by Jim Harrison
We sat in her den and had two martinis in two hours, an adequate but not precipitous rate. I never totally recovered from her announcement when we first sat down that she had made a reservation for me at a motel in La Crosse a dozen miles farther down the road. I mentally paused, trying to think just what I had expected. She also turned down my offer to hoe for a couple of days because the flowering plants were now too small to be treated by anyone but “professionals.” I was, however, welcome to attend her wild-flower workshop in late June at seven hundred bucks for five days, vegetarian meals included. She found it quite comic that I had spent the entire night reading the book she had sent. “So ask a stupid question if you’re still capable,” she said.
“Why are there so many plants in the world? It’s like God couldn’t make up his mind,” I suggested.
“You got all that dreadful God stuff from that cranky old lady, your grandma,” she laughed.
I was pretty nearly offended but it was too early in the evening for a snit, and besides I hadn’t had any dinner. I suggested she offer her life history and she demurred though a good deal came out in casual conversation. She had two “real” marriages, discounting our own, and two dead husbands which she implied was lucky in that both men were wanting in quality. Neither were “soul mates” as we had been, which warmed my heart for a minute or two. The first husband, who she’d married soon after college, had already been forty years of age. Two children were born, now both doing quite well, but when they were in their early teens and her husband was a good jump into his fifties, he fell apart in every respect, whatever that meant. He was a C.P.A., a senior partner in a Chicago firm, and had lost his job in a scandal involving certifying the books of a semi-criminal firm. He began drinking too much, was abusive to her and the children, so she left him. He was dead by sixty-two but before then, in her late thirties, she had married a comparative high roller and moved to Santa Barbara. He was in his late forties when they married and into his fifties when her children left for college (Northwestern and Oberlin). At this point her husband’s “flagging hormones” had driven him into being a sexual adventurer and he had dragged poor Cindy through all sorts of “humiliations.” This, of course, intrigued me but after a number of subtle probes it became apparent that she wouldn’t become more descriptive. She ended her narrative by saying that so many men seem to become “pathetic” in their fifties, adding with a weak smile, “Present company excepted.”
Now it was my turn and I wasn’t eager despite the normal buoyancy of martinis. This was because I sensed none of the warmth I had hoped for coming from her. I pretended to be bored and successful and then it occurred to me minutes later that this wasn’t far off the mark. I fibbed relentlessly as I described tactfully my affair with a theological student whom I seemed to love. If Cindy had given me a soupçon of hope I wouldn’t have done so. Sweat beads of enervation popped on my skull as I described the delights of my life, including my prolonged affair with my “mature” French lover, Claire. To add to the credibility of my story I included slight details about Claire’s sexual boredom and the high expenses of maintaining her.
Well, shut my mouth as we used to say. Cindy was outraged more than halfway through her second martini. I should have remembered that a single glass of beer could make her hypercritical in the old days. How could I throw that kind of money away on a “lazy slut” when her not-for-profit rare-flowers organization was crying out for funds, and when without more money certain flowers would disappear from the face of the earth creating an actual hole in creation. This is what is called being hoisted by your own petard. I could almost hear the rare flowers bleating out their needs in the American night. Within five more minutes of pleading I had made a pledge to rid myself of Claire, not a bad idea, and give Cindy an amount commensurate to what would be saved, not necessarily a good idea.
Miss Blocky called us for dinner and on the way to the kitchen table (the dining room table was stacked with papers and books as was every surface in the den) it untypically occurred to me that the only reason Cindy had told me to come ahead was in her fund-raising capacity and perhaps the idlest of curiosity. Not only was my continued presence out of the question but there was the suspicion that she wouldn’t sleep with another man in this life at gunpoint.
Adding to this confusing state of affairs I was served a massive plate of pasta primavera, a dish I loathed, and as it sat there on a pinkish Formica table I envisioned a bovine struggle to get through half of it. If this wasn’t enough I was also given a bowl of carelessly chopped vegetables and a glass of California jug wine that bespoke its screwtop roots. Rutabaga and maple syrup aftertaste, a hint of tag alder and algae.
