“My wife?”
“In a way. The work in progress is my first novel, and your wife is its inspiration.”
“You’re writing a novel?” This really was a nasty shock to me. “You hate fiction.” Guy had this thing about what he called, with venomous contempt, “mere psychological realism.” He often bragged that he hadn’t read a single novel since Nightwood.
“Hilda thinks it’s time.”
“Why?” What a pompous poop. “Jesus, Guy, why not build a suspension bridge? Write a symphony? You know as much about—”
“You’re writing a novel about my wife? Have you lost your fucking mind?”
“How do you turn this thing on?” Abigail gazed raptly at a white horse with a worn leather saddle. Its neck and head were extended, so that it could crane its gaze upward at the sun. “I remember this one,” she said. “It had its own name.”
“They all do,” said Tansy. “Look at the bridle. See, there’s a gold nameplate.”
“Fayton,” Abigail read. “It’s the same identical horse.”
Meanwhile Conrad was beating up, verbally, on Guy, doing his Dominant Male routine, but it didn’t have its usual effect. Guy stood up to him by ignoring him. He seemed centered, as Tansy would say, and his eyes remained upon my sister. No, Guy said, mildly, he wasn’t interested in Abigail’s life story, which Conrad colorfully assured him was a matter of public record anyway. He wasn’t interested in “achieving a fictional replica.”
“Mere psychological realism,” I said. “Heaven forefend. The thing that kills me about you guys, you postmodernist hoo-hah pooh-bahs, is how little respect you have for character. You carry on as though the human personality were some trivial thing, and it’s not, it’s not, it’s everything. It’s the great mystery.” I had Guy’s attention. He regarded me with respect, which was thrilling in a way, because I was suddenly sober, energized, speaking up for Readers Everywhere. “Your character. Mine. What does it amount to? It’s real, but we can’t know it. We can make predictions about our own behavior based on what we’ve done in the past, and how we feel about it now, and what niggling horrors we come awake to at three o’clock in the morning, but they’re only predictions.
“We don’t even know if we’re good, until it’s all over, and then it’s too late. We can be decent all our whole lives, and then at the last minute we can do some inexplicable unforgivable thing.”
“You always get back to morality, Dorcas,” said Guy. “We can all count on that. You’re predictable. So am I. We’re clockwork things.”
“Not true!”
“And who,” asked Tansy, “is winding the clock?”
“Tansy,” I said, “could we try, just this once, not to let this debate turn into a cliché festival?”
I heard a metallic clunk and turned to see my sister astride her dream steed. Her feet barely cleared the ground, and the entire structure listed slightly to her side. She was holding fast to the gold-painted pole, her head thrown back, staring upward in the manner of Fayton, the carousel horse with the irritating, nonsensical name.
“Somebody,” piped up Tim, “has to balance it. We need someone on the opposite horse.”
“If you’re going to make people up,” I said, “which is what fiction writers do, Guy, storytellers, they create fictional human beings, then you have an impossible, holy task. You have to create characters as complex and unknowable as real people. The fact that you can’t do that, that you can’t even come close, is the very reason you should try. If you’re not going to bother, then stick with your poetry.”
“I can never realize what you people talk about,” said Pilar.
“Dorcas,” said Guy, “would you mind getting on the other horse?”
“Get on Pegasus, Dorcas,” Tansy said.
“I’m talking here,” I said. “I’m making a point. Excuse me. Would somebody please for one goddamn second pay attention—”
“Get on Pegasus,” said Abigail.
“I heard you,” said Guy. “I respect you. Now, please pay me the same respect. I’m looking,” he said, reasonably, “for my central image.”
“Well who the pluperfect fuck isn’t,” said Conrad.
I was crying when I got on the horse. Not out loud, but I don’t think I bothered to hide my tears. When had I become such a baby? I saw Abigail and her horse rise up, so that we dangled an equal, short distance above the dirt. My horse was a palomino or something. I don’t remember the details. Pegasus was Perseus’s horse. He sprang from the spilled blood of Medusa. “Abigail,” I called to her. “Spell the name of your horse.”
