by Jim Harrison
Luckily the red card was out on the bush-shrouded porch and no cars were parked in front of the house. Martha hasn’t driven a car since her late teens when she began referring to cars as “nasty items.” Her specialty is the human race and anyone’s mental condition is thoroughly acceptable to her if it’s interesting, thus she’s able to indulge the most outrageous nitwits that are likely to saturate the arts community in any academic setting. Her only bete noire has been “minimalists” of any variety, probably because she’s big, about one hundred seventy pounds or so.
Only she wasn’t that big anymore. I embraced her on the porch and thought she might be down to one forty.
“I’m missing to watch you eat meals with such justice,” she said, quoting Claire’s garbled English which I had shared with her. Over her shoulder through the screen door I could smell pot au feu which she makes expertly whenever I arrive. At my request she made it for my friend Rico when he passed through town which caused him to propose marriage. When he tried to seduce her she laughed for several minutes before telling him to go back to his motel. Last year when we had been drinking a great deal of wine I had asked Martha to tell me what had happened to her in England more than thirty years before and she had told me not to worry, that she would fully recover on her deathbed.
“Get your luggage. I want you to stay with me,” she said firmly.
“No thanks.” I felt sweat begin to emerge from wherever it comes from.
“Then go away, you fucking coward. I talked to your child bride and she says you’re in extremis. Her words, not mine.”
Martha helped me find the mysterious keyhole to the trunk after watching me fail from the vantage point of the porch. It was still practically daylight and she studied the street in both directions before coming through the gate of the picket fence we had painted together as youngsters, though scarcely with the brash innocence of Tom Sawyer. I’ve never understood why she feels the games of night are less threatening. She’s often said that noon is her worst time of all.
“I’ve been thinking about hiring a boat to take me down the Mississippi,” I said, trying to delay any trunk-side discussion of my sanity.
“Those are wonderful,” she said, pointing down at my Marine combat boots.
Over our delicious dinner I began to create a funny rendition of my evening with Donna as I spread beef-shank marrow on French bread with a liberal sprinkling of sea salt. I should have known she wouldn’t bring up anything as banal as sanity. She’s just a little flighty about suicide after having lost a number of friends over the years. I had passed the test rather quickly and she was delighted with my theologian Donna.
“Where will you go and what will you do?” she asked while we were eating our crème caramel, one of the few desserts my mother could make competently.
I looked around the connected living room—dining room. If it weren’t for the paintings, many of them obnoxiously bad, the year still could have been 1958. The only additions from our childhood had been a love seat, and oak end tables with marble tops from Ida’s house. My father’s favorite easy chair still had doilies on the arms. The only jarring note was a faint green light that peeked out of the door of Martha’s office. This woman had been torturing me about integrity ever since my single little novel had come out thirty years before, albeit with subtlety. She had stayed the course, as the “great” Reagan liked to say, never having uttered a single positive word about any of my thirty-six Bioprobes. She was well beyond the concepts of compromise. Some things were worth doing. Others weren’t.
“I only know what I’m not going to do,” I finally said.
“Just don’t turn simpleminded on me,” Martha said. “That’s a natural inclination for someone in your position. They take up photography or making pot holders and in your case the product would be the same. You’re too much of a premature geezer to find something reliably ordinary and you don’t learn very fast. Remember when you were playing father and I had to teach you how to dance so you could take that big-titted moron down the street to the prom. What was her name?”
“Sylvia,” I said. Her perfume had smelled similar to an overripe watermelon.
“Maybe you could do something sensible like learn another language.” Martha had always been irritated by my total ineptness at other languages. “And why spend so much money on floozies that treat you like shit? Matthew told me about that French plane trip last year. The accountant called him and then he called me to see if you’d gone batty.”
