Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather

by Jincy Willett

  Guy brightened, unteased. It is impossible for most people to tease Guy, to catch him entertaining the notion that he might not be taken seriously. “Hilda gave me her impressions of you. This is how I meet people, you know.” He nodded, as if he really expected her to know this. “She screens people for me, just as she reads newspapers for me, and tells me what she thinks I ought to know, if, in her opinion, I can bear hearing it. Hilda is my filter, and my buffer, and of course my muse.”

  “You give her a lot of power,” said Abigail, thinking aloud. Hilda had never struck her as a powerful woman.

  “Yes,” said Guy. He spread his plump arms wide, an awkward, creaky gesture, referring to the whole room, the torsos. “I revere powerful women,” he said, “as my work proves.”

  Abigail told him she’d never read his “work.”

  “Of course you haven’t,” he said, delighted. “And you shouldn’t.”

  Abigail drew herself up. “I can read, you know.”

  “Yes,” he said, oblivious, “but why should you? Why read, why write, when you can…occupy space!”

  “Go to hell!” said my sister, just as Hilda came in with the tea. They both turned identical smiles on Abigail.

  “Magnificent,” said Guy. “All that vitality, and wit, too.”

  This threw Abigail off stride, since, reasonably, she didn’t consider “go to hell” a particularly witty riposte.

  “What Guy means—”

  “I understand English. What Guy means is, It thinks! Stop the presses!”

  “Look at the anger,” said Hilda to Guy.

  “Visceral rage,” said Guy. “Magnificent.”

  “So long, folks,” said Abigail.

  Guy rose up to speak. His knees caught under the kiddie desk, so that he addressed her from a half-crouch, looking up at her, as she was already on her feet. Still he spoke with great authority, which impressed Abigail, under the circumstances. “You think I patronized you. You are right. This is inexcusable. But the point I was trying to make is that my art—my poems, my sculpture—is so poor alongside your reality, alongside the truth of powerful women, that all of it amounts, alas, to condescension. You are art itself. This is what I was trying to say. Forgive me.”

  Abigail sat and chewed her lip. She liked the “art itself” part but something still bothered her. “You’re talking about my looks?” Abigail has never been vain or deluded. “I’m a blowsy broad” was how she had summed herself up since her mid twenties, after the baby was born and she had obtained a permanent belly, to go along with her breasts and all the rest of it.

  Guy cleared his throat. “I’m going to be frank with you. As I said, Hilda brings me…news of the world, and this includes the local world. News of Frome. In short, gossip. Gossip she thinks might be pertinent to my work.”

  “Ah ha.”

  “Your reputation precedes you,” said Hilda, blushing again. She had, thought Abigail, the ugliest blush in the world, with no pleasure to it, only shame.

  “Exactly how does it precede me?” The blush darkened to a bruise. “Who? Name names. Who shot off his mouth? Lucier? That little weasel next door?”

  “We’re not at liberty to disclose—”

  “George mamma’s-boy Lucier! I only grabbed him because he was always sneaking around, answering the door in his bathrobe, asking me stupid questions about priority mail and zip codes. Lucier’s a slimy little weasel, the kind of guy who looks and looks and then runs away and plays with himself. I hate that,” said Abigail, who genuinely does. “I despise a sneak. So I reached into his little silk bathrobe one day, to straighten him out, if you know what I mean, and he screams and backs away, if he had a cross he would have held it up, and you know what he says to me? I’m at risk! I have a type A personality! I told him he had a type F personality. And now I suppose he’s bragging to the little woman here about his exploits—”

  Guy laughed out loud, a sexy, smoky laugh, Abigail said, and after an alarmed glance at her husband, Hilda joined him, laughing instantly, as if she genuinely thought something was hilarious. Since she was no actress, Abigail marveled at this phenomenon. “Wonderful,” said Guy, wiping his eyes. “You’re so right. George’s version was somewhat different.” He began to laugh again.

  Hilda leaned toward him, smiling admiringly. “You guessed it, remember? That he wasn’t being truthful.” She turned to Abigail. “He’s uncanny,” she said.

  “You’ve been canvassing the neighborhood about me? How do you do it? Questionnaires? ‘Has Abby Mather jumped you, and if so, how often?’”

