Lacking Character

by Curtis White

  Jake took appropriate measures with her, and they settled in for the night—“Chingé” and his prized Sharps be damned!—there among the trees!

  * I think this is adequate evidence for the claim, made earlier in this volume, that Nature herself is all too often guilty of the imitative fallacy.

  42.

  “One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.”

  —FLAUBERT

  Let us pass beyond the obsession of the Reading Public with trees and return to our Minnesota scene with Suzanne standing out in front of a boulder. She is about to tell her story (as requested by Jake).

  Here is the scene:

  Harshly murmured the afternoon. The sky inky clouds overhung. Distant, you could see the youngsters of the village go clanking by with football cleats and helmets, purple their scarred knees, livid their eyes, steaming their breath in the formidable air. Leaving, they shouted lustily down at us words, culpable words.

  This creature, young ’Zanne, stood before us like a cutout figure, a paper doll in her modest dress and apron. Not a real girl but something a child could color in, careful to stay inside the lines, with a crayon, well aware in its immature way that there never was a girl anyway.

  The scene behind her was also a copy of a copy, but what a copy. In a wash of green and sepia and brown stood one blaze of gold from a forsythia. Splendid! But everything around it was fading and indistinct. As for her, she stood beneath an ancient beech tree, its massive arms extended in a gesture of protection for the paper girl.*

  She began, “All my life I have tried to understand the meaning of the imaginary silence in which I live.”

  “Excuse me,” I interrupted, “but what is an imaginary silence?”

  Jake gave me a fierce, chastising look as if to say, “Let her tell her story.”

  You should know, by the way, that the whole time she spoke Jake had a romping bronco of a hard-on pushing against the thin and frayed fabric of his trousers, his first such since Fanni’s sexual Armageddon. This was not one of the Marquis’s speculative hard-ons. In fact, had the trousers not been so loose on him because of all the weight he’d lost on this trip, I’m quite certain the “bronco” would have burst through the fabric. So much for his earlier claims about the triviality of sex, because ’Zanne obviously turned him on. I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to warm up to Jake. Unlike Percy, there can be no question now of his humanity. He’s one of us.

  * Well, as you can see, it’s another tree.

  43.

  I am, O Anxious One. Don’t you hear my voice

  surging forth with all my earthly feelings?

  They yearn so high, that they have sprouted wings

  and whitely fly in circles round your face.

  —RILKE

  Freud was right to say that there is childhood sexuality, but he was wrong to assume that there is adult sexuality. Sex is where we go when we want to flee the adults. In spite of the “bronco,” when Jake fell in love at first sight with ’Zanne, he was thinking as a child. He was also a child at heart when he married Fanni, even if, as we know, she had other ideas about that.

  In Totem and Taboo Freud relates the primordial story of humanity, its deepest trauma. He tells of the son’s incestuous threat, and the father’s castrating expulsion of the son. The son then joins the Band of Brothers (the Brother Hoard) earlier expelled for wanting, if not their own mother, somebody. But the father claimed a monopoly on all of the skirts. And so, in a guilty return, the brothers proposed murder most foul. Get Daddy out of the way then we’ll see what’s what.

  But Freud had it wrong. We don’t really care if Daddy is dead; his life is punishment enough, the sodden thing. What’s wrong with Freud’s fable is the idea that, once expelled, the sons ever wanted to return. The father’s sex is a grinding affair of rocks, like the subduction of tectonic plates. Beneath it, women groan and think to themselves, “When will this ever be over?” There is no life in it, only fate, the wrong fate. The father is always the Dead Father, the Stone Guest, Death-in-Life.

  Also wrong is the idea that all of the daughters stayed in the patriarchal fold. Many of them sympathized with the brothers, and ran away to be with them. Even the mother must have looked on with her pale eyes and wondered what it must be like to move beneath something less ponderous than a continental plate. She sighed. She joined the brothers and sisters in spirit, and sat warm and brooding in her bed awaiting their return, waiting for the day when life could be interesting; that is, when life could be playful freedom.

