Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  “Who?” Again, Pimletz thinks, take it back. Stupid question.

  “Fuck do you care, who?” Volpe says, flat. “Someone else. Not you. You, you’re on the straight obit.”

  “With no body?” Pimletz says, making sure. To the best of his knowledge, which hardly ranks up there with the best of anyone else’s, the Record-Transcript has never run an obituary without a confirmed death. This has been discussed, from time to time. “It’s an obituary you want, or something else?”

  “Obit, tribute, fuck do I care what you call it?” Volpe barks. “Fifty inches. Life story. First break. Academy Awards. That Playboy interview he did, couple years back, made all the headlines. Talk to his wives, his kid, some Hollywood shits. The works.” He snuffs his butt under his shoe and kicks the flattened filter toward Haskins. “And lots of local color. We’re his hometown paper. Don’t let those fuckers at the Times beat us on this one.”

  “He’s from here?” Pimletz marvels. Everything is news to him.

  “He’s from here.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “And Maine?” Pimletz tries. “Why Maine?”

  “Fuck do I know?” Volpe snarls. “Maine.”

  “Oh,” Pimletz says. “Good. Good to know.” He nearly puts pencil to scalp with this mental note.

  “Check the morgue,” Volpe says, turning for his office. “Check the live file. We should have something.”

  With Volpe’s leaving, Sam Haskins, a large man with delicate features, reaches into his center desk drawer and pulls out a plastic sandwich bag, zip-locked, from which he removes a small pair of tweezers. Then he stoops—a swooping kind of stoop, given his size and the statement he wishes to attach to the motion—pinches at Volpe’s kicked butt with his tweezers, and walks the offending filter to the garbage can across the room. He does this with a dozen sets of eyes on him, unruffled. Then he returns the tweezers to the bag, the zip to the lock, and the bag to his center desk drawer. Then he makes for the Men’s to wash up.

  Pimletz looks on and doesn’t get how there’s a guy like that, just a couple desks over, and Hamlin still beats the shit out of him.

  The newspaper’s live file—banked obituaries of still-breathing heads of state, politicians, business leaders, aging movie stars, retired athletes, and anyone else rich or famous enough that their sudden but increasingly likely death might spark a scramble for biographical material—is stored in its computer system and retrieved by punching in the command “NOT YET,” followed by the first three letters of the subject’s last name. The drill, on slow days, is that Pimletz is supposed to fill at least some of his down time scanning magazine features, press kits, and unauthorized biographies for thumbnail life stories and anecdotal material, which he then plugs into working obituaries on notables of his choosing. Just yesterday, flipping through a back Vanity Fair, he noticed something interesting on Ross Perot and dropped it into the live file under “PER.” Once, from scratch and from memory, he started a file on Fay Vincent after learning that the former commissioner of baseball was facing tricky back surgery and reconsidering the fact that the guy walked around with a cane. He even got one going on Macauley Culkin, the kid star from those first Home Alone movies, after catching an interview on Good Morning America or someplace, couple months back, and deciding the kid had an attitude.

  NOT YET, but SOMEDAY. . . .

  Always, compiling these epitaphs-in-progress, Pimletz is filled with a dizzying power. It is a kind of voodoo, he thinks, the way he writes off the rich and famous and still-breathing while his innocent subjects are left to meander through the balance of their lives unaware. He imagines what Barbara Walters would say if she knew her passing would invoke a graph in one of the Boston papers on her turn as a “Today Girl,” dressed in a bunny suit for a Playboy feature, or if Boston Pops conductor John Williams had any idea his leave-taking would be accompanied by a sordid anecdote from the set of Steven Spielberg’s forgotten opus, 1941.

  It is a special thrill for Pimletz, a wonder, knowing something so intimate about these beautiful people, something so benignly spectacular. Sometimes, it is all he can do to keep from calling Heather Locklear (or Larry Bird, or Boston University President John Silber) and letting loose the childish taunt, “I know something you don’t know,” sing-song, although it would also be more than he could do to get someone like Heather Locklear on the phone.

