by Joan Connor
Eleventh: like ninth and tenth only a shade dimmer. The pain peels off like the scrims of mica sparkling on a granite boulder, paler and paler, thinner and thinner sheets of Isinglass. Un-loving is a process of exfoliation. Layer by layer, you get closer to the hard pebble that is your metamorphic heart, pressure-warped and heat-fused. You no longer call him just to hear his voice on the answering machine. You remember the box in the attic and are surprised as you unwrap the watercolor that it no longer pains you. Now that you no longer want to call him, you find that you could, that you could ask him how life is treating him, that you could bear to hear his girlfriend’s name in his deep, measured voice.You try to recall her name. There it is: yes, Lissa. You actually could call him. But don’t.
Hang the watercolor back up in the living room. Try to click through the wardrobe of your memory for his suits, the smell of his starched shirts only to find the closet empty, the gillyflower perfume wilted, and his socks lamenting their mates forever lost in the limbo of some fluorescent-buzzed Laundromat.
Discover that certain songs, Counting Crows’ “Mr. Jones” perhaps, no longer make you cry, that instead you feel only the aura of that time, that discrete episode in your life as if it were lived by someone else, someone who once knew you very well, him perhaps. Shake your head as you marvel how once you thought your very life depended on a word, a word from him, a word that bore all the joy that is possible in this world.Yes.Yes.Yes, I do.
But No slammed the door on the mustiness of an empty closet.
There will be other surprises. When you reread Simone Weil, different phrases isolate themselves like, “To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.” Love the middle distance; it is time. It is love itself. It is the peace of knowing that you have or once had the capacity to truly, truly love. And above all be prepared. Because just when you think that you are finally at long last over him; then, at that very moment the floor collapses as you realize that you love him still, that you always will, and that you cannot bear it. Fall into despair. Open the forbidden door where your monstrous grief crouches, chuckling.
Twelfth. So here we are which is to say that we are almost there. We are almost at the bottom, the nadir, the piedmont. We are stumbling through the foothills of affection, back through time, back to the beginning before Jack and Jill went up the hill, before you met him, before you loved him where love ceases and there is surcease from pain.
There is, you will realize now, only one way to stop loving someone. Admit that you are powerless. Admit that you are a puling, crawling, drooling weak-kneed sapsucker. How to stop loving someone? You can’t. Snap out of it. Forget it. Give it up.You can’t because you cannot sear your own memory, you cannot burn him like an insincere love letter, you cannot scorch him out of your soul. No matter where you turn, he is there, biding his time in the lobbies and corners of your life and dreams. The cure for love is lobotomy or this. There’s always this:
If you have the heart for it, return to step one. Select someone, preferably B). Repeat the above.
Palimpsest
FOR THIRTY-TWO YEARS Caspar Weems, who was actually a novelist which he would have been happy to explain to anyone who asked but no one did, had written obituaries for The Glad Rag, the newspaper with the third largest circulation in Hobson’s Choice which was a city dwindled to middling in size, once renowned for its production of tractor parts and for rendering duck fat, and for a small role which it played in the Revolutionary War when one of the duck fat forebears got a Redcoat General drunk on dandelion wine who then failed to show up for battle, but the tale may have been apocryphal.
Hobson’s Choice, nestled in the corner of a riparian confluence and in its day a port for mill goods, woolens and paper, now found its geographic situation anachronistic, but it stubbornly hung on despite its once rackety brick mills gone rickety. A hospitable city, even a convivial one, it boasted many neighborhood bars along the waterfront which had persisted from the days when the mills were working and liked to see their working men happy—or drunk and belligerent and Friday night paycheck poor. Like Hobson’s Choice itself, the bars, a string of them named for their owners—Paddy’s, Bruno’s, Red’s, Ritchie’s, Joe’s, an infrequently frequented Abraham’s—hung on with the tenacity of vetch.
