They run away to a neighboring county and are married by a justice of the peace. It is a purely romantic impulse.
What is the history of the woman whose actions we have described?
A farm girl from Kansas, whisked away by the jet set, having lost touch with her rustic roots, temporarily mad for the horses and cows, the barns and bales she sees through the windows of her limousine. Does she place all her affection for her past into the person of this courtly, even virginal man who does her a kindness?
Wouldn’t she come to regret it?
Hurt didn’t want to make either of them unsympathetic. They are devoted to one another, yet heroically unsuited.
She starts her own business from the home, designing and hand-sewing a line of science fiction–themed headbands.
She has a hot, sloppy affair with the town’s bachelor farmer, a gentle giant based on old Puffer over here, whatever his real name was. Hurt had never caught it.
One night, the night after Skunk has been banned from the car, they are driving through a mist, a silvery mist. And they come upon a hitchhiker, their old friend Olivia, standing weirdly beside a deserted country road in the silver mist, wearing the silver slacks that made her butt so famous, the silver jumpsuit, her beehive hair as it looked on her TV show, except now it has turned silver. Otherwise she looks strangely young. She is a beautiful old African-American woman with limpid eyes. Hurt was clearly seeing the woman who had played Uhura in the original Star Trek series. He couldn’t stop himself, she appeared out of the mist.
Of course, the silver pantsuit was his own invention. Well, he had stolen it from that other TV show. But if not for his magnificent, writerly brain making connections…
He was too fond of the word silver.
We hear about Olivia only from inconclusive e-mails and phone messages sent from the road. She never speaks, she never eats, she just rides with them, a harbinger of something. She is solid enough. The other women prod and pinch her. Skunk and Mr. Timberlake have a hard time piecing together this information. Isn’t Olivia dead? Didn’t she die? Everyone seems to vaguely recall hearing that Olivia had died at some point.
When they get to the hotel, it’s not there. It burned down in the 1980s. Maybe Olivia walks into the space where the hotel used to be and disappears.
It would be nice if the burned-out old hull of the hotel was still standing, but would that be realistic?
Skunk knew about the fire.
Here lies the heart of his culpability.
He knew the trip would end in blackened timbers, that the past had vanished and could not be reproduced or recaptured, no matter what that old gasbag Faulkner said. It was the prefab tragic ending of Skunk’s story, which he was writing for a national magazine. A human-interest piece that would elevate him from the world of pie catalogs forever. Skunk was, like Truman Capote as depicted in motion pictures, pushing reality, nudging it toward a desirable outcome for his article. Only his mother didn’t cotton to being used as human interest, especially without her knowledge, especially by her own son. And now to discover that he was willingly driving them forward into heartbreak!
Upon discovering the ruination and emptiness of life, the old women are destroyed. Their oldness comes out. Olivia—representing their glory or something—has melted and merged with the ashes and now they are just three tired, sick old women on the highway. Thus depleted of their essences thanks to Skunk’s machinations, and speeding along in the wee hours of the night because they wish to put as much distance as possible between them and the site of their mortal dreams, one of them falls asleep at the wheel—it has to be her, it has to be Skunk’s mother, and he must be haunted by the question of whether she fell asleep at the wheel or did it on purpose—and they drive under a rumbling log truck, and the Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction are no more.
Part of Hurt knew that this all had to do with his pending divorce. How he got from there to matricide was not something he wanted to consider. If you thought about such things too much you couldn’t write.
MALE SECRETARY looked charming on the napkin. A pedestrian job for Mr. Timberlake, but one of deep attentiveness and servitude, like that sad butler in the book about the sad butler.
Mr. Timberlake is like the sad butler who could only cry on the inside!
In the book, people would always be trying to “help” him “reclaim” his “dignity” by saying “personal assistant” or “executive assistant,” and Mr. Timberlake would proudly insist on his respectable station as a male secretary of the highest order and would never let anyone get away with trying to gussy it up in newfangled lingo as if it were a secret shame.
