“Therefore women aren’t funny. QED.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, obviously nobody is actually thinking about any of this on a conscious level.”
“Well, but you are.” Cel realizes she’s chewed her straw nearly into sludge. “I mean, you’ve thought about this a lot.”
Luke flinches a little.
“I think about everything a lot,” he says.
1975
It is almost midnight and Cel is still awake, watching Ruth bang on the television with her shoe. Their TV is black-and-white, rabbit-eared, alternately high-strung and stupidly insensate—like an actual rabbit, Cel says, and Ruth laughs. Cel is five. Ruth bangs a final time and then, through the mizzle of bullet-colored static, an image appears: a man with pale, jumping eyes, standing anxiously beside the record player.
The Mighty Mouse theme song is playing; the man on television is waiting for its chorus. Cel and Ruth laugh and laugh—at the solemn lip-synching, the earnest urgency of his gearing up to do it, and at something else Cel can’t put a name on yet and maybe never will. She loves Saturday Night Live because if they’re watching it at all it means they’re already breaking half of Hal’s rules. For the rest of her life, Live from New York it’s Saturday night! will give Cel a sense of promise and thrilling subversion: one day she will follow this feeling all the way to New York City.
Around them, the house is dark. Ruth likes to turn out all the lights that aren’t already burned out whenever they watch TV, letting its reflection play out in the picture window. The images loom above the dark woods like an animatronic meteor; looking at it makes Cel shiver. She huddles deeper into Ruth, ready to laugh again when she does. They laugh at Mighty Mouse until they’re sick; Ruth laughs until she cries and then keeps laughing beyond that, until things start to get tangled and some critical switch flips and she is sobbing instead of laughing. This happens sometimes, and Cel has learned to fall into her own sort of fit when it does, growing hysterical and wild. This time, she throws a frenzy—she carouses and shrieks and, in a fit of inspiration, even meows—and something about this pushes Ruth back to laughing. Sometimes Cel cannot stand how much she loves her mother. She celebrates by falling off the sofa. And then Ruth falls off the sofa after her, cry-laugh-crying, her eyelashes clumping prettily from her tears.
Cel lives her real life outdoors. She spends the summers in shorts, usually shirtless, the phragmites whisking against her legs. She stations herself in the stream, hypnotized by the rippling water, fleeing only when the humid afternoon susurrus grows thick and coiling all around her. She runs inside to listen to the thunder, so fierce sometimes she feels like a marble being shaken in a palm.
In the stream, Cel is predatory and alert. On the beach, sycophantic squads of ants go fanning across the sand. The sight of a blue crayfish claw in the mud sends a feral thrill down her spine; she tried to cook one once, but its meat was so stringy and soapy that even Hal spit it out. The fish she regards as her allies, and with them it is strictly catch-and-release. Cel scorns the pale little suckerfish—so easy to spot, so easy to catch; she covets instead the dark and darting minnows, some as fat as her thumb. Bigger fish are slow but rare; she might spot a trout once a year, if she’s lucky, and stalk it unsuccessfully all summer. The only one she ever gets to touch is already dead: pinned under a plastic bag, eddying around a pool beneath a little waterfall. Up close, its colors are almost luridly bright, like a clown with melting makeup, and seeing it this way feels wrong. It is, after all, just a very small unimpressive thing, when alive in the water it had seemed lordly and strange.
Best of all are the real animals and their clues: the iridescent clamshells, chipped from where the raccoons had broken them open. In the wet sand, delicate footprints in the shape of tiny human hands. Bears make dusky semicircles in the grass, and leave a sharp, cautionary scent if you’ve only just missed them. Cel sees them sometimes, too—she sees bobcats, and coyotes, and an inexplicable red thing in a tree. She looks it up later with Hal: it is a marten, apparently, which Cel has never heard of. What she really wants to see is a mountain lion. Ruth claims to have seen one, though Hal doesn’t think it’s true. Cel makes her tell the story over and over—how the tawny cat with the long, long tail had once come down over the hill—and Cel decides that she believes it. She watches the woods obsessively, waiting for her faith to be rewarded.
The forest has its own mythology, complex and self-referential, marked by omens and touchstones. The enduring, talismanic mysteries posed by the forest: the ski pole stuck in the ground halfway up the hill; the red truck she discovers near the top, half-obscured by vegetation, that she swears was never there before. The wiry half-dead grapevines, tangling amidst the hemlocks. The sagging stone wall that Hal says is from the olden days, before all the farmers gave up on the shallow soil and moved west.
Then there are the great mysterious events, totemic and elevating and defining of eras. The time nudists come walking down the river. Another time it’s a family with children—like something summoned directly from Cel’s dreams—though they only stay through one summer and a divorce. Anything, it seems, can come crashing through the forest; anything could be given, and anything taken away.
