Jackson set to work right after the holidays, resigning his position at TF, making contact with the Forest Peoples Project in England, applying for his visa, donating his books—and Claude’s books—to the TF library. He laid in a large supply of Lee Oskar harmonicas, taking them apart one by one and tinkering with the reeds till he had them just right.
Laurent-Désiré Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was assassinated in January, and though his son Joseph, the new president, was promising to back the Lusaka Agreement, L’Avenir predicted nothing but trouble. Even civil war. I thought this might deter Jackson, but at the beginning of March he left for London to “liaise” with the Forest Peoples Project people. He spoke French and Kingwana and could get along in the language that the Mbuti used among themselves, and the Forest Peoples Project was glad to have him on board. As the rain forest was being destroyed by logging, many of the small bands of net hunters were spending more and more time in the Negro villages and plantations along the Epulu River, putting on shows for tourists, exchanging bush meat for tobacco, iron tools, and commercial food. Other were entering into permanent relationships with commercial meat traders, called bachuzzi, who promoted intensified net hunting. But some were withdrawing farther and farther into the Forest, and I was sure that this is what Jackson was planning to do. He wasn’t going to Africa to save the pygmies. He was going to save himself. He gave the house to me. I tried to protest, but he had me sign a quitclaim deed, and he made me promise to look after Maya.
Claire and I drove him to the airport in Chicago. O’Hare. Claire didn’t need a map, but I traced our route on a fold-out roadmap: 74 to 80 to 55 to 294 to 190. It was a clear cold March day. The indoor parking lots were full and we had to leave Claire’s BMW in a distant lot and take a shuttle to the international terminal. We took turns carrying Jackson’s suitcase, an old-fashioned one without wheels. In those days, before 9/11, you could still accompany passengers to the gates, but we waited in the international terminal for Jackson’s British Airways flight to be called. He kissed us both good-bye, and after he left we drove straight home. Claire wanted to spend the night with her parents on Bellevue Place in Chicago, but I was too sad and just wanted to get home.
All that time after I shot Earl I’d put my life on hold. I was waiting till the trial was over for it to begin again. But all that time, all that waiting, was my life too, maybe the best part of it. The part I’d remember when I was old and sad.
I cried most of the way home and let Claire worry out loud about the title of her novel. She wanted to call it Kiss of Death. The publisher wanted to call it My Serpentine Romance.
Every morning at six thirty Maya and I played Frisbee, and I would shout at her just the way Jackson did: “Big pi-pi girl, big pi-pi girl.” And then, if all went well, “Big poopy-girl.” I’d gotten pretty good at throwing the Frisbee, and in my imagination I could hear Jackson shouting: “Look at the arm on that woman.”
I didn’t want to risk damaging the timpani by trying to move them out on the deck—this was after the weather had warmed up—but at night I’d open all the doors and windows and fill the woods with the sound of copper—well, fiberglass—and Mylar.
The word “timpani,” I’d learned from Paul, comes from a Greek word meaning a vibrating membrane, like the timpanic membrane in the human ear. They weren’t called kettle drums till the time of King Edward VI in England, in the sixteenth century; and as Paul always pointed out, they aren’t really drums, because they have a definite pitch that can be varied. They’re “membranophones.” There are references to kettle drums–timpani–membranophones in ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablets and in ancient Egypt hieroglyphs, and in the earliest literature of Greece and the Middle East. In the fifteenth century the Turks carried them mounted on horses and camels when they attacked Constantinople, and pretty soon the Europeans did the same thing. The players of these drums were held in very high esteem and got to wear ostrich feathers in their hats.
The size of the drums was limited by the size of animal skins, though the heads of the new drums are made of Mylar. You needed a thirty-two-inch skin to get a low D out of a drum, which is what you needed for the low notes in Carmina Burana. The drums were hard to tune. You had to be a mechanic, and you still have to be a mechanic, though the adjustments you have to make are smaller. Pretty soon you’ll need a computer to tune your timpani, just the way you need a computer to tune up the engine of your car. But the quest for the perfect sound will never end.
