The Morels

by Christopher Hacker

  “Dad,” Penelope said, “it’s a work of fiction.”

  “It’s got his name, your son’s—our grandson’s—name. Don’t tell me about fiction. Your husband’s telling me he’s worried about molesting your son. Doesn’t that alarm you?”

  “No,” Arthur said. “What I mean to say is—okay, take this knife.” He reached across the table to the platter and picked up the carving knife. Everyone flinched. At his empty plate, he began slicing imaginary vegetables. “You’re going about the ordinary business of making dinner. You’re chopping and you’re cutting—and the knife slips, almost slitting open your thumb. But it doesn’t slit open your thumb. So you continue about the business of slicing and dicing, dicing and slicing, and yet now you’re thinking about your thumb, slit open by that knife. It’s an image, suddenly, that you can’t shake—it’s visceral, gory—it makes your gums ache, makes your knees weaken with its bloodred vividness. You try thinking of something else, you turn on the radio, but that image persists, still in your mind as you continue to chop and chop and chop. At times like these, when your brain is stuck like this, the only way to get that image out of your mind is to touch that knife to your thumb”—and here Arthur touched the carving knife to his thumb—“lightly, so that it doesn’t draw blood, because after all you don’t want to cut yourself, but just firmly enough to satisfy whatever compulsive itch your brain can’t seem to scratch. And once you do, once you’ve pantomimed that act of cutting yourself, the image vanishes. Do you see?”

  “You married a lunatic,” Frank said. “You realize that, don’t you?”

  “Art has nothing to apologize for. It’s literature; it’s not real life. You’re all confusing the two.”

  “Your mother’s not asking for an apology, Penny. She’s asking him to help her understand. But once again he offers this psychobabble. It’s meaningless. Arthur, don’t you see? We need to hear from you that this did not happen.”

  “Of course it didn’t happen,” Arthur said, almost grudgingly, as though he were giving something away. “It’s fiction.”

  “Then tell us why—why this was not just some pointless stunt.”

  “They’re just words. Come on, Frank. I’m still me. Nothing’s changed.”

  “I wish that were true, son. But saying something doesn’t make it so.” He stood, stared down at his plate. “I’ve got to get out of here. I need to think.” He grabbed his jacket off the back of the couch and strode to the front door.

  “Frank, you’ll freeze,” Mrs. Wright said.

  As soon as Frank was gone, Will opened the door of his room. He stood there in his powder-blue pajamas and yelled, “Stop fighting about me! I didn’t do anything wrong!” He was crying. He held his pillow clenched in his fists as though he might smother any one of us seated at the table.

  “Honey,” Mrs. Wright said, but Will had already retreated and slammed the door.

  I looked at Penelope, who was looking down at her plate. Arthur was observing his mother-in-law steadily. She was shaking her head, looking back.

  Arthur turned to me and said, “I think I might have a cigarette.”

  I patted myself down and pulled a pack from my back pocket. “Two left.”

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” I said, once we were out on the patio.

  “I don’t. I tried once and found it disgusting. But the moment seems to require it, don’t you think?” I gave him one and lit it, watching as he sucked and coughed doggedly. He stepped out past the overhang and tilted his face to the misting rain. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “Sorry to get you involved in the drama.”

  “Looks like Penelope was right. You really did need an ally.”

  “Don’t get them wrong about art. They like art. They’re genuinely curious people. To browse their bookcases is to know this about them. Edith Wharton, Hemingway, Michener, Mailer. Writers who tell us the story of ourselves as Americans. Who entertain and enrich our understanding of the world. They are avid readers of American literature. House on Mango Street, Interpreter of Maladies. Asian writers, gay writers, black writers. They allow in the great democratic bounty. They’re not snobs either. Tom Wolfe and detective fiction—Hammett and Chandler.” Their bookcase, Arthur said, was evidence of the usefulness of art, each book a powerful statement in support of its usefulness and, when it came down to it, damn fine reads, each and every one. If there were any evidence required to prove society’s enrichment through literature, one had only to look at the books in the Wrights’ bookcase. They were living proof of the relevance and power and usefulness of literature.

