The Name of the World

by Denis Johnson

  “Uh-oh! Wait a minute!”

  “That sounds stupid. Maybe I don’t know what I mean.” Seth shook his head, embarrassed.

  “No. No. Please. Don’t chicken out. What do you mean? Why should this accusation prick me?”

  “Or, okay, I’ll say the characters are morally uninstructive—”

  “Hey, come on, Seth. They’re fictional. Do you really hope to get your moral lessons from people who don’t exist?”

  “You don’t challenge them to get down in the muck of themselves and find out what’s right and what’s wrong. Not like you used to—like you once did.”

  Kit, who seemed in general a charming man, became at this moment, while his admirer tried to explain himself, suddenly very unattractive, somehow elongated and parsonlike. One corner of his mouth twitched with cartoonish villainy, I have to say, as if he’d arrived first all by himself at this dinner party and set traps around the place and Seth had just sprung one. And the kid did have the nauseated look of someone dangling upside down.

  “Look,” Kit said. “You talk about my books as if they’re artifacts. Maybe yours are. Maybe your books are artifacts and maybe for you they serve as currency in various transactions I can’t guess about because I don’t know you. It’s up to you to decide whether those transactions are corrupt or not. I can’t accuse you.” But he said this as if he was in fact leveling some sort of accusation that none of us, nobody other than Seth himself, could understand. I think it was just a conversational ploy, and I don’t think Seth understood the charge any more than the rest of us. It was just that Kit had been in this corner before and he knew how to duel his way out of it without having to say anything that actually made sense.

  Having leaned across the table to get right in the guy’s face and put this sinister turn on the conversation, he sat back.

  Seth said, “My book…there’s only one, and I don’t know if it’s really worth talking about.”

  “Then we won’t talk about your book.” By now the whole table was silent, and as he clearly sensed he’d sounded too harsh a note, Nickerson limped on. “Andrew, Andrew, my books aren’t artifacts. They’re sloughed off behind me like dead skins. They’re organic to the life.”

  “Well…okay, I guess.” Seth didn’t have quite enough steel left now to tell him his name wasn’t Andrew.

  The table was silent. Kit’s gaze drifted toward Kelly’s end, maybe seeking some touchstone of support. It stopped at Tiberius Soames, who looked bloated with emotion, in fact whose face in the candlelight seemed to change size and shape rapidly. Soames managed to say: “Dead skins.” He coughed violently several times, sighed with exasperation, looked away from us, from all of this. “Dead skins!”

  “They’re detritus,” Nickerson said of his books.

  This was right around the end of the meal, whether before or after dessert I can’t remember. Whenever the liqueur is served. I happened to glance in through the briefly open kitchen door where Joan, Mrs. Martin Peele, wife of the Dean of Liberal Arts and the woman of the house, consulted with Eloise, who catered almost all the faculty dinners. Eloise was a character, a very small, rapid woman, perpetually sardonic, and always smoking. She had a round Peter Lorre face and a thin-lipped Peter Lorre mouth. All she needed in this world was a foot-long holder for her cigarette. Mrs. Peele looked flushed and happy. Geniuses were fighting at her party. Directly behind our hostess’s back, Flower Cannon tilted a jug of what looked like Drambuie to her mouth, gulped down a quick one, exhaled, and set the bottle on a tray. I believed she was looking right at me. I expected her to wink. But she didn’t.

  Sixteen of us surrounded the dregs of the meal at a long wooden trestle table without a tablecloth. The floor and the walls around us were also of wood, all of it brilliantly finished and gleaming as if this room had just emerged from under a rain cloud. For a few long seconds I stopped bothering to hear—sometimes this happens to me—and just observed how the group of us sat in a big, wet place.

  “So, okay,” Kit Nickerson went on, “okay. I hope I’ve got books out ahead of me that do the work you’re asking for, but I have to live my way to them, and through them. That’s what I mean when I say they’re not artifacts. There’s no turning back, that’s for sure. I can’t reassume my former shape. Put it like that.” Now he sat back farther, relaxing, and let us all off the hook by addressing everybody so that we were no longer spectators at what in Washington we’d always called a pissing contest or a dick-off. “They aren’t incidental, unimportant—I’m not saying they’re garbage—listen, I know they’re books, I know I’ve made them, I hope they’re beautiful. But I have to leave them behind me as I move along the life.”

