We walked outside to the grounds and the real sadness of the place took me. An old woman reached to me with her eyes as I passed her wheelchair, asking if I could tell her something, tell her that I knew her, anything. They were all old, all waiting. Some seemed in good enough spirits. Most were women. Outside, the sun was warmer, the expanse of green lawn leading to a wrought iron fence negating the earlier hint of fall in the air. I turned to Mother to find her wandering away toward the fence.
“Mother?” I chased after her. “Mother?” I turned her around.
Her face showed no recognition. I was a blank space in her universe. She let me lead her back to her rooms. The young nurse who had been guiding us and trailing back a proper distance seemed to all too well understand what was happening. She helped me put my mother to bed, backed me out of the room and said that she would sit with her a while. As I left I realized that all the furniture had rounded edges and was soft wherever possible. I would bring no furniture from home.
Bill and I were over at Eastern Market, wandering through the aisles of produce and fish. Bill was a teenager and I was pretending to be one. Father had charged us with finding a nice late-season bluefish. School was about to begin for us and we were enjoying the last days of summer break. Bill was talking with a friend of his who worked at a crab stand while I looked over the fish. Two letter-jacketed boys from Bill’s school swaggered down the aisle toward us, making their kind of animal noises to announce their presence.
“Hey, it’s Ellison,” the shorter one said.
“Hello, Roger,” Bill said.
“Ready for school?” Roger asked.
The taller of the guys looked at his watch, then out the far door. “Come on, Rog.”
Roger smiled. “In a minute.” He looked at the skinny kid behind the counter. “What about you, Lucy?”
“Don’t call me that,” the kid said.
“So, what were you two talking about? Is there a party somewhere I shouldn’t know about?” Roger laughed, nudged his friend. His friend laughed weakly, disinterestedly. “Is this your brother?” he asked Bill.
“Yeah.”
“You one, too?” Roger asked me.
I looked at his face, then at the letter G sewn onto his blue and white jacket. I understood it was an award for wrestling, because it had pinned to it a medal, two figures posed one behind the other in close contact.
“What are those guys doing?” I asked.
Roger was thrown. “What?”
“On your jacket. Is that what you got a letter for? What sport is that?”
Bill and the kid behind the counter started to laugh.
“What?” Roger said. “It’s for wrestling.”
“You mean rolling around on the floor with another boy.”
Roger’s brown skin turned purple and he took a step toward me. His friend caught him and said, “Let’s just get out of here, Roger.”
Bill and I watched them leave. Bill then flashed me an awkward smile, then seemed to fold up. But I was pumped up, wanting to talk, jump around. “Did you see his face?” I asked.
“Yeah, I saw it.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“No, I’m not mad at you, Monk.”
“Then what is it?”
“Nothing. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I understand a lot of things.”
“Like what?”
“Like—” I stopped and looked at the fish. “This is a good one. Father will like this one.”
I drove back to D.C., back to what had been my mother’s home, what had been my parents’ home. The inside of the house was stale and hot. I switched on the large air-conditioning unit in the dining room and sat at the table. I sat where I had always sat during meals and regarded the other chairs. Mother and Father had sat at the prominent ends and I was placed on a side alone, facing my brother and sister, an empty chair beside me. The occasional guest would occupy that seat, but otherwise it was always there, empty, never removed to be against the wall like the other auxiliary chairs. I listened to the house, recalling my parents’ voices and footfalls, but I couldn’t hear them. I heard the hum and periodic rattle of the air conditioner, the switching on of the refrigerator in the adjacent kitchen, the ringing of the phone.
It was Bill. “I’ll be there in a bit.”
“Where are you?”
“National. I’m about to walk over to the Metro.”
“Would you like me to pick you up?”
“No, that’s all right.”
“I’ll pick you up at Metro Center.”
“I’ll take the Blue to the Red and I’ll meet you at Dupont Circle at,” I could hear him looking at his watch, “four o’clock.”
“See you there.”
My brother’s hair was blond. I recognized his face as he sat on a bench near some conga players, but I thought only That guy looks just like my brother. My brother had blond hair. It was my brother and his hair was yellow. His skin was still light brown. He called to me.
“Bill?”
“It’s me.” He hugged me, an event in itself, and I appreciated the gesture, but it was as stiff as if he hadn’t touched me at all.
“Hey, your hair is blond,” I informed him.
“Like it?”
“I guess. It’s different.” I felt like an old fuddy-duddy, as my mother would say of herself. “I found a parking space up on Connecticut.” I reached down and picked up his soft leather bag. “It’s good to see you,” I said as we started to walk.
“You’re looking well,” he said.
“A little out of shape. But not you.”
“I’m in the gym every night.”
I made a kind of congratulatory sound that I hoped didn’t come off as patronizing. “I should try a little of that.”
“How’s Mother?”