  “So? What’s the problem?”

  “What’s not there,” Arthur said. “The gaps in their collection speak for themselves.” There was Steinbeck but no Stein. Bellow but no Burrows. No Faulkner, no Pynchon. None of the great American experimenters. Gass or Gaddis, Barth or Barthelme. And with the exception of a single hardbound volume of the complete Frost, no poetry. “What good are they? They are books that tell difficult stories—if they tell stories at all!—that are difficult to follow and that don’t necessarily make you feel better for having read them. The Wrights’ belief about the usefulness of literature makes no room for these books. They are not useful books. They do not confirm our understanding of ourselves and in fact often leave us more confused about ourselves than we were to begin with. They are voices from the margins that are better left to the margins. Society would not be worse off without them.”

  “So it’s the limits of their taste that prevent them from liking your book.”

  Arthur smiled.

  This talk pissed me off. At the time, I didn’t know why, but later when replaying the conversation in my head, I imagined myself shaking Arthur, just taking him by the shoulders and shaking him. Cut the intellectual bullshit! Your family’s in real trouble here! I said, “So what are you going to do?”

  “Do?”

  “They’re pretty upset.”

  “Should I apologize?”

  “What would be the harm in it? Even if you don’t see eye to eye, they’re important people in Will’s life, in Penelope’s life.”

  “But I’m not sorry.”

  “Does it matter? Convince them you are. For the sake of peace.”

  “I can’t undo what I wrote, and apologizing won’t make it disappear. An apology is an admission I’ve done something wrong. It would only further justify their anger.”

  “You don’t think you’ve done something wrong?”

  “The book is good.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I don’t see how anything else matters. We don’t read Hemingway any differently because he was a bully and an absentee father. Do we? The author is human and has human failings and eventually dies. He is irrelevant. Mortal. In the end the book is judged on its own merits. It is judged not against the author but against other books. The author is the husk, out of which the book sprouts.”

  “This is an evasion, and you know it. I’m not talking about your book.”

  “You think this is some quarter-life crisis.”

  “I don’t know what to think, Arthur. Why do you need to make things so complicated? All these years have passed and, as far as I can tell, you haven’t changed a bit. Still squandering your good fortune. Still dumping on the people who champion you. Of all the subjects in the world available to write about, Arthur. Why would anybody choose to fictionalize the incest of his own prepubescent son? It’s self-destructive and, as a statement, opaque. What’s the point? I’m going to have to agree with your in-laws on this one—I get the fear part, voicing a fear in order to dispel it? Fine, so you see a therapist, or you write it down in your supersecret journal. And then burn that journal. You don’t publish it! I don’t understand it, Arthur. I mean, is Frank right? Are you mentally ill? Or is there something you’re not saying, some key to understanding all this?”

  “He’s back,” Arthur said. Through the window we watched him as he was greeted by Mrs. Wright at the front d
oor. He paced the room, saying something that only came to us out here as a deep humming. Penelope appeared from Will’s bedroom, and Frank stopped pacing and beckoned the two women to the dining room table. The ember of Arthur’s cigarette reflected on Frank’s chest.

  “What’s going on?” I said. We watched through the sliding glass door as Frank unsheathed a stack of papers from the copy-shop bag he’d been holding. Frank looked up, and his eyes met Arthur’s.

  “The other shoe,” Arthur said.

  I suppose another explanation is required here. Why, after reading Arthur’s book, wouldn’t I have just walked away? Not only not walk away, but accept an invitation to a holiday dinner with his in-laws? And then, after that dinner, continue to subject myself to the family strife? (For to spend time with them—to be in the same room with them—was to know just how deeply in trouble they were.)

  Here, I suppose, I will have to confess: I was in love with Penelope Morel.

