In the end, our heroine, Jane Abbott, discovers that William Butter, her ancestor, was innocent. A guest high on laudanum had fallen into a drowse, allowing Butter’s large raccoon to rest on his face, resulting in suffocation. William Butter was so dedicated to his raccoon that he refused to incriminate it, fearing that it would be euthanized.
Writing from a woman’s point of view was going to rejuvenate Cookie’s spirit and stop him from being a hack. It was going to unleash his genius. But the pie company called in need of an emergency supplement. Cookie tried to tell them he was through with pies for good, but they said, “Nobody writes about pie the way you do.” They said, “I don’t even like pie anymore, and you make me like it with your words.” They offered to pay him more. Cookie said all right. He didn’t tell his wife because it was shameful and desecrating, like committing adultery with the pie company.
At some point they stopped paying him with money and started paying him in pies. Cookie hid the boxes from his wife and ate the pies in the middle of the night while she slept. They had a weird aftertaste, like dust.
4
Cookie ended up calling the class he taught “The Art and Science of the Ghost Story,” which meant nothing. It met on Tuesdays and Thursdays for an hour and fifteen minutes.
The first day was easy. Cookie went around the room asking each of his twelve students to describe the last ghost he or she had seen.
There was a sad old man who stood at the foot of a bed.
There was a blue light that floated around.
There was a kindly woman who sat on the edge of a bed.
“I haven’t seen a ghost since I was a kid,” said this one kid, this kid named Dennis Guy.
“Do you remember it?” said Cookie.
“Aw, hells yeah,” said Dennis Guy. “It was this shadow man. He looked like a shadow, and he lived in the wall of my bedroom. And he had these ten little shadow monkeys who would help him.”
“Shadow monkeys?” said Cookie.
“They were these little shadows about the size of a spider monkey, and they hopped around like monkeys. One night, I left a plate of food on my dresser, and the shadow monkeys came out of the wall and ate it.”
“Now, see, that just sounds crazy to me,” said Cookie.
The class was taken aback.
“Hey, you think this is bad?” asked Cookie. “I should tell you about the time I made an old lady cry.”
The students didn’t seem interested.
“I called her at home later, to apologize. Her husband said she had ‘taken to bed with a little brandy.’ That’s what he said! ‘Taken to bed.’ He said, ‘a little brandy.’”
The students still didn’t seem interested.
“It was a fiction writing class, the place where I made her cry, the old lady. I had her in an archery class, too. Once she said, ‘The arrows make such a lovely plop when they hit the target.’ Lovely plop.”
He looked at them. He couldn’t tell whether they understood that “plop” was the wrong word. So was “lovely.” So was the combination “lovely plop.” He supposed it didn’t matter.
“I don’t care,” said Dennis Guy. “I don’t care if you believe me or not. This isn’t what I want to do anyway. I plan to wear a turban and go around reading rich socialites’ minds. And then when I get enough money I’m going to go out where there are actors and be an actor.”
The kid had the looks for it. He was a bland kid with steely blue eyes and steely blue stubble.
“Okay, great. Hey, is there an old graveyard around here? Wouldn’t it be fun if we met in an old graveyard? I think class should meet in an old, abandoned graveyard.”
It was Cookie’s last idea.
5
The town was nice anyway. There was a rare old family called the Crowns. They were seven sisters with captivating eyes and long white hair pulled back, strong, beautiful, athletic women who gardened, all in their sixties or early seventies, blessed with glowing complexions, the radiant Crowns, ageless goddesses of Mississippi.
Each Crown sister was married to a prominent local gentleman—the sheriff, for example. An obstetrician. The town historian. A guy who owned buildings.
Each of the seven husbands had a different surname—Melvis, Ronson, Turner, Blot, Garland, Chesterfield, Mayhew—but all of them were thought of as Crowns.
