Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  She flips him over on his back, works her way smoothly down his torso, and collects him, full, in her mouth. She moves, Wood has room to think, like a woman her size should not be able to move: like a dancer, a cat, a snake. A dancing hippo. His thoughts shift to what he’s doing—here, now, like this—then on to where he’s going, where he’s been, what he’ll do next. He’d forgotten about his circumstance, his supposed death, but now he’s back on it. It just comes to him, comes and goes, been that way all day. It’s not yet a part of him, and yet here, in this moment, on the unmade bed of this too-large woman, it finally takes hold. He is here and gone and back. He is reborn, reclaimed, and absolutely untethered. At fucking last.

  Nothing can touch him, he thinks. No one.

  “Gracious,” he says, playing with the name of this moment’s lover and again with her hair. “Goodness, Gracious.”

  There’s been this thing between Pet and Norman going back to, like, day one, since about the time the boy first jizzed his shorts. Not a big thing, not anything at all really, but a thing just the same. Lately, this thing has been with them whenever they’re in the same room. They each recognize it, Pet feels certain, but neither one has chanced to give it voice or action.

  Anyway, this is how she sees it, and when Norman, dressed in a towel, steps innocently from the guest bathroom to the living room couch on which he’d left his overnight duffel, it’s all she can do to stay focused. Used to be she could slap herself back to reality, but now, with Wood gone, it’s more than she can take. She’s sitting there, thumbing the pages of a perfumed fashion magazine, trying not to think, when she gets this eyeful. Lord. In the middle of everything else, she has to confront this and the dreadful weirdness that comes with it. Like this is what she needs right now.

  It’s not like it’s her fault or anything, not like she can help it if the kid looks just like his father. Look! It doesn’t make her a bad person—does it?—if the sight of him, wet still from the shower, gets her going the way only Wood could get her going. There’s nothing morally wrong with a runaway thought. She didn’t ask for any of this. And besides, she never knew Wood as a young man; it’s only natural she would wonder what he was like, right? Come on, he was fiftysomething when they met, old enough to be his own fucking grandfather. There was this image of him, the one she had throughout her growing up, and then, finally, there was him. She’d seen Wood’s early movies over and over, and once she met him, she longed for what she’d missed, and wetsweetnaked Norman is simply a manifestation of her longing. That’s all. Nothing wrong with that.

  “Hey,” Norman says, reaching for his bag, catching Pet’s stare.

  “Hey.” Hey. That’s all. Hey, get the fuck out of here and give me a minute to save me from myself. Hey, take me with you to how it might have been with your father. Norman grabs his bag and retreats to the back room with the pull-out sofa to get dressed. Pet watches him leave and tries to harness her thoughts. Come on, she tells herself. Come on, come on, come on. This is nothing. This is everything. Her head runs to where she sees this non-thing with Norman as not unlike the real thing she reads about in the tabloids. That’s it, it’s like Woody Allen and that thing he had with Mia Farrow’s kid, what the hell is her name? This is how it is with Pet, over such as this; she tends to filter the stuff of her own life against the sensational headlines of a lifetime (or a week ago), and here is where she lands with this one.

  Okay, right, fine, so she’s Woody Allen, lusting after her lover’s kid. At least now she’s got a frame of reference. Pet and Norman. Woody and Mia’s kid. It’s the same thing, complicated by biology, and by the fact that Norman’s mother happens also to be Pet’s closest friend, and by the fact that Wood is gone, and by the fact that Woody Allen probably has a bit more going on upstairs than she does. Okay, so it’s not the same thing at all.

  “Jesus, Pet, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Anita, back from the kitchen, from cleaning up after lunch. Leave it to Anita to find cliché in high drama. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.

  Yes, Pet wants to say. Yes, I have. Our ghost. Our Wood. Right here in this room. Yes. She wants to tell her friend everything, but she catches herself. Now is not the time, she’s caught enough to realize. Never is the time. Shit, Anita is Norman’s mother, no way Pet can tell her where she is with this. “Just sitting,” she says instead. “Trying, you know, to get my mind off things.”