  Hilda rose—she had been kneeling beside her husband—and knelt down before Abigail, grabbing her arm with evangelistic zeal. The whole abrupt performance was so unnerving that Abigail closed her mouth and listened to her with that wariness we show to maniacs on a train. “You’re thinking, ‘How degrading,’” Hilda said, “and ‘How can she lower herself?’ and ‘Where’s her pride?’” (Abigail was thinking: They must do it from behind. Otherwise he’d have to look at her face. She pictured Hilda on hands and knees, patient, mottled, swaybacked from all the pointless weight—for Hilda, according to the torsos, had the most unfecund, powerless fat body Abigail had ever seen—and felt a rare pity for her which matched, for a moment, her contempt, and a flash of inarguable insight. This one should have been a nun. She’s shaped for worship; she was born with mortified flesh. And she got the tantalizing beginnings of an idea about just what sort of brand-new kind of pervert Guy DeVilbiss was.) “And I must tell you,” said Hilda, with her crazy smile, “that art is more important than dignity, reputation, morality. There is nothing, literally nothing, I would not do in furtherance of Guy’s art. The work is all.”

  By that point Abigail was, by her own account, greatly excited, which surprised her, since, as she often put it, “Threesomes give me the creeps, when the other two are married. They gang up on you. They know the rules already and they won’t tell you what they are. They turn you into a beanbag.”

  This couple was different. In the first place, if they really had a sex life—Hilda on hands and knees was a dolorous, anesthetic vision—clearly they were too delicate, too metaphorical (“academic,” Abigail said), too mannered, to drag in third parties. Their brains, Abigail said, are simply too large. They do it all with their giant brains. She stared at Guy’s bald head and pictured his brain, fragile and mushroom-colored, bulbous, pulsing in a sexual tattoo.

  The only excuse she could later come up with for her physical arousal was the smoky, masculine voice and laugh of the Great Man, his odd, surprising authority. He intrigued her. She didn’t want him, and she felt absolutely confident that he didn’t want her. (Abigail is never wrong about these things.) He made her feel like a sexual field worker. “He’s like a different species,” she told me. “He makes you feel like Jane what’s-her-face, in the jungle.”

  “He reminds you of Tarzan?” I asked, amazed.

  Abigail laughed and laughed. “No, my God! No. Jane. You know. “Born free…” She began to sing.

  “The woman with the lions?”

  “No, no, no. Monkeys, apes, whatever. Chimpanzees.”

  “Jane Goodall?” I shook my head. “He reminds you of an ape?”

  Abigail laughed and laughed. This was a pretty typical conversation. “Dorcas, you never saw anyone further from an ape in your whole life. If anything, he looks like…” She looked at me expectantly.

  “Abigail, is this thought actually worth pursuing?”

  “…a reptile. A newt. But what I meant was, we’re the apes, and he’s the human. That’s it. Bomba the Jungle Chimp comes to the New World, you know, to live among the humans in their native habitat and study their ways.”

  “And you’re Bomba the Jungle Chimp.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s idiotic. Besides, what does it have to do with…”

  “Getting turned on? Easy. You think old Jane Goodall doesn’t have funny thoughts out there, in the jungle night? You ever hear her on T
V going on and on about ‘dominant males’ and ‘the posture of submission’? Hubba-hubba!”

  “Look, folks,” Abigail said to the adoring humanoids, one kneeling at her feet, one crouching on miniature furniture, both transfixed, “do you need a model? Do you want me to sit or something, while you write a poem?” The DeVilbisses whooped with delight. “I know better than that,” said Abigail, getting angry again. “I was making a joke.”

  “Of course!” cried Guy. “And what a magnificent joke it was.”

  “Well, what do you want?”

  The DeVilbisses looked breathlessly at each other, and after a solemn moment, turned identically solemn faces toward her. “We want you to be our friend,” said Hilda.

  “We want you in our lives,” said Guy.

  “You see,” said Hilda, “we have very few friends.”

  “By choice,” added Guy.

  That’s what you think, thought Abigail.

  “Most people bore Guy.”

  “Boredom is my greatest torment.”

  “And yet…he hungers for human companionship.” Hilda shook her head at the wonder of it. “Just like any ordinary man.”