“P-h-a-e-t-o-n. Fayton.”
“Conrad,” ordered Guy, “turn that key back there.”
And Conrad did as he was told.
At first we flew in silence at a sedate speed, heads tilting slightly inward, and I could see faces as I passed, Guy gleaming like Buddha, Tim smiling like a kid, Conrad scowling furiously. Why, I wondered, are you so angry? I shouldn’t have gotten on Pegasus. It was bad enough that Conrad couldn’t intimidate Guy. The ver de terre had indeed revolvéed, at least for this one night. On top of this I was somehow betraying him, and I found that this mattered to me. Where did my loyalties lie? Where indeed.
Phaeton, desirous of his father’s glory, drove the sun chariot to ground, perishing in spectacular excess of ambition. The night wind, as we gathered speed, froze my eyes, the faces blurred, my tears dried, my ecstatic sister’s hair streamed out long and straight behind her upturned head, and the carousel calliope came to life, sharp enough to wake the whole town. “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.” We flew faster, parallel to the ground it seemed, our heads close together, our feet outflung and dangerous. The rickety rumbling thing was going to break, we would careen out through picture windows into people’s living rooms, we were raising a ruckus, we were out of control. I wonder if she ever tells him of me. We were objectified, observed, fiddled with, entertained, like juggler’s balls, in the mind of the only postwar poet certain to survive the millennium. We were a central image, Apollo and Dionysus, churning into butter, and that was my last cogent thought, if you can call it that, before I was cut off from my world by pure sensation, and I had no thoughts at all, and what a vast and lonely place that was. No signposts, no template, no limits. I was in my sister’s universe. How could she stand it here? How could anybody stand it here?
Time Out
The Tail
I still don’t believe she’s coming full force, but it looks pretty bad. I haven’t spotted a single bird all day today. Where do they go? The electricity went an hour ago, but I don’t need it to read, although the light through the window is rather nauseating, the color of an illuminating bruise. Not much rain, but a hell of a lot of wind. I finally broke down and masking-taped all my windows, so I must be taking this seriously.
The phone was still working the last time I checked, and Anna was enjoying herself. I don’t worry for her safety: The trees around our house are small, mostly birches; even if all of them fall, which they’re not likely to do, they can’t effect any serious damage. She’s rounded up all the candles in the house, and set out a pile of books to read: a Ruth Rendell, Mansfield Park, and one of her favorite Sherlock Holmes stories, “The Final Problem.” She must be on an English kick.
Of course I didn’t bring a transistor radio with me. That’s the kind of prideful old bat I am.
There’s no one out in the street, on the Mile. Ten cars sit abandoned in the Food Land parking lot, and around back I can just make out the rear of a single trailer truck, looks like an Eclipse Syrup truck, hopping from side to side in an irate fashion. Wind must be pretty strong.
Right across the street a big show is in the making. Some slob apparently started to offload boxes of junk at the Job Lot, then took off without closing up the truck, and already two boxes have come loose, banging up against the Tile World sign, taking out the W, and spilling their contents into the air. Anybody fool enough to step outside right now could ge
t whanged by a bagful of defective dice, impaled by crooked golf tees. Some of it has already made it across the street; two of my cherry trees have been decorated with knee-high-hose eggs and what looks like a plastic (it must be) likeness of the Blessed Virgin.
My guess is that we’re at the outer edge. Pandora is playing crack-the-whip with Frome, and her eye could be fifty miles away. A hundred perhaps. Or maybe not. I’ve never been in the Eye.
Mother and Father told us about the big one, the ’38 hurricane, which came along three months before we did, on September 21. Father was in New London on business, and he saw the Eye. (Mother saw it, too, in Frome, but she was the only Rhode Islander who did.) He’d taken the train down, but couldn’t very well take it back after a tidal wave deposited an enormous Coast Guard lighthouse tender, by the dainty name of Tulip, across its tracks. Father witnessed explosions, fire, and floods on that amazing day, but we could never get him to talk much about the devastation. I suspect he saw dead bodies; it was not like him to dwell upon the tragic. Besides, nothing he saw that day, he told us many times, compared to the experience of the Eye.