Cookie loved the Crown sisters. They held the ghost college in disdain and merrily encouraged him to gossip about it. He would go to their houses and sit in chairs overlooking their gardens and drink cold martinis as the sun went down. He imagined himself into the peaceful existence of a country squire.
“I can do what I do from anywhere,” he said.
“Nothing?” said his wife.
“Yes, I can do nothing from anywhere.”
The Fellowship had all but expired, and it was time to pack up and return to their penthouse in the big city. Cookie didn’t want to go.
“You’re a nature poet,” he said. “Don’t you want to live in nature?”
The nature poet explained that nature is everywhere and she wanted to live in her luxurious penthouse, near her friends and surrounded by her worldly possessions. But Cookie was on the verge of that new thing, he said, that famous new thing.
He had made a mistake, secretly keeping up his pie assignments at the expense of his popular murder novel.
After his wife went back to the city for good, leaving Cookie behind, he occupied himself mainly with old movies and drinking.
He was so glad to have a TV again. When he didn’t have one, he thought about it every day.
“I wonder what’s on TV right now,” he would say.
“You can watch TV on the internet,” his wife told him.
“It’s not the same,” he said. “I’m old.”
The morning she left to go back to the city, she dropped by Cookie’s new place on her way out of town. He showed her all the musty furniture with which the house had come furnished and the place where the TV would go.
“You don’t have to pay for one. It’s a waste. You should just come get ours,” she said.
“But it’s not a flatscreen.”
“So what? It has a nice big screen.”
“It’s shaped differently than TVs are shaped now. To have one in your home is kind of like walking around in…what’s something unfashionable to walk around in?”
“A burnoose,” said the nature poet.
“Yeah,” said Cookie. “And when you watch the square TV, the sides of all the new shows are cut off. Like maybe there are people standing off to the side of the stage doing funny stuff on Saturday Night Live, and I can’t see them. Sometimes I see a shoulder or a hand on the edge of the screen and wonder what I’m missing. On the other hand, I like old movies, and what I can’t figure out is, what if I’m watching a movie from the ’40s, you know, before widescreen. Like, say I’m watching White Heat. Is that ’40s or ’50s? Anyway, it’s not widescreen. Would Cagney’s face be stretched out in a grotesque fashion, beyond recognition? When I close my eyes I can imagine how Jimmy Cagney’s big, wide, stretched-out face would look, taking up the whole screen. It’s nightmarish. There’s probably a button you can push to fix the aspect ratio, don’t you think?”
“Our TV is fine,” said the nature poet.
“Well, if I take custody of our TV, what are you going to do for TV?”
“I’m not big on TV.”
“I’ve seen you watch a lot of TV. I’ve seen you watch the worst stuff. Lifetime movies. A young teacher goes on vacation and some unsavory fellows videotape her on the beach then edit the results to make her look sleazy and sell it on the internet. Her professional and personal lives suffer as a result. The wedding is called off. She fights to regain her dignity.”
“Caught on Tape,” said the nature poet. “I forget the subtitle.”
“Those Lifetime movies always have subtitles. I love it!”
“I think I can live without it. I’ve enjoyed not having it around
.”
“What, are you going to be one of those people who goes around saying, ‘I don’t even own a TV’?”
“Maybe.”
“It’s like I don’t even know you,” said Cookie.
They laughed. It was one of their standard lines. But they stopped laughing sooner than usual. Then they changed the subject to why she had started buying unscented antiperspirant for them. Cookie could never remember whether or not he had put it on.
Cookie did eventually make the long drive to the big city to pick up the TV. He wasn’t sure which dramatic event he thought would happen, but whatever it was, it didn’t.
He and his wife walked across the street that night to a tapas restaurant with a huge picture window and the business of the city going on outside. They ordered a number of exotic dishes, like mashed green plantains with pork cracklings and an aromatic broth and tiny shrimp. It all came mixed together in a shallow silver bowl with a silver lid, and when they opened the lid up came the aromatic steam from the aromatic broth.
