by Jonathan Dee
Finally Mal appeared, barefoot, in shorts; before taking a seat or saying a word to any of us he went around and pulled down all the window shades. He returned to his seat and stood beside it, looking around the room, whispering something to himself. I realized he was counting heads.
Anybody seen Milo? he said. No response.
Well, that’s okay, I guess, Mal said, and sat. He picked up a remote on the table beside him; there was a kind of popping sound, and then Elaine’s Kerouac film began to roll.
He let it run through twice, then switched it off. There was a moment of confusion – it’s not customary to hold this sort of formal screening of in-house work – in which Elaine stole a glance over at me and cocked her head to ask if I knew what this was all about. I shrugged discreetly to convey to her that no one was more in the dark than I was.
Around the table there was a bit of scattered, tentative applause. Mal was still looking at the blank screen. Finally he spun around in his chair.
Nice, he said, but no. I do like the way it reverses the usual imagery, I mean, it makes the whole notion of driving a car seem old-fashioned, retro. Most car ads you see are basically high-gloss porn.
It was startling – if I understood him right – to hear him refer to Elaine’s piece as an ad. He never does that.
The thing is the quote, he went on. The entire aural element of the piece is lifted from Jack Kerouac. I have that right, don’t I?
Silence. I don’t think Elaine was sure whether or not she was being addressed directly.
We could include an acknowledgment, I said, if that’s what you mean.
No, that’s not what I mean. The point is we don’t do that. My first thought was that Elaine should know this by now. But then I thought maybe not: maybe I haven’t made it clear enough, to everyone. So here it is. We don’t co-opt, we don’t filch value, no matter the source. Advertising has skated by on that method for decades. Any artistic value a piece like this one might have is value established somewhere else, in some other context, established and then bought. That’s why people hate advertising, even at the same time as they like the ads themselves. Stealing value. Well, we’re putting a stop to that here. We are about original value, about the creation of value. Let other art derive itself from us! No looting, no sampling, no colonizing of the past!
His voice was raised, and he wasn’t smiling. Elaine was leaning back in her chair, staring at him, her neck mottled red. His exhortation hung in the air for a few seconds.
The original, he said, more quietly. The unique. The unrepeatable. The perfect magic of the artifact. This is our new creed. That’s what I want. That’s what we will all, as of now, be consecrating our efforts towards. Our direction has evolved: that’s only natural. This just seemed like a good opportunity to make that clear. So this piece you all just saw: we won’t be using it. Thank you all for coming.
ELAINE, NEEDLESS to say, tracked me down in my office within the hour. I shut the door, but still she was so loud that I figured the best thing to do was get her off the site.
Okay, fine, she said, glaring. The least you could do is buy me a few drinks.
I took her to El Sombrero. She sat in silence through one margarita, her nostrils flared.
You know, I said finally, I had nothing to do with all that. I certainly would have tried to change his mind if—
Filching value, is that what he said? She shook her head. Jesus. You know what I think it’s really about? Pride. He doesn’t like the idea that he’d have to share credit for the provenance of one of these artworks with poor old dead Jack Kerouac.
I don’t know that that’s it. It’s more like, I don’t know, a point of dogma with him or something.
Dogma! Dogma bums! So did he think it was demeaning to Kerouac, is that it? That I was stealing from him? Did you know that I wrote my whole master’s thesis on the Beats? I went on a road trip to fucking Lowell when I was in college, for Christ’s sake! I visited his house!
The bartender looked at us sternly. I held up one hand and nodded to reassure him.
And he said it would be okay if I wrote the text myself, she muttered, quieter for the moment. But that’s the whole point. On the Road is an artifact of a specific past, a time we can’t go back to. What are we supposed to do, create a new past?What is this, Year One? What is he, fucking Pol Pot or something?
I drove home because I was the less drunk of the two of us, but it was still a mistake; I was plenty shaky myself. By the time we turned down the Palladio driveway, I was down to about fifteen miles an hour. Elaine started reciting.
So in America when the sun goes down, she said, and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all those people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old …
Other lights were on, in other rooms, but we saw no one. Somewhere on the road home oblivion had kicked in: in the hallway, walking behind me, she put her hand through my legs and squeezed, giggling delightedly when I jumped. Drunkenness always tends to release something in her, for better or worse. I was impatient with it tonight; but then, as she turned off the light I had just turned on and started fumbling with my shirt buttons, a strange thing happened, strange at least for me: that angry impatience fused with my lust, redoubled it, and it wasn’t like my desire to push her away from me just gave way to a desire to fuck her: the two desires were suddenly one and the same.
I put my hands under her arms, lifted her to a standing position again, and spun her around. She took two steps toward the bed in the darkness, but I shoved her the rest of the way, until she fell across it.
Oooh, she said; a little too sarcastically, I thought.
