Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  “I don’t know shit,” Stemble dismisses. “Just enough to get you down here.”

  Oh. He knows he’s being foolish, but Pimletz had been hoping that for some reason this guy had been following his career. (Yeah, right. The only thing following his career is his retirement, and even that’s in doubt.) “Well, Mr. Stemble,” he says, “I don’t know shit myself.” He’s drunk, a little. He’s trying to gather his thoughts in a neat little line so that he might retrieve them as needed.

  “Warren.”

  “Warren,” Pimletz laughs. “Still don’t know shit, but I can certainly call you Warren.” He laughs again, louder than he needs to. It’s not even funny.

  The silence that surfaces between the two men would be awkward, were it not for the two martinis. As it is, it is simply there.

  “What are you reading?” Stemble asks, making to fill it.

  Pimletz hadn’t realized that he was. “What?” he says. This is hard for him. Reading? He figures these publishing guys are pretty proprietary about the printed word, but there’s no reading matter in Pimletz’s view other than a tented cardboard advertisement for blendered tropical drinks, which he now holds out for his host’s inspection. He attempts a joke: “Don’t spoil the ending.”

  Stemble doesn’t get it. Or he does and it’s not worth having. “On your night stand,” he clarifies, “on the plane down, on the crapper. Everyone’s got a book going. Me, I’ve got three or four. I can’t keep track.”

  Oh, what am I reading? They expect me to read and write, these people, to have a book going. Hamlin would say that costs extra. Pimletz does a quick review of his recent readings and figures the newspaper doesn’t cut it. “The new Grisham,” he finally manages, hoping this might cover him. All he knows of the new Grisham is that it probably resembles the old Grishams, which he also hasn’t read. He hasn’t even seen the movies, but he gets the idea.

  “We published his first book,” Stemble offers, “before anyone knew who he was.”

  Pimletz gets that this is a good thing, although he’s not certain why. “I’m a bandwagon kind of guy,” he says, permitting the drinks and the lie to reveal more about him than he would bare on his own. “Ten million people can’t be wrong.”

  “Does that include foreign?”

  “What?”

  “The ten million readers. Is that just domestic?”

  Pimletz has no answer. It was just an expression, and now he can’t decide whether to play it out or come clean. What does he know from sales figures? “We should have such worries with Terence Wood,” he instead suggests, boldly inserting himself into the deal before it is formally offered, while, at the same time, neatly side-stepping the manner of his embellishment. Neither response is particularly like him, and yet to accomplish both—on the same pass, and under the influence of two vodka martinis—is a kind of triumph. He allows himself a slight smile and a tinge of confidence, but he’s not enough used to either to pull them off.

  “Indeed,” Stemble says, raising his glass in toast, and showing himself to be the kind of person for whom the word “indeed” indeed has a place.

  “Indeed,” Pimletz tries, toasting back, the word rising from the desperate atmosphere of the bar to where it just might pass for hope and possibility.

  Indeed.

  They decide on Pet’s rental—a two-door Omni coupe, cherry red. Anita’s car is in the shop, Norman’s roommate’s car is way too small, and Nils’s truck is so totally not what Pet has in mind.

  Nils, driving: “You’re sure you listed me as one of the drivers?”

  “They give me a form, there’s a space for additional drivers, I put down you and Nita,” Pet assures. “Doesn’t cost me anything. Who else am I gonna put?” She gives Norman a look across the back seat that says, yeah, right. She’ll tell poor Nils anything.

  “Good,” Nils says. “That’s good. I don’t want trouble with the insurance.”

  “Nils is very particular about insurance,” Anita translates from the front passenger seat. “It’s one of his things.”

  “Which is why I made sure to put him down on the form,” Pet pours it on. “Do I know my Nilsy or what?” She reaches forward to tousle her Nilsy’s hair, and he flinches from her touch.

