Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  “No,” Pimletz tries. “Hear me out.” You sonofabitch.

  This is tough for Hamlin, to sit on his chances, but he rolls back his chair a few feet, indicating to Pimletz that the floor is his.

  Pimletz: “So I get this call, hour ago, maybe two. Guy from New York. Senior editor at Asterisk Books.”

  Hamlin, bounding from his chances and onto Pimletz’s floor: “Wanted to talk to you about the Wood book.”

  Fuck, this guy knows everything. “You know about the Wood book?”

  “Come on, Axel!” Hamlin shoots back. “Pay attention. It was in your goddamn obit.”

  “Oh,” Pimletz says, and guesses it was. Right.

  By the time poor Pimletz gets his story out in a form poor Hamlin can comprehend, poor Wood surely has begun to decompose. Pimletz tells what he knows about the shape of the manuscript, the outline, Wood’s notes, the situation with his wives and entourage, tells how what the editor is looking for is someone to capture the New England aspects of Wood’s character. He tries to cover everything. “Warren Stemble,” Pimletz says, as if the name might mean something.

  “Never heard of him.”

  “No, but he checks out.” (As if Pimletz did any actual checking.) “Wants me to come talk to him. Tonight. Maybe catch a late dinner.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And you’re telling me this because?” Always, Hamlin is leaving room for Pimletz to work for his point.

  “I’m telling you this because I want to see what it looks like to you. I’m telling you this because who the hell else am I gonna tell? I’m just telling you.” An uncomfortable note hangs between them, and Pimletz moves to play over it: “I mean, you’re always saying it pays to have the conversation, right? It pays to go to New York, hear what this guy has to say?”

  Hamlin stands, re-shoes his feet, fills the few paces between himself and Pimletz, pats his associate on the head like a small child. “Ooooh, Axel,” he mocks. He pinches his cheeks. “Look at you. Such a big boy. Jetting down to New York to take a meeting.”

  These had been Pimletz’s thoughts, although not exactly. In his own head, he does without the condescension, but he can’t shake the abrupt turns his life might be taking. He can still count the number of times he’s been on a plane (fourteen, not including his annual puddle-jumps to the Vineyard to stay with cousins, off-season), so it’s not even close to an everyday thing for him. Think of it: down and back to New York just for dinner. He’s never been the kind of guy to go down and back to New York for any reason at all. Even the idea of it is intimidating, and now, through Hamlin’s taunts, it also seems ridiculous.

  “What?” he says, suddenly unsure of his plans. “Tell me. This is something we should do over the phone? Me and Stemble? You think this is something we can talk about over the phone?”

  “What the fuck difference does it make, you meet with this guy in New York or on the phone? Go. Have dinner. Move and shake.”

  “So it could be something?”

  “Shit, yeah, it could be something.”

  “Like?”

  “Dinner, for one thing.”

  “No, I mean, there could be something here?”

  “Listen to me, Axel,” Hamlin says, underneath a long sigh. “Best I can tell, you’ve got no shot here. At the paper. Be honest with yourself and you’ll say the same. You’ve been doing this for like a hundred years. With a rotary phone, you were doing this. With carbon paper and copy boys, you were doing this. Great, so you’ve got it down, but it’s also got you, and if you’ve got a chance to break out of this grind, well, then, you’ve got to take it. How can you not take it?” He takes in a long breath, lets his words find their mark. “Man,” he finally says, “anything’s better than cranking obits. It’s a long time, Axel. You want to be a writer, be a writer. Doesn’t matter what you write, long as you write something else.” He means to be constructive, but he can’t help himself. “If I were you, a fucking grocery list would start looking good to me.”

  “I’m not a hack,” Pimletz asks, tentative, “if I take a job like this?”

  “Yes, you’re a hack,” Hamlin rides, “but you’re a hack now. Been a hack long as I’ve known you. Fuck do you care if ghosting some dead guy’s memoirs isn’t the most prestigious gig in the world?”

