His mother always sat in the best chair. He saved the best for her to sit in. With her big purse on her lap she sat in the chair he had saved. Knees together under a tent-sized skirt. She sat the way sitters sit: still as the paint they would become. So tonight she’d be sitting in the nearly stuffed chair by the window, next to the air-conditioning knobs. Big white bosomy blouse she often wore for—was it midweek?—for sitting midweekly, quiet unless addressed.
I think a person ought to keep her feelings fastened to her family and not let them fly about on leafs that got, you said, bugs on them. Ladybugs, mom, the harmless ones, with the tiny black polka dots. I think a person ought to keep her feelings fastened to her family and not let them fly about on leafs that got ladybugs on them. A rose in your room though. That’s nice.
How these designs did date. SuperCity by Harry Hershfield. I looked at this one already, Riff reminded himself. The jacket pictured a jazzy riff of buildings, shooting up like rockets yet all atumble. Riff. That’s me, but me is hardly jazzy. I never heard of Elf. Some abbreviation? Published in 1930—do tell—what a year!—by The Elf. Elf? “It will make a better man or woman of you!”
Baloney. Don’t need to heft Barrett Wendell again. But he did. It did have heft. It did. And this? Martin Meyer’s Moneybook. Here—Riff held the book high so she could see—right on the cover—can’t miss it—in redblackyellow letters like a crowd—mom—listen, the cover says, “Yes, you can earn 10.4% to 23.5% on your savings—federally insured.” A subject I know something … I knew … oh well … What? Once Around Lightly? Is that a novel? No, it’s travel. I get it. Around the world on small bills and a single suitcase. Just Riff’s speed. These can’t be leftovers, these books, which the motel has recovered from its rooms. How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market. Oh yeah. Not likely, Mister—Mister Darvas. If you’re so rich whadya writing books for? telling people how to make money too, right mom? if he’s so good why isn’t he still hand-over-fisting it? It was funny, Riff thought, because, in a way, Riff unmade money. He made profits take a trip. Once around lightly.
More swill than the sow can swallow—that much money—mom said, repeating a bit of wisdom from her almanac.
When Riff was a kid, around the world meant getting your ass kissed and your cock sucked. He had to watch the way he mouthed his thoughts. Eleanor did dirty well enough but she didn’t like the dirties dirty-worded.
Walter was a traveling cut-rate accountant. He wondered what old law school prof Wendell would think of his job, because he moved from town to town and firm to firm—little loose ones mostly, like buttons about to come off—and cooked books until their figures resembled fudge. He issued statements saying all was well, which it was when he got through erasing and rewriting. Ah, but he loved account books, sheets of green-blue lines like represented rain. He loved pawing through papers, he often told himself, licking his fingers to part sheets—there was nothing lovelier than the lavender and amber and violet of faded inks—or sitting in strange offices where stamps were kept in cigar boxes and stacks of flat nubble-covered ledgers loomed and filing cases opened like fridge crispers. Where he faced row after row of drawers with brass name holders and lovely curved tugs. Where lights hung from their wires beneath green metal shades. A lot of the ledgers were dusty too, like these books. He’d had a good deal of dustpuff practice.
When he had slipped over the line and begun his itinerant practice, he had been cocky about his cut corners, his helpful little cheats. He wanted to brag in bars about it—about his legerdemain—but he knew he didn’t dare, and he couldn’t tell his mom of course or Kim or Miz Biz or Eleanor either. All that pride like held breath. But the breath that would have gone into boasting began to leak out after a while, because he never made much money at it, his clients stiffed him sometimes, he had to keep changing his firm’s name, and sack his secretary, because he had a secretary once, he called her Miz Biz, as odd in his office as this one was here in his measly motel room, hulking up the air, with the books behind glass to pass for fancy, though Miz Biz was easy if empty under her skirt of any love, and when he fired her for financial reasons, and for safety first, of course, she wasn’t willing to become even absent ash in an empty tray, to leave a pin like a shine in some dark desk drawer when she went away. She hadn’t said a swear. Made no thanks. Uttered no regrets. Issued no threats. Not a single expletive was expleted. She didn’t snarl, say: why don’t you get fucked by a prick that’s diseased, or: I hope a tornado gives you a blow job. She didn’t crack a single joke of any coarse kind though she was one of the original cursing kids. No rage. No threats. No regrets. Girl her age too. Couldn’t spell. Miz Biz should have read The World’s Orphan. What do you suppose it said? Her glassy black shoes went clack, and that was that.
