Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  “Coffee’s about all I can manage,” he says kindly, inching the plate from his range of smell.

  “Suit yourself,” Grace sings back, and she collects the hash and reconnoiters with it to an already-started plate of same, two tables over, apparently occupied by a diner with less discriminating tastes. She slops the hash from one plate to the next without a word. She doesn’t even step back to notice her breakfasting customer—a large, also-oily, also-overalled man, who receives the extra helping as if he has it coming, as if everyone around here eats from the same pot like it’s nothing at all.

  This, Wood thinks, might take some getting used to.

  Here’s Norman: half-orphaned, half-paying attention, halfway home to deal with his mother, this guy she married, Pet, every damn thing. Woodman. This right here’s the hard part.

  It’s like it’s not real. Half real. Half assed and half real. The way Norman heard, what he heard, what he knows, it’s all like something out of one of Woodman’s movies. It’s happened, it’s scripted, but it’s not yet finished. He’s been redirected, his whole life set off course, but then there’s this gaping loophole, another way around. His father’s dead, but maybe not. He smirks at his own melodrama, but he is held by it, taken. Poor Norman’s been ripped apart and left hanging, half orphaned, but maybe not. Better: quarter-orphaned. Still, he’s more orphan than not. He considers the phrase. Movie title, he thinks. More Orphan Than Not. Something he can use.

  The loaner he’s driving lost its radio to an unfortunate piece of parking a couple weekends ago on Riverside Drive, so Norman’s got the headphones on full tilt: “It’s a Sunshine Day” retooled by some industrial band. His roommate’s tape. He remembers the song from a Brady Bunch episode and wonders what it’s doing now in his ears. Everybody’s laughing. Sunshine day-ay-ay. Everybody’s smiling. Sunshine day-ay-ay.

  Maybe in 1973, he thinks. Now’s another story.

  Norman ramps onto the Massachusetts Turnpike underneath a helmet of grunge-kitsch. He’s got the windows down, the sunroof cracked, but the traffic sounds don’t reach through the headphones. He’s cocooned himself from whatever else is going on, denied to the rest of the world, like he’s driving in one of those boothed arcade games: Killer Grand Prix. If he drifts from his lane, he’ll never hear the bleat of horn to scare him back in line.

  He’s in his own head, a straight shot into Boston. Nothing to distract him, but, at the same time, there’s nothing to keep him focused, rooted. His thoughts bounce from school to home, friends to family, from the picture he was deconstructing before he heard to this right here, right now. There’s The Godfather and the destruction of the American family, and there’s the Woodman and the destruction of his. There’s nothing to hold him to the moment, but this doesn’t register as a concern, at least not on any conscious level, and certainly not at first. Anyway, it’s not like the road twists and turns all that much. What the hell is there to pay attention to anyway? He can watch The Godfather and still drive this road. There’s a slight curl off the Pike onto Interstate 93, north to New Hampshire, but that’s it. If he keeps his eyes between the lines, dead ahead, he should do just fine.

  To Norman—unfocused, driving—the Mass Pike has got to be one of the most boring stretches of asphalt ever committed to high-speed, intrastate travel. Absolutely. In truth, there are sparkling lakes, lush valleys, and here and there, pockets of great natural beauty, but to Norman the road just unravels and keeps going and going. The only dots on the landscape are the rest stops and food courts that reappear before it even occurs to him to eat, or piss, or stretch his legs. It’s like his needs have been programmed into the road. Also, it’s like one long strip mall with no good stores. It’s like a lot of things, he thinks, and, at the same time, like nothing at all. Even the songs blasting through his head are no distraction. What the hell kind of songs are these, he wonders. Who programmed this fucker? He’s way up on the volume, but he’s not truly listening. He keeps flashing back on images of his father: speedboating in Cannes, high-rolling in Vegas, limelighting in Hollywood, uncoiling in one of his ridiculous fucking cabins. . . . Stills from a long life lived someplace else.

