Desire Provoked

by Tracy Daugherty

  “There’s a big difference,” Adams says. “It’s important to know where you stand.”

  “Ahhh.” Rosa waves her hand. “How’re your kids?”

  “Fine. They really enjoyed having their fortunes told.”

  “Your little boy’s got a lot of hostility, you know?” “Yes.”

  “Was he born in a leap year?”

  Adams is astonished.

  “Saw it right away. He’s not at home with himself. He tries to keep up but he’s like a slow watch. His sense of timing’s been off from the start. He wants to be older than he is, and it crushes him that he’s so far behind.”

  “I wish it were as simple as that.”

  “Believe me.”

  “Maybe I do.”

  “More chips?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Well, drop by sometime. The dead don’t say all that much.”

  Jordan is back at work, conciliatory, cheerful, refreshed. He insists on treating Adams to lunch. Jill comes along. She was questioned this morning about the missing money, as was Adams a week earlier. Routine, the accountant says, we’re checking everybody. Jordan forgets his wallet and Adams ends up spending forty-three dollars.

  Carter tells him, “Things’ll calm down once this latest deal goes through. Ever been to Greenland?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know if we can swing it, but Comtex has some interests up there. Word has it they’re dissatisfied with the base maps Tobin and Muldrow have given them. Want their own, firsthand. Would you like me to check into it for you?”

  “Wonderful, yes.”

  Adams waiting for the kids. Pamela reading into a tape recorder (“I have to prepare a lecture on art and politics for this little gallery downtown”) a passage from Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour: “‘White water is inconceivable.’ That means we cannot describe (e.g. paint) how something white and clear would look, and that means: we don’t know what description, portrayal these words demand of us.”

  “Hence,” Pamela says into the recorder, “Dangerous words. No, scratch that. Let’s see. Color. What can we say about color? Well, all right, for one thing, color is temporal—not like words on a page where it takes two minutes or whatever to read a paragraph. But Time, as in the tenor of the times or the latter days of the twentieth century, fixes color and dictates color choices. A silly example—get a better one later—say I’m working on a portrait. I pause for lunch and read about the deployment of medium-range missiles in Western Europe and I think about the end of the world and my mind trips back to the passage from Revelation that my father forced-fed me every night, about the moon turning blood-red. So when I return to the portrait, I mix a little extra red into the skin color. Temporality has chosen the color for me because I live in a tragic, temporal world.”

  Sometimes Adams sees colors when the band’s in the middle of a set. It’s as if there were a thin film of tinted water on the drums; when he taps them with a stick, sheets of blue-green, ruby, and yellow shimmer in the air.

  “So much of modern art,” Pamela continues, “has no philosophical basis. It’s aimless and irresponsible, like the country. As such, it’s an accurate barometer of the country. But every choice of color and form is a moral choice. We discriminate, one instead of another. That’s why my art and my political consciousness are developing hand in hand, why the nuclear threat affects the way I draw a line.”

  According to a front-page story in the Elgin Observer, the Honorable Frederick Palmer, congressional leader of the tenth district, has secured funds from the Bureau of Reclamation to build a dam on the north bend of Elgin Creek for the purposes of flood control.

  Adams checks the records: Elgin Creek has never flooded. Carter and Palmer have figured out a way to make a profit on the dam, and have government funds to pay for it.

  He’ll press harder for Greenland.

  “Only one man I ever met had good reason for owning the land he did,” Otto tells Adams on the phone. The connection is weak, since Otto lives in the mountains of Pennsylvania where telephone linemen seldom service equipment. One of the richest men in the state, he chooses to live in a one-room wooden cabin full of squirrel shit and mice. “When I worked as a landman, we scouted ranchers to see if they were willing to sell mineral rights to their property, then we looked for oil and gas. One time I visited this old man in western Kentucky. He owned a bunch of woods down there, never had developed them. They’d turned to brambles but he wouldn’t sell. I asked him what he planned to do with that property and he said, ‘Nothing.’ When I asked him why, he said, ‘Cause there’s a wild child in there.’ I didn’t know what he meant. He told me a son of his had crawled into those woods soon after he was born and never was found. They could hear him late at night, though, howling with the wolves. And the old man wouldn’t sell—wanted to protect his son.”