Cookie was going to miss stuff like that: aromatic broth and stuff.
They slept in the same bed that night. It was friendly. The bedroom had a lot of books in it.
“What about your books?” said Cookie’s wife.
“I don’t care about them anymore,” said Cookie. “I know each one of them even in the dark, just by the vague sight of their spines. I see a pale one, which is Journal of a West India Proprietor. I remember where I bought it. City Lights in San Francisco. In 1999! The last century. I never read it. Last time I opened it, the pages were brown. I keep meaning to read it. Now I know I never will, and part of me is relieved. All of me.”
The nature poet laughed.
“What?”
“I’m giving up TV and you’re giving up books,” she said.
They both laughed. They laughed and laughed.
Ha ha ha.It was so friendly.
The next morning, when the big, ugly TV had been lugged out of the penthouse and wedged into the small car, Cookie knew he was really going to leave. It was too hard to imagine hauling it back up.
The slogan on the license plate had taken on a melancholy resonance.
They kissed goodbye in the parking garage, among the rancid perfumes.
Cookie kept in touch with his wife, calling her, for example, the time he found a lump on his wrist.
“It’s probably a ganglion,” she said.
“You know everything,” he said.
“They used to call them Bible bumps,” she said.
“Bible bumps!” he said.
“They’d smash the ganglion with something big and heavy, like the old family Bible. The fluid would disperse and go back where it’s supposed to go.”
6
Now that he and his wife were living apart, Cookie often found himself reminiscing about the jerk who had refused to let her bum a smoke. True, his wife was a champion mooch.
He remembered how they saw the town cobbler leaning on a lamppost with his ciggie and a certain look on his face like a horrible movie star.
“Hey,” said the nature poet, “can I be really bad and ask you for one of those?”
“No,” said the cobbler.
Everybody laughed. The cobbler had the short, bitter laugh of a character whose stage directions said, He gives a short, bitter laugh.
“You can have a drag of this one.”
The cobbler held out threateningly, in the nature of a challenge, the soggy, crimped end.
“That’s okay,” said the nature poet.
Cookie and the nature poet walked home.
The town square was a mile away from their quarters over the dentist’s office in the strip mall and the walk required confronting some desolation under the stars, but usually they enjoyed the exercise.
Tonight they walked fast and felt agitated and insulted. Their hands wanted something to do. They had to shake the energy out through their hands.
“Wow,” said Cookie.
“I know,” said the nature poet.
“What was that about?” said Cookie.
“I guess I learned my lesson.”
“I guess you’ll never do that again.”
“I guess not.”
That night Cookie lay in bed and thought about taking the cigarette out of the cobbler’s hand and poking the red end into the cobbler’s cheekbone.
Just two days later he heard that the cobbler had been hospitalized with an intestinal parasite that nearly killed him.
A grudge was a petty shame. The cobbler had many good qualities and practiced the noble old trade of his forebears. He did not deserve to be struck down by an intestinal parasite, leaving behind a precious little son and grieving widow just because he had refused to fork over a cigarette to the woman Cookie loved.
Now the woman he loved had gone back to the big city, and why did Cookie think about that cigarette so much?
He should have taken better care of his wife. Was that proprietary and old-fashioned? Was it sexist? He wished he had been a better husband. It was like prodding at a wound, thinking of a world in which people could be dismissive toward her, try to put her in her place. She had a place all right. It was a great place, miles up in the air. Everybody else could suck it.
Pinkeye
I WAS STROLLING TOWARD THE HIGH SCHOOL ON THE OPENING DAY of football season when I saw a five-dollar bill fly out of the pocket of a little girl’s shorts. By the time I scooped it up, she had gamboled quite a distance down the block. I wanted to run up to her and say, “Little girl, you dropped this.” But then I pictured myself, a stout and ugly man of the town, a bachelor past my prime, wheezing as I dangled a five-dollar bill in the face of an unattended child in the town square on this busiest of days. Though I had no reason to be ashamed, the picture was too unseemly to contemplate. I put the money in my pocket and kept walking.