Caspar was well-suited to Hobson’s Choice, having served The Glad Rag with the same tare-like perseverance with which the bars had served the working men of Hobson’s Choice. Caspar Weems was a solitary man, serious, sedulous about obituary writing which he considered an art, and he had studied the styles and tones of other funereal columns with artistic perspicacity, noting the range from the lugubrious to the lurid, from the lachrymose to the laudatory, from the solemn to the silly. Caspar favored the encomium. Whenever anyone inquired about his style, Caspar liked to remark that the difference between elegy and eulogy was a few vowels. But nobody inquired except one elderly coworker, Turnkey, given to hovering around the water cooler in the morning, downing dromedary volumes before his break as if lunch were a desert, and given, in the afternoons, to an affability unmarked by thirst, but one which gradually gave way to a drowse at his desk. To him, Caspar was able to deliver his imaginatively rehearsed line, but only to him, because Caspar alienated the rest of the staff, largely newcomers, young, fresh from graduate study in T-com, VI-com, Com, or J-school with their whisk broom haircuts and squinty glasses, their etiolated coffeehouse complexions, noire elegance and Dolce & Gabanna gabardine. Caspar did not converse; he blurted—brusque and hard-boiled as he imagined rough and tumble newsmen spoke. Sartorially, he aimed for rumpled as he imagined gritty newshounds dressed, tie askew, tails untucked, and he achieved it.
When the cappuccino and croissant guy came around in the morning, Caspar growled, “Give me a cup of Joe.” At lunch he hit the Hobson’s Choice Diner and ordered, from a waitress with an etched blue “Hannah” name tag, corned beef hash with poached eggs “and leave ’em runny.” Always ketchup. Always on the side. Always with a legal pad on which he scribbled his novel, Palimpsest, with papery zeal as if he relished rustling or wanted someone to ask him what he was working on. But no one did.
After lunch, office, then home. In the office, a serviceable drudge of renovated cubicles on the second floor of an old warehouse, Caspar wrote out his obituaries either longhand or on a recalcitrant old Smith Corona with a sticky letter ‘H’. Most of the obits, he wrote pre-mortem, doing the research himself on the doctors, philanthropists, duck fat family members, or tractor tycoons, and retired school teachers, and downplaying the sundry scandals since he ascribed to the panegyric school. Life might be yellow journalism, but the obituary page was white. Black and white with solemn Old English font.
The meaning of life, Caspar Weems knew, was death. And its text: the obit. Obit. Obitus. Obire: to go, to meet, to die. And the novel, Caspar believed, was an obituary form. (Hadn’t he read somewhere that some eminent author had proclaimed it dead?) So Caspar transcribed all of his obituaries into his novel as well.
What Caspar’s colleagues did not know (although Troy Fagan, City Desk, was soon to learn) was that he always wrote two versions of his obituaries, one a tribute, the other an exercise in some aspect of fiction writing, tone, plot, humor. He needed to keep his craft supple. Today he was working on a pre-mortem for the publisher of The Glad Rag, a duck fat descendant, Claude VanMeer and was exploring the issue of tone.
He wrote:Claude Chase VanMeer, age *, died peacefully on *, ** in his home in Marvin Gardens. Claude was born in 1957, the oldest son of Claude and Mildred VanMeer of the VanMeer Rendering Plant. Claude Senior founded The Glad Rag in 1946 after returning from his service in W.W.II.
Claude Junior became the publisher in 1973 after briefly attending VanMeer Community College where he was preparing for a career in law. The Glad Rag flourished under his management growing from a local newspaper which focused on community and social events to a competitive daily which covered loca
l, state, and national news, incorporated an editorial page, and obituary column, and an amusements page.
A selectman from 1977 until his resignation in 1978, Claude Junior, like his father, was active in local and national charities, the Odd Fellows, the garden club, and the Loyal Order of the Otters. He was also a member of The Equestrians and a renowned horseman.
His hobbies, which included architecture, cartography, spoon collecting, and limericks, and the members of his family were his greatest joys.
He is survived by his lovely and loving wife, Jillian who resides at Marvin Gardens, and his son, Bruce who resides in San Francisco.
The funeral service will be held at * at * p.m. at the * Church.
Friends may call at * etc.