  It started the day after, Friday. On my way home after a busy matinee shift, I found myself passing Balthazar’s. I loitered by the bakery’s menu out front. I was about to leave when Penelope appeared from the back and, recognizing me, waved.

  She came out. “Thank God. A man with cigarettes!”

  The following day, and every day after for the next seven days, I found excuses to be on Spring Street so that I could pass the bakery and catch a glimpse of her through the swinging door beyond the glass display cases. She’d flash in and out of sight in her starched chef’s whites, red bandanna around her black hair. I’d stand at the front window pretending to look at the menu but really watching the swinging door. Each time it opened, I scanned for her red bandanna. I could have done this for hours. I could have done nothing but this for an entire day. Invariably, she would see me and come out wiping her hands on her apron to give me a hug. We’d sit on the bench outside and smoke and talk.

  “I keep going back to that day,” she said. “You were there. He handed me the damn thing. Said read it, tell me what to do with it. I don’t know what I was thinking. I saw the look in his eyes. He really did want me to read it. He wanted me to stop him. And what did I do?”

  “It’s not your fault he wrote that book.”

  “I told him to go forth and publish. Those were my exact words. I should have read it! I should have thrown it across the room, thrown it at his head, told him to shred it! Shred the damn thing! I should have told him that if he published it, I would divorce him. But I let him go forth, even though I knew there was something wrong. I could sense it. What stopped me? And what stopped me when he did publish it, when I did read it, from immediately kicking him out of the house? I should have told him that he was crazy, that he was too toxic for Will to be around, and filed for divorce.”

  “Well? What’s stopping you?” The air was frosty and damp—the forecast called for snow—yet under her apron Penelope had on only a T-shirt, and her clogs exposed her bare heels. She hugged herself against the cold. I unzipped my down jacket and draped it over her, feeling even as I did it the awkwardness of this chivalric gesture. I could feel Penelope’s eyes looking me over, appraising me—maybe wondering what I was up to. She thanked me and pulled the jacket’s flaps around her.

  “Who else would have him,” she said, “if not me?”

  Then there was Viktoria. After our night on the couch, I was respectful of her need to take it slowly, happy to enact a chaste domestic bliss with this gorgeous and troubled girl. Lying next to her at night, I would imagine that I had found my Penelope, my other half, who would come to love me as much as Penelope loved Arthur, despite the havoc I might cause in our lives. She would see my failings as an essential, even lovable part of who I was. But in this relationship, unfortunately, she was Arthur and I was Penelope. I pictured meeting her German parents, winning them over, and perhaps even forgiving them for being so criminally neglectful of their daughter. I pictured Viktoria bearing me a child whom I would love absolutely, for whom I would give up all notions of art making without a second thought.

  She talked about a man, her “best friend.” He was her dealer and had once raped her, she said. But she also had sex with him willingly. The chronology of their relationship was confusing. She had broken off contact after getting out of the hospital. He would call her, but she wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t return his calls.

  Viktoria was at her best in the presence of gawkers. When we were out, even though she was talking to me, it seemed she was playing to some other person at our periphery listening in. She didn’t seem to know how to behave when it was just us, alone in the apartment. She was always telling me how nice I was and how she didn’t deserve someone as nice as I was. Nice was new to her, it seemed. She wasn’t used to it. I got the feeling I annoyed her with my niceness, that she was doing all she could not to bait me into an argument, to get us on footing that was more familiar to her. Our tame evenings with takeout and a movie and the barking dog must have felt, in comparison to her previous life, like just an extension of the white, antiseptic flatline of the hospital. She said that I was good for her. As though I were a kind of root vegetable.

  She brought me to a certain Midtown nightclub—her nightclub, she called it. It was one of those places whose advertisements I would come across while browsing the housing listings in the Voice, ladies in fishnets, disembodied DJ turntables floating above them—I’d pass these ads and wonder who on earth actually went to places like that. Answer: Viktoria. Nightclubs are excruciating when you are sober. It seemed like she was doing it to punish herself—or maybe tempting herself back into a relapse. She told me to go ahead and have a drink—she didn’t mind—but I wouldn’t.