This was one of his favorite dinnertime topics. He was worried about Mother, he would begin, home alone and pregnant with us. He wasn’t worried for her safety—she was inland, as I am today—but he knew she’d be anxious for him. And I was, she would chime in, but bad as the storm was, here at home, I had no idea that it was anything more than a bad storm. We didn’t hear the word “hurricane” on the radio until the next day.
Nobody in New England knew what a hurricane was, Father said. I thought it was the end of the world. First the rain, and then the wind, sounded like a hundred trains, and from the second floor of the Mohican Hotel you could hear windows, hotel windows, department store windows, popping like corn.
Then it stopped, and the sun came out. Father ventured outside to help clean up. The sky was blue, he said, but the sea was the awfulest shade of yellow you ever saw. The shade the Devil’s eyes would be, said Father, who was ordinarily no devotee of the supernatural. The main street was littered with boats of all sizes, dinghies, sailboats, part of someone’s yacht, the Amphitrite, and not far from where he wandered the entire business section of the city was on fire, casting up clouds of pitch-black smoke, but he was drawn to the water-front. It made no sense to go near it, he said, as the water so clearly meant to come for us, but none of us could help ourselves. The land was full of boats and the sea was full of piss (“Say ‘urine,’ Jabez”), and the sunshine was wrong, he realized, the wrong color, and the air felt wrong too. And looking far out over the evil sea, he saw a wall of white cloud, and when he turned around he thought he could just make it out, the white wall, way beyond what few rooftops remained, and gradually he came to realize that they stood in the middle of a huge circle of still light, and all around them the world wheeled.
We were in this cylinder of quiet, he said, and the walls were moving, slowly but perceptibly, counterclockwise. It was, he said, like standing in an inside-out merry-go-round. He wished with all his heart that he could stay in the circle forever, moving with it until he found our mother. But the walls were closing in, and there was nothing to do but face up to whatever was behind them.
Abigail always wanted details, sensory details, what did the upended cars look like, and the women, how were they dressed, and did the wind rip off people’s clothes, and she always wanted to hear more about the fires, and the waves. She was disappointed to learn, I recall, that there was no lightning. Although I remember Father’s words, dutifully, like a recording secretary, I remained imaginatively back in Frome with Mother, and those bafflingly obtuse radio bulletins. They called it a storm, a nor’easter, a fierce blow; by the time they came up with its proper term it was history. How could that happen? I would ask, how could people be so ignorant, and our parents would explain, again, about Neville Chamberlain, and Czechoslovakia, and how even on that terrible day the only history that mattered was happening in Europe.
It occurs to me today that the entire northeastern seaboard of America was like Icarus in my favorite Auden poem, a boy falling out of the sky, unmourned by a world that had somewhere important to get to. About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters.
I used to believe that conversations like this, seminal adult talk, drove me to books, the obvious best refuge and bulwark against a perilous world. Now I know this isn’t true. I had no choice. My choice was made for me, and Abigail’s for her, in the womb.
And I wonder what is really happening today, right now. My sister, safe inland at the ACI, must have fewer clues than I. The walls there are too solid for buffeting, and I’m not even sure she has access to a window. But if she does, if she can see out, she is in the storm, effortlessly, one with the wind and rain, ravenous, scouring the perceptible earth for every last detail. My sister knows what’s really going on. My sister always knows where she is.
I see the ceiling lights flicker and dim, I hear the wind and the pitiful creaking of dying trees, my skin feels raw, hypersensitive, not like a fever but like something opposite, an enlivening chill; outside my library articles of evidence mount up, jitterbugging, smacking into one another, slapping up against my windows. Clearly something momentous is happening. But I cannot say what it is. I will not know until it is over, and I can name it. I can’t help this. This is what I am.
Chapter Nineteen
Winged Hedgehog
Chapter 19
Work in Progress
Now the books really begin to pile up.
