Novelists

by C. P. Boyko

  Then there were the insects. The countryside was infested with insects—and not just the aloof, industrious kind, but intrusive, predatory bugs, bugs with feelers and pincers and poison sacs, bugs too large to kill and too small to see. She was covered with their bites. Every time a breeze or a breath stirred a hair on her skin she slapped and clawed at the spot, but the scurrying, burrowing insect was always too quick for her.

  “Look.” She rolled up her sleeve and rotated her arm under Terence’s eyes like meat on a spit. “Bed bugs.”

  “They look like mosquito bites.”

  “They’re itchier. And bed bugs bite in a line. See?”

  “I don’t think two points make a line.”

  But Madison, who was more mathematical, explained impatiently that all you needed to define a line was two points. And in any case, she had seen them: little red-eyed crabs scuttling along the perimeter of the mattress like jingoistic soldiers patrolling a border. When she had exposed them to the light they had stared up at her balefully before disappearing into the seams.

  All the wildlife here treated her abominably. The birds would not shut up; they did not sing so much as repeatedly clear their throats, like old men with catarrh. One had even flown in through an open window, squawked and thrashed about in the rafters for a few minutes, then flown back out—a message from the avian mafia, presumably. Squirrels too she discovered made horrific chittering noises to unhinge their enemies, and deer (she had seen a deer outside her window one dawn) stared at her with unmistakable malice as they tore out and chewed grass, as if to say: This could be your head. Even the dogs and the cats here had gone feral, and evidently recently. They still wore their collars, but with an air of bitter irony, like a bag lady sporting a broken wristwatch or a homeless former millionaire sleeping in his suit jacket. They were gaunt and scarred and dirty, their teats and testicles dangled obscenely, and they looked at Madison with weary resentment as one more thing they could not eat. She might have felt sorry for them if she weren’t so afraid of them.

  The people she did feel sorry for. They were so friendly they seemed servile—as if everyone in the countryside were angling for a good tip. There were not many cars on the roads, but what drivers there were treated Terence and Madison, as pedestrians, with the deference one might show a mad bull. Once she had gone into the pharmacy to buy condoms (just another item on the grocery list now) and found the pharmacist drinking a can of soda. When she spoke to him he threw the can, which was far from empty, into a garbage bin—as if he had been caught doing something disreputable, as if anything that might divert any part of his attention from her assistance was disreputable. And whenever she and Terence visited the restaurant, the family who ran the place insisted on seating them at the family’s own table, which they vacated with gestures of grateful renunciation—though there were plenty of other tables, and the family had not finished eating, and their table was too big for Terence and Madison, and it certainly did not require seven people to prepare and serve a meal for two. But those who were not engaged in the effort stood at a maximally respectful distance and smiled and nodded with groveling approval at the young couple’s every choice, then with hopeful solicitude at their every bite.

  She told herself that it was not the locals’ fault, any more than in olden times it had been a slave’s fault that he called his owner “sir.” They were servile because they had been subjugated for so long. Generations of bad food, bad plumbing, bad dentistry, and insects had left them weak, dull-witted, docile, and industrious. They were like poor dumb beasts of burden who didn’t even recognize their plight.

  Clearly it was the novelist’s job to rescue these creatures from the mire. But how was it to be done? She grappled with the problems that beset every didactic novelist. How to praise good and condemn evil while telling a fictional story, which does neither? The easiest way would be to create a mouthpiece character who could do the praising and condemning for her, in forceful soliloquy or Socratic dialogues with doubters. But how could she signal to the reader that these were in fact her ideas; how could she persuade the reader to take her mouthpiece seriously? Perhaps by making him likeable? But different readers, surely, found different sorts of characters likeable. She did not want to alienate those who, for example, found politeness, or eloquence, or good looks distasteful; she did not want to alienate anyone. It could not be avoided: she would have to dramatize.

  But now the difficulties multiplied. Obviously, the good to be praised and the evil to be condemned must be particularized, must be personified. But once she rendered the good people good and the bad bad it began to seem implausible that the good would ever have let themselves become victims of the bad, who were obviously their inferiors. In order to make her victims believable, it seemed necessary to make them at least ignorant, or fearful, or weak—that is, less than perfectly good. Or she could hope to elicit the reader’s compassion by making the hero-victims as frail and innocent and frightened as babes in a darkling wood; but then it became difficult to imagine them fighting their way out from under their oppression. And they had to fight. She couldn’t simply give the villain a change of heart, or he would become the sympathetic character, the hero. No, the villain must be blackly and unrepentantly evil, and must in the end receive his comeuppance. That much was certain. But then a still more thorny question arose: Who was the villain? To be specific, who was responsible for the misery and stupidity of rural life? She did not know. But never mind; the personifications were symbolic, not actual. In the end she made her hero an honest overworked farmer who said little but expressed his dissatisfaction through sarcasm, and her villain a slick manipulative lawyer hired by a conglomerate of highway builders to bribe or drive off farmers from their land. She showed he was evil by making him chuckle a lot and lust after the farmer’s wife. Nevertheless, she felt that with each page and passing day her thesis was becoming more and more obscured by a fog of dialogue, characterization, and event. She was also bemused by the fact that the lawyer, by buying the farmer off, would seem to be saving him from the wretchedness of country living. In order to get any work done at all, she had to thrust these doubts from her mind—but they were persistent, like affectionate dogs nuzzling the very hand that pushed them away.

