L____ shakes her hand, or would shake it. But Mrs. McGarry extends her hand to clasp his, in commiseration, perhaps, not merely to be shaken.
L____ is eager to escape. L____ is eager to drift away into the night in chagrin and shame and a kind of fury except Mrs. McGarry retains him. “The last time I saw you, I think—Margaret and I had just returned from visiting Chloe Sanderson in the hospital—poor Chloe!—your mother brought her flowers from her garden, an armful of the most fragrant flowers—white carnations—” A bittersweet memory. A memory to be shared. A memory not to be avoided and so L____ endures it with a stoic smile.
“Are you living in your parents’ beautiful house now? I thought I’d heard this. Are you returned to us?”
Mrs. McGarry clutches at his hand. Her eyes search his with a discomforting intensity and he sees that it is Mrs. McGarry (perhaps) who has been awaiting him in this place, not the other.
L____ wants to ask the librarian about the shimmering-silvery-haired woman who’d leaned over the old atlas: Who is she? Did Mrs. McGarry see her too? He wants to ask her what she recalled of the boy he’d been. What his mother might have told her, of him. But the words choke in his throat, he can only smile and allow his hand to be clasped and stroked, in consolation for his loss.
Are you returned to us? He has no idea.
No. Ridiculous! Yes. Ridiculous.
He is very tired. “Drained.”
His energy drains from him like the slow drip, seep, ooze of excrement. His life.
Wouldn’t have had the energy to follow the silvery-haired woman if he’d seen her. That is the sobering fact.
He has his eye on the farther edge of the lake, along the east shore. On one of his restless walks he has scrutinized the area. The possibilities. His mind is always working. Swift, sharp like flashing scissors. He’d recalled from years ago and has reacquainted himself now: that fetid stretch of rotted cattails, fish floating belly-up, broken Styrofoam. Since he has no boat to row out onto the lake, no motorboat, no way of assuring that the body will be far enough from shore that the body will sink to a depth of more than six feet to lie against the mucky bottom of the lake, he will have to dump the body in a more convenient place.
“A highly challenging, very ambitious project for which I need seclusion here in Cattaraugus.”
So he said. There was pleasure in such a statement made to the inquisitive. Saliva gathered in his mouth as with a delicious taste.
A shock to L_____, yet deeply flattering, that he’d been named executor of the literary estate of the distinguished writer-historian V____S_____, who’d died, at eighty-four, the previous December.
Obviously there had been a mistake on someone’s part: for L had not been contacted beforehand. Nor would L____ have expected to be singled out for this honor, which carries with it a good deal of responsibility.
A call from a lawyer, congratulations from friends, his name in the very last paragraph of S____’s obituary in The New York Times—all so sudden, unexpected.
He had just begun chemotherapy. Every two weeks for four hours in succession, poisons dripping into his veins and coursing through his heart, so lethal the infusion-room nurses had to wear protective clothing, gloves. Yet when S____’s lawyer called, L____ heard his voice crack with emotion.
“Yes, of course! Though I knew, it’s still a—surprise … and a great honor.”
Flushed with this honor like a transfusion of fresh blood, L agreed to help S____’s editor prepare S____’s final book for publication in January of the new year.
A Biography of Biographies will be a “magisterial” work—no doubt. The manuscript, or manuscripts, runs to thirteen hundred pages.
S____’s editor, upset and aggrieved that the prominent elderly author had died before his book was quite ready for press, assured L____ that the book was all but finished: it needed only “minimal reshaping, reorganization, some revision and rewriting, and an index.”
L____ had agreed without hesitation. Like a drowning man clutching at a lifeline, which will haul him out of a turbulent sea, allow him to breathe for a while longer, to endure.
“Thank you! This is an honor.”
And: “I’m a longtime admirer of S_____. I think that I’ve read everything he has written …”
And, somberly: “We were never exactly friends. There was a generation between us. But I felt a kind of kinship with S____, and only wish now that I had known him better.”
Is this true? Perhaps not entirely. L____ has certainly not read all of S____’s work, which consists of a dozen or more substantial books. Nor had S____ sought him out, though S____ had always been perfectly friendly, kind, and behaved as if he was interested in L____’s work. It is true that L____ initially is grateful for the assignment. Or was. Fact is, after his evisceration L____ has no energy to undertake original work of his own nor can he foresee a time when he will regain his energy.
(Possibly this was the case even before the evisceration. But L____ doesn’t care to consider that.)
Some days L____ is enthusiastic and hopeful about the project; other days L____ is rueful and chagrined that he’d made such a blunder in a craven gesture of attaching himself to a famous and respected name in the hope that some of the glory would rub off on him, like the faint iridescence of a broken moth’s wing.
He has been working with at least three manuscripts written at different periods of time, derived from several computer files; he has been trying to give structure to an essentially structureless book. There is much to admire in S____’s eloquent prose but there are many passages that are haphazardly written, and uninspired; there are sections that have been left blank—glibly marked material TK. (With a sinking heart L____ wonders who is expected to provide this missing material.) Chapters have been many times revised, with much overlapping and repetitive material. Footnotes are overlong, pedantic. Other footnotes are just numerals, with no information at all. At the time of his death S____ hadn’t even begun an index. Most upsetting, A Biography of Biographies seems to be based upon numerous other books on the subject, and to contain virtually nothing that is original or inventive. Like every other historian of the subject, S____ begins with Plutarch’s Lives but he ends (arbitrarily) in the early 1980s with Leon Edel’s Henry James and Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, as if these are the most recent major biographies S____ had troubled to read.
What a joke! A cruel joke.
L____ had hoped to attach himself to a work of substance, even of genius. A work of literature that mattered.
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 email 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 ex
tension …”
“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 wilderness moves 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, silk
y 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.
Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense Page 20