Maggie Brown & Others

by Peter Orner

  How could she blame them? How could anybody blame them?

  An old boyfriend once told her that she had a way of using magnanimity as a weapon. That wasn’t exactly a fair assessment at the time. She’d dumped the boyfriend soon after. Still, she’d been intrigued by the possibility and hadn’t, ever since, put it past herself. That kindness itself can be wielded. That love itself—

  She drinks her coffee and watches the light above the bay, now green, now pink. Neil will be up soon. They’ll both sit here and look out the window together. Isn’t this the way of it? You stray, you stumble; somehow you find yourself on a ridge? Was that why she told him to leave the photographs on the wall? Because she’d won a battle she hadn’t known she was fighting?

  Neil’s retired. Now his job, with a tool belt and great aplomb, is fixing things around this ramble of a house. Her job? What does she do all day? She works from home, writes marketing copy. But she’d told the old busybody up here on the ridge, his beloved neighbor for decades, the one who told her how pleased she was to see such joy and light back in Neil’s life, that she was working on a memoir in the shed.

  “You know, Catherine lingered for years, it was beyond dreadful.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “She died in the house, you know.”

  “Yes, Neil—”

  “What’s your book about, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “I absolutely respect that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Certain things one must keep to oneself.”

  “Yes.”

  Neil certainly found himself a young one. Says she’s writing a book. Who’s not? Who’s not writing a book is what I’d like to know.

  Out back there’s an orchard that predates the house. It’s August, and huge yellow apples, an ancient variety, one you could never hope to find in stores, have begun to drop off the gnarled trees.

  Naked Man Hides

  Everybody knows this. Sometimes you lose everything, including your clothes. I must have taken them off at some point after the crash. I can’t remember. I must have felt hot. How else to explain why I took off all my clothes? Helene came to jail the next morning and showed me the paper, and we even laughed about it, at first. Above the fold: NAKED MAN HIDES AFTER CRASH. They’d never given anybody much of a reason to buy the Independent Journal before. I should get a cut of the sales. Helene said she hadn’t come to bail me out this time. I said, “When have you ever?” That’s when she started to cry. She wanted me to understand what I’d become, as if I didn’t know it. She thought shoving a headline in my face would help me see in black and white what everybody else saw. Not just our kids, my parents, her parents, my sister, but everybody in San Rafael. You went to college to end up here? I told her if I had any shame left I’d yank it out of my throat and stuff it down again. Helene threw the paper on the floor and stood up and knocked on the little window to let the guard know she wanted out. She stooped, picked up the paper, and left. Maybe she’ll paste the article in one of her scrapbooks.

  They brought me back to the cell, and I sat there and trembled, for hours. It was hell, of course, but it’s also a little like having the chills when you’ve got the flu. You’re grateful because that seizing your body’s doing helps keep you warm. I’d gone from so hot to so cold. Must have been hours sitting there. I remember at some point they tried to give me lunch. I couldn’t look at the food. Same later on with a dinner tray. Before lights-out, they brought in two new guys. Because I’d been in there alone, I’d taken the single. These two got the bunk. They each took a long piss and went to bed. At eleven, they turn the lights down, not off completely, and I sat there in what passed for darkness. You know how your eyes adjust to the light there is. I looked across the cell, which was maybe seven by nine, and saw the two sleepers, both of them wrapped in white sheets up to their necks. The fat one was on the bottom. He was a stranger to me. I’d seen the skinny one around town. I was still shaking, but like I say some part of me almost half enjoyed it. There was a blanket I could have pulled around my shoulders, but I didn’t. Amazing what our bodies are designed to take. Helene says I’m looking at five to six on a good day, if the judge got laid the night before and had some waffles for breakfast. Eight to ten, at least, if he didn’t get much sleep and was suffering from an upset stomach. Possession of a controlled substance, driving under the influence of said controlled substance, driving under the influence of another controlled substance, unlawful taking of a vehicle, reckless driving, fleeing the scene of an accident, indecent exposure, failure to follow a lawful order, resisting—

  “It was your car, Hennie.”