  “There’s no looking back,” Seth agreed. “Like Emerson—‘Say what you think today in hard words, and if you have to, contradict it tomorrow in words just as hard.’”

  Everybody was relieved to hear him arguing Kit’s side of it now, as Flower and Eloise came around with three liqueurs.

  “Exactement!” Kit said. “Let’s drink to it!”

  Maybe the celebrated author took such criticism more seriously than I give him credit for, because later, while people sat around the table, having broken up into tiny conversations, he still wasn’t finished, though Seth was—Seth had left. “Well,” Kit said to a couple of us, “I might be an old hack…At least I’m not an old hack with nothing better to do than imitate his earlier stuff. The ground I break might not be new to everybody else, but it’s new to me, and that’s how I keep myself interested.” He paused. “And if you don’t get your hand off my woman’s knee,” he told Tiberius Soames, “I’m going to knock your head out from between your ears.”

  Soames looked bored. He repeated his previous remark: “Dead skins,” he said.

  He was dressed in a white single-breasted suit with wide lapels and vivid burgundy stripes and looked like a Mississippi minstrel. All night he’d managed to be quietly, yet wildly, inappropriate. This was just at the start of March, two months after his stint in the psychopathic ward.

  As I left that night, a bit early so as to avoid the others, I reflected that even if I hadn’t liked Kit Nickerson’s performance very much I still had to agree with him, particularly from the perspective of advanced middle age, about the dangers of imitating oneself, repeating old moves, clinging to routines and rituals long after they’ve stopped holding us up, and we’re holding them up instead. About the danger in hiding oneself away from the nauseating vastness of a conscious human life. I was excited, glad I’d come tonight, glad I’d come to the University in the first place.

  I looked back toward the lighted kitchen window and I saw Eloise the caterer with her face tilted up, laughing and exhaling a cloud of smoke. Of Flower Cannon I saw only her back and shoulders as she swayed in her gray outfit, wiping down the kitchen counter.

  Now, outside the Italian restaurant, by calling back the scene into my mind’s eye, I managed to conjure one almost exactly like it: a solitary moment in the dark, a warm window…and now, right now, as I puffed experimentally on my big Churchill, the woman herself, Flower Cannon, appeared before me in a cloud of cigar smoke.

  I stood on a pedestrian walkway. The walkway passed between two buildings, a hotel and a boutique. Framed in a tall ground-floor office window of the hotel was Flower Cannon. She sat in a swivel chair before a computer console, apparently daydreaming at her task, arching back with a weary air, her right arm limp and distended, dangling a pen.

  In my head I talked to her as much as I did anybody else, as much as Bill the museum man, even more. You, I told her. You act wild and it’s not fake. You have a kind of blessed ignorance. You are California. What do I mean you are California? I asked her. You’re long and your variousness sweeps down to the Pacific Ocean. There’s no reason not to say these things when nobody’s listening.

  Tapping on the glass seemed wrong: I’d only have succeeded in troubling her, probably—a figure in an alley, tapping. On the other hand, that figure was pretty muc
h who I was.

  I went around to the building’s entrance to see if I could find her and say hello. The lobby was polished wood and brass—luxurious, silent. I was alone. Not even a concierge or a night clerk. From the front desk I could see back into the office now, where she sat beside her vague reflection in the window.

  It was somebody else entirely, a woman quite a bit blonder and with a face deeply tanned for this time of year, working late, taking a minute for her thoughts. It wasn’t Flower Cannon.

  I stared at her until a man who appeared to have no function whatsoever here approached me and said, “Sir, we’d rather you didn’t smoke inside the lobby.”