  Freud could think (and think and think) Oedipus, but he couldn’t think Dionysus. That agile god popped from the side of the father, ran, and never looked back. He was the original Gingerbread Man. “Can’t catch me,” but also, “Don’t look back.” Joy at release, not Freudian resentment and revenge. The brothers indulged in a great, productive flowing away.

  “Dance, dance, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the dance!” says he.

  Once we are free of the brooding father, we expose our soft spots to each other. We whisper. We cuddle. We pet. It’s a way of saying, “There are no adults here. We are safe. Look at this! Touch this! Kiss kids!” Thus is it written: Give up to me thy soft spot, prepare thyself to die knowing that I am a child and will not harm thee, and I will accompany thee as we move toward God, the “Anxious One,” toward whom we surge “with all our earthly feelings.”

  But isn’t this only what we call “vanilla sex”? Without the threat of paternal violence, will some grow bored? What we call the perverse says, “What if we let the adults join us? What if we let Daddy—with his heavy, dark, and stinking limbs—in?” A scary thought but thrilling. After all, what if he won’t leave after the fun is done? The adults bring the rough stuff: the ropes, the leather, the hurting, the choking on request, the role games. As in, “Pretend to rape me, okay? Let’s see, you’re my boss and I’m working late. Put me over that table and don’t hold back! Lay on, I say! Bring on the grave, the solemn, the stern and grim timber!” In this way we draw a moustache on Nobodaddy, for the perverse is the sex that exposes its soft spots not only to other children, but to the Father’s Law.

  But those are the odd occasions. Mostly sex is something invented by and exclusively for children, who wish to sprout wings and “whitely fly in circles” around God’s face.

  44.

  “If a story is a skeleton structure of plot, overlaid with a felicity of thought and phrase that may be called the flesh, then the pulsing heart of the creation, the one factor that gives it life and beauty, is the imagination. But this imagination must be rightly controlled.”

  —FROM PLOTTO, BY WILLIAM WALLACE COOK

  —after Flann O’Brien, again

  “Let her tell her story!” Jake loudly insisted.

  “All right,” I thought, “but it’s on your head. And so is that stupid ancient beech tree.”

  I noticed that something had happened to the lighting, there was something wrong with the sun, and a section of the sky was shaking.

  THE LEGEND OF JOE DAKES

  Suzanne began, “When I was a child, everything conspired in magic. Misshapen things fell out of cupboards. Even our conversations, our quarrels, to be honest, had the darkness of magic in them.”

  As she spoke, the western sky turned from flaming yellow to a lambent apple-green. Languorous in the air wafted the scent of syringa, which brought back, with a satisfying pain, the memory of other springs and past lives richly lived.

  “My father was a major in the Army of the British Raj, mother and father of his native rifles.”

  God damn, there it is again, the stinking British Raj, the ridiculous Pankot rifles in their colorful Sepoy britches. This is the price I pay for letting the trees in. Apparently, the licentious child now feels she has narrative license to say anything she pleases.

  “I was just a girl when he came to me to say his goodbyes before shipping off to India to join his loyal
native forces. He bent down on one knee and took my two small hands in his.

  “‘Darling child,’ he said, ‘I want to tell you something before I leave, in case I don’t return.’”

  Her father enjoyed human frailty for its own sake.

  “‘You must listen carefully. One day you will meet a young man and you will marry. But you will never have any idea what he’s really like. You will always be puzzled by his jokes. And then one day you will sit by his deathbed and it will seem that he is worse than a stranger—he is someone you have forgotten. Meddlesome aunts will say, “You had such a good life together,” but you will hear it as a reproach.’

  “Wiping a tear from my cheek, Daddy said, ‘It will not matter to him whether you were there or not. He is dead and he has forgotten you in just the way that dead people do.’

  “‘Oh, Daddy!’

  “‘But at least you will have learned that you are a series of meaningless moments, always vanishing.’