“In and out.” As I said it I wondered which was the bad way: in or out? Was she lost when she was in her mind or out of it? And I wondered if the symptoms I had been observing were in fact not those of her disease, but of her coping with deterioration, a retreat to a safer place.
“Does she know who you are?”
“She did today,” I told him. “How are the kids?”
“Fine, I think.” He watched me for my reaction and when I gave it to him, he said, “We’ll make it through. It’s hard to hear your daddy’s a fag.”
“Would you like to go the house first or to see Mother?”
“The house. I need a shower. I was up early to catch the plane.”
I drove us home. Bill fiddled with the radio.
“How’s work?”
“Good.”
“How’s—” I searched for his friend’s name.
“Gone.”
I have often stared into the mirror and considered the difference between the following statements:
(1) He looks guilty.
(2) He seems guilty.
(3) He appears guilty.
(4) He is guilty.
“Are you all right?” Bill asked. He was out of the shower and had returned downstairs to join me in the den. I was lighting a cigar. “You shouldn’t do that,” he said.
“Yes, I know.” I watched the tip glow orange and shook out the match. “Are you about ready to go?”
“It’s sort of late now, don’t you think?”
It was in fact nearly six. “It’s a little late,” I said, “but it is her first day there. I’d like to check up on the old lady.”
Bill nodded.
Mother had not eaten, we were told. She did not recognize Bill, pulled away from him when he took her hand and tried to look at her eyes. She did not recognize me. She might have if we had stayed another sixty minutes, another fifteen, another five. But we didn’t.
“About the money,” Bill said.
“I’ve got it covered,” I told him.
It had become my practice (at least I wanted it to be) to let such conversations wither and die of their own accord, to not offer any appropriate or in
appropriate comment, but to simply shut up and let the words become vapor.
Only appearances signify in visual art. At least this is what I am told, that the painter’s work is an invention in the boundless space that begins at the edges of his picture. The surface, the paper or the canvas, is not the work of art, but where the work lives, a place to keep the picture, the paint, the idea. But a chair, a chair is its space, is its own canvas, occupies space properly. The canvas occupies spaces and the picture occupies the canvas, while the chair, as a work, fills the space itself. This was what occurred to me regarding My Pafology. The novel, so-called, was more a chair than a painting, my having designed it not as a work of art, but as a functional device, its appearance a thing to behold, but more a thing to mark, a warning perhaps, a gravestone certainly. It was by this reasoning that I was able to look at my face in the mirror and to accept the deal my agent presented to me on the phone that evening.
“His name is Wiley Morgenstein and he wants to pay you three million dollars for the movie rights,” Yul said. “Monk? Monk?”
“I’m here.”
“How’s that sound?”
“It sounds great. Are you crazy? It sounds terrific. It makes me sick.”
“He insists on meeting you.”
“Tell him I’ll call him.”
“He wants to meet you. He wants to pay you three mil, the least you can do is have lunch with the guy. I haven’t told him that there’s no Stagg Leigh yet.”
“Don’t. Stagg Leigh will have lunch with him.”
Yul laughed. “You’ve lost your mind. What are you going to do? Dress up like a pimp or something?”
“No, I’ll just put on some dark glasses and be real quiet. How’s that?”
“Three million for you means three hundred thousand for me. Don’t screw this up.”
“Yeah, right. Gotta go.”
“Wait a second. Random House says there’s so much excitement about the book that they’re going to try to bring it out before Christmas.”
Bill asked if everything was all right when I walked into the kitchen after having been on the phone. I told him that all was well and he told me that he was going out with an old friend. He told me that his friend was coming to collect him shortly. He told me not to wait up.
I hadn’t noticed before the box containing the letters from Fiona to my father smelt of lavender and rose-leaves. This time, without actually reading the letters, I attended to the script, the hand at work, and found a purity there that perhaps reflected the depth of feeling. I imagined that nurse had had small but strong hands with trimmed nails, a weaver’s hands perhaps. I opened each letter, then thumbed through the pages of the curiously chosen novel. With Silas Marner I found a slip of paper and on it was written the lower East Side Manhattan address of Fiona’s sister. Her name was Tilly McFadden.
Editor: What a surprise.
Stagg: I just called to ask if I need to make any changes in the manuscript since you plan to bring the book out earlier.
Editor: No, it’s just perfect as it is.
Stagg: Will I see galleys soon?
Editor: No need to bother with that.
Stagg: There is one change I’d like to make.
Editor: Certainly.
Stagg: I’m changing the title. The new title is Fuck.
Editor: Excuse me?
Stagg: Fuck. Just the one word.
Editor: I so love My Pafology as the title.
Stagg: We’ll call the next book that. This one is called Fuck.
Editor: I don’t think we can do that.
Stagg: Why not?
Editor: The word is considered obscene by many.
Stagg: The novel has the word fuck all through it. I don’t care if many find the word obscene.
Editor: It might hurt sales.