The darkest portent—the one that can only be called a curse—is the night the giant white pine tree is hit by lightning. It was a catastrophe of literally nightmarish dimensions—Cel has many times dreamed of this loss—and something about the combination of prophecy and grief renders her inconsolable. Only Ruth understands the extent of her sadness, just as only Ruth understood her hysteric hilarity when, years after adopting a tiny tree—Cel wreathing it with stones for protection, Ruth cooing at it with a singsong, hypocoristic lilt, both of them devoting themselves with an ardor that Cel hadn’t recognized at the time as, essentially, maternal—they finally realized it was a bush. They laughed over this with the same intensity they later extended toward the pine, while Hal muttered darkly over boys he’d known in the war who were mourned less than this goddamn shrub.
But in the woods, things matter, both differently and more. Home is where things are said and done that might later reveal themselves to never have happened at all. Trying to decipher Ruth is like trying to learn a language that keeps changing its alphabet, and sometimes insists it has no written tradition at all. In the woods, everything is real and also more than real: all stones are arrowheads, all rustles are bears. Though Cel isn’t greedy: she rejoices every day over the more quotidian revelations. The stubborn handful of beech trees amidst the conifers; the place deep in the forest where a stand of chartreuse ferns grow in a shaft of narrow light. A dark panicle of deer scat in the snow.
The seasons comprise a liturgical year, complete with rituals and rites. Cel marks time from the icing of the stream in the winter; to the blooming of the mountain laurel, the color and shape of cumulus clouds; to the resurrection of the tiger lilies every Fourth of July; to the springtime emergence of the painted trillium—so intricate it seems to belong in a museum, so beautiful it seemed impossible that it would have really been there if Cel hadn’t come along to see it.
And maybe, just maybe, it hadn’t: after all, who can say that it had?
TWENTY-EIGHT
semi
I am besieged by humidity as I emerge from the Fifty-ninth Street station; the air is so thick it feels like an impostor. This is why I’m bent at the waist, why I need a moment to catch my breath, as I straggle along Columbus Circle.
Matthew is at the restaurant already. He probably makes a habit of having his girl misstate the time. Must be nice to have staff—maybe this could be my opening line? But no, this makes no sense—it is not a rejoinder, only the eruption of a mind in dialogue with itself. Which is what this whole thing always was, in fact.
“Hello.” I seem to have sat down already.
Matthew looks at me and says, “Oh.” This Oh is part laughter, part harrowing sadn
ess: it sounds like the exclamation of a person in an absurd freak accident the moment they understand that this (this!) is what is actually going to kill them.
There is a long, drowning pause.
“You look well,” he says.
“Ha.”
His mouth opens, closes. He looks like a lamprey.
“You look like a lamprey.” His mouth closes more decisively, and then he laughs. He has one of the sadder laughs I’ve ever heard—though the competition in this area is stiff—and it relumes something within me. I tell myself this is not recognition, but déjà vu: a skipped beat in the brain.
“It’s been a while.”
“An age!” There’s an unhinged merriment in my voice. “Since ’79, I think it was?”
“That sounds right.” It seems just possible he isn’t sure. I tell myself that these preliminaries are important; once they’re dispensed with, once I can be sure of the steadiness of my own hand—then, then, I will turn on the recording device in my pocket.
“Well, here you are,” he says.
“Alive and kicking.” I’d like to pour myself some water, but this seems inadvisable. “Maybe you wondered.”
“I’m so glad,” he says. Then: “I was sorry to hear about your friends.”
I suppose he means this in a general way; I can’t imagine he’s been scanning the obituaries.
“Oh, did some of them still owe you money?”
I was hoping we could negotiate our way to some mutually acceptable level of hostility—but all of a sudden the waiter is upon us, imperiously listing the specials. I remember why I hate going to restaurants: I can no longer bear being a supplicant on my own time.
When he finally leaves, Matthew asks: “Are you still writing?”
His voice has fallen into its familiar tessitura, which is how I realize he’s been using his TV voice until now. This certainly means it is time to turn on the recorder. I drop a napkin, retrieve it, and do.
“Oh yes,” I say, emerging. “I’ve had a play about AIDS running at the Underground for a year. It’s been a huge sensation. I’m surprised you haven’t heard.”
None of this will sound great on the tape, I realize.
“I live a pretty cloistered life these days,” says Matthew.
“Positively priestly, I’m sure.”
“I’ll have to come to see your show.”
“I could probably comp you a couple tickets,” I say. “No guarantees.”
“Are you working on anything new?”
“Oh, always.” This is a lie. All my new ideas keep getting subsumed into The Spectators: more and more, I have the sense I will be writing it for the rest of my life. “My new project is about the Mattachine. That was the group that—”
“I know.”
“You know. Okay. So it’s about, you know. Fools speaking truth to power.”
I’ve invented this project strictly for the thematic purposes of this conversation.
“Well, you always did like an allegory.”
“These days all anyone writes is allegory. Or autobiography. Which are embarrassing in different ways, but what can you do? Anyone who’s still getting to pick their humiliations at this point is very, very lucky.”
“My guests must be the luckiest people in the world, then.”
“I’d say they are relatively lucky, yes. You know, in the scheme of things? I mean, none of your guests are AIDS patients, are they?”
“No,” says Matthew quietly. “Not since Comment.”
“Not since more than four people have been watching, you mean.”
“I didn’t think it would be the right fit,” he says carefully, “for this version of the show.”
