possibly have known Georgian? Once, after I’d finished a long, hard session of constant thumbing of the dictionary’s pages, Sharon happened to come into my room and, looking around, asked, “Did you have a man in here?”
Beneath my name on the title page I was almost tempted to write, Translated from the Georgian by Daniel Lyam Montross. This intense “collaboration” with Dan on the translation offered me a convenient excuse for declining Sharon’s invitations, frequent at first, to join her for an evening at one of Arcaty’s “night spots” (I loved that term as soon as I was able to determine that it did not mean a blemish on the evening, but I had little liking for the actual places). At least three nights a week, she would go out to the “Frog’s Nest,” the “Mole’s Eye,” or, her favorite place, up on the mountain, that same Halfmoon Pub where I, or Cathlin, had spent some fun hours during the bow convention, and, invariably, she would either be gone until morning, spending the balance of the night in some man’s room or apartment, or she would bring a man home with her. Once she brought two men home with her, “Michael” for herself and “Ted” for me. My only “blind date” was a very handsome, witty, well-spoken gentleman who, had I been at all romantically interested in a twenty-nine-year-old man, would have been a prize. But long after Sharon and Michael had retired to her bedroom, Ted and I were still talking, he genuinely fascinated with Svanetia and Russia and even Pittsburgh, and I pretending great interest in his boyhood and youth in a dull downstate place called Eldorado. Along about five A.M. he looked at his watch and said, “Don’t you think it’s time we got in bed?” He seemed to accept without question, as I showed him to the door, Svanetia’s ageworn tradition that a woman can never “chosh” with a man without having known him for at least two months. Ted sent me things, flowers and books, and called me up on the telephone, and rang the doorbell, and even wrote me a long letter in which he called me the most beautiful and alluring woman he’d ever met even in dreams, but by the time the two months elapsed he had given up trying, or, like so many of Arcaty’s transients, had gone on to some other place.
“Don’t you like men?” Sharon asked me one day. And I realized the excuse of the work was wearing thin, although it was a genuine excuse. I also realized that Sharon and I had become very close, very open, and that we had no secrets from each other…no secrets except that one, which I then decided to reveal to her.
“Not after they’ve started to shave,” I answered her. To Sharon’s everlasting credit, she did not think I was making a joke, nor did she even say, “Really?” or “Come on!” or even ask for a clarification: At what age did men begin to shave? Knowing Sharon as I did, I might have expected her to laugh and say, “I can’t stand whiskers either.” But she didn’t do that. What she said was: “Well, we’ll have to find you one who thinks razors are for making model airplanes.”
Which is precisely what she did. It turned out that Sharon’s “heaviest” date, Michael, had a son, “Jason,” who was constructing from kits, with much glue and many razors, quite an assortment of toy airplanes. Michael had been leaving Jason and his airplanes with an overnight baby-sitter, although Jason had been complaining that he was much too old, at eleven and three-quarters, to require the services of a baby-sitter.
In February, for Jason’s birthday, Sharon suggested to Michael that the three of us bring the boy to the house for a birthday dinner, give him a little party with some presents, and then later the two of them, Sharon and Michael, might go out for the evening at the Halfmoon Pub, leaving Jason, if he needed any babysitting at all, with “Aunt Kat,” who would be glad to keep him entertained with ghost stories or teach him how to play chess, or something.
Jason’s birthday coincided with my last day of work on the translation of Georgie Boy, during which my effort at rendering into English the tragic death of beloved Dzhordzha not only filled me with a third attack of sadness over the event but also gave me that sense of postaccomplishment horniness that I have already described in my narrative of the first sexual encounter with Kenny Elmore, which had occurred, come to think of it, exactly one year earlier. Can a quota of one seduction per year be called profligate or promiscuous?
“You’re just another baby-sitter,” Jason accused me, when his father had departed with Sharon. “Only you’re a take-out instead of a come-in baby-sitter.”