  For the longest time, the running joke he played with himself was to change the lead on Rose Kennedy’s file. The thing was mostly written when he signed on at the paper, but he kept topping it with one cause of death after another. Falling safe. Drive-by shooting. Scared to death by Dr. Kevorkian. It was, for a time, his daily amusement, and he wondered if there maybe wasn’t a board game in here somewhere, on the dovetailing theories that others might find some challenge in his callously trivial pursuit, and that he might as well make some money from it.

  When Rose Kennedy finally expired in her sleep of natural causes, Pimletz couldn’t bring himself to write the straight lead. Hamlin had to do it for him because, for Pimletz, the point wasn’t at all how Rose Kennedy died, but that she finally did, and that he’d have to come up with some other way to pass the time.

  He’s back to the live file, looking to get himself going. Ah. There, right after Kerry Wood, the Chicago Cubs pitching phenom, he finds what he’s looking for. Wood, Terence Upton (b. March 2, 1932; Boston, Massachusetts)—American film actor. Then he scans from Wood on down to Mort Zuckerman to measure the file, study his output, kill time. Back to Wood. There’re only about three screens of information on this guy, most of it pulled from a People cover timed to promote the actor’s last relevant effort, but some of the entries show evidence of Pimletz’s tired hand:

  see Tonight Show appearance, 12/76, for comments on Vail run-in with Pres. Ford

  note T.V. spots for some potato chip with Redskins running back John Riggins, early 1980s

  panel participant, “Reinventing Hollywood: Will Big Budgets Kill American Cinema?” New York University Film School, spring, 1984, transcript available

  Always, Pimletz’s notes reflect a resigned shorthand, as if he were merely going through the motions of his job and never planning to linger at the obit desk long enough to have to work from his abbreviated entries. He does what he has to do, barely, but now that he is here, on deadline, he realizes it is not enough. This Wood file is a sorry example. There is reference to some recent out-of-town articles, including one on the dedication of a plaque outside the actor’s boyhood home on Beacon Hill, and one profiling his first wife, Anita Tollander Wood Veerhoven, who apparently resettled in Nashua, where she opened a rug cleaning business with her second husband. But there are no corresponding dates or publications to help Pimletz now locate the real deal. There is also mention of an unauthorized biography by a British journalist, who claimed to hold evidence linking the actor to quashed bigamy charges in the state of New Hampshire, but there is no reference to the book’s title, or author, or publisher.

  Of course, he could look these things up like a real journalist, but he rides himself for letting what was once at hand slip so haphazardly away. The way Pimletz works, or chooses not to, this is hardly enough to go on.

  Petra Wood has got her phones rigged to sound an old-fashioned bell ring—two short bursts and a pause, two short bursts and a pause, just like in the old movies. The only problem with this ringing is the way the clang invades her sleep and jolts her awake. The peals are like fire drills to her at these times, but, for the rest of her day, she finds them calming and not nearly so intrusive. She even has the antiquated handset that looks like a dolled-up parenthesis to go along with the ring.

  It is 10:30, California time, when the first two short rings jolt Petra Wood awake, and it takes her a moment to focus. By the time the second bursts clang through, she has noticed the clock; calculated there are still another two hours of sleep to be had before Wilton, her personal trainer, arrives for their early
afternoon run; peered through her taupe mini-blinds to see what the day was doing; kicked the remote control from her quilted covers to the pickled wooden floor; and watched helplessly as the two triple-A batteries came loose and rolled to the air vent by her nightstand. She even found time in the pause between rings to worry how she might retrieve the batteries should they roll into the duct, if maybe she could just leave them there without a problem, or, relatedly, if perhaps the things were too thick to fit through the narrow openings. She abandoned these lines when one of the batteries stopped short and the other came to rest nearly perpendicular to the vent slats. All of this, along with another mess of thoughts having mostly to do with the way her mind races while the rest of her is too numb to move, and how later, when she’s fully awake, her thinking will slow to its more accustomed pace, before the third set of rings. “What?” she says, picking up finally. “What?”

  “I have news.”

  Her lawyer, she processes. In New York. With news. “Good or bad?” she says.