  Terence, still lying in bed, had a somewhat different idea of the novelist’s job. He felt that writing had less to do with the crafting of sentences, the making up of stories, or the imparting of wisdom than with the sampling, the encountering, the undergoing of pure experience. The novelist’s job was to live. He had to go out into the world as if deciding whether or not to buy it; he had to taste it, sniff it, heft it, palpate it, rub himself up against it, turn it upside down and let its contents wash over him; then, and only then, could he return to his garret sanctum and write about it, exactly as he had perceived it. The novelist experienced life so others would not have to. He was a sort of inverted Jesus figure: instead of dying for humanity, he lived for it. It was therefore his sacred duty to do and feel everything that a human being could possibly do or feel. He could reject no pleasure or pain that came his way, and must seek out all those that did not come his way. He must walk every path, learn every song, love every kind of person that had ever been born. Terence, still lying in bed, did not feel as if he were getting much work done here in the countryside either.

  But he refused to feel guilty. It was not his fault that there was nothing to do here. Despite his lassitude—or because of it—he had walked every dusty inch of the village, read every sign, looked into every shop, and spoken to every yokel in a ten-mile radius. From Frederickson at the hotel pub he had learned how to play pinochle; from Eloise the school librarian he had learned finger knitting; Hastington, who had taken over Old Jastvyk’s farm, had taught him how to operate a combine harvester; Patchmatt had given him an introduction to the principles of compound pharmacology; Webbing next door had instructed him on the advantages of organic gardening; and Bubbie Katiele at th
e restaurant had inflicted upon him, in overlapping installments, all six nations and eighty-nine years of her life story. Hours and hours of useless talk! Not one thing Terence could write about! Yet he drank it all in with desperate distaste, like a man dying of thirst guzzling sea water. His boredom drove him first towards the locals, then away from them, sent him careening like a pinball from one tedious lesson or tale to the next. Sometimes the momentum of the repulsion carried him right out of town and into the surrounding fields and woods.

  It was the end of summer. Insects clicked and whistled and buzzed in deafening profusion, sounding when he closed his eyes like thousands of ramshackle refrigerators. The brittle yellow grasses held their seed pods out to the wind, which never came. The brown trees creaked like floor joists; their brown leaves shook their heads slowly, No, no, no. The dry earth gave off waves of languorous heat at the exact pulse rate of his own heart. All of nature seemed to be slowly drawing and holding its last fevered breath, before the long lingering death rattle.

  He lay down in the tall grass beneath the trees and watched the branches sail across the sky and wondered what it would be like to be dead. Not so bad, he thought, and fell asleep.

  Madison awoke to the sound of screams. She was half out of bed before she realized that it was not the babies screaming, but Terence.

  She was about to punch him awake—but he was already quiet. She loosened her fists and lay back down, congratulating herself on her self-control and her compassion. Then she changed her mind, and her forbearance became vicious. She only refrained from pummeling him so that he’d get pummeled worse by his nightmares. This was the third night in a row he’d woken her and the babies (the babies were probably awake and getting ready to bawl any moment now!), and with the ear infections and the teething none of them could afford to lose any more sleep. If he was going to wake them all up without even waking himself, the least he deserved was troubled dreams. Then she felt a pang of conscience and changed her mind again. He was the one to be pitied, after all; they were his nightmares, his screams. And they were not his fault. She decided to stand vigil over his slumber and shake him gently at the first sign of any further distress. But, alas, none came. His face was placid, his body limp and soft. Even as she drifted back to sleep her resentment returned. He made her worry for nothing!

  When morning came she found herself in a bad mood, which at first she tried to defuse with physiological explanations. She had not slept; she had not eaten; she needed a coffee. But the line between internal and external causation is a thin one, and soon she was crossing it. Why, after all, hadn’t she slept? Or eaten? Or had her morning cup of coffee? The answer was not far to seek.

  “Sorry,” said Terence. “I didn’t realize this was the last cup. I’ll make some more.”

  But she didn’t want more; she wanted her original share. Was that too much to ask? Then she realized that she was being unreasonable, and tried to withdraw peacefully from the incipient argument by waiving her rights. She’d changed her mind, she said; she didn’t want any coffee after all. But Terence saw this as a martyr’s pose, and insisted irritably that it was no trouble. He got up and began banging pots and spoons and coffee tin. She did not like being made to feel like a moody, demanding, manipulative prima donna, and ordered him to stop. Terence threw his hands in the air and reeled about the kitchen, slapping the floor with his feet, unable to believe that they could be fighting about something as stupid and petty as who had drunk the “last” cup of coffee. Madison began to explain that that was not what they were arguing about at all, but before she could get the words out she was overwhelmed by insulted indignation. Did he really think she was the sort of bird-brained nag who picked a fight over something as silly as that?

