Desire Provoked

by Tracy Daugherty

  What does that mean? Adams pauses for a moment. He considers the crescent roll lying on the plate on his kitchen table. My consciousness of that crescent roll depends upon my awareness that I am not a roll. I don’t get lost in rollness. Separation (i.e., negation) is fundamental to consciousness.

  He wonders how to represent negation on a map, then realizes that maps are by definition negations of territories they do not include.

  If every positive implies a negative, it follows that every negative implies another positive, and so on. Self-generation.

  The universe is constantly working itself out.

  He pours himself another Scotch. The problem remains: What is working itself out in the universe?

  He picks up Hegel again. “Reason is the substance and energy of the universe.”

  But where does Reason begin? Like a mathematician, Adams must isolate the principles. The beginning of Reason. It must be the most abstract conceivable thought. Being generates Nothing, and vice versa, so this, Adams thinks, is the ultimate abstraction: a blank idea into which anything may fit. Being is the quality without which a thing ceases to be itself. He looks at the crescent roll again. He could remove the brown color from it but it would still be a roll. He could change its shape but it would still be a roll. He could take it apart any number of ways but nothing he does can tell him why, when all of the elements are joined, a roll is formed.

  Is language Reason? That seems a little suspect. He marks his place in Hegel, buckles his pants, and walks down the block to the library. A white cat zips across the cemetery, a single bulb burns in Rosa’s kitchen. Adams whistles a tune as he walks up the street.

  In the library he settles himself at a scuffed oak table with several heavy volumes. Locke identifies ideas with all objects of consciousness. Consciousness is the mind’s apprehension of its own processes, and the wellspring of knowledge.

  But what is an object of consciousness? An object, Adams thinks, is something toward which consciousness directs itself. Words? Thoughts? Ideas?

  The intentionality of consciousness: It is always conscious of something.

  Locke is no help.

  Berkeley says an idea is a mind-dependent Being. Closer to Hegel, though Hegel would not restrict ideas to the mind.

  Sartre: Consciousness is an insatiable hunger.

  Adams’ stomach growls. He chuckles, catches the eye of a girl who is trying to study. She gives him a severe look and returns to her book. Adams wonders if he has any cheese and crackers at home. He walks back up the street. The wind rises, blowing paper and cans along the curb. He stops and looks at the field of the dead, the chilly marble stones and bent flowers in copper cups.

  What we want, as human beings, is to know.

  What we look for in other human beings, a knowing that knows our knowing.

  Reason seeking recognition of itself.

  The light goes out in Rosa’s kitchen. A Volkswagen Rabbit turns the corner, sputtering loudly. Absurd to anticipate Reason in a world that’s running down, where people’s needs are so opposed. Still, when he recalls Hegel—“Nothing remaining but the mere action of subjectivity itself, the Abstractum of Spirit—Thought—” he feels braced.

  Hoping is harmless, he thinks. He bounds up Rosa’s steps, rings the doorbell. She comes yawning to the door, dressed in men’s pajamas. “Sam? What the hell are you doing out so late?”

  “Rosa,” he says, “Reason is working itself out in the universe.”

  Adams takes a few days off, leaves the kids with Pamela’s friend Cyndi, and flies to Pennsylvania to help Otto adjust after leaving the sanitarium.

  “I want to change my will,” Otto says. “Cut those bastards out of it. Pammy’s a good girl, but she listens to her daddy.”

  He’s twelve pounds lighter than the last time Adams saw him. A sallow swirl around each eye.

  “You don’t have anything left to bequeath,” Adams reminds him.

  “I’ll get it back, don’t you worry. Got me a Southern lawyer.”

  That afternoon, while Otto sleeps, Adams talks to the lawyer, a Harvard graduate in her thirties. Her name is Sharon Wells. “I’ve been hired on a contingency basis,” she tells him. “My fee depends on the settlement.” She is dressed smartly in a kneelength navy skirt, an Arrow shirt, and a man’s red tie. Her hair is ash-blond; round glasses magnify her eyes. “He has a very good chance of regaining his property. They violated his civil rights.” She is currently drafting a new will in elementary language, echoing Otto’s style, naming Deidre and Toby as beneficiaries, as per his wishes. She intends to videotape the signing in case there is a question about Otto’s competency. Adams leaves the office impressed.