  They are lost, most of them, in the mundane logistical matters of the moment: directions, insurance, what to listen to on the radio, dinner. And yet, from within these mundane matters, from time to time, they are each hit by what has happened, where they are going, what they expect to find there. It comes and goes, and, when it comes, they move so uncomfortably against it that it gets pushed aside. The weight of Terence Wood’s death is too much for them, to where it can only be processed in little bits, by not thinking about it. It will come to them, in time, when it needs to; until then, it is left to fill the interior of Pet’s rented car in such a way that it only occasionally sets down in their heads. It’s there, and then it’s not. It’s a part of them, and then it’s gone.

  Nils, driving, is the closest to acceptance. He is a practical man, removed enough from Wood to acknowledge what has happened, but even he has his moments. He allows himself to worry about the insurance because it is easier than worrying about Anita, what she must be feeling. He allows himself to forget because he doesn’t like what the remembering has to tell him, the way it makes him look to his lovely wife, the way he looks to himself in the reflection. If Terence Wood can be said to have been larger than life, then surely Nils Veerhoven must be smaller, and surely Anita will now recognize the correlation. It was tough enough competing with the bastard when he was around, and now there’s the way he will be exaggerated in memory.

  For Pet and Nita, there is a pocket of comfort in these momentary denials or, at least, a hold on how things were. If they choose not to believe it, then perhaps it hasn’t happened. If they focus on something else, the rest will go away. This is not a conscious thing, this inability to accept Wood’s death, this not thinking, but they are both taken by it. And linked. For a while, last night, they were able to talk about what they were feeling, to reach deep for what it means and where it leaves them, but they have since turned away from it and from each other. From Wood, even. They will talk about everything but their shared loss, even though there is no one else for whom the loss could possibly mean the same. There’s Elaine, but she’s so far removed from Wood’s recent life and times that she’s hardly a thought.

  There is also Norman. Anita can’t fathom the way this must be registering for him. She hates that they hadn’t been close, Wood and Norman, the way fathers and sons are meant to be close, but then there’s always been something between them beyond her understanding. They have this strange shorthand, the two of them, a telepathy. All right, so maybe they are close, but their closeness, if that is what it is, has nothing to do with proximity. They don’t spend time together, not really, but they have come to define each other. Anita sometimes thinks Norman can actually feel his father’s legacy, that the weight of who he is and where he comes from has some kind of structural impact on her son’s existence. It’s why he’s in film school. It’s who he is. Certainly, they look alike, the two of them, but she sees it also in the way her Norman carries himself when his father is around, or even when he isn’t. He’s a skinny kid, and tall, but he takes on a hulking demeanor that is more than he was meant to carry, and he looks the part for the moment. It’s a striking transmutation and exactly right. He’s thin, and shy, and unassuming, but when he’s with his father, or in his orbit, or even just at one of his pictures, he takes on new dimensions. He goes from decorous to devilish in, like, nothing flat. She wonders what will happen to all of that now. She wonders if anyone else sees what she sees.

  For Norman, the wondering is all about these other people here in the car with him. He doesn’t get why it is he has to deal with Nils. What’s that all about? Pet he doesn’t mind, actually likes it when she’s around, but Nils is like a tourist. The guy’s got no fucking clue and no claim. Back at the house, Nils c
alled him over and whispered something about wanting to be there for his mother, and Norman was like, yeah, well, where the hell else you gonna be? Why are we even talking about this? Norman’s in and out of acceptance just like everyone else, but when it hits him, it hits him hard. Like now. He gets a picture in his head of what has happened, and he works it against the noise about the insurance and Nils’s generally annoying presence, and what he’s left with is a giant frustration. It’s pretty fucking huge, like nothing he’s ever known. He doesn’t know what to do with it, but he has an idea. Just like this, it comes to him. He pulls his knees to his chest and then he kicks, hard, against the back of the driver’s seat, whiplashing Nils to where his chin is knocked against the steering wheel and his glasses thrown to the dash.

  “Pull over!” Norman screams, slipping into one of his father’s famous tantrums.

  “Norman!” his mother shoots back, without much conviction. She spots the devil in her son for what it is.

  Nils rubs at the sharp pain in his chin and pulls to the side of the road—not because the boy told him to, and not because of Anita’s apparent upset, but because, at the moment, he is too stunned to do anything else. Forget driving. He wonders if the thing to do is comfort his wife or lean into Norman for his outburst. Another option: get out of the car and walk, leave these people to themselves.

