Erasure

by Percival Everett

  Paula Baderman had a smoker’s voice, but she sounded young and spirited enough. She came to the phone quickly when I called.

  “Mr. Leigh,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad we could get together, even if it is over the phone. I just wanted to touch bases with you. You know of course that I love the book.”

  “So I understand,” I said.

  She paused, leaving a blank between us, then said, “How long did it take you to write it?”

  “It took me just a little over a week.”

  The quality of her next silence was clear to me. She was surprised, if not put off by my diction, being not at all what she expected. I was not going to put on an act for her.

  “A week. Imagine that.”

  ‘Are there any changes you’d like me to make?”

  “Not really. In fact, I think it’s about as perfect a book as I’ve seen in a long while. But I just want to get to know you right now. If you don’t mind my asking, what were you in prison for?”

  “I mind your asking.”

  My abruptness was apparently pleasing to her, if not downright exciting. I detected a change in her breathing. “Certainly, I don’t mean to pry.”

  “Did you read a lot in prison?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Well,” she said. “We’re hoping for a spring pub date. I think this is just perfect for summer reading.”

  “Yes, white people on the beach will get a big kick out of it.”

  That sent walking fingers up her spine and if I had been in her office (looking the part), she would have been tearing off her blouse and crawling across her desk toward me, perhaps not literally, but at least literarily.

  “Do you think I might take your number in case I have any further questions?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t think so. You just tell Yul that you’d like to speak with me and I’ll call you. Everything will work better like that.”

  “Well, okay. Oh, and Stagg? May I call you Stagg?”

  “You may.”

  “Stagg, thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Ms. Baderman.” I hung up before she insisted that I call her by her first name.

  The first half of the advance arrived. I found Mother sitting in the living room listening to Mahler. My father had always loved Mahler, but even as a child I found it heavy and overwrought. She was listening to the Kindertotenlieder and looking near tears. I was smiling.

  “Why are you so happy, Monksie?”

  “Just got paid for a new book.”

  “A new book? I can’t wait to read it.”

  “Yes, you can,” I said. “But anyway. I’m taking you on a trip. Anywhere you’d like to go.” I wanted to take her on a vacation while she could still enjoy it, while she could still remember who I was and who she was and what a fork was for. “Where would you like me to take you?”

  “Oh, Monksie, you know how I’ve always been about traveling. You decide. I’ll be happy with wherever you pick.”

  “Detroit,” I said.

  The expression that crawled over and sat on her face was precious and let me know that she was no vegetable yet.

  “Just joking,” I said.

  “I should say.”

  “Well, it’s summer, so what do you say we head north. How does Martha’s Vineyard sound?”

  “Why don’t we go open the beach house,” she said.

  It wasn’t what I’d had in mind, but the idea was perfect. The house had sat empty now for three years. Lisa had used it with her ex-husband, but never returned after the divorce. “That sounds good,” I said. “We’ll take Lorraine and we’ll leave tomorrow. How’s tomorrow?” “Fine, Monksie.”

  Yul: What did you say to her?

  Me: What do you mean?

  Yul: She’s more gung-ho than ever.

  Me: I don’t know why that would be.

  Yul: They’re going to take out a full page ad in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

  Me: You’re kidding me.

  Yul: She wanted me to ask if Stagg will do a couple of talk shows. Morning network stuff.

  Me: Laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh.

  I called the number Bill gave me and a man answered. He seemed cool until I identified myself as the brother, and then he, Adam, was quite pleasant and told me more about Bill’s problems than I believe Bill would have wanted me to know.

  “William tried to see his children the other day, but it became a big scene. His ex is seeing some homophobic highway trooper or something and they nearly came to blows. The kids aren’t taking the truth very well, I’m afraid. I believe he told me that he’s picked up a few new patients. That’s a good thing.” Then Bill came home. “It’s your brother,” Adam said away from the receiver.

  “What have you been telling him?” Bill’s voice was stern.

  “We were just chatting.”

  Bill took the phone. “Monk?”

  “Hi, Bill.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Fine. What about with you?”

  “Things could be better,” he said. He sounded near crying.

  “Bill, I’m calling because I’m planning to take Mother out to the beach tomorrow. We’re going to stay there for a few weeks. I was wondering if you could make a trip out. I’ll pick you up at BWI.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Bill?”

  “I’d really like to, but things are pretty hectic around here these days. I’m having to go to court about visitation and all that stuff.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Well, I just thought I’d ask. Hey, what if you brought Adam with you?” Before he could respond, I said, “I’ll buy your tickets. Mother’s not doing well, Bill.”

  “Okay, Monk. I’ll talk to Adam. Are you going to turn the phone on down there?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Okay, well, I’ll call in the next couple of days.”

  “Okay.”

