Maggie Pouncey

by Perfect Reader (v5)

  No one knew the poems existed. Her father had given them only to her. They could easily disappear. Manuscripts had disappeared before. Manuscript and fire—as linked in the literary imagination as tuberculosis and undiscovered genius. Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, had famously not burned his friend’s papers, and all the literati considered him a hero for it. Having never read Kafka, Flora could imagine a world without him; her world was without him. She had read about the posthumous act of defiance at the Cross Library while doing her executioner research. Defiant, and dishonest, wasn’t it? Brod had what she wanted: instructions in a will. And ignored them.

  A violent act: throwing a book on a fire. Irreversible, like death. And a bit Victorian—manuscripts weren’t burned anymore; they were lost in the wilds of hard drives, they crashed, or were mis takenly trashed. Something romantic and old-fashioned, then, in throwing papers on a fire. Also anti-intellectual, repressive, and selfish. What Republicans did, or geniuses overcome by madness. Her father had told her the story of Dante Gabriel Rossetti burying his manuscript with his muse, only to regret the move years later and have the body and papers disinterred. There were many acts more brutal than incineration.

  What would it look like to incinerate a manuscript? How long to turn to ash and ember? Most of her father’s work Flora regarded with equal parts tedium and fascination. But the poems were a special case. It was flattering to be the only one he had trusted with them, as though he had left her, in addition to the house and the money, a piece of his mind, his most private self. Still, she did not want to read them. Reader’s block—a mutation of the old, familiar literary neurosis. She’d read poetry, but never seriously, and mostly at her father’s suggestion. “Pay particular attention to the third stanza,” he’d instruct. “That’s where he begins to make the language work for him.” “Don’t bother with Stevens yet,” he’d told her once when she picked a volume off his shelves in high school. “If you read him now, you won’t love him. Don’t deny yourself that falling in love.” But had she ever fallen in love with a poet, or a poem? When she was little, she asked her father in tears, “What if I don’t like poetry when I grow up?” fearing this would be the end for them. “Of course you’ll like poetry,” he told her, and she’d believed him. And she did like poetry. But she felt she didn’t love poetry as she ought to. What if she couldn’t love his poems?

  Looking at the fire, and the possibilities it presented, she became aware of her pulse. The thrill of a bad idea. One’s body telling one to act. Fight or flight. But how to know which action it was recommending? Childhood had been so ripe with opportunities for disobedience. What opportunities had the past seven years of her life—her trial adulthood—presented? A gradual diminution in photo copying responsibilities, an ever-fluctuating stream of anxiety and anxiety medication, a haze of cigarette hangovers and haircuts she couldn’t afford, afternoons spent in Laundromats reading Susan Sontag at the recommendation of some boy with only minimal comprehension, sex without foreplay and urinary-tract infections, air-shaft apartments with bathroom doors painted over so many times they wouldn’t shut. Was this, the loss of her father, the means of escape she’d been wishing for, a new opportunity to disobey, her own act of defiance in the making? She’d packed her party dress, for Christ’s sake. Her twenties, now, had something of a narrative arc: My father died, and everything changed.

  She’d had violent fantasies before—tripping, shoving, plate shattering—but they’d remained fantasies. Having no siblings, Flora had never hit or been hit. She pulled back the screen. She could throw one page, one poem, on the fire and see how it felt. Once she’d pinched Georgia hard on the arm, and her fingertips had left a dark purple welt that so appalled her, she didn’t speak to Georgia for a full day, as if she had been the one responsible. Just the title page, perhaps. Nothing of substance would be lost.

  “Some good bits, though,” her father had said, handing her his poems over breakfast, asking for her opinion. The last time she saw him. “But be kind to your old dad. Don’t give me the full editorial treatment. Big picture. Favorite and least favorite lines. Triumphs and disasters. That sort of thing. But I hope you like them, Flora-Girl, I really do.”