  Pimletz weighs the truths in what Hamlin’s saying against the perception he has Velcroed to his self-esteem all these years. Yes, he defines himself as a writer, but he is no writer. Yes, he toils, ostensibly, at journalism, but he is no journalist; he has a profession, but he is no professional. He works for a newspaper is about the best he can say for himself, and this may be his one shot ever to say anything more. Or different. Hamlin’s right, he can’t do this shit forever, even though he probably will. He considers these things—everything, all at once—but his face is blank, without aspect.

  Hamlin watches for Pimletz’s reaction, but he picks up nothing. Jerk-off never shows his hand, probably doesn’t even know what he’s holding. For all Hamlin can tell, Pimletz is thinking about Olestra, the environment, the federal trade deficit, what the short trip to New York might cost in terms of what he’ll miss on television. “So you’re going?” Hamlin finally prods, not wanting to leave things loose.

  “I’m going,” Pimletz says, playing at determined, but beneath his surface resolve is another layer. Fuckin’-A, he’s going. That, or he’s gone.

  Place has emptied, pretty much, save for this interesting Harlan person, just passing through. Gets dark early these days, and most of the Two Stools regulars are quick to get back out on the water, see about their traps, set ’em down again before nightfall. Nothing like the long, shiftless stretch of summer, when a cup of coffee after lunch can reach to just this side of the six o’clock whistle.

  This new fellow, though, this Harlan . . . well, he seems content to fritter away his entire afternoon. Isn’t that something? Grace, she keeps to herself, but she’s got an eye on this one. Oh, she relishes this time of day, this time of year, knows it better than anybody, but even the tiniest shift in routine can set her to wondering: this stranger, in back, nursing his coffee until it heals. Doesn’t take more than that.

  She tries to put her mind on something else, but it won’t move. She sits uncomfortably on the two stools by the cash register, half working her receipts. She wills herself inside the stillness, the contrast from the rest of her day. She wants everything else to melt away. She wants the feeling of being in the eye of a storm.

  Jerry Springer’s on, although just barely, coming as he is through the portable black-and-white, rabbit ears pointed south and west for the signal. There’s not much to look at through the fuzzed reception, but the audio’s coming in clear enough. Today’s panel: unattractive women (some with teeth missing!) who’ve cheated with their husbands’ best friends. From the tone of his voice, Jerry’s never heard of such a thing, but Grace doesn’t get the fuss. In a small town, everybody knows everybody. Who else is there? Why, she can think of a half dozen of her customers, right off the top of her head, who have driven their marriages (or someone else’s) to the same place.

  She’s half-listening, half-working, half-lost in thought. Three halves in all. Grace laughs at the way things just never add up. Like with her receipts, she’s always coming up short, even when her regulars are paid up in full, even when there’s nothing to figure.

  There’s a cup of lemoned hot water on the counter in front of her, cornered by the elbow of Grace’s massive left arm. It’s like she’s guarding it. And here’s a funny thing: she brings her face to the cup when she’s got the taste for a sip, rather than the other way around. Been drinking her tea and coffee and hot lemoned water like this since forever, never thought it strange until a girlfriend pointed it out, couple years back, in her kitchen, and, even now that she’s been made aware of it, she can’t quit the habit.

  Wood’s never seen anyone go about their sipping in quite this way. He considers himself a student of
human behavior, an estimation he developed after a brief stint at the Actors Studio, under Kazan. An actor observes, Wood was taught, and so he observes. Always. Observing, more times than not, he can find something off in behavior others regard as not worth noting. He’s spent some time on this. Life is all about nuance, he believes, and best lived in the details. Most folks bring the cup to their lips, maybe meet it halfway, but this Grace leans herself full onto the counter and laps at the cup like a cat at a saucer. She doesn’t touch the cup with her hands at all, except (eventually) to tilt it slightly, to help the liquid to her lips. This is her essence, what he finds in her details.