That didn’t help. Before long, though, her growls were real, and I closed my eyes and banged into her as hard, as violently as I could. I wanted to hurt her, there’s no question about it. But she didn’t seem to get it. Then, with my chest against her back, I withdrew, shifted up a little, pushed forward again.
Whoa, she said, with a kind of nervous flutter.
I kept on.
Hey, she said. Hey! Stop! Finally she got her hands underneath her and did a kind of pushup, so that I lost my balance. I rolled all the way on to the floor, and sat there.
You were hurting me there, she said. Jesus, you must be drunker than I thought.
I’m sorry, I said.
We were both breathing hard. She had raised herself up on her elbows and I could feel her staring down at me as I sat on the floor.
That’s not like you. I mean, you could ask. Don’t bother, ’cause the answer’s no, but you could ask, you know what I mean?
I’m sorry, I repeated. I guess I just got too excited.
I just stared at the wall ahead of me. Finally I felt her drop herself back across the bed.
What the fuck is going on around here today? she said.
* * *
I WENT TO your house, you know. I flew to Newark. I put the ticket on my credit card and flew out there. What a mistake, to have warned you that I was coming: but I had no inkling of that yet. I was spending money we didn’t have anyway, so there seemed no sense in limiting myself; I rented a car at the airport, spread out one of those Triple A maps on the passenger seat beside me, and found Ulster.
Nothing much to see. It’s the nicest town around there, I suppose, but then the surrounding towns look practically like Appalachia. You’d never really prepared me for it, the bald hills, the scruffy pines, the houses with collapsing porches and front yards full of rusting iron chairs and dee
r antlers mounted over the garage door; but I suppose you didn’t feel the need of it, you didn’t think I’d ever see it, or that you’d ever see it again either. At what I supposed was the center of town I parked just short of the traffic light and went into the first open store I saw, a cluttered, shabby Rexall pharmacy with a few of the ceiling panels missing, a few of the fluorescent lights burned out.
Excuse me, I said to the back of a gray head, and a thin, white-haired lady, bird-featured, eyeglasses hung round her neck with a black shoelace, turned to face me with a kind of dull mistrust. I don’t imagine they got a lot of strangers coming through that town.
Do you have a phone booth in here?
The stare she was giving me was mostly because of my accent, I realized. She shook her head no, as if the word no might not be part of whatever language I was speaking.
A phone book, then? A local phone book? She gazed at me blankly. I just need to look up an address, for a family in town. I’ve lost it, and they’re expecting me.
She cleared her throat. What family?
The Howes.
She cocked her head. Unhurriedly, without ever smiling or making some other kind of sympathetic gesture toward me, she patted down the apron she wore over her flat front, then searched through the mess around the register, until at length she located a pencil and a notepad. She wrote down the address, along with directions to the house, tore the paper off, and handed it to me.
You can thank me by telling them they still owe me two hundred and fourteen dollars, she said. Where are you from, anyway?
But the bell over the door was already ringing behind me.
* * *
DID I DO something wrong? Back in Berkeley? I mean, I always had the sense, in the year or so that we were together, that I had to be careful, that Molly was poised for flight in some sense, that the balance was delicate in terms of holding her life and mine together. Still, it all seemed to be going well, until one day she left and never came back. What happened? Should I have insisted on going out to Ulster with her? Should I not have followed her out there; should I have been more patient, shown more trust in her? Should I not have left all those phone messages, or announced I was coming, just springing a surprise capture on her instead, as one does with an animal or a mental patient?
I wish the answers were clear. Actually, what I wish is that the answer were clearly yes. Because such a mistake, the mistake of a young man too much in love, would gnaw at me, there’s no denying it: still, it would be easier to carry through life than the suspicion of a much more vague, ingrained, broad-based, personal insufficiency. I couldn’t hold her, I couldn’t make myself indispensable to her, and that kind of personal failure isn’t located in any act, one that might at least in the realm of fantasy be taken back or amended. I fell short; and that’s much harder to accept.
* * *
THAT WHOLE EPISODE with Mal essentially rejecting Elaine’s Kerouac film as too derivative – I confess I thought of it at the time as a small fire to be put out, a matter of mollifying Elaine, trying to let her know I sympathized with her bewilderment at having been humiliated in front of the entire staff and at the same time to let her know that Mal’s decisions, hard to understand though they might be, were basically unappealable. Well, I underestimated its effect. No work of art has ever been rejected here before. It’s all I hear anyone around here talk about: when they talk at all, that is, when they don’t clam up because they see me coming.
Jerry Strauss is carrying around what he calls a formal letter of protest, trying rather confrontationally to persuade everyone to sign it. Most have; those who refuse have a hard time with him.
It’s about your fucking freedom! he says. Does that mean so little to you?
Look, Daniel told him. (Daniel is one of the few people who dares to stand up to him.) A letter of protest, what’s that? Will it do anything? Will he reconsider?
