Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  Pet, on the other side of the cut cell transmission, was left to draw her own take on the same situation. First, there was Norman to consider, but, on top of that, now there was Wood. What the fuck was that? Him picking up Axel’s phone? Him not being dead? What? She wondered, is this some end-around, him wanting to get out of a picture? Or not paying alimony? It made no sense, it wasn’t like him, but it was all she could think.

  She’d gotten used to Wood’s being dead, the memory of what they had, the way his star had lifted to where it was. First, it was waking up every day and having to remind herself what had happened. Then it was processing what had happened, and then it was a part of her. One morning, she woke up and it just was, and it colored the memory of everything that had come before. Just as the motion picture industry had found a way to set aside the shit work Wood had been doing at the end of his career and celebrate the good work he did at the front, Pet had found a place to put his shitty treatment of her and not have it infect the rest. There was that time, early on, when he brought back some kind of venereal disease from his sleeping around, and Wood slinked into bed, thinking Pet was asleep, and applied some topical antibiotic to her pussy beneath the covers. He was too chickenshit to come clean about it, and she was too much of another kind of coward to confront him, and they moved about in this kind of mutual deceit until they could no longer look away from it. It wasn’t just this one thing. It was all fine on the surface, but there were layers and layers of betrayal underneath, to where the surface finally fell through. But now, with Wood gone, Pet had at last been able to shore up those betrayals and return the surface to the top, where everything between them was fine once more. Now, at last, she could look back on his under-the-covers deception and think it was just Wood, you know. It was just how he was.

  And now this. Out of nowhere, he was back, and she didn’t know what to think. She simply told him her news about Norman as if it was the most natural thing in the world, his answering the phone. Oh, it’s you. Wood. Hey. Long time. Her thoughts were all over the place, her head a collage of how things were—early on, late, just last week—and how they were just then, and how they’d be the week after next. It was all bundled together, but all that came out was about Norman. She delivered her news, and Wood was gone, leaving Pet to wonder if Wood was so much a part of what she was feeling about Norman that she couldn’t separate the two. She had no instincts for a transformation like this, no place to look for help. She wanted to call Anita, see if she couldn’t get her to look at things more clearly, but she stopped herself before dialing because, ultimately, you know, this whole revelation flowed from what happened to Norman. As confused and alone and spooked as Pet was, she still couldn’t tell Anita about her son over the telephone. She’d have to drive down, tell her in person, but then she realized—shit!—Anita’d likely bump into the news on the television or hear it from someone else, and she couldn’t think which was worse, to have to hear it from her on the telephone laced with the news of the born-again Wood, or to have to hear it from a stranger.

  As it happened, it was Nils who brought the news home to Anita, and he did so lovingly and with great care. At least he meant to. He didn’t know the part about Wood, so he just went with the straight accident account, which he collected from the portable radio in the carport, where he’d been organizing his tools and equipment. He went about it systematically, the way he would a major carpet job after a flood. He wrote out a little script in his head and hoped he could follow it. Then he went back into the house through the kitchen, where he found Anita tidying up from dinner, making sandwiches for tomorrow’s lunch.

  “Sweets,” he said tenderly, “there’s some news about Norman, just over the radio.”

  Anita turned away to steel herself against what she might hear.

  “He’s been in an accident,” Nils continued, like he planned. “He’s okay, they said. In the hospital in Nashua.” He threw in the part about his being okay. They said no such thing, just that he was taken to the hospital. If he was dead, they would have said he was dead.

  “When?” Anita said. “Where? What?” Her head filled with knowing and with images of Norman as a little boy, crushed inside his Big Wheels plastic riding toy. It wasn’t her full-grown Norman being pulled from some full-blown wreckage, it was her baby being pulled from a heap of primary-colored plastic. Then she tried to think what Norman was doing in Nashua without telling her, thought maybe Nils had heard it wrong. She didn’t question the part about Norman, just Nashua, as if it mattered whether he was hit by a flatbed truck in New Hampshire or someplace else. Either way, it was like she always feared. Since she gave birth, she walked about expecting some great tragedy. She didn’t know how other people sent their children off into the world when she was so consumed by worry. Even now, with Norman living on his own in New York, it hasn’t gotten any better. She noticed, in among her racing thoughts, that she was thinking still in the present tense, as if nothing had happened. He’s living on his own in New York. He’s got his own place. He’s fine.

  “We can call,” Nils said, his hand on her shoulder from behind.

  “Yes,” Anita said, still turned away, looking down at the sandwiches.

  And they did.

  Cut to Norman’s bed in the critical care unit, all of them not saying anything, making room for what’s changed.

  Wood, finally: “So, like, what the fuck am I doing here, right?”

  His wives flash him looks that, between them, could mean a hundred things, but there is no good place to begin.

  Nils moves to fill the silence. “Frankly, yes,” he says, “now that you mention it.”

  “And, frankly, who the fuck is she?” Pet says acidly, indicating Grace in the corner of the room. “Your personal trainer?”

  Wood’s not about to let Pet crack about Grace’s weight or the fact of her being here, but he’s stripped himself of any authority he might have had over the situation. He’s up for grabs, and so is Grace. “How ’bout we just leave Gracie out of it,” he announces, as firmly as his position will allow.

