by Michael Oren
Yet even those visits have dwindled of late, leaving her more than enough time to write or, failing that, to gaze at Kittatinny. She adores the way it wears the seasons—luscious green in spring and summer, confetti-colored patches in the fall—mirroring the trees along its shores. Winter, though, is her favorite. Those months, when the waters freeze and are hidden by snow, make her feel that she and the lake share secrets.
Now it is March, no foliage, no ice, and the lake looks like a moldy soap dish. Days pass without the phone, much less the doorbell ringing, and the pencils sit unchewed. Such times she finds herself dwelling on Maxwell or, at least, the early Maxwell. The scruffy, lustful writer with the voice that sounded scoured with borax. He lived hard, he said, meaning he drank and smoked until his body surrendered, and lived wantonly, helping himself to whatever and whoever he desired.
And he desired Pamela. Many men did back then. Though box-shaped now, Pamela was once what they called stacked—ample of bosom, broad of hips, a model for fertility goddesses. Her features were handsome, fleshy, feral. All that and she could write, her stories compared to symphonies or expansive canvases of art. No genre could contain her. Nor could any man and certainly not Larry, the delicate soul she married right after his graduation from dental school. Larry, who financed her writing habit until she was famous enough to deceive him with a succession of lovers and to leave him, finally, for Maxwell.
How could she have resisted him? He wrote the way he made love, furiously, with vengeance. War stories, detective stories, noire stuff. Cigarette stubs like crimped exclamation points piling up in his ashtray. For hours, while pretending to write herself, Pamela would watch him pounding a keyboard as if it were his enemy’s face. That was Maxwell at his fiercest and most irresistible. And how could she not have foreseen the later Maxwell, looking like a Thanksgiving Day balloon, post-parade, deflated and tied down with tubes?
She thought of him and wondered if there wasn’t a story. A young man who is angry about nothing in particular, just angry, and sees life as an adversary to be pummeled. An artist angry because he is a great artist who can never be great enough. Mulling over the idea, Pamela selects a pencil from the jar and inserts the blunt end between her teeth. Outside the old white house with black shutters, the world and the lake are gray. Inside, though, the legal pad and the bits of pencil paint that stick to her lips are yellow. Colors could be coaxed from the page.
But no sooner has she started writing than a knock sounds on the front door. A knock? Can’t she see the bell, Pamela grouses. And why hasn’t the station agent called? Irritably, she gets up from her desk and plods downstairs, adjusting her hair and scarves. “Yes?” she asks, haughtily surprised, as the door swings open not to a book club nanny or a giggly undergraduate but to a tidily-dressed man in his early-thirties. At first, she doesn’t recognize him, or rather refuses to, but realizes ignorance isn’t optional. “Yes,” she says to Roger, for that is his name. Yes, not a question but a sigh.
He enters and looks around, nodding slightly at objects that might be familiar.
“Please,” she says, “a cup of tea?” as she always does with visitors, but this is not one of her readers. In fact, Pamela would bet that he’s uninterested in her work and doesn’t enjoy fiction.
Roger ignores the offer and removes his coat. Cold clings to its shoulders as she takes it from him and hangs it on a peg. When she turns, he is already positioned in her living room and glancing over the awards aligned on the mantel, the framed bestseller lists.
Pamela steps toward him, then halts. “It’s good to see you,” she says, and the words are as flat and bleak as the lake. He does not answer but sits in the armchair that’s traditionally hers when entertaining. Struggling to maintain stature, but still sheepishly, she takes a place on the couch.
“You look well,” she says, as if she would know if he didn’t. Yet he does look like his father at his age—hair, chin, even his teeth receding. As if his entire being were recoiling from some threat. “You sure no tea?” she asks him instead of “why have you come here?” But it’s the second, unuttered, question he answers.
“I’m divorcing Melanie.”
“Oh,” she gasps, though more out of relief than sorrow. Pamela could never have guessed her name.
“Trust issues.”