Why was Mr. Timberlake Skunk’s father? Why wasn’t Skunk’s father more like Hurt’s father?
Hurt’s father was an agile and boisterous man, unlike Mr. Timberlake in every way.
And why was Skunk’s mother dead? What would Hurt’s mother make of that?
When was the last time Hurt had visited his parents?
What about Hurt’s brother, who lived so far away?
What about Hurt’s sister?
In your last novel you gave the characters your parents’ names. You think if you amass and collate a sufficient amount of superficial details—how stiff the legs of your father’s pants got after a week on the shrimp boat, how he picked the trash fish out of the nets, how after a while he would see the sun on the horizon and not know whether it was coming up or going down, about the swells so high nothing could be cooked on the stovetop—a true portrait will emerge.
What you end up with is just fiction.
Appendix: Hurt’s Napkin Stories
Wheelbarrow
Hired a young couple to push me around in my wheelbarrow. They’re not a couple, but I’d like to see them get together. I’d like to fix them up. Maybe they’ll bond over how much they hate pushing me around in my wheelbarrow.
Texaco Sign
Travelers say that all of Oklahoma is covered in a white fog. The only thing visible is a tall Texaco sign, and beneath it three enormous white plastic tiles with red letters that spell out EAT.
Maybe when you get there it’s a plate of chicken, or maybe the sign keeps receding and receding and you never find out what there is to eat.
One report has come back: a coyote chasing a little white dog, but the sighting cannot be confirmed and it may have been an illusion brought on by the fog.
Encouragement
I think about all the encouragement I’ve received over the years. Are people just being friendly? Or do they hate me?
Mississippi River
I’ll never forget the first time Bill saw the Mississippi River.
He said, “Who cares?”
The Black Parasol
AMY O’BRIEN, ALL ALONE, TOOK A WALK AT NIGHT THROUGH THE dilapidated town square of Ordain, Mississippi, to the creepy old doll hospital where the horrible murders had taken place. She pressed her palm to the cool lemon stucco just as lightning struck.
O’Brien ducked around the corner and under an awning. Big, slow drops of rain began to pelt the canvas.
Past the end of the alley was a bar she had never noticed, made of red cinder blocks. It had a glossy black wooden door. Warm yellow light streamed from the dirty windows.
The rain and wind picked up. She ran for it.
The insides were dimmer and gloomier than the welcoming light had suggested. At the end of the long bar, one old man shook dice in a long leather cup while another old man watched. A jowly, furtive middle-aged couple sat at a table in a far corner, staring at their empty glasses.
The rain came harder still. The bar’s corrugated tin roof rang and roared with it, a sound both pleasant and frightening.
O’Brien stood just inside the door. There was no bartender. Powerful rumbling rattled the bottles. She stepped up bravely and took her place on a stool. O’Brien steadied herself, putting her hands on the clammy bar. The surface was light green streaked with black, made of futuristic material,
like a kitchen counter from the 1950s, so ugly. The old men kept going with their game. O’Brien turned and tried to get a better look at the soft, chubby couple—man and wife, she imagined, having a terrible anniversary.
When she turned again the bartender was there, slicing up a puny lime on a white plastic cutting board as if he’d been there the whole time. He looked up at her and smiled. He was a handsome, dark guy with crooked teeth and a funny hat. Like, a half black guy, maybe? Not that it mattered. She kicked herself for even wondering. The air smelled like limes. O’Brien heard guitar music, snatches and hints above the rain outside.
“You ordering, sweetheart?” said the bartender.
“Yes, please.”
He wiped his hands on his apron.
“Got some ID on you, sweetheart?”
“Oh, I’m twenty-five. I get that a lot.”
“Still need to see it, darling.”
He didn’t look any older than O’Brien, and certainly not old enough to call women “sweetheart” and “darling” with such casual sincerity. Was it some irritating Mississippi affectation? She thought she would say something about it, but didn’t. She gave him her driver’s license.
