Lapham Rising

by Roger Rosenblatt

She seems to recognize that it would be prudent to return to the matter at hand. “We have plenty of seats to Buffalo on the eleven P.M. flight. How many do you want?”

  “One for myself.” Then, wondering if it will queer the deal, I add, “And one for my dog.” Hector’s ears prick up in alarm.

  “I love dogs,” she says.

  “Name your price.”

  “The dog will have to travel in the baggage compartment. But that’s perfectly safe too.” Amazing what gentlenesses total strangers are capable of. “Do you want me to book your return reservations now?”

  I have been afraid of that question. I have tried to put off thinking about what will happen after Chautauqua. Once I do what I shall do this evening, what then? A moment’s moral elation; a nighttime escape by rowboat to a safe haven; a hired car to take me to LaGuardia and USAir; the dreaded turboprop to Buffalo, where I shall be met at midnight by a Chautauqua driver who wants to talk to me about all the famous people he has driven since 1931—“really famous, not like you.” No sleep. The certain knowledge that the police are hunting for me, and the certain pleasure that they will never think to look in Chautauqua, either because they have never heard of it or because it is so hard to get to that it lies outside every jurisdiction and has no extradition treaty with the Hamptons. The morning lecture. Followed by a life of hiding and running. Loneliness, despair, memories of chicken-fried steak at Applebee’s in Riverhead and of clambering atop the White Duck landmark when I was a kid, and bellowing quacks. Disgrace and eventual death in the cheapest room of the cheapest motel outside Bridgeport. Then interment in some potter’s field that is about to be sold to a developer. Of course, I could always live out my days in upstate New York, but I would prefer to be buried horizontally and underground.

  So I tell her yes, I will want return tickets for Hector and me. Yes, I will be coming home to face the music. Anyway, I want to face the music. Why commit an act of social protest, of civil or uncivil disobedience, if one is not prepared to suffer the consequences? Suffering the consequences is the whole point.

  “Don’t you think so?” I ask her. “Don’t you think that if someone does something on principle, pure principle, and that something happens to break the law, he should willingly pay for the act as a public statement of his noble intentions, and as a sign of his respect for the law in general?”

  “It depends on how bad the act is.”

  “Well, it’s bad, but it’s not as bad as acts get.”

  “The question is still too general for me to offer an opinion. I hope you’re not planning to make your public statement on your flight.” She is gravely serious.

  “Oh, no,” I tell her. “That would be crazy.”

  Five

  I miss Chloe,” says Hector out of the blue. He is staring at her statue.

  “No, you don’t. You couldn’t stand her. And she felt the same way about you.”

  “She adored me,” he says with a straight face, which is all he has. “And I felt very warmly toward her.”

  I make a few more notes for the Chautauqua lecture, then head for the dock again to adjust the winches. The assembly is nearly complete. I am glad I chose the Da Vinci model. Sir Ralph’s plans also provided schematics for the Bellifortis, the Stirling, and the War Wolf, whose name I found darkly appealing. But in the end I selected the Da Vinci because it looked so clean, so purposeful in the pictures, and even more so as it has come together under the tarp.

  “Have it your way,” I tell Hector. It is 11:09. Tick tock, tick tock. He follows a few paces behind me. An outsider observing us would conclude that we represented the heartwarming tableau of man and his best and most loyal friend.

  “The thing about Chloe,” he goes on, emboldened by the fact that I want to drop the topic, “was that she lived in the world, she made plans, she talked to everybody. With Chloe, we had a little life around here.”

  “A little too much for my taste.”

  “So why did you marry her?”

  “Because she had a lovely soul. Still does.”

  “Then why did she marry you?”

  “She mistook the occasional normalities in my fiction for the life I preferred.” But why am I spilling all this to Cujo? “I have an idea!” I tell him. “Why don’t you revert to type and dig up a bone or something? Or maybe create a meal out of your own vomit?”

  “You’re a misanthrope,” he says. “You hate everyone.”