We’re closing in on the shattering climax, yet Hilda stops the action to flog the dead nag of Guy’s first and last novel. Guy’s “work” was almost six years in the gestation and only half-term at the time of Conrad’s death. After an entirely unconvincing crisis of conscience, Guy decided he had to finish it, and Appetite magically contrived to hit the stands the very week of Abigail’s preliminary hearing, boosting the hell out of its initial sales. Perhaps Guy’s agent, in collusion with Hilda, managed to shield unworldly Guy from their machinations. Perhaps not.
Guy’s Abigail, Fanny Montaigne, is a grotesque character, of course Larger than Life, topping off at 8'6". Why do we take writers seriously when they do this? He subjects his Rabelaisian woman to picaresque adventures of dubious eroticism; congress with winos, dead people, bison; at the novel’s end she fondles a small child, who turns out to be, quel surprise, her own baby self. Hilda affects to draw parallels between this creature and my sister, but really all she’s doing is chiding the reading public for neglecting her husband. To understand Abigail, she actually says here, one need only read “aloud, to oneself, in any candlelit church” the saga of her husband’s “most deeply felt” creation. I may be wrong about the bison. There was something both unspeakable and confusing with a beast.
Appetite’s first reviews were respectful, if tentative, and initial sales quite robust, considering that their author had never sold respectably outside university walls (within which he was taught widely enough to keep him in Calvados and pearwood bread troughs). But after the first month sales began to plummet on word of mouth, and then came “Big Fat Fanny,” Gore Vidal’s public disemboweling of Guy in the Review of Books, a brilliant three-page stompfest so joyously vicious as to become an instant legend, and the DeVilbisses fled to the Old World in mortification. (“You know,” said Abigail, wiping her eyes as she finished reading the review in the prison visiting room, “he really should have seen that one coming. Poor little booby.” This was another occasion where we made such a racket that I was asked to leave.) Appetite still dominates remainder shelves and church rummage tables. I look forward, once the furor of the trial dies down, and with it any attendant curiosity about Guy’s “work,” to consigning our single copy to my basement morgue, alongside Fun with Stunts and The Irritable Bowel Handbook.
Conrad’s work in progress will never make it into print. Abigail had the only copy of the manuscript, ten blue-lined sheets stained with gin and smeared as
h, and she gave it to her lawyers, and sent a Xerox to me, across the top of which she wrote “Exhibit A!!!” It is, in fact, Defense Exhibit A, and on its strength alone Miles Minden is confident of acquittal. You could tell that the sheets had been pleated and crimped together at one end, like a child’s homemade fan. Whether he did this, or Abigail, I have absolutely no idea. Yes I do. It was him.
It isn’t really a manuscript at all, just ten handwritten pages of false starts, framed and punctuated by filthy cartoons, the pornography of a demented, ungifted child: naked women, all headless, all violated, mangled, rearranged, in a variety of ways, exhaustive rather than ingenious. Interspersed with these are what one might take to be abstract doodles, if one were not aware that their creator had the benefit of extensive medical training. Both text and illustration are accomplished with blue ballpoint ink. Each uterine triangle is darkened so thoroughly that the cheap paper bellies out beneath.
When these pages arrived in the mail here, three weeks after his death, I read them on my feet, unable to sit down or even lean back against the wall. I remember Gloria Gomes asking me if I was all right, and telling her, Just fine, thanks. I stood there and pretended, all to myself, that what shocked me was the prose. I knew he wrote garbage, I thought, but really. Then I went back and analyzed the text, observing clear evidence of his pathological view of women, his deteriorating self-control. There never would have been a book, not even if he had lived. He was too far gone to organize his fear and loathing into even the tritest narrative thread. Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Reading Conrad Lowe’s de facto last will and testament was like the morning I woke up in the house I had shared with my sister for almost all of our lives and refused, for as long as I was able, to see the gaping breach in our wall. Just how plain is the nose on your face? Unless you’re looking in a mirror?
Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather Page 22