  “Depends,” says this guy, Andrew somebody, she can never remember his name. Smith. Zalaznik. Merlinson. Something. He’s been handling her divorce for six months, just about, and she still can’t get it straight. “Shall I spoon it out,” this Andrew guy says, “or do you want it all at once?”

  “That depends, too.”

  “It’s Terence,” the lawyer says. “I’m afraid he’s had a terrible accident.” He hates being the messenger on a call like this, wishes someone would come up with a way for him to deliver his news whole, all at once. Like a “send” button on a fax machine. Here. Here is everything I know.

  “Terrible terrible?” she asks, anxious for the rest of it.

  “Pretty terrible. There was a bad rain. Car apparently skidded off a cliff up by the house. They don’t think he made it.”

  Petra Wood doesn’t understand this Andrew guy’s hand-holding, the effort he’s making to ease her into what he has to say. “They don’t think he made what?” she tries. Reservations? “What don’t they think he made?”

  “It,” he repeats, presumably in clarification. And then, for emphasis, “It. You know, they don’t think he made it. They haven’t found his body, but they’re pretty sure he couldn’t survive such a crash.”

  There. The part about his body is Pet’s first hard clue that something is wrong, that this call is anything more than another in a long series of updates on a hoped-for divorce settlement with her estranged husband. Now, with this body business, she’s all over the place in her thoughts. First she’s thinking, You know, okay, so Wood banged up the car a little bit. Not the first time. And then she’s thinking about the cliffs up in Maine and it’s still not registering. And then, inexorably, she knows. “When?” she says.

  “Last night. Late, I think. Not really sure. Got the call just now.”

  “Shit.” She falls back against her pillows, lets the phone drop to her chest. The truth of the moment nearly overwhelms her, but not to where she is lost in it. She is whelmed, just. A part of her is very definitely here, focused, thinking, you know, okay, this thing happened, it’s a happened thing. She worries that, in her thinking, she has not made room to feel anything, that she has given these instants over to simply absorbing this new piece of information, that she is not letting it touch her in any substantive way. She is not transformed by the horrible news the way she thinks perhaps she should be. Then again, she catches, she must be feeling something because she is momentarily paralyzed, unable to move or think clearly. Wood, she thinks. Her Wood. She goes from hating him to wanting him back, desperately, in the time it takes for Andrew Somebody to deliver the news.

  Petra Wood is swallowed up by her pillows and by the thought of her very nearly ex-husband tumbling on down to the stormy sea. She wonders, briefly, what it was like for him in those last moments—if he was conscious or afraid, if he called out to her or to someone else, if a lifetime of memories truly were unfurled before him or if his thoughts were blank, if he had the radio on, if he’d been drinking—and, in her wondering, she fixes on a vision of Mel Brooks in that Hitchcock spoof (what the hell was that movie called?.) He’s falling backward, spinning, flailing in a crazy, swirling vortex, screaming madly, almost comically, only in Petra’s wild imaginings, Mel Brooks has become her Wood. The mad screams have exaggerated to where they are now joyous shouts of “geronimo!” and “look out below!” and there is no end to his falling.

  Wood.

  “Petra, I’m sorry,” Andrew says, thinking that his client is still listening at the other end. “I know how upsetting this must be for you.”

  “High Anxiety,” Petra says, remembering the movie, only the phone is by now buried beneath the linens and all her attorney can hear is the rustling of sheets as she rolls from her bed and thumps to the floor.

  “Petra?” he says, “Pet?” but he gets back nothing.

  Petra Wood, whelmed and cold and naked on the pickled wooden floor, crawls frantically to the air vent by her nightstand and fumbles for the batteries. It is an effort for her to pinch the things from their position against the metal duct, but she eventually manages. Then she looks under the bed, also frantically, for the kicked remote, and when she finds it, she struggles to fit the batteries into the trap and line them up against the vague markings etched into the black plastic, copper tops opposite. This, too, is an effort, and when she’s satisfied with it, she spins on her seat and points the empowered remote to the television at the foot of her bed. She holds it out like a magic wand, a divining rod, only she can’t get the thing to work. She presses every button. Then she spins the batteries in their trap and tries again. Then she holds the remote in her right hand and slaps it crisp against the palm of her left, over and over. Then she bangs it on the floor. Sometimes this helps.

