As for my father, on the other hand, I wouldn’t have been able to think of a metaphor. He has wandered and proliferated. He has been a continuous flow of ideas. He has long since, I believe, lost track of the mariner’s church with its eccentric Unitarian pastor, and its few familieswho attend its occasional services and are pleased to get a free meal now and then from the refectory in the rear of the building, and drink the wine left over from communion. While I find it hard to believe that he hasn’t got some knowledge of the surpluses that this Trust has amassed over the years, until now never critically scrutinized by anyone, the result of luck and del Russe’s quiet brinkmanship, I believe he truly doesn’t understand what the Almanac branch means.
So, the man sat with his coffee and asked questions. He put them in a way (the guy was clever) that didn’t totally disarm me, but did give me no sense that he posed any threat. Had I known, or even suspected his motives, I would have shown him to the door—or else confused him with a bundle of answers that would have sent him off after another scent altogether. But for a quarter of an hour I did respond. It embarrasses me to record, though I must, that there was some vague sense in this procedure, and in his very politeness, that the council was going to bestow some award on the Trust. If only I had asked.
Oh yes, I had a clear childhood memory of the trip Berg and his father took together down to the islands, when the corporation was first being set up, though of course my brother Berg didn’t comprehend at the time what its function was to be, or for that matter anything else about it. It was a funny question, reaching so far back in our family history, but it didn’t seem incriminating. He crossed his legs, and took his glasses off, and put them on again. Yes, I remembered the dinner party where some of my father’s associates—several of those figures who toiled in the more obscure branches of the Sprawl, Pannett and—
“Neden, Patrick Neden?”
Well, yes, Neden sounded right, but they were men whom I had never met before nor since, but whose names occasionally wafted by, whom Faw was never much willing to talk about, and about them I knew nothing. I hadn’t even known that Neden’s given name was Patrick. Was it?
“If it is the same Neden,” he said.
How did you know about that dinner? I asked.
Someone else had told him about it, no big deal, he assured me. He was jotting some of this down. Did I remember anything more about the party? But I wasn’t seeing how this tied in to anything that would interest the National Council of Churches, I told him. It felt a little like the first time I tasted champagne, which was just what Berg had told me it would be like, just as he had remembered it when Faw proudly announced that his oldest son was being made a vice-president in the Trust.
“That’s Burke?”
Berg, we call him.
“Berg,” noting it.
Because his fingers, well he didn’t need to know that, and I was wondering what he did need to know, wouldn’t it be easiest to ask me in so many words, but I was remembering how that night Berg had quite a case of the swirlees, and a hangover the morning after that grand dinner. Of course I wasn’t going to tell this man any of that. It wasn’t any of his concern. He asked about the church and if I could tell him anything about its connection to this wonderfully generous donor, the Gulf Stream Trust. I don’t know about the church, but as for Cape Hatteras, where it is, it was always my understanding that this was the northernmost location on the Eastern seaboard that the Gulf Stream truly touched. I knew that my father loved coincidences—as in, things coinciding.
“Well, it is a marvelous program,” the man smiled, which put me back at ease. I asked if he would leave his card, so that my father could be in touch with him. He left it on the table in the foyer when I was letting him out, but when I went back to look at it, half an hour later, it was gone.
Maybe I wasn’t wrong to have trusted him, I thought, but when he left, I felt a weight in my chest and a megrim’s heat played around my temples. I pondered, in my owninsular and too-sweeping manner, that evil worked best when it was pitted against love. Love just isn’t as strong a force as evil. Look at my experience, evil having taken Desmond away, having polluted my few attempts at making love work for me, and who would I be to contradict it? I put the cup in the sink, and stared at the windows of the building across the way, hoping maybe that something might happen in them that would distract me; they were a blank, though. Back in the study, I took up the envelope the visitor had left behind. From the papers he’d left with me for Faw to consider—which I then took out and read (since the envelope was unsealed)—my opinion of evil expanded.
