The Name on the Door is Not Mine

by C. K. Stead

  During what remained of his sabbatical year Ashtree’s fame spread, promoted especially by an article Henry Bulov wrote for the Times Literary Supplement. Unused to his work receiving the kind of attention he always believed it deserved, Albie now found the condition of being dead difficult to give up. Casually at first, and then, as time passed, purposefully, he contrived a new life for himself, one which allowed him to keep his death alive. This involved difficulties and sacrifices. Posing as a former anti-Vietnam defector-to-Canada whose previous identity had to remain undisclosed, he had been able to get a teaching post in a minor, though well-endowed, Catholic college. But he was not able to profit by, or to enjoy (except as an observer), Alban Ashtree’s increasing fame. Part of him wanted to reclaim it as his own; a more cautious self recognised that to ‘come back’ might be to lose it.

  ‘I’m like the lover on the Graecian urn,’ he told Henry. ‘He lives for ever because he’s a work of art. But because he’s a work of art he’s not flesh and blood—he can’t kiss the girl.’

  But was he intending to stay dead for ever?—that was what Henry needed to know. He put the question in a way which sounded odd even as he said it: ‘Will you ever come back to life?’

  Ashtree smiled. ‘It’s a hard one, Henry. If I do, there’s going to be hell to pay. A massive critical backlash, wouldn’t you say? That’s why there have to be new poems first, and they have to be good.’

  What he impressed on Henry during that first meeting was that in the meantime his real identity must remain secret. It was not known to anyone—not to Woodlake College, which employed him; not even to the woman in his life, Joy Gates, also a teacher at the college, whose considerable private wealth, Albie hinted, was only one of her many attractions. During the past few years he had acquired a modest reputation as a poet of the Jersey Shore. Woodlake College had issued two small collections of his new work. He gave readings, poetry workshops, was interviewed on local radio and written about in the local papers.

  ‘No one connects my work with Ashtree’s,’ he explained. ‘The new stuff is different. Smaller in scale.’ There was a look of uncertainty as he said this. ‘Tighter. Closer to the knuckle.’

  After a short silence, which Henry couldn’t think how to plug, Albie murmured, ‘Hopefully.’

  Henry was to share Albie’s house on the edge of the campus. He was to read the new work, comment on it, prepare for a time when it might seem right to reveal that the two poets, Alban Ashtree and Albie Strong were one; but he was to say nothing until Albie gave the word, which might be soon or might be years away. It was possible even that it might have to wait until he died—in which case Henry would be named as his literary executor. This was something they would discuss. Together they would arrive at a strategy.

  ‘I need someone to tell me how I’m going with my work,’ Albie said when the meal was eaten and they were sitting over their decafs. ‘You’re the critic I can trust, Henry. The only one.’

  Again there was that uncertain look, but also a glimmer of courage. ‘You have to give it to me straight, man.’

  IN THE DAYS SINCE that first meeting Henry has begun to understand why Albie’s confidence is less than perfect. With his real name and nation has gone, it seems, his real strength as a poet. Away from Canada and the northern wastes that were his inspiration, Alban Ashtree’s talent has shrivelled. As poet of the Jersey Shore, he is Samson after the haircut. What remains of his former strength is a sort of sad afterglow.

  He is also away from Libby Valtraute, his Muse, with her red-gold hempen hair. He misses her, still loves her. Henry gets the impression that contact has been re-established; that she knows Albie’s secret and is party to his plans.

  So the visit, embarked on with such enthusiasm, has turned into a trial of character for Henry. Should he be truthful, and if so when? When a poet says, ‘You have to give it to me straight, man,’ is he to be taken at his word? Even if he means it, that’s not to say he won’t react badly when he gets it. And wouldn’t the truth be like a death sentence? It would be saying in effect, ‘Don’t come back to life if you want Alban Ashtree’s reputation to continue.’ Because the new work would cast a doubt over the old. It would also cast a doubt over the value of the critical essays (mostly Henry’s) that had promoted it.