  “I know,” Anita says. “I just cleaned out my spice cabinet. I’m actually thinking of running down to the store for shelving paper. Can you believe it?”

  Pet can’t recall ever thinking of running down to the store for shelving paper. What kind of store even carries shelving paper? Hardware? Grocery? Office supply? “Want company?” she says.

  “I’ve lost the impulse. Think maybe I’ll just stay here by the phone.”

  “Good. I had no intention of actually going with you.”

  “Nils was saying maybe we should drive up to Maine to where the accident was, maybe see about the cabin, if there’s anything we can do.”

  “You think?” It had never occurred to Pet to do anything but sit right there flipping through perfumed magazines for the rest of her life.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  Pet doesn’t respond, leaves it to Anita to figure their next move—truly, she doesn’t have a decision left in her—but after a few beats, feels compelled to move things along. Any direction will do. “What kind of shampoo do you use?”

  “What?”

  “Shampoo.” She rustles her hair to illustrate, like she’s signing to Marlee Matlin, whom she met once at a square dance for the homeless. “Left mine at home.” Somewhere between Norman’s exit and Anita’s entrance, it occurred to her that a shower might be a good thing, a way not to think about Norman, or Wood, or what’s happened. She doesn’t recall processing the idea, but here it is. Again, without sign language: “I’ve got a hotel bottle of something in my bag, but that stuff dries me out.”

  “I keep a whole assortment. In this weather, I’ve been using some natural crap from this place in Cambridge. Supposedly milk and honey in it.”

  Pet imagines some foul-smelling curdled ooze. “Gross,” she says.

  “It’s actually not bad,” Anita offers, patting her hair like a model in a commercial, pretending at perky. “Leaves me sure and shiny.” She crosses the room to Pet, head down, like a battering ram: “Smell.”

  Pet smells. “Actually, not bad.”

  “There’s like a vat on the shower floor, upstairs.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Help yourself.”

  Pet leaves the room committed to the notion that a shower and shampoo will carry her past the day’s uncertainties, only by the time she reaches the staircase Norman has reemerged from the back of the house, looking for his mother. Pet, redirected, lingers at the foot of the stairs, choosing to overdose on pure family dynamic, from the source, instead of bottled milk and honey.

  “What’s this about Maine?” the kid says to his mother. “We going?”

  “I don’t know,” Anita says. “What do you think? Nils is thinking maybe we should.”

  “Screw Nils,” Norman says, with a shade more disdain than the moment requires. “You think it’s a good idea, then we should go. Pet thinks it’s a good idea, then we should go. But don’t tell me about Nils.”

  “Norman,” Anita admonishes. “This is his house, remember?” She had thought her son might have gotten past his little differences with Nils by now.

  “Of course it’s his house. How can I not know this is his house? There are like a million pairs of clogs in my room. All these carpet remnants.” Norman lifts the square of industrial weave at his feet—brown, with rainbow flecks—to illustrate his point.

  Anita’s smile is like a patronizing pat on her son’s head. “They’re not clog clogs,” she tells. “You can’t wear them or anything. They’re just decorative. He collects them. They’re handmade.”

  “Great. That ex
plains it.” Silly him.

  Pet listens in and thrills at the tension. It’s a regular soap opera, what goes on in this house, with her in the other room. Also, she thrills at the way Norman validates her being here by including her in his argument. She gets a vote. She matters. She sees the way he treats Nils. It’d kill her to be cast in the same role.

  Anita: “So?”

  “So, I guess. Yeah. I mean, if that’s what everyone wants.”

  “I didn’t say it’s what everyone wants, just it was something Nils suggested. I’m just putting it on the table.”

  Norman hates it when his mother puts things on the table, which usually means she wants to gather support for whatever it is she already has determined. With his mother, you either put things on the table or in your computer or on top of the “in” box. “Let Pet decide, then,” he says. “I’m not exactly up for any big decisions.”

  “Oh, and like I am?” Pet, from behind the living room wall, on the staircase landing.

  “Pet, you’re a child,” Anita reprimands. “Eavesdropping. Nice.”