  Abigail thought about it. “Friends usually sit around and talk, don’t they?” Abigail doesn’t have any friends, so she wasn’t clear on this. “Well, what are we going to talk about? I’m not too big on talk. I’m not very abstract.”

  Guy grinned hugely. “You’re not abstract at all. That’s what’s so magnificent—”

  “If you want to talk,” Abigail said, “you’d be better off with my sister, Dorcas.”

  “The librarian,” said Guy’s interpreter, out of the corner of her mouth.

  “My twin,” said Abigail.

  “You mean,” said Guy, looking less than delighted, “there’s another one just like you?”

  Now it was my sister’s turn to whoop.

  And this is how we became part of the DeVilbiss circle, a group so small that we could all hold hands around their round oak dining table, and did on one occasion, the day a collection of Guy’s finally won the National Book Award. Abigail and I were the only nonartists in the group. The rest were all couples, gay and straight, at least one of whom had been published, or shown in Manhattan, or performed at the Marlboro Festival.

  Even the nonprofessional spouses did “something with art.” There were two potters and a dance teacher and one man, the composer’s husband, who claimed he was “keeping a journal.” His name was, and is, Tim Paine, and he was my favorite. Whenever we got together Guy would ask him, mano a mano, how his journal was coming, his “work.” Tim would say something like, “I think I may have made a breakthrough” or “I’m blocked,” and the rest would rejoice or commiserate. Tim was a bright, slobby drunk, a Pooh-faced failure with a contagious laugh, and carloads of charm he was born into, the way some people are born into money.

  His wife was an anorexic Spaniard whose English was poor, even after fifteen years in this country. What little she said was indecipherable. No one paid any attention to her except when she sat at the piano, where she was eloquent, so long as she was playing Chopin or Brahms. (Her own compositions were thin, angular, painful to hear, very much like herself.) Whenever the conversation turned to Tim’s journal—Guy was scrupulous in his attentions, especially to the lowliest and least talented of his dear friends—Pilar would mourn, “Tim never show me to it. It is secret.” And Guy would admonish her, smiling, that her husband must never show his journal to anyone; that exposure would amount to violation. And I would wearily, dryly protest the idea of inviolate art, keeping my arguments as abstract as possible. And whenever words like “inviolate” were used, my sister would snort and help herself to more of Guy’s excellent white wine.

  Throughout, Tim, the ostensible focus of the debate, would hang his head and smirk, occasionally throwing in an “I should say not,” or “I should say so.” I was positive that he held the DeVilbisses in total contempt, that he and I were soul mates, but no matter how carefully I watched for signs I could never either confirm or deny my reading of him. For all I know he really does keep a journal.

  Guy condescended to everyone in the circle except Abigail and me, the two without pretensions. Us he respected, for insulting reasons—because we simply were. He was wary of me. He listened carefully to me, no matter how trivial my remarks, giving me a depth of attention that always made me feel silly, but he did not, I think, put me on in doing so. I was some sort of threat to Guy from the beginning, and I thought it was simply my relation to Abigail, my obvious amusement at his adoration of her. Abigail thought it had nothing to do with that. “You scare him,” she said once, “because you’ve rejected sex.”

  I was driving at the time, late at night, home from the DeVilbisses’. I clenched my teeth in the dark. “How does he know sex didn’t reject me? I don’t see what’s intimidating about a dried-up middle-aged—”

  “They always know,” said Abigail. “You don’t give men credit for much. Even he knows. You’re above it all. You’re like an aristocrat.”

  “You’re bombed.”

  “Which means that his work has no power over you. This is very threatening to him. He thinks you’re smart. Smarter than him.”

  “Even.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s a jerk.”

  “Worse,” she said. “Did you see what he was doing to Hilda? The woman obviously doesn’t want to do anything but care for him and wash his feet, and he keeps bullying her about doing something creative. He practically had her in tears tonight. Do you know what she told me? He’s threatened, more than once, to divorce her if she doesn’t fulfill herself in some way! The poor woman’s been—”

  “Oh, come off it. You loathe Hilda.”

  “Well, but still. She’s actually going through with the doctoral thesis and everything, just to please him. She couldn’t care less about Socrates.”

  “Sophocles.”

