The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  She and Vernon rarely kept anything from each other (except a few vices and virtues she’s already thought of, above, and a few more she’ll think of soon), not even their innermost thoughts and fantasies (well, of course she’d never told him about sexual daydreams she’d had about his best friend Day Whittacker) and there was only one other thing besides Pyrrhonism that she considered her own private province of knowledge: the fact that she had taught herself enough of the ancient Egyptian language to be able to talk to her cat. Not to converse with it, because the cat had never replied, but to capture and hold its attention in a way she’d never been able to do with English. Or with Japanese or Gaelic, which she’d also tried. Her very large and handsome marmalade tom (altered), which she had named Vernon (why not?) was, like all cats, totally indifferent to the speech sounds of human beings, or pretended to be. Therein was the fundamental difference between dogs and cats.

  She had acquired Vernon (the feline, not the human) from Aunt Latha, who had such an awkward surplus of cats living in and around that old dogtrot log cabin she insisted on keeping despite Vernon’s efforts to provide a much more modern home for his grandmother or, lately as Latha had passed her centennial, to persuade her to move to Jasper into a “residence for assisted living.” Jelena had asked Latha if there was any way to talk to cats, but Latha, who’d been keeping them for a hundred years, said “If there is, they sure do a good job of keeping the secret to themselves.”

  As Vernon (the cat) grew up and became fully developed, and as Jelena’s studies and travels gave her new vocabularies, Jelena tried out French, Gaelic, and Japanese on the cat, to no avail. To accommodate her, Vernon (the man) even tried Osage on the cat. Osage was the only one of Vernon’s several languages that Jelena had never bothered to master, but she trusted that Vernon in speaking it to Vernon was not telling the cat to get lost and never come back. Vernon the cat however was as indifferent to Osage as to any other language.

  Eventually, secretly, keeping the book hidden in the same cabinet she hid her Bible, Jelena had learned how to speak ancient Egyptian, and to her surprise when she said “Miw,” the Egyptian word for cat, Vernon perked up his ears and turned and stared at her with a dumbfounded look. She had seen cats with quizzical looks and curious looks and questioning looks but never a dumbfounded look. So she went on talking to Vernon in Egyptian, and while he didn’t answer he sure paid a lot of attention.

  Once not so long ago Vernon (the man) had overheard her talking to Vernon (the cat) in Egyptian and had asked her what she was saying or what tongue she was using, but she just said that it was just some gibberish she’d invented to attempt to reach Vernon. “Successfully, it would appear,” he remarked.

  This morning she was hanging clothes on the line with wooden clothespins, not plastic, and she was wondering if they would be dry before those people showed up, and she realized that she didn’t care if those people saw the laundry still flapping in the March breeze like a row of singular ensigns. On a whim which was not really a whim, she occasionally eschewed her soundless, hideously expensive nine-cycle moisture-sensor clothes dryer, and instead hung the clothes on this line, not to imitate her Stay More ancestors but simply because that state-of-the-art dryer couldn’t impart to the laundry the scent of fresh air and the scent of sunshine. She spoke in Egyptian to Vernon the cat, who was watching her, “Does sunshine possess a scent?” And he nodded. Those Egyptians knew a lot about the sun.

  This morning she was a bit more careful to use her artistry in hanging the clothes according to color and shape, just in case those people saw them. Thinking of art, she thought of Picasso dangling a cigarette from his mouth while he painted, and she fished the pack of cigarettes out of her apron pocket and smoked one while she worked. The clothesline was too far from the house for Vernon to see her, even if he happened to be looking out his window.