“I see…” Of course, she doesn’t, not yet. What does catch her eye is the resemblance. The same features that were sensual on her face suggest, on his, weakness. And he has his father’s tenuous build.
“My trust in her. My trust in myself.”
“Um-hmm.” Her head rocks in understanding but in truth she’s clueless. All Pamela knows is that this will somehow come back to her. Already she’s braced for recrimination. Already she’s preparing to defend herself, recalling how Roger was a baby when she left and was raised by Larry’s second wife. That marriage also ended in divorce, Pamela later heard, but how was that her fault? How could this breakup with Melanie—that was her name, right?—be remotely attributed to her?
She readies to say all of this, but merely replies, “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Sorry? Really?” Roger’s eyes, unlike the rest of his retreating face, seem to lunge at her. “My father never recovered.”
“But…he remarried.”
“Remarried but never healed. Did you know that he cheated on Mom?” Roger crosses his legs and cups a knee in his hands. Subtly, in the armchair, he rocks. “And when I asked him why, do you know what he said?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “He said that he did it to her before she could do it to him. Because he couldn’t survive another betrayal. Crazy, isn’t it?”
No crazier than abandoning a kindly dentist and his infant son for a self-destructive egoist. Pamela declaims, “We all have our scars.”
Again, he glares at her. Is he, sitting cross-legged in his navy crewneck and corduroys, her scar? The child whose custody she at first fought for and then conceded, whom she visited regularly for a while, then infrequently, and then never—all before he was old enough to remember. By that time, he had a more caring mother, she’d told herself, and she needed to devote herself to art. To Maxwell. Better that Roger lived his own life—so the justification went—and grew into manhood free of anger.
Still, he could lace into her, she fears, become violent perhaps with no one around the lake to hear. But instead he merely shrugs. “Scars, indeed.”
“But what does this have to do with Mel…your divorce?”
Roger chuckles acidly. “Trust. Distrust. I was jealous of every man she talked to, even her oldest friends. And suspicious. Every time she was out of the house, not within eyesight, I imagined her in bed, in various positions, with many partners. I drove myself insane. I drove her insane.”
“And this is somehow connected with me?” The question, for Pamela, is half-serious. To pin his irrational envy on her is truly deranged, she concludes. She never even knew her son, much less influenced his behavior. But then came the other half. She never wanted to know him—in fact, forced herself to forget him, which was easy enough with Maxwell sucking up her air. Still, there were moments when she’d be clipping the hedges, perhaps, or proofreading a text, when the thought of her son intruded. It would give her pause and often make her wonder what he was doing just then, what he looked like, how he was managing in the world. But those instances would pass. Roger was a reality, like faltering book sales, like death, that dwelling on only caused pain.
“I know you’d like to think it wasn’t.” Roger is responding, but to what, she no longer remembers. “But it turns out there is such a thing as original sin. Turns out that the sins of the mother are visited through the tenth generation, maybe the hundredth.” He says this with his knee still slung in his palms, as if he’s talking statistics. “You leave Dad. Dad leaves Mom. Melanie and I leave each other.”
Oh, that—now Pamela recalls. “Is it an apology you want? I can’t. I won’t.” She struggles to sound kindly. “We are who we are.”
“Indeed,” Roger says. He liked that word. “I didn’t come here for an apology. I came to ask you a question.”
Pamela’s eyebrows rise.
“Was it worth it?”
“It?”
“Your decision. I’ve followed your career—I shouldn’t’ve but I couldn’t help myself. It’s successes and now. I saw how you lived your life as if you were writing it. And I wanted to know, looking back from this last chapter, was it worth it?”
Hand to her breast, Pamela exhales, “Why, of course.” Her hand sweeps the trophied mantel, the artwork on the walls, the bay window with the leaden lake behind. “All of this is because of that decision—that and sweat. All of this and much more.”
Roger nods. “Good. I needed to hear that. It might surprise you, but expressions of regret would’ve been worse.”