“Could I get a white wine spritzer?”
He laughed at her.
“Something funny?”
“It’s a funny drink.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “Yeah, but it’s what I want.”
“You got it, sweetheart.”
The bottle of white he grabbed from the little glass-doored cooler had about a quarter left in it, the cork barely jammed into the neck.
She finished half her drink in two desperate gulps.
“Oh baby,” she said.
“Whoa, you really wanted that white wine spritzer.”
“Brother, you have no idea. Tell me about your hat.”
He took it off and examined it. His hair was very curly. He frowned and picked a piece of lint off the crown of his funny hat.
“Want to hold it?” he said.
“No thanks, sport.”
He showed it to her from a number of angles. “It’s felt, but sturdy. It’s bespoke. Do you know what that means?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, a lot of people don’t know what that means. But okay, you’re all right. I dated this hatter from Tennessee. She’s famous on the internet. I did a lot of research on this hat.” He put it on again, cocked it just so. “Some call it a Goober hat or a Jughead hat. I saw an old picture of one and they called it a whoopee cap. It was also associated with juvenile delinquency. You’re supposed to stick collectible pins in it, but I don’t choose to do that. The felt is mulberry, an unusual color for this kind of hat. My girlfriend picked it out, my ex-girlfriend, the well-known hatter, she picked out the color, said it went well with my rich skin tone. Well, you’d have to see it in the light.”
O’Brien downed the rest of her spritzer. “That was one sour-ass spritzer,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m sorry, honey. Don’t serve much white wine in here. I’m sure that bottle was pretty skunky. Want the rest of it? No charge.”
“Hell yes,” she said.
The door blew open. A flash of purple lightning showed a tall, thin figure draped in a long black cape. O’Brien could smell stinking wet wool all the way across the room.
“No book tonight, Doctor?”
The cadaverous stranger shook his head.
“Too wet, I guess,” said the bartender.
The man hung his dripping cape on a peg by the door. His slate-dark hair, parted in the middle, reached his shoulders. Putting down his twisty walking stick, he wrung out one side of his hair and then the other, splashing rainwater on the floor, and moved to a large round table in the middle of the bar, obviously his regular spot.
The bartender got a cheap bottle of port and filled a whole water glass with it. After he had delivered it to the tall, thin man, he came back and leaned over the bar, speaking quietly to O’Brien as if in confidence. “Dr. Cherubino. He usually brings his big black book. It must be two feet tall and a foot across and five inches thick. I don’t know how he carries it. He lays it out on that table there and gets out an old ink bottle and some blotting paper and writes in it with a big old goose-quill pen.”
“What is it?”
“You should go ask him about it.”
O’Brien looked over her shoulder. The man was there in the dark, staring at her. She gave a little shudder.
“No thanks.”
The bartender pushed another spritzer in front of her.
“How old you think he is?”
O’Brien took the tiniest sip of the new spritzer. She grimaced.
“Oh, that’s the worst,” she said. “Yeah, I don’t want to look at him again. I don’t know, fifty-five?”
“That’s the thing. He must be eighty. He’s been all over the world. People gave him herbs and all kinds of things to make him live longer. Techniques and secrets.”
Despite herself, O’Brien looked back at the doctor again. He was crumbling something into his port, maybe a dried leaf.
“You should talk to him. What else are you going to do? You two would really hit it off.”
“Seems like a loner.”
“Aw, he’s an old ham.”
The bartender went back to his sad lime. O’Brien contemplated her flat spritzer. She looked back at the old man and thought what the hell. She went over.
“Hi, I’m O’Brien. Do you mind if I sit down?”
He spoke without looking at her. “When I was a young man I broke my back entirely. I was healed by a weird shaman.”
O’Brien took it as a yes. She pulled out a chair at the end of the table.
“I like your stick,” she said.
