The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  After the initial onslaught of fan mail following the publication of Georgie Boy eight years ago, adoring letters sent to V. Kelian in care of the publisher and forwarded by Publisher Z to me, I asked Dori Weintraub, their publicity person, to cease forwarding the mail, or, better yet, to selectively forward only the more interesting letters, a policy that has spared me much unnecessary reading over the years (and for which I herewith apologize to any reader who expected a personal reply from V. Kelian). But as soon as that candid Vanity Fair piece appeared a few months ago and the “news” of my “predilection” for young boys found its way into the popular press and the supermarket tabloids, Dori’s selection of “the more interesting letters” got out of control: I began to receive actual “propositions” from a variety of bright, horny, and possibly corrupt twelve-year-olds in various parts of the country, many of them enclosing their photographs (with a few adorable nude studies) and offering to come visit me “wherever your Mezzaluna Hotel happens to be.” Worse, I had letters from older men pretending to be twelve. Still worse, I began to receive a number of letters, some of them quite intelligent and almost persuasive, from older men who were convinced that their charms and their interests would “rescue” me from my “paraphilia” (as three of them put it) if only I would give them a chance to visit me at “your enchanted Mezzaluna, wherever it happens to be.” To all of these charming offers, I have been constrained to answer with the same printed postcard I’ve been sending out for years:

  V. Kelian deeply appreciates your interest and enthusiasm but asks you to respect a sense of privacy that can admit of no contact with the “actual world.”

  Which is not strictly true. I have permitted myself, these five years since Billy’s death, to continue certain habits of contact: Travis Coe phones me occasionally, usually to talk about his latest film or affair with one or another of the stars or starlets of the fantastic “actual world” of entertainment, and two years ago he flew me to his ranch in Wyoming because he wanted to see if the Wind River Mountains would make me homesick for Svanetia (they did). Travis is one of only four people with my unlisted phone number, the other three being Sharon, Liz, and Trev. Sharon has been for the past five years the wife of Larry Brace, and they live rather happily ever after in that lovely old building of Stick Around that once was Lara Burns’s house and store and post office, just down the road a ways from the dogtrot log cabin where, yes, Lara Burns herself still lives and still has her populous A Cat Arena. Sharon and Larry have converted the actual post-office boxes of the old abandoned post office into the ornate headboard of their waterbed—an idea they picked up from Ingraham, who sleeps with his Kay beneath a similar set of postoffice boxes taken from Limestone, a town south of Stick Around, in the same county. Ingraham’s whimsical novel The Termites of Stick Around, a fable or allegory that played fast and loose with certain actual experiences of Sharon and Larry before their marriage, almost sold well, for an Ingraham novel, and I understand he has commenced his novel about Vernon’s gubernatorial campaign. Vernon Ingledew was too distracted by his political ambitions, or his philosophical studies, or a metaphysical combination of both, to notice that his tenant of the old Jacob Ingledew house, Larry Brace, was, in the depths of alcoholism and struggle with a difficult literary analysis of Daniel Lyam Montross, allowing the house to go to ruin and even contributing to its demise during his bouts of drunkenness by firing his pistol at the termites he imagined were infesting it (a situation adroitly rendered in Ingraham’s fable).

  The house actually is not termite ridden, I’ve been assured by the team of restorationists who are busy expensively resuscitating the old place to the original condition in which Governor Jacob Ingledew erected it. Vernon alone knows the identity of the new owner of the house, who bought what’s left of it from him for if not a song, a promise not to sing. I have told no one of my intention to move shortly from the Halfmoon, and Wölfflin (Wölfflin’s successor) is under strict instructions to excise this paragraph from my memoirs in the event that I actually do move into the Ingledew house, which was once Stick Around’s modest hotel and thus is but one generic remove from the hotel in which I’ve spent the last decade, although I don’t expect to have the services and amenities there that I’ve enjoyed here. I expect, if all goes well, to move everything from my triplex, including Morris, if he’s willing (and if he’s not, he’ll let me know), into the old house as soon as the head restorationist, Clifford Stone, gives me the go-ahead, perhaps this month or early next, and to live there alone forevermore, without servants, without guests, without a houseboy. I may thus come to resemble in my old age the woman who inhabited it for all the years of her old age until her death, the woman whom, Ingraham keeps assuring us, we cannot name.

