A (posthumous) collaboration with S_______ would have lifted L_____’s sodden spirits even as it would have lifted his reputation. Not that L_____ cares so much any longer for a “reputation”—at nearly forty-two, he has lived long enough without one.
What had he hoped for then? To live again, through another?—through the elderly S_______?
He thinks: He could give up. He could admit defeat. But he will not admit defeat. He is still alive.
There is much more work to do on the book than L_____ anticipated but perhaps (he tells himself) this is good—good for him in his depressed and morbid state of mind …
He is not so happy with S_______’s editor. A prominent New York editor, much respected.
L_____ has patiently explained to S_______’s editor that he prefers e-mail exchanges to telephone conversations yet the man continues to call him, never less than once a week. This is a particular sort of harassment, L_____ thinks. Oblique but unmistakable.
When the other day the editor called to ask L_____ how his work on the book was “progressing,” L_____ replied with a sardonic laugh, “Well. I’m hoping to stay alive long enough to finish it.”
S_______’s editor was stunned into silence for a long moment, unsure how to respond to this remark.
“I—I don’t understand … Are you ill?”
“No! That was a joke.”
(Not a very witty joke. Immediately L_____ regretted having made it.)
“Well. If you need an extension …”
“Not at all. I will get the revised manuscript to you by”—he named the September first deadline he’d been given.
Thinking—Are they hoping I will give up? Do they know that I am a terminal case?
Thinking—They don’t really want to publish this book. A posthumous author is a lost cause.
Since the library, he avoids the library.
Since the lakeside esplanade, he avoids the lakeside esplanade.
He has become an ascetic. He is scrupulous in denial. He is not a fool to wish to approach a woman he doesn’t know in a public place, who would be repelled by him.
That particular area of Cattaraugus Park near the bandstand, near playground swings, the children’s wading pool, popular on hot summer afternoons and early evenings. He has a fear of encountering people whom he knows, and who might know him.
“I will not. I will.”
And, “Ridiculous. You are risible.”
Risible not a word one commonly uses. Rhymes with visible.
In any case there are other places to walk in our small town. The thick-wooded dead end of Road’s End Lane where dirt paths once made by children (including L_____ and his friends) have mostly grown over. The neatly mowed Lutheran churchyard and the lake itself—the farther, eastern shore of Lake Cattaraugus that is usually deserted.
The grassy stretch along Catamount Road that ends in a marshy field. A dirt lane with narrow dirt paths leading down to the mucky water.
Thinking how, when he was a boy, the eastern shore of Lake Cattaraugus had been a place to fish. Somehow it has happened that, in recent years, the lake water here has become clotted with algae, broken and rotted marsh reeds, cattails, discarded trash; the black bass population has been decimated as the water level of the lake has steadily lowered.
And there are times for walking that are not so dangerous as others. Of course.
In the early evening when (you might suppose) the young silvery-haired woman would be preparing dinner for her family, assuming the young woman is married, and has a family, including children, perhaps a young baby.
Places where a man might walk when he can’t bear his life.
When he can’t fathom his life.
Thinking in derision—Just forget. Oblivion.
He never shuts the slow-moving garage doors any longer. Never troubles to drive his vehicle inside the garage only just to park it at the rear of the house so that no one can see, from the road, whether anyone is home.
Avoids the garage. Detritus of the lost self.
Except once or twice, out of curiosity. (He discovers a beautifully executed birds’ nest of twigs and dried grasses amid the dusty folded curtains.) Wondering if the panicked little birds had found their way out and deciding, yes, they had.
Smiling, he thinks—At least, they’ve escaped and saved themselves.
He knows that he will see the silvery-haired woman again. It is inevitable, for him and for her. But he wishes it would not be inevitable for her.
He does not want to hurt her. He does not even want to frighten her.
He does want her to acknowledge him.
She owes him (he thinks) that much. A beggarly gesture, for which he will be absurdly, abjectly grateful.
He has taken to hiking out to the lake via Catamount Road, he is so restless. Even with his cramping legs.
We have observed him, at a distance.
Some of us have outboard motorboats, rowboats. Some of us have canoes though we don’t “canoe” so much in the muggy summer heat of the Finger Lakes region, now that we’ve grown up and become adults.
L_____ limps slightly. You almost wouldn’t notice. (She will not notice. L_____ is determined.) But he can limp quickly like a dog with three practiced legs.
It is the largest and (by tradition) the most beautiful of the eleven Finger Lakes of central New York State—Lake Cattaraugus. Indeed it is oddly shaped like a finger, a beckoning finger, forty miles long (south/north), four miles at its widest. The village of Cattaraugus is the only populated area on the lake though there are cottages and cabins scattered around it, some of them difficult of access, and some abandoned. Much of the eastern shore has reverted to the wild.
It is good to see this, L_____ thinks. How quickly wildernessmoves in, suffocating the merely cultivated.
Occasionally there are boats on the lake. For the lake is quite deep at its center. Outboard motorboats. Sailboats. L_____ is intrigued to see, to think that he sees, a shimmering flash of silvery hair—in one of the blinding-white sailboats drifting past. She is with one or two others. A man, two men. A woman. He shades his eyes but the figures fade in a haze of sunshine.
