The River Swimmer: Novellas

by Jim Harrison

  “I’ve never poached an egg,” he mumbled.

  “I’ll give you a lesson this afternoon. Where did you get those beautiful trousers?”

  “In Florence last October. Firenze they call it.” Clive specialized in picking up the odd piece of clothing on his dozens of European trips. A handwoven and tailored light summer sport coat from Cordoba, a bulky corduroy sport coat from Calabria, a half dozen pairs of linen trousers in Nice and a half dozen linen shirts from the same tailor, cream colored and off white, a butcher’s leather vest from western Burgundy, brogans from a shoemaker in Dublin which were resoled every seven years. At a party after a Lincoln Center function Tommy Hilfiger had said, “My God, who dresses you? Fabulous.” Clive never wore neckties under the private conviction that all of the political and financial mischief in the nation was created by men who wore neckties.

  “You’re in for it, kiddo. I taped the instructions to the refrigerator.” Margaret laughed again. “But then what’s a month? As a New Yorker you’ll be pissed that you have to lead her out to a bird-watching site at six a.m. after coffee. I made a map and a numbered list of the sites.”

  “Thank you. I usually get up at seven a.m. anyway,” he lied, idly wondering why people lied about money, alcohol, and when they got up in the morning. At least rural Midwesterners lied about sleeping hours, having been relentlessly taught that “the early bird gets the worm.” Rural Midwesterners were given to getting up in the dark and patiently waiting for daylight. At least with his father there were chores to be done. The cows and the remaining old draft horse had to be fed. Clive would pitch down hay for the half dozen Holsteins and Jerry, the draft horse, the remnant of a team that had been retired after their first tractor had been purchased when Clive was six.

  Margaret helped him carry his luggage up to his boyhood room at the back of the house on the second story. Clive hadn’t stayed in the room in more than a decade, preferring a motel in Reed City for his visits while his mother was still on the warpath. Only in her early eighties did she begin to mellow and during the last visit to New York City with Margaret she had grasped his hand across the kitchen table when talking about how well his father had danced the polka.

  “I was the envy of every woman over Ralph’s dancing. You better believe he raised his knees high at the polka and in perfect time to the music.”

  She was definitely never a hand-holder. Margaret left in a merry huff over toting one of his too heavy Moroccan leather suitcases upstairs. He noted how happy she had become after her divorce three years before in Chicago where she had run a laboratory in a big hospital. Clive had loathed her dot commer husband, a technocratic oaf of which there were many, though the couple had produced two fine sons now in their midtwenties. His mother’s constant complaint was that she would likely die without great-grandchildren since Margaret’s boys seemed ill inclined toward marriage and his own estranged daughter, Sabrina, was definitely not marriage material. Sabrina was working toward a PhD in earth sciences, whatever that was, at the University of Washington in Seattle. This seemed to him extraordinary for a rich girl who had never acted spoiled. Their moment of disaffection had come three years ago when they were eating in Babbo on the eve of his ex-wife’s fourth marriage in Santa Monica, where she had a house off San Vicente.

  “Your mother is buying husbands like trinkets,” he had said idly while drinking a full bottle of Amarone. Sabrina had gone for a couple of glasses of budget Friuli.

  “Dad, what an unspeakably asshole thing to say. She needs the love you never gave her, that’s for sure. You were all about ambition. You didn’t even come to graduation.”

  Sabrina threw down two one-hundred-dollar bills, a habit of her mother’s, this throwing money. He had missed her Wellesley graduation because he had been near Saint-Rémy, France, appraising the collection of an American man on the verge of divorce. The man was itching to have a couple of Matisses declared bogus to save settlement money. Sabrina had gone out the door leaving her veal chop untouched and his ensuing letters and phone calls were unanswered. He had taken the veal chop home to the apartment. Sabrina had visited her grandmother a couple of times a year, staying in this very room he thought.