  In her deliberate frenzy, her thoughts arrive on the possibility that maybe this Andrew guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, maybe he didn’t even call, maybe she dreamed his call and she’s only now waking from her nightmare. Maybe the ugliness over the divorce—and it has gotten pretty ugly—has left her feeling sentimental and willing to forgive the six or seven times she knows about Wood dipping his cock into any warm hole he could find. (And those are only the times she knows about!) Or, okay, he did call, the lawyer did call, there was very definitely a call, yes, but maybe it was just a wrong number, some other piece of bad news meant for someone else.

  There, the television flashes on, and, for an instant, the screen confirms her frantic imaginings. She’s landed on one of those mid-morning talk shows with bouncy supermarket music and an enthusiastic audience and a jump-suited blonde looking far too earnest for her day part. Today’s topic quickly reveals itself: cosmetic mastectomies, something Petra Wood has never before encountered, and which strikes her, at this moment, as particularly repulsive. Still, she is momentarily drawn into the discussion—it’s “a radical-feminist fashion statement,” “a defiant, streamlined look”—and to the presumably tasteful before-and-after photos displayed on the screen, and then, underneath her watching, she remembers the phone call. It hits her all over again.

  She switches channels. Surely, if something has happened to Terence Wood, the kind of larger-than-life Hollywood celebrity whose untimely death would almost certainly merit an interruption in regular programming, she will not have to flip too long to find out. And, indeed, she doesn’t. CNN has got a tiny map of Maine inset over the blonde head of its anchorwoman, and right away, she knows. Again. It’s like they’ve been waiting for Petra to tune in, only now that she has, she’s not listening, she doesn’t want to hear what this blonde head has to say. She’s thinking of the last time she saw her Wood. She’s trying to remember his last words to her, his smell, the way his balls would spin in their sack when she sucked him off, the sound of his voice, the rough of his beard sandpapered against her skin, that odd little whistle-puckering thing he used to do to clean his teeth after he’d eaten. She doesn’t want to lose the slightest thing.

&nb
sp; The map of Maine morphs into a headshot of Terence Wood as a young man, a still from The Half Shell, the movie that launched his career. He’s smiling, his thick, dark hair breezed by a wind machine, and there is magic in his eyes. Petra wasn’t even born at the time of that shoot, but his eyes seem to know her. She looks at the still and swears he can see her coming, and then her own eyes are drawn to the black border underneath the picture, with the still-open birth and death dates burned in (1932– ), and she’s thinking it is like a headstone, a video headstone, the way the television reports on the deaths of all these people. She’s also thinking, well, okay, it’s true, it must be true. They don’t put up dates and black borders around pictures unless it’s true.

  The headshot fades and is replaced over the anchorwoman’s other shoulder by one of Bill Clinton, which, in turn, is replaced by photo opportunity footage at some Rose Garden ceremony, and then a shot of Lloyd Bentsen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. As Petra Wood collects these various images, she wonders how it is that the stuff of her life has become also the stuff of everyone else’s. She loses her Wood off a cliff in a storm, and here it is for the world to see, scripted and TelePrompted and sifted through the machinery of mass communications. Her kick in the stomach is news to CNN, and, after that, they’re onto the next story.

  She reaches for the phone to call Anita, wife number two, who’s up in New Hampshire somewhere (she doesn’t know the number, but it’s on the speed dial). When she follows the cord and fishes the machine out from beneath the covers, she realizes she’s left it off the hook. She clears the line, speed-dials, but the call does not go through. “Hello,” she says, into the silence. “Hello?”

  “Oh, good,” she gets back. “Good, I was about to give up on you.”

  “Andrew?” Parker? Applegate? Wojiski? What is his last name?

  “Yes,” her lawyer says back. “Andrew. Me. Still me. Thought I’d lost you.”

  “You’ve been talking to me all this time?” She’s confused a little, that this lawyer person has somehow remained on her telephone.