For the first time in decades I felt lucky when Don called. How could he be so unwittingly kind? I stepped into the hall with the portable phone, suffering from the raw sharpness of uncooked life. Don likes to show his power by calling at inconvenient times, but then his voice was more attractive than the pasta primavera, not to speak of the idea of giving up Claire for flower ideology. As I spoke to Don I stared at a framed photo of a rather vulvic rose which added to my uncertainty.
The upshot of Don’s call was that there was an open window for an earlier and cheaper press run, thus I had sixteen days to finish with Eisner rather than twenty. Time doesn’t fly, it jumps. To avoid a quarrel I said I would try my best but “try” wasn’t good enough for Don. He had never nagged or cajoled and this time he just said, “Get the work to me, kiddo.” What kind of man would still be in his Manhattan office at nine on a Friday evening? I lamely said that I was having family problems and he told me I was lying because he had just talked to my brother and sister while tracking me down and they sounded “great.” I said I was in the company of my estranged and only wife (he knew the story) and we were thinking of resuming the relationship. He said something to the effect that she had waited thirty years and another two weeks wouldn’t hurt her. Then he hung up his phone. My ears were ringing and I wondered how you puke up a hundred pounds of your life. My eyes became misty and my heart fluttered.
I came back into the kitchen and nearly walked out the door, a decisive move, but it suddenly occurred to me that it was the back door and in my present condition it was unlikely that I could struggle through the greenery to my car out in front. Cindy and Blocky looked at me with a perceptible compassion having heard the local half of my waffling chat. I sat down trying to think of a witticism about highly paid slavery but couldn’t trust my voice to be manly like my new boots. I stuck my fork in my pasta primavera, which had begun to congeal. Cindy reached a hand across the table and patted my own.
At this exact moment a tall man came up the back steps and in the door looking grimy and distracted. I assumed he was a worker on the farm. He patted Blocky on the head, then leaned over and kissed Cindy with a quick interchange of tongues which didn’t immediately record on me even though she ran her hand up the inside of his leg. He offered his hand and I shook it, judging him to be in his late thirties. He talked about irrigation and water problems as he wolfed his pasta. I was still short of my first bite, my innards tightening with total comprehension. For some reason I actually thought of Shelley drowning in Lake Como. I bolted up and whispered that I didn’t feel well, then headed briskly toward and out the front door.
Cindy caught up with me at my car where I had paused quite dumbstruck by the beauty of the twilight, the way the river flowed southward through two sets of giant green hills that were dimming to black. I was the macerated piglet in the valley who felt as unreal as is possible without simply floating away. Cindy gave me a peck on the cheek and told me to call. I looked at her shadowed face and tried to ponder the thirty years in between the last sighting but they had floated away.
Despite my silly romantic grief and confusion I ate an enormous cheeseburger at the bar of the Best Western, my motel beside the river which in itself had an unexpected consolation. Travelers were out on the lawn staring at the river, actually a channel of the main M
ississippi, or so the waitress told me. She was cheap, pudgy, and brassy, but I liked her. I was so tenderhearted I limited myself to two beers. It wouldn’t do to sob over my french fries or leave a tearwet pillow for the maid in the morning.
I was up and on the road at dawn, just after five A.M., having left messages with Thad and Martha, my beloved brother and sister. I reached Chicago for lunch in one of Thad’s yuppie hellholes and made a delicate attempt to fire him. He said he had sensed that I was “on the skids” and reminded me he still had five years left on his employment contract at a minimum of a hundred grand per annum. This is the kind of thing I don’t read but trust my lawyer to read, though I never listen closely to my lawyer. After a wretched chicken-breast concoction with fruit, Thad announced pompously that he was part owner of the establishment and that I wouldn’t have to pay the tab. I said that dog shit is also free which he seemed not to hear, looking fondly out over the full restaurant with people talking about themselves at a greater volume than in New York. When we parted out on the street Thad gave me an extremely untypical hug and told me that if I needed any advice on how to be a failure to give him a call. This was a startling thing for him to say and we both smiled uncomfortably. A stunningly attractive girl approached and gave him a kiss. She looked far too young to be in the company of an adult male. Thad didn’t bother introducing her and when they got into his Porsche parked comfortably next to a fire hydrant, I caught a glimpse of her blue undies. This was a far more palpable form of success than my own.