Stagg: I don’t think so. If you like I can give you back the money and take the book elsewhere.
FUCK
A Novel
Stagg R. Leigh
The fear of course is that in denying or refusing complicity in the marginalization of “black” writers, I ended up on the very distant and very “other” side of a line that is imaginary at best. I didn’t write as an act of testimony or social indignation (though all writing in some way is just that) and I did not write out of a so-called family tradition of oral storytelling. I never tried to set anybody free, never tried to paint the next real and true picture of the life of my people, never had any people whose picture I knew well enough to paint. Perhaps if I had written in the time immediately following Reconstruction, I would have written to elevate the station of my fellow oppressed. But the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression. So, I would not be economically oppressed because of writing a book that fell in line with the very books I deemed racist. And I would have to wear the mask of the person I was expected to be. I had already talked on the phone with my editor as the infamous Stagg Leigh and now I would meet with Wiley Morgenstein. I could do it. The game was becoming fun. And it was nice to get a check.
Jelly, Jelly
Jelly
All night long
Behold the invisible!
Bill did not come home that night, but came in the following morning, smiling and talking fast. I had collected some of Mother’s favorite recordings and was taking them to her with a CD player. He seemed high to me, but I couldn’t imagine on what and I had never been good at making those kinds of calls. I asked if he was all right.
“Yeah. Why?” was his response.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You just seem different.”
“Different? Like how?”
“Never mind.”
“No, I want to know how I seem different.” The edge on his voice was amplified by its suddenness.
“There was no subtext,” I said. “If you want to know, I thought that maybe you were high.”
“High on what?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care.”
“This is because I’ve been of no help regarding Mother, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“You’re mad because I stayed out all night. Should I have called?”
“I’m going to see Mother.”
“That’s why I’m in town.” Bill tried to look like he wasn’t high. “But I can see that my presence isn’t urgently required.”
“I was on my way out when you came in. I waited around this morning for you and so I decided to leave. Now, you’re here. So, I’m asking you, would you like to go with me to visit Mother.”
“I need to shower. And it’s my business where I’ve been.”
“I’ll wait.”
“No, that’s okay. You go on. She’s probably wondering what’s keeping you.”
I watched his lips and realized I understood nothing he was saying. His language was not mine. His language possessed an adverbial and interrogative geometry that I could not comprehend. I could see the shapes of his meaning, even hear that his words meant something, but I had no idea as to the substance of his meaning. I nodded.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.
He was mocking me. That was it. He understood my confusion and was using it against me. I nodded again.
“Go on.” As I reached the door, he said. “I was wrong to think you’d understand. Actually, I didn’t expect you to at all. You’re just like Father. You always were and you’re growing up to be him.”
I nodded.
“Go on. Go see Mother without me. Time has a way of deflating purpose and becoming all those things that the center of our being would rather reject. Be that as it may though, my center is far more centered than that tainted middle of yours. I’m true to myself in spite of the detours and interruptions I have encountered beyond the shelf of what is my beach.”
I didn’t nod this time, but left.
Sitting in the attending phy
sician’s office, awaiting a report on Mother’s first night’s stay, I was able to examine the small shelf of books behind the doctor’s desk. There were books by John Grisham and Tom Clancy, a paperback of John MacDonald and things like that. Those books didn’t bother me. Though I had never read one completely through, I had peeked at pages, and although I did not find any depth of artistic expression or any abundance of irony or play with language or ideas, I found them well enough written, the way a technical manual can be well enough written. Oh, so that’s tab A. So, why did Juanita Mae Jenkins send me running for the toilet? I imagine it was because Tom Clancy was not trying to sell his book to me by suggesting that the crew of his high-tech submarine was a representation of his race (however fitting a metaphor). Nor was his publisher marketing it in that way. If you didn’t like Clancy’s white people, you could go out and read about some others.
Where fo’ you be goin?
Mis’sippi.
Why fo’ you gone way down dere?
I gots to get ‘way from this souf-side Chicago.
Shit, Mis’sippi aint nofin but da souf-souf-side Chicago.
(They laughed together.)
The doctor was a fat, unhealthy-looking man, but a natty dresser. His wingtips were polished to a shine and the sweater vest (despite the warm weather) he wore blended perfectly with his suit. He sat behind the desk and I imagined him to look like Tom Clancy, though I had never seen as much as a newpaper photo of the man. Then I imagined him trying to squeeze through the small hatch of a submarine.
“Your mother is not having a good day so far. We’ve had to sedate her. We have a nurse at her bedside now. I don’t really know what to say, Mr. Ellison. Sometimes patients take a sudden turn. Perhaps tomorrow she’ll have a better day.”
Then the fat doctor was my sister Lisa. She leaned back in the chair and lit that imaginary cigarette and said my name. I allowed my awareness of my hallucination to serve as evidence that I was not in fact insane, but I had to note that coming on the heels of my brother’s linguistic show I was a bit concerned.
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