“But I’m different,” I declared, “from any baby-sitter you’ve ever known.”
“How?” he demanded. “Except for being the prettiest ever?”
“Is there anything you ever wanted a baby-sitter to do for you but couldn’t ask?”
He thought for a minute. “Yeah,” he said. “Give me a bath.”
“I will be happy to give you a bath.”
“Aw, I’m too old for that, now.”
“Or maybe you’re not even old enough,” I said, and winked at him.
The wink got to him. “I bet I am,” he said. “Let’s prove it.”
So I gave Jason a thorough bath, in Sharon’s big white claw-footed tub. With much soap and lather and bubbles. With much fondness and attention. He was modest getting out of his clothes, not from the act of undressing so much as because he already had an erection, but after I praised it suitably he lost his self-consciousness about it and was especially appreciative of the way I soaped it.
Hours later, tucking him in just before his father and Sharon returned to spend the night, I heard him sigh and say, “You sure are some kind of different baby-sitter.”
For the rest of that winter, and through the springtime too, Jason insisted that he would accept no other baby-sitter, and his father even teased him about it, telling him he was too old now for baby-sitters and asking him once in my presence, “What does she do for you?” and poor Jason blushed so furiously without being able to answer that I knew his father must have suspected something.
“It’s all right,” Sharon eventually assured me. “I’m not sure that Mike knows, but if he does know, he thinks it’s an okay thing for the kid. Believe me.”
Arcata Springs had a reputation, I discovered, for free-thinking libertarianism. A few years earlier, it had been tolerant of the largest concentration of hippies in the state, and the signs of its indulgence were still in the air. In addition to rampant heterosexual free love, there were communities of homosexuals, male and female, and assorted paraphilias: a community of transsexuals; a community of sadomasochists; and communities of sodomists, urolagnists, and coprophiliacs. To my knowledge, there was not a community of hebephiliacs. I was, and am, the only one.
III
The very first of the several million American readers of Georgie Boy was an Arcata Springs woman named Joni Lynn Miller, the receptionist, clerk, and secretary for a law firm, and thus an expert typist, whose years of typing wills, deeds, briefs, and contracts prepared her for the more exciting job of making a presentation copy of the manuscript of my first novel. She was a casual acquaintance of Sharon’s, and Sharon told me that Joni Lynn could use the money, which, as I recall, was some ridiculously low sum like fifty cents a page. Doing the job only in her spare time, nights and weekends, she finished it in less than two weeks, and I was amazed. The manuscript was not simply “clean” in the sense of what publishers call “a clean copy”; it was immaculate: not a smudge on it, and its corrections, if any had been made, were invisible. With my permission, Joni Lynn had even corrected several misspellings and a few errors in grammar.
Best of all, Joni Lynn was still crying when she gave me the finished typescript. “I don’t suppose you’d want to know what I think of it, would you?” she asked timidly and deferentially. I assured her I would be thrilled to have her opinion. She was, I told her, the very first person to see it. “Did any of that stuff really happen to you?” she wanted to know, foreshadowing dozens of reviewers who would put the same question in fancier language. And when I told Joni Lynn that most of it was genuinely a work, and a working, of fictio
n, although it had liberally utilized and converted some of my own experiences, she hugged me. She wordlessly wrapped her arms around me and held me for a long moment in an embrace of sisterhood, comfort, sympathy, and perhaps, I like to think, simply the wish to touch the author. Then she declared, “I haven’t read a whole lot of novels, but I’d rather read a good novel than watch TV, I can tell you. I’ve read everything by Stephen King, which I guess isn’t anything to brag about. And I’ve read everything by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. But I’ve read some ‘real’ novelists too, like Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark and Joyce Carol Oates. And I just want to say, Georgie Boy is the best novel I have ever read in my whole life. I’ll never forget it.” Hearing that, I began crying myself, and we had a good cry together.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 22