  She was not nervous about those people. Skeptics are imperturbable and she was skeptical that those people would have any luck at all in getting Vernon to change his mind. “What about me?” she said in Egyptian to the cat. “What about my mind?” Vernon (not the cat) had explained to her just who each of these seven people were, how “famous” they were in their respective areas of expertise in the game of campaign politics, which was a vocation requiring incredible powers of persuasion, and she knew that these people were coming here with the full intention of selling them on the idea of occupying that mansion on Center Street in Little Rock where little Chelsea Clinton had grown up. Jelena had used as a handy excuse, to those who had sought her opinion—her best friend Diana, Diana’s husband Day, Uncle George, Vernon’s sister Sharon and her husband Larry, and Aunt Latha—that she simply couldn’t stand the thought of living in the governor’s mansion, not after over thirty years of living in this fantastic twin-orb palace on a mountaintop in the Ozarks.

  When she first saw this house, when Vernon was building it in the Seventies, it scared the daylights out of her. She didn’t see how she could possibly learn to live in such a weird pair of giant balls, and in fact she had bad dreams the first several nights she slept here. But now, after so many years of taking for granted its fabulous comforts and amenities, she didn’t see how she could possibly live anywhere else. Several times, back in the Eighties, when she and Vernon had been visiting Day and Diana and they’d had too much pot or booze to drive home afterwards, they had stayed in that house, a thoroughly cozy traditional house that had been built long ago by that weird old hermit Dan Montross who had been either Diana’s grandfather or father or both. Jelena hadn’t slept well, not because the place was haunted by Montross, but because its walls did not make great curved spheres surrounding and hugging her like her own walls.

  No, she had no intention of living within the boxy walls of the governor’s mansion, where she probably couldn’t find space to set up her darkroom and would have to abandon photography for four years, but that was just her most convenient excuse, sparing her the trouble of elaborating upon her more intense reasons for not wanting to be First Lady of Arkansas. Jelena’s favorite reading matter was biographies, particularly women’s biographies, and she had consumed a ton of books about Sappho and Marie Curie and Sacajawea and Susan B. Anthony and Simone de Beauvoir and George Eliot and Harriet Tubman and Mother Teresa, et al., et alia. But when Vernon moved from philosophy to politics in his program, she began reading biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, Betty Ford, Rosalind Carter, and, more recently, Hillary Rodham Clinton. She understood how much a politician’s wife had to deny her own identity and submerge her own feelings, and she was not ready to do that. Before Vernon abandoned his harebrained notion to run for governor, she’d tried to tell him this, but he had assured her, “That’s not the way I’d see it. We wouldn’t deviate significantly from the way we’ve always been living, together as equals.” But she had doubted that the campaign signs would read “VERNON AND JELENA FOR CO-GOVERNORS.”

  What she disliked most about the whole idea was that the “job” would require of her almost constant contact with the public. She’d have to give speeches to ladies’ garden clubs and church socials. She’d have to shake a lot of hands. She’d have to learn to make polite but meaningless chitchat with anybody who chose to greet her, and she’d have to learn to smile when she didn’t feel like smiling.

  But worst of all, she and her whole life and history would become the property of the people of Arkansas. Their ownership of her would allow them to pry into her relationship with Vernon and into everything she’d ever done in her life. They would know that she’d married at eighteen a loutish Stay Moron named Mark Duckworth who built and maintained eight enormous sheds for the raising of chickens. They would be unmoved by the fact that on her way down the aisle at the church, before Uncle Jackson Ingledew had given her away, she had paused at the spot where ten-year-old Vernon was standing in his first coat and tie, she had stopped beside him and bent down and whispered rather urgently into his ear, “I was going to wait
until you grew up. Will you marry me when you grow up? If you say ‘yes,’ I’ll call off this wedding.” The people of Arkansas would not understand what it had done to her when Vernon had looked at her as if she were only teasing him, but then, understanding that she meant it as seriously as she’d ever meant anything in her life, shook his head and declared, “I will never marry.” The people of Arkansas would not understand just why he’d said that, and they certainly wouldn’t understand how right he was: he had never married, certainly not her.