  She gets back a laugh. “I’m not eavesdropping,” Pet insists, not quite sincere, still in hiding behind the wall. She puts on a wee voice. “It’s a small house. I couldn’t help overhear.”

  Norman pokes his head around to where Pet is crouched on the bottom step. “Pet’s in trouble,” he sing-songs. “Pet’s in trouble.”

  “Oh, Norman, shut up,” Anita says, following her son to the stairs. She’s about run out of good cheer.

  “Norman’s in trouble,” Pet taunts back. “Norman’s in trouble.” She stands, makes to climb the stairs, turns and shakes a finger at Norman: “You wait till your father gets home, young man!”

  She’s a sitcom mom, lampooned, only as soon as she says it, she wants to change her lines, replay the scene. Wait till your father gets home. What’s that? She struggles for a way to un-say the words, but Anita’s not waiting for any explanation. She flashes her friend a look that could chill soup. She’s not like this, Anita, not usually, but this is not usually. She surprises herself with her reaction. The line strikes her first as no big deal, just a slip of the tongue, but then she hears it from Norman’s perspective and she gets all twisted up inside. She goes a little crazy on his behalf. She bounds up the first few steps to where Pet is now standing and leans into her at the waist.

  It’s a good, clean hit, and Pet is abruptly rag-dolled over Anita’s shoulder with the force of it. Then she straightens and slumps to her seat, where she tries to reclaim her wind and her bearings. “Jesus, Nita,” she says.

  “Don’t ‘Jesus Nita’ me.”

  “Mom,” Norman intercedes, pinning his mother’s arms to her sides in a tight hug. “It’s cool. Be cool. Everything’s cool.” He can feel his heart, up against his mother’s collarbone, racing, like, a million beats a minute. Anita can feel it too, and she wishes her own beat in synch with her son’s. That would be nice, she thinks, to feel what he’s feeling, to be in synch.

  But it’s too much for Anita. All of it—too much, too soon, too everything. Instead of racing, her heartbeat goes flat, near as she can tell. She feels suddenly faint, overcome. She doesn’t black out, but she’s close enough to know how it might feel. Oh, yes, this. . . . She goes with the feeling and lets herself fall against Norman, limp. He tries to lower his mother gently to the steps alongside the slumped Pet, only when the dead weight of her is more than he can handle, he is pulled down as well, so that eventually all three of them are slumped and draped across the middle steps like the victims of a shooting spree.

  They lie in this haphazard way for what feels to Norman like a long time, underneath the sounds of their breathing and the unfocused thoughts of what just happened. What an odd picture they must make. They are puzzled together in roughly the same formation Norman remembers from the adolescent game of Ha!—a human circle linked head to stomach, head to stomach, all the way around, allowing laughter (or tears, or whatever) to pass from one body to the next like a contagion. Ha! Used to play it with his friends in the atrium at the mall on rainy weekend afternoons when he was about thirteen, when the thought of lying his head on a girl’s stomach was the biggest thing in the world. Now it’s just his mother and Pet, but he gives it a try. “Ha,” he says, without much conviction.

  His mother and Pet, lost in their own reflections, do not respond. Anita’s got her strength back, but she’s not up for doing anything with it.

  “Ha!”

  Nothing still.

  “Ha!” This time Norman’s canned laughter turns somehow genuine, and he is collected by it—hahahahaha—and transported to another frame. Really, he can’t help himself. His laughing gets bigger and bigger to where he is doubled up in such uncontrollable fits that it begins to hurt. There’s no explaining it, but there’s also no stopping it, and soon Pet and Anita can’t help but join in. (It never worked like this when he was a kid!) They’ve got no idea what they’re doing, or why, but they are taken in. It’s like a wave, a shared release: the three of them, laughing, wiping away tears, desperate to ease the same pain.

  Nils, in from the carport, where he’d been sorting his screws, happens onto this scene like an immigrant to some strange shore. Norman’s right, they do make an odd picture, and Nils struggles to filter what he sees against what he knows: his wife, her son, her best friend, splayed across the steps, giggling helplessly like children, waiting for the other shoe to drop on Wood. They all know what’s coming; what they don’t know is when or how. It’s like they refuse to acknowledge the poor man’s fate. Listen to Nils. In death, a bastard like Terence Wood is elevated to pity. He works to understand it, Nils, the way these people are coping. He’s missing something: how they’ve contorted into such an unlikely position, how things like appearance and propriety don’t seem to matter, how they can laugh at a time like this. It makes no sense. A death in the family is a solemn thing. A tragedy like this, time should just stand still.