  They are everywhere for Norman, these images. Everywhere and in no one place. Here’s one: long time ago, on vacation in Sun Valley, Idaho, his father ditched a perfectly good snowmobile into a perfectly passable gully. He wanted to see how long it would take rescuers to track down his missing self and wanted to impart to Norman his strange values of patience and place and purpose. For several hours, father and son sat huddled against the cold in a crude snow bank, awaiting salvation, weighing the mysteries of the peculiar lives they shared. The picture reforms in Norman’s racing head as if it never left. He was only ten or twelve, too young to be placed into such danger or introspection, but it’s all here for him still: the fleeting closeness with his father, the taste of the old man’s breath bouncing off the packed snow, the strangely adolescent notion that through Terence Wood’s eyes the world must seem a sorry fucking place.

  He does not remember being afraid.

  “Bad for business, them to let us freeze to death,” Woodman told his only child, presumably in reassurance. The words reached Norman’s nose before they found his ears. “You’ll see.”

  And he did. The sun didn’t set on the valley before the father proved his labored point to his young son, the boy he saddled with the eery-queery name of Anthony Perkins’s Psycho character years after it mattered that Wood had lost the part. When mountain patrol workers arrived breathlessly on the scene, the actor was appropriately stoic. It never occurred to Norman to reveal the purposefulness of the incident to rescuers, to his mother (God, she would have just shit!), to any of the dozen reporters who had gathered at the Idaho hospital where father and son were choppered and treated for frostbite, and it was never again discussed. There were the requisite mentions on Entertainment Tonight, CNN, and a two-page spread (with “exclusive photos”) in People, but the incident was pushed from public attention by a staged reconciliation between Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and a flare-up at a gala Holmby Hills picnic for the preservation of the rainforests, during which the actress Blythe Danner would not accept that the organizer’s choice blend of Brazilian coffee was being served and warmed in nonrecyclable styrofoam cups. There followed, respectively, a flap and a scene, and after such as these, the news of a celebrity snowmobiling mishap seemed a trifle, even if it seemed to Norman Wood the largest, most defining fucking moment of his young life. In the movie he keeps in his head, this was a key scene.

  Still, it happened and it was over. To talk about it would have been to put his father on the defensive, to question the precepts he had put on display. It occurs to him now, naturally, because of the similarity to yesterday’s accident. He imagines the headline: GAS-POWERED VEHICLE DROPS FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH, but also because of the manner in which it reveals his father: impetuous, impervious, self-important.

  Now that Norman Wood’s put his unfocused head to it, virtually every memory of his father reveals similar aspects of character. There was that time, this is going back now, when the Woodman went on the Carson show to endorse independent presidential candidate John Anderson and wound up referring to Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter as “a couple dumb fucks.” (Norman’s seen the tape, with Carson’s classic doubletake, the censor’s transparent bleep; it made the anniversary show, couple years running.) Or, just this past summer, when he called a press conference to announce his application for the post of Commissioner of Major League Baseball. (Come to think of it, what the hell was that all about?) Or, when the maitre’d at Lutece wouldn’t seat him without a reservation, no matter who he was, and the old man simply walked to an empty, not-bussed table and sat himself down, without reservation, at a table next to Liz Smith, who made dutiful note of the incident in her next column.

  And even this. This business with the car over the cliff, the body missing, the terror of not knowing what happened, the raging doubt surrounding his
father’s last moments, if they were indeed his last moments . . . it all seems to Norman like a part of the same package. It is all just the Woodman, as ever, on his own kick, manipulating his world to his own rhythms, having his way.

  Tollbooth guy, just off Route 128 outside Boston: “No pennies.”

  Norman, who had counted out the toll with what change he had: “Why not?”

  “Read the sign.”

  Norman reads the sign: No Pennies. Okay, he thinks, so now we can all read. “Okay,” he tries, lifting the headphones from their perch and sliding them down around his neck like a collar, “but why not? Maybe they screw up the machines or something, but this is the full-service lane, right?”

  “Sign’s not there for my health.”

  To Norman, this seems an arbitrary nuisance. He holds out his coins, palm up, sixty-five cents. Exact change. “Either you want my money, or you don’t,” he says.