  I hung up and stared at the phone on my desk. It was black and heavy and had been used by my father and sometimes I imagined I could still hear his deep voice humming through the wires. Bill sounded so remarkably sad, so lost. When we were kids I had often felt, however vaguely, his sadness, but this hopelessness, if it was in fact that, this lostness, misplacedness, was new and not easy to take. For the first time I sat back and watched the destruction of my family, not a weird or unnatural thing, indeed it was more natural than most things, but it was a large portion to swallow. My father was dead for several years. My sister was recently murdered. My mother was slipping away on her kite of senility. And my brother was finally finding himself, I suppose, but seemingly losing everything else in the process. I wouldn’t use the cliché that I was the captain of a sinking ship, that implying some kind of authority, but rather I was a diesel mechanic on a steamship, an obstetrician in a monastery.

  “Would you rather lose your sight or your hearing?” Lisa asked one evening while we all sat at the picnic table behind the house. The mosquitoes were just starting to come out and the crabs were almost gone.

  “Hearing,” Bill answered quickly. “There’s too much in this world to see. Paintings, landscapes, faces. You can get around if you don’t hear and you can learn to read lips.”

  “What about you, Monksie?” Mother asked. She saw these sorts of things as good conversation and good for us.

  “I don’t know. I’d miss hearing music and crickets. I’d miss seeing things like paintings like Bill said. I guess it would be hearing. I’d rather lose my hearing.”

  “Me, too,” Mother said.

  “What about you, Father?” Bill asked.

  Father had been chewing and listening to us in that absent way of his. He looked at Lisa, then me, studying us, it seemed. He looked down the table to Mother, nodding his head. Then he looked
longest at Bill. He then took us in as a group, and said, “Sight” with a smile that was not quite a smile, but enough for us to laugh as if we had been teased rather than insulted.

  In my head, as I drove along Route 50, Mother by my side, disapproving Lorraine directly behind me, I considered everything that was not good about the novel I was about to publish, that I submitted for the very reason it was not good, but now that fact was killing me. It was a parody, certainly, but so easy had it been to construct that I found it difficult to take it seriously even as that. The work bored and had as its only virtue brevity. There was no playing with compositional or even paginal space. In fact, the work inhabited no space artistically that I could find intelligible. For all the surface concern with the spatial and otherwise dislocation of Van Go, there was nothing in the writing that self-consciously threw it back at me. Then I caught the way I was thinking and realized the saddest thing of all, that I was thinking myself into a funk about idiotic and pretentious bullshit to avoid the real accusation staring me in the face. I was a sell-out.

  Mother touched my arm as if she recognized my torture. “Are you okay, dear?” she asked.

  “Fine, Mother.” I looked into the rearview mirror. “Okay back there, Lorraine?”

  “Yes.” Lorraine had not really wanted to come, but I needed her help in taking care of Mother and, frankly, I couldn’t see leaving her alone. “I could use a ladies’ room.”

  We had been on the road for thirty minutes and had perhaps another twenty to go to Annapolis. “Do you think you can wait until we get to Annapolis?” I asked.

  “I suppose if I have to.”

  “Lorraine needs to stop,” Mother said.

  I nodded and pulled off at the next exit which turned out not to be conveniently located for anything people in cars might want. I drove along the two lane highway until thirty minutes later we’d come to a gas station. I parked in front of the restroom doors and killed the engine. “Okay, Lorraine.” I got out and opened her door for her. A greasy-looking, lanky white teenager watched us through the window.

  Lorraine went to the door, opened it, then came back, got into the car. “I can wait,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I can’t go in there,” she said.

  “There’s no place else.”

  “Lorraine said she can’t use that one, Monksie,” Mother said.

  “I’ll just wait until we get there,” Lorraine said.

  An hour later we were in Annapolis and Lorraine was asleep in the back. Mother was asleep beside me. I drove through town to the beach. The guard at the gate actually recognized me. He was as old as my mother, but I couldn’t recall him. “Monk Ellison,” he said. “My, my. You don’t even remember me, do you? Maynard Boatwright.”

  I did recall the name, but I remembered a big, heavily muscled exmarine with an iron jaw, instead of the sweet old man saying my my in front of me.

  “I remember you,” I said. “How’s life treating you?”

  “Finer than frog’s hair.” He looked over at my mother, then at Lorraine. I remembered that Lisa suspected he had a thing for Lorraine. “Is that?”

  “Lorraine,” I said.

  “Well, I’ll be.”

  I turned to wake Lorraine, but Maynard stopped me.

  “You must be a good driver,” Maynard said. “For everybody to fall asleep like that.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Well, I’ll see you later.” Then he waved to the sleeping Lorraine.

  The naps must have had a restorative effect on the old ladies. Once at the house and awake, they set to the task of getting the place in order with single-mindedness. I was only a little tired from the short drive, but they wouldn’t let me close enough to help with the cleaning. I went out to the side of the house, turned on the water and threw the main breaker. I poked my head back in to reaffirm my uselessness and stepped out the back to the little dock on the tidal pond. I looked east out to the bay. The old aluminum canoe was still upturned on blocks and covered with a tarp the way it always was. Later, I would take it out and just float on the water with a cigar. The rim of the pond was crowded with houses, nothing like it had been when I was a kid. I could hear the noises of families, music, dogs, a distant car alarm. I walked between our house and the neighboring one and to the road, where I walked toward the bay beach.