Then he wrote:Thankfully Clod VanMeer died, having outlived everyone’s patience and interest. Claude was born a fat duck, choking on the golden ladle in his beak. After being kicked out of every school he ever waddled through, including the Hobson’s Choice Normal School and the one which his father bought just so he would be accepted somewhere , he inherited The Glad Rag from his father, the goose who laid the golden egg. Claude Redux promptly scrambled it adding a page of his addled editorials, a garden column by his Belladonna, Jillian and a page of insipid horoscopes and amusingly unfunny cartoons. More of a Minus Touch than a Midas one, he had the good sense, nonetheless, to discriminate at least once between Fool’s Gold and the echt ore and to hire and retain yours truly, 24 carat and freshly graduated from Cornwall University, to write elegant restrained obituaries for the proto-dead.
He was the member of many prestigious and prodigious drinking clubs, among them: the Oddballs, and the Loyal Order of the Why-I-Otter-Punch-You-One-For-That. He was a renowned horse’s ass, kicked out of the most exclusive drinking club in town, The Board of Selectmen, for mixing a vodka Martini.
Claude VanMeer was a dabbler in slumlordship, much loved by his tenants when he turned on the heat to commemorate Ground Hog’s Day. His lord also enjoyed finding his way home from Bruno’s where he played the spoons and improvised dirty lyrics to pop songs on karaoke night. His hobbies included: tomfoolery, skullduggery, pettifoggery, and rampant quackery.
He is survived by his loving wife, his indiscriminately loving, all-loving, loving wife, loving everyone from ambulance chasers to zookeepers, Jillian, the dull trull, the trull doll, the droll troll and his disinherited son.
Etc.
Caspar was in the habit of submitting his handwritten or poorly typed copy with its dropped aitches to Lois the secretary, long in the habit, and long in the tooth of the habit, thirty-two years. A technosaur, Caspar was not about to make a sudden adaptation to electronic evolution.
“Copy,” he said as he crunched the pages at Lois who perched on her stool at an over-varnished counter, and he blew out the door and hastened home. Caspar’s home, a three room apartment, crouched above Bruno’s in a sooty late Victorian tenement with one bay window which beetled out over River Street like a hyperactive eyebrow. Sparse but lavish enough for Caspar’s needs, a black and white television, an enameled kitchen table, a bed, an easy chair, and a dormitory style fridge furnished the flat. Caspar had never upgraded the television because he only watched old black and white films, mysteries, dramas, the occasional romance, and he had no need of a desk.
He had read that Faulkner (or maybe it was Thomas Wolfe?) used a refrigerator as his desk. Doing likewise, Caspar reasoned, might inspire him to write his magnum opus, but the refrigerator was a stretch. Caspar was short, 5’ 4”; hence the compact icebox at which he dutifully wrote every night after watching reruns of The Untouchables.
This was Caspar’s life. And this might have remained Caspar’s life were it not for the event which was about to change it dramatically, even drastically, the event which occurred the following morning when Troy Fagan, City Desk, summoned Caspar to his office. Troy Fagan always referred to himself as “Troy Fagan, City Desk,” preferring, so Caspar thought, to present himself as moveable goods, decor, rather than as a sentient being.
“Caspar, have a seat.” Troy Fagan invited him into the office.
Caspar slumped into the nubby Hunter’s Green club chair and considered Troy who, he thought, looked more like a missile every year and not at all like a desk, his dome polished, his torso straight and somber in a charcoal suit.
Troy leaned casually against his leather inlaid desktop and crossed his legs, exposing his tan argyles.
Nice detail for the novel, Caspar thought. Nice detail for an obit.
“How long you been with us now, Caspar?”
Caspar rubbed his head. Theatrical question. Troy knew the answer better than anyone. He stared at Troy.
“How long you been writing the obits now?” Troy extended his arm, yawned, and examined his fingernails.
Caspar shook his head. Troy knew the answer to that one too. Same question.
“It’s time for a new assignment, don’t you think?” Troy propped himself back on the desktop and blinked into the popping hiss of the tubular fluorescent bulb.
Caspar sat attentive. An old newsdog, he had a nose for news, and in the obit biz a newsman knew that the noose was news. He sniffed a bad wind, a new breeze, a whiff of the dying breed.
