But then it turns on him, his thinking, and not because his thinking of Grace gets him started on what he’s missing, but because after Grace, he runs out of argument. He’s still with the here and there, still with the weighing of Maine against L.A., but now the scales tip the other way. Here, he starts to think, the only prize is making the rent, making it through the long, cold winter. Here, he’s had about all he can take on the weather; on the merits, in deep winter, of dry heat versus moist; on this new kind of outboard motor meant to start sure and steady—first time, every time, or your money back.
Shit.
“What’ya waitin’ on, Harlan?” It’s Mike, another one of Grace’s chowderheads, on his way in. He hasn’t quite got the situation figured. “She finally gettin’ ’round to tarrin’ that roof?”
“Just a sign,” Wood shouts down. “Go on inside. Gracie’ll fill you in.”
Mike steps to the door and then pulls back. He looks up at his friend Trask. “I’m pretty handy with the tools,” he says.
Wood waves him off. “I’m good, Mikey-boy,” he says. And he is. Good and charged and almost like new. He’s also about as far removed from any kind of life anyone would even recognize.
It’s not like Norman to be caught dead driving a Buick, but it’s not like he has any choice. Guy at the rental counter, a buzz-cutted pain in his ass with a septum retainer showing through his too-large nostrils, said it was a Buick or dick, and Norman wondered whatever happened to trying harder. Then he wondered if he was even at the trying-harder counter, and just who the trying-harder people were, anymore, and if they were even still in business. Then he wondered how it was they were still making these cars—LeSabres, Park Avenues—without his fully realizing it, which went to show him the Buick people didn’t exactly have him in their sights, demographically speaking. You know, if they wanted a fuckwad film student to really rather have a Buick, they’d find a way to get him the message. They’d buy a page in Details, sponsor a film festival, something.
Car’s got like two miles on it, smells like a showroom, and it drives, he’s come to realize, like it’s out at sea. Like a fucking cabin cruiser! A sloop! He wonders if they even call them sloops anymore. (What the fuck’s a sloop, anyway?) He pulls out in this boat of a car and takes the small hills in the now-winding road like swells in the open sea, and this is what he has time to think. The only reason he even knows the word “sloop” is from some fucking Beach Boys song. I wanna go home. He grows up on the ocean, pretty much, and the Beach Boys are the extent of his sea-faring knowledge. This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on. Repeat and fade.
Wheretogo? Wheretogo? Wheretogo? Where the fuck to go? Somewhere, is all. Anywhere. Just go. Move. Do. Be. Do-Bee. The fucking Romper Room Do-Bee. Christ, when was the last time he thought of that? When was the last time he thought of any of this shit?
Norman’s mind, racing, reaches back over every emotion he ever had, every impulse, every thought, the whole of his experience, all at once, and he pulls with it a joke from his growing up, an inside joke he was too fucking plugged in to not get, even back in Kindergarten:
What did Sinatra sing on Romper Room?
Do-be-do-be-do.
Kid who told it to him lived in a house once owned (or maybe rented, but at least lived in) by Dean Martin’s kid, Dino, so it came with its own Rat Pack lineage. It wasn’t just a joke, it was an inside joke, and young Norman knew to laugh at the connection as much as the punchline. That’s how it was, how he grew up—on the inside, looking out. His father knew the people who did the voices on his favorite cartoons. Adam West, in a bad career patch, showed at one of Norman’s birthday parties and let his friends try on his cowl. The Starland Vocal Band (shit, remember the Starland Vocal Band!) came to his friend Bradley’s bar mitzvah and played a memorably painful version of “Sunrise, Sunset.” (People still talk about it.) It left him thinking the whole world was crammed into the same front row.
North, he decides. He’ll head north, maybe unspool for a couple days in New Hampshire. Pet keeps saying to come on up, any time, don’t even bother to call. If she’s not there, she leaves the key inside a faux rock she ordered from a garden catalog and now keeps by a post near a side door, with the word “serendipity” boiler-plated into the stone. When she told Norman this, he wondered just who it was she expected to fool, advertising her hiding places like that. Might as well get one with the word “key” on it. “Help Yourself.” “Back at Noon.” But then he thought, you know, it’s not like she’s in New York or anything. It’s fucking New Hampshire. Folks are a little slower, a little more trusting.
Serendipity, he thinks, driving. Serendipity-do-dah. Do-be-do-be-do.
Pimletz is moving now. At last. At least. He’s pointed toward the Bar Harbor Public Library, determined to source his dried-up flow of e-mailings, certain he is onto something. He hasn’t thought things enough of the way through even to guess what he’s on to, but he figures this is enough of a first step, this going forward. No sense tilting the machinery with theories.
Pet said to take the cell phone with him in case she thought of something she needed. She was thinking, maybe one of them lobster roll things they do up there, but then Axel would have to pick up one of those cooler-thingies so the mayonnaise didn’t go bad on the drive home, so that would be, like, two things she needed: the sandwich and the cooler. Two things, one call, no biggie. Anyway, Pimletz has got the phone set to Roam now that he’s left its home area. He’s also got a map and a hardly used reporter’s notebook with the Record-Transcript banner stamped on the cover all stuffed haphazardly into a black leather shoulder bag he’d taken to carrying back and forth to the paper. He never had any work to take home with him (or, resultingly, to bring back to his desk the next morning), but he liked the way the bag made him look, that the other guys all carried them too.