  She threw her tea on the fire. It released an unsatisfying hiss, then a sputter, then nothing. There would be no incinerating, no disinterring. She was not a deranged genius; she was no book burner; there were limits, even, to her selfishness. She turned the page and faced the first poem.

  It was a Tuesday evening, after dinner at Ponzu, that her father told Flora without her mother, breaking with the standard practice, the recommended protocol of both parents presenting a united front, a last hurrah of togetherness, an encore. He said afterward, when it had become another thing for them to fight over, that he’d felt he had to; something Flora said had made him think she knew. Flora didn’t know what that was, what it could have been. She knew nothing. How could she have known? Her father took the tea and English muffin up to her mother in bed every morning—he always did this, up until the very end. Then he and Flora ate their breakfasts together in the big kitchen, on the tall white stools, resting their elbows on the red Formica countertop, and then he’d make her lunch and take her to school. Every day, like that, just the same.

  When he told her, he said, “Your mother and I have reached an end,” as though there were many possible ends and they had arrived at one by chance, as though it were a board game, or a choose-your-own-adventure story, and she said, “I don’t know what you mean,” though she was crying. She was sitting on the ground on the rough gray industrial carpet on the third floor, once the maids’ quarters, now the family area, and she was crying and sweating a little, and she said, “I don’t know what you mean,” and he said, “We’re filing for divorce.” And she cried, sitting on the floor, with her father in a chair above her, and she didn’t want him to come near her, to comfort her, and he didn’t try to, as if he knew, or didn’t care. She wanted to run away and throw herself down the stairs, down all the stairs in one great leap, to smash her body into the floor below.

  Once she knew what they had known for a few months, there was no need for pretense, no need for civility. She wanted to not know, to unknow. Before, they had spoken in French so she wouldn’t understand, laughing exotic secrets to each other. Now they fought in French when they remembered or cared that she could hear them. Her mother cried and ate Reese’s peanut butter cups. “Your father is such a prick,” she told Flora as she braided her hair tightly for school. Her father moved into the guest room and had a private phone line installed. “Your mother is a sick woman,” he said, buttering Flora’s English muffin.

  The house, in its institutional grandeur, was impervious to them, untroubled by their misery. It easily accommodated her father’s move, and the new private phone line. He disappeared into the gold room. Flora rarely saw him, except at breakfast, which was weirdly normal, their routines impervious to them as well. When she saw him in the evenings, he was on his phone, already tethered to another person, another life. He hired Jimmy Mills, a local sleazebag, as his divorce lawyer. “Dark Satanic Mills,” her mother called him. Flora didn’t get the joke. The only one who got the joke was her father, and he pretended it wasn’t funny. They’d reached a stalemate in the financial agreement. They would all live together—the three of them in the President’s House, all in separate bedrooms, as if it were a dormitory—until the divorce was final, the contract signed.

  “It’s my only leverage,” her mother said. “He wants us out of here so badly.”

  “Mom says you’re trying to evict us,” Flora told him one morning as he drove her to school.

  “No, sweetheart,” her father assured her. “Not you, never you.”

  But they all knew, without discussing it, that she would live with her mother, that when she went, Flora would go, too.

  6

  Revolts

  DAWN, AND A DAMP SPOT nestled beside Flora in the twin bed, spooning her. Above the cano
py frame a brown ring, the paint bubbling sinisterly. The house was in revolt against her: She hadn’t read the poems.

  “Fuck,” she said, realizing what had happened. “Fuck this stupid fucking house.”

  The roof had given way, with God-like precision, to the ark-worthy rains overnight. Cynthia had warned of—or perhaps willed into being—such an event. Who did one call when it started raining indoors? There was no super, or father to call; Flora was in charge. She needed to know about things like poetry and leaking roofs. But she couldn’t face the morning, or the mess. She found a plastic basin under the sink in the bathroom and placed it on the sheet below the leak, then slinked down the hall to her father’s room. The thought of someone seeing, or explaining the move to her mother, embarrassed her. It looked bad. Damn Freud! Couldn’t a grown woman sleep in her father’s bed in peace?

