Erasure

by Percival Everett

So, what do you say to that? I said, “I’ll be honored.”

  “And I want your mother to be my matron of honor,” Lorraine said.

  “Okay.”

  “We’re tying the knot on Saturday,” Maynard said.

  “That’s two days away.”

  “We’re old. We don’t have time to waste.” Maynard laughed and then Lorraine laughed with him.

  Their laughter was genuine, sweet, beautiful and I felt happy to hear it from Lorraine. Listening to it, I realized that I had never heard the same quality in the laughter shared by my parents, though I’d no doubt they loved each other very much.

  “Saturday,” I said.

  It was Christmas break of my freshman year in college. Father was excited to have me home and telling him about my classes and my professors. Ever since I began reading serious literature, he had forced the rest of the family to endure our discussions at the table. When I was eleven, he would prod me with simple questions, get me tied up and laugh a bit at me. When I was fourteen, he would bait me, twist me up, confuse me, then laugh a bit at me. At eighteen, he honestly seemed to believe I could add something to his understanding of novels and stories. I told him that I had read Joyce in a class. Bill moaned. One would have thought that his second year in medical school would have proved a more normal common ground between physician and son. Lisa was about to graduate from Vassar and had adopted a kind of death-girl attitude in spite of her being off to medical school the next year.

  “We read Portrait and Wake,” I said.

  “I see they’ve refrained from using complete titles in university these days.”

  I laughed and Father laughed, but the rest of the family, I’m sure, read his comment as contentious and condescending.

  “What did you think of Finnegan’s Wake?“ Father asked. He turned to Bill. “Have you read it?”

  Bill shook his head.

  Father took a quick bite of potatoes and returned his attention to me. “So?”

  “I think it’s overrated,” I said.

  He stopped chewing.

  “Or not rated correctly, anyway.”

  “That’s youth talking,” Father said. “The word play alone makes it a remarkable book.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And it’s multilingual and all that, but still.”

  “I’d think that you’d never consider fiction the same again after reading that book.”

  “Well, you don’t actually read it,” I said. “You look at it for a long time, but you don’t really read it.”

  “My point exactly.” He laughed and drank some wine. He offered a nudge of his elbow toward Lisa as if to include her.

  “Okay,” I said. “This is what I wrote in my paper.” I looked at Mother and my siblings and felt sick, like I had been seduced into slitting their throats. I looked at my father’s excited eyes. “In spite of the obvious exploitation of alphabetic and lexical space in the Wake and in spite of whatever typographical or structural gestures one might focus on, the most important feature of the book is the way it actually conforms to conventional narrative. The way it layers, using such devices as metaphor and symbol. What’s different is that each sentence, each word calls attention to the devices. So, the work really reaffirms what it seems to expose. It is the thing it is, perhaps twice, and depends on the currency of conventional narrative for its experimental validity.”

  Father looked at me for a long time. He then looked at his other two children and put his fork down. “I hope before you go to bed this evening, you kiss your brother.” Then he stood and left the table.

  Of course I felt bad for my brother and sister, but I felt worse for myself. I didn’t enjoy being so set apart and I was well aware, painfully aware, of the inappropriateness and incorrectness of Father’s assessment of me. At eighteen, I realized I was eighteen and not so smart or special, and that might have been the only way that I was in fact special. I found my own ideas poorly formed and repugnant, my self awkward and, more or less, for lack of a better word, geeky. In fact, my brother, second-year medical school student that he was, revisited his childhood and, when he passed in the hallway, muttered, “Geek.”

  “It’s not my fault,” I said.

  Lisa hit the top of the stairs as I said this, gave me an almost sympathetic look, shrugged and stepped into her room. The closing of her door was just ever so slightly louder than a normal closing of a door and so she too managed to slap me about some.

  But how bad Lisa and Bill must have felt. They were far more accomplished than I at the time (and later). I had done nothing yet. I viewed my father’s favoritism as irrational and saw myself as being saddled with a kind of illness, albeit his.

  Numbers 23, 24

  Wilde: I’m afraid for the voice.

  Joyce: What do you mean?

  Wilde: The way writing is moving. All voice will soon be lost and what will we be left with?

  Joyce: Pages.

  Wilde: And story?

  Joyce: What is story anyway? Just a way to announce the last page.

  Wilde: Have you ever walked through a thunderstorm carrying a long metal pipe?

  Joyce: No, I haven’t.

  Wilde: You should try it. Joyce: Are you upset?

  Wilde: No, just announcing the last page.

  Marilyn had never looked more beautiful to me. We were sitting in her kitchen and, from all appearances, Clevon was not present. Marilyn poured the coffee.

  “I looked at a place for Mother yesterday.”

  “How was it?”

  “Fine. Clean. Neat. Cheery. What do you say about a place where people go to expire.”

  “I’m sorry about not calling yesterday.”

  “I figured you were busy,” I said.

  “Clevon and I are now officially broken up.”

  The news pleased me but I was unsure how I was supposed to take it.

  After a brief pause, Marilyn said, “I have to tell you, though, that we slept together that night.”