  Tollbooth guy looks back at Norman from inside his own bad day. Norman sees that he’s got his tiny workstation decorated with pictures of Selena and Jesus, the slain Latin singer and the crucified son of God. Funny how Norman’d never heard of Selena while she was alive. And funnier how he’d been raised to think he, Norman, was the son of God, crucified by his very birth and the burdens that came with it. Lately, before he heard, he tried not to think about his father, to place himself in some unvarnished context, but these last couple hours, he can’t lose the old man. A part of Norman believes his father is in the car with him, spiriting him through these next paces, telling him what to do.

  A fruity-smelling stick of incense, not unpleasant, burns alongside the cash register inside the tollbooth. Gloria Estefan is scratching her way from a Tandy transistor radio hanging from a hook on the far wall. “Turn the Beat Around.” Tollbooth guy’s got a sterling silver cross dangling from his left ear, a jail-green tattooed serpent slithering from his right shirt-sleeve. He flashes a gold-toothed, fume-sucking smile that tells Norman he’s up for the hassle. “I could write you up for the headphones alone,” he says, reaching toward the incense for an official-looking pad. “Take down your plates, send you out a nice fucking summons.”

  “You want my money or not?” Norman says back, palm still open.

  “I’m tellin’ you, kid. Bust my hump and I’ll bust yours.”

  At this, Norman turns his open palm over and lets the coins drop to the pavement. Some of the coins are stuck to his sweaty skin, and these he scratches off with the fingers of his other hand. “Don’t bother counting it,” he says in his best Woodman impression. “It’s all there.” Then he stomps on his roommate’s gas pedal and speeds from the toll plaza, itching for a chase. The car doesn’t respond the way he’d like it to—it goes zero to sixty in a time no one would advertise—but it does the job, and, as he pulls away, Norman thinks he doesn’t have to put up with this shit. Nobody should have to put up with this shit. Not someone who is more like his father than he knows.

  Phone.

  It takes Pimletz a half-dozen rings before he realizes it’s his own line and not Hamlin’s. It’s not like anyone ever calls, not unless he’s left a message and is waiting to hear back. On his voice mail, he tells people he’s either away from his desk or on another call, but he’s never had to use the damn thing. He’s hardly away from his desk, and he’s rarely on another call. If he leaves a message for a coroner or a funeral home director or a grieving family member, he waits around until he hears back. It’s been two years since the paper spruced up its phone system, and he’s never even bothered to consult the memo the office services people sent around telling how to use it. It’s not that he doesn’t trust the technology; he doesn’t trust people to make themselves available to him a second time.

  “Pimletz,” he barks into the handset, the way he’s heard Hamlin bark his own name forty-three times already today. And it’s not even lunch.

  “Axel Pimletz?” he hears back. “Obit desk?”

  No, he wants to say. Axel Pimletz, tax attorney. Synchronized swimmer. Horticulturist. Systems operator. Instead, he says, “This is he.” What the hell kind of way is that to talk? He scolds himself, soon as he’s said it. This is he.

  Guy on the other end introduces himself as Warren Stemble, senior editor at Asterisk Books in Manhattan. “You may have heard of us,” he says to Pimletz, coaxing at recognition. “We’ve had quite a lot of ink these past months.”

  “I know the name,” Pimletz concedes. He’s thinking, I thought Asterisk was a magazine. He’s thinking, books and magazines, they’re becoming the same thing.

  “Good. That makes what I have to say that much easier. I find it awkward having to introduce myself. I never know where to start. Don’t you find that, Mr. Pimletz?”

  For a guy so concerned about making what he has to say that much easier, this Warren Stemble doesn’t seem to Pimletz to be in any great hurry to reach his point. “No,” Pimletz says, “not really.” He’s got his own introduction down to where it doesn’t mean a thing.

  “Fine,” Stemble follows. “Good. Well, then, here it is. I have a proposition for you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “As you may know, my company owns world rights to Terence Wood’s life story. He was at work on the manuscript at the time of his accident. We’ve seen only a few pages, but what we’ve seen is brilliant. Just brilliant. But that’s Terence Wood for you, right?” He gets back nothing, continues. “I understand there are notes to be found among his papers and hours of unedited interviews on tape. Hopefully, somewhere, there’s another few hundred pages of manuscript, possibly an outline of some sort. It had been our plan to publish Mr. Wood’s autobiography late next year, but, in consideration of yesterday’s tragedy, we would like to come out with it sooner.”