“Crepe myrtle,” he said. And now that she was seated he looked at her. “According to Robert Graves, the myrtle is simultaneously the tree of love and the tree of death.”
“Wow,” said O’Brien.
Dr. Cherubino’s face was drawn and sunken, streaked with violet but not especially wrinkled. His eyes glowed black.
“What about this book of yours?” said O’Brien. “I’m hearing about a book.”
Dr. Cherubino looked down at the table as if expecting to see his book in its usual place.
“I collect ghost stories,” he said. “Ghosts interest us because they seem to blur so many lines we don’t acknowledge—and by blurring, to make them clearer, curiously. Presence and absence, life and death, dreaming and waking, the real and the unreal, sanity and madness. These are just a few of the categories we refer to as ‘opposites,’ unthinkingly.”
“So you write ghost stories?”
“I seek them out. I try to record them faithfully. Do you have any?”
“Who, me? No. I mean, I apparently said some strange things as a kid.”
“Please elaborate.”
“You know, I’m Korean. I don’t know if that has anything to do with it. Don’t ever remember being there. I was adopted, obvi. I complained that somebody named ‘Hot Dog’ was keeping me up all night making faces at me, which everybody thought was hilarious. And Mom said, ‘Are they funny faces?’ Apparently I shook really hard, I shook all over, and I said, ‘No, he scare me.’ Wow, I had forgotten. It’s stupid. ‘He scare me.’” She laughed. “Creepy.”
“I’d like more details, if you please,” said Dr. Cherubino.
O’Brien shrugged. “I was little. There was other stuff.”
“If I might interview your parents…”
“They don’t remember it any better than I do, really. It’s just things we say when we get together. I don’t know if you can even call them memories anymore. Just silly things we say that make us laugh. Inside jokes, family stuff.”
The bartender approached. “I’m stepping outside for a smoke,” he said. “Y’all need anything?”
“I’d be honored to buy you a drink,” said Dr. Cherubino to O’Brien. “I hope you will be encouraged to continue our convers
ation over it.”
“Maybe just a bitters and soda,” she said. “But you don’t have to pay.”
“Bitters and soda on the house, sweetheart,” said the bartender. He went to get it.
“I don’t believe I know your people,” said Dr. Cherubino. He took a luxurious swallow of bad port and licked his lips. “Are they immigrants to the area?”
“This area?” said O’Brien. “I’m not from around here.”
Dr. Cherubino looked disappointed. He dabbed at himself with a cocktail napkin. “My work is exclusively concerned with a fifty-mile radius, of which I like to fancy this establishment the exact center,” he said.
He leaned in. O’Brien leaned back. He leaned in closer, his hot breath like an expensive and dreadful cheese. O’Brien moved her chair.
“Are you quite aware,” he said.
“Bitters and soda,” the bartender interrupted, bringing the drink.
“Pretty,” said O’Brien.
It was pretty—a big, clean water glass. There were bubbles and lots of ice. The angostura wafted pinkly, coloring the water.
“I put a lime in it,” said the bartender. He looked proud.
O’Brien turned and looked at his butt as he walked away, apron strings tied above it. He had a little spring in his step. He pushed his bespoke hat forward on his head in what he probably thought of as “a jaunty angle.”
When she turned back to face the doctor, his big, sad eyes looked like hypno wheels. His long hair hung down, the color of a gravestone rubbing with a No. 2 pencil. He was an uncanny-looking dude wearing a lot of rings with gems of dark colors, blood and indigo. His caved-in cheeks were like black holes trying to suck in the rest of his face. He should have had moss growing on him. His eyelashes were like cobwebs.
“My dear, you look peaked,” he said. “A sip of soda might do you good.”
She looked at it, paranoid. Sure it was pretty. It glowed, like a witch’s frosted house. Drink it down. The magic potion. Come on, dearie, it’s just like medicine. Where was she? She didn’t know anybody. Dr. Cherubino and the bartender could be in on it together. They could be adept at luring.
Movie Stars Page 12