  I see that I a moment ago struck through Wölfflin’s name, and I should attempt to explain, since, although Wölfflin will no longer be my editor when this work is readied for publication, I owe it to Wölfflin that this work exists at all. My readers know that I am not a vain person, that I have always hidden behind my anonymity or the pseudonymity of V. Kelian without regard for personal fame or adulation. Dear Pete Tchaikovsky, whose somewhat soupy First Piano Concerto continues to give me orgasms despite its bathos, once predicted that people would try to penetrate the intimate world of his feelings and thoughts, “everything that all my life I have so carefully hidden from the touch of the crowd.” When Wölfflin first proposed the writing of this memoir, I objected strenuously on three counts: one, that like Tchaikovsky I want to keep myself hidden from the touch of the crowd; two, that I lack the requisite self-regard or self-promotion to pull off an autobiographical work (I still subscribe to Ingraham’s distinction between penises and neckties); and three, as I expressed it in a very simple but crucial question to Wölfflin:

  “But what if Bolshakov himself should read my memoir and thus come to know my present whereabouts?”

  “We can handle that,” Wölfflin assured me. “We’ll simply not publish your memoir until after you’ve finally and safely gone home to Svanetia.”

  All these years, I’d made no secret to my intimates, even Billy (of whom I inquired shortly before his tragic death of his possible interest in accompanying me), that I wanted to go home. After I wrote Lamshged; or, The Shady Side of the Mountain, the collection of short stories with a Svanetian setting, I was so overcome with homesickness and toska that I actually bought an airplane ticket to Tbilisi and applied for a passport, but I was informed by the State Department that it was not advisable I return there at that particular time, especially in view of my having just been naturalized as an American citizen.

  Then, when to the astonishment of the world the entire Soviet Union came crumbling down around Gorbachev’s heels, my old friend and comrade-in-arms Zviady Gamsakhurdia rose to power in my native Georgia and personally wrote to me, in care of my publishers, calling me—or V. Kelian—a Georgian national literary hero and inviting me to return triumphantly to the land of my birth and see it freed at last from communism. Late last year, I actually closed up my triplex temporarily, arranged for Morris to return to his at-large feeding and roaming within the Halfmoon, and flew to New York to meet my Kennedy connection with a flight to Tbilisi via Athens, when the news came in that dear Zviady was in trouble: a junta of his Georgian opponents, accusing him of behaving like a dictator and jailing his critics—ironically, the same treatment he and I had suffered as critics of the Communist regime—had seized control from him in a civil war that left over a hundred Georgians dead. I waited to see if those loyal to Zviady might eventually win out, but they did not, and from New York I spoke to Zviady himself by telephone at his temporary exile in Armenia and was advised that it would be dangerous for me to return.

  Thwarted and unhappy, I decided that as long as I was in New York, I might as well pay a visit to Liz and to Wölfflin, my agent and my editor. But my editor, I discovered, was in the hospital, recovering from a “nervous breakdown.” I visited Wölfflin there anyway and learned the
distressing reason for my editor’s problems.

  “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you about it,” Wölfflin said, “but since you’re here, I can’t avoid it. Please don’t blame yourself.”

  It seems that just a short time before, Wölfflin, returning from an editorial conference, was accosted in the private office by a man brandishing a heavy pistol, a Beretta automatic with a silencer screwed into its barrel. From the descriptions of the man that occur throughout Georgie Boy, Wölfflin recognized him as the original Dr. V.T. Bolshakov, and told the man as much, and advised him to put away his weapon or face possible arrest and imprisonment.

  The man laughed (“Insanely, I thought,” Wölfflin told me) and shook his head, saying, “No, I intend to become as hard to find as your Kati/Kelian has been all these years. Nobody will find me. I can no longer work in the Soviet Union. There is no Soviet Union. I can no longer attend psychiatric conferences anywhere. Everywhere I have gone these past seven years, people have asked me if I am Bolshakov. Ha! How would you like it if everywhere you went people asked you if you were Wölfflin and, when you admitted that you were, heaped scorn and contumely upon you?”