  I wondered how far I should take my Stagg Leigh performance. I might in fact become a Rhinehart, walking down the street and finding myself in store windows. I yam what I yam. I could throw on a fake beard and a wig and do the talk shows, play the game, walk the walk, shoot the jive. No, I couldn’t.

  I would let Mr. Leigh continue his reclusive, just-out-of-the-big-house ways. He would talk to the editor a few more times, then disappear, like down a hole.

  I walked along the beach, then turned to look back at the Douglass house. It had been owned first by the grandson of Frederick Douglass and had fallen into several hands since. When I was a child it was unoccupied and we would walk into it, climb the stairs and stare at the water from its tower. My father told me that James Weldon Johnson had written in that lookout. The thought of it scared me a little, but also made my mind race, searching for lines of poems of my own that would never come. Now the house was fresh looking and somewhat unfamiliar. The tower top was no longer screened in, but surrounded by glass. The house looked tight and air-conditioned. There was a Mercedes Benz station wagon parked by the front walk.

  I walked back up the street. I stopped to look at the old Tilman house. A woman whom I had not seen was sitting on the porch and she asked if she could help me, in that way which really asked what the hell I was looking at.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just remembering a former owner.”

  “Oh, really?” Meaning of course, yeah, right.

  “No, really. His name was Professor Tilman. I never knew his first name. Maybe it was Professor.”

  The woman laughed. She was tall, as tall as me, and she stepped off the porch and looked at the house with me. Her square face was framed by near blonde dreadlocks. “Professor Tilman was my uncle,” she said. “We called him Uncle Professor.”

  She was funny. I smiled at her. “I didn’t mean to be rude, but I didn’t see you.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “How is the Professor?” I asked.

  “He died three years ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I inherited the house. Some of the house. My brother and I own it, but he lives in Las Vegas and never comes east.” She said Las Vegas as if it were not to be believed.

  “I’ve driven through there,” I said. “My name is Thelonious Ellison. Everybody calls me Monk.”

  “Dr. Ellison’s family?” I nodded and she said, “My uncle mentioned your father often.”

  “How about that.”

  “Marilyn Tilman.” She shook my hand. “Are you down for the summer? What’s left of it?”

  “Just a couple of weeks. I’m here with my mother and her housekeeper. Speaking of which, I’d better get back there. I know they’ll have a shopping list waiting for me. I’ll talk to you later, okay?” I took a couple steps away. “Would you like me to pick up anything for you?”

  “Why don’t I ride with you?” she asked.

  “It’s the two story with the green shutters.”

  “I’ll be over in a couple,” she said.

  “Good.” I watched her take the porch steps two at a time and enter the house.

  Back at the house, I discovered that Mother and Lorraine had gotten on each other’s nerves. The outward manifestation of this nerve-pinching was an awkward silence. Mother told me she felt the need for a nap and Lorraine told me, aside, that Mother needed a nap. Lorraine had compiled the shopping list, at the end of which were a couple of things added by my mother’s shaking hand. This was no doubt the source of trouble between them, especially as one of the items had already been listed by Lorraine.

  “She’
s tired,” Lorraine said again, this time loud enough for Mother to hear.

  “It’s no wonder,” Mother said softly, looking around as if for a place to lie down.

  “Lorraine,” I said, “take Mother up and get her to bed, will you? I’ll be back in an hour or so. And I’ll pick up some food so no one cooks tonight.”

  “Yes, Mr. Monk.”

  Lorraine followed Mother up the stairs.

  “I don’t need your help,” Mother snapped.

  “I have to make up your bed,” Lorraine said.

  “Well, get to it, Lorraine. You’re such a slow girl sometimes.”

  I stepped outside to find Marilyn approaching. She was wearing a straw hat that shaded her face, but still her youthfulness shone on her cheeks and in her eyes. It was a glow that I believed I recalled, but was faded from me. My eyes felt tired as I watched her confident gait, her cloth knapsack swinging by her side.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “Oh yeah,” I said.

  We sat in the car and I fumbled a bit with the keys. The scene was strikingly and alarmingly unfamiliar to me. A woman less than seventy was seated beside me, a woman whom I found attractive, a woman whose short-term memory was at least as good as mine. I felt like a spinster and fought appearing too self-conscious.

  Ten days drifted by. I walked alone, walked with Marilyn, once walked with mother. Marilyn met Mother and Lorraine. Maynard, the gate guard, paid a call on Lorraine. Mother told me she liked Marilyn. I told Marilyn I liked Marilyn. Marilyn told me she liked me. The four of us ate together. I ate with Marilyn. I rowed out onto the pond and smoked cigars. Mother and Lorraine got on each other’s nerves. Lorraine muttered under her breath. Mother took naps. Mother spoke alone with Marilyn while I was at the market.