Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  Yes. Here. Sylvia Fleishmann. Arlington. Died in her sleep on the night of her one hundredth birthday after a brief illness. Mourned, for eight dollars an agate line, by her temple sisterhood, the B’nai B’rith, her adoring grandchildren, and an organization seeking a cure for juvenile diabetes. Four ads. Not bad. One for each quarter-century—Pimletz does the math again—and one of them for pretty decent money. Normally, according to the newspaper’s archaic guidelines for full-blown obituary consideration (a dedicated career; noted service or contribution to the community; historic, unusual, or otherwise celebrated accomplishments), the Sylvia Fleishmanns of greater Boston would be passed over by the Axel Pimletzes, even with their four paid death notices, but her fleeting status as a centenarian combines with her fortuitous timing and vaults her into consideration. If it’s good enough for Willard Scott, it’s good enough for the Record-Transcript. Plus, there’s no one else.

  Okay, so the lady is only worth a couple column inches, one hundred years or no. Pimletz, on hold with a spokesperson from Arlington Pines, the nursing home where Sylvia Fleishmann did her passing, works his lead in his head. He does this without thinking. Something about a finish line, oddly. A race, a finish line. All the time in the world, and this is what he comes up with. He fixes on the hackneyed image, likes the picture he gets of a noble old lady breaking the tape at the end of a long ordeal, maybe in a wheelchair, maybe with a walker, fists punched out or high in last-gasped exultation. Twenty years cranking the same obits for the same people, give or take, and now it has come to this. It’s like a New Yorker cartoon, the way Pimletz figures it. As he labors to transform this picture of a dead woman he has never seen and knows nothing real about into his own flat prose, he reminds himself why he has never moved from his place of indistinction at the newspaper: he writes like a greeting card. That, and he’s got the instincts of plankton.

  “Any hobbies?” Pimletz tries, when the Arlington Pines person returns. If he had a dollar for every time he’s asked the same of countless family members or nursing home spokesfolks, he’d have enough, say, to reupholster the salvaged armchair in his living room.

  “Like what?” he gets back.

  “Like, did she have any hobbies? Special interests? What kinds of things did she enjoy?” These follow-ups, too, are part of the drill, and they tumble from Pimletz’s chapped lips as if they know the way.

  “Well, most of our clients are involved in our crafts program,” the woman on the other end reports, cheerfully. “We have a very talented local artist, comes in two times a week. That the kind of thing you’re looking for? I believe Mrs. Fleishmann was active in that.”

  “How active is active?”

  Pimletz gets an ear about Sylvia Fleishmann’s fondness for crazy-colored pot holders—she liked to spell crazy with a K, the spokesperson tells. Recently, Sylvia Fleishmann fashioned a reasonable likeness of the South Fork ranch from the television show Dallas out of popsicle sticks and Lincoln Logs, with pápier mâché landscaping. Also recently, she had been helping to restore some of the antique quilts donated or otherwise discarded to the Pines by some of the other clients and their families.

  He decides to go with the quilts and, going, loses the piece at the top about the finish line. Somehow, staring back at him in dull green letters from the dusty screen of his video display terminal, the notion of poor Sylvia Fleishmann, done up like Granny in The Beverly Hillbillies, breaking some badly metaphored tape of life and then dropping dead in front of a viewing stand of up-next Arlington Pines clients, seems to Pimletz not the way to go. He knows this much. He plays it straight, clean: cause of death, the quilts, lifelong interests, funeral arrangements, surviving family. Maybe he can get Volpe to dress it up with a picture; the woman at the nursing home said this Sylvia Fleishmann was stunning. Her word. Said they’ve got a shot of her posed next to the popsicle stick ranch, taken for the nursing home newsletter, shouldn’t be any trouble to pinch it for a couple hours.

  Pimletz slugs his copy—“OBIT.SF”—and sends it off to be digested by the Record-Transcript’s computer system. That’s the way it registers for the once-again-resting Pimletz, like he’s feeding the institution that in turn feeds him. True, all he’s got to dispense are crumbs, but this is how it translates.