  “Nilsy!” Pet cries, when she notices him at the foot of the stairs.

  The others turn to look, and their doubled-up laughing swells by the powers of three and four. The sight of poor, staid Nils strikes them all as about the funniest thing they’ve ever seen.

  “Nilsy!” Norman shouts.

  Anita tries to stifle her laughing, but even she can’t control herself. She doesn’t want her husband to think they’re making fun of him—it’s not like that—but even if she could find the words, there’d be no place to put them. She tries to calm herself, to slow her thoughts, but, for some reason, she starts gesticulating madly, patting the air in front of her like a spastic traffic cop. When she realizes what she’s doing, she makes to halt Nils and his passing judgment, but in that same realization is the knowledge that she is having the opposite effect.

  “Anita,” Nils says, making his disappointment known. He doesn’t know what to make of her mad gesturing except to think it strange.

  “Anita,” Pet mimics. “Get a fucking grip!” She notices, for the first time, Norman’s head on her stomach, and, in this instant, her laughter subsides. She wants to run her fingers through the boy’s hair, touch them to his lips. She can’t remember a time he’s been in her lap like this, wonders if he even notices, if this whole set-up means anything to him. She leans close, wanting to smell his hair, the back of his neck.

  “Oh, Nils,” Anita says, finally composed, hands still at her sides. She’s nearly out of breath. “I’m so sorry. It’s not what you’re thinking.”

  What could he possibly be thinking?

  Pimletz, shuttling to New York to take a meeting. Last time he took the shuttle, it was run by Eastern, but the wings of man have long since been clipped. Now it’s Delta, or USAir, one of those. He has to consult his ticket to make sure. On his own dime, he’d have taken the train, maybe even the bus, but this Stemble guy said he’d reimburse him for the fare, and time was tight, and no way he’d have gotten there and back the same night on the ground. Anyway, there’s a kind
of heightened sense of importance, flying. No reason Pimletz need deny himself a taste of the high life—especially if someone else is paying for it. Especially if he wants to matter.

  It’s been a while. Last time Pimletz took the shuttle, Ed Koch was still mayor. He remembers because Koch was on the same plane, couple rows back, a good head taller than anyone else on board. Kissinger, too, on the same flight, other side of the aisle, average height. The former secretary of state was giving a talk at the Kennedy Center, at Harvard, there was an item in that day’s Record-Transcript. Nothing in the paper about what Koch was doing, and Pimletz had to fight back the impulse to ask.

  Still, Koch and Kissinger on the same plane, what were the odds on that?

  No one worth noting on today’s flight, not that Pimletz can tell. He’s wondering if anyone’s looking at him, thinking if maybe he’s someone important, the way he’s been studying everyone else. He longs to tell someone his business, to justify his being here, to leave the guy next to him with a story to tell. Yeah, interesting fellow, that Axel Pimletz. Writes for the Record-Transcript. Surely you’ve seen his name. That’s right. He’s Terence Wood’s biographer. Going down to meet his publisher, have some dinner, maybe a couple drinks.

  Guy next to him appears to be no one special, no one better. Pimletz thinks maybe he should engage him in conversation—interact!—but he’s never been any good at that sort of thing. He worries that his breath, up close, is not what it should be, that he hasn’t done such a good job on his ears, past couple days, that he’ll run out of small talk before anyone recognizes it for what it is. You know, what does he have to say to these people? He grabs the in-flight magazine from the seat back in front of him and turns away with it toward the aisle to avoid the possibility of confrontation.

  “Sir,” he hears, from an officious voice, “we’ll need to pass.”

  It does not occur to Pimletz that he might be the designated “sir.” Why should it? People are always addressing each other respectfully, in ways that have nothing to do with him. With Pimletz, it’s always more like, “Hey, you!”