“Totally. I mean, what a drag, right? Best avoid the topic entirely! There’s some precedent for that, you know. Not only the more glaring examples—your federal government, your mainstream media. Even some of us in the gay community prefer not to discuss it.”
“I believe it,” he says.
“For example, there’s this photographer—you wouldn’t know his work—who spent years taking picture of AIDS patients? Now he photographs llamas.”
“Sounds like a familiar trajectory.”
“Upper-class llamas, at that.”
“Is there any other kind?”
“Or Robert Ferro—another unfamiliar name, I’m sure. He just wouldn’t put the word ‘AIDS’ in his last novel. Just wouldn’t do it. It’s one of those words that if you let it be one word, it sort of becomes the only word, you know? And who wants to be summed up like that? Still, entre nous, I think it was bad form of him. I mean, there’s a war on. Even Hemingway had to drive ambulances.”
Matthew, I notice, is twirling some spaghetti around on his fork. Its presence makes the entire scene feel abruptly dreamlike—and then I was sitting with Matthew Miller in midtown, and then he was eating spaghetti!—but a scan of the minutes preceding does reveal a dim memory of ordering food. I look down and notice a plate of mussels.
“But enough about me!” I say, cracking one open. These must be expensive; some part of my brain, clearly, was operative. “I want to hear about you. Do you still watch wrestling?”
“No.” Matthew laughs again, that rueful dammed-up laugh, and I hate him for it—what does he know of sorrow, and how dare he parade it around like that, where anyone at all can hear? Over the years, I’ve come to understand that the truest grief is often undetectable; this creates the suspicion that casually demonstrated pain is inauthentic. Or maybe I’m only turning into my grandmother, and am finally just embarrassed by displays. “I suppose I don’t need to anymore.”
“You’ve got your day job for that.”
“It’s a similar idea. Different participants, slightly different skill set.”
“It seems to keep you busy.”
“Yes,” he says tiredly. “That is exactly what it does.”
“Your staff seem awfully peppy, anyway. That little cheerleader producer is just a doll.”
His eyes flash. This is some distant descendant of an expression I once knew—there’s that sense of an urgent awakening that you alone have summoned—and I remember how it stirred me, how it stunned me, once.
“You don’t have everyone’s number, you know,” he says.
“I do know.” I knew it just yesterday, for example, while looking at that paisley-shirted woman. But knowing this isn’t the hard part. It’s the remembering. “I don’t think I need to remind you who first taught me that.”
He issues a flinch that somehow apologizes for itself; he seems to realize he hasn’t any right. I’ve read about a cognitive disorder in which the sufferer becomes convinced that everyone around them has been replaced by simulacra—that they are surrounded by identical, sinister doubles. I can imagine this experience, I think, by multiplying Matthew Miller by everyone.
“So what’s the story with the kid-murderer’s letters?” I am trying to sound conversational.
Matthew puts down his fork.
“Is that why you’re here?”
I hunch over my mussels. “Not exactly.”
“Are you working for someone?”
“I’m just curious.”
He sighs, and I know he doesn’t believe me. To prove to myself I was going to do it anyway, I turn off the device in my pocket.
“I just think it’s interesting,” I say. Although I don’t. As a politician, Matthew wrote back to all his letters, and some of those were from people who’d already committed murder; to me, his writing back to that shooter is one of the least surprising things he’s done in decades. “Although you always did like to side with the underdog.”
“I like to withhold judgment,” he says.
“Don’t you think that’s cowardly?”
“I think it depends on the circumstance.”
“Well, you always liked to let things depend on the circumstance.”
How this had impressed me, how it thrilled me, once—Matthew’s ability to understand opposing arguments, to articulate them better than their own best champions ever did. I’d never wanted Matthew to succeed in politics, but he did, for a time, make me believe in them. He made me believe, anyway, that an acknowledgment of reality’s ambiguities was not a useless dithering, but a righteous first step toward action. We all know better now, of course—the political sphere has long ago exposed itself as a self-sealing pageant, immune to decency or data. But my disillusionment really began, I’m understanding now, with Matthew. His ludicrous post-politics career wasn’t even the half of it.
“You aren’t who I thought you were,” I find myself saying now.
Brookie said this to me once, back when we were little children and thought we were breaking each other’s hearts. You aren’t who I thought you were: I’d found it very hurtful. It seems a peculiar kind of loss, coming, as it does, alongside a retroactive blessing—leaving you with the unbearable knowledge that you’d had someone’s regard, once, before you squandered it.
For a long while, Matthew studies a spot above my forehead.
“When you and I knew each other,” he says finally, “I thought a great deal. I spent a lot of time thinking about what was right, and I spent a lot of time wondering where I had it wrong.”
I don’t get where this is going; I hope to God it isn’t turning into a case of Matthew getting things off his chest. Whatever he’s got in there can stay right where it is.
“I wasn’t arrogant, you know.” He says this forcefully, as though rebutting some long-standing accusation.
“I never thought you were arrogant.” Though I don’t remember, precisely, whether I did or not. The light around us has a dense, waterlogged feel. “I think I mostly thought you were delusional.”
The Spectators Page 29