Paul didn’t like the commercial mallets or “sticks” that had come with the drums and gave me two sets of handcrafted ones, and I could feel the difference they made. Each pair had a different balance and required a slightly different grip, and produced a different sound. “The subject of mallets,” he said, “is vast.” Not something I would have guessed.
On Thursdays Paul came out, in the late afternoon, for a lesson and to have dinner and spend the night. He had grown up in Colesville, played drums in the Colesville High School band, and then gone to live with an uncle in Amsterdam, where he studied percussion at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. He offered to take me to Amsterdam in the summer, but I had too much work to do to make up for the semester I’d missed when I was waiting for my trial to begin.
Like Jackson, he was a good cook, and after the lesson he’d remove his coat and tie and we’d cook something together, something simple with lots of butter. Paul never gained any weight, but I had to watch myself.
After supper we’d go back to the timpani and—maybe it was because we were a little tipsy by this time—we’d stick some owl feathers in our hair while we looked for that perfect sound.
Cramer usually came out on Sundays. He was always so serious that I told him he needed to tell me a new joke every time he came or I wouldn’t go to bed with him.
I don’t know where he got the jokes, maybe the Internet, and I’ve forgotten most of them. All of them, in fact, except one. One that cheers me up every time I think of it, maybe because it’s so unCramerlike.
An elderly Jewish man is unable to bring his wife to orgasm, and Jewish women have the right to sexual pleasure. That’s the law. So the husband goes to a rabbi, and the rabbi tells him to hire a young man to wave a towel over him and his wife while they’re making love.
The husband hires one of his employees, a handsome athletic type, to come to the house and wave a towel over him and his wife as they’re making love. The young man complies, but nothing happens.
The husband returns to the rabbi, who tells him, this time you wave the towel and ask the young man to make love to your wife.
So the young man comes to the house again. This time he makes love to the wife while the husband waves the towel over them. Sure enough, the wife comes to a screaming, earth-moving orgasm, and the husband says to the young man, “Now that’s waving a towel, schmuck.”
Every time I came to an orgasm, even a little one, I’d think of that joke and it would make me laugh, and Cramer would ask me to marry him, and I’d say no.
When neither Paul nor Cramer was there, I let Maya sleep on the bed with me. And then in June, I went to Paris with Claire.
What happened was that a New York publisher had bought Claire’s novel and we spent her advance on the trip. Claire wanted to check the scenes in Paris before the manuscript went to the copy editor. For authenticity. She wanted to go to all the places she’d written about. She wanted to stay at the residential hotel where Jackson had lived with his parents when his father was lecturing at the Sorbonne. She didn’t want to go alone. She said she needed someone who spoke French.
We walked along the Seine, drank coffee at a bar near the Hôtel de Ville where Diana and Alexander—the protagonists of Claire’s novel—go ice skating; we walked in the Luxembourg Gardens and up and down the Champs-Élysées and from Nôtre-Dame across to the Île-Saint-Louis for ice cream at Berthillon; we looked in the decorated shop window at Ralph Lauren; and Claire lit a candle at the Church of
the Madeleine. She took pictures with her new digital camera and made copious notes in a little notebook made out of moleskin that she carried with her in her purse. She didn’t know a word of French, so I was responsible for getting us around. I ordered for us at the Tour d’Argent and in a bistro on boulevard Saint-Germain where we became “regulars.” We ate a lot of poulet rôti and steak frites. No one made fun of my baby French, not even at the Tour d’Argent. In fact, everyone treated us very nicely.
A month was not very long, but it was long enough to pretend that we weren’t tourists but were actually living there, doing our own shopping and cooking, sometimes eating at home, sometimes in the neighborhood bistro, walking up and down the boulevard Saint-Germain, me in my spaghetti-strap cami and my pale putty skirt, Claire in beige slacks and a striped shirt.