  Maybe it was all about delusions of integrity. In his own twenties he had thought overmuch about not compromising when no one was asking him to compromise. At that age a specific rigidity seemed necessary to isolate yourself from your own confusion and to invent the person you were to become. Sabrina and her grandmother had always had an open level of communication based on their mutual obsession with the natural world. He had nothing of the kind with either of them since they both were singularly disinterested in his own passion for art.

  He sat on a reading chair beside the back window of his boyhood room. Margaret had thoroughly cleaned the room but had not quite expunged the mustiness of disuse. Above the antique iron bedstead painted white with brass knobs on the posts were three of his early landscapes with only Pond at Dawn showing any talent, his having caught the rising mist off the water and the curious blur of lily pads, an effect cribbed from Monet. Of far more interest to him were the wavering distortions offered by the antique glass back window and the rusty torn screen behind it. A spider was trying to extricate one of its eight feet from the screen which gave Clive a feeling of uneasiness so he stepped through the open door into the hall. He tried to ignore two of his early paintings Margaret had hung in the hall but gave up and looked at them closely. He mildly liked the one of Jerry the draft horse’s head, but he attributed this to sentimentality. The other was an amateurish portrait of Dad’s green John Deere tractor made at his father’s request. There was too much green, as his father had parked the tractor in front of a grove of lilacs which had been toward the end of the blooming period, so that the flowers hung limp and desiccated. There had been a mild argument with his father, a firm supporter, who had ordered Clive’s first twelve-dollar watercolor set from the Montgomery Ward catalog. His father wanted the tractor, lilacs, and all of the backdrop including the farm implement shed in perfect focus, which had put the twelve-year-old artist in a state of high dudgeon but ultimately had been wonderful. Clive had patiently explained that a painting wasn’t a snapshot. A photo can be okay but that’s not how we see. When we look at things we don’t put the entirety of the surroundings of what we’re looking at in focus. He and his father had had a wonderful time walking around the barnyard looking at things. His father had agreeably noted that when you looked up at a swallow’s nest under the barn’s eaves the wooden slats of the barn aren’t in focus and neither is the metal roof. When you are looking at a particular hen in a flock of thirty chickens the thirty are certainly not seen in photographic detail. When Jerry lifts his huge head from the water trough you see the water dripping from his muzzle in the glint of the sun for a moment and that’s all you see. Out of his implicit sense of fairness Clive had said that great photographers were more likely to imitate painters than vice versa.

  Clive turned in the hall and stared at the source of his early life’s work. The hall window was part of a door that looked out at the twenty-acre thicket. He had been a scant five years old when his father had taken the door from an abandoned country church a few miles down the road cushioning the pickup bed with empty burlap potato sacks. Clive had tagged along in his miniature OshKosh overalls with saggy suspenders and was a little worried that his father was stealing. The upstairs door was necessary because a maiden aunt who had a phobia about fire was living with them, thus his father had installed the second-floor door and a wooden staircase down the back of the house in case the aunt had to escape a burning house. That was fifty-five years ago and the sloppily built staircase was gone and the door was there now nailed shut.

  It was the door that brought Clive as a child through the portals of the mystery of vision. The outer edges were dozens of pieces of beveled leaded glass and the boy looking through each fragment was given a peculiar dist
orted vision of the back forty, now a thicket and pasture gone wild. At sixty Clive knelt on the floor and peered through the lower separate small panes as if he were five again. A bird flew by and startled him and he suddenly stood up feeling an uncomfortable itch in his head from this time travel. On his way downstairs he recalled a lecture he had given about the origins of painting, and how the child makes squares of reality with his fingers and peers through the square at the mysterious world, or in a house moves his head left or right to change the view of the world through panes of glass. He had ended the lecture contentiously with a quote from the literary critic Randall Jarrell, who had written to his wife, “What a pity that we didn’t live in an age when painters were still interested in the world.” This naturally pissed off the abstract expressionists in his New York audience but having abandoned painting Clive no longer had any territory to protect. He was up for anyone doing what they wished as long as they weren’t all doing the same thing. Back in the seventies and eighties he thought there must have been twenty thousand abstract painters in the art schools and universities throughout the country. He had noted something similar when as a morning ritual he listened to Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac with sketches and birth dates of writers’ lives finishing with a contemporary poem. As an obsessive reader he had noted that novels, stories, and the poems Garrison read all tended to deal with etiolated suburban ironies. Maybe in unison with the painters there also had been twenty thousand MFAs in fiction and poetry? In any event he had become bored with his thinking. To even say aloud the truncated phrase “the arts” had become a big cotton ball in the mouth and such inanities as “a rich cultural heritage” were sheer torture. He had forgotten who had said “Art cannot survive the abstraction of it.” In his old room he had studiously avoided looking at the bookcase on the far side of the bed.