The sun, setting behind him, seems to light Pimletz’s way like what’s left of a fire. It’s too bright for headlights and too soon for streetlamps, and yet the road is bathed in the kind of dulled orange you might get if you left a handful of candy corns to soak in hot water for a couple hours and then spilled the residue out in the sink. Jesus, this book has got him thinking in descriptive terms. Trying, anyway. He’s thinking, burnt sienna. He remembers the name from those super-sized Crayola boxes as a kid, but he can’t recall the color. It’s not a color he normally encounters, and yet he’s guessing maybe this was what they had in mind. This color here, this muted orange in the graying sky. If it doesn’t already have a name, this is something that should be called burnt sienna. Or ember. Even better. He’s wondering if this is a good name for a crayon color, if anyone’s ever thought of it, if there’s any money in marketing new names for new colors to the Crayola people.
Ember.
Ah, here it is, easy enough to find. The public library. Not one of those strange-to-fathom, mostly concrete structures he’s used to seeing in the new-monied suburbs of Boston, in the city itself. No new money here, judging from the library, just a basic clapboard building with a couple not-quite-thought-out extensions grafted to each end. Basic. Looks like it was once somebody’s house; there’s probably a tub in the bathroom. He leans into the latch-bar on the heavy front door and wonders how it is such a simple-looking library in such a simple-looking town is even wired to send out the kind of e-mailings he’s been getting.
Leave it to technology to root itself in the unlikeliest places; but then, leave it to convention to hold fast. Library has still got a card catalog file along the side wall, he notices, stepping inside. Pimletz can’t remember the last time he saw one of these. Shit, even the Roxbury branch back home has had its catalog on computer since forever. He wonders what all those libraries did with their files when they switched to computers. As furniture, you know, it’s a pretty interesting piece. Lot you can do with it, all those tiny, deep drawers, those hook-down brass pulls. Make for a kick-ass sewing kit. (An elaborate utensil drawer?) He wonders if maybe there’s some kind of afte
r-market for such a thing, but then he thinks probably the antique dealers have already picked up on this. Probably all the good card catalog files are already gone, and out there, and refinished, and occupying space in some of the finer homes in North America. The conversation piece to end all conversation pieces or, if restored to their intended use, to end all conversation.
He steps in the direction of a slender, plain-looking woman at the desk facing the front door. She’s sitting where he expects to find a librarian, in the manner he expects to find on one, except she’s wearing a Patagonia fleece pullover and sipping from a bottle of manufactured water—altogether, not librarian material. Plus, she looks like she’s twenty. Pimletz runs a reckless inventory of all the librarians he’s ever seen, in all the libraries he’s ever been, and he can’t come up with another this young, this casual. Oh, there are the students manning the desks at the university libraries he is sometimes made to visit, but those shouldn’t count. This one’s even got on black nail polish, he sees now, stepping closer, and this strikes him as another first.
He wishes he had a card to give her to help explain himself. He must’ve asked Volpe about a million times for a box of business cards, but the conversation never went the way Pimletz planned. “What,” Volpe usually railed, “you’re expecting to hear back from the dead?”
“Excuse me,” he says, attempting eye contact and conversation at roughly the same time, a combustible bit of social interaction for which he has never demonstrated tremendous facility. “This the public library?” As soon as he says it, he wants it back. Of course this is the public library. Says so right out front. There are, like, a shitload of books piled high and all around. That card catalog thing. Jesus.
“Last I checked.”
Pimletz all but sighs. At least she has the courtesy not to rip into him for being such an ass. “Good,” he says. “Thought so.”
She smiles. “Something I can help you with?”
He doesn’t know where to start, so he finds a spot in the middle of what he has to say. “There’s probably a log or something,” he says. “Right? The people who use your computer. They sign in?”
She’s not sure what he means, but she means to help. “There’s a sign-up sheet,” she explains, “if there’s a wait or something. We only have two terminals. I don’t know if that helps.”
Pimletz doesn’t know either. “And if there’s no wait?” he tries. “If there’s no wait, what happens, you just sit down and start typing?”
“Basically. We’re pretty loose about it.”
He considers this, wonders what good it does him, flits back to the beginning. “So if I wanted to go back a couple weeks, see who was using the computers at a given time, you know, six o’clock on a Thursday night, there wouldn’t necessarily be any record?”
She shakes her head no. “Even if there was,” she says, “I’m not sure I could give that out. I’d have to check.”
“Could you?” he asks.
“Check?”
“Or see if there’s a record. Whichever you have to do first.”
“Six o’clock which Thursday night?”
“No,” he says, reaching into his bag for his reporter’s notebook and flipping it open to one of the few blemished pages. “That was just an example. These are the times and dates I’m looking for.” He shows her.