  It’s been about a dozen years since management finally acknowledged the technological revolutions of the computer age, nearly all of which remain a mystery to Pimletz, who goes through his motions, still, as if for the first time. He consults his user’s guide and punches out the appropriate commands on his keyboard, but he’s got no real idea what happens to his copy when it leaves his screen. It disappears, for him. He knows it winds up on Volpe’s screen, and at the copy desk, and, eventually, enchantedly, in the newspaper, toward the back of the Metro section, where it looks vaguely familiar, like a distant cousin to what he’d first written, but he doesn’t know where it goes in between.

  When he started out, whenever the hell that was, he’d bang out his stories on a manual typewriter on special “six-plicate” paper. What Pimletz misses most about those days is the way he’d finish a take, pull it from the carriage with grand importance like everyone else, rip the sheets from their perforated tabs, and crumple the fallen carbons, ink-side down. He’d pile up this great mound of fallen carbon balls. After the last take, he’d spread out his six-sheets and start collating, happy for the chance to attach some overwrought public significance to what he’d just done. Then he’d hold up his hands like a surgeon after a scrub and march significantly to the Men’s to see about the carbon stains on his fingers.

  Now all that’s left for him to do is beam his copy across the newsroom—zip!—with no hard proof he’s done anything at all, no smudge on his hands, no way to remind Hamlin and the rest of his abutting, and occasionally onlooking, colleagues that he does, in fact, have a role at the newspaper and that he does, also occasionally, play at it. Now, for appearances, he’s developed this flowery final key stroke (a poke, really), which he displays every time he logs off his computer, or feeds his copy to the hungry newspaper, or punctuates an uncommon lead, and which he hopes signals similar heat and relevance to the rest of the newsroom, even though he knows it is not the same and that it probably does not. Now, for Pimletz, it’s his word against theirs, and the only time he gets to hold up his hands like a surgeon after a scrub is in front of his own mirror, alone, working to imperfection the bad Ed Sullivan impression he will never share.

  Resting, Pimletz loses himself in the rhythms of the newsroom. He takes it all in, but not to where it actually might register. There is a dull hum, not emerging from any one place or any group of places, but rather from the coalescing of activity around the large room. For Pimletz, there is no single, identifiable noise, just an insistent purr, like an engine. It is the noise of friction, activity, consequence. He likes to think he contributes in some important way to the general newsroom purring, but, as he checks himself, he realizes he is not making any noise at all. Even if his thinking made noise, he’d be quiet. He’s done for the day, and what he’s done has hardly mattered. He shuffles some papers in a show of consequence and logs on the in-house Lotus Notes bulletin board to see if there are any messages for him. It is late morning—Jesus, he only killed a couple hours with this Fleishmann obit!—maybe someone’s wondering if he’s free for lunch. Scrolling, he thinks, look busy, look busy, look busy.

  Bill, in Classifieds, is selling his x-country ski machine. Cheap.

  There’s an office pool seeking wagers on whether Hillary Clinton will wind up in Westchester or Manhattan. (It looks like Long Island is pretty much out of the running.)

  And here’s one lingering from a few years back: the sports department peddling “Free Jack Clark!” bumper stickers—three bucks each, two for five—looking to raise funds for its annual bender on the back of the financially and otherwise troubled former Red Sox slugger who squandered both his personal fortune and his ability to hit a baseball in the same season. No one thinks to
delete the posting, just as no one would think to display the bumper sticker anymore.

  Pimletz scans the mess of unsigned drivel and mock headlines—HONK IF YOU LIKE SEXUAL HARASSMENT, BABE; NICE WEATHER WE’RE HAVING; THE CELTICS DRAFTED WHO?—until the screen finally flashes with a bulletin for him: “Hey, Axel. My dog died.”

  He gets this shit all the time. He looks up from his screen and sees Hamlin, next desk over, doubled up, laughing. Fucker doesn’t even have a dog.