The Chicago River didn’t quite dollar up in comparison to the Mississippi for which I felt a slight pang as the latter was the first dominant presence in the natural world I had noticed in quite some time. All that water dropping down the skin of earth from Minnesota. Too bad the water is opaque or one could wear scuba tanks and walk slowly south on the bottom of the river, saying hello to fish and the bottoms of passing boats. On Interstate 65 a semi-truck passed that was the same color blue as the undies of Thad’s girlfriend. Another pang and the taste of dank papaya on the wretched luncheon chicken. Cindy’s kiss with her farm laborer reminded me of when my dad said that reality was when you were peeking through a keyhole and someone came up behind you and kicked you in the balls. I was in the ninth grade at the time, and he was counseling me on my moping, lovelorn behavior. I was barely eating and totally ignoring my homework because our high school had a senior exchange student from Portugal named Leila who had visited our geography class with a guitar and had sung us love songs from her native land. To say I was stricken is a euphemism. I was in the second row (no one ever wanted to sit in the front row except jerks of both sexes) and she sat on a high stool in a short skirt, which added to the enchantment. This first experience of falling in love was terrifying. Between classes I’d locate her and follow her around the halls as secretively as possible. In the lunchroom I’d give her meaningful glances from several tables away but I can’t say she ever noticed. Once by accident I walked by a popular drive-in and she was leaning against a rich kid’s new Chevrolet convertible and necking with him. He had his hands on her butt. I wept. In April that year she flew home suddenly for good because there was an illness in her family. I entered mourning and my alarmed father finally took notice and I mumbled out the truth. To his credit he took my dire straits seriously though he had no particular wisdom to offer.
While weaving out and in between trucks in my peppy rent-a-car I was humming de Falla’s Nights in the Garden of Spain. Of course Leila was from Portugal but on the map Portugal was right next to Spain, sort of like Canada and the U.S. I had decided way back then. In English class we had been reading the love poems of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning but they seemed snuffy and quite pathetic compared to the monstrous, surging love in my heart, not to speak of my pecker, for the dark-haired Leila. A large Bloomington record store managed to get me an album of Portuguese love songs and they drove my family witless until my mother bought me a cheap phonograph for my own room.
My parents weren’t noteworthy examples of romantic love. Later, when I saw Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I was uncomfortable. My parents when arguing would hurl little etiolated epithets at one another, complicated word firecrackers, so that a working stiff, or a normal child, would have no real idea what the tiff was all about. But then the children of academics aren’t intended to be normal. It is a tiny world where everyone is expected to be exceptional, or at least well above average. It is odd that by and large academic parents are unaware that their word daggers cause permanent damage, or it would be called “damage” in a more perfect world. In the actual world this might be good training as nothing is meant to be clearly understood. Don, for instance, can put a dozen types of spin on the word “the.” Don is on his fourth marriage and some fools think he had been going downhill in regard to women but I’ve noted that real estate is central, the whim for good digs. Number three owned a pleasant but not spectacular brownstone in the East Sixties, but number four has a house on one of those private lanes up in Greenwich, Connecticut. I was up there one Sunday afternoon for an editing session but I wasn’t asked for dinner. This was fine by me, as a specific division of labor is better in the long run. Earlier in my career I had an obnoxious young woman as an agent but the pro forma nature of the Bioprobe series made an agent unnecessary, especially after Don had a brief, unpleasant affair with her. She was simply too bright for her job and later rose quite high in the bureaucracy that allows the U.N. to function. Before dying of breast cancer a few years ago she wrote me a note suggesting I buy a pistol and shoot Don through the heart, then escape to Spain and do something serious. When we first met I had shared some of my grander ambitions with her.