  Larks watched, the black caterpillars of fur above his eyes lifting, ears poised.

  “Lie down, Larks,” she said, and he settled into his spot at the foot of the bed with a sigh.

  Larks was still in mourning, or, more accurately, in patient wait. Maybe that was what mourning was—waiting. Larks was a sweet, affectionate dog who liked everyone well enough, but he’d regarded Flora’s father with an undignified level of devotion, and his days were now devoted to the kitchen window, where he could gaze at the slate steps for hours. His anticipation constant, his optimism irritating.

  “He’s not coming back, Larks,” she’d told him in a hard voice, and then felt hard. She’d scratched around his soft ears. “You know he never would have left you by choice. His plan was to outlive you,” she’d said, the way her father had spoken to the dog—in complete sentences, as though talking to a person.

  Being in a proper bed, a bed big enough for two, was a thrill. She could sprawl; she could stretch; she could span. At a certain age, twin beds became ridiculous, demeaning even, sad, and she had reached that age. His mattress was extremely comfortable, the sheets silken and expensive to the touch. New? Flora liked interiors. Hence the job. Hence the rearranging. She liked making a space her own. She liked being in a space she had made. But did she like her father’s interior? The whole house was very comfortable, if imperfectly arranged, well stuffed and clean. Her father liked good wood—cherry above all—and simple Shaker lines. He liked paintings of barns or broken wooden fences, leather boxes with motley mementos stuffed inside—a postcard she’d sent from Mexico, an arrowhead, a hand-carved spoon, a photograph of Larks as a puppy. It was all tasteful, easy, with ample storage space. A strange setting for a lone twenty-something girl. What would become of her living in the midst of this throw-pillowed, subzeroed existence? Would she skip her thirties and suddenly emerge middle-aged?

  This room was much nicer than hers, with an extra window, better light. There was even a working fireplace and a larger closet. There was no need to preserve the room as some kind of shrine, was there, or to leave it lying fallow? The door to the closet hung open, offering a glimpse inside, as though her father’s shirts and pants, his shoes and his ties were stunned by, and monitoring closely, this new move. He was a man who even in his presidential years owned only two suits, which he referred to as “the suit” and “the other suit.” But for someone who cared so little about clothes, he’d worn them well, relaxed and elegant, if a little rumpled. Like a colonial Raj—at home in the world, his world, confident and at ease.

  He was never going to wear any of those shirts again. He would not come home, annoyed to find himself displaced, a refugee in his own home. He would not take back his house, his manuscript. He could not revoke her literary executorship, her control of the estate. He would never know her secrets from him, or what she had learned of his from her. Such revelations kept striking, mallet-like—he will not be there to throw tennis balls for Larks tomorrow; if I answer the telephone, he will not be on the other end—each a fresh, wounding surprise. The permanence of death a continual surprise. Like Larks, she waited. She listened for his footsteps on the slate.

  The yawning maw of the closet accused her. She got up and closed the door. If she slept in her father’s room, she would do so clothed. There was no need to be naked in there. The whole house was hers. She’d use her old bedroom as a dressing room, keep her things in there for now. But God, if she stayed in his house, would she never have sex again?

  She sank into sleep but was awakened by the phone—who on earth? It was still “sparrow fart,” as her father called the early morning. She didn’t answer. It would not be him on the other end. She was not a call screener, as that implied there were people whose calls she would receive. She just didn’t answer. She listened to the rain, an aural cliché of relaxation and coziness, but in this case a reminder of the hole in the roof, the burgeoning decay above. Again, the phone. Either an emergency or an asshole. She answered.

  It was Cynthia Reynolds, her father’s friend.

  “Yes, Cynthia, of course I remember,” Flora said, sitting up. As if she would have forgotten. In her father’s bed, her father’s lover in her ear, she felt newly self-conscious, as though Cynthia could see her there; as if Cynthia had a greater claim to that bed than she did and knew it.