  But there are more immediate problems for Henry. Albie is not easy to share a house with. More precisely, Albie is extremely difficult to share anything with. All day, when he’s not teaching, he sits at a desk in his room, hammering away at an old-fashioned typewriter in furious bursts interspersed with long silences and occasional eruptions of swearing, or singing, or muttering, or laughing—the latter a kind of dark laughter, more sinister than the swearing and muttering. Albie, Henry writes in the journal he is keeping, is a sort of Glenn Gould of the lexical clavier.

  At intervals of about half an hour the poet jumps from his chair and rushes either to the front porch or to the kitchen. On the porch he has set up his bench press and weights. The lifting is accompanied by huge orgasmic groans and sighs. When the rush is to the kitchen he fills a bowl with fat-free granola and a fat-free fruit-yoghurt drink, downs it at speed, and returns to his room and his desk. There are no regular meals, but if Henry wants them he can take them at the university dining room.

  ‘This is better than my old regimen,’ Albie explains, leaning against the door jamb of Henry’s room while he spoons out the last of a bowlful. ‘Before Joy I only used to eat every second day. The starvation days were hell. You wouldn’t have liked living with me then.’

  Albie works till late, then unfolds an ironing board and stands at it while he watches a replay of the old Star Trek series. He irons not only shirts and handkerchiefs but underclothes, sheets, pillowcases, towels—everything. When there’s nothing left, he re-irons clothes already done. The ironing, Henry has come to recognise, is only because Albie needs something to do, can’t sit still while watching.

  Then he takes sleeping pills, puts a rolled towel across his bedroom door, and turns on what he calls ‘radio static’, a sort of white noise, to drown out all external sound. When Henry gets up in the night to go to the bathroom he hears that strange loud continuous hissing coming from Albie’s bedroom. Fortunately Albie is not there all the time. There are days and nights when, as now, he is at Joy Gates’s house, twenty miles away in a town called Brick. Then Henry has only to cope with the loneliness of the little suburban house at the edge of the campus, a house in which the furnishings and pictures provided by the nuns, sober, dull, proper, self-abnegating (and including by way of uplift only a golden Christ on a midnight-blue cross over the living-room door), fight a Cold War with the items Albie has introduced—a Tiffany lampshade over an art deco dining table in black glass on a red central column; a shiny red plastic wall-hanging representing an English telephone box; an Algonquin shield and spear; several big-faced 1940s electric clocks advertising dairy products, motor oil, piston rings; a white sofa with red cushions; a telephone in transparent plastic which lights up in blue when it rings; a print from the Utamaro brothel series. Slowly the sensibility of Albie is winning its interior-decor war against the pale restraining hands of the Sisters of Mercy, but there are battles yet to be fought and in the meantime no truce is in prospect. The Joseph House, as it is called, is not a house of peace.

  Henry leaves it to walk to the supermarket. By now the ploughs have done their work on the roads, and the pavements are partly cleared, but patches of ice make the going on foot slow and dangerous. Up and down the street men are out with shovels. Without exception they are dressed in black with broad-brimmed hats, some with a long lock of hair trailing somewhere over face or neck. These are Hassidic Jews, and the suburb is full of them. Their wives wear wigs so their hair will not be seen by strangers, their children are innumerable, their cars are large old station-wagons with many dents, and their lawns are covered with plastic toys in bright colours sticking up like wreckage through the whiteness of the snow. The Hassidim are devoted t
o prayer and propagation, but also (Albie’s Random House Dictionary informs Henry) to joy. Their responses to his morning greetings, however, are mostly grim and formal. He is not one of them.

  It is almost two miles to the shops—far enough for Henry’s ears to feel the cold painfully. He buys fruit and cheese and chocolate and wine. At the liquor store he checks his ticket in the New Jersey lottery. He has not won a prize; but the storekeeper tells him there is a huge jackpot coming.

  By now the ears have thawed and he is ready for the long march back.

  Joy Gates, the woman in Albie’s life, is a glamorous, energetic divorcee, a woman in her forties who wins Henry’s approval not by cleverness (though she may well be clever, and probably is) nor by charm (though he’s quite sure she could charm if she chose), but simply by smiling. Joy’s smile is warm, wry and self-sufficient. It seems to come from good health, self-acceptance, and an inner electrical charge. No doubt, Henry reflects, it could be defeated, but the circumstances would have to be dire—flood, famine or slaughter.