They chat for a while longer. Seems Roger followed his father’s path into dentistry but has yet to become a father himself. “The curse ends with me,” he smiles. Pamela mentions some stories she’s finishing, the fans that persistently show up. Less than an hour passes and already he is on his feet, a small man, she notices, on whose shoulders she can lay—rather than hook—his coat.
“Call you a cab?”
“No need. I drove.”
Ah-hah, she thinks. Hence no heads-up from the station agent.
“Well, drive safely,” she begins and almost adds, “and please visit again,” but doesn’t. Nor does he offer.
At the door, he hesitates and turns. Pamela tenses, fearing he wants to kiss her goodbye. But he only twitches a finger on his lower lip. A second passes before she mutters, “Oh,” and scrapes beneath her mouth. A chip of yellow paint comes off on her fingernail. “Chewing pencils,” she says, expertly rolling her eyes. “Horrible habit.”
She lets him out and admits the cold, which leaves her shivering long after the door is closed. An engine growls, gravel crunches, and then there is silence. Her breath drums in the hallway as she plods up her office stairs. The chair creaks beneath her weight. She thinks of Maxwell or tries to think of him, while trying not to think of Larry. But what she wants most of all—desperately—is a story. Stories, alone, are her life, and they are what make it livable.
Pamela stares out of the window at the barren trees veined across Kittatinny’s surface. How about this one, she ponders. The professor whose great-great grandfather is executed for petty theft. Traumatized, humiliated, his son becomes a revolutionary, blaming society for his father’s crime. He, too, is killed, cut down by a barrage of militia fire. But he leaves an orphaned son who grows up hating his radical father and becomes, instead, a reactionary. A dictator who rules with blood-drenched hands. A car bomb ends his reign, but not before he sires yet another son who, in defiance of his forebears, joins the priesthood. But, alas, the chastity vows prove too draconian for him and the result is yet another offspring—the professor, his life now jeopardized by semi-autobiographical works that provoke a rival’s grudge.
Pamela scribbles on her pad. She scribbles and selects a pencil for chewing. The past may be sepia but the present’s yellow. The house is whitewashed, and the lake is gray. The world is any color we choose.
The Boys’ Room
Half-bounding, half-plodding up the stairs, he wasn’t sure he would make it. A cascade of kids slowed his ascent while the din of slamming lockers and the second period bell befuddled his calculation of the route. Why had he put off going until after algebra, he berated himself; why was he always procrastinating? And about this, of all things. Grunting as he clutched the handrail, he hoisted himself onto the floor. The classrooms were already sealed and the hallways silent as he staggered the few remaining feet. Then, stifling a cry, he shoulder-butted into the nearest lavatory and pitched toward the furthest stall.
The eruption was monumental, record-breaking perhaps, but at least he’d gotten his pants down. With a thunderous gurgle, his innards emptied. Only now he could sigh, relishing the relief and his own pungent solitude.
He studied the metal walls and their key-etched graffiti. The highlight was always a hotdog-shaped object pumping into what looked like a human eye standing on its duct. Beneath it was scratched “Kitty Morgan”—a girl probably long graduated—“is a hore.” Yet, to his puzzlement, the hotdog and the eye were gone, along with Kitty Morgan. In their place were a nicely rendered image of a pitcher of flowers and another of a cat frolicking on its back.
He didn’t dwell on the mystery but merely shrugged and reached for the toilet paper. Reached and plumbed, but the aluminum dispenser was empty. “Shit,” he muttered, and was old enough to appreciate the irony. He also knew there was no choice but to hitch up his underwear as high as he dared and waddle into the adjacent stall. Halfway into this delicate maneuver, though, he heard the bathroom door squealing open and sneakers padding on the tiles.
“Shit,” he gasped again, but not out loud. The picture of him with his belt around his ankles and his thing hanging out would be all over the seventh grade, he knew, and well before lunchtime. So, instead, he sat again and prepared to wait it out. The signal would be the urinal’s gush.
But there was no gush, only a high-pitched whine, “I cannot believe this zit.”
Another voice, equally shrill, counseled, “Leave it alone. You’ll only make it worse.”
