He had gone to a small college in northern Virginia, and he had met a girl named Elaine
Gregson his sophomore year, and they had lived together for a couple of years. They were married in June, the year they graduated. The wedding was large, most of the guests being friends of Elaine's—she was a popular girl—or members of Elaine's substantial stock of family and relatives. Philip's mother came, as did several of Philip's friends, bookish misfits who huddled together, a dark-suited and sullen clump amid the brighter celebrants.
Philip's father was dead, but he was represented by Philip's grandfather, a dour, gray- bearded man who looked a little like Philip's father but did not drink and almost never spoke. It was never clear to Philip whether grandfather Kenan liked or disliked him.
Philip showed Lily photos of the wedding.
"She's very pretty," Lily said, looking up from the album. In the photo inspiring this observation, Philip's bride was lying on the ground in her green wedding dress, looking skyward, her smile demure. Her hands are hooked behind her head and her shimmering black hair is spilling out to the limits of the frame. You can see to the bottom of her dark eyes, and what is there is a white, pure contentment—a serenity at once arrogant and innocent—as the rich green grass springs up through her hair, and everything (the weather, her new husband, her friends) conspires to ensure her happiness.
"She's dead," Philip said.
"I'm sorry."
"Well," Philip said, realizing that he was uttering the precise words that Bingham had used in the hospital when similar condolences were offered, "that was a long time ago." He understood then that the hollowness was intentional, that the words were not meant to indicate healing or indifference, that they were, indeed, bitterly ironic.
"How did it happen?"
"She killed herself," Philip said.
Lily opened her mouth. Philip thought she might say it, might say, "That makes two," but she didn't.
She didn't say anything, but she looked so sad, so stricken, that Philip sought for words to comfort her, poor old woman.
"I don't think it was intentional," Philip said. "She was drinking a lot, and she was always going to all these different doctors, and she never really thought that pills and alcohol could harm her."
"Can you tell me about it?" Lily asked. She had moved to sit on the bed, and she rested her arm on Philip's armored leg.
Philip said, "Elaine was going to be a world- famous painter. Her degree was in fine arts and she painted these oil paintings that were terrific."
They were hard-edged, violently colored canvases, abstracts within which photorealistic details existed, a door knob, a tennis shoe, an apple. She was very serious about her work, and a professional; she worked every day. Whenever Philip thought of Elaine, he saw her in a gray apron, the pockets of which bristled with gaudy brushes. Her cheeks or forehead would usually bear some mark of the day's work, a splash of yellow or orange or some other primary color.
When they made love, he would smell the turpentine in her hair.
Philip told Lily that he had majored in English literature. He was, he said, one of that vast horde of post-war baby boomers that went to college as a matter of course (in Philip's case, primarily to please his mother). Philip had always been a good student, and he had gone on a scholarship.
Philip never thought of the college world as remotely connected to the mundane, dimly perceived world of employment, and none of his professors ever suggested that the two were connected. Philip was going to be a famous novelist. People like Norman Mailer were going to review his first novel.
Philip, closing his eyes, quoted Norman Mailer's review: "I just finished reading Philip Kenan's stunning novel, and I am frankly overwhelmed. This man is a genius, and I applaud his arrival on the literary scene, but I confess that I can no longer look at my own efforts with any joy or pride, and I doubt I will be able to write anything in the shadow of this profound talent. I am paralyzed by Mr. Kenan's monumental achievement, and I must retire from the field with what dignity I can summon."
Lily smiled. "Pretty impressive," she said.
"Oh, I've memorized my future reviews," Philip said. Philip lay back on the pillow and looked at the ceiling, studied its ominous bulges where yet new leaks threatened to sprout.
"Artists should not marry artists," Philip said. "And young artists are the worst. We thought we were protected, that talent was some sort of shield against reality."
They had ten thousand dollars in the bank, money from Elaine's trust fund, and that seemed more than enough to keep them going until fame and fortune arrived.
They rented a small house in Falls Church, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., and they planted a garden in back and acquired two cats, Seth and Jesus, and worked as diligently as young artists could amid the distractions of the late sixties and the confusion between lifestyle and actual work. Many of their friends, fellow artists, seemed to remain on the preparatory, research side of their art, expanding their minds with LSD, seeking enlightenment in communes, smoking dope and developing long raps about the nature of reality.
Compared to their colleagues, Philip and Elaine actually did considerable work. They smoked dope and listened to Bob Dylan and learned to play the obligatory folk instruments (guitar, harmonica, autoharp) and drove into Washington to protest the infamous war that was raging in Vietnam, but they also wrote and painted. Elaine even found a gallery in Georgetown that was willing to exhibit her paintings.
The war tried to claim Philip; he was called up for the draft. But his knees saved him. They were inclined to dislocate on whim, and the right knee had undergone corrective surgery after a nasty fall Philip had taken while ice skating with high school friends. The night of the day Philip failed his physical, Elaine threw a party for all their friends. Philip wore shorts displaying knees that Elaine had painted white and emblazoned with four red F's apiece.
