His old man: If his Aunt Humpy had known what she was setting in motion that morning she’d of killed herself, I hope. We are not fancy people, airs and all, but we are not common. She might have even knowed he was lying, that Cecelia would of never let him go to Lumberton or anywhere else during cotton. But even so she could not have knowed that that little lift would have created our largest disgrace. It defies my logic. It defies my logic.
Brody: She wouldn’t let it wait to dry out, and when you pull, you know, on the bolls, when they wet, they pool back, and you get this—it hurts.
My fine living relatives say that, in general, my problem was reading too many books. What they cannot guess is that when I saw Brody step out of the briers on the Lumberton road I thought, There’s Brody, making his move, as wild and plenary as a character in a book. I knew Ceece wasn’t letting him go anywhere. He had on these huge, hard shoes and brilliant white socks, and he was pigeon-toed. His suitcase had straw on it. He even tried while standing to hide the suitcase between his legs, which made him more pigeon-toed.
I bought a beanfield, if fifty acres can be called a field, and Land Banked it, let it fallow, and took to walking the regenerating scrub in my after-work dress: pantsuit and parasol. For the first years I could be seen, of course, so the people were able to graft on one more badge of idiosyncrasy to the already highly decorated spinster librarian. The parasol contributed more to this, I think, than simply walking one’s field (indeed, walking banked land out here is regarded a normal if unfortunate substitute for farming it), the parasol that carried with it—last seen bobbing over the tops of three-year pines—a suggestion of spinsterism that I believe included in local mythos not only elements Southern but New England as well. I was a kind of Scarlett-Emily, witch and Poppins, gathering beggar weeds. The truth was, I carried the umbrella less from a concern with image or sun than from a concern with lizards, of which I had an inordinate fear and an equally misinformed notion of parrying the assaults of with said rapier.
This field was a curious purchase for anyone, let alone a woman seen swordfighting lizards at dusk in it. It was worthless as cropland. But I had decided at some point to own some earth, and it did not matter to me which part, and that scrubby squat is what I took. Brody sweet himself put the idea in my head when he bought the adjacent fifteen acres that were even less desirable by farming standards. He got his dog stock chained down to it and managed thereby to depress even further the local values. So I took an adjacent fifty. You do things like that in life, and the less readily the act can be made to seem sensible the more gratifying it is. I was proud, daft owner of my useless spread, and in five years of strolling it I had intimate trails, trails pressed into the weeds by a combination of my random prowling and the more purposed prowling of rabbits and rodents and I think in the end even deer. I was happy with that sorry field.
I will confess to having lived finally a hungry, hollow life. I never left Pembroke and I had the stuff to have been anywhere. Yet whether my life was a failure or not is not the large matter, I hope: for I look at all the people who for one reason or another do not rise but remain routine and routinely small, and their failure as a class does not seem to amount to anything.
I took my pleasure then and now in small things—watching Brody run away one day, years later listening to him explain why he could not be a dogfighter, he there on the edge of his worthless plot and I on mine, his wild-eyed cat-dogs wagging at us. Brody excitedly telling me of his discovery of a new food concentrate that will save his money and his back, and of two puppies to be certified for international shipping—to Australia this time, where a man wants to see what they can do to kangaroos.
“Kangaroos?” I say. “Why hurt kangaroos?”
“I don’t know, Humpy.”
We must both have pictured our private, limited visions of kangaroo—gloved in carnivals, hopping the veld—and I remember thinking this is life, my life, standing at dusk speculating about the fate of a dimly known marsupial with my dimly known nephew I once rescued from pulling damp bolls and maybe from more, and Brody no doubt was thinking a bit less heavily, with refreshingly less profundity, about sending the red-and-white male or the larger washed-out gray dog, who might do better, against the down-under foe he’s heard can disembowel a man.
“Good night, Brody.”
“’Night, Humpy.”