  There’s a lot about this woman that strikes Wood now as extraordinary. He watches from a makeshift table at the back of the restaurant between more customary sips of his own. Her movements are not without effort, he notices, but she manages them with a kind of artfulness—he’s back on those dancing hippos from Fantasia—a grace that belies her size and yet justifies her name. Where she gets it, he can only imagine. And what it’s doing to him? Well, he can only imagine that too. It’s been just a couple hours, but already this Gracie Two Stools is all he can think about: the way her fleshy arms wipe down the tables between customers, the trace of perspiration at her upper lip, the give and take with her crew, the whole damn package. It surprises him, this rash attraction, especially with the way he’d been thinking he’d run out of drive, but it isn’t in him to question something so basic. It’s almost primal. She’s pretty enough, and sure enough of herself, and she smells altogether wonderful.

  Ah, yes, this last gets him going most of all—or, at least, most recently. Someone should bottle the way this woman smells. When she passes with a fresh hit of coffee, she leaves behind the not-incompatible scents of just-baked bread, and bacon, and fabric softener, and (for some reason) lilacs, which mix with the coffee and her own sweetness to leave Wood solidly distracted. He’s all coiled up with what’s going on in his head. He’s thinking, maybe if I just sidle up from behind while she’s distracted by her paperwork, press myself against her, spin her around to where she’s facing me. Then he’s thinking, well, no, he can’t quite spin her around, not with Grace camped like she is on two stools at the same time, not without spilling her to the floor, but he still likes the idea of sneaking up on her. There’s no one else around, the short-order Lennys are off for the few hours until dinner, everyone else is out doing what they can to make a buck. He’s got the place and its owner to himself.

  From the television: “You, the man with the tie? You’re not bad looking, you got a good job, you could do better.”

  “Her, on the left, she nothin’ but trash!”

  “Wouldn’t talk if I was you.”

  “Let’s keep it civil, folks.”

  “Don’t be runnin’ your mouth ’bout what you don’t know.”

  “Tell it, girl.”

  Applause.

  He slinks up from behind, presses against the fat of Grace’s ass, reaches for her hair. He moves in a kind of zone without thinking. She doesn’t notice the pressing—not at first, there’s just too much of her—but she’s distracted by the hair. Startled. Let her tell you, she loves it when they touch her hair. Oh. My, oh my. She rests the pencil she’s been using to scratch out her figures on the counter in front of her, closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to think about what might happen next.

  “Well?” Wood says softly, a beat before the exchange can turn clumsy. His not thinking has turned to where he is now keenly aware of how exposed he’s left himself, how close to being found out. No way he should be connecting with another human being—not now, not like this. Disappear, he cautions himself. Disappear.

  “Well, what?” she answers, her eyes still closed. She’s lost in some serious not thinking of her own, and in the gentle tug and pull of her hair, and in what should be her response to this most recent development.

  Wood steps around the stool, wedges himself alongside, reaches for Grace’s chin, coaxes her to face him. If he can’t spin the whole of her, he’ll settle for the highlights. She turns, and he catches, for the first time, the soft peach fuzz of her cheeks, the light of her smile, the taste of her breath: lemon, heat, grease from the deep-fry, overworked Trident (spearmint). “Well, hello.”

  Grace, flustered, considers how to play the moment. Okay. He’s an interesting man, this Harlan Trask. Interesting, she guesses that’s the right word. Unusual. Something about him. Different than the guys she sees up here, that’s for sure. The way he plays at her hair is like nothing she would have imagined, although the simple fact of his playing with her hair is also like nothing she would have imagined. This never happens. Guys up here just don’t see her like this, so it follows that she never sees herself in this kind of situation. Only now that she has, and is, she doesn’t want it to play out on its own. She wants to contribute something, to be herself, to give over fully to this moment, and yet she doesn’t want to think things through to where she loses the spontaneity. “So,” she says, also softly, “you’re short on cash? You lookin’ to work off your tab?”

  Good, she thinks, having offered her contribution. Exactly right.

  He smiles, keeps at her hair. “Lunch,” he says. “Need to work off what I ate.”

  She laughs, then teases. “What ate? You’ve been mostly coffee all day long.”

  “Just an expression.”

  “A girl could lose her shirt offering a bottomless cup to someone like you.” Also, good.