  “Why are you yelling at me?”

  “I’m not yelling!” she yelled.

  Terence made choking spluttering noises, tried to detach his head from his spinal column, threw his cup of coffee at the wall, and juddered like an unbalanced washing machine across the apartment and out the door—which he took care to slam, so the neighbors would know who the wronged party was.

  After this she stopped trying to defuse her bad mood and started instead to fortify and embroider it with justifications. These came readily to mind, in orderly single file, as if they had been waiting in the wings for their cue.

  First there was the matter of money. There wasn’t enough of it. She could not believe how much more things cost when you were buying for four people; surely something more nefarious than straightforward multiplication was involved. Even well before the arrival of the babies, she and Terence had stopped going out to dinner, movies, or concerts altogether, because she could not accept that the price of these outings should be, for a couple, double what it had been for herself as a single woman.

  Terence, of course, refused to worry about finances—which was why she had to; and that was why he didn’t have to. It wasn’t fair. She wasn’t parsimonious by nature, and didn’t appreciate being cast in the role of tightfisted housewife. She hated what he had made her become. And she didn’t find it helpful when he advised her to “relax.”

  She wasn’t allowed to fret about money because she wasn’t bringing any in: it wasn’t her parents who supported them, but Terence’s. But Mr. and Mrs. Loach, she was sure, had never intended to support them, only to help them out a little. Anyway no one could seriously expect four people to subsist solely on what the Loaches gave them. When Madison tried to suggest this to Terence he became defensive, and twisting her words, said that if she had such an overpowering lust for luxury she could get a job as easily as he could, more easily, probably—implying by his tone that there was something sordid about being employable. She would almost have considered it, just to get out of the house and away from him and the squalling babies occasionally, if not for her resolute sense of fair play. She was not going to be the only breadwinner, by God. She was not going to support his leisure with her labor. Though he claimed to be working on a novel (the same novel he had been working on for three years?), she no longer considered novel-writing real work, because she knew there was no money in it. Her own novel had been politely rejected by every single publisher she had sent it to. Did Terence think he’d have better luck? If he needed a hobby, let him pursue it in the evenings and weekends like every other responsible father. And would it kill him to mind his own children once in awhile? And what did he have to be having nightmares about anyway?

  Meanwhile, Terence’s rage had passed. It had served its purpose: it had got him out of the house. Consciously and officially, he could only write at home; but in actuality he found it nearly impossible. For one thing, he was easily distracted, and was inclined to blame this on the little sounds his family made. Even when the babies were sleeping, he could (he believed) hear their boisterous breathing in the next room. He certainly could hear Madison flipping the pages of a book—which she did with infuriating irregularity, so he could not even get used to it, as one could with a clock or a dripping faucet. When, from time to time, the apartment did fall silent, the suspense became deafening. He could still feel their presence on the other side of the wall; it seeped into his consciousness like a black fog, and made him feel watched and hovered over and judged. He could never forget that he was not alone, and no one, he believed, could write unless he was utterly, absolutely alone. But when Madison did take the babies out for a walk or a doctor’s appointment, his relief was so great that all tension left his body; he became too limp to move or even think. He basked bonelessly in the sensation of freedom and possibility that solitude brought, and dreamed of all he would do if only he had more hours like this. Then he would spend the rest of his idyll, however long it might last, regretting that it must end so soon. So that by the time he heard Madison return, cautiously scraping her key in the lock and loudly shushing the babies, he let out a sigh almost of gratitude—for no one likes to wait long to have their pessimism vindicated.

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nbsp; Thus it was only when Terence contrived to get himself expelled from this writer’s paradise that his outrage at the injustice and inconvenience became great enough to actually spur him to work. He entered a noisy café or crowded pub and gawped, appalled, at the hardship he had been reduced to—then sat down and began spitefully to write.

  He was spiting his parents, who with their paltry allowance had finally chained him to the life of mediocrity and muddle they had always wanted for him. He was spiting Madison’s parents, who looked at him as if he had raped their daughter, and who wouldn’t even acknowledge their grandchildren until Madison completed her worthless university degree. He was spiting the babies, who smelled bad and made a lot of noise. And he was spiting Madison, who had become the very things she had once mocked: bland, timid, and drearily conventional; flustered, hectoring, and house-proud. She who had once said that the most important thing was to live with intensity and integrity now scolded him for putting leftovers in the fridge before they had cooled sufficiently, and nagged him to get a job. A job!

  How had it happened? Who was to blame? Had she lied to him, had he lied to her, had they both lied to themselves? Had everything changed, or had they merely been blind to realities? As his spite modulated gradually into melancholy, his pen began to move more slowly, and he settled into a contemplative, reminiscing rhythm. The novel he was writing was about the countryside.