  He drives his rented car across town to Jurgen’s house, a white wooden Tudor, brick trim, picket fence in front. Pamela lets him in. She’s thin.

  “How are you,” he asks.

  “Tired.” She doesn’t seem friendly.

  “Your father?”

  “Some better. How are the kids?”

  “Fine. Cyndi was going to take them to the zoo.”

  Pamela nods.

  Jurgen is also unfriendly. “Why are you helping that old goat?” he croaks, sitting up in bed. Kleenex and bottles of capsules crowd the night table to his right.

  “He has nowhere to go. Somebody’s got to look after him.”

  “You think I’d just abandon him?” Adams shrugs.

  “He’s my brother, even if we don’t get along.”

  “I’m just lending him a hand, Jurgen.”

  “Well, it’s not Christian charity, Sam, I don’t believe that for a minute. You’re doing it to spite me.”

  “I’m doing it because you stuck him in that sanitarium against his will,” Adams says, glancing at Pamela. She is standing by a window, letting the sun warm her shoulders.

  “Well, aren’t we on a high horse?” Jurgen says. “Since when are you so concerned about other people? If you’d worried this much over Pammy, she might still be your wife.”

  Pamela turns toward the window.

  “I think I’d better go,” Adams says. “I didn’t want to get into this. I just came by to see how you were.”

  Jurgen coughs loudly and can’t stop. Three white hairs wiggle in the middle of his forehead. Pamela pounds his back. Adams brings him a glass of water. When Jurgen is calm again, Adams squeezes Pamela’s wrist, tells her he’ll let himself out.

  That night, time on his hands, Adams goes to an ice show he’d seen advertised in the paper. Otto is resting comfortably at the sanitarium; Adams’ room at the Holiday Inn is too depressing for anything but sleep. The ice show is being staged in a giant arena downtown. His seat is good, a little high perhaps. The arena looks like an airplane hangar, with a green metal roof and heavy rafters. The crowd moves about restlessly on the scarred wooden bleachers. Everyone’s wearing a coat.

  The show begins at eight. Cold vapors rise from the square of ice, big as a basketball court, on the arena floor. A man dressed as Chaplin’s Little Tramp circles the rink, tossing white roses to women in the front row. Adams remembers nights he spent with Jill, the sheen of her legs in the chilly air of her apartment, the warm touch of her hip on his thigh. He thinks of Carol on a bed of snow. He makes a mental note to take Toby and Deidre skating when he gets home, and to buy for them at a hardware store a heavy chain, a fragrant piece of pine wood, a sheet of water-repellent plastic, because these textures are nice to feel.

  Otto disappears on the day of the signing. For two hours Adams combs the city. Finally, after lunch, Otto appears in the lawyer’s office, drunk, wearing a checkered flannel shirt. He is covered with hay; he won’t say where he’s been.

  The lawyer tells Adams, “Clean him up. Buy him a suit.”

  Adams drives Otto to a department store where just this morning, searching the streets, he’d seen a blue serge suit in the window.

  “Where the hell do you get off, buying me a suit I don’t want?” Otto snaps.

  Ties run
two for eight dollars. Adams gets a couple for himself.

  Back at the office the lawyer signals her assistant to start the videotape machine.

  “Are you married?” she begins.

  “No, are you?” Otto says.

  The lawyer begins again.

  Adams tells Otto, “You’ll need a place to stay while your case is waiting to go to trial. It could take months. Why don’t you come back to Nebraska with me? I’ve got a place in the country now. It’s isolated. You can have it to yourself most of the time.”

  “Does Pammy know about this place?”

  “She never comes out.”

  “She’s awfully upset with me.”

  “You’ll never see her. I promise.”

  “Sam, my man. What’s shakin’?” Pete has let his hair grow back. He’s wearing a sleeveless jersey.

