Erasure

by Percival Everett

  “I’m sure we’ll discover each other’s tastes and show due respect,” Harnet said.

  Jon Paul Sigmarsen laughed and said, “I plan to do a lot of my reading while ice fishing.”

  “How much ice do you usually catch?” Tomad said.

  Tomad and Sigmarsen laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Hoover asked.

  “I have a question,” Sigmarsen said. “How does one judge a novel against a collection of stories? I mean, if a novel has a bad chapter, then it’s a flawed novel. But if all the stories in a book are great except one, then it’s still a great book. Do you see what I mean, what I’m getting at?”

  “That’s a good question,” Tomad said.

  “What question is that?” Hoover asked.

  “About stories and novels,” Harnet said.

  “Oh, yes, I suppose we’re to read them both,” Hoover said.

  “Ellison, you haven’t said anything,” Hoover said. “Ellison?”

  “I’m here.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Nothing yet. I haven’t seen any books. How often are we supposed to meet, on the phone or otherwise?”

  “They’ve left that up to us,” Harnet said. “But I have a plan. I suggest we talk in three weeks just to compare preliminary notes.”

  “We should meet in a couple of weeks to see if anything great has shown up,” Hoover said. “I hear Riley Tucker has a book coming out. And Pinky Touchon.”

  “You know, somebody got a picture of her the other day,” Tomad said.

  “Who?” Hoover asked.

  “Touchon,” Tomad said. “In was in the Chronicle. It seems Pinky lives here in San Fran and no one even knew.”

  “I heard it’s a big book,” Hoover said.

  “I heard that as well,” said Sigmarsen.

  “In a couple of weeks then?” I said.

  What some people would have you believe is that Duchamp demonstrated that art could be made out of anything, that there is nothing special about an objet d’art that makes it what it is, that all that matters is that we are willing to allow it to be art. To say, This is a work of art, is a strange kind of performative utterance, as when the king knights a fellow or the judge pronounces a couple man and wife. But if it turns out that the marriage license was incorrectly filled out, then the declaration is undone and we will say, “I guess you’re not husband and wife after all.” But even as it’s thrown out of the museum, what has been called art, it is still art, discarded art, shunned art, bad art, misunderstood art, oppressed art, shock art, lost art, dead art, art before its time, artless art, but art nonetheless.

  I’m reminded of the parrot in the house, which when he hears a knock at the door says, “Who is it?” The man knocking answers, “It’s the plumber.” The door remains closed and so he knocks again. “Who is it?” the parrot asks. “The plumber.” Knock, knock. “Who is it?” “The plumber!” This goes on until the crazed knocker breaks through the door, falls onto the carpet below the parrot’s perch, has a heart attack and expires. The residents of the home return to find the man stretched out on their floor. “Who is it?” the wife asks. The parrot says, “The plumber.”

  The question is of course, does the parrot answer the woman’s query? And of course he does and he doesn’t. He’s a parrot.

  Rauschenberg: Here’s a piece of paper, Willem. Now draw me a picture. I don’t care what it is a picture of or how good it is.

  de Kooning: Why?

  Rauschenberg: I intend to erase it.

  de Kooning: Why?

  Rauscbenberg: Never mind that. I’ll fix your roof in exchange for the picture.

  de Kooning: Okay. I believe I’ll use pencil, ink and grease pencil.

  Rauschenberg: Whatever.

  (4 weeks later)

  Rauschenberg: Well, it took me forty erasers, but I did it.

  de Kooning: Did what?

  Rauschenberg: Erased it. The picture you drew for me.

  de Kooning: You erased my picture?

  Rauschenberg: Yes.

  de Kooning: Where is it?

  Rauschenberg: Your drawing is gone. What remains is my erasing and the paper which was mine to begin with.

  (Shows de Kooning the picture)

  de Kooning: You put your name on it.

  Rauschenberg: Why not? It’s my work.

  de Kooning: Your work? Look at what you’ve done to my picture.