So much for discreet help. It’s hard not to resent it when people show concern for you. What happened a year ago was that I was in Paris and having a reasonably unpleasant time with Claire when she got a late-night phone call from her mother that her father had pneumonia. Claire became so hysterical that I was frightened. I made a call and hired one of those small French business jets, a Falcon, to fly us at dawn to Montpellier down on the Mediterranean, not all that far in American terms from the Spanish border. In fact when her brother picked us up at the airport I saw road signs for Perpignan and Barcelona! This was the closest brush with Spain in my life. Of course it was ungodly expensive and her brother pointed out with humor that a commercial flight from Paris was due in an hour. Also Claire had been so fascinated with deluxe travel that she’d never mentioned her sick father during the flight. Within two days her father, a school principal, was walking around, drinking wine, and treating me with amiable cynicism. I stayed at a hotel on the water and at night I could see a strong patch of lights way down the beach to the southwest. I asked a bellhop if they were the lights of Spain and he said, “Narbonne,” shrugged, and walked away. I didn’t know what this word meant having had only three years of high school French, two years of college French, and two dozen trips to the country. Later I found out Narbonne was a city down the coast. On our trip back to Paris, Claire seemed slightly pissed off that we flew commercial.
“Intelligent people aren’t intelligent across the board,” Martha teased, intent upon my brooding. She lightened up by asking what we should make for dinner the next day. Martha thinks we both fell into food because it was one of the few barely permissible sensual expressions for midwesterners. Frowned upon but allowed. How many times has one heard, “We should eat to live, not live to eat.” You’re more likely to hear this mental drool in the Midwest than any other place on earth. Martha is kind enough when I visit to cook dishes rarely found in restaurants. It was a toss-up between poule au pot, a simple stewed chicken, or bollito misto, a rather involved Tuscan multiple-meat dish, probably the former rather than the latter, because it was senseless to make bollito misto for only two people and I doubted I was up to having company.
“You should give up pronto the idea that your situation is anything out of the ordinary. I’d bet half the people in this fucked-up country snare themselves in a life’s work that they know isn’t right for them. The trouble is there aren’t enough right things to do. I just made it less of my life than you did. You simply lacked the character to follow through on what you dreamed you should do. I’m surrounded by people who followed through and probably shouldn’t have. There’s nothing new in this, is there?”
Martha’s reassuring little speech was truncated by the doorbell. It was time for her night walk and one of her companions was a burly, surly metal sculptor I had met before who scorned words as inferior metal and favored meaningful grunts. The other, by odd coincidence given Martha’s speech, was an old acquaintance and near friend from my Iowa days who had written a half dozen novels about a hick from Missouri named Hokey Pokey. The first one was well received and sold moderately but better than my own first effort of the same year. He went along in the mid-list for a number of years with several different publishers, but the last two of the Hokey Pokey series have been regionally published in small editions. He’s had a drinking problem which has made him unable to hold the usual creative-writing job, which would produce more of his own kind. In the last decade he has supported himself by cut-rate travel w
riting where you get a couple of grand for the piece and the magazines help you weasel free air tickets and accommodations. I’ve always thought that we could have become friends except for the money I’ve “loaned” him which makes him nervous despite my assurances that it doesn’t matter. On this evening his speech was ever so slightly blurred and he looked especially threadbare. Another pang hit my sternum as I said good-bye and off they went for their endorphin walk.
I thought of having a nightcap but knew it was inappropriate. I walked down the long dark hall of the big house, once a farmhouse before the First World War but now totally encroached by a suburb. My parents loved the occasional plaster cracks and the way the entire structure was out of plumb. I looked into Thad’s room and the dusty model airplanes still hung from the ceiling. He did a lousy job. Once I tossed one from a high campus building for him so he could see it crash. On another occasion he tipped our gasoline lawn mower back, then lowered it on a model plane to imitate a “space typhoon,” or so he said. Model plane making wasn’t the sort of hobby my parents approved of, thus he continued.