If we’re all together on it—
Of course he won’t. This place is not a democracy. And I’m glad it’s not. Has he been wrong about anything yet?
He’s wrong about this. Ever since he brought back the goddamn Madwoman in the Attic up there—
He’s not wrong about it. That film of Elaine’s, God knows I love her, but that was a piece of shit, and he was dead-on right about why. I’m not going to the barricades over something like that. It’s childish.
You know, Jerry said, holding the typed letter a little too tightly in his hand, this really only means something if every name here is on it.
And why is that, if you value your independence so much? You’re just trying to have it both ways, to pretend you’re a rebel and still cover your ass. All you’ll do is make yourself feel better in the most superficial way. A petition! It’s like something you’d do in fucking high school.
Goddamn coward, Jerry said. Just admit that you’re too afraid of losing your job.
Admit it? Daniel said, laughing. Of course I want to keep my job! It’s nothing to admit! This is the best job in the history of the world. What, Jerry, do you want to go back to publishing zines and working at Kinko’s?
Elaine is never a part of these conversations that I can see. I guess the thinking is that she’s still too upset. Discretion keeps me from asking them, just as a way of taking part, if they know where she’s sleeping now. Her stuff has disappeared from my room.
* * *
THE HOUSE WAS a simple white condo with a split-rail fence in front, and a withered-looking garden on the side not shadowed by the rim of the valley. It was mid-afternoon but it seemed much later there; all the lights were on inside. No one else was in sight. The sky was a kind of bleached blue, one of those early spring days that seem surprisingly cold, unfairly cold.
I thought you were in there. I rang the doorbell, waited, rang it again. It was possible that all those blazing lights were on some sort of theft-deterring automatic timer, but just as that occurred to me, I saw someone moving, through the filmy curtain over the narrow window beside the door. Someone walked right through my field of vision and out of it again, without so much as a hitch in her step or a glance toward the door.
I knocked, even though I had heard the doorbell ringing in the house. Finally, crazed with the thought that you were inside, I jumped over the railing at the end of the porch and walked around to stand in the garden, the direction in which that figure had traveled. I found myself at about chin level with the sill of the kitchen window.
This was your mother; that much was obvious. Her gray hair was in a bun, and she wore a blue pants suit (maybe she went to an office on weekends, I thought), but she had that same mouth, that same smooth, too-fair skin. I knocked on the kitchen window and this time she heard me, though she didn’t jump or scream, as well she might have under the circumstances. She smiled at me as if this were the most natural thing in the world, to find a stranger staring and knocking at you on the other side of the kitchen window. Then she left the room. Maybe she’s phoning the police, I thought, chinning myself on the windowsill to try to see further into the house; but then I heard the front door open at last, and a maternal voice chirped, May I help you with something?
With all the good manners I could muster, I walked around the railing and back up the porch stairs, brushing dirt off my pants.
Are you Mrs Howe?
Kay, she said.
Her eyes were very bright, very wide.
Is Molly in?
Molly’s out, Kay said. Would you like to wait for her?
If I might, yes, thank you. She held her arm out, and I stepped across the threshold, through the vestibule, into the bright living room.
Do you know when she’s coming back? I said.
But Kay had already forgotten about me; with one knee up on the arm of the couch, she was straightening the pictures.
Left alone, I sat politely in the living room for a while. I had my bag in the car but I didn’t quite feel right about bringing it in yet. After an hour had passed, during which your mother w
alked by me four times, humming to herself, without so much as looking at me, I felt free to give myself a tour. At the top of the stairs was, I guessed, your room. It was unmistakably the bedroom of a young girl: the novels and high school textbooks still in the low, two-shelf bookcase, the stenciled mural on one wall of characters from nursery rhymes, the fringed and tasseled spread on the old wooden bed with the half-moon headboard. No photos in there, though, of you or anyone else, which I thought was odd; no trophies or mementos or anything specific to who you were, or are; still, that didn’t stop me from breathing the air in there, the atmosphere of you at age eight, age ten, age fourteen, as if I were on the top of a mountain.
I heard Kay humming as I came downstairs again. She was polishing the silver. It was now nearly six o’clock; there was no sign of you; and I was starving. Yet for all Kay’s industriousness I saw no sign that she was planning dinner, for herself or for anyone else. I hadn’t seen her eat all day.
Did Molly say what time she might be back?
No, dear, Kay said, smiling.
Because I wasn’t really … I hadn’t planned … I trailed off feebly, not sure how to say politely any of the things it occurred to me to say. Finally I hit upon:
Mrs Howe, since I’m putting you to so much trouble, I’d be happy to drive into town and pick up something for dinner.
She smiled reproachfully at me, as one would at a small child. Oh, you wouldn’t find anything open now, this late on a Sunday, she said. Not in a little town like this.