  Rauschenberg: Nice job, eh? It was a lot of work erasing it. My wrist is still sore. I call it “Erased Drawing.”

  de Kooning: That’s very clever.

  Rauschenberg: I’ve already sold it for ten grand.

  de Kooning: You sold my picture?

  Rauschenberg: No, I erased your picture. I sold my erasing.

  The books began to arrive, boxes of them. At first I could not open a single one, but was taken by them as objects. The covers were all so attractive. The jacket copy made each one sound great, blurbs from established literary icons told me why I should like it. The fat books were praised for being fat, the skinny books were praised for being skinny, old writers were great because they were old, young writers were talents because of their youth, every one was startling, ground-breaking, warm, chilling, original, honest and human. I would have found refreshing:

  Jo Blow’s new novel takes on the mundane and leaves it right where it is. The prose is clear and pedestrian. The moves are tried and true. Yet the book is not so alarmingly dishonest. The characters are as wooden as the ones we meet in real life. This is a torturous journey through the banal. The novel is ordinary but not insipid, pointless but not meaningless, savorless but not stale.

  Jo Blow is a middle aged writer with a family and no discernible special features. He lives in a house and is about as smart as his last novel.

  So, I opened the first book and I loved it. Actually, I enjoyed reading. The book sucked. But I did enjoy reading it and so I read another and another. I read three in one night and the better part of the next day. All three were sterile, well-constructed, predictable fare. I decided that perhaps I was jaded. I was familiar with novels the way a surgeon is familiar with blood. I would have to contact my innocent, inner self, the part of me that could be amazed by the dull and commonplace.

  As I was leaving the house to visit Mother, the telephone rang.

  She said, “Wanna fuck?”

  “Linda?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  Linda Mallory. I considered her name. And as she spoke, saying things that I could not remember because I was not listening, I realized that my life was in need of a gratuitous sex scene. My mind required a new source of guilt, as Mother’s failing condition had justified her placement. And even as I decided to pursue that guilt, I also sought to assuage it by reminding myself that Linda very much was using me. I caught in her stream of language that she was in Washington.

  “Where are you staying?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the Mayflower again.”

  “I’ll be there at seven. How’s that for you?”

  “That’s fine,” she said, skeptically. “Monk? This is Monk Ellison, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Seven.”

  “Seven is great.”

  Mother’s incontinence had become more pronounced and though she seemed strong enough to move herself around, she chose not to. When I arrived, the attending nurse and an orderly were changing the sheet while my mother lay in the bed. She was uncovered from the waist down and while the orderly pulled away the soiled sheets, the nurse wiped the mess from my mother’s skin. I turned away and stepped back into the corridor, still seeing Mother’s head rolling toward me and her vacant eyes pointing my way. She was so far from the woman who had told me once that listening to Mahler made her see colors right before she cried. “I see autumn in the fourth symphony,” she said. “Ashen greens giving way to reds and ochre while the sky darkens and the night feels cool.” The same woman whos
e shitty ass was being wiped by a woman who didn’t know who Mahler was had said that.

  Linda Mallory was the postmodern fuck. She was self-conscious to the point of distraction, counted her orgasms and felt none of them. She worried about how she looked while making love, about how her expression changed when she started to come, whether she was too tight, too loose, too dry, too wet, too loud, too quiet and she found need to express these concerns during the course of the event.

  “Does my hair look nice splayed out across the pillow?” she asked.

  “It looks fine, Linda.”

  “Am I moving all right, too fast, too slow?”

  “Move however it feels good to you.”

  And so I suspected she did, as she screamed into my face, startling me somewhat and my reaction must have shown, because she said, “Was that too loud? Was I ugly? Oh, my god, I can’t believe I did that. Oh, my god.”

  “It’s okay, Linda. Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Why, don’t I seem all right? Did you come?” She leaned after me as I rolled off her.

  “No.”

  “I can’t believe I screamed like that.” She turned to the nightstand and grabbed a cigarette, lit it.