Sees, thinks he sees, the young woman in a bathing suit, on a deserted stretch of beach, later that day. Not so slender as he’d imagined but lanky limbed and hard muscled like a high-school girl athlete. Her hair has been pulled back into a ponytail and seems to be lighter, wheat colored. Distasteful to L_____ that the beautiful girl is in the company of other, cruder individuals her age, all of them in bathing suits, barefoot.
He is shocked, repelled: One of the loutish boys tugs at her ponytail, teases her.
If he’d brought a rifle with him …
(Why has he thought of a rifle? There is no rifle in his parents’ house. He had not been brought up to use firearms.)
But no: That girl is not her. He is fully sane. He is not sick minded. He knows this.
Before the teenagers can see the white-skinned middle-aged man spying on them from behind a bank of cattails he withdraws shrewdly.
He can drink all he wants.
He can drink until he has forgotten why he is drinking.
Several old whiskey bottles of his father’s left behind in a sideboard in the dining room. Scotch whiskey, bourbon, gin. Why not?
In the upstairs bathroom, stripping himself bare. Hearing his breath catch.
Though he’d showered early that morning before dawn, after a violent leg cramp had awakened him, he feels the need, the compulsion to shower again by late afternoon.
Beneath his (loose-fitting, ordinary, and not unattractive) clothes he is a marvel of male ruin, scarred and pallid, like wax that has partly melted and then hardened. He has learned to avoid contemplating the genitals between his legs, which are both swollen and shrunken, like small tumors in sacks of very thin ripe-
plum-colored skin.
His mouth tastes like chemicals, still. Poisons that have dripped into his veins to “kill” cancerous cells and have not been totally flushed out of his body even after months.
If he were to kiss a woman. The silver-haired woman, turning to him, lifting her face to his in a gesture of trust.
Idly he wonders—Am I radioactive? Can I kill on contact?
God help me.
I cannot help myself.
Today she has brought a book with her. She is seated on a bench overlooking the lake and engrossed in her book as a young girl might be engrossed in a book in a long-ago time.
She is not in the place he’d seen her initially. For L_____ has avoided that place.
In another part of the park that is much less popular where (L_____ has thought) he would be safe.
Immediately he recognizes her. With a gut-sick sensation of certainty his eye swerves upon her.
He sees her from behind, and then he sees her in profile from approximately twenty feet away. He is shaky legged suddenly.
He will not see her face fully unless he approaches her and positions himself in front of her, to her (left) side. It is quite natural that a visitor to the park might stand at the lakeside rail in this way to look out at, to toss bread crusts at, an excited little flotilla of mallards and geese bobbing in the water. No need to defend himself from accusers!
But doing so would (probably) draw the attention of the young woman, which he must avoid.
How beautiful she is! How solitary.
Speckled sunlight falls upon her like gold coins. He dreads violating that stillness.
She is wearing a long skirt of some thin, silky fabric, slit to the thigh—a startling sight. It is a provocative way of dressing and yet (L_____ thinks) it is a classic Asian style, an elegantly long skirt, unexpectedly slit to the thigh. (What he can see of her leg, her thigh, is an expanse of very pale flesh, not muscular, but very lean. The tight, taut flesh of a young person.) Her hair is less silvery than he recalls, more likely faded blond, ash blond, threaded with glinting hairs. Not so wavy–curly today and falling straight past her shoulders.
L_____ feels his heart missing beats. He has had few cardiac problems, his doctors have been impressed. Such physical trauma to a man’s body, such incisions, eviscerations, are more profound than simply physical injuries, and he has prevailed nonetheless, his heart has rarely failed him. And now, his heart is hurting.
He sees: The book in which the young woman is engrossed is covered in transparent plastic, a book borrowed from the local library, no doubt, not a purchase of her own.
He is just slightly disappointed that the young woman hasn’t bought the book for herself. That it is only a library withdrawal suggests that her commitment to it is ephemeral.
He wonders what the title is. At the same time, he believes that it would be better for him not to know.
Knowing curtails desire. From his former life, when he’d been alive, he recalls.
Still, he is excited to have discovered the woman. Until this moment his day had been tortuous, beginning with painful leg cramps at an hour before dawn, the dismay of being awakened so early, with the prospect of the long, interminable day ahead.
He has had to confront the fact: His work is stalled. He sees himself in a vehicle stalled on railroad tracks, paralyzed as a locomotive rushes at him.
He’d spent that day, he has spent several days—in fact, weeks—in a trance of frustration so extreme it borders upon wonderment. Each morning he hauls himself to his writing table in the glassed-in porch as you might haul a lifeless body—he works for lengthy hours, becoming increasingly fretful as the morning hours wane, and he has little to show for his effort; but with the appalling movement of the clock downward, in the afternoon, he becomes ever more agitated, and it is very difficult for him to keep his mind from fastening on to—her.
His thoughts are both roiling and “flat”—thoughts at a boil that nonetheless go nowhere. Like chapters in S_______’s book so many times revised, and rewritten, the momentum of their prose has wound down. And the more L_____ rewrites S_______’s prose, the deeper he sinks into a bottomless sand that will soon cover his mouth.