Just before Indianapolis I turned off into the Lebanon rest area because I was feeling thumpy. My interior monologue had begun stuttering of its own accord. I was hyperventilating and didn’t have a paper bag to breathe in, the most immediate remedy for the condition. I walked in elongated circles around the rest area and then back and forth along the back fence that abutted a plowed field. It occurred to me with horror that I had forgotten to take my DynaCirc, my blood pressure medicine, that morning, an item I hadn’t forgotten to take in the twenty years since the condition had been diagnosed. It was probably a sign of mental health to finally forget taking the pill but I returned to the car and swallowed one with a swig of warmish water said to emerge from an alpine spring. I felt a specific envy for a small group of bulbous truckers who were smoking cigarettes in front of their enormous rigs. Now I was bathed in my own rank sweat and walked to the far end of the rest area and said firmly to a flowering crab tree, “I quit.” Back in my car I allowed myself a single, heartfelt sob.
Afternoon rush-hour traffic around Indianapolis was grotesque but I enjoyed it. Like the others, I was also driving home from work but then I didn’t intend to work anymore. It also occurred to me that the enormous vigor with which I had approached my work could now be applied to doing nothing, or something else. I can’t say that I was ready to sing the “Hymn to Joy” but I was quite pleased to nudge along in the miles-long traffic jams, glancing at other cars and catching faces contorted with anger and impatience, or simply lax with boredom. The scenery of urban sprawl makes Harlem and Brooklyn look lovely.
I reached my sister’s by seven in the evening. Martha had insisted on buying out Thad and me years ago so now our ancestral home (two generations) is truly her own. It had been more than twenty years since I stayed there when visiting Bloomington for research purposes, a difficult few days when Martha lays out the possibilities of the Bioprobe at hand. I stay either at a motel or in the guest house of my broker and investment counselor, a friend since high school named Matthew, but he is currently under chemo and radiation for prostate cancer and Martha told me his second wife was having an affair with a gas station owner we both know. It was Matthew who indiscreetly told me that Martha had a great deal more money than I did because she was smarter. He hastily a
dded that he meant smarter in terms of investments, buying heavily into the technicals even before the advent of the ten-year-long bull market while I stayed conservative as a Kansas schoolteacher.
I felt a trace of sentiment driving through an older section of Bloomington, mostly because academic communities aren’t so hysterically venal as the rest of our culture. There are cranky people who don’t watch television and maintain a distance from popular culture. On my occasional visits I am charmed by their laconic indifference to most current affairs, which is largely pundit gossip anyway.
The real reason, though, that I don’t stay with my sister is that she is a doyenne of the arts, and her house is a virtual salon. I’ve mentioned that she rarely leaves her home but then painters, sculptors, musicians, poets, and young fictioneers visit her for her acid tongue, food, and wine. She has two three-by-five cards, one green and one red, tacked by her front door depending on whether visitors are welcome or not. I had been pleased in Chicago when Thad told me that she had lately taken to walking a few hours after dark with a group of her arts cronies though the daylight hours were still too raw for her. Something very bad had happened to Martha during her junior year at Wellesley when she had spent three months in London. No one but Martha knows what except, of course, the other possible participants, singular or plural. She returned home when I was gone for my M.F.A. and that was that.
I frankly don’t feel comfortable with her visitors. There is nothing haughtier than an unsuccessful person in the arts and Martha’s evening living room often abounds in them. When I’m there I’m the toad in the soup tureen. Of course everyone is polite depending on the quantity of the wine served, and even then, the attacks are not personal but directed at the art and literary “establishments” of Chicago and New York, and the vulgarity of the large sums of money directed to unworthy artists and writers. For some odd reason the locals always know the inner gossip of gallery and literary circles in New York and Chicago better than I do living there. I really don’t know how accurate this gossip is but everyone moderately successful is lumped into one stew, the contents of which lack parity.