  There would be people who would want to know what she herself did not know and could not find out: was she possibly a grandmother? Surely, if her two sons had grown to manhood and perhaps even finished college in California or wherever their father had taken them, they had quite possibly married, and somewhere on this earth there might be a beautiful child—or two or three—whose photographs ought to be in Jelena’s wallet for her to show to people. She had nothing whatever against the idea of being a grandmother. If only she knew! She couldn’t stand the suspense. And page after page of her journal was filled with letters she had written to her grandchildren, year by year as they advanced from childhood into adolescence.

  She stepped back to study the clothesline and admire her arrangement. She decided that even if the clothes were dry before those people got here she might leave them hanging anyway, not to let the world know that she still did things by hand but just to add a touch of color and pageantry to these drab March woods. The house itself, the two giant spheres, were a pale white surrounded by the bare trees and bushes in the woods on the eastern bench of the mountain, not even visible from the drive as it crossed the crest of the rise; her clothesline was out in the clearing, in the sunshine, the first thing those people would see when the road brought them off the plateau. Thus, she reflected, if she left the laundry hanging it could serve as a kind of beacon, to let them know they had arrived.

  She stomped out her cigarette and buried the stub, then grabbed up the empty laundry basket (not plastic but wicker) and hiked back to the house, to check on the ovens. In both ovens of her built-in Whirlpool double-oven she had things baking: breads and pies. She was very good at pie. She would be serving a black walnut pie, just like pecan but tastier, made from nuts she’d gathered from their woods, and a cushaw pie, like pumpkin but made from cushaw she’d raised in her garden and canned. One part of that clearing on the mountaintop, which the visitors wouldn’t notice because there was nothing in it this time of the year, and Uncle George was coming up to Rototill it next week, was her vegetable garden, her patently substitute child, to whom she devoted all the love and attention that she had left over when she got through loving and attending Vernon and Vernon. Her orders to Burpee and Shumway and Park had all been filled. When Vernon had built the “annex,” as they called it, to house the sprawling overflow of books as well as her darkroom (and the building was not spherical like the house but conventionally boxy), he had added on the south end of it a greenhouse for her, and she had her plants thriving there already, waiting to be transplanted to the garden later this month and next: heirloom tomatoes, four varieties of pepper, three kinds of eggplant, six kinds of cantaloupe, as well as flowers already blooming. She could not conceive of the state of Arkansas permitting her to convert part of the lawn of the governor’s mansion into a vegetable garden.

  She gave the living room another going-over. She was disturbed by the unusual number of chairs: in order to accommodate the guests, not just their side but our side too (seven of each, which was a fair balance), she had had to borrow some chairs from Diana and from Sharon, and there was an irregular assortment of old ladder-back rush-seated chairs, country rockers, captain’s chairs, and Victorian cabriolets, as well as her own Eames and Barcelona. She could not tolerate clutter; all the books climbing the rounded walls to the domed ceiling were very neatly arranged, their spines lined up, and they were carefully dusted. There were bouquets of glads and mums and dahlias she’d forced in her greenhouse. The omnium-gatherum of furniture seemed chaotic, but on reflection she decided that it might mirror the distinctly individual personalities of all the participants. Jelena had tried to arrange the hodgepodge with two equal focal-point chairs: for Vernon a tall, stately ladder-back which had been made in Stay More in the mid-19t? Century; for Mr. Bolin Pharis an equally stately Hitchcock chair. She had considered but discarded the idea of providing pads of yellow legal paper and pencils; those who wanted to take notes would have to furnish their own.

  Before taking Vernon his lunch, she hiked to the mailbox, back up on the mountaintop where the dirt road met the gravel driveway. It was a big mailbox which said simply “Ingledew” on it, which could have represented either one of them. Today it contained her orders to Coldwater Creek and J. Jill and she couldn’t wait to try on the garments but realized she’d have to postpone it until after the guests had left. It also contained three packages from Amazon.com, and she had her arms full carrying all this back to the house, along with the daily Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a stack of bills and catalogs from Sundance and The Linen Source, and a letter for Vernon from someone in Louisiana named “Monica Breedlove.” Jelena stared at the envelope. They knew several people named Breedlove here in Newton County; it was a common name. Was this one of their displaced cousins?