  Wood thinks so too. He could get used to this one. “Kinda what I had in mind,” he says. He reaches for the top button of her once-white blouse, and when she doesn’t move to stop him, he unfastens it and slides down to the second. By the third, he catches the precipitous drop made by the space between her enormous breasts and the rest of her shirt, still unbuttoned. Could hide a textbook in there, he thinks. An encyclopedia.

  Grace, not without interest: “You goin’ somewhere with this?”

  “Hope to,” Wood replies. “Before long.”

  “I see.”

  “Bet you do.” Wood has no idea what he means by this, what she means, if together they mean anything at all. Just words. For his part, he means to keep her talking. That’s basically it. Talking and interested. There’s nothing but silliness between them—a Paul McCartney song without the melody—but as long as he keeps up his end, he’ll find his opening. This he knows.

  Grace knows it too, only she finds one first. She hoists herself down from her stools and saunters to the front door, as ladylike as she can manage. She can feel Harlan Trask’s eyes all over her, but she moves as if she’s not being watched. Tries to, anyway. She reaches to a shelf above the doorjamb and pulls down a frayed rectangle of cardboard with the message, ERRANDS, BACK IN TEN, block-lettered on one side. The sign is fixed to a triangled string tacked to a shelf above the door, and she leaves it to hang against the glass, at eye level, facing the street. She drops the blinds behind the door and twirls them shut, then does the same at the half-dozen picture windows at the front of the restaurant. She moves self-consciously back to the counter.

  “Quittin’ time?” Wood says, reaching for the tucked parts of her blouse.

  “More like a break.” She slides confidently up against him, presses her dry lips against the scratch of his beard, and when he opens his mouth to receive her she’s overwhelmed by the taste of coffee. Figures. And she doesn’t mind!—the scratchiness or the coffee—which figures also.

  He kisses back, struck by her cool-warm wetness. And the gum.

  “Upstairs,” she says, gently pushing him away. She indicates the swinging doors to the kitchen and beyond. “There’s a back way. No place for us to get comfortable down here.”

  “You live up there?” Wood says, grabbing Grace’s meaty hand, letting her lead.

  “Just a small apartment,” she says, climbing the stairs. “One room and a bath. No need for a kitchen.”

  “Not a bad commute.”

  He likes to talk, thi
s one. Grace supposes he’s the kind of man who’s terrified of the normal silences that form between normal people, the kind of man for whom small talk runs big. Sally Jesse did a whole show on this just the other day. “Jesus, you,” she says, opening the door to her place, closing it behind them. She leans into him again, wanting to take charge the way the Sally Jesse expert recommended. “Shut up and fuck me.”

  Wood, happy to comply, maneuvers his prize to the unmade bed, and by the time he climbs aboard—it and its owner—he realizes he’s in for a bouncy ride. In truth, he had no idea what to expect. This Grace appeared big enough when she was wrapped in unnatural fibers and questionable blends, but there are whole sections to her he’s never encountered on a woman. Never even considered. Naked, she looks like a giant genie let loose from a bottle, and he contemplates the crumpled-up clothes at the foot of the bed and wonders how she ever fit inside. (He thinks, also, of the blue-cartooned genie from Aladdin, and the voice-over gig for which he reduced himself to audition.)

  For a moment, initially, his mind is everywhere but on this sweet, gentle giantess waiting to receive him, although he is soon enough absorbed—by the possibilities, yes, but mostly by the woman herself. He’s never seen such fleshiness! Such abundance! He allows himself to be swallowed up by her folds and crannies. He buries his face in her chest and worries jokingly for his own safety, first to himself, and then out loud. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes,” he says, pretending to come up for air, “call in the National Guard.” He hopes she takes this the right way.

  She nearly does. She also takes it as a cue for some playful teasing of her own. “You call this a cock?” she says, reaching for him.

  He’s embarrassed, a little, but he joins in when he sees the turnabout in her heckling. And the truth. Next to her, his very nearly erect penis looks very nearly like nothing at all. “Just look at me!” he cries out, truly amazed. “I’m a fucking toothpick!”