  “‘Stop! Daddy!’”

  In my time I had learned a lot about men in action, so I said, “Your father is a very wise man.”

  “Was. He never returned to us.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. It would have given me pleasure to shake his hand.”

  This gave her childish heart pause. She stood still for a minute and turned a keen glance up the river into the smoky thickness of the distance, which was suddenly flushed crimson with the last purple and blood-red glow of sunset.

  She continued.

  “The next day Daddy decided he would not go after all. But the colonel dropped by to say, ‘This is not your call.’ Daddy claimed that his collection of bottles—the claret, the Madeira, the rubicund port, the single-malt, the old hock, and, for private thoughts, the special rum punch—was at risk if he left.

  “‘Explain yourself, man,’ said Colonel Blinker Chapel.

  “‘It’s simple: if I go Grandpa will drink it all,’ he replied.

  “‘The devil! The devil you say!’

  “‘Now you understand me?’

  “‘I do indeed. But my dear fellow, those are the tides of war. Those the risks. I would not wait for a concrete bargain if I were you.’

  “Grandpa peeked from around the door. He’d been unlucky in life. He’d placed demands on his will, given it a shot, but by teatime it was dark and he was lost. Or that’s how he explained it. I was never very clear about where the tea came in. Anyway, the bottles were Daddy’s last hope, especially the old hock. The idea of the old hock made him ‘sanguine,’ and so he wished to stay.”

  It was not raining, but the clouds were a level dun. Rory handed out presents, just some little things. Keepsakes, I suppose you’d call them. Perhaps magic is a normal part of life.

  She continued. “I’ve seen a lot of gaiety in my noisy life, but nothing like what followed my father’s departure for the Malay front. At the time, I was merely a body, sitting at a table. I had no sense of myself as a person.”

  “Nor should you now,” I suggested. A halfhearted glare from Jake.

  “As my grandfather worked his way through Daddy’s bottles, he became…singular, as my aunts put it. (As in, ‘Oh, dear, how very singular!’) At dinnertime he would put a large cardboard box under the table. Wearing his stained boxer shorts with the cowboys on them (sent to him by an admirer in Wichita, Kansas, U.S.A.), and a bottle in his hand, he would crawl beneath the table and get in the box. Of course, we all bent under to see what he was doing. His knees poked up above the edge of the box. His head was as far down as he could manage. In-between swigs from Daddy’s bottles he sang some of the old songs about the old days in the old country. One of the songs went, ‘Tooraloorah something tooraloorah.’ I raised up and exclaimed, ‘Look at Grandpa!’ But all of my aunts in their long calico dresses with the buttons in front were gone. I looked around, my eyes burning with anguish. The room turned dark. I felt grandpa’s hand on my bare thigh, and I froze like a tiny, scared mouse.”

  At long last, some sunshine peeking out over yonder, even though the sun itself had been diminished by about a quarter. The segment of shaking sky had really done some damage. The dauntless sun clung to its pride.

  Apparently, she was done. Apparently, she thought that the rest of the story told itself. The artist pushed back his Borsalino with its fine woven grasses and whistled. He blew her a kiss. Jake looked on, lovestruck. The atrocious head of his cock had now succeeded in making a small tear in his pants and was purple with the exertion, like the strong man at the circus breaking his chains. Rory was napping in the grass, an emerald ash borer making its way through his hair, looking for a place to bore, I suppose. Some more fucking sunshine. Over yonder, if you please.

  45.

  “The universe [started] in a smooth and ordered state and [became] lumpy and disordered as time went on.”