Maxims don’t make mother happy, mom said, and I bet it was a book of maxims.
Is a book, mom. Is. Somewhere. In the maybe abandoned maybe burned out maybe demolished offices of The Elf.
Clean hands make an honest handshake.
Maxims did make his mother happy but they had to be hers.
He should shower, he thought. He’d had a tough day. All that guy did was deal in apple cider vinegar. Lots of fruit trees along the river down there. Apple cider vinegar. Yet what a mess his loan life was, his inventory. Jeez. Had to pretend he was robbed. Mister Write Off, that’s me. No profit except in loss. Of this he never spoke—of course—aloud. Riff didn’t sing in the shower. He’d seen too many murder movies. Riff sang sitting on the john. He sang Neapolitans he made up as he went along: O solo meoh O Jones’ cow I can’t forget you Not anyhow. Maybe he should try singing something different. On and on it goes … each … something … season in its worry … yeah … contending with the next.
Gol’amighty, mom, don’t sit so close to the AC, you’ll catch a crink sure. So sit me somewhere else, sonny, she said back, as unwinking as a stuffed toy.
Catherine Carter. Pamela Hansford Johnson. What a mouthful. Which one’s the author? Catherine Carter sounds canned. Like Betty Crocker. Politics Among Nations. Hey. Second edition. Hoo, Heavy. Hans Morganthau. There’s a weighty label. Just the ticket. Germanically serious author—that’s what that Hans has to be. Still, who cares? Economics. Principles and Applications. Another something Riff knew … Published in Cincinnati? He didn’t know anything was published in Cincinnati. I should write a book, the know-how I know. But he couldn’t tell mom its title, nor Eleanor neither. Riff had had the canny-author daydream before. Cooking the Books, the name would be. Or The How to Cook Books Cookbook. Cute. Maybe too cute. He could ask Miz Biz what she thought. Because Miz Biz knew what he was up and down to, though he couldn’t speak to her shoes, couldn’t tell them anything, shiny and black with big bows, or the belt about her belly, or the mole above her eyebrow, even though all were admirable and as kissable as ears. No. Let her go like a fish too big to boat.
Salute to Courage. That’s the ticket. William Tyler Arms. Gives himself airs like a ritzy hotel. Signed inside: William Tyler Arms. Hey. Printed in typewriter. Riff had never seen a book like that. It said it was an historical novel. Printed by the Enterprise and Journal of Orange, Mass., in … 1966. Printed in typewriter, but how? Must be rare. What was it doing here alongside Czar. Czar? As in financial tycoon. Another money book, a novel, yeah, by one of the … hey mom … Wiseman. All these different years: a volume issued in the twenties, another in the sixties, a book from the thirties, then the fifties turns up again. How come? This gathering was no reunion. They weren’t related; they were never in the same class at school or found themselves frat brothers or became World War buddies. Older than the motel, most of them. Tippecanoe and Up in Arms too.
Undo her shoe—the bow’s for show—undo the belt about her belly, kiss the mole above the eyebrow … how’s one? how’s two?
Men, muttered Eleanor. You still here? Girls go to reunions, not just guys go. He went to one once, Riff told her. Lost in reminder, Riff held The Egyptian in his hand. A small-town kid fr
om lower Illinois—hey, nearby Cairo—so fresh even his balls were smooth, Riffaterre had attended SIU in Carbondale and studied business, economics, a bit of law, before ending up in accounting like a pinball come to rest by the binkedybank of chance in a little hole. He had had ambitions, ideals maybe, dreams. But after graduation he had drifted back into small-town life again and lost his love of study, his interest in the new and strange, anything lofty. He shortened his name, dumped earth, severed every connection with the French, ended up a gap. Gradually, as these things usually happen, he became a fixer, somebody the corner store could count on, slow as mold but sure as rust. He would carry all kinds of blank receipts in his valise, and make up expenses, their lying numbers, like words for a story. He didn’t just juggle figures, he rebalanced lives, created costs and catastrophes, invented divorces, begot additional children. Wal-. Waltari. Riff laughed to think his name might have been Waltari Riffaterre before he shortened it. Pretty swish.