He stands there a minute more, as I do, he in his slippery, hard dress shoes, which he perversely insists on wearing instead of practical boots. He is yet escaping that original, damp field, dressed for travel. The moon glints off these large, shiny wingtips, which trod uncertain across the sloping dirt to the jumping dogs.
Mr. Irony
I AM A STUDENT of low-affect living edged with self-deprecating irony.
I am a character of lower-affect living a bit on edge with Mr. Irony, a self-deprecating therapist.
A therapist of self-deprecation, teaching the presumptuous among us to edge ourselves with irony until we can be said to be low-affect burghers of the modern world, appropriate denizens of the modern world, Mr. Irony sits on the edge of the sofa smoking with his leg crossed over his knee after the fashion of a lady crossing her leg over her knee, not after the fashion of a man crossing his, etc., a manly configuration suggesting, from above at least, more the figure 4 than Mr. Irony’s position does. Mr. Irony’s position—smoking and bouncing his shoe in front of him, in the air in front of him, his shoe edged with the black trim applied by the black man at the barber shop with a toothbrush—suggests a pair of scissors more than a figure 4. His legs cut in slight snips the airy fabric of irony in the apartment around us.
Mr. Irony cuts a pattern of ironic air into certain pieces; they assemble on the carpet in no real order, to be sewn later into a garment, a coat of irony perhaps, a just-reminiscent-of-Nehru shirt-jac not for sale in any but the most hip low-affect haberdasheries in the world. This coat Mr. Irony will edge with a piping of flamingo pink he has begun to remove absently from the sofa upon which he scissors.
I will be expected to wear the ironic shirt-jac edged with flamingo piping as part of my low-affect therapy unless I do something. Doing something is precisely against the grain of Mr. Irony’s teaching, and yet if I were not resistant to becoming a low-affect self-deprecating character I would not need Mr. Irony to instruct me, and he is of course fully aware that pulling the piping for the jacket for me to wear in consummate humiliation—no. He is not aware, not aware that I am nervous about wearing the ironic coat. I must get Mr. Irony some wine, white wine, to occupy his hand that absently pulls the piping for the jacket. I shall tape the piping back into place. A ridiculous restoration that will crackle and fail, crackle and make Mr. Irony notice it with a particular, subtle smile. Then he will be aware.
He will be amused, tolerant of my device to not yet have to wear a late-Nehru jacket with flamingo edging in the irony-edged world. In my device to forestall the dismantling of the sofa he will see the natural Young Republican resistance to self-deprecating irony-edged low-affect living, and it will confirm his presence as my roommate and tutor, and he will scissor some more air, touch lightly the tape I’ve transparently tried to stop him with, sip his wine, think well of me. He has a good student who ever questions the development he seeks, a resistant student all the more worthy, for that resistance, of his efforts, and valuable to him, as are heathen to their converters for their very backwardness; a student who will come round, come round, come round in a swoon of faithful self-deprecation into the low-affect irony-feathered dance of life, the limbo of bending backwards so far that no disappointment can get beneath you, no rug of unexpected loss, jerked, can ever surprise. “Things do not turn out well,” Mr. Irony says.
“May I get you more wine?”
“More wine.”
“More wine, sir.”
“My man.”
“May we look out the window at joggers, sir?”
“Fine plan.”
Mr. Irony and I go out, for
a lesson, to look at alligators. The alligators, located easily, display themselves, as if for our benefit, by walking about high-legged, out of the water, like dogs. “The crocodilian,” Mr. Irony says, “the crocodilian is not a creature of irony.” When Mr. Irony says irony, which he seldom does, he undergoes a phenomenon of nature, or of supernature: his edges recede and expand, almost at once, as if he italicizes. “The shark, by contrast, is a creature of irony.” Again he shimmers, he thins, is momentarily less and more than he was as he spoke the words “The shark, by contrast, is a creature of.” “In the gut of the shark you will find the license plate of the auto, the leg of the mannequin. Not so the gut of Alligator mississippiensis. In there,” he goes on, “at best the golf ball, the turtle.” The field trip is concluded.