When I turned out the light in Thad’s room there was the idle thought that sharing the money I’d made on my Bioprobes might not have done my sister and brother all that much good. This was an errant and unpleasant consideration. It reminded me of my sister’s question, “Could you describe someone you actually know?” Maybe, but it would be damned hard work. My Bioprobes actually depended on me not really knowing the subject at hand, and I expect that in journalism, except of the highest order, truly knowing the person presents a barrier. Anything I’ve ever read about anyone I’ve known well has proved to be blithely inaccurate, a bit silly, and could only be considered interesting to someone ignorant of the emotional contents of the person. If you add the physical image as you do in television news you’re in real trouble.
Jesus Christ, I’m sinking in a bog like that mudflat on the Mississippi, only this time over my head. I impulsively returned to the living room, found one of Martha’s innumerable Post-it pads, and wrote, “I’ll learn TWO languages if you’ll buy another pup.” I pasted it to an urn of ashes on the fireplace mantel, all that remained of her little female mongrel Sash who had died the year before. She kept saying she felt too emotionally timid to get another dog. My note was only to return her friendly meddling.
Before I went to my own room, which I had been delaying, I opened the door to my parents’ bedroom, flicking on the lights for a full second. It was supposedly now a guest bedroom but I doubted Martha ever let anyone sleep in it. It seems to be sudden death that creates ghosts. Did my father have a spirit capable of emerging from that sunken boat? Was there anything left of my mother after she took her life from herself? That seemed to be the question.
* * *
I’m not sure what I expected from my own room which I hadn’t slept in since I was thirty-five and so arrogant that, to reverse Henry James, I was one on whom everything is lost. A man in his mid-thirties on a full-tilt-success boogie is as self-referential as the pancreas which is doomed never to know it is a pancreas. My room was absolutely chock-full of the comedy of youthful expectation and, as opposed to science fiction, maybe the only true time machine is when we revisit the signal locations of our far past that resonate so deeply we are drawn out of our shoes back to the emotional content that still resides there.
Glued to the inside of the door was the only arrowhead I had ever found. The creek at my grandparents’ farm, beside which Cindy had found the snake, drained into a marsh of forty acres or so. At the juncture of marsh and creek there was a small knoll of high ground that must have been an Indian encampment. I used to know what tribe of Indian but then both D. H. Lawrence and William Carlos Williams had pointed out that this is the first thing we Americans like to forget. Anyway, one day my father took us to the farm to give my mother a few clear days off, then my father abandoned us to botanize on Indiana’s southern border. I was fifteen and it was up to me to look after Martha and Thad who were twelve and nine and both capable of nightmarishly bad behavior, but then my grandparents were too infirm to keep track of them. I was sitting on the knoll trying to feel poetic like Vachel Lindsay. Martha found an arrowhead and we all started digging around. Martha ended up finding seven and Thad four. I only found one, which pissed me off because it punched a hole in my presumed superiority. Now millions of people have found arrowheads but at the time it gave me my first little glimpse into living history and confounded me. All of the writers of the books I had been reading were dead like the makers of the arrowheads.
Turning from the door and glancing at the bookshelf I could see the books I favored in my late teens and early twenties, mostly nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish and French poetry, and novelists like Faulkner, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, also a peculiar book a French professor had given me, Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. I took out the somewhat tattered volume of Lorca’s Poet in New York, knowing the absurd photo that lay within. In the ninth grade I had taken my Brownie camera to school and persuaded a vain friend to stand near a group of girls on lunch hour, including our Portuguese exchange student, Leila. It was the only way I could get a picture of her but in the photo she’s a bit blurred and half-turned away. In volumes of Roethke and Robert Duncan’s Roots and Branches there were a few photos of high school and college girlfriends, including an electrifying nude Polaroid of Cindy, but none, including Cindy, had the ineffable power of Leila out near the front steps of the high school, out of focus with a hand raised as if gesturing toward the sky on a sunny but cool day in mid-winter.
What a freaky-deaky fucking romantic, I thought, sitting down on my narrow bed. How could I be such a goddamned nitwit that I could offer such substance to a youthful infatuation that had no substance. But it apparently did.