  Tracing grids, preparing to add the numbers. He remembers Deidre, at the age of two, trying to unfold a slip of paper. Until she had actually opened it, she didn’t know what the flat piece of paper would look like, though she had watched Adams fold it seconds earlier. Now that his divorce is final, Adams sees himself in this same blank relation to Pamela and the kids.

  I’ve made a decision, Pamela tells him (by way of asking for a loan). After long years of fast food and automobile air conditioning, of learning to ignore, for the sake of my children’s uninterrupted happiness, the rapid decline of our dear urban centers, the dyeing of our air, dark, darker, as though it were an egg on Easter Sunday, the division of men into segments, the left hand literally not knowing what the right etc. (the inevitable result of a division of labor), the thinning of our bones in disgust as we bat the badminton birdie over poisonous lawns and gardens, entire communities smelling like burnt toast, the murderous revolt of our own tissue cramped as it is by carcinogens and Coke, perfume and smoke, and finally, Sam, after the failure of love, I have decided to wrap myself (along with hundreds of other women who have been running to keep the planet from crumbling under their slippered feet) around a nine-mile stretch of chain fence at Greenham Common, England, to pester and molest the young American men there dressed as soldiers, to goad them to distraction so that the deployment of medium-range American missiles cannot be accomplished with any degree of businesslike efficiency and pleasure. Joyously we will cling to one another in the mud and rain, tampons held proudly between our legs, hearts beating proudly beneath our breasts, our powerful female bodies blocking the birth of twilight. Don’t try to follow me, old friend, men have been banned from the Common, a source of consternation to those of us who feel that disarmament is not specifically a fern-inist issue; on the other hand, those are men’s missiles, vast and raw as Easter Island penises, leaning heavily on the children of the Soviet Union, the children of East Germany, the children of China, while their missiles lean in turn on the children of Europe, the children of the United States. Their children, our children.

  Part Five

  A BRIEF unexpurgated history of the world (when Toby was four years old and Adams asked him what he did today in preschool):

  “We put clothes on our clothes for finger-painting and then we painted with our fingers and I ran out of paper and we took the clothes off our clothes and Mrs. Thompson she’s a girl took me to the back and helped me take my clothes off so I could wet the toilet and then it was time to rest. Then we ate bananas and looked at pictures and rested some more and Mrs. Thompson took Lisa Griffin she’s a girl too to the back and helped her take her clothes off so she could wet the toilet and then we rested some more when we were all dressed.”

  Hundreds of women. Bobbies in blue. The women dragged off by the bobbies to jail. At night the women in jail. The bobbies as husbands at home, as fathers at home with their wives. No plan, not really, not really a plan to speak of. Missiles. Gleaming white silos, a chain-link fence that runs nine miles. In the daytime mud and rain, plastic hats, the husbands as bobbies at home. Fathers of a chain-link fence. Hundreds of women in
the daytime, muddy and wet, weighty, resisting the bobbies, heavy yellow plastic trying to stop the deployment of missiles. I have to go there, Pamela said, where for nine miles the world is coming to an end.

  “Attending one cause to the neglect of others inevitably foreshortens knowledge of the overall effect,” Adams writes in a letter to his brother. Pamela’s in London. He gave her five hundred dollars to help pay for her ticket. “The right breast is just as marvelous as the left and that, in part, explains this woman’s terrible arrogance.”

  “Carter was furious this morning,” Jill tells him at dinner. “The county informed Palmer that the dam site is privately owned.”

  “They’ve changed their tune, then. I thought the county claimed that land.”