“Get out of the old routine?” Troy continued, staring at the ceiling. “Take a risk? Shake the lead out?” he asked the water-stained acoustic tile.
Caspar lunged forward in the chair. “Hey, Mac. Whad is this? The third degree? Twenty questions? Why the grilling, hotdog?” Caspar asked in reporter-ese which he delivered with a hint of Hollywood Brooklyn.
Troy snapped upright. He liked Caspar, he really did, but VanMeer had called that morning. Lois, the secretary, had typed the wrong copy and VanMeer was not amused. “Caspar, I am merely suggesting a new assignment, something worthy of your creative talents. You’ve dedicated yourself to that novel—”
“On page eighty-five thousand, two hundred and thirteen,” Caspar said. “but I started it late in life; I’ll be working backwards soon to get the early years. Novel writing, it’s a bitch.”
“Exactly,” Troy said, “and it deserves recognition.You must not squander those years of dedication to the craft. You’re wasting away in obits.Your heart is in the arts.”
“Ya wanna read the novel? My stuff? Bet on my dark horse? Hitch a ride on my hansom cab?” Caspar asked. “It’s a work in progress.”
“No, no, not before it’s finished.” Troy relaxed again against the desk. The fluorescent light ricocheted from his pate. “I am thinking of a special assignment, a top secret mission, literary in nature, a scoop that could scoop you up more than a few awards.”
Caspar studied Troy’s argyle socks; he had to get the details of the diamonds right. He was engaged in writing a naturalistic roman à clef of his own life as it was happening. He had a Proustian eye for detail but an aesthetic of present rather than past tense, more Swann’s Day than Swann’s Way. Sort of Joyce does Proust. Or Every Day In The Life of Caspar Weems. Slice of life, he was buying the loaf, one long baguette, Swann’s Book of Years. But recorded daily. And minutely.
Double diamonds, they were, with black diagonals. “What kind of assignment you got in mind, head honcho ?” he asked Troy’s feet.
“Okay. Here it is. No one has ever succeeded. How about an interview with T.D. Pinchinger?”
Caspar jerked his head up. “T.D. Pinchinger? The novelist?”
Troy nodded.
Caspar rubbed his forehead, the argyles forgotten. “The recluse. No one has ever had an interview with T.D. Pinchinger.”
“Precisely. That is why it would be such a coup.”
Caspar cathedraled his fingers. “Hmm. And if I cannot get an interview? If the canary won’t sing? If the blue bird of paradise won’t crow? If the Bird Man’s flown the coop de Grace? If . . . .”
“Gather material. Snoop. Write an exposé.”
Caspar considered, hunching. “Yeah, Troy, no question, that’d be quite a feather i
n my cap, quite a sugar lump in the cup, and a shot in the shot glass. Expenses?”
Troy shook his head. “You’d be on your own.”
“Salary?”
“Of course.”
“Of course.”
The fluorescent tube hummed and hissed.
“Who’d do the obits?”
“We’ll get one of the kids.”
“The cashmere kids?”
“They all are today, Caspar. That’s what we got except for Turnkey.”
“Turnkey?”
“The water cooler guy.”
Caspar nodded. “Yeah, right.” He sank himself deeper into the club chair to consider it. An interview with Pinchinger. Nobody but nobodaddy had ever had an interview with Pinchinger.
“So?” Troy asked.
Caspar clapped his hands on the arms of the chair. “You’re on, Mack,” Caspar said. “I’m game.” And he shot up from the chair.
Troy straightened and shook his hand. “Good man,” he said, ushering him to the door. Troy smiled sweetly as Caspar shut it behind him, not knowing that he’d just been had. The assignment was impossible.
T.D. Pinchinger was the greatest cult author in the country. No one had ever seen him, but a few had read some or all of the six novels: Alpha, The Knave of Diamonds, Pinchinger on Pinchinger: A Memoir or (K)not, A Black I, Z, and Liner Notes: A Novella. Caspar set about his research of Pinchinger with the same fervor with which he attacked his novel, unsurprising since they quickly merged into one project. Caspar spent days in the library researching the Pinchinger family tree. (There was none.) And he recorded the minutiae of his failed research promptly in his novel.