  In fact, I am not a misanthrope, though I do not bother to protest the characterization. I like certain, select individuals. I even have a few friends distributed across America and Europe, two in Africa, and one in Asia Minor, with whom I exchange greetings once every three or four years, which is how we remain friends. I bear no one ill will, except Lapham. I am perfectly content to watch others go happily about their business, unless one of those others is Lapham. I also was perfectly content to see my family—Chloe and the children—go happily about their business in the great wide world. It did not matter that what seemed great and wide to them was alien territory to me.

  But watching those others, my family included, always felt to me like viewing a painting on a museum wall—one of those 1890s New England winter scenes, in which boys and girls skate on a glassy pond and their parents, swathed in colorful scarves, haul sleds through the thick snow. I was entranced by such paintings, pleased to see any segment of the race engaged in civilized play; I wished the participants well. And when it came to my own family, I wished them well too. I did my best to ensure their well-being. I just never wanted to be part of the picture.

  Hector paws the planks on the dock. He has mistaken my silence for assent. “Who but a misanthrope would live like this?”

  “What’s wrong with the way I live?” I ask a dog.

  “What’s wrong?” he says. “Where to begin? How many people watch Murder She Wrote reruns all day long? The show was bad enough the first time around. Now you watch the repeats, and the repeats of the repeats.”

  “Jessica Fletcher is an agent of justice. That is why I watch it.”

  “And why Junior Gilliam, whoever he may be?”

  “Because he could turn a double play better than anyone in baseball. His pivot was poetry—good poetry. Not that you would appreciate such a thing.”

  “And why Blossom Dearie?”

  “Because she sings on key, not that you…” I give him the first few bars of one of her blues standards: “Is you is or is you ain’t my baby?”

  “You live too much in the past.”

  “Where would you suggest I live?”

  “In the moment!” he says, to my disgust. “You should be up on current events. You should watch Press the Meat.” I would correct him, but I prefer his version. “And why aren’t you writing something—I mean other than a lecture for the Chautauqua Institution about Lapham and the end of the world? Your last novel—when was it? Ten years ago?”

  “Eight.”

  “And it was nuts. I should have seen all of this coming. A boxer who was so lovesick that he never ate or slept? Couldn’t happen. Impossible.”

  “The boxer was a man.”

  “Oh. Well, I still think it was nuts. Who’d want to read such a thing?”

  “No one, according to the sales reports.”

  “You need help.”

  “What else? What else is wrong with my life?”

  “You mean apart from everything?” he asks. “You mean apart from your diet of ravioli, which you eat cold from the can, and Devil Dogs? Devil Dogs, indeed! There’s a healthy food pyramid for you!”

  I should explain that I eat things like Devil Dogs and cold ravioli because I have never learned to cook, though I used to be a master at takeout. I once received a call from a woman who was compiling a writer’s cookbook—the favorite recipes of authors. I sent her four phone numbers.

  “And your appearance! Everything you’re wearing is ten years old.”

  “Not the bandage on my ear.” He looks away. “And what about your
appearance?”

  “I’m perfect,” he says. “I take care of myself.” He curls up and licks his genitals, thinking that proves his case.

  “And your computer,” he goes on. “Why did you bother to get one? You only use it to communicate with your children, and to track your imagined archenemy, Mr. Lapham.”

  “‘Imagined’!” I lunge for him, but he skitters away.

  “And then there’s Chloe, seated forever at the kitchen table.”

  Perhaps I also should explain that the effigy of Chloe is a true work of art. The Hungarian dwarf in New Hampshire bridled when I asked him to put Chloe in shorts; he thought I was making fun of him. But temper aside, he has quite a good reputation. Not only is his work both accurate and imaginative; it is durable. When he finished the project, he told me, “This baby rules!” I resented the “baby” but was otherwise satisfied.

  “And in the library,” Hector continues. “One book. One book! In a writer’s library! And what is that book? A slim volume of The Vanity of Human Wishes!”

  “Because…” I start to say.

  “Yes, yes. Because Dr. Johnson was always right. I don’t know about that. I’ve never read him.”

  “You’ve never read anything,” I remind him unkindly.