  Joy seems, in her egocentric way, to love her poet and to do all she can to promote his work. She doesn’t live with him, however, except overnight, or sometimes for two nights on end, and Henry understands why. No one, not even Joy Gates, could live for long with Albie and keep smiling.

  Today, a Saturday, is Joy’s mother’s seventy-fifth birthday, and they are to take her to New York to see a matinee performance of a play by Edward Albee, Three Tall Women. Joy has ordered a white stretch limo as part of the birthday treat, and it arrives at the Joseph House a few minutes early. Joy’s mother, Gay, is already in the car. They will drive next to the town of Brick to pick up Joy and Albie, and then on up to New York. The driver is wearing a suit and bow tie. ‘Do you have boots, sir?’ he asks at the door.

  Henry says he doesn’t need them.

  The driver frowns, looking at the path deep in snow. ‘I’ll try to clear some of this while you’re getting ready, sir.’

  Henry tells him not to be silly. ‘Wait in the car and keep warm.’ But when he emerges the driver is waiting on the porch with a golf umbrella. His eagerness, and the size and whiteness of the stretch, which seems at one moment to vanish into the snow, at another to be materialising out of it, signal generous expense. This is something grander than the Gofar Limo Company. Joy is turning it on for her aged parent.

  Inside the limo there are two pairs of leather chairs, facing one another. There is a drinks cabinet, and ice. Gay, in furs and a fur hat, has a face that must once have been pure Hollywood and is still glamorous. She introduces herself, they shake hands and he wishes her a happy birthday.

  ‘Happy birthday?’ she repeats, puzzled. And then, ‘Oh yes. Sure.’ She laughs, revealing a perfect bow of upper teeth, all her own.

  It is Saturday and the Jews are walking to the Synagogue in family clusters, not along the sidewalks but in the middle of the suburban street where the snow ploughs have made the deepest impression. The men have shed their broad-brims and are wearing immense fur hats out of Russia or central Europe. The limo crawls behind them. When it tries to go around them there are angry shouts and gestures of protest.

  When they get out of the Hassidic suburb and on to the highway Gay begins to tell stories about Joy’s infancy. ‘She didn’t creep like other children. At eight months she just got up and walked. Her first words were, “I do it.”’

  ‘I do it?’

  ‘I do it,’ Gay says, putting the emphasis in the right place. ‘She was always very independent.’

  Yes. Henry can imagine that.

  ‘From the time she was seven,’ Gay goes on, ‘I never had to manage money. Joy looked after it. When we went shopping, she had the purse. If I bought something, she paid. If I wanted something too expensive, she told me I couldn’t have it—there wasn’t enough in the purse.’

  ‘From the age of seven,’ Henry repeats, not disbelieving, but by way of showing that though his eyes are on the woods and the river and the white, transformed landscape, he is listening. He is aware that Gay must be a widow. He asks about her husband.

  ‘He was a Sioux,’ she tells him. ‘A beautiful man with a fine body. He was a pilot.’

  ‘So Joy’s father was an Indian …’ He corrects himself. ‘A Native American …’

  But Gay is shaking her head. ‘Joy’s father was Samuel. Walter was the Sioux.’

  ‘He was your second husband?’

  ‘My third,’ she replies, and then appears uncertain. In any case Henry is not sure whether they are now talking about Samuel or Walter.

  ‘What did he—Joy’s father—do so to speak.’

  Gay’s eyes have gone dreamy with reminiscence. ‘He was a beautiful man, a pilot, and I lost him …’

  But wasn’t it the Sioux who was the pilot? He gives it up. ‘I’ve heard good things about this play,’ he says.

  She sighs, still sad at the thought of Walter. ‘Is there an orange juice in there?’ She is pointing to the drinks cabinet.

  He opens it and finds what she wants, a bottle, up to its neck in ice. ‘I won’t have it now,’ Gay says. ‘Later.’