  He decided to take a walk and tiptoed through the living room past his mother, who was dozing upright on the sofa with a large book about raptors on her lap. He paused at the refrigerator to filch a piece of the delicious ham and at the same moment he heard his mother’s voice.

  “Son, that ham is for Margaret’s going-away breakfast and for a sandwich I’ll make her to pack along. You can’t tell how they’re going to feed her overseas.”

  He fled in haste. He had had the urge to do a reconnaissance of the thicket while Margaret was still here in order to ask her any pertinent questions, but in his hurry he’d unfortunately forgotten to take along her map of the thicket pinned by a magnet to the refrigerator door, or the aerosol can of mosquito dope Margaret had advised. There had recently been a heady item in the New York Times on how it was important to take a pee before driving because the biological urgency of having to pee will adumbrate your driving skills. Chewing the ham and his mother’s voice made him forget the map and mosquito dope.

  First he walked out to the gravel road for a clear view of north and south and the sun’s afternoon to get his bearings. South was diverting because he could see Laurette’s house a mile distant, also a farm lane lined with Lombardy poplars on the west side, the scene of a memory that was still curiously raw after forty-plus years. It irritated him that the farm was still part of his character despite how much he had resisted its tagging along behind his life. The irresistible memory, with a remnant of rawness akin to the wound left behind by a tooth extraction, burst into his consciousness with the sight of the tree-bordered farm lane before he began walking the thicket path. Two nights before graduation he had dropped his date off in Reed City, then was flagged down by Laurette and several of her friends under a streetlight. It had been the traditional “girls’ night out” for those in the in crowd and they all were a bit drunk and stoned on the weak local pot called Indiana Red. They all shrieked “Frenchy” when they normally would have ignored his passing car. The problem was that the girl who was supposed to give Laurette a ride home was out of it and was Clive willing? Of course. The group had been skinny dipping and Laurette’s hair was still wet and she smelled pleasantly like lake water. Her head lolled a bit and her normally crisp voice was a little slurred. They chatted like they had been doing since kindergarten.

  “Did you have a hot date with Tania?” she asked without interest.

  “Of course. We fucked like minks,” he teased.

  “You didn’t!” she laughed.

  “Then we didn’t if you say so.” Clive and Tania had had a mild coupling. She was somewhat of a hippie, the movement having invaded the outback in 1968, and she and Clive were the only members of the class who actually read books so the relationship of the two was thought to be natural to others.

  “Just think. Six hundred acres under the plow.” They were passing her boyfriend Keith’s family farm where a half dozen silos gleamed in the moonlight.

  “Tell it to someone who gives a shit.”

  “You’re just a poor boy who’s jealous.” She was pissed. “You don’t want me to tie the knot with Keith in July? You’re invited.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “We’re lifelong friends and you won’t come to my wedding?” Now she was teary.

  “I can’t deal with bourgeois spectacles.” He loved the word bourgeois and overused it.

  She wanted to talk so he pulled off down the farm lane between their houses. She had half a joint in her purse which she lit and he drew a pint of peppermint schnapps from under the car seat.

  “We haven’t kissed in years.” She coughed.

  “It was in the eighth grade. You needed me for practice.” The French kissing had taken place on the porch swing in August at her place. She had hooted with laughter when he got a hard-on, slapping at it, which was painful.

  “Well, this will be our last chance so we could make out a little. Of course you know me and Keith have gone all the way.”