  Jelena made a BLT on toasted whole wheat and took it with a bottle of Dos Equis up to the “nest,” which was in the upper reaches of the other sphere, which contained their bedroom and the extravagant bathroom (whose shower could accommodate six or seven people although it had never known more than two). The nest was Vernon’s study, where he spent most of his time, usually half-reclined in his Barcalounger with a book in his lap or his computer blazing away. She didn’t worry that he was too sedentary; every day without fail he practiced his Tai Chi and then went for a long hike, sometimes all the way, three miles, down to Stay More, where his vast pork processing factory was sprawled out along the banks of Swains Creek. He also had an elaborate “gym” of exercise machines out in the annex, and he didn’t allow them to collect dust.

  Now she noticed that although he had a stack of books on quantum mechanics on his worktable, what he was actually reading was a volume called Antipolitics by Max Konrad. She handed him his lunch and his beer and his love letter, if that’s what it was. “Who’s Monica Breedlove?” she asked him.

  He studied it and turned it over. “Got me,” he said. “My first thought was it’s Clyde Breedlove’s daughter, but she’s not in Louisiana, and her name isn’t Monica but Mona, I believe.”

  “Open it,” she requested.

  He tore off the end and pulled out the letter. He took a bite of his sandwich and sip of his beer, and began reading it to her.

  Your Excellency. Please don’t laugh. Don’t laugh at my salutation, which is practicing, not facetiousness. And don’t laugh at my name. You may be aware that there are many other people in your part of the country named Breedlove, and my former husband is probably descended from Arkansas Breedloves. I have had lots of experience working in Arkansas for successful gubernatorial candidates, such as Clinton, and unsuccessful ones, such as Bristow. Also I worked for Bill Clinton for years when he was governor, and then after he became president and that Lewinsky child got involved with him, anytime I told people my name or tried to get a job and mentioned that I had once worked for Clinton they would break out laughing, and some of them made crude jokes. You wouldn’t believe the nightmare my life became simply because I was given this name, a perfectly good and pretty name which, by the way, means “advisor,” and that brings me to my reason for writing to you. I am going to become one of your advisors. I am not going to get into your pants or let you into mine. I have many talents that will prove to be very useful to you but none of them involve that sort of thing. I know you are very busy, probably over your head in quantum mechanics already, but please listen to what I have to say.

  Quite possibly you will have already met me before you read this, but if my timing is as good
as it has always been, you will get this letter on the same day, maybe just minutes before, you first lay eyes on me. My good friend Lydia Caple, who as you know also worked for a time in the office of Governor Clinton, and was thus my colleague and dear friend, for whom I would do anything she asked me to, has asked me to join the select group of paladins who will constitute your campaign staff when you storm the statehouse.

  I fully realize that you have elected not to seek election. I understand that we will be meeting with you this afternoon, maybe in just another hour or so, for the purpose of trying to convince you that you really owe it to yourself as well as the people of the great state of Arkansas, to change your mind and resume your previous ambition of learning politics by participating in it.

  You won’t hear me say much if anything this afternoon. I am a shy person, especially when there are a whole bunch of other people present who are much brighter than I. And I understand that it is difficult for you to converse with persons of the opposite sex. So I have to say here and now what I’d want to say to you. Namely that I have this feeling—and I have always trusted my hunches, which have always turned out to be true—that you could become a governor such as this state, this whole nation, has never had before. And that is why I am willing to buckle down and bust my ass for you.

  Yours sincerely,

  Monica C. Breedlove.

  PS The others don’t know I’m writing this to you, so please don’t tell them. See you in a jiffy.

  “Well, how about that?” Jelena said. Vernon did not comment. He was smiling but seemed lost in reflection, as if he were actually touched by her flattery. A governor such as this state has never had before.

  But what he was musing he eventually spoke: “It has a Farmerville, Louisiana, postmark. How could she have known exactly how long it would take to reach me so it would arrive on the same day she does? And how could she know so much about me?”