  “I’m trying to map the universe.”

  “Heavy,” Pete says.

  “Do you ever think about it? I mean, do you have a mental picture of what’s out there?”

  “The universe, man, is a single sax note blown in the face of God.”

  To Bob, it’s a series of cogs.

  To Denny, a case of jewels.

  Mary, the teenage girl who flirts with Pete between sets, doesn’t know but hopes it’s soft and cool, like sand at night. “Maybe they’ll teach me in college,” she says.

  “No, books published one week are obsolete the next,” Adams tells her.

  “Like music, you mean? Heavy metal was in for a while, then disco, then punk?”

  “Sort of, yes.”

  “Well, shit. What’s the point of going if everything I learn’s a golden oldie before I even get out of school?”

  Otto has settled into the dome, an uneasy alliance with the computer. Adams introduces him to Rosa, hoping they’ll hit it off, but Rosa has recently purchased an ammunition belt (dummies) and insists on eating a box of chicken wings she has brought. Otto is leery.

  “What makes you love black people so much?” he says.

  “It’s not a question of love.” She licks her fingers. “It’s the wave of the future. Even if the spirits hadn’t told me, I’d have seen signs in this world.” “What signs?” Otto says.

  “Poetry, music, theater, dance … the most vital art is being produced by minorities.”

  “What’s art got to do with it?”

  “Art reflects changes in the world. The imagination of the white Anglo-Saxon male has run out of gas. Read their books. They’re all depressed.”

  “Let’s eat,” Adams says.

  “That woman’s crazy as hell,” Otto tells Adams once Rosa is gone.

  “I know.”

  “Why do you hang around a woman that’s crazy as hell?”

  “She’s kind to the children. Keeps me company.”

  “Married?”

  “Widow.”

  “Probably talked her husband into the ground. Although …” Otto props his feet on Adams’ stone table. “She’s got a point about the signs. I used to figure out what was happening in the country by looking at the ads we painted. Whatever ails you, that’s what we put on our billboards. When I first started painting, it was just stomach disorders and colds, then it was female troubles and I knew if that’s what people were reading signs about they were talking a whole lot more about screwing than they used to. I coulda told you there was going to be a sexual revolution years before it happened. You just got to watch what’s ailing folks.”

  The tips of weeds in the field behind his yard sparkle like spurs. Bright quarter-moon. Wooden roofs on nearby houses resemble rough thatch.

  The man in Adams’ yard crouches by the fence, elbow on leg, free palm to the ground. The same man who appeared in the yard months ago. Quickly, Adams slips past the front door, circles the house, and approaches the man, stealthily, from the rear. A light mist is falling. He lifts the latch on the gate. The stranger has not moved. Adams steps forward, not too close. “Can I help you?” he says.

  The man turns, keeping his face in shadow. He pushes away but trips over Adams’ right foot. Together the men fall in a bed of wet leaves. The stranger tries to rise, slips again. Adams holds his shoulders.

  They get to their feet. Adams crouches, ready to tackle. The man is not tall, quick, or imposing. His shoulders are small and smooth beneath the padded suit.

  “Pam?”

  She loosens her hair and it falls around her face. “Yes.”

  “All along …” he asks, astonished. They haven’t spoken since returning, on separate flights, from Pennsylvania.

  “Yes.” She is breathing heavily, brushing wet leaves from her arm.

  After thirty seconds he recovers his voice. “Are you crazy?”

  “Of course.”

  She’s mocking him, answering every question in the affirmative. He changes his approach. “Will you tell me what you’re doing?”

  “Yes.” She smiles, loosens her tie, but says nothing.

  Adams turns to look at his house, the kitchen light, the drawn curtains.

  “Oh no no no.” Pamela laughs. “Not a voyeur, Sam. You know me better than that.” She removes her heavy coat. “I’m the Man of the Year, the nuclear threat, a lead pipe, a piston. I’m the Terror of the Prairie, the thundering hooves of unperceived radio waves.”

  She’s not drunk. Her eyes are clear and sober. She’s putting him on for reasons he can’t imagine.