  There was a friend, a girl, but I don’t remember what the friend looked like. Who could tell what any other girl looked like in the presence of Viktoria? She eclipsed all other girls. These two would dance for hours, and Viktoria would shout to me places in the club that were meaningful to her—the bathroom stall where she used to do blow, the stage where she would be invited to dance, and the time she was dared to take off her top in front of the orgiastic crowd, the bar where they’d sometimes hand out glow-in-the-dark necklaces. It was hard to understand what she liked about these places—they were so loud—big empty black-painted rooms that stank of stale beer and cigarettes. It was all noise, a noise that tried to fill the void. Or maybe it was meant for something else entirely; maybe I fundamentally didn’t get clubs; maybe it was a space for people to be their sexiest, to show off their ideal selves.

  We met up with Rich, the best-friend-drug-dealer-ex-boyfriend-rapist. Rich. He was, somewhat unexpectedly, old. Old and fat and poorly dressed. He kept calling her darling. He spoke with an affected lisp. He had red hair and a beard. He looked me up and down like he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to stab me or fuck me. Rich took her aside and talked to her while I waited, watching them.

  After that encounter with Rich, Viktoria changed.

  We would go to a club and now Viktoria would have a drink. Or two. I wouldn’t go home with her. She would tell me to go on ahead, she wanted to stay a while longer. I didn’t know how to react to her drinking and felt parental and judgmental when I said anything about it.

  She started classes at NYU and would bring home her course books and line them up neatly in her empty bookcase. She bought enough stationery supplies to turn over a new leaf and color-coded her schedule with highlighters. She talked about the new people she was meeting—teachers and fellow students—and this gave us something to talk about when I came over and ate takeout with her.

  I should have broken things off. I don’t know why I persisted. Domestic routine comes so naturally to me. I have always had a nesting instinct. I fantasize future life histories with girls I barely know. I love homemaking, burrowing in. An and I, when we both were freshman and living in the same dorm, would sign out the party room—we both had roommates—and lock the door and build a fort out of the couches and cushions and chairs.

  One evening I came ov
er and Viktoria was dressed to go out, a short skirt with sparkling earrings. She had a nose ring—a single tiny diamond sparkling on her nostril—and a belly ring. Her stomach was firm and flat. Her top exposed this part of her. We were supposed to eat at home and watch a movie. I had rented a couple of new releases and brought them in my laptop case. She suggested we go out, meet a few of her friends instead.

  We went to a lounge in the East Village and sat on a low couch and drank cranberry vodkas with one of her new NYU friends, a girl, a total blank to me now.

  Viktoria spent most of her time on her cell phone and made frequent trips to the bathroom, returning to her seat to proclaim to both of us how great this place was. “Isn’t this place great? Don’t you just love it?” We agreed that it was great.

  Viktoria’s friend smiled at me with pity.

  A couple of other NYU friends arrived and drank and then left. Viktoria was agitated, restlessly tapping her foot and chain-smoking. I had never seen someone under the influence of cocaine before, but it was clear to me that this was the source of her restlessness. She made a phone call and said that she wanted to go to a club. Did I want to come?

  I told her to go ahead.

  “Are you sure? Okay.”

  I told her that I would call her tomorrow. To have fun but not too much fun. I kissed her. I felt like her father. Then I left, walked home.

  In my room, sitting on my bed and taking off my shoes, it suddenly hit me that I’d left my laptop (and my rented videos) at Viktoria’s apartment.

  I called her cell, and a man answered. It was Rich. It was quiet, no thumping club music. I asked to speak with Viktoria.

  She came on the line. She asked if I couldn’t just wait until the next time I was at the apartment to pick up the laptop.

  I told her that I needed it now. For work. I sounded petulant.

  She said that she was at Rich’s apartment and wasn’t planning to return to her apartment tonight, but she agreed to meet me at her place the next morning.