  Why did she have to tell me that? I didn’t need to know it and I could have done quite well without knowing it. Had I not known, I would not have cared, but now all I could do was care. I cared about what he meant to her, about what I meant to her, about whether she was on top or he, about whether she had had an orgasm, more than one?, about the size of his penis, about the size of mine, about why she had told me. I studied the aged wood table, warped white pine slats with a mitered border of what I thought might be maple, an odd combination. I ran my fingers along the rounded edge in front of me. “Well, those things happen, I guess,” I said.

  “I realized he doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  I nodded. “A good thing to realize.” However late.

  She got up from her chair and came to me, bent at her waist and kissed me on the lips. She pulled me to my feet and led me by the hands into her bedroom, where again she kissed me. We rolled around a bit, gyrating and rubbing body parts with a level of arousal that was both refreshing and, sadly, stale, my understanding that the excitement was partly, at least, simply a function of newness. While kissing her neck, which was slightly salty, I glanced at her night table and saw a copy of We’s Lives In Da Ghetto by Juanita Mae Jenkins. I stopped moving.

  “What’s wrong, baby,” she said. I liked the way her voice sounded, especially as she called me baby, but the sight of that book had called back the troops.

  “Have you read that book?” I asked.

  She looked back over her head to see. “Oh, that? Yeah, I just finished. It was pretty good.”

  “What was good about it?” I rolled off to lie beside her.

  It was clear she was confused that we were having this conversation. “Is something wrong? You can just come out with it. I shouldn’t have told you about Clevon.”

  “What did you like about the book?”

  “I don’t know. It was a good story, I guess. Lightweight stuff, but it was fun.”

  “It didn’t offend you in any way?”

  She stared at me
for a couple of seconds, then said, with an attitude, “No.”

  “Have you ever known anybody who talks like they do in that book?” I could hear the edge on my voice and though I didn’t want it there, I knew that once detected, it could never be erased.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Answer the question.”

  “No, but so what? I just read through that dialect shit. I don’t like the way you’re talking to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling genuinely bad for having sounded like I was attacking. “It’s just that I find that book an idiotic, exploitive piece of crap and I can’t see how an intelligent person can take it seriously.” So much for changing my tack.

  Marilyn pulled the nearest pillow to her chest and rested her chin on it. “I think you should leave.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Just go.”

  As I left the room and approached the front door I could hear her crying. But there was nothing to say.

  Since Lorraine spent the night and the morning at Maynard’s getting ready for her wedding, I was left alone to care for Mother. I had not known the extent to which I depended on the servant, and I learned that reality knows neither subtlety nor kindness when it decides to “get in your face,” as it were. Mother was having a particularly difficult morning. She knew who I was and who she was and that there was a wedding to attend, but had forgotten how to dress. And so I dressed her. My maleness meant nothing to her as she asked me to help her with her bra and her slip and her hose. I felt as if I were stranded in some surreal, poorly dubbed, Italian film, but finally it was all too real.

  “This bra cuts into me,” she said. “Find me another one.”

  I imagined this was the way she had come to talk to Lorraine. I brought her another and helped her on with it, having to adjust her sagging breasts in the cups.

  “That’s better.” She looked around. “My shoes. The black ones with the straps. And my pearls. The double strand.”

  “I can’t find the black shoes,” I said from her closet.

  “They’re there, Lorraine. You simply have to look.”

  “Mother, I don’t think you packed them.”

  “They’re right in front of you,” she snapped. She stepped over in her stocking feet, lowered herself to a knee and grabbed a pair of ox-blood pumps. “Right here.”

  “You look nice, Mother,” I said, standing behind her as she sat facing her vanity mirror.

  Father had returned from a dinner, the pre-departure discussion of which aroused my curiosity. He kissed Mother at the door and then walked up to his study. I followed in his wake and plopped down on the leather sofa across from his desk.

  “And how was your dinner?” he asked.

  “Standard,” I said, using a term I’d gotten from him. “Lorraine put too much salt in the vegetables. As usual.”

  Father laughed.

  “How was your dinner?” I asked.

  “It was very good. But I’m afraid I’ll pay for it later.” He sat at his desk and began to sift through his stack of mail. “We had oysters and lemon pie for dessert.”

  “I like oysters.”

  “I know you do. Perhaps we’ll all go to Crissfield’s later in the week.”

  “Lisa will like that,” I said. “What was the dinner like? What did you talk about?”

  He looked at me for a couple of seconds. “Well, it was a group of my old friends. A couple of them have been away for years. They’re all gray now. We talked about the days when we were not gray, about the things we used to do and how we used to laugh.” He paused. “It was the talk of the dead, Monk.”

  I just looked at him.

  He studied my ten-year-old face, then smiled. “I’m not as old as it sounds, I believe.” He opened another letter, read it and tossed it. “It would of course be a shame to get too old. There’s no virtue in living too long. Living shouldn’t become a habit.” By now he was talking more to himself than to me. “Tomorrow night. Tomorrow night, we’ll go out and get you some oysters.”