  He certainly didn’t want to hear this from the love of his life though he had suspected it and heard rumors. Nothing is a secret in small town schools. He had a lump in his throat when he swigged from the schnapps bottle. She drank more deeply and he moved toward her on the capacious front seat of the car. They embraced tightly and kissed so that many years later his taste buds could recall the peculiar mix of flavors of pot and schnapps. When he ran his hands across her bottom and his favorite green skirt that she wore his hands paused feeling no panties line.

  “I couldn’t find my panties after swimming.” She laughed a bit manically and her laughter increased when he boldly, he thought, pushed her skirt up to her waist. “You always wanted to paint me nude and now you don’t have your paints. Keep your hands to yourself, buster.” She reached a hand up and pushed the button to the dome light. “Here’s the other side,” she said turning over.

  He had become dizzy having forgotten to breathe. She had drawn her knees up and was leaning against the passenger side door with a glittery smile. Her pubis was clearly visible and like all burgeoning painters he was taking mental photos.

  “Get yours out and I might just jerk it.”

  He did and moved toward her. Her hand was rough and a little frantic.

  “Your pecker is bigger than Keith’s. It’s not fair.”

  “You’ll live with it.”

  “All men’s dicks should be the same,” she insisted.

  “There’s no democracy in the arts or in life,” he muttered, close to coming off.

  “You always have to bring up that art bullshit,” she said, taking a firmer grip and he was finished. She grabbed tissues from her purse, wiped her hand, then threw the tissues at his face. She slumped back and closed her eyes. He was bewildered staring at her crotch and thighs. He was still erect but wondered if it was ethical to slip it into a girl who was drunk, stoned, and sleeping. He answered himself by turning off the dome light, starting the car, and taking her home. The denouement came when he helped her up the porch steps and to her front door and she giggled, “You missed your only chance,
kiddo.”

  Chapter 4

  Clive only came back to relatively full consciousness when he found himself next to an old crab apple tree in bloom near a large willow tree and a bog that was perhaps an acre in size with cattails, some uprooted by muskrats for food. The bog had once been a small pond beside a bone yard where milk cows that had died from natural causes or disease were dragged by harnessed Jerry or later on by the tractor. His immediate surroundings told Clive that he was at the back of the property due west of his mother’s house. He could continue west and come out in an open field and take a circular route back home but it would be far longer and involve climbing a couple of fences, an irritation he wasn’t ready for. There was an urge to find a grassy spot and take a nap but the air was full of those bloodsucking pests, mosquitoes, and he could only diminish the bites by keeping moving at a good pace. Unfortunately the paths weren’t laid out on a geometric grid but wandered left and right, and short of busting brush in dead reckoning he was trapped by the established route set by his mother and Margaret’s sons and Sabrina who had come all the way from San Francisco to help out. Clive had never been a good navigator. Once in his early teens he had gone fishing with his father and they had walked a long path through the woods to a small lake where they kept a cheap aluminum rowboat. Clive had forgotten the can of worms in the pickup and when he fetched the can had strayed from the path back to the lake while looking at wildflowers. He heard his father calling and was finally able to thrash through the thick undergrowth to the lake.

  His irritation was growing over his lack of mosquito repellent and the map, plus his expensive pair of Italian walking shoes were wet and muddy. He was also angry at Laurette’s part in his indiscretion. As a northern Midwesterner, Clive overrated sincerity but Laurette had no compunctions about fibbing or outright lying. In their long childhood friendship he had been a quizzical, tolerant boy but by high school he had figured out that she was three girls in one. First of all she was his friend, second a member of the in crowd at school, and thirdly, she was a jittery waif with a largely absent father, no brothers and sisters, and a mother obsessed with her flower and vegetable gardens and English mysteries. When she was a kindergartner her parents had moved north from Grand Rapids where her father had a good job with a grocery store chain. Her father had a fantasy about becoming a farmer but was ill prepared for the relentless labor. Laurette’s family were referred to as “new people” and would have been if they had lived in the locale fifty years. Her father had returned to his job in Grand Rapids promising to visit each weekend but gradually his trips back north became rare and local gossip had it that he had been seen with other women.