  “Finally,” Pet says, “some fireworks.” She smiles at the excitement.

  Norman throws open his door, steps from the car before Nils brings it to a full stop, and with the momentum, storms to the front of the car and glares at his mother’s new husband through the tinted windshield. His mother and Pet are frozen by his fit. Nils is just waiting for the rest of it. So is Norman. This is his father’s doing. Norman moves without thinking. He kicks suddenly at the front headlight with his sneakered feet, and, when the glass does not shatter, he goes at it again. And again.

  “Insurance,” he rambles, scanning the shoulder of the road for an object that might do the job for him. “Insurance. I’ll give you insurance.” There. A rock. Boulder, almost. He lifts it with two hands and walks it to the driver-side headlight. He goes so slowly about his business that someone might make it theirs to stop him, but no one is moving. He presses the rock to the light, hard, as in a pounding motion, but it won’t give. Then he steps back and shot-puts his find at his target, which finally shatters, and, from the sound of the shattering, seems to have been made from heavy-duty plastic. No wonder. Anyway, Norman’s just about made his point. He picks the rock back up and lofts it onto the hood of the car, where it leaves a good-size dent and a good-size thud and a couple good-size scratches. That should do it.

  “See if that’s covered,” he says, loud enough for them to hear inside the car. Then he cleans his hands against his pants, slinks calmly back into his seat, and wills himself whole.

  Pet bursts into applause and laughter, and Anita reaches over from the front seat to slap her into silence, biting back her own smile.

  They sit there, the four of them, for so long Nils can’t think of a thing to say or do except to ease the car back onto the road.

  Anita, who has been looking back at her son, wondering how it is he’s become so much like his father and when, turns ahead with the car’s movement. She grabs Nils’s right arm, to get his attention. “Rock,” she says, pointing out the window to Norman’s boulder, still on the hood. “Honey.”

  “Fuck the rock,” Nils says, pulling onto the highway, picking up speed. He turns sunburn red with his exclamation. He doesn’t usually talk like this. Once more, softer, as in an apology: “Just fuck the rock, okay? Excuse me, but that’s all I have to say.”

  “Nilsy,” taunts Pet, unfrozen and back at it. “Such language.”

  As advertised, Grace’s Brat has two black plastic seats, all-weather, facing back, right there in the truck bed—probably the most useless things Wood’s ever seen. Who the hell came up with these?

  Still, he climbs in, sets himself down along the curves of the seat backed against the driver’s, and tries to understand how he’d missed such a significant moment in the history of automotive design. Seat’s working overtime to hold him (it’s not exactly built for hulking presences, still tortured or no), but Wood’s not so uncomfortable he can’t adjust. There. Better.

  He pulls the top on a can of Coors Light pinched from Grace’s fridge upstairs, sucks the foam from the arrowed opening, considers his new circumstance. He’s got all night and a lot to consider. He still can’t get his hands around what he’s set in motion. All he knows is he’s got no place to be, nothing to do, and in this he finds contentment. Fuck, he’s not jumping for joy or anything, he’s not spinning cartwheels, but there’s a mighty weight gone, the kind of weight he never fully measured until it was lifted. He feels twenty years younger, twenty pounds lighter, twenty times richer. He doesn’t dwell on what the rest of the world has made of his apparent death, only on what he has managed, and what he has managed is something. What he has managed is to get through the better parts of a day without thinking about his asshole agent, his next project, his back taxes, his divorce lawyers, his too-high profile, his goddamn cellular phone, his hangers-on.

  Well, okay, so this is not entirely true. He’s thought of these things, all of them, and a whole lot more besides (he’s even thought about calling his machine at home to check for messages), but what he hasn’t done is think about them too seriously or for too long. Before his disappearing act, when something or someone commanded Terence Wood’s attention, he neglected it at great risk to his karma and equilibrium and general good feeling. Now, he simply puts his mind on idle, like it was an appliance setting, and, when he happens on an unpleasant thought, he quickly jumps to something else. There’s nothing to hold him down.