  We are told that the subject of the statement should not be taken as synonymous with the author of the formulation—either in substance, or in function. This is, my theoretical friends have told me, a characteristic of the enunciative function. The statement with which I was concerning myself was the box containing the letters of my father. Was it something my mother was attempting to tell me about my father? Or rather, was it more ingenious, as brother Bill would have had me believe, a message from my father, his knowing that Mother would not in fact burn the box and would somehow get it to me? As I got Mother ready to go to Lorraine’s wedding I went over and over again the contents of that box, wondering what if anything I was supposed to do and at whose behest. Knowing Father, perhaps I was only supposed to learn some lesson about life, not take literally any concern about tracking down some lost half-sibling. Indeed, I knew him to be short-patienced when it came to, as he put it, “vulgar, common and simple-minded devotion to rudimentary biological relationships.”

  “So, Mother, what do you think of Lorraine getting married?” I asked as we walked to the car.

  “A bit sudden.”

  “She seems happy.”

  “I don’t think she knows what she’s doing. What does she know about relationships? She’s never had one. And this boy.”

  “He’s almost seventy, Mother.”

  “Oh, well, he looks young. I don’t know, Monksie. I guess it’s a good thing. I won’t be around forever to care for Lorraine.”

  “Let’s not talk like that,” I said as I closed her door.

  I was putting the key in the ignition. We were taking the car even though Maynard’s house was just a quarter mile away, just outside the community.

  “I think they’re having sex,” Mother said.

  I said nothing.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s their business.”

  “Hmmmph.”

  Wittgenstein: Why did Bach have to sell his organ?

  Derrida: I don’t know. Why?

  Wittgenstein: Because he was baroque.

  Derrida: You mean because he composed music marked by elaborate and even grotesque ornamentation?

  Wittgenstein: Well, no that’s not exactly what I was getting at. It was a play on words.

  Derrida: Oh, I get it.

  When we arrived at Maynard’s house, Lorraine was standing in the yard and yelling back at her husband-to-be who was standing on the porch. “How dare you call me old, you fossil!” is what she yelled.

  Nothing’s easy. Least of all being confronted with one’s own questionable agenda, however unworked out or articulated. In a flash, I was washed with guilt as I considered that on some level, this was all my plan, that I wanted to marry off Lorraine and commit Mother and get on with my life. Indeed, I did want to marry off Lorraine and indeed I wanted to do so, so that I would not have to look after her in her remaining years. But I truly did not want to commit Mother. That was a lie to myself. On some level, given her condition, I wanted very much to commit her and for as much my sake as hers. I was also troubled by the word commit. One commits murder or suicide, permanent things. The finality of my admitting her to the retreat in Columbia loomed large in my thinking and feeling.

  Mother remained seated in the car while I approached Lorraine, asking the stupid but appropriate question, “Is there something wrong?”

  “Yes,” she cried. “That old coot called me old.”

  “That ain’t what I said,” Maynard said, calmly. He leaned against a post. “I told her to let my nieces take care of the food because she needed her rest.”

  “He said it again,” Lorraine said.

  “Said what?” I asked.

  “He called me old.”

  “No, he called his nieces younger,” I said.

  “He called me old,” she cried.

  “Damnit, Lorraine, you are old,” I said.

  The look on Lorraine’s face cannot
adequately be described and that is description enough.

  “Hold on there,” Maynard said, walking to Lorraine. “That’s awfully rough, what you said to my bride. Who are you to call her old?” He put his arms around her. Lorraine hugged him back.

  Mother had gotten herself out of the car now. “If Lorraine is old, what does that make me?” she asked.

  I looked at each of their faces, then settled on Maynard’s. “Where’s the preacher?”

  “Everybody’s in the house,” he said.

  “Well, come on,” I said, cheerfully. “Let’s have ourselves a wedding.”

  D. W. Griffith: I like your book very much.

  Richard Wright: Thank you.

  Somewhere in Hollywood, Wiley Morgenstein smoked a cigar and contemplated the commercial value of My Pafology. He sat poolside with a big man from New Jersey with whom he attended two years of school at Passaic Junior College thirty years earlier.

  Wiley smiled and relit his cigar. “They go to the movies now, these people. There’s an itch and I plan to scratch it.”

  “Feel like some shuffleboard?”

  “It’s a damn good book, too. This one will get me taken seriously.”

  “Who’s the blonde in the jacuzzi?”

  “I’ve gotta meet the writer though. I want to know the hand that wrote this book. You know what I mean?”

  “I’m going to ask her her name.”

  The dynamics of the joyous occasion were all too apparent upon our entering the house. The faces of those who bore resemblance to Maynard were unsmiling and easy to read. The faces asked, Why is this old maid marrying poor old Maynard? For his meager savings? Still, there was an attempt at cordiality which was slightly more than admirable and somewhat less than fully hypocritical. There were six of them, a daughter and her husband, three nieces, and a sister-in-law. There was a table of food and a television tuned to a baseball game. The son-in-law sat eyes fixed on the game. I asked him who was playing and he said he didn’t know and it became clear that he was not watching the game but seeking to seep into the screen, away from the scene at hand. I sat beside him and watched my mother engage rather comfortably in small talk.