While I am tending to business, there is another matter I want to address. I hadn’t understood it until I went back and reread this, my almanac, hoping to discover some common thread of thinking through it all. It is well known that we least understand what is right there in front of us. How strange it is then to look over these other pages, my pages, and come to the realization that my almanac has turned out to be so much a sexual history. I would never have guessed that it would turn out like this. Everything I have said, for what it’s worth, is the truth. Even so, I stand before myself and confess that my life has been largely led in solitude. I’ve been married to a husband not even for a hundred days before retiring back into myself; so weak was my sense of being a wife that I have never been compelled to push for a divorce. Cutts was not impressed enough with my way of leaving him to raise much of a protest—indeed, I think he might have felt relieved to know I wasstill married and thus less threatened his own marriage. Maybe I was becoming too much of a burden on his sense of personal innocence—he let me leave, and doesn’t seem to mind that I hardly ever call him and Bea anymore, haven’t seen them for over a year. There is not a woman I know—and, I admit, I don’t know that many in any deep way, outside Erin, and Bea, and Djuna—who I feel is not as sexuallyexperienced as I, and yet look. Bea and Erin I am convinced have never encountered a Li Zhang in their lives. Erin, I am sure, has never had an affair: the moment she slept with Segredo was the moment she must have known she was going to come clean with Faw and leave the family; to her, this must have been the only honorable equation. Bea, I happen to believe, has never cheated on her husband, or if she has it was an uncomplicated, trivial, almost imperceptible flash of curiosity. Neither, to be sure, has Djuna on hers, even after she passed into widowhood. So where does this place me? What does it mean I’ve been, or am? The thread I discovered is not one I’d have predicted would trace its way through the center of my life. Even in the face of what I’ve disclosed, I consider myself retiring, ingenuous, and, yes, hardly “sexed-up.” I have had some lovers since I walked out of the aerie and back into my Brush life. None of them in any way involved with the Sprawl, just casual things, more or less haphazard as that first encounter with Zhang, infatuation being a state of mind I have now thoroughly discarded as a trashy waste of time. The travail of intimacy seems too hard to press on with given how probable it is that whatever I get myself into will fail. And how much should I trust a self who reviews her history with men and, despite all, still senses that Zhang’s malice was the closest pass at perfect release that love has to offer? Maybe, in the end, it isn’t that I am sexually inexperienced, but rather sexually detached, disengaged, disinherited.
“You don’t know a house until you’ve spent some time in its basement, you don’t know a house till you’ve lived in its attic,” one of my teachers at school said once. We were reading Emily Brontë or Mary Shelley, or one of those old Gothicists, where these two extremities of the house are the loci of mystery and where the key to understanding those who have dwelled in the house is hidden. Cellars are dark, and dug into the earth, where the chthonian spirits venture through fissures in the loam to blow their noxious air into the intruder’s gaping mouth. Attics, the other extremity,are where we store things we no longer want to look at or live with on a daily basis—worn-out furniture, dated clothing, broken typewriters, and back in the olden days, insane relatives
. Everything between them is where we live and would just as soon keep living.
At Scrub Farm the cellar was merely a place to put things if you secretly wanted them to be destroyed by rust or mildew. Erin told me in one of her letters (it made me think she wanted to come home, that she missed us and simply had lost the way back), told me that she believed Faw stored her suitcases in the cellar because deep down he never wanted her to leave. It is possible; he, like me, has never remarried, is something of a monk from what I can tell. And given that he works so much by intuition I’d not put it past him to have “thought” that far ahead, when we first moved into the house out on Shelter.
So what about the attic? Am I stretching my metaphor out of form to look on the attic as a place of exposure, as an analogue to this film of Berg’s that Djuna has called me, all in hysterics, to tell me about? Maybe so, but if I hadn’t had those experiences with intimacy and its estimable, if often bloodless, procedures and ends, then I might have a narrower-minded reaction to this film that my brother is in the midst of making. My reaction is not narrow, though. And it has everything to do with attics, with doing things that we think of as dark and damp as cellars can be, but revealed in a lightness and warmth we associate—or, at least I do—with attics. Moreover, attics have windows, often architecturally whimsical affairs shaped like half moons, or triangles, and if I were in an attic I would be able to look down upon his gestures, and watch him putting other people, actors, through the paces he seems to think might explain our own, and I would open that window and cry out “It’s all a lie” to the lot of them moving about like Gumby’s ant enemies, descended from the widow’s walk to the orchard to prey upon its fruit, below.
The rite of passage—call it a rite, call it passage—from producer to writer-director had been simple for Berg, though he knew it might be more difficult for his colleagues to accept. Berg had lost his creative impulse, as we all are susceptible to doing, in his early twenties, and if Faw had intended to sterilize him, redirect him a little, by sending him to that private school, limit him, and hone him in a bit so that he would loop back into the Sprawl, take up with its activities, be his father’s son, he succeeded handily. At least for a while. Why leave flighty things unsecured, was a phrase I once heard postmidnight on the box. The baseball player who said it might have said it in other words—the subject was loans, second mortgages to be exact—but I thought it was an appropriate epigraph in general. Faw had secured Berg as you secure a kite to a stake when you run inside to get another ball of string because the wind high up is running so nicely, and the kite is already out as far as the lead you’ve got on it will go. The only problem is you can come back outside, full of anticipation, excited at the prospect of tying on the extra length of string with the hope of letting your kite up higher and higher, and find that in the short time you were away the wind had died, and the kite fluttered down. Or else, as in the case of Berg, that the wind had picked up, and the string had broken.
This gnarled world of the art film was governed by fewer laws and forces than that of commercial film making. Money here was, as elsewhere, the prime motivator when people or things resisted movement, and was the most effective tranquilizer when they moved either too fast or in the wrong direction. It was, good old money, usually the ultimate purpose, the end in view of making an art film, as well as a commercial one. So, Berg’s access to pure, clean money, his willingness to provide the capital that could push matters along, then swing right around again to bringback home to the sugar shack more nice sugar was only one of the assets he knew he could bring to the project he had in mind. The great green leverager was how he’d thought of himself before. Now he could be something more. Granted, money was an idea, but there were worlds of ideas out there that were valuable in and of themselves, and Berg had reached down into his past and brought one forth, all viscous and shivering with promise, wanting to breathe, waiting only for a surgeon with green eyes and a paper-thin, green blade to cut it loose and let it go off on its own. Berg—it was as if he’d been hit on the head so clearly the whole thing had come to him—was going to be mother, surgeon, blade, and baby all at once. Hell if he wasn’t going to make a masterpiece.