  “Within a week of the ground-breaking, city council dropped all legal proceedings.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “It’s illegal for the government to fund projects on private property. The county obviously wanted to block construction of the dam.”

  The Observer carries a full account: the dam had never been intended for flood control. It was meant, instead, to be a power source, generating hydroelectricity for homes in northern Elgin County—the lots that Carter had recently sold. The dam, privately owned by Carter and a few partners (Congressman Palmer among them, Adams figures), threatened to eat into the revenues of the Elgin Utility Company.

  For several days, Carter maintains publicly that he had planned the dam to prevent high water. When meteorologists point out that there is no such danger, Carter publishes Adams’ map, with the altered isohyet. “Flash floods are an imminent possibility,” he says. “We’re fortunate there have been no disasters so far.”

  Palmer flies back from Washington for a news conference. “My record and my conscience are clear,” he tells the press.

  Adams fears an indictment for falsifying documents. Jill feeds him Pepto-Bismol, Nyquil, Excedrin.

  Pamela has lost eight pounds. Her right elbow is cracked. She won’t say much about her ten days in England (though she does give Adams her receipts): mud and rain, a few arrests. She wasn’t among those taken to jail. “Dissent’s the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do,” she says. She seems discouraged, a bit shaken.

  She’s been playing tricks on the children. She bought a smoke alarm, Toby says, and the other night around two it went off. He hustled Deidre out of bed and they ran into the hall. There was Pamela on a chair, pressing a button on the alarm, making it buzz. She smiled at the kids, walked into her bedroom, and shut the door.

  “Maybe she was just testing it,” Adams says.

  “In the middle of the night?”

  That’s not all, Toby tells him. The day she got home she asked him to heat some roast beef for her in the microwave. He opened the oven door and was startled to see a shiny face. He dropped the roast beef on the floor. She had placed a clown mask—part of the costume she had bought months ago to tease Deidre—upright in the oven. She stood in the kitchen doorway, smiling, as Toby picked up the meat.

  Near the cemetery in the least lit end of town fireflies signal their names. Again. No one dead bothers him and he doesn’t think past the overhead hum of the wires.

  Night is a flat color through which he’s stared at his country. In quiet times, when he was a kid, he poked among car scraps in junkyards on the edge of town, looking for radios that would sing to him from someplace down the highway.

  In the kitchen of the dance hall down the road, an all-night cook sends flour into the air beneath a ceiling fan. Adams can just make out the dance hall door from here. He delights, imagining the arcs of dough and the sugar he could chew until it hardened like tobacco in his mouth.

  The sky’s insistent clouds; the cemetery trees, top heavy, wrapped with iron to keep them from splitting; the clasp of his own ribs. He’s happy about the snow that won’t fall again tonight. On calm nights it’s possible even to be happy about the earth, though it’s packed with victims and hides its face in an accident of rock.

  His children will take care of their mother. He will take care of himself. Rosa’s screen door scrapes open in wind, a sound that reminds him of home.

  “Sometimes, in the middle of a séance, the dead start talking all at once,” Rosa says. “I can’t tell one voice from another.”

  I used to powder my face in the morning light through serrated curtains the green and gold sheen of the mirror hush twenty bucks I says to him for the gun in that case Smith and Wesson was a pisser wasn’t it I’d say so yes train tickets grilled ham and cheese colanders seed packets a copy of The Masses a toy rickshaw with a paper umbrella for God’s sakes hush that man could drink I haven’t been thirsty in what was it like being thirsty like making love to yourself and stopping before you were through I regret to inform you opening day Ebbets Field my heart soared like a pigeon purple martins came we built a house for them hush now hush up but the sparrows made a nest in your friends and neighbors have nominated you for tomatoes the Columbia Encyclopedia Robert’s Rules of Order black olives matchbook covers most sincerely crossword puzzles yellow paper I was sixty years old in what was it like being sixty years old not enough get me some more a shaken Mrs. Wilson informed her children good-bye honey I love you will you please be quiet keep frozen broke out in hives too soon can’t rush fifty amperes warmest regards insert part A into part B then shhhh three dollars and fifty vaya con Dios did you twice at least no what was it like I don’t remember hush.