  —STEPHEN HAWKING

  I’m sorry. This story is a mess. It started off well enough, long ago, but now it’s lumpy gravy. It began with a strange messenger coming to a house in the middle of the night, but that’s how all stories start. Then the Marquis, Halo, the Queen of Spells…that was all fine. Even Percy was okay, if you remember him. But this! I don’t even know how to explain why it’s a mess. Is it that the characters have “taken on a life of their own,” as some novelists claim that theirs do, but, lamentably, my characters don’t have a clue about how that might be done? Or is it that my readers (if you will allow me a hypothetical) have sensed my weakness and tried to turn my story into something more “conventional,” and, being essentially stupid, are running the thing into the ground? First they had a simple request for trees. Okay. I tried to be reasonable. I guess they thought they had carte blanche after that. “How ’bout some weather?” they asked. So they stuck in some weather. The sky was a “lambent apple-green”? Have you ever seen a sky like that? And what about that three-quarter sun? At which point, perhaps, they thought, “How about a sad story?” Then comes this crazy obsession of theirs with the British Raj. And now, this dreadful memoir stuff about growing up in an alcoholic household and being sexually abused by a family member. You’d think that readers had gotten enough of that in their own lives and would like something different in a novel. And I had such high hopes for Suzanne and Jake, a regular For Whom the Bell Tolls of tragic romance, but you can forget that now.

  Finally, sensing what a disaster they had on their hands, I think they just went for the universal plan B these days—“What about some porn?”—and threw in Jake’s ridiculous boner tearing a hole in his pants. Chaste Jake! Of all people. The very soul of modesty and youthful innocence. And just how is such a thing even done? I doubt that my male readers have ever had their erections tear a hole in their clothing, and I know that they’ve probably had really hard ones, good as they come. If erections could tear holes in cloth, I’d trust my boyos to be the first ones to accomplish it. And this title? “The Legend of Joe Dakes”? What’s that all about? Maybe they thought they could sell it to Boy’s Life. What’s next? Indian Joe?

  All I can say is, Culpam transferre in alium!

  Or perhaps it’s no one’s fault. Perhaps it’s simply that my story has used up its energy source like a star that has exhausted its once-infinite supply of hydrogen, and now it is taking on all kinds of weird behavior: it’s pulsing, losing control of its own boundaries, spinning ominously, growing hotter and hotter, and now on the cusp of exploding or collapsing, it can’t quite seem to make up its mind which.

  Well, if it’s just a law of nature taking effect, there’s not much to say about that, although this one is pretty disappointing as laws of nature go. After all, what do you say to gravity? “Stop it”? And in the end readers are their own sort of reality, a sort of parallel reality, folded into a hidden dimension like strings and their branes, where the proper laws of novel-making don’t apply, as I hope the meddlers can see now. Don’t you feel the opaque presence of the Reader, calmly paring His nails, now and then pointing downward and giving His awesome
directives, bent brooding over the spinning world?

  The immortal Gods do what they will, and I have nothing to say about that. But the characters, ah, there I think I still have some as yet unexpended and salutary authority to exercise.

  You’ll see. They’ll see.

  46.

  “Now, children, off to bed with you! The Sandman is coming, I can already hear him.”

  —E.T.A. HOFFMANN

  After Suzanne’s weird little autobiographical tale, we were all just standing around in the clearing before her boulder. Out of nowhere, coffee and a tray of cookies appeared, as if this were a reception for the artist. The whole thing made me sick. I began to improve my coffee with some brandy that her grandfather had apparently missed during his binge. I bided my time, but it was not long before it was long enough. I made my move.

  I went over to ’Zanne and removed a cup of coffee from her hand, took her cookie—a Lorna Doone, I believe, something store-bought—and threw it into my mouth, then chewed it menacingly.

  I said, “Can I speak with you for just a minute? Privately.”

  She looked worried. She had begun to relax, and I think she had enjoyed her little moment at the center of the stage. She may even have begun to believe that we’d all been moved by her preposterous tale and felt human sympathy for her. And she’d certainly caught Jake’s saucy eye—and liked what she saw there. But my only thought was that her tale now littered my tale like a kitchen garbage bag that some trailer-park refugee had tossed out the window of his ’94 Chevy at 50 miles per hour scattering green-bean tins, coffee grounds, and soiled diapers on the road.