  A light sleet was falling as I came out of the hotel. I stepped backward under the awning and watched out for J.J. I thought about my wife. Whereas before I’d chased away any memories of her, now I found myself catching at what I could, and it was less and less. Anne drank a lot of black coffee. She liked cinnamon-spiced chewing gum. Anne was thin, intelligent, humorous, sweet. She fidgeted. She cleared her throat a lot. She frowned when something struck her as funny. Human stupidity tickled her, she wore the world lightly, and that was important to me. I needed her. In the heights and depths, in the most silly and trivial ways, she was my wife. And now here was Flower Cannon.

  I wouldn’t say I was infatuated. I had noticeable but manageable feelings for her, helpless lustful feelings, and fatherly feelings, and the mild resentful envy of someone no longer young for someone so full of vitality. Feelings not at all different in kind from those I entertained for every young woman in the world—different however in degree; stronger.

  Women had always appeared fair to my eyes. Yes, college girls, and even the high-school girls I once taught. But much of that evaporated when I became a father to my own little girl. Now every woman looked like somebody’s daughter. And after I lost her, they all began to look like my own daughter—to look like Elsie, inhabiting her years, filled with my daughter’s unlived life, Elsie seeking something out of their eyes.

  Curious to say, her name wasn’t Elizabeth, or anything else to do with Elsie. She was Huntley, a name arguably a lot nicer, but as a baby she had a stuffed animal—these days they call them “sleeping animals”—named Elsie by the manufacturers, and labeled Elsie across her bearish belly. In that world, in the baby’s crib, in that epoch, identities flowed back and forth. There weren’t even fantasies then—all was fantasy. Through a kind of enchantment the child Huntley appropriated Elsie the bear’s name, and kept it. The bear kept it, too. Everybody ended up Elsie, all the sleeping animals, also Anne. And for a little while even I was Elsie.

  Everything became Elsie, and in a manner of speaking everything still is. In losing Anne I’d lost the woman in my life. But in losing Elsie, I’d lost all of us.

  “Mike?” It was J.J., standing in front of the Italian place looking right and left and pulling on a pair of gloves. “He arrives!” he said to me. I went carefully down the slick steps.

  Now, in this season of return, I felt myself becoming less and less Elsie and more and more Mike Reed. Less the man who’d lost his family, and more just somebody who didn’t happen to have one.

  “It’s funny,” J.J. said, the sleet landing and melting on his shoulders, “Trevor Watt was a teacher of mine, my most important teacher. For a while he was the most important person in my life. I mean, you know, I pored over every nuance. Do you know how it can be with a teacher, and you’re young, you’ve got nothing yet, only what he confers on you? Every word he said was gold. Then suddenly I hated him. He betrayed all my worship. He didn’t mean to. He just turned out to be human. And I burned with hatred for the guy. I wanted him dead. And when those people tonight mentioned his name, and now he is dead…I suddenly realized I hadn’t thought of him since…I couldn’t even tell you. It’s been years.”

  When J.J. dropped me at my house, I didn’t invite him inside. I made no excuse, though he actually got out and walked me to the door. We stood listening to the noise of a party across the street, students, surely, exploding after their midterms: a repeatedly banging screen door, and laughter, and the thump, thump, thump of their music.

  J.J. jammed his gloved hands into the pockets of his leather jacket and said, “Ah! Youth.”

  A white car, one from the early seventies, a big old Moby Dick of an automobile, whizzed around the corner onto our block, blew a front tire with a cheerful plopping noise, and went into a pirouette that ended with the rear wheels on the sidewalk, where they spun angrily until they found a purchase and the vehicle shot into the street again, then stalled. Apparently satisfied with this as a final position, as a parking place, very nearly in the middle of this dead-end street, two young men got out with deliberate movements and stumbled toward the house where the others laughed.

  J.J. said, “Hey—fellas—excuse me—”

  They wandered on inside, and he shouted louder, “Hey!” and then screamed, “HEY—” and stopped himself.

  For a few seconds we were silent. The noise of the party went on unabated. “I wouldn’t want to repeat my younger days,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic.