All incidents roll off Mr. Irony’s mind like a drop of the water of dailiness from the oiled back of the duck of time. Mr. Irony has taught me locutions like this.
“Just to try,” he says. “To hone. To play. To discover.”
“Mr. Irony.”
“Yes?”
“Why? What does saying the oiled back of the duck of time exactly do—I mean, do for me as someone—”
“As someone seeking to edge himself with irony, put a self-deprecating piping around his minimal self-importance?”
“Yes, how does the playful locution do this?”
Mr. Irony will look at me over his glasses, a gesture I have come to know means that he disapproves of my questioning so bluntly; he is looking to see if perhaps I am not joking, hedging us up with feigned obtuseness. But no, I am not: I am obtuse.
“The oiled back of the duck of time does not precisely itself do anything. Whence it wends our way?”
“Well, I said it, or thought it.”
“You can make money and be famous if you write what you say or think, and the difference is therefore enormous.”
“Yes, sir. I wrote that incidents fall from your mind as drops of daily water from the duckback of time.”
“Not bad, that. You changed it somewhat.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I invited Mr. Irony on a trip around the world. “I’m sure you’ve been, of course,” I said.
“Be less sure,” he said.
“What’s that mean, sir?”
“Means, mostly.”
“You don’t care to go, then?”
“Didn’t say that.”
Mr. Irony was irritable. I leveled his glass with wine from the coldest part of the refrigerator. The colder, the less likely he is to deem it vinegar. I considered dropping the subject of world touring until he perked up. All subjects except perking up, in fact, and that subject never to be broached. The coldness of the wine made Mr. Irony open his mouth and extend his head forward as if he were a goose about to honk.
“For two?”
“Excuse me?”
“You spoke of taking Magellan’s cruise, I believe. For two?”
“Yes, sir. Unless—”
“—?”
“I could get more tickets: $1.50 each.”
“Most reasonable. Do tell.”
“Pulled them from Duke, sir. Man at His Best just reads the travel section, and these, perforated in the binding, are his world-tour tickets, sir. Two tickets, $3.00 magazine. Man at His Best.”
“You said that. Play a joke, as a ball in golf, once.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Irony sat regarding this proposition in the attitude of one regarding no proposition at all. This was part of the method, and I confess there may be more to it. It is possible Mr. Irony was regarding the proposition with his entire being, or with 10 percent, while the other 90 percent was regarding all the things tangential to talking with a student. Optic yellow tennis balls might well have been at the center of his brain.
“Not easy to do, I know,” he said, apparently referring to the golf-ball conceit, and, if so, demonstrating a rare instance of tutorial sympathy. I took advantage of the soft-looking moment.
“Do you care to go or not, sir?”
“Care to go.”
“More tickets, then?”
“Two more’d be nice.”
“For your wife, sir, and—”
“Not my wife. Not my wife. And not my wife.”
“Anyone in mind, sir?”
“Not yet. What is the mode of travel?”
“Varies, sir.”
“—?”
“Unspecified, sir. On the ticket: unspecified variable means of transport.”
“Makes one rather reconsider the wife,” he said, scissoring his leg. He was feeling considerably better. “Short of planes that land too hard, nothing more pleasing to me, less to the wife, than transportation that doesn’t work.”
“Minimizes the self-importance of the individual, sir?”
“Naturalmente.”
“You’d best,” Mr. Irony said before we purchased our extra tickets, “you’d best make sure that Duke allows Men at Their Best to travel with women.”
“Right,” I said. He had a point.
I checked the matter. The woman I spoke with at Duke assured me that the $1.50 world-tour ticket would be honored without respect to sex. I got us another two tickets, and Mr. Irony and I went down to the International Hostelry for Available Traveling Women.
At the International Hostelry for Available Traveling Women we were abruptly led to a gymnasium filled with cots and women. We were received, on the floor, not unlike visitors to a dog pound. A few women remained still, a few showed us minor interest, but most jumped up and wagged themselves violently at us. “I’ve seen this spectrum of behavior in a whorehouse in Texas,” Mr. Irony remarked, not ostensibly looking at any of the women.