He went to a class reunion one time. Hardly recognized anybody, or was recognized. The whole affair, would Miz Biz have said? was flat as a sat-on sombrero. Papered tables, paper napkins, paper name tags, smiling hello buttons, happy hello hats. He found he didn’t care who was wealthy, who was fat. But driving the short drive home (he’d never have gone if the reunion hadn’t been near as a neighbor), he realized how backslid he’d become, how his tastes had clouded like a sky, and how he’d been sharp-eyed once, quick to retort and genuinely wide of laugh, less suspicious, less cautious, more personally akimbo, not meanjeaned and tightass thin, not closed like the cabinet he was presently pawing books from so that now he could smell the dust, and here was Ann Lee’s & Other Stories. What the hell? That was no proper title, Ann Lee’s what? Elizabeth Bow- … the spine was smeared, the black had run. Bowen. Bet it wasn’t Ann Lee’s quim. See? Here he was—playing the coarse and stupid small-town stud, mouth made for a matchstick.
The glass doors were glinting from a bit of outside light. Low sun. On the vase of his poor rose … raised to falsify a rented room with its pretense of friendship. Is it supposed to lead us to lengthen our stay? although we’ve agreed to check out tomorrow or today; which would require Rose, though footsore and weary, to wipe away our street dust once again, cleanse the mirror of our worried face, erase the traces of our restless body in the bed, straighten loose papers, replace the dead bud with another dead bud, vacuum the rug, scour the tub, and routinely carry out the other duties of beauty, so we may rest afresh in our room, in our bed, and talk to our mother as if she weren’t down out of sight in the ground. Rose, dust these books, too, will you?
Riff had always had a deep suspicion of refinement. He was holding the dustiest volume of all, so visibly silted he dared not whoosh it off. He wouldn’t open it either. Adam’s Breed was on the cover. By Radclyffe Hall. But he did. Parted the pages in sudden despair. This dust goes back to ’26. That’s what he didn’t want to grow into, a Riffaterre, a lace-cuff guy named Radclyffe. Sadly slid the book back. Closed the cabinet carefully, a pall upon him. Held his hands in the air like a surgeon beseeching gloves as he went to wash. OK, mom, OK. Keep your seat.
Such a seat as’ll put a crink in my neck? Well, I got no place to go. This room ain’t like your usual, with that Big Bertha sulked against the wall, sure it’s not for sale? It or the books. Maybe there’s a price inside each one. Have you looked? Yet a flower. Fancy.
The account books he had looked at had numbers in them right enough; told stories too, Riff supposed, of success and failure, of tragedy and triumph, of the common bollixes of life, just like, he bet, Anthony Hope’s Little Tiger did, and just like Riff, the figure doctor, managed to write, with his long thin fingers and the fancy columns and characters they fashioned. Nice name for an author: Anthony Hope. Made you want to read, implied a happy comeuppance.
Hope you can keep your hands clean, sonny. Hope you remember life’s lessons. Hope you cross at the light going home. I have. I will. I did, dear.
Tonight would he imagine his kiss burning a hole in her nightie clean to the nip? Eleanor had a nice light giggle. Men. Riff was faithful. Not like most. Her groans would grow beneath him like the spring bulbs he had never planted. But only if mom had poufed. Taking her fat lap with her. And her chin with the light white hairs. Of course he had thought a lot about Miz Biz, buxom as she was, with a Scotsman’s knees. Miz Biz, though, kept verging on the real. That wasn’t right, it was disconcerting, and he’d let her go like when a kite pulls free and you don’t chase it into its capturing tree where its twine gets snagged on twig after twig, easy to see caught there because not a leaf is green yet, and the kite’s tail made of cast-off neckties fluttering among the limbs, fluttering though fastened, therefore fluttering helplessly.