He’d had enough experience as a producer and enough financial success with the films he had helped to get made—few of which he had bothered to see, in fact. His taste for such stuff had been worn out by the time he was in his early thirties, his aspirations ran to higher ground. When he told Analise he had a script idea he wanted to develop and shoot himself, he had reason to believe her response would not be pessimistic. Analise was like a sibyl to him, and her advice was cherished; the two of them had been on and off lovers for years, and now they were in an off-period, which meant they were collaborators in making money, and nothing else. It took him a couple of weeks to work up the courage to present her his idea, in part because he predicted that there would be aspects of the proposal she wouldn’t like, and he was averse to disappointing her.
She did say, “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself in for,” and she might have even said, “You don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” and yet he knew these words were a sure sign of interest, as was the fact she remained seated across the table from him in the darkish downstairs hole on Sheridan Square.
Analise removed her incorrigible white-framed sunglasses—which were so retro—as she filled her role ofdevil’s advocate. This delighted him, and he might even have made a note of her penchant for doing this whenever she wanted to emphasize her point (indeed, he hadwritten a few words about it in the pocket notebook he carried with him just for the purpose of cataloguing interesting tics that he could use to liven up characterizations he hadn’t gotten around to developing)—and, well—Analise both withheld and didn’t withhold her opinion.
He wondered whether all this might have gone better if they were in an on-period, but then remembered that she was even more straight with her opinions when they were sleeping together than not. She proceeded, “Like, what kind of story do you have in mind?” which gave him the opening to tell her what he thought to do.
“It’s going to be a film about a family, it’ll have the old crossbones rating but I want it to be so subtly psychological, and the production qualities unique and fresh enough that it could win a prize at Cannes. So, the family is made up of a father, mother, and three children—”
She opened her mouth to say something, interject a sarcasm like, Win a prize at Cannes? but allowed, “Yes, so?” instead.
“One of the three children—the younger boy—he isn’t alive anymore except in these hyper constructs of the girl.”
“His sister.”
“Right, the sister. So the boy has died in a freak accident, drowned in a riptide, you see they live on the ocean, and there’s the possibility behind all this that the sister was responsible, I haven’t bothered to work that through yet, not sure it’ll be useful. But anyway you see how these constructs of the girl, who is very devoted to the family—devoted for sure to the dead brother because he’s so easy for her to manipulate, being dead and everything, kind of repressed but a bundle of energies, you see how these fantasies of hers make absolutely perfect vehicles for the graphic stuff? Family disintegrates. Mother runs off with some artist, say, a guy who wouldn’t mind tagging in to the husband’s wealth in some kind of way that has to do with his knowing something about an operation in the man’s business that isn’t altogether on the up and up. The husband married to his work. Ignores all this, keeps building and building. And his daughter, Grady I think I’m going to call her, driven to the edge by this combination of a kind of need to make a family for herself, and all this anger at her own family for having burned itself down, what happens with her is that she has all this fantasy life as a child and then runs face first into the real world, gets married, the marriage doesn’t work out, and then she goes on through a series of escapades trying to find the Holy Grail in the guise of a lover.”
“Pre
tty complicated. Too complicated.”
“Could be, but it could work for us, for instance it could go into sequels, one, two, threes. I want at least to make it so we see her at two different stages of her life—both when she’s going through this adolescent trauma of the brother’s death and parental split, and then later when she’s somewhere in her mid-thirties, is divorced herself, and she’s carrying on with her best friend’s husband—”
Analise interrupted now. She had waited just long enough to identify what she perceived to be her cue. Berg was important to her and she wanted to let him down as easily as possible while not jeopardizing her relationship with him. She had seen this before, the producers wanting to move into the art itself; everybody wants to be a star, to write, direct, nobody is content to have the real power, the soft-spoken money power behind the scenes. Why would anybody want to write if he didn’t have to make a living? It wasn’t even that uncommon for the money to want to get out there in front of the camera—and, she always wondered, to what end? What was it in backers’ minds that made them want to parade their stories or their bottoms out there with the others, half of whom—the others, that is—would give anything to leave behind the heavy breathing, the creative thinking, all the alcoholic battles withthemselves in front of the dailies, and spend their days reading scripts, shouting into the telephone at delinquent accounts, and letting someone else bring them the lime, the mineral water, the Marblehead bowl filled with organic trail mix. “You realize this is going to cost a king’s ransom? There’s too much plot to it. Plot means sets, means actors who can act, can remember lines, means technicians who can do lighting and props and on and on.”
The Almanac Branch Page 20