“You a cop?” she says, taking the notebook.
Pimletz wants to laugh, but catches himself. “Nothing like that.”
“A reporter?”
Nothing like that, either, is what he should say, but what comes out is, “You might say that.” You know, she might. She did. What the hell.
Her eyes take on another shade. “Well,” she says, conspiratorially, “let’s see what we can dig up for our friend, Mr. Woodward.”
Pimletz doesn’t catch the reference. “Pimletz,” he corrects.
“No, I meant, as in Bob. Woodward and Bernstein.” Beat. “Watergate.” Beat. “Hello?”
“Oh,” he says. “Right.” Jesusfuckingchristalmighty. “Them.”
“We’re studying them in school,” she explains. “Journalism class I’m taking. “All the President’s Men. The right to know versus the right to privacy.” She shrugs. “Pretty basic stuff.”
“I guess,” he says, wanting to enlighten this black-nailed student librarian or, at least, to move her along.
She disappears for an adjacent room without any help from Pimletz, presumably to look for the computer log, although, just as likely, he suspects, to get away from this would-be journalist who can’t organize his thoughts for shit. She returns a couple beats later with one of those marble-covered notebooks he remembers from grade school, open to one of the first few pages. “How far back we going?” she asks.
“It’s not even dark,” observes Nils Veerhoven, home from two cleanings and an installation, expecting dinner. He twists open a shut window blind. “Who watches television, middle of the day?”
Anita Tollander Wood Veerhoven, for one, and if this comes as a surprise to Nils then perhaps the man is still a few hints short of a fucking clue, as Norman so neatly put it last time he called. Who doesn’t watch television in the middle of the day? This is America. This is what people do in America. Plus, the day’s all but shot, and it’s not like Anita’s twiddling her thumbs over some talk show or rehashed sitcom or Jeopardy! It’s not like she tapes the soaps to watch later. No, she’s got a movie going. One of Wood’s, one she hasn’t seen in who knows how long.
Elemenopee, with Judy Garland as a small-town teacher to his superintendent of schools. Alongside the predictable love story, there’s a bit of racial tension regarding a black janitor wanting to send his son to Judy Garland’s class, believing he’ll find a better education there than the one that’s finding him at the mostly black school across town. The picture sank when it came out and since has fallen into disfavor among African-American groups for its outdated depiction of white middle-class values concerning blacks. Even the title—meant, simply, to indicate the middle letters of the alphabet, singsong—was a source of controversy. It stood, for a time, as a pejorative phrase for blacks wanting to pass in white schools, all of which goes to explain why Elemenopee is one of the few Terence Wood movies not available on video. None of the cable movie channels will touch it, still, but it turns up here and there, edited for broadcast. Here it is on TV38 out of Boston, shot through with commercials, in the late afternoon, as if no one will notice. Or, more likely, as if no one has. Probably, the guy they’ve got programming this day part has no idea of the original friction surrounding the picture; probably, he just saw Wood and Judy Garland in the credits and figured, hey, this is something we can put on.
The picture came and went on its first run before Anita even met Terence Wood, and, for years, she’s known it only as a regrettable footnote to an otherwise not-regrettable career. Wood himself didn’t even own a print, and he kept a copy of almost every picture he made. She did see it once, however, back when it first came out, at the old Trylon movie house in Rego Park on Queens Boulevard with some girlfriends. That’s how it is with Anita and the movies. She remembers where she saw them, and with whom, and what was going on in her life at the time. Some Like It Hot. The Half Shell. Suddenly, Last Summer. They came with her own story attached and everything else, but that’s not how it is anymore. How it is—now, after Wood—is completely different, and it’s not just because she was married to all that picture-making and it became a part of her. It’s mostly because of the disease of multiplexes and the killing off of great old movie houses like the Trylon. Who could remember they saw Klute at the downtown Cineplex Odeon on screen number six? Who could care?
And so, coming across the listing in the newspaper, Anita was too happy to drop what she was supposed to be doing (bills, answering the business phone, dinner). She let the picture take her back: to a time of poodle skirts and unvarnished dreams, to holding hands with Lester Tankoos in the balcony and thinking about kissing, to walking w
ith her friends across the parkway overpass to watch the installation of the great globe on the World’s Fair grounds, to when movie stars like Terence Wood soared bigger than life and the holes in her heart were small enough to fill.
Nils takes one look at the small screen and knows enough to wait for a commercial before saying anything more. He doesn’t have to wait long. “Any calls?” he says.
“On the machine.” She doesn’t turn from the screen when she says this. She’s working to keep the illusion of what’s happening in the picture, to push her reality from her mind, to remember her Wood as he was before, to be astonished all over again just how much Norman looks like his father, to lose herself in what she’s already lost.
“Dinner?” Nils says. He doesn’t know the rest of what’s going on in his wife’s head, not even a small piece of it, but the picture comes back on before Anita can say anything. She shushes at him and waves him away, and he is left thinking, how about that? The great Wood, he is here even when he is not.
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