  “He have any hobbies?” Pimletz hollers, playing along.

  “What hobbies?” Hamlin shouts back.

  “Like, you know, hobbies. What were his interests?”

  Hamlin: “He liked to lick his own balls. That a hobby? That something you can use?”

  Here is Norman Wood, rail-thin, crew-cutted, twenty-three, smoking Camels, deconstructing The Godfather, lost in the swirl of making movies. Well, okay, he’s not exactly lost and he’s not exactly making any movies, but he is in the swirl. Here, in one of the screening rooms at New York University, he gets to sit in the dark with a dozen other pale and darkly dressed students and trade bombastic, overblown comments on what the people at NYU like to call the literature of the screen. He listens with a detached importance as the professor, a smallish man with smallish credits, offers his take on the American family, as seen through the eyes of Francis Ford Coppola.

  The Godfather, to this smallish man, is all about the strength of family to withstand the disintegration of society. Anyway, that’s what registers for Norman. He can’t concentrate. He can’t get past the way this guy stops and starts the picture to make his various points, the way he talks over the scenes to narrate what he thinks is really going on. This is where Francis does this, he tells, and here you can see Francis is trying to say that. He calls him Francis.

  About the only things for Norman to get off on are that he is here at all—in film school, about to matter—and that they let him smoke. Everywhere else in Manhattan, you can’t watch movies and smoke at the same time, at least not in a theater, but Norman lives to smoke in theaters, to look away from the screen at odd moments and catch the swirls of second-hand smoke as they pass through the light from the projector. He loves how, sometimes, an image from the film catches a cloud of smoke in such a way that he can actually see the light patterns filtered through the air above his head. It is, he thinks, an apparition of an apparition, the once-removal of an image that is already once-removed. It is the way movies were meant to be seen, the way he watched his father watch the rough cuts of his pictures back at the Woodman’s house in the Hills.

  The Godfather he can do without. It’s not like it held any kind of defining screen moment for him, and he can do without the stopping and starting and dissecting the thing to its component parts. It’s just a picture, and, anyway, he knows more about it than this smallish man. Probably, generally, he knows more about making pictures, about reaching into the heart of a purely American darkness and finding an essence of humanity and compassion and artifice and whatever the hell else it is a good movie can help you find. Absolutely, he knows movies. He’s lived movies. Shit, he grew up in better screening rooms than this.

  The smallish man interrupts the movie again, only this time to engage in whispered conversation with one of the department secretaries, who brings so much light into the room with her that the image on the screen is nearly washed out.

  The professor looks up from his whispering and calls out to Norman. “Mr. Wood,” he says. “It seems you have a phone call.” He holds out a pink While You Were Out message slip.

  “It’s his agent,” mocks Mona, an androgynous looking friend of Norman’s, whose pictures are to the literature of the screen what Woody Allen is to estrogen. “He’s got Warners on the line with a three-picture deal.”

  Everyone laughs but the smallish professor, who looks at his watch and makes notes on the legal pad resting on his angled podium. Norman collects his backpack and his smokes and his previously owned bomber jacket and walks to the front of the room to retrieve the message slip. Then he crosses to the bin by the door, where the professor has his students check their cell phones and pagers, switched off to avoid interruptions such as these. He grabs his phone from the loose pile and switches it back on, and, as he leaves the screening room and the picture starts back up, he can see the professor’s shadow in the corner of the screen. He’s gesturing toward James Caan’s elbow, only his entire shadow is about the size of James Caan’s elbow, and the effect reminds Norman of George C. Scott standing in front of that giant American flag in Patton. The man is dwarfed by the images on the screen, and Norman leaves the room thinking how cool it is to get a phone call in the middle of class, to give the appearance of some business cooking on the coast, to circumvent the professor’s ridiculous cell phone check, to have a chance to put such a small man in an even smaller place.