Out of a sense of courtesy, I looked at the women. They were, most of them, beautiful. I felt, in fact, as if I were drowning before a replay of all the missed sexual opportunities of a lifetime.
“Gravid with heat in here,” Mr. Irony said.
“Yessir.”
Some of the women leapt up, approached us; others held back, deliberately diverting themselves; others remained indifferent. “Flat on their backs, those two,” Mr. Irony pointed out, indicating in a corner two supine figures on cots. Beneath their cots, packed backpacks: two neat bundles, in distinct contrast to the sloppy, strewn, dorm-room environs of the cheerier, aggressive women.
“Be polite among Harpy as I steer us to the Defeated Ones,” Mr. Irony instructed. This I did, occasionally shaking hands, as Mr. Irony tugboated us to the corner of the absolute uninterest.
We stood between the two cots looking at two broad-hipped women in cotton shirts. They were similar enough to be sisters: square faces, full lips, wide eyes.
“You girls healthy?” Mr. Irony asked.
“I’m as fine as frogs’ hair and she’s right as rain,” one of them said, motionless.
“Be down,” said Mr. Irony. “Do you cost more, or come with liabilities, or strings, or whatever, for this sour demeanor which wins a sane man?”
The woman who had spoken looked at her companion.
“No,” the companion said.
“’Tis settled, then,” Mr. Irony said. “We court you.” He turned to me. “This would be my opinion extempore regarding world-traveling companions. You have a voice in the matter.”
“Mr. Irony,” I said, pulling him a bit out of earshot, “ordinarily I would hesitate to differ, would automatically defer to your experience. But I confess to have wanted twenty women in here more than these. But. Now I’m won. These are the girls one finds in a suburban cowboy club, looking for love. They are of good stock, well-bred, well-heeled in the moral zone but not without appetites one could call—”
“It’s wonderful you are filled with ideas, son. Keep them to yourself.”
Mr. Irony turned to the women. “Ladies, a world tour?”
They hit the floor, boots on.
We made arrangements to meet them later. On the way out, Mr. Irony turned to me and said, “Unless I miss my
mark, these girls don’t expect things to turn out well. My kind.”
“They’d better not,” I said.
This was the sort of obtrusive remark Mr. Irony ignores. I was having more and more trouble getting in a word edgewise. It was making me sullen rather than ironic.
First stop, on the cliffs of Acapulco, the girls stand, nipples spiked up in the salty breeze, as Mr. Irony prepares to make the 85-foot dive into the swells. “One of the more challenging stretches of your Duke world tour,” our Duke brochure tells us.
“If he can do it,” my Traveling Woman says, “I can do it, and I can do it nekkid.”
Mr. Irony takes deep breaths. I read to him from the brochure: “You must determine the seventh and largest swell of the series and count to seven once it clears the large rock on the left. Don’t look back, and keep it tight.”
“That it?”
“That’s it, sir.”
“And grap your cojones, señor,” a local boy adds, watching the spectacle of gringos with considerable excitation. Mr. Irony grabs himself, with two hands, before tumbling from the cliff in a spidery roll altogether suggestive of a horse taking a fall.
From the swell into which he exploded, we see Mr. Irony’s red face surface, unquestionably smiling. The word real wafts to us, in reverb, seconds after we see his mouth open and close.
“Shit,” my Traveling Woman says. “The turkey survived.”
“Grap your teeties,” the boy tells her.
Atop elephants in Lanxang, we hear Mr. Irony say, “I am immortal. I have died a thousand deaths.” I turn to acknowledge that I am all ears. “Of the imagination,” he says, as we lurch over this small but important part of the world.
Each of us has grown accustomed to the odor of the elephant he rides but not to that of the mahout behind whom he sits. The Traveling Women, on the third and fourth elephants, have complained of this very thing.
“Deodorant would go a long way here,” a Traveling Woman said.
“Or nowhere,” the other Traveling Woman said.
Typical Page 3