  “How was I supposed to get to work? Who was going to pick up the kids? In what?”

  But what I’m trying to say is that while I was watching those guys sleep, just two guys snoring, coughing, gurgling, moving around, changing positions, trying to get comfortable on those slack mattresses, I felt something, let’s say, beyond my immediate predicament. My mother once took me and my sister Francie to a museum. We were in Chicago visiting cousins. An Egyptian museum. What it was doing in Chicago, who knows, but there were these mummies in glass cases and I remember how I pressed my nose against the glass and stared at the wrapped-up body of a woman and wondered what she’d make of me, some ten-year-old—what, almost two thousand years later?—snooping on her infinite sleep. My nostrils up against the glass. You know how it makes you look like a pig? I was doing that. Oink, oink. I wanted to get as close as I possibly could. I whispered hello to her head, to her old head wrapped in that yellowed burlap—was it burlap they used? Hello? Francie asked. Who are you talking to? And I said, Who do you think I’m talking to?

  It was like that with these two guys. I was only trying to get close, to establish a little camaraderie across the chasm. Do I make any sense? Except with these two I didn’t need to move toward them at all. My two fellow fuckups asleep in white sheets. I didn’t need to move an inch. I swear, from my bunk, I stroked their faces without needing my hands. The skinny one had stubble. I felt it grow beneath my fingers. The fat one was clean-shaven, his face slicked with sweat. And I thought, Holy fuck, we’re not dead. Together. As in not dead yet. Think of all the years we will be. Our bodies turn to caramel. You with the tiny sprouting tendrils of facial hair. You with the sweat-wet cheeks. Together at this moment, I thought—don’t laugh at me, Hennie—we are not dead. You think this isn’t a net positive?

  Reach

  The way a door gradually opens on a windless night when you’re alone in a room. That’s how she described how she came to understand, to know slowly but all at once, that he wanted her, that the last thing he wanted was to want her, but he wanted her, my God did he want her. He was a journalist and critic of some renown. Nobody reads him anymore. She said that for a number of years he’d been gradually losing his sight. It was almost completely gone by the time she met him. He’d put the word out that he needed someone to take dictation. He’d promised his publisher a last book about growing up poor in India. The aimless London years. The move to San Francisco in the late ’50s. His improbable rise to relative fame as an unlikely chronicler of the counterculture. She told him he’d never intended to finish it, that the whole exercise was frivolous. He’d grown up poor, he said. That’s novel? The mass of humanity lives a world away from a hot bath. Simone Weil, she knew the score.

  He’d written, he told her, about flower children because they made him laugh. Spent my life trying to get clean and these kids can’t get dirty enough.

  He’s long dead now. But she told me that, recently, while examining her face in the mirror, it was as if she caught a glimpse of his opaque brown eyes.

  They’d meet at the Mechanics’ Institute on Post Street, in his little office down the hall from the chess room and the silent chess players. A table, stacks of oilskin typing paper. That paper, she told me, smelled like new soap. His half-empty bookshelf. He was always giving her his books. The
typewriter, its ink-stained keys. A curtainless room. The dust, how it was ever present, like tiny drops of dry rain in the stab of afternoon sunlight. She remembered how he listened to her when neither of them was speaking. Her feet shifting on the grainy, never-swept floor, her clicking tongue, what he called her girlish sniffles. When he was too tired to dictate, or, as he put it, spew, he’d ask her to read to him. Often it was Faulkner. He’d sit back in his chair and listen to her and let the great man lull him, sentences with so many clauses they’d climb the walls. Occasionally he’d stop her.

  See? He’s your crazy drunken Uncle Billy until he’s not. The sober truth was almost more than he could take. He was drunk when I met him. This was at the tail end of his folly in Hollywood. Not sloppy drunk, polite drunk, cordial but utterly off his crock. Lovely man. The interview was a bomb. He didn’t tell me a thing. He just sucked his teeth and nodded. The only time he wasn’t drunk was when he was working. Drinking was the only way he could turn off the sentences. He didn’t tell me that. I must have read it in Blotner’s biography. The only thing he said to me was, “Is it as hot as they say in New Delhi?” And I said, “Sir, I’ve never been to Delhi.”