  News of Terence Wood’s death stops the presses. Literally. Figuratively. And every which way, besides. Pimletz returns from his hard-boiled eggs and chocolate milk at the P&S Lunch and smells that something has happened. Place gets that way sometimes. A strange stillness develops underneath the purr of activity. He wills himself into it. It permeates the vast room, this strange stillness, and the people inside it, the way it did when Reagan was shot, when the stock market dropped five hundred points, when the shuttle exploded with that teacher on board. Not like when Pimletz wakes to a piece of news after the bulletin has a chance to establish itself. Those times, the story is already written, the drama complete. The weird hush comes in the space between tragedy and deadline. Someone, maybe Hamlin, told Pimletz that during the San Francisco earthquake, when the news hit, there was a pocket of about ten, fifteen minutes during which everyone sat frozen in front of CNN and ABC, waiting for pictures. It got to where you could walk into the newsroom from the outside, unconnected, and right away know something was going on. It was like a visceral thing. Pimletz was home, waiting on the World Series, but this was what he was told.

  Today, back from his early lunch, Pimletz’s nose for news tells him he is about to be floored. There, over by the assignment desk, six or seven reporters are huddled around a small television. Something’s definitely going on. Most of the desks surrounding Pimletz’s are empty, their monitors abandoned between thoughts, the dull green from the letters of their not-saved stories coating his corner of the newsroom with an uncertain light. He rests his still-warm Warburton’s muffin—jumbo oat cranberry crunch—on his desk and inches toward the television huddle to see what the matter is.

  “Got something for you,” Volpe announces, approaching the same huddle.

  Pimletz, startled, looks over his shoulder to see who’s got what for whom. Nothing’s ever for him.

  “Axel,” Volpe says.

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  Pimletz shrugs. “Okay, what? What’s up?”

  “Terence Wood.”

  “Terence Wood, the actor?”

  “No, ass wipe. Terence Wood, the dry cleaner. We’re holding the front page for Terence Wood, the fucking dry cleaner.”

  Pimletz wonders about the ass wipe. He wonders whether it’s just newspaper talk, the kind he’s been fielding for most of the last twenty years, or if maybe Hamlin has spread the word about his underpants. And why did he have to mention dry cleaner? Where did that come from? Volpe knows, Pimletz determines. He knows. Shit. Then he thinks, okay, wait, it’s nothing, right? The ass wipe and dry cleaner business, it’s just nothing. Just expressions. I’m being paranoid. You know, that’s just the way Volpe talks. I’ve heard him talk that way. Probably he just thinks I’m an ass wipe. Good.

  “Front page?” he finally says, up from wondering. “Jesus, what happened?”

  “He’s dead, that’s what happened.” Volpe fires a Marlboro Light, shakes the match onto the floor, in the direction of Sam Haskins, the health and science reporter who has been petitioning to declare the Record-Transcript newsroom a smoke-free environment. “Of course he
’s dead. Why the hell else you think I’m talking to you? Car spun out over some cliff in yesterday’s storm.”

  “Here?” Pimletz can’t think where Terence Wood might have found a cliff in downtown Boston. He hears it back and he thinks, okay, ass wipe, stupid question. Take it back, take it back.

  Volpe: “Up in Maine. Acadia. National Park Police found his car this morning. What was left of it. Tide ran out along those rocks and cliffs and there it was. Still looking for the body.”

  A million thoughts queue for Pimletz’s attention. Maine. Park police. What kind of car? What else did they find? How can they be sure he’s dead without a body? Why Maine? Plus, what about that movie Terence Wood was supposed to be making? Scorcese, Tarantino, one of those guys. De Niro. Jessica Lange. He definitely remembers reading about this somewhere. “I can be up there this afternoon?” he says hopefully, asking, sort of, making room for what he has to do. “I’ve got a car I could use.” He’s thinking maybe they were shooting this Tarantino movie up in Maine, maybe he’ll get to meet Jessica Lange out of the deal.

  “What, up there?” Volpe says. “You’re here. I want you here. I’ve got someone else on the story.”