“Bad enough the zit, worse with that asshole De Vingo. You believe the way he hit on me?”
“A dickhead, that’s what he is. A teeny-weeny little dick.”
He glanced at the walls. The paint, he now registered, was no longer army brown but an overly-cheery pink. The cat, the flowers, delicately rendered. And, come to think of it, he didn’t remember there even being urinals. The realization made him feel as if he had to go all over again and, at the same time, throw up.
The first voice giggled, “He’s teenier than your pinky, I heard.” And both of them snorted, “What? Is it in me? I can’t feel a thing.”
He thought of Andy DeVingo. The Horse, they called him. The way he strutted around the showers after gym, showing off his pubes. He glanced down at his lap which had yet to sprout a single strand. If the Horse was teeny, what, then, was he?
And what did they mean by feeling it? He struggled to understand, shuddered at the possibility that he did.
“And Gerry Franks. He swings both ways, you know.”
He tried to place the voices. They sounded vaguely like Linda and Stacey, two of his quietest classmates. Always taking the desks furthest from the teacher, never hanging out in the halls, avoiding the popular kids’ lunch tables. Linda and Stacey, who dressed in plaid skirts and pants that were never jeans, according to the code. The one with a ponytail, the other with bangs and braids. The girls he sometimes glimpsed and watched, wanting, as they chewed their pens.
“I heard that, too. Both ways.”
For a second, he imagined the pimply, bespectacled Gerry Franks seated on a swing and pumping his legs in the air. Then, one of the girls snorted, “Ewww.”
“Yeah, somebody’s dumping in here.”
“More like somebody died.”
He cringed. He pictured them peeking under the stall and catching sight of his loafers or climbing up on the next-door toilet, looking down and howling. Silently as possible, he brought his knees upward and hugged them with both his arms.
“Whoever you are in there,” Stacey or Linda called out, “lay off the garlic bread.”
“Whoever you are in there, forget about ever getting laid.”
More chortles, followed by the slap of tender hands high-fiving. “And if we find out who you are, we’ll turn you over to DeVingo,” one of them warned, and the other added, “No, to Gerry Franks.” And they giggled.
He said nothing, of course, tried not to breathe. Fear and confusion careened in his head. How long would they stay there, he fretted? What if one of them wanted to pee?
The hiss of water in the sink. “Crap. We’d better get back.”
“At least
there’s Mister Margolis.”
“Oh my god, Mister Margolis. I would so do him.”
“He could so do me.”
A collective grunt, “Mister Margolis.”
The crunch of paper towels sounded musical.
“Christ, I have to go and sit next to that Reeseman kid. Douchebag.”
“Talk about douchebags, I’ve got Schletter.”
He sunk his face into the wedge between his knees. God, he prayed, don’t let them say anything about me. But they said nothing, which seemed like a miracle but was also strangely disappointing.
The lid to the trash bin opened and clanged. Sneakered feet skipped across the tiles. “Pee-eww,” a voice shot back at him as the bathroom door opened to the ghostly murmurs of the hall. “Pee-eww,” someone seconded as the door swung shut.
Their snickers, though, kept rattling around the porcelain fixtures. He sat there listening, scarcely moving, hurt and perplexed. Curled up in his stall, he was suddenly aware of his ignorance of the world. A cruel and deceiving world, to tell from Linda and Stacey. Mysterious and threatening.
The bell would ring soon, sending countless kids stampeding through the halls. Pouring into the bathrooms, too. He could not stay there another minute. He had to move. Drag up his pants, wash his hands, and emerge, an underclassman, into school.
Live in Studio
“Zoom in to head,” said the voice in his ear, and he focused the camera on Jennifer’s face. Not the best call, he thought. The new weather woman looked pretty enough from this three-yard distance but close-ups showed the pockmarks that must have tormented her as a teenager and that not even foundation could hide. Not a good call, but then again, he wasn’t the producer, merely a cameraman on a local station. Unionized, seasoned, professional, and bored into a decades-long stupor.