"One day the money ran out," Philip said.
All of a sudden, it seemed. They had to get jobs. Philip hadn't finished his novel, and Elaine had made a few hundred dollars from her paintings—spent immediately in celebration— and the bank account was empty and the rent was coming due.
Potential employers (discovered through the help wanted ads in the Washington Post) were far less enthusiastic than college professors when contemplating fledgling artists.
Philip got a job working in the research library of a large government contractor. His job was to help catalogue the library by typing endless notecards.
Elaine got a job as an admissions clerk in an orthopedic hospital. She worked the three-to- eleven shift, and Philip worked from eight in the morning until five at night. During the week, they saw each other only briefly, in passing.
They tried to pack all the work and play they could into the weekends, and there was a kind of giddy excitement to those early months when they took some satisfaction out of having saved themselves from financial ruin and eviction. They had needed money, and they had gone into the bourgeois world and gotten jobs. They had done the adult thing, and it had been easy, actually, and it was, of course, an expedient measure, nothing for the long run.
Elaine quit the hospital after working there six months. "I don't want to work in a hospital," she said. "I don't like sick people. And nurses are worse than sick people. And the only thing worse than nurses are doctors."
She said that she would get a different job, but the next day, when Philip came home from work, she had set her easel up on the porch. She did not look for other employment for the rest of her life.
8.
One night, two years and two months after |i| Philip had begun work at the research library, he heard his father's voice, choked with self-pity and outrage.
"I knock myself out for nothing," his father's voice muttered. "I am getting nowhere except older. I do not deserve this. It is a rigged game."
Philip was in the kitchen, nursing a beer. Elaine had gone to bed hours ago, and Philip was
alone with his father's querulous voice and the flickering fluorescent light.
Philip felt a cold, crackling terror. In a moment of despairing clarity, he knew what he had heard. He would have preferred a ghost, a moldering ghost with broken teeth and dirt spilling out of its eye sockets. This transformation was more dreadful.
Philip had spoken the words himself.
"No," he said, trying to regain his voice, his own inflections. "No."
It was his father's bitterness that possessed him. It was the implacable weight of the System.
Less than a week later, Elaine asked him how the novel was going. Later she said she had asked in good faith, that she had been curious, interested, nothing more. Philip knew better. She was drunk and mean, mean with the failure of her own art, and he had answered her with his frustration and rage. He had told her that he was not writing a novel, that he was working at a rotten job in order to keep a wife with artistic pretensions supplied with booze and tranquilizers.
Elaine responded by saying that he had spent her money writing what had to be one of the most unengaging monologues ever written, and that pity and horror had kept her from voicing her true assessment of his novel. He needed, however, to hear the truth, and the truth was that The Unraveling of Raymond Hart (the working title) was one of the most insipid and bloated creations ever spawned. More succinctly, it was shit. And, while a publisher might publish sensational shit, a publisher would not publish boring shit, and Unraveling was boring enough to kill an accountant.
Once the battle lines were drawn, they fought often.
#
The research library was located in the basement of a gravy-colored, three-story brick building that squatted in the middle of a parking lot, its tiny windows like the glittering eyes of a mechanical spider. It was a big shoebox of a building, aggressively ugly inside and out and inhabited by unhappy people: secretaries who had lost all hope, narrow-shouldered men in cheap suits who lived in fear of being fired, fast- striding men in better suits who lived in fear of dying before they had fired their quota of timid underlings, and the real bosses, grim, self-assured men, ever vigilant to screw before being screwed.
Every morning, Philip would park and walk through the glass doors and smile at the security guard who never smiled back and get into the small elevator that smelled like dirty wet towels and ammonia and go down to the basement and walk down the green hall to the library. Mrs. Walston would already be there.
She was a dumpy woman, Mr. Grodinov's secretary, and as soon as Philip sat down at his desk, she would begin talking.
"Well Philip, it's good to see you," she would say. Then she would tell him in detail what she had had for breakfast that morning. She would describe the nuances of thought that prompted certain decisions (I thought, I'll have Grape Nuts, and then I thought, No, I had Grape Nuts two days ago and anyway I'm out of skim milk and only have the regular, which I don't care to use with cereal, and I thought, I'll have a grapefruit with maybe some toast and jam because I just the other day went to the supermarket and...). Philip would listen. Her words would fill him up, like wet concrete, and he would experience a sense of deep despair, brought on in part by Mrs. Walston's narration and in part by the knowledge, bom of experience, that the day offered nothing better, that, in fact, the drama of Mrs. Walston's morning repast would be the highlight of his office hours.
Mr. Grodinov, Philip's boss, would come in an hour or so after Philip. Mr. Grodinov was an old man, bald and small, shrinking daily it seemed into a dusty suit so old that its original color was now a matter of conjecture. Mr. Grodinov had come from Russia a hundred years ago or so, to the basement of AmMaBit, Inc.