It haunted him: this meaningless gathering of meanings. He let the glass doors click. Gloom had settled in his head. That one-watt light. That’s always how he thought of it. With one watt. He’d dream of creamy walls, the corners of creamy ceilings. So Riff decided he wouldn’t fondle the books again. Had he been … had he been fondling them? Now he peered at their backs through an enclosed dusk. The Spell of the Turf. Two authors, Hildreth and … and Crowell. Advanced Figure Skating. Um … Maribel Vinson. The Day’s Play. A. A. Milne. Wasn’t he Pooh? Pooh, sure. If the case had been open, Riff would have taken the Pooh guy out, but he’d made his vow—to keep his hands clean—and held it for now. The Little Yellow House. The Younger Set. How I Made Two Mil—Oh yeah, I’ve seen through that one. Diary of the Great War. Wonderful. Here they all were: war, money, romance, skating, self-help, kid stuff, verse. Books which had once been open to someone’s eyes. Which lay for a while on a body’s bedside table. Maybe by a bud. And were held in considerate hands, propped on a welcoming tummy. Then doubtless shelved with others. Ultimately attic’d. But death had disbanded the collection. Cartons sold to a dealer for a pittance. Or given to The Good Will. Picked up by a curious browser for a quarter. Politics Among Nations maybe. It said second edition even on its spine. Must be important. Hans Morganthau. A popular pick no doubt—to improve the mind.
Their dispersal was easy to imagine. It was their meeting here, in his—Riff’s—motel which was the toughie. Because of the room’s weak light, the darkening day, he could scarcely make the titles out, and Riff regretted not having been more methodical about his inspection, making sure he took account of them one by one and row by row in the accidental order of their shelving. He knew some of the books contained fiction but now each of them (even the volumes on ice-skating and horse racing and making money) would have their own larky tales to tell: how they happened to be together here, how they went begging before they were chosen, how they came to be written in the first place, where they were in their author’s family—firstborn or midkid or last rite. And there’d be a story, too, or maybe just an anecdote, which would explain a jacket tear here and there, or a badly shaken spine, stretch of water damage, bit of sun fade. Bookmarks made of bobby pins revealed where a reader had ceased; dog-eared pages pointed to a pause; torn slips of paper, inserted receipts, rubber bands, postcards, indicated some interruption: however, none said why: you’ve reached your station; the phone is ringing; it’s dinnertime; boredom has lowered its sleepy head. And the pencil underlining on page ninety-nine: what did that single sentence say, that lining signify? Should he hang his good pants and his jacket up? For just one night? Mom’s face was a faint unsmiling moon, so he pulled the garments from his bag and hung them like scarves from two of the bent wires. No more click or clatter. That left a hanger for Eleanor’s cocktail dress. He’d have her remove.
He’d never been read to, but he remembered some of the drawings in Pooh: the fat round bear, a bridge, a honey pot. Gwen whatever her silly name was did birch trees and spumes of grass. Graphs and tables, photographs were in the books on war and economics, maps when it was travel, baby pictures in the bios. He’d seen Pooh at school he supposed, and that tiger too. And the kangaroo. You’d feel real small in—wouldn’t
it have to be?—Gwen’s large soft lap, her sleeved arms around you, holding the book in yours, the book’s bright pictures as enticing as a plate of cake, enjoying the coziness of it all he supposed, the odors and textures and comforts of closeness, feeling the breath in her chest, while in his ears from the voice behind him he hears the words on and on it goes. Riff tried to wrap his arms around his head but he couldn’t do it very well.
When he drew the blinds on the parking lot, he knew he was alone. He could call for Kim but she wouldn’t come, only her voice sometimes like a radio’s. The World’s Orphan. Hah. So I’ve got to read it, have I? How, hey? He didn’t have a copy, only an ad. Was that a good excuse? So he’d never be a better man. He took out toilet articles. Arranged them around the bathroom basin in the order required by natural law. Out and eat. That was the next thing. Maybe he’d just grab a candy bar from a machine. Round the world for only two mil. He’d need three quarters. Candy prices way up. Chocolate candy especially, especially with nuts. These days costs inflated like an inner tube. Kim cut two syllables from her name and it never seemed to trouble her—what she’d lost. Burly? Take a dare, why shouldn’t she pare, why should she care? But he thought Kimberly Riffaterre pretty spiff. At attention now. Walt Riff! Yo! Out and Eat! Let’s go! Get your ass out of traction and into action!
Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas Page 7