  Go on, go on, please, and pardon my blather—

  He’d done it while she was reading. Without leaning forward he’d reached across the table with one long arm and placed three nervous, twitching fingers on her clavicle. She told me she didn’t need to react. He retreated like a startled crab. The feel of her skin, her bone, was shocking enough. She’d been wearing a low-cut V-neck blouse. How could he have known? He’d been prepared to meet only fabric, not skin. She’d stopped reading for a moment and watched him. This substantial man, this winner of prizes. He didn’t attempt to explain himself. She’d let him dangle, her finger holding her place in Light in August. And now, she told me, all these years later, his minor prominence forgotten, his books long out of print, she imagined pulling him close, letting him do what he wanted, which couldn’t have been much. Only to touch her. Is it always a choice between love and pity? Back then she’d felt neither. Is there nothing in between? His eyes, the way he didn’t move his head, not because he couldn’t see her but because he could. He saw her with everything he had left.

  The Case Against Bobbie

  Was embezzlement of her demented mother’s bank account. There wasn’t any question of fact. She’d drained it. Someone from the nursing home must have tipped off the police. The day after the story appeared in the Light, she walked to town in the morning like she always did because the old Mercedes that had belonged to her late father no longer ran. It sat in her driveway; sometimes you’d see her in there taking a nap, the front seat reclined. Every morning she sat in the park and waited for Smiley’s to open. This was when the bar still opened at nine. (The new owners sleep in.) I’d already be there, sitting on a bench with a cup of coffee reading the paper, but willing to listen in case she was in the mood to talk. If Bobbie was in a good mood, she’d interrupt me and tell me another story about her father, who’d once been a well-known film director, and her mother, who’d been a concert pianist. The house on Lilac was long bought and paid for, though God knows, she’d say, they’ll pry it away from me eventually.

  The day after the story broke, she didn’t want to talk. Who would? We sat together without speaking. I went back to reading. Who am I to judge anybody for stealing? After a few minutes, though, she told me that the night before she’d had a talk with her father’s ghost. You know, like in Hamlet, she said. Her father asked her—no, demanded—that she go and kidnap the child, or, no, the grandchild, a grandchild would do the trick even better, her father told her, of one of the studio execs who’d fleeced him back in the ’60s. “Kidnap a kid,” Bobbie said. “Like Lindbergh’s baby. Lindbergh was a horse’s ass, but he didn’t deserve that, or at least that little boy didn’t. You ever see his picture? The little blond boy with the fat face? I said, ‘Papa, I love you with all I’ve got left, but I’m not a kidnapper, I don’t even have a ladder.’”

  I laughed. Bobbie looked across the street at the bar, which was still closed. There were some mornings, for Bobbie, when getting from eight forty-five to nine took more than an hour.

  Eventually they dropped the charges. Her mother, the concert pianist, had left her estate to Bobbie, so while it was still technically theft because the mother was absolutely still alive, the DA in San Rafael probably decided that a jury might not convict, given that the money would be Bobbie’s soon enough anyway. It wasn’t good precedent, but you had to pick your battles. And as far as the town felt, most people thought, Why shouldn’t Bobbie have the money and not the far-bigger thief in this case, the nursing home? Bobbie didn’t gloat. She’d sit in the park in the morning like she always did and try not to look at Smiley’s. She started to read the paper again. She never bought her own. She’d ask to look at mine because the last thing Bobbie would do would be to walk into John’s and buy her own paper. Another morning, a couple of months after her mother died—so we all knew that she was either flush with cash, or at least would be soon—Bobbie told me, without preface, “She always thought her hands were ugly, that they were too plump. That’s why my mother played Bach so fast, not that anybody could see them that far away in the dark.”