"The old man is crazy as a shaken-up soda pop," Mrs. Walston would confide. "He don't do nothing but the crosswords in the newspaper, and they pay him for that. And he don't even do the crosswords right; he puts in extra letters and makes words up."
Philip actually liked Mr. Grodinov, who almost never spoke and did, indeed, spend most of his time doing crossword puzzles. Occasionally the old man would sigh or laugh.
When Philip was new, he had been logging in papers and abstracts with some speed and sense of purpose. Mr. Grodinov had picked up the stack of typed notecards, thumbed them like a card shark taking the measure of a new deck, and said, "This is very good, Mr. Kenan, but please remember the turtle is the winner."
This cryptic statement came clear over time. "The truth," Mr. Grodinov said one day, "is that he is nobody that comes here. Nobody cares about this libraries. They spit in it as a toilet."
Mr. Grodinov had sighed and taken off his shoe and absently scratched his ear with it. "This is a job of work, you see. This is a doing every day over and over of the same thing, and throwing out the old and putting in the new. It is not a thing for finishing, but only for doing. It is the System here, and that is our jobs."
#
Philip was aware that he had stopped talking when he heard Lily urging him to continue.
"The Old Ones were trying to come through, but the building wasn't properly located, maybe, or maybe there was too much individuality, too many nut cases like Mr. Grodinov. Sometimes, when I worked late, I'd notice a wet trail down a hall or hear a noise like a high, shrill whistle. I was writing on my H. P. Lovecraft novel a lot. Elaine hated the book, and somehow that made the writing all the more urgent."
"You were writing about monsters at home," Lily said, "and seeing them out of the corner of your eye at work."
Philip smiled ruefully. "That's what Amelia thinks too."
"But that's not it," Lily said. She pursed her lips, frowned. "So enlighten me."
"Writing isn't a cut-and-dried, cause-and- effect sort of thing," Philip said. "They were there to begin with, the monsters. I wrote about them. The writing came, as it does for all writers, from some deeper, more observant me. And then I took that back into the office. And, of course, Mr. Grodinov knew they were there, although he was unfamiliar with Lovecraft and didn't call them the Old Ones. But if you don't have the name of a thing, it is still the thing. I knew what he was talking about.
"Mr. Grodinov died, and they closed the library down. I was out of a job."
#
"They are after me," Mr. Grodinov had confided, the last day Philip saw him. "First they are after me in Russia because I say this is very wrong. Then to this countries they are after me but I am no fool." Mr. Grodinov tapped a throbbing vein in his temple to indicate the presence of brains. "I hide here in this undergrounds, safe from the secret police and the CIA and the FBI and the other letters, and I see right away that it is here too, but I think, 'It is nothings here, just small crappers, little mice things that cannot kill.' Ha ha. I forget and it grows and grows and now it comes out of the pipes, and it puts poisons to my brain so I dream about being already dead and my mouth sewed shut." Mr. Grodinov waved the half bottle of wine in the air. His gold-rimmed glasses flashed with some of the mad fire of his revolutionary youth. "They say, 'Mr. Grodinov, Mr. Grodinov, you are too old, go and die,' but I say nothing. I say nothing so they will not hear me and find me." Grodinov clutched Philip in an embrace of alcohol and stale old man. "You are like me, young Mr. Kenan, you think they don't come if you be very, very quiet and clever. But still they come. They smell the dream in you. They smell it and they, little tiny crappers at first—make you laugh to see them—they come."
Mr. Grodinov left early that day, and Mrs.Walston, scowling after his departure, said, "Well, the old fool's drunk."
Mr. Grodinov's wife called the next day. This in itself was extraordinary. "The way he talked," Mrs. Walston said, "I thought he was a widower."
Mrs. Grodinov had less English than her husband. "No come," she said. "Dead." She had broken into sobs then, and Mrs. Walston had had to wait until the old woman collected herself again. "Stuck," the woman said. "Stuck dead."
Mrs. Walston got the hospital's name and was able to confirm that the old man was dead of a stroke.
"Mark my words," Mrs. Wals
ton told Philip, "they'll close this office."
And she had been right.
"And you think that, somehow, the Old Ones killed your boss," Lily said.
Philip nodded. "Yes."
After Philip lost his job, he did not seek another one. And when the rent came due and they could not pay it, Elaine said, "I am moving in with Susan." Susan was an old college roommate, and she had never approved of Philip.
Philip nodded. "Fine." He moved back to his mother's house, and he slept in the bed he had slept in as a child, waking with a start when he thought he heard his father's footstep on the stairs.
One day Susan called. "Elaine's in the hospital," she screamed. "You son of a bitch." She had hung up then, and it was only when Philip arrived at the hospital that he learned his wife was dead, that she had died of an overdose several hours before her arrival at the emergency room.
Résumé With Monsters Page 5