  “Don’t worry. So, you screamed when you came. That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “I think I came. Yes, that would be good, right?”

  She put her cigarette-free hand down on my penis. I was still hard, but far from excited.

  “Mister Ready,” she said.

  Paying a visit to Linda had been a bad idea and it was still one. I could not simply get dressed and leave, though guiltily I must admit that is exactly what I wanted to do. I harbored no ill feelings toward Linda and in fact respected her enough not to pity her. Oddly, her anxieties were coming across as endearingly comic. Even then, when I first considered that awkward thought I understood my judgment to be mere rationalization, not to have me think better of her, but of myself.

  “Shall we watch a movie?” I asked.

  “Don’t you want to make love again?”

  “I’m afraid you’ve worn me out,” I said. “You’re really quite athletic.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  I used the remote control to turn on the television. Linda nestled her head onto my chest and I was saddened by the fact that I disliked the coconut fragrance of her shampoo. The first image on the screen was a wildcat tearing apart a rabbit. “Change,” she said and I did. “Change.” I did. “Change.” I did and offered her the controller. She refused, said, “No, you hold on to it. Change.” Finally, she had me settle on some noir film with actors I didn’t recognize. She squirmed playfully, as to get more comfortable, then promptly began to snore.

  It was the season of the absent or lazy editor. So many of the novels were needlessly fat. Six were more than nine hundred pages, twelve were better than seven hundred and any one of them would have and could have been, with a modicum of editorial attention, a good four-hundred-page novel. There was an incredibly dense novel from a well-known, reclusive writer of dense novels. There was a nicely crafted and notably lean novel from a writer whose reputation was astonishingly well made. There was a volume of collected stories from a dead writer, a shelf of first novels about fatherly abuse and motherly alcoholism (and the reverse), a mid-list author’s new (but dreadfully old) take on the academic novel, twenty-eight middle America, domestic, where-will-the-children-live novels, forty coming-of-age novels, thirty-five new-life-after-the-wrecked-marriage novels, thirty crime novels, forty so-called adventure novels and six yeah-we’re-Christians-with-chips-on-our-shoulders novels. For the most part the titles received more consideration than the stories or the writing. Still, I found thirty I wished I had written—ten because I would have done a better job. Of ten others I was saddened to admit I could not have written them better. The other ten were simply good, well-crafted, serious, thoughtful.

  At the first conference, one of the judges, I am not to say which one, said, “I’d like to see Rita Totten’s Over My Body on the short list.” When asked why? she said, “For two reasons: because Rita is a good friend of mine and because she got such a scathing review in the New York Times.”

  I pointed out that one could argue that either of those reasons might be enough to keep her off the list.

  Thomas Tomad sighed, “This is Tomad speaking—” (as it was a telephone conference it was kind of him to identify himself) “—and I believe that Totten’s novel is just so much fluff. Filthy fluff, but fluff none-the-less.”

  Another judge: “I’d like to see Richard Wordiman’s book on one of the lists.”

  “Don’t you work with him?” someone asked.

  “Why yes, and although I don’t think it’s his best book, I’d like for him to know that I take his work seriously.”

  “Why don’t we wait until all the books come in?” I asked.

  “Sounds reasonable,” Wilson Harnet said. “This is my suggested course of action. We each compile a list of twenty-five books. Then we see if there’s any overlap. We’ll discuss the list and any book with at least two mentioners goes to the next round. From there we’ll wing it.”

  Tomad: “Sounds good. I’ve already got a couple I’m willing to go to the mat for. There is some gritty stuff out there.”

  Sigmarsen: “Ya, sure. The nature writing is skinny by my standards, but still there are a couple good ones. Toby Lancfugen’s book is remarkable.”

  Hoover: “I didn’t get all of that. Yes, of course. I was surprised to see so many books by such big names. Shouldn’t we just go ahead and put them on the first list?”

  Ellison: “Okay.”