And maybe these former beloved books were only an immature young man’s prized fetishes, once magical arrowheads or a hick’s bedraggled rabbit’s foot, carried until it was soiled bone and sinew. The room was shimmering slightly like in one of those loathsome horror films on television that I am occasionally drawn to. In a single volume of Hemingway, In Our Time, was a short letter from old Ida about the biblical figure Lazarus that I had once thought very funny. Early in my teens I had told Ida I didn’t believe the story of Jesus bringing Lazarus back from the dead. She was so shocked she said nothing at first, then wrote me a note a few days later that said, “Young man, if the Bible says it, it’s true. Signed, Ida Price Shotsworth.” At the moment the controversy didn’t seem funny. Ida could “see” Lazarus and I couldn’t. She had different eyes. As a senior in high school I had become too finicky to read Hemingway. This was soon after I had gone into a woodlot with two friends and we had shot eleven squirrels with our .22s. We were going to have a fried-squirrel feast, but instead left them in a bushel basket behind a garage until they stank.
The room began wavering again so I turned off the light. On the far wall from my bed was a large map of Spain that was barely visible in the illumination from the streetlight that dappled through trees and bushes that moved in the night breeze. Seville, Córdoba, and Granada flickering with the leaves. I thought of pulling the shades but the streetlight turned out to be the moon, quite visible without the high buildings of New York and Chicago. Is life accessible? Is life inaccessible? Can I only write down what I have made some sense of which leaves out the other seven-eighths or more, the sometimes juicy void that whirls around us, or the darkness bleached with color that closes in, the high noon that suffocates Martha. She hates artless sincerity. She hates sincerity. She loves art with two rooms upstairs full of art books. I said they’ll collapse the living room ceiling and she said good, with the art books flopping down and bruising us. Maybe parents should protect their children from poetry not pornography. What disastrous ideals I’ve had. Guillen said, “Your childhood, a fable for fountains now.” I think he said that. Martha caught Thad with these dirty eight-pager comic books and screeched and Mother
saw them, then she showed them to Father. Thad lied and said he found them in my room but they didn’t believe him. I was sitting out on the grass figuring out my relationship to the moon and stars. Mother and Father were on the porch with poor Thad between them. Mother said this points a finger at something but I’m not sure what. Father said I agree. They were straining for the single evening drink they allowed themselves. Father said, Thad, we’ll burn them in the fireplace. Thad said okay, I didn’t mean nothing. Anything, Mother said. Say it right. I didn’t mean anything. Better that they burned my poetry collection. It was designed for another culture no longer our own. Early ideals can kill you but they deserve to. Early ideals were designed with great pain by everyone through the centuries, from Góngora to Cela, from Villon to Char and onward, from Emily Dickinson down to all of us Bartlebys. The Times said, I think, that there are thirty-nine thousand writers in New Jersey. Toil and grow rich and see the girl’s flared bottom at the Cajou. I wept today at the rest area and now with the moon on my bare belly for the first time my parents disappeared wherever. A man began weeping in a restaurant just after a fire truck passed by. He couldn’t stop and the maître d’ asked him to leave. I sat there wondering why he wept and was slightly tempted to follow him and ask. Maybe it is a sign of character.
It was after midnight when I heard Martha’s footsteps pausing outside my door. Then they went slowly away. I doubted a new language, or even two, would change the alphabet of my life, but then I’d no longer have to string together fibs, those fuzzy cousins of the lie. “Bob Famous Person toyed with his egg yolk at breakfast, using the end of a piece of bacon and the yolk to paint the fate of nations on the white Wedgwood. He could have been Dalí, he thought, but he was Bob, and he stared down at the hands that held hundreds of millions of destinies, hands that he washed every morning in sheep’s milk, a habit taught to him by his mother in an alpine canton in Switzerland because they lived too far up the mountain to fetch water.”