  “Is that why you are waving that pistol at me?” Wölfflin wanted to know.

  “No, I am waving the pistol at you because you are going to tell me where Yekaterina Vladimirovna has been hiding all these years. I am waving the pistol at you to let you know that I shall kill you if you do not.”

  “She no longer goes by that name,” Wölfflin confessed.

  “Of course not!” Bolshakov yelled. “Any fool knows that she is V. Kelian. Any fool knows that V. Kelian’s lively stage entertainment, Hotel Mezzaluna, which I myself had occasion to sit through here in New York a few years ago, takes place in an enchanted but decaying resort hotel on a mountaintop somewhere. You are going to tell me where that mountaintop is located.”

  “And you intend to kill her?” Wölfflin asked. “Is that your objective?”

  “Not at once,” Bolshakov said. “No, I shall permit her to live a short time longer, long enough to listen to me. I have some things to tell her about what she has done to me.”

  “I should think that she has a very good idea of what she has done to you,” Wölfflin said.

  Bolshakov screamed, “AND SO DOES THE REST OF THE WORLD!”

  (“And he began trembling so much,” my editor told me, “that I knew he couldn’t hold the gun steady enough to shoot me with it. Which is why I reached for the button to summon Security.” Wölfflin pulled aside the top of the hospital gown to reveal to me the bandaged shoulder. “He shot at me four times and missed the first three. Then he held the gun to my forehead.”)

  “TELL ME THE LOCATION OF THE REAL HOTEL MEZZALUNA!” Bolshakov demanded.

  Wölfflin realized the inevitability of either telling him or dying. But at that moment the editor’s secretary, having detected the popping of the pistol despite its silencer, stuck her head in the door, screamed, and immediately ran to alert the building’s Security, and a guard chased Bolshakov down five flights of steps to the street, where he disappeared into the traffic of lower Fifth Avenue.

  “Thank you so much for not telling him,” I said to Wölfflin. “And I am so sorry that the terrible experience has done this to you.” I indicated the hospital bed.

  “He’ll find you, Kat,” Wölfflin warned me. “If you can’t go home to Svanetia, you’d better get out of the ‘Mezzaluna.’ It won’t take a cryptographer to discover that Mezzaluna means ‘Halfmoon’ in Italian.”

  Now, as I write these words, as if the meaning is dawning even upon him, Morris, my cat, abruptly perks his head up, as if he has heard something, or as if he knows something. The larger portion of his life he sleeps away, upon his favorite cushion beneath the painting I acquired at a Sotheby’s auction some years ago, Rene Magritte’s Chateau de Croissant, which depicts a castle floating in the air beneath a crescent moon, the castle almost a hybrid of the architecture of the Halfmoon and that of my native Svanetian towers. Now Morris, more impetuously than is his custom, rises up from his nap, looks around himself as if he’s discovering his surroundings for the first time and finding them unfamiliar, then leaps down from his cushion and trots hastily to the stairs leading down from my aerie/study. His arthritis seems to have disappeared.

  I consult the clock, which hangs beneath another favorite painting, William McNamara’s Leaping Rock, an enormous watercolor depicting a landscape of Stick Around with a prominent geological feature, a bluff overhanging Swains Creek Valley. The clock informs me that this is not the customary time that Morris goes downstairs for his feeding. (I interrupt my writing here and go down to my kitchen and discover that indeed he is not dining at his dish but has apparently exited the apartment through his Cat-Port in my door.)

  This simple detail of my daily life seems so fraught with portent that I cannot return to the writing of this memoir but rather, after reflecting upon the place where I left off (Wölfflin recently retired, for good, from publishing, and I, having expected for so many years that Bolshakov could show up at any minute, long ago gave up expecting to be surprised by him) and deciding to call it a day, I leave my writing desk, expecting to pick up tomorrow morning with a report on tonight’s séance, and prepare to leave the apartment, first selecting and donning my disguise, so sentimentally similar to that of Cathlin McWalter in Pittsburgh: red wig, huge hat, sunglasses, much jewelry. Then I lock my apartment and go downstairs, and farther downstairs, not taking the elevator, because I need the exercise, to the lobby, where I begin my incognito search for Morris.