  “Say goodnight, Gracie,” Pet straightlines.

  “Pet,” Pimletz interjects, surprising himself with his attempt at forcefulness. The others look at him as if he’s just brushed his teeth with dog vomit, and he slinks back to his place on the wall. He doesn’t know how he fits into this scene, if he fits at all, and he tries to look at his situation objectively. Here he is in the raw middle of these movie people, people he reads about in magazines, and they’re all about as fucked up and fucked over as any group of people he’s ever met. He’s connected in only the most tenuous way, and yet, when he thinks about it, he realizes he is more deeply rooted to what’s going on than anyone else in the room will likely acknowledge. They may not be larger than life, these people, but they are life itself—Pimletz’s life, at last!—and he sets this out in his head as if it makes sense.

  Also, he’s back onto The Wizard of Oz, the one movie he knows well enough to reference. He’s trying to think like these people, connecting his life experience with a scene from a movie. What he comes up with is everyone hovering around Dorothy’s bed, waiting in black and white for her to wake from her dream, only here it’s not a dream, and he’s no Auntie Em or Uncle Henry or whoever the hell else they had crammed into the shot. About the best he can do for himself is the guy who eventually turned out to be the wizard, the carnival humbug on a breeze through town who, for some reason, stops by to check on the little girl hit her head in the storm. He’s like the farm hands, too—no ability to feel each moment, to think for himself, to stand up for his convictions—but, mostly, he’s like the guy who doesn’t belong. He doesn’t even get to come in the room, he has to lean in through the window. That’s the parallel. He’s got no role beyond circumstantial, and he leans himself more firmly against the back wall of the small room, waiting for the others to realize he’s got no reason to be here and start asking him to leave. It’s only a matter of time.

  Grac
e, too, is wondering how she fits and waiting for it to come up in strained conversation. She doesn’t want to press too close to Wood, waits for him to come to her, if that’s what he wants. Whatever he wants if fine. Let him play it how it works because, eventually, she knows it’ll be just the two of them back in her apartment above the coffee shop or maybe someplace else. His son will be okay, she’s sure of it, and his wives will crawl back into the lives he left behind, and it will be just them, back up in Maine, somewhere. She believes this deeply, and, in the places where believing doesn’t reach, she prays for it.

  “How ’bout I get us something to eat?” she suggests, wanting to get out of the small room, leave these people to themselves.

  “I hear you’re good at that,” Pet stings. “That’s why he hired you.”

  No one moves in Grace’s defense, not even Wood, but he does turn and ask if she wants company. She shakes her head no, but he goes anyway. It’s like she’s got her own gravitational field, this hold she has on him. He hadn’t realized it until now, out in the real world, and now that it’s hit him, he gives himself over to it.

  Yielding, he flashes back to a time in Cannes, a side trip to Monaco, whooping it up with some of the drivers there, and then getting back to his hotel and turning on CNN and hearing one of his new drunken, fearless friends had wrapped his car around a light pole and suffered massive head and spinal injuries. He had a press breakfast the next morning to blow smoke up the ass of whatever picture he was there to promote, but, after that, he hired a car and driver to take him to a hospital in Nice, where his drunken, fearless friend had been taken. In his boarding school French, he managed to determine that the guy was on the reanimation unit. It was the same setup they’ve got here in critical care for Norman—same basic machinery, but over there it was called reanimation. He considers the difference in outlook. It didn’t even strike him, then, but now, in contrast, it seems such a pleasant, joyful outlook on what it is. Reanimation. He says it in his head in a French accent so that it sounds like something he might order off a menu, and, in saying it over and over, he loses what’s happened to Norman and fixes on himself. As he steps outside the unit with Grace, he notices for the first time the stares of the nursing staff. They know who he is. They know there are reporters camped in the parking lot waiting on word of Norman. They’ve made sense of the whispering on Wood’s arrival. It’s the first time in months he’s been on the receiving end of these stares, and he doesn’t know whether to relish in them or look away. He’s been unmasked, revealed.

  Reanimated.

  He leans back in to Norman’s room and catches Pimletz’s attention. The man is wallpapered to the corner. “You coming?” he says.

  Pimletz lets his eyes answer for him: Me? Where? Now? You mean right now?

  “My Boswell,” Wood declares, holding the heavy hospital door for the man who might as well help him sort through what’s happened, set a few thoughts down on paper, long as he’s here. “What, they picked you out of a hat? That how you got the job?”

  Pimletz doesn’t get the reference or the joke. “Fuck if I know,” he says.

  About the Author

  Daniel Paisner is one of the busiest collaborators in publishing. He has helped to write dozens of bestselling and headline-making books with prominent entertainers, athletes, business leaders, and politicians, including Whoopi Goldberg, Anthony Quinn, Geraldo Rivera, New York governor George Pataki, former New York mayor Ed Koch, and FDNY battalion commander Richard Picciotto, whose account of his epic tour of duty on September 11, 2001, Last Man Down, became an international bestseller. On his own, he has written nonfiction books on baseball, television, small-town America, and other national pastimes. Mourning Wood is his second first novel.