  “Okay,” he says quietly. “Is the performance over? What the hell have you been doing out here?”

  “That’s right,” she says. “It’s a performance, Sam.” She rolls up her sleeves. “How long did we live in this house together?”

  “Seven years,” he says.

  “And married for fifteen?”

  “Do you want to come inside? Can we talk about this like we’re not two crazy people?”

  “I like it out here. Country of my Fathers. I am Zorah, protectress of the men with no heart.” She laughs.

  “Cut it out. What are you doing?”

  “I’m making you uncomfortable?”

  “You’re acting like an idiot.”

  “Remember, Sam, art is imitation. The first time you saw me out here, you thought I was a burglar or a pervert, didn’t you?”

  “I thought you were a guy I knew at work. I didn’t know what to think.”

  “Street theater’s risky. If you stage a holdup on a sidewalk, people’ll call the police unless you signal them it’s all an act. Art telegraphs its intentions. When it doesn’t, it ceases to be art. Or ceases to be perceived as art, which amounts to the same thing. Why didn’t you call the police on me?”

  “I tried. It’s not their jurisdiction.”

  She’s greatly amused by that.

  “Is that what you call this? Street theater?”

  “The Song of the Lorelei, the Poisoned Lozenge, the Terrible Awakening of the Lycanthrope, his wolflike skin, the wrenching echo of his cry across flat country. I must say you disappointed me, Sam. We had one good chase, but that’s all.”

  He looks at her as though he’s not seeing her.

  “You know the best thing about this house?” she says, absently wrapping the red tie around her hand. “The floor space between the built-in shelves in the living room. Too large to ignore but too small for furniture. You could fill them with wastebaskets, but who needs six wastebaskets in a living room?”

  “Come inside, Pam. I’ll make you some coffee.”

  “I used to imagine Alan was sitting in one of those spaces—I swept them every day—or lying on a shelf watching TV with us in the evenings. I never wanted a dead child, Sam. It’s hard to know what to do with them.” Mist collects in her hair.

  “We have two living children,” Adams says. “Where are they?”

  “Playing with friends.”

  He rubs the moisture from his face. “You scared the hell out of me. Didn’t you think about that?”

  “How old would Alan be?”

  “I don’t kno
w. Fourteen, I think. Come inside.”

  “I don’t live here anymore.”

  “I’m inviting you in. Will you stop this silly game?”

  “I know you won’t understand this, Sam, but standing here has given me a wealth of knowledge about the differences between art and life. Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray’s Monument to de Sade, Florence Henri’s Self-Portrait, the formal creation of stillness through stable structures—”

  “Will you come inside?”

  “This is important. Jung speaks of container and contained in marital relationships; conversely, in art, the image and the frame—”

  “Then get out of my yard.”

  “But I am the Hook and the Eye, Collar Bone Stew-”

  “Let’s get the kids. Where are they?” “Mother of Hope Unborn.”

  Dear Sam,

  Austin is beautiful in the summer. Mimosa and crepe myrtle. Honeysuckle and roses. The Colorado River is full and near-naked students lounge around the drag in front of the university.

  Come see it.

  Jack is in California in June, visiting his folks. I can’t promise you anything but I do want to see you. Any chance?

  Let me know. Use the univ. address. Got to run.

  Love,

  Carol

  P.S. You got my map?

  It is now late April. Adams and Otto are sitting at Adams’ stone table, north of Deerbridge Road. Early evening. The roof of the dome glistens in the sun.

  “Pam and the kids are coming out here on Sunday,” Adams says. “I thought we’d have a picnic.”

  “You want me to disappear for a while?”

  “No. She wants to see you.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “She’s making a real effort to be fair.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” Otto sips his beer. “In that case, can I invite someone?”

  “Sure.”

  “What if I give ol’ Rosa a call? She’s a crazy old woman,” he’s quick to add, “but you got to admit, she keeps the conversation hopping.”

  “She does that.”

  “Just to break the ice, you know, in case Pammy’s got a bug up her ass.”

  “I understand.”

  “She won’t be wearing a suit, will she?”