  In the lobby, among other guests, there is a woman who looks almost like myself: huge floppy hat, red hair (or wig), dark sunglasses. As women will, we cast arch looks at each other, as if comparing jewelry, much of which we both are wearing.

  Then I turn and approach Jackie Randel, the sales manager. “Pssst, Jackie, it’s me, Kat,” I say to her, and I give her a moment to recognize me in the shades and flaming hair. “Have you seen Morris?”

  “Why, yes,” she says, whispering in her Bodarks voice, so as not to give me away to anyone else in the lobby. She points. “As a matter of fact, he just jumped up on the mantel over there. I’ve never seen him do that before.”

  And there sits Morris, perched precariously on the narrow marble mantelpiece that trims the long-unused free-standing fireplace in the Halfmoon’s lobby. I move to him. I am unable to discern any omen or portent in his behavior, beyond the originality of it. “Morris,” I say, “what are you doing up there?” Of course he does not answer, and I wonder if he can recognize me in my disguise. He does, however, from his perch above my eye level, look deeply into my sunglass-hidden eyes, and I recall again how there have been times I’ve suspected him of being “inhabited” by some spirit, perhaps even Dan Montross’s.

  And then he stretches himself upward with unaccustomed agility and raises his paw and places it briefly upon the marble slab impaneled above the mantelpiece, where the Halfmoon’s original builder had engraved some homely verses in ornate Victorian letters. This builder, one Powell Clayton, an ex-governor of the state, who in fact had succeeded Jacob Ingledew as governor during the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War, had supposedly composed these lines himself:

  Although upon a summer day,

  You’ll lightly turn from me away,

  When autumn leaves are scattered wide,

  You’ll often linger by my side.

  But when the snow the earth doth cover,

  Then you will be my ardent lover.

  II

  All my years in the Halfmoon, I have been aware of the existence of this inscription but have scarcely bothered to read it before, and I am not able to convince myself now that Morris wants me to read it. If he does, what does he want me to think the verses mean?…Is he trying to predict our future together in Stick Around? Is he telling me, for example, that come some winter and a snow, he will cease being Morris the feline and magically turn into th
e twelve-year-old Danny Montross? Or is he making some distant echo or allusion to those lines of “Danny Boy”—But I’ll come back, when summer’s in the meadow, or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow…?

  “Excuse me again, Jackie,” I say, “but would you happen to know the circumstances or significance of those verses carved over the mantel?”

  She looks at me as if to question how the significance could have escaped someone intelligent “Don’t you see?” she says. “It’s just the fireplace talking. What do you call it? Pathetic fallacy? The fireplace is just telling the guests that they will appreciate it most during the wintertime.”

  “Oh,” I say, abashed that I didn’t catch it. I laugh lightly in embarrassment and remark, “But the fireplace hasn’t been operative for many years.”

  “Neither has Morris,” she observes. “But both seem to be trying to tell you something.”

  I wander down the end of the lobby to the Crystal Room, where people are arranging the tables and chairs in a crescent facing the podium in preparation for tonight’s séance. Morris follows me, having leapt down after his futile attempt to communicate with me by means of a long, cold fireplace’s cold marble inscription. A photographer, by the looks of him not a local man or tourist but one of those national paparrazzi who have been camping out at the Halfmoon in hopes of shooting me, gives me a second glance, as if to attempt to penetrate my disguise, and I leave quickly in order to avoid another of those situations that had me flipping the bird in the pages of a recent Time magazine.

  I stroll outside, Morris continuing to follow me—and all cat owners know that cats do not follow people as dogs do; it is one of the main differences between canine and feline. Silvia, my Range Rover, rests, long unused these past months of her eighth year, in the Halfmoon’s parking lot alongside a red-white-and-blue van from Fateville’s Channel 7 television station. I am tempted to take Silvia and flee to Stick Around to observe the progress on my house, to watch Clifford Stone and his restorationists make love to it with their scrapers, their sandpaper, their paint remover, and their fancy wallpapering equipment. But I cannot leave Arcaty.