  He pushes it back into the ice. ‘Drinks can make you think you need to eat,’ Gay says. ‘I eat only once a day, in the morning, and it’s all I need. It’s how I kept slim. Of course,’ she acknowledges, ‘I’m not so slim now …’

  She is not slim, it’s true, and he lets this invitation to contradict her pass. There is a long, thoughtful silence. Snow has begun to drift down again, and now she is telling him what she cooks for that one meal. There are many items, and she explains in what special way each of them is nutritious.

  He stops listening. And then, ‘Yes,’ he hears her say. ‘A play. He’s a talented boy isn’t he?’

  Henry wonders how to deal with this. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I drifted off for a moment. Who is talented?’

  ‘Albie.’

  ‘Albie, of course. His poetry …’

  ‘His poetry. And now his play.’

  His play? Has she confused Albie and Edward Albee? To get it clear which of them is confused, Henry asks, ‘What did you say Joy’s father did for a living?’

  ‘Samuel,’ she says, in a tone both firm and dismissive, ‘worked for my father. He was an instructor.’

  They are driving now into the town of Brick, and she makes him promise he will not let Joy know that she has told him things about her infancy. Albie and Joy are waiting at the door of Joy’s townhouse.

  Before they leave Brick, Albie gets the driver to stop at a shop that sells tickets in the state lottery. There’s a jackpot draw coming that’s to be worth at least 17 million. They each put in five dollars. That will give them twenty shots at the pick-six. Albie comes back waving the tickets. ‘Seventeen million among four,’ he says. ‘That’s four each with a million over for a party.’

  He stuffs them into his bill-fold.

  ‘I might go on a world cruise,’ Gay says. ‘I’ve never been to foreign places.’ She stares out at the snow. ‘Or maybe Miami.’

  ‘Los Angeles for you, Mom,’ Joy says. ‘Hollywood. They’ll put you straight into a movie. You’ll be a star.’

  Gay says, ‘When I was young that’s what everyone told me. Go to Hollywood, they said. You’ve got the looks. You’ll be a star.’

  ‘With four million,’ Albie says, ‘you could be a star without doing the movie. You could just buy yourself a big house in Brentwood and throw parties.’

  Gay purrs. ‘I’d like that.’

  Albie is restless as they drive on. He keeps checking their speed, the distance covered, the time the play is due to start, and on his iPad the state of roads and weather. He takes ice from the drinks cabinet and sucks or chews it, presses it to his wrists and along the back of his neck. As they get nearer to New York Gay becomes excited. It’s a long time since she has seen the city, which was once her home. She recognises landmarks—fuel depots, derelict warehouses, refineries, generators, ash heaps, wreckers’ yards—gree
ting them as if they were things of great beauty. When they come out of the tunnel into Manhattan she lowers her window.

  ‘Halloo, New York!’ she shouts up at the skyscrapers. ‘Hi there, New York! Halloo!’

  She turns her face to them, at once smiling and tearful. ‘Ah, New York,’ she says. ‘Isn’t it great? And Gene Kelly had to go and die on me. That was a man I would have married.’

  The Edward Albee play turns out to be about an unpleasant old woman, attended in the first half by a sadistic nurse and an angry lawyer. These are the three women of the title, and they are named in the programme as A, B and C. There is a lot about A’s imperfect control of her bodily functions, and at the end of the act she suffers a stroke. In the second half A, B and C represent A’s three selves, old, middle-aged and young. Her sex life is recounted—a beautiful teenage experience, unappetising marital sex, and a brief violent affair with a groom in her husband’s stables. Throughout this half of the play A, the terminal stroke victim whose earlier selves these three now represent, lies unconscious in a big bed wearing an oxygen mask.

  It is hardly a play to celebrate a woman’s seventy-fifth birthday and Henry feels such embarrassment at what seems like a bad mistake he finds it difficult to concentrate. During the second half he’s relieved to see that Gay has fallen asleep. Joy rolls her eyes at him across her mother seated between them, as if to signify that she too is embarrassed. But as they come out of the theatre Gay seems refreshed and cheerful. ‘Did you write that about me?’ she asks Albie.