  He needs to act it out to understand it. He stands in the cab, rubberstretches his arms at his sides, goes all floppy, like a dropped marionette. Then he slinks back into the uncomfortable seat. He’s got no strings to hold him down. This is his idea of improvisation. He takes a long draw from the Coors Light. This is what untethered looks like. This’ll show that fuck from Chicago with his thumb up his ass. This is me, hopelessly lost, without tether.

  Only thing Wood can’t get past is Norman. He hadn’t figured on this, although if he’d thought about it at all he’d have come to it eventually. Everything else he can do without, but he can’t face losing the connection with his kid. That, and he’s got poor Norman thinking his old man has met a ghastly end off the side of a cliff. How could he do this to his own child? To strip him of his father just because his father wanted to shake things up? He can’t forgive himself, or justify his grand act, or even understand it, but he wonders if he might make repairs. Yes, he’s got to find a way to get to Norman, he suddenly thinks, to make him get what’s happened in a way that doesn’t leave him hating him for the rest of his life or running to tell his mother. He can’t decide which would be worse. He’s got to bring the boy back into his life, into his secret, before the thought of his dying takes hold. He can’t do that to his own son. Okay, so he already has, but he can’t let it stand, not for too much longer. If he does, and he’s found out, he’ll be left doing Rogers and Hammerstein in dinner theater, which he guesses is a kind of hell. Plus, he can’t sing for shit.

  He resolves to make things right with Norman and soon, although, for the moment, he’s got no idea how to accomplish this. With his resolve comes an impulse to move, and so he downs the last of his last beer, hops down from the bed and into the cab, and fires up Grace’s truck like it has some place to go. It does, for a time, until Wood, not thinking, veers wildly from the side of the road into one of these little protected marsh areas he’d seen along the coast, here and there, during the day. They’ve got these too-tall egret nests every couple hundred yards along this stretch of town, built and lovingly maintained by the local wildlife weirdos. There’s not much in the way of street lighting, but he can make out the resulting skyline in the night air. In his headlig
hts, at varying high speeds, the towered nests look like telephone poles against a stark Texas landscape. Of course, there are signs and shit to help tell the difference, but these don’t register in the darkness. About the only thing that does, and this Wood remembers from his wanderings on foot this morning, is that there are way more nests than egrets, and yet he manages to run Grace’s Brat head-on into one of each.

  Wood, hitting and running, continues on his nocturnal chase, not sure where he’s headed, not thinking anything of the strange ka-thunk! beneath his tires, the snapped base of the nest stand as it rips from the ground and flips over the length of the speeding pickup.

  Winter

  “There is a time for laughing, and a time for not laughing, and this is not one of them.”

  —Inspector Clouseau

  Up-Gathered Now Like Sleeping Flowers

  Norman, dead drunk but not really, turns to his dead-but-not-really father and frames a question. It doesn’t matter what he asks, only that he does. The trick, he’s learned, is to get this ghost of Woodman started. When he appears like this—late at night, as in a vodka-soaked hologram—it doesn’t take much to get him talking, and in the run-on, Norman can sometimes discover the truths of his growing up. He hears what he wants to hear.

  “You bought Microsoft at what?”

  This is what Norman comes up with because this is what’s on top. He’s sorry about this, but lately, with all the estate nonsense, and the back and forth with the lawyers, and the persistant hounding from certain elements of the media, and the not-quite-Sotheby’s auction the widow Pet is considering to consolidate all the unagreed-upon stuff (custom shoe horns!), Norman has been fairly preoccupied with the financial aspects of his father’s life. Stocks. Trusts. Safe deposit boxes. Limited partnerships. Art. Insurance policies. It’s all that’s left. That and his pictures, but Norman can’t watch a Woodman picture without thinking also of what’s to come. Or, what has passed. Even the early ones—The Half Shell and Straight On till Morning and (especially) Sixes and Sevens, where his father actually buys it in the end in a badly orchestrated bar fight over a badly dressed woman—they’re all tied up in the same thing.