  “So now he’s got it in his head that she’s a poet and he’s browbeating her all the time, like tonight, about her ‘work.’ She just hangs her head like a sheep. Baaaaaa. Jesus.”

  “So why,” I finally asked her, “do we keep going over there?”

  Abigail was quiet for a while. I pulled into the driveway and shut off the engine. “He’s dedicating the new collection to me,” she said. “To Abigail Mather. The Ultimate Knowable.”

  I cracked up. “Well, no one’s going to quarrel with that. Hoo, boy!”

  “Yeah, well,” Abigail said with some asperity, “I tried to explain that to him, how some people would snicker, and he just said, ‘Some people are wicked,’ and shuddered. The way he does, you know. Mr. Sensitivity.”

  Chapter Eight

  Sooey Generous and the Dominant Male

  Chapter 8

  The Meeting

  …most capricious of ironies that Abigail should meet Conrad Lowe at the home of an ardent feminist. Guy DeVilbiss has always been a feminist sui generis. Lowe was his old college roommate, and an artist of some small talent himself….

  …And presto! My sister becomes a murderess, spends half a year at the ACI, achieves an international reputation as an avenging feminist, and writes the scurrilous piece of ordure on my desk. Some registrar’s secretary threw Lowe and DeVilbiss together, and here we are.

  Physically they were opposites, Guy and Conrad. Conrad was tall, whippet-thin, predatory. His brown eyes were feminine, long-lashed, moist. They stared out at you from the wrong face. “He’s got Jewish eyes,” Abigail whispered the night she first met him. And though I made fun of her and asked her what this could possibly mean (she kept saying she didn’t know), she was right. He had a Jew’s eyes and a Nazi face.

  The eyes were the bait. They said to women, Ignore the brutal wit of my hard smiling mouth, my jackal posture, ignore especially that warning bell in your head that is never wrong, that animal alertness at the scent of danger, and look in here, sweetmeat. See how sensitive, misunderstood, peace-loving I am. I may
talk mean, I may leave you feeling bruised for days after just five minutes of cocktail flirtation, but this is just a pathetic diversion on my part. I can be had. Trust me.

  He had a large sharp nose that preceded him everywhere. He walked canted forward, with his narrow shoulders hunched, as though heading into a bracing wind. He wore whatever he wanted to. Salvation Army raincoats, cashmere mufflers, ratty English tweeds, tennis shoes. I saw him once on Westminster Street in the city on a cold January morning wearing a pair of child’s earmuffs. His finely molded skull was small enough, just, for that. One of his front teeth, the right-hand tooth as you faced him, was nicotine-stained and crooked, swiveled slightly away from center, like a door stuck ajar.

  Women rushed at him like lemmings. Wondering, even as they unhooked their own bras, folded their skirts and laid them over the backs of chairs, wondering, Why am I doing this? What’s in it for me? Who’s in charge here?

  He was just there one night, at Guy and Hilda’s, when Abigail and I came by for drinks. There was another couple, too, but I don’t remember who they were. Not the Zamora-Paines. Guy introduced me first, as “our splendid librarian.”

  “Conrad and I,” he told me, in an oddly simpering voice, “go all the way back to Harvard, if you can imagine such a thing.”

  “I don’t think she’s going to have too much trouble,” said Conrad Lowe, his eyes on me.

  “What? Eh?”

  “Imagining such a thing. It’s not so astounding, Guy, that we were both young once, and from there it’s a short imaginative leap to the idea that we were young in the same place. Miss Mather looks capable enough.”

  “I should say,” said Guy, squirming, reddening. “I only meant—”

  “He was always like this,” said Conrad Lowe, to me. “Picture him with actual hair, all gussied up in his knickers and his Buster Browns…”

  “Oh, you’re so awful!” said Hilda, giggling.

  “…and the only guy in the dorm, the entire class of 1960, who brought a full-sized steamer trunk full of crap from home, you never saw anything like it. First editions, fuck books—you always laugh, Hildy, but it’s true—his official Communist Party Membership application blank, his father’s false teeth, his mother’s sanitary belt, and his seminude pinup of Gale Sondergaard—one of the most sobering sights of my young life. This was in 1956, Miss Mather, Dorcas, when it was literally worth your life, on an Ivy League campus, to be a fellow traveler….”