We were surprised and disappointed to learn that the Café Anglais pictured in Jackson’s Time-Life French cookbook had been closed in 1913. According to our concierge it had moved to the Place Vendôme for a few years, but now it was gone for good. Claire would have to find another restaurant for Alexander to propose in (and for Diana to accept), and the concierge came up with another Café Anglais—in Maisons-Laffitte, a suburb about thirty kilometers from the center of Paris. The concierge suggested that we go to the races there, and Claire thought that this was something Alexander and Diana might do, so she asked the concierge to book a hotel for us.
The Café Anglais turned out to be a bar, or maybe a brasserie. Whatever it was, it had prices written on the windows with what looked like whiteout, and it was clear that you could drink beer there. It wasn’t much of a place, but we were looking for an adventure, not a restaurant. Too bad it was closed on Thursday afternoons.
We ate at the hotel, and in the morning we toured the racehorse museum in Château de Maisons-Laffitte and the training establishment, with its various tracks for different kinds of races. In the afternoon we went to the races. I was totally at sea. I’d never been to a racetrack before. Claire had been to the races at Arlington Park with her father when she was a little girl, but neither of us had any idea what was going on and we probably would have turned around and left after the first race if Claire hadn’t got it into her head that she wanted to add a racetrack scene to Kiss of Death.
“Isn’t it too late for that?” I asked.
“I guess we’ll see,” she said.
We didn’t panic, but we must have looked lost, because a handsome man in a striped silk suit and a yellow cravat came to our aid and explained, in perfect English, how French racing differed from American. The races are run clockwise, for one thing, and exclusively on grass instead of dirt, so after each race an army of men and boys—jardiniers—came out to stomp down the divots that the horses’ hooves had kicked up; the track, or Arc, is twenty-four hundred meters instead of a mile or a mile and a quarter. He showed us how to place our bets and where to find the odds (on TV monitors inside the building), and explained the pari-mutuel betting system, which the French had invented. Claire and I had our own systems. I bet on black horses and Claire on chestnut. Claire bet gagnant, to win, and I bet something called placé, which gave you a better chance of winning, but you don’t win as much.
The grass track was so big you couldn’t see the horses when they were on the back stretch. We bet the minimum—one euro—on each race and lost most of our money, though on the last race Claire won thirty euros. She bought drinks for us at a bar on the second étage (floor) where we could watch the divot stompers and grounds crew working on the turf.
Our silk-suited friend bought us a second drink, and Claire asked him questions about racing and about Maisons-Laffitte and about Paris and about France in general, always pushing for the sort of details you couldn’t get from a guide book. She jotted everything down in her moleskin notebook. We had another drink, and I got a little tipsy and thought Claire was going to invite the man to have dinner with us, but she didn’t. He offered to take us to dinner, but I said we had to get back to the hotel.
That night Claire asked if I’d have accepted the invitation if I’d been alone, and I asked her what did she think I was, and it took a while for her to answer. We were drinking beer and eating bar food—prosciutto, salami, cheese, bread. “What about you?” I asked.
“He wasn’t interested in me,” she said. “He was interested in you.”
I wanted to protest, to tell Claire, who was wearing a yellow blazer over a flowery summer dress, how good she looked. She’d lost weight and nothing bulged or pulled, and her strappy shoes and her purse matched her blazer, and she looked, well, French. People smiled at us as we walked down the street. People smiled at us in the Café Anglais, and I explained to the locals that Claire was a novelist who was writing about the races at Maisons-Lafitte.
I was thinking about my first night in the garage apartment, coming down to the big house and peeking in the window and seeing Claire and Jackson on the davenport.
“When I first came to TF,” Claire said, “I had a manuscript, and I had a New York agent. I gave a big party and put the manuscript in the middle of the table with candles around it. The Sins of the World. Everybody got drunk and we went up on the roof—I had a big apartment on State Street, next to Ulrich’s Bookstore—and we made so much noise the police finally came and told us to keep it down. The policeman shouted up from the street with a megaphone. Later that night I fucked Jackson up on the roof.”