  I suppose I ought to explain this as well, though why The Vanity of Human Wishes should require anyone’s defense is beyond me. When my parents lived in this house, they packed the tall bookcases with the best that ere was thought or felt, as did the Marches before them. The books stretched from floor to ceiling, lined up in rows at the front of the shelves, like lewd and happy whores leaning on the windowsills of a Paris cathouse, their rosy tits spilling out of their housecoats, and calling to me: Come on up. So I did. Starting at the age of three, I climbed those shelves like a second-story man and sniffed and touched, and soon I could read. That continued until a few years ago—the reading, not the climbing.

  But then one morning, not long after Chloe went west, I regarded the high shelves with a new coolness approaching coldness, and I realized how much excessive activity was going on in those books as I stared at them. Hamlet whining, Anna moaning, Ahab yelling, the nitwit Daisy sobbing over shirts. The din began to get to me. Not that these characters hadn’t a right to their tragedies and melodramas, but why did I have to be subjected to their squalid if well-wrought displays of passion? I had heard their stories once, and in most cases two or three times. Let them make their fusses elsewhere.

  So little by little, I got rid of them by dumping them on the threshold of the Quogue Free Library, which, after all, is committed to preserving that clamor. I began with the most expendable: the complete James Whitcomb Riley, the too-complete Galsworthy, and Proust, who long had been getting on my nerves. Then I reached to pluck the higher orders of the likes of Swift, Mann, Eliot (George and T. S. both), Ellison, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Yeats, Márquez, Cavafy, Conrad, Baldwin, Malamud, Nabokov. Marianne Moore adjusted her tricorner and came along peaceably, as did Austen and Kafka, who said he had seen it coming. Chaucer chuckled. Emily Dickinson said she needed a change of scene anyway. But Twain, surprisingly, threw a hissy fit, and Joyce, as one might have expected, blew a gasket. Hemingway told me to go fuck myself. Off they went nonetheless, until there was but one work left on the shelves, right side, third shelf from the bottom, leaning casually against the wall—a single humble yet confident, self-aware yet not self-involved, brief yet eternally expansive book. This one I could not bring myself to toss. It made no unseemly noise. It did not plead for its life. It did not preen or strut. It was, in fact, the English language’s supreme argument against noise, against pleading, preening, and strutting. See? Everything makes sense if you give it a chance.

  “And while we’re on the subject”—he never gives up—“what exactly is so great about Dr. Johnson? Everything you quote by him just sounds crabby to me, like someone else I know.”

  “Honor and principle, Mr. Tail. Honor and principle. Here’s a story for you. While Dr. Johnson was working on his dictionary, which took him years and years, the Earl of Chesterfield, his so-called patron, was supposed to give him money to live on. But Lord Chesterfield never gave him a cent, with the result that Johnson was often at the point of starvation. When the dictionary was finished, however, and it began to be acknowledged as the monumental work of the age, Lord Chesterfield suddenly wanted to get in on the act and offered Dr. Johnson his help. Dr. Johnson wrote him the following: ‘Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water and when he has reached the ground encumbers him with help?’ Brilliant, no?”

  He stares at me as though I were wearing a gorilla suit. “Do you realize you’ve told me that story a dozen times?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.” I pat his head.

  He sniffs, then snorts. “And look at your bedroom, which has nothing in it but a box spring and a mattress. And the parlor, which has no furniture at all. And the living room, in which you never set foot, with its tattered sofa—”

  “It was you who scratched it to shreds, Mr. Tail.”

  “Sure, throw that in my face! I was just a puppy!” He shakes his fur into place. “Still, all of that would be excusable if you could not afford to live like a human being.”

  “Is that your standard?” I ask him. “Getting and spending? Yearning? You want a monument to yearning, like Lapham’s over there?”

  “But you’re rich!” he says.

  “I am not rich.”

  “You are! I’ve been in the Money Room.”

  He refers to a room in the house where I keep my fortune, whatever it amounts to, in stacks of cash bundled with paper bands. I refuse to use a bank not because I disapprove of banks but because I cannot abide talking about money, which is what they do in banks. My money comes from a couple of best-sellers I wrote many years ago. I have no idea how much of it there is, and I don’t care. This drives Hector up the wall.