Indeed his lips have gone numb as if all sensation has drained from them.
He keeps his distance from the woman, who sits very still, almost unnaturally still. He tells himself this is all very casual. There is nothing urgent, fated about discovering her. There is nothing doomed.
This is a “good” side of the lake where the water is relatively clear of the algae that grows elsewhere in thick metastasizing slime clumps.
All is calm today. Calmer. The lake’s surface reflects the sky dully like hammered tin.
What is she reading?—L_____’s heart contracts with yearning; he wants badly to know.
(It is not a heavy book—not a long novel. Nor does the slate-gray cover, with calm pale letters—suggest a popular best seller.)
From time to time the young woman glances up from the book as if it reminds her of something—a moment of tenderness, a private thought.
He will not approach her, he thinks.
He will respect her privacy. Her beauty.
For he feels inadequate, of course. He is wearing his loose-fitting clothes that have been chosen to disguise his body and not in any way to reveal it. A T-shirt, khaki shorts. Running shoes and no socks.
He launders his clothes in the washer in the house. He does not trouble to iron them.
He will say—Excuse me. I happened to have seen …
The other day, I think I saw you sailing …
Here is a rude surprise: Children are approaching. First, middle school–age boys on bicycles, loudly calling to one another. Then a young couple with small children.
The calm of the lakeside has been shattered. The father in T-shirt and rumpled shorts is chiding one of the children, who has displeased him in some trivial way, and the mother is trying to placate the father in a soft, pleading voice. Please. He didn’t mean it.
L_____ tries not to stare at these intruders with a look of rage. Thinking how much more beautiful it would be, and more merciful, if human beings did not utter words out of their contorted mouths but “signed” them as the deaf do, with precision and grace. He has frequently been impressed—indeed, fascinated—by observing a deaf interpreter sign to an audience at a public event. It occurs to him that the silvery-haired woman whose voice he has never heard is a kind of “sign”—her beautiful averted face, her shimmering hair, her slender and very still body.
Yes, L_____ is weary of those dull, banal, predictable, and demeaning words that are uttered aloud, that abrade the ear. How he yearns for the beauty that is directed to the eye in silence.
So absorbed in her book, the young woman seems scarcely aware of the intrusive family who have, to L_____’s dismay, set down their picnic things on a nearby table. L_____ wonders if they are aware that there is a much more attractive picnic area elsewhere in the park, in a shaded grove.
Only mildly annoyed, it seems, the young woman glances around at the bickering family, and for a dazzling, heart-stopping moment, at him—but without quite seeing him, L_____ thinks.
(Yet: He has seen her. The impact of that face, those eyes, will remain with L_____ for a long time.)
It is time to leave! On his shaky legs L_____ retreats.
That night as he drifts into sleep he realizes—the silvery-haired woman had been reading his book.
Vividly now he recalls the slate-gray cover, the pale, pearlescent letters—he is sure it was his book.
His first book, a little-read novel titled Jubilation. Into which L_____ had opened his veins and never quite recovered.
It was L_____’s first published novel, though it had not been the first novel he’d written. He had not ever written another.
Of cou
rse, I’ve done other things. I’ve published other books. I am a “literary figure”—of a kind. I have even published poetry—poems. Not yet a book of poems.
He is explaining to the silver-haired young woman, who listens intently. He is captivated by the way she brushes her hair out of her face with both hands, like one parting a curtain of some fine, shimmering material like silk.
Of course, the Cattaraugus Public Library has Jubilation in its fiction collection. L_____ has checked. At the time of its publication (in 1999), Mrs. McGarry or another librarian would have been sure to order it—unless L_____’s mother donated a copy.
It comes to L_____ in a flash, he can learn the name of the silvery-haired woman if he visits the library and determines who has withdrawn the single copy of Jubilation in the past week … The possibility leaves him too excited to sleep.
Chloroform makes of the most resistant body a very bride. The struggling hands, the clawing nails, the convulsive flailings of the limbs—all surrender within seconds.
Her lover tells her: Please understand. I am providing a happy ending for you, who will be protected from the terrible erosion of time. In my arms you will always be young—you will always be my bride.
You will always be worthy of love, and loved.
In a dead faint he has fallen. Dead faint is exact for the brain is extinguished in an instant.
Fallen heavily onto the ground in some public place, a chatter of excited voices, deafening sound of a siren, a siren too close, and strangers bending over him to “revive” him …
The first he knows how very sick he is.
Must’ve known. Fastidiously averting your eyes from the blood traces in the toilet.
How ridiculous you are, how pathetic thinking you can deceive …
Later in the hospital he will discover that his clothes have been expertly sheared by the EMTs to allow access to his body. Deft hands of strangers touching his body. Blood-pressure band tightening around his upper arm, forefinger pressed against the carotid artery in his throat, an unresponsive eyelid lifted, small light ray piercing the (sightless, unfocused) eyeball. A defibrillator on hand, which, fortunately, they don’t have to use.
Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand Page 19