  An Old Poet

  Is Dying in Bolinas

  A lesser-known Beat poet. There were others like him. Unfamous names who made the Beats the Beats, scrawling in dirty notebooks in cafés, typing in unheated North Beach apartments wearing gloves with the tips of the fingers cut off. You can still see his face on the wall at City Lights. He’s standing in a photograph, in a row of poets, behind Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, hardly recognizable because he still had a full head of hair then. He’d come to California from Minneapolis and found poetry and women. In the City Lights picture he’s wearing a ferocious grin. He’s a foot soldier in Ginsberg’s army of jesters. He’d kill for poetry, sure. But, honeybaby, wouldn’t it be more fun if we just fucked for it? By the time I came to know him, he was still smiling. He smiled all the time. I believe he was one of those rare birds, a truly happy soul. I used to see him in the bar, when he could still walk, shuffling around, dancing by himself. He’d lived off poetry and the many women who’d come and gone over the decades. More off the women than the poetry, he’d be the first to say. The women who’d come and the women who’d gone. In and out of his little one-room cabin up on the Mesa. The place smelled of mold and rot, old books and unwashed sheets. His eyes don’t quite work anymore, but still he lies in bed holding a book over his face. What else are my hands good for? He doesn’t write anymore, either. Thank Eros he still has filthy dreams. A man who used to write ten, twenty, thirty poems a day.

  Sometimes, even now, a line will emerge out of the fog of morning:

  The only defense against man’s envy is not to be enviable.

  Who said that? Did I say that? Why not? Now I can say I’ve said anything. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your toes—and he’ll laugh till his ribs hurt. He’ll take pain over emptiness. Every night an old friend, his neighbor from across the road, sits beside his bed and reads him to sleep. Every once in a while, she pauses and says, “Aren’t you weary, Henry? Would you like me to stop?” And he answers, “Yes, it is. Isn’t it wonderful?” And when he’s alone, those long hours he’s awake and waiting for the dawn to creep through the windows, he listens to the ocean and considers the total uselessness of sleep when there’s no body beside you. He never had much talent. He’d always known it. Ginsberg once said, Don’t worry, Hank, you got a poetic face.

  And he thinks about how they used to call out. How when they approached his cabin, they always, always, before knocking, called out his name.

  Pacific

  After Andre Dubus’s “At Night”

  She sat calm and motionless in the living room while they worked on her husband upstairs. There’s something so assuring about these people who tromp into your house out of the night. She’d always been a socialist and
saw these men, and this one woman who’s in charge, with their dark blue uniforms and heavy boxes and imperturbable faces, as physical proof of the ultimate (potential) goodness of government. She knew them. It wasn’t the first time they’d come. Nor was it the second.

  She sat in the living room amid their work. He was a sculptor; she was a potter. When people asked what the difference was, since they both worked with clay, she’d say, “The stuff I make is useful.” And this was true. She made bowls. He made heads. Both of them always had day jobs. She’d been a librarian; he, an accountant.

  The day jobs were a front.

  On weekends, when they were younger, they’d attend craft fairs all over northern California. Sonoma, Napa, Solano, Contra Costa, San Joaquin. A few times they’d driven up to Humboldt. Once all the way to Oregon. They’d set up a card table and a couple of umbrellas. What better way to see places we wouldn’t normally see! That’s what she always told the children as she gently set unsold piece after unsold piece back into the trunk of the car.

  She’d have to call them in the morning and tell them. Maybe not tomorrow morning, but soon. She sat in the living room, hardly listening to the commotion in the bedroom. She’d heard it all before. What fuss over a failing body as if it weren’t designed to ultimately fall completely apart. To disintegrate. She gazed at their work in the half dark. The work of their hands. The rest of the world, she knew damn well, including their kids, thought them both a little bonkers. This room, the bedrooms, the kitchen, the bathroom, the front stoop. There was never enough room for their work. New pieces crowded out old pieces, heads and bowls, heads and bowls. After they retired, it was as though they’d been spurred on by a kind of delirious compulsion. Not to stave off anything, but simply because they’d had the stamina to go on working. Let it not make sense.