  “Ah, well,” he said. He smiled. In the light of streetlamps tears shone in his eyes. “I’m off,” he said. “Thanks for the company.”

  “Any time. Really.” I thought it very possible we’d see more of each other, two single men.

  The ticking sound of the frozen rain stopped an hour or so after it started. The party down the block careened on through the night. For better than two years now this generally quiet section of town had been my neighborhood. I had an entire small house to myself. I slept in an attic bedroom. I kept the window wide open because it was always warm up there. The street dead-ended at some railway tracks, but apparently there were more important routes through town, because we hardly ever heard a train go by.

  I lay in bed under the low ceiling and listened to the party across the street as the music got lower, as the number of voices diminished, although the voices themselves carried more clearly as the night grew deeper. Along about three in the morning I was wakened by shouts in the street.

  “SEND OUT YOUR WOMEN!”

  “SEND OUT YOUR WOMEN!”

  They made this request over and over and over. A couple of young men, from the sound of them, maybe the same two young men who’d sailed on three tires down the middle of the neighborhood. They screamed for a good half hour, taking turns mostly, sometimes hollering simultaneously but by no means in unison, catching their breath and laughing and talking together, and then starting up again:

  “SEND—OUT—YOUR—WOMEN!”

  “SEND! OUT! YOUR! WOMEN!”

  “SEND!—OUT!—” until they were hoarse.

  This performance brought on the full spring. Over the next few weeks the students put melted-looking divans on the porches of their rooming houses, threw away their books and shoes, and got out their guitars. You could sit by an open window in the dusk and hear their whoops and laughter like the cries of wildlife. They were forever flitting over the flat dead lawns uncovered by the thaw, tossing baseballs, Frisbees, water balloons. They lay by the river in pairs, drove slowly down the streets in open convertibles playing loud rap music, like old-time loudspeaker trucks advertising humanity’s least attractive secrets. I enjoyed all this. I liked the young students. I think my first spring here, they saved my life.

  I saw Flower Cannon again at the end of April. The weather was warm. By noon of this particular day I was down to jeans and a T-shirt, carrying my sports coat over my shoulder. The people along the avenue seemed relaxed and alive. A combo of five students played jazz in a tiny garden park. There were children on the grass. Balloons were for sale. A snapshot would have caught mouths open in laughter and dogs floating in mid-air.

  The two men who ran a shoeshine stand at the local bus station had moved their bench out onto the sidewalk. I climbed up onto one of the chairs there and presented my old walking boots. In airports and hotels the professionals gene
rally refused to have a go at these clodhoppers, because I’d worked the leather full of waterproofing compound. But these two, a white-headed old black man and his partner, who might have been his son or even his grandson, always cordially wiped them down and slapped some drops of oil on them.

  “I guess they won’t take a polish,” I said, as I’d said to them many times over the last four years.

  “That’s all right,” the old man said. “We can clean them up just as good as anything with some saddle soap and mink oil today.”

  The younger man took care of me while I sat in the elevated chair with my feet on the metal rests, watching the folks go by.

  The old man, who’d been gone inside the station a while on some errand or other, returned and began sweeping down the area with a short broom, bent over in his navy pants and navy sweater. He seemed lost in a world of his own until he addressed his partner. “You tell him?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll go ahead and tell him then.”

  The other said nothing.

  “That stuff you buy,” he said to me, “it’s just as good if you get a big jar of Vaseline. That’s only what they use anyway. Vaseline petroleum jelly.”

  “Oh,” I said, “you mean the waterproofing stuff.”

  “Yes. It’s just Vaseline petroleum jelly. That’s all you need to get. Or anything like that.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “You might as well just get you a big jar,” the old man said, “the large economy size. Be done with it.”

  “Be done with it,” the young man said.

  “What I want to know,” the first said, “is how can he go every weekend over to the river, lose thirteen, fourteen hundred dollars, come on back like it was nothing.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know for sure,” the other said.

  I looked from one to the other and gathered they weren’t talking about me.

  “Go for a weekend, lose three thousand dollars like it wasn’t nothing at all.”