  “Am I calling too early?” Cynthia said. “I see it’s just gone eight o’clock. I never know when it becomes acceptable to phone. You see, I’m a terrifically early riser—like your father. I guess I’m used to dialing his number at odd hours.”

  “No, it’s fine. I’m up.”

  “I called a few minutes ago, but there was no machine, so I was worried I’d dialed wrong. But now it occurs to me you told me the machine had broken…. How are you?”

  Flora debated mentioning the leak. Cynthia might know a roofer, know a number to call. “I’m fine,” she said instead. This had been her default reply to such inquiries since childhood, regardless of circumstance, misery and joy reduced to the same monosyllable. Though in Flora’s case, she stretched the word out over two syllables, raising her pitch slightly at the end: Fi-ine. “How are you?”

  “I’m sure you have plans for Thanksgiving,” Cynthia said. “But I’m having a few people over and we’re going to eat late. I was hoping you might be able to stop by for dessert and coffee in the evening.”

  “Sure.” The curt word out before Flora thought to say no.

  Thanksgiving: the great feast of familial gratitude; the onslaught of the season of good cheer. It was a week—or was it days?—away. Flora already had two Thanksgivings planned. The first a brief visit with Georgia’s parents—Madeleine had called to invite her after their reunion at the library, perhaps out of pity, because that was what one did when someone’s father died. The second was dinner with her mother, who was coming to Darwin to check on her, a preemptive intervention, though she would stay not with Flora, but with friends in town. “It would be too weird to sleep in that house, your father’s house,” she’d insisted.

  “Oh, that’s wonderful.” Cynthia spoke too enthusiastically, with exaggerated warmth. “About nine, then?”

  “Yes.” Flora wrote down the address, which was nearby, as everything was in Darwin—inescapably convenient.

  “Oh, I’m so pleased you can make it.”

  “Can I bring anything?”

  “Oh, no, just yourself.”

  Did the woman start every sentence with the word Oh? And what other, truer words did it leave unsaid?

  “Thanks for the invitation,” Flora said. “See you then.”

  And Cynthia hung up without saying good-bye.

  Mrs. J. had described her as “after something.” Was she now after Flora? Was she wooing the daughter, as she’d wooed the father? Or was Mrs. J. right that it was the house she wanted? Flora’s father’s bedroom had been sprinkled with some unmistakably feminine touches—a gratuitous glass bottle on the dresser, what looked like a vintage silk scarf, red and floral, laid like a runner across the mantel. Cynthia had certainly spent more time there than Flora over the last year. It had probably come to feel like her h
ouse as she gradually, month by month, began to make herself more at home in it, as one does at a boyfriend’s place, slowly colonizing the maleness—a new bath mat here, a ceramic coaster there—seeping in, claiming, detail by detail.

  “But, technically, it’s my house now, not his,” Flora had reasoned against her mother’s objection to sleeping over. “What if I decide to live here for the rest of my life? Will you never come visit me?”

  “God, Flo,” her mother had said. “You’re not seriously considering that, are you?”

  Her mother had fled from Darwin as soon as Flora graduated from high school, and talked about the town as if it were below Chernobyl on the list of places one might want to live. She had no use at all for nature—city parks presented too much greenery for her taste—and so Darwin’s bucolic charms, such as they were, were another strike against, rather than for. She still talked about the move to Darwin as though Flora’s father had brought her to the most backward of backwaters against her will.

  Back in Darwin, Flora felt a sharp longing, like the quick thrill of a bitten tongue, to go back in time, to protect her younger self from what was to come. But then, she was going back, wasn’t she? The word move suggested action, suggested progress. But the move to Darwin, if that’s what it was, the move into her father’s house, and now his bedroom. What was she doing? She heard her mother’s voice, her disapproval: Flora, what exactly is going on with you?