  “And?” Pimletz wouldn’t recognize a proposition if it breathed hotly in his ear.

  “And, naturally, we need a writer, someone to pull all the loose ends together. It must seem ghoulish, I know, for me to be on the phone to you the very next day, but you understand that time is of the essence.”

  Pimletz’s first thought, also naturally, is that this polished, big time book editor, with his polished, big time moniker, is merely seeking a recommendation, a couple names from the Record-Transcript rank and file to start him on his search, maybe a confirming vote of approval. But then it hits him. It’s not the rank and file this guy wants, just the rank.

  “Me?” he checks. “Why me?”

  “Don’t be modest, Mr. Pimletz,” Stemble pushes. “We saw the obituary in this morning’s paper. Your paper. Front page, no less. Guy who writes like that should be writing for us.”

  Pimletz does not wish to argue the point, but he can’t help himself. “Yes, but, still. . . .” He lets his mini-protestation hang, hoping Warren Stemble will be kind enough to upend his thought, or to keep him from having to finish it himself, but when there is no help forth-coming, he attempts a kind of follow-through: “There are, like, what, a million writers in New York? Another million out in L.A.?”

  “Give or take,” Warren Stemble agrees, “but how many up in Boston?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “You’re New England. Terence Wood is New England. Christ, you live in his hometown.”

  I do, Pimletz wants to say. Then he’s thinking, okay, I’m in the right place, but I’m also cheap. And available. He’s thinking, it’s not yet noon, but probably these Asterisk assholes have called every other hack who knows how to type and come up with shit. Probably, I’m a last resort dressed up to look like first choice. “What you read was a clip job,” Pimletz says, damning his chances.

  “And a fine clip job it was, Mr. Pimletz.”

  Jesus, this guy won’t go away.

  “Look, Axel,” Warren Stemble says, “if I may call you Axel. I know how newspapers work. I know what you do. I did it myself for a time. I know that if you’re like most writers, if you’re like me, you have time on your hands. I know you can do this shit sleeping, and that you’d probably not like to be
doing it for the rest of your life.” Beat. “You’ll let me know if I’m getting warm?”

  “Go on.”

  “I also know that you’re probably making, say, fifty-five thousand a year? Sixty, tops?”

  “Warm.”

  “There’s money to be made here, Axel,” Warren Stemble says. “Good money. For all of us. For Wood’s family, too, if that’s a concern.”

  “How much?” Pimletz asks. “What are we talking about?” This he has to know.

  There’s a town square, just outside Bar Harbor, actually looks more like a town parallelogram. What it is, basically, is a small, unevenly shaped patch of grass dropped into the middle of one of the busier intersections, making itself a much-angled rotary and the center of attention. On it, there’s a bench and a plaque and a flagpole and two dormant flowerbeds.

  He crosses onto the green without thinking about it, although perhaps he should. The center of attention is the last place a guy like Wood ought to be right now, and yet here he is, sunning his famous face on the most prominent bench in town, awash in the harsh glint of midday sun. He’s got the place pretty much to himself, save for a couple terns. Or maybe seagulls. He’s never been any good with birds. One thing he knows is they’re not pigeons. Pigeons, he knows. Egrets, he thinks. They could be egrets.

  He’s got a Free! Take One! local newspaper tucked under his arm—Acadia Week—but he hasn’t cracked it yet. He’s figuring how to access his trapped, once-considerable funds, without giving himself away. This is both a nagging concern and a daunting puzzle. He might have thought of this beforehand, would have made things a whole lot easier, but his instincts did not anticipate any great need for financial planning. All he wanted was out, and there’s no way back in without money.

  Until yesterday, money was always one of the last things on his mind. There was someone to pay to think about his money for him. Now, he thinks of little else but what’s left in his pockets, and from there it’s a short trip to what he might find in the Acadia Week classifieds. In his head, he runs through the kinds of jobs he can handle, if it comes to that: he can paint houses, inside and out, if someone shows him how; he can lift things, heavy things, long as he doesn’t have to navigate any stairs; he can trap lobsters, cut grass, clean toilets, read the news on the radio; hell, he can middle-manage, if he can find a local businessman fool enough to give him a shot.