  “Why don’t we ever spend some of that money?” He is working himself into a rabieslike lather.

  “On whom would I spend it?” I ask gaily.

  “Well, you’re going to lose it one day, mark my words.” He paces, agitated. “A Money Room! You’ll have a flood or a fire, and poof! All gone! You can take that to the bank.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “The point is, you spend too much time alone. All these crazy thoughts of yours come from living by yourself.”

  “I simply prefer solitude.” Then, looking straight at him: “Though perhaps my life is not solitary enough.”

  “You can’t hurt me. I have God on my side.”

  “And if you want to know why I hate Lapham, it is precisely because he has attacked my solitude.”

  “‘I shall embrace mine enemy or I shall become mine enemy.’” He bites at the air.

  “He has attacked my world, my middle-class, out-of-the-way, nonglittery, nontoxic yet occasionally useful world.”

  “So? He has his philosophy, you have yours. It’s not personal.”

  “It’s always personal, Mr. Tail. No matter what anyone tells you, all enmity is personal. And as much as I detest the ideological, mythical, symbolical, allegorical, abstractical Lapham for his grasping paws—you should pardon the expression—it is the noise he has brought into my head—my head, the head that belongs to me alone—that has shoved me over the edge. Look, do you think I would be preparing the Da Vinci, or even the Chautauqua lecture for that matter, were it not for Lapham? Do you?”

  Of course he doesn’t. I was a reasonably acceptable eccentric before Lapham banged into my life ten thrilling months ago. The essence of his crime against me is that he forced me to engage with the great wide world and, in so doing, to abandon my own. Worse, he forced me to do so voluntarily. Until he came into view and earshot, Noman was an independent country, existing modestly and decently apart from the great wide world of nations. Its insularity entailed the avoidance of alliances. It had an adequate if not a lavish economy, with a balanc
ed budget and no national debt. It had its own customs, its own language, and its own rules and laws, which, though admittedly idiosyncratic, did not violate any international rules or laws. It had its own culture, such as it was, and its own animal life, such as he is.

  But it had no armaments. Noman did not have armaments. And now, thanks to Lapham, it has been reduced to acting as any country would act, or react. Thanks to Lapham, Noman has become a nation like any other, just as predictable and armed to the teeth. That is the injury the Laphams of the great wide world inflict, you see. They make others as common as themselves. They bring you low. People see the House of Lapham, and they want one for themselves. Gaah. People watch Lapham make a public spectacle of himself, and they want to do the same. Modesty obliterated. Decency kaput. He who is inspired by envy inspires envy in others. Amen. On his way up, Lapham brings others down. And even those who oppose him, as I am about to do, are brought down as well, through their instruments of opposition.

  “You make too much of Mr. Lapham,” says Hector. “All he is doing is building a big house. Let him alone, and we’ll be at peace again. Blessed are the peacemakers.” I’d love to choke him. He goes on, “I really don’t see what the big deal is. Isn’t Mr. Lapham doing what everyone is supposed to do? Making something of himself?”

  “He’s making too much of himself,” I tell him.

  “But what’s that to you?”

  “You don’t get this at all, do you? You think that Lapham’s construction is limited to Lapham, or even to me and Lapham. Let me give you a lesson in the ripple effect. Already Lapham has invaded my mind. He has invaded Dave’s mind, and Jack’s and José’s, and the minds of the Mexicans, even Kathy’s—though that would be more like Germany invading Austria. Soon his monstrous house will have invaded the minds of all those who look upon it, and who comment upon it, and who write it up as the place to be for extravagant parties where birdbrains divine one another’s chin tucks late into the night. The attendees at these parties will speak of them, and of Lapham, to others. His name will be synonymous with achievement and magnitude, and people will expect big things of him, as he will of himself. Eventually, everyone on the East End and beyond will be thinking of Lapham at the expense of everything of value. Soon all they will see is Lapham. He will have invaded the minds of the great wide world, as he has invaded my mind, as he has invaded Noman.”