  Christmas came and went. Mother’s body became more fit as her mind failed completely. My editor called my agent with the exciting news that Fuck was going to be released earlier because of the great interest. And even then, when I heard that I would see the book in March, I did not suspect that in January I would open a padded envelope addressed to Thelonius Ellison and find a bound galley of Fuck with the request that it be considered for The Book Award.

  Dilemma: I refused to admit that I, Thelonius Ellison, was also Stagg R. Leigh, author of Fuck. But yet here was the book. I could not disqualify myself, because I would betray my secret.

  Solution: Ignore it. Who in his right mind would consider giving that novel an award?

  Yep.

  I had become a hermit. I had a stack of mail from friends, which I had not opened. I had a stack of letters from people at various universities either requesting letters of recommendation for applicants seeking employment or students seeking admission to programs—such was my conjecture, as all of them remained sealed. I felt guilty about those, more so than the personal ones. From a couple of institutions there were three or four letters and I guessed that they were invitations to give readings. I gave few enough readings, as I found the whole custom rather idiotic. “Read the damn book,” I always wanted to shout and just sit down. Once I considered taking a couple of boxes of books and having the audience read silently while I read silently, then point out that they didn’t need me after all. I was not a popular reader, a fact that never hurt my feelings, but now I could imagine that my failure to even respond to the invitations made me that much more desirable.

  I sat back on the sofa in the study, closed my eyes and imagined a reading given by Stagg Leigh:

  Site: East St. Louis Public Library or the Lansing Public Library or the Worcester Public Library or Borders Bookstore in Philadelphia, Dallas, Jacksonville or Waterstone’s Bookstore in Boston, New York, Chicago.

  Stagg’s outfit: Yellow, baggy, draping wool pants. Black silk shirt with loose sleeves and several buttons at the cuff. A gray, sharkskin blazer, double vented, double breasted with a yellow kerchief peeking from the breast pocket. Gray hose. Tasseled loafers, black.

  or

  Black pants, black shirt, black watch cap, dark glasses, black army boots.

  or

  A colorful dashiki, whit
e trousers, sandals, red fez.

  Stagg is to be introduced by a young white woman, a representative of the Friends of Books Society, Becky Unger. “I’m just so pleased you could come and read for us,” she says privately. “We’d heard that you’re very shy. Oh, I didn’t mean anything by my use of the word ‘shy.’ Private, I meant to say private.”

  “I prefer ‘reclusive,’” Stagg says, his voice barely audible.

  “Reclusive. Okay, then.” The friend of books gets up and steps to the lectern. She clears her throat and the room comes together “Thank you all for coming,” She clears her throat once more. “It is my pleasure to introduce our guest, Mr. Stagg Leigh. I know that many of you have been as eagerly awaiting Mr. Leigh’s reading as I have, so I’ll make this short. Mr. Leigh is the author of an exceptional first novel,” looks at the audience, catches her breath, looks at her hands, then, “Fuck.” Mixed giggles and muttering erupt in the audience. “This first novel is a runaway bestseller and is presently enjoying its third week at number one. I believe that Mr. Leigh lives in Washington, D.C. This book meant so much to me when I read it. It opened my eyes to ways of black life and helped me understand the pain of those people. So, please join me in welcoming Mr. Stagg R. Leigh.”

  Stagg stands and steps to the lectern, acknowledges Ms. Unger with a nod and faces the audience. There are a couple of blue-haired older white women in the front row, nervous-seeming, eyes darting, Stagg says, “Thank you for having me.” His voice is barely audible. The audience leans forward, collectively, hanging on his voice, staring at him. Stagg takes a breath and says,

  “Fuck!” The audience is knocked back into their seats. “—is a true story.” Again his voice is barely loud enough to hear, but they do and they moan their approval. “This novel is not true factually, but it is the true story of what it is like to be black in America. It ain’t pretty.”

  “Here, here,” from a white, bow-tied man in the back.

  “During my time in prison,” a look at the blue-haired ladies, “I learned that words belong to everybody, that I could make my place in this bankrupt society by using my God-given talent with language.”