I had heard some of the story from Jackson, but not all of it.
“We used to take a blanket up on the roof all the time. I’ve never been so happy. But after my novel was turned down thirty-nine times and my agent had called it quits, and I had to start sending it out to contests … I started thinking seriously about suicide. Jackson was afraid I was going to throw myself off the roof onto the sidewalk. After a year no one said a word about the novel. Everyone pretended it had never existed.
“I started going to church, and I started praying. And then I stopped screwing Jackson. It didn’t feel right until I had a publisher. This was at the Episcopal church. I turned to Father Ray for help. He would tell me about God’s love, and I would tell Jackson about it. Finally, after I submitted the manuscript to the Donner competition, which I read about in Poets & Writers, Father Ray set up a prayer vigil. All these people in the church who hardly knew me were praying for me, and then the news came. I got a phone call. I’d won the Donner Prize. I sat on the news for quite a while. I didn’t tell anyone except Father Ray and Jackson. Jackson wanted to have a party, but I just wanted to be quiet for a while. Quiet and thankful, prayerful.
“Jackson thought I’d go to bed with him now that my prayers had been answered and the novel was going to be published, but I didn’t.”
“God didn’t write the novel,” I said. “You did.”
“I wasn’t so sure about that back then, and I’m not so sure of it now. I used to think that I did it all myself, but now I’ve learned—I think I’ve learned—differently.”
“What about the new novel?” I asked. “Did God write Kiss of Death too? It looks to me like you’re the one doing the work.”
Claire signaled the garçon for two more beers. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to unload on someone. I’m glad it was you.”
I was glad too, but in a funny way. I was pretty drunk by this time, but the kind of drunk where you suddenly see things clearly. What I saw clearly was that in spite of her encounters with rattlesnakes, the feisty, spunky, sassy, tough-talking, snake-handling protagonist of Kiss of Death wasn’t me. It was Claire. I’d been thinking all along that I’d come to Paris with the wrong person; I’d been thinking all day long, right up to that moment, that I was here in Maisons-Laffitte with the wrong person in the wrong Café Anglais. But now I saw clearly that it was Claire who had come to Paris with the wrong person, Claire who was sitting here in the wrong Café Anglais with the wrong person. I was the wrong person. She should have been here with Jackson.
“Did you make the right choic
e?”
“For a long time I didn’t think so.”
“And now.”
“Right now?”
“Right now. This very minute.”
“It all worked out.”
We walked down to the river, holding hands—like the French schoolgirls we’d see sometimes in the Luxembourg Gardens. Like sisters. We didn’t say anything because there wasn’t anything more to say.
24
Joie de Vivre
I’ve graduated—or “been graduated,” as Claire would say—Phi Beta Kappa, and with high honors. I’m still throwing the Frisbee to Maya, who will be going with me. I’m not sure how much she knows, though I’ve tried hard enough to explain. What can I say? How can I explain what had happened, why Jackson left us?
Uncle Warren blamed me for going off to Mexico with Cramer. Claire blamed me for not saying yes in the first place when Jackson asked me to marry him at Christmas. Jackson himself said it was because his daughter had appeared to him in his dreams, and wanted him to go to her elima.
What did I think? I thought he’d used up his life here at Thomas Ford, his life with Maya and me, and needed to move on. There wasn’t anything here that he needed.
I’ve sold the house and property to TF for $150,000, a lot of money for me but significantly below market value. TF is going to turn the property into a biological field station. A crew is already at work, measuring the house, which will be converted to a dormitory. I have a full ride at UF (University of Florida), and now I have a cushion.
I’m leaving on the thirtieth of June. I’m anxious to get the last few days over with, but I’m an adult now and I try not to wish my life away.
My honors project turned into an article that’s going to be published in Copeia; Cramer’s name should appear on the paper too, but he’s left it off, just the way Harold Urey left his name off the Stanley Miller paper on amino acids. This kind of altruism has always posed a problem for evolutionary biologists. Though not an insuperable problem.
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