  Elgin County’s legal staff is no match for Mai-low and Vox, not to mention Palmer’s Washington pals. Not only is the dam approved, it receives additional funding from the Bureau of Reclamation. All objections from the Elgin Utility Company are swept away, as are the protests of the individuals who had originally opposed the county.”

  “Everything in its place, hmm?” Carter says, signing a document that effectively terminates one-third of On-Line’s employees. “With our operations streamlined, we’ll show an even greater profit margin next year.”

  Under new policy, Jordan’s position in the Records Office is absorbed by the clerical staff. Ever since the accounting department reported to Carter, rumors have been thick that Jordan was caught trying to embezzle two to three thousand dollars from the political action fund. Adams asks Carter about him.

  “Unstable. Mayer warned me. I should’ve fired him long ago.” If he suspects Jordan of stealing the money, he doesn’t show it.

  Adams stops by Jordan’s office to say good-bye. “You’re going to have to find another boogeyman now, Sam. I’ll be three thousand miles away.” Adams wishes him luck.

  At five o’clock he stands at his office window. Jordan, carrying a small box containing articles from his desk drawer, steps onto a bus. The doors close behind him and he’s gone.

  Each friend is a light and you stare at your friends. The dark moves in. It never leaves. He sits here thinking of his debts.

  The worst dreams come back like a series of bad decisions. Each has a face he can recognize: his father reading in a square of light, his mother smelling of milk, the rude and perfect taste of girls who circled his house in the dark: I’ll help you don’t worry just think how long you’ve waited.

  Think of the friends who’ve looked to you, how often your help didn’t matter. They fuck themselves up, you don’t see them again. It’s what you do all day.

  Jill has let herself in with a copy of Adams’ house key. Adams comes home carrying two sacks of groceries.

  “Stay out of the kitchen,” he tells her. “Le Grand Diner coming up.”

  He boils rice, bakes chicken, steams clams, mussels, peppers, tosses salad, mixes a spicy oil and vinegar dressing, butters a baguette. He sets the table with cloth napkins, lights two red candles, pours champagne. “I’ve been given an international assignment,” he tells her.

  Jill nods. “I knew it was a matter of time.” She helps him carry the plates to the table. “Where?”

  “Svalbard. Near Greenland.” Adams passes h
er the salad.

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Carter made a deal with Comtex for exploratory mapping. They think there are undiscovered oil deposits on the island.”

  “How long?”

  “Six months.”

  “Whew.” She lowers her glass. “Can I visit?”

  Adams smiles. “Four weeks after I get there, the sea becomes too icy for ships to navigate, and there are no commercial flights.”

  “Well, you know, your papers will have to pass my desk,” Jill says.

  Adams pours them each a glass of Amaretto. They retire to the bedroom, undress each other slowly in the reflected light from the window, and sit together on the bed.

  Jill tells him of her plans: she believes she will leave On-Line within the next few months. A better offer has come her way from the physics department of Murray State College. The university’s personnel director seems to have taken a romantic interest in her.

  “Do you like him,” Adams asks. “I don’t know.” She traces a line on Adams’ thigh. “Maybe.”

  “Then I think you should go out with him.”

  “I might,” she says. She sips her Amaretto. A sweetened kiss.

  He must renew his passport, contact the utilities, visit his parents, make arrangements for a replacement with the band. (Zig has written a song about him called Sanitized Terminal Man, “about this real straight dude who likes to get down at night.”) He’d forgotten what it meant to say good-bye.

  Rosa puts him in touch with his paternal grandfather, who if living would’ve been a hundred and thirty-two years old.

  “What’s it like being dead,” Adams asks.