The little girl rushed forward to meet a group of friends, other little girls. Something else flew from her pocket, a single this time. I kept that too.
Now the girl had stopped. She and her knot of chattering playmates were concerned about something. They scowled and carried on, hands on hips in a miniature attitude of high drama that was quite charming, though my heart was chilled with fear that one of them had seen me picking up the bills from the sidewalk. I passed them without incident, however, and continued toward campus. On the way, I stopped at the Chevron station and bought a pack of cigarettes with a portion of my loot.
We have no opera house. Tailgating passes for art here. My friend’s mother always puts out a tempting spread. I wolfed down pimento cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off, homemade fried chicken, sugary ham biscuits, and other finger foods. I drank gin from an enormous cup and worked on a sunburn. Nothing could have been lovelier.
Four or five nephews (not my own) sported about in the grass with their toy football, waiting for the game to begin. I popped a whole slippery deviled egg into my mouth in order to take the hand of an old woman I did not recognize. She mentioned that her granddaughter had just been accepted into the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I remarked in turn that the event was world famous, and she seemed surprised and delighted by the news.
“World famous!” she repeated. I did not trouble her with the fact that its true name is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Her garbling of the phrase is all too sadly common, even among the intelligentsia to whom I have been exposed in cyberspace.
It is a fact that I am more informed about entertainment and culture than many of my neighbors.
Something important had almost dawned on me the night before as I watched a crummy old movie about a French viscount escaping from a British prison.
The woman he loved helped get him across the channel, disguising herself as a shepherd and then as his “postboy.”
There was the snooty Englishman—in love with the same woman—tracking him down.
There was his decadent French cousin who was happy the viscount had been put into prison. He was wea
k and foppish and awash in debt. He coveted the fortune that belonged rightfully to the viscount, and was so spineless he was willing to poison his old benefactor to get it quick.
There were various supporting players, such as the girl’s feisty old aunt and an unshaven, double-crossing innkeeper.
It was awful.
The girl wore a tri-cornered hat and snug livery as she said, “Not now! Who has ever imagined a viscount kissing his postboy?”
“Everybody,” I ventured aloud.
I thought it the kind of witticism that would go over big at a sophisticated party where everyone drank cocktails and poked fun at an old movie, just one sort of event for which this area is not primarily known.
It was late. I kept thinking I would turn off the TV and go to bed. But I could not deny that I wanted to see the snooty Englishman bested and the decadent fop get what was coming to him.
I wanted to see the girl—the worst actress in the world—glowing with connubial happiness.
I had trouble sleeping. Something was flitting there, not merely the girl in her tight boy suit. The next day, amidst the bright revelry, I tried to grasp it still.
One of the little nephews of my friend bumped into my legs, distracted by squinting at the instructions on a medicine bottle with a pink cap. He neither begged my pardon nor acknowledged my existence.
“What’s wrong with that child?” I asked my friend. “Is he sick?”
“Pinkeye,” answered the old woman, who had overheard.
“So I should completely avoid him?” my burly friend asked in a jocular tone of voice. He is large and full of life and enjoys joshing about his supposed vulnerability to the vagaries of fate.
“I don’t worry about germs anymore,” said the old woman, whose hand I had clasped so warmly. What a luxury, I thought, to be an old woman who no longer cares about germs.
In a coffee shop I had witnessed a little boy ineffectually stifling his liquid cough in the crook of his arm as he stood over one container full of straws and another full of spoons. Nearby, his brother, smaller still, spun the postcard rack around and around with something like viciousness. Nonetheless, I took no pleasure in the cruelty of the marketing executive who had decided to put pinkeye medicine in a little white bottle with a bright pink cap.
Movie Stars Page 2