Moth

by James Sallis

  “And that I wasn’t a hero.”

  She nodded. “And that life is just doing the things you have to do: staying alive, getting through the day, turning into your parents. Maybe I was wrong about that part, huh? Maybe there’s something more to it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Can I make you another pot of tea? That has to be cold by now.”

  “Only if you’ll have some too. I’m already sloshing when I walk.”

  “Deal.”

  We went out to the kitchen. I leaned against the sink thinking of meals I’d prepared long ago for Verne, for Vicky and Cherie, remembering their laughter, seeing their faces, as Alouette emptied the kettle, drew fresh water and put it on to boil, filled the pot with hot water from the tap.

  “Transportation’s going to be the biggest problem,” she said. “I figure between work, group meetings and whatever classes I settle on, I’m going to be piling up a lot of miles. I’ll centralize what I can, find locations closer in to home. But some of it, like work and school, won’t be so easy.”

  “Give it time. We’ll see. Things start working out so that you decide you need a car, I’ll match whatever money you can save up for one. And I’ll take you to a friend who has a used-car lot and owes me a few favors.”

  “All right.”

  She emptied the pot, measured in Earl Grey, poured water, stirred once and set it to steep under a brocade cozy Vicky had sent me from Scotland years back.

  When the tea was ready, we went back into the living room. Alouette settled on the couch with her notebook, feet tucked under her. I sat in my chair with a copy of Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro. I looked up at her after a while and thought how strange this tableau, this quiet domestic scene, was for both of us. Then how very alone I had been all these years, and how good it was to have someone here again.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  QUENEAU ONCE REMARKED THAT JUST about anyone could learn to move characters around, getting them from place to place and scene to situation, pushing them through pages like sheep until finally one arrived at something people would read as a novel. But Queneau himself wanted the characters and their relationships—to one another, to the sprawl of human history and thought, to the book itself—to be structured, wanted those relationships to be in the word’s purest sense constructed: in short, he wanted something more.

  There are those who would argue—engagés like Sartre, or perhaps in our own country the late John Gardner—that, in eschewing the tenets of “realistic” or mimetic fiction, he wanted less.

  This strain of what we might call irrealism, this motive of artifice, in French fiction reaches back at least to Roussel, whose Locus Solus some of you may have encountered in Jack Palangian’s magic-realism seminar, and persists today in the work of Georges Perec, the group OuLiPo—cofounded by Queneau, incidentally—and American expatriate Harry Mathews.

  Le Chiendent, Queneau’s first published novel, in fact consciously, deliberately parodies most all the conventions of realistic fiction.

  It is a rigorously structured novel. Ninety-one parts: seven chapters each containing thirteen sections, each of them with its three unities of time, place and action, each confined to a specific mode of representation, or narrative: narration only, narration with dialogue, dialogue alone, interior monologue, letters, newspaper articles, dreams.

  The novel, a meditation on the Cartesian cogito, in fact had its beginning in Queneau’s attempt to translate Descartes into demotic French. It opens with a bank clerk, Etienne Marcel, coming to consciousness, surfacing out of the slough of his unexamined life, while looking into a shop window. Taking substance from his sudden self-consciousness, and from the objective existence accrued from Pierre le Grand, who has happened to see him there at the window and become curious about him, Étienne is plunged headlong into a series of adventures—into the thick of life itself.

  At one point le Grand, through whose eyes we witness much of the book’s early action, says: “I am observing a man.” And his confidante replies: “You don’t say! Are you a novelist?” To which he replies: “No. A character.”

  As things go on, and as still more characters and situations are introduced, many of them truly bizarre—it’s rather like those jugglers who begin with a small cane or club and end up piling chair atop chair, all of it tottering there far above them—the novel turns ever more fantastic, drifting further and further from the moorings of realistic fiction, until at last the reader is forced to abandon any pretense that he’s reading a story about “real” people or events and to admit that he is only participating in the arbitrary constructions—reflective, complex, but always arbitrary—of a writer. A sophisticated game-playing.

  From one of the novel’s many discursive passages:

  “People think they are doing one thing, and then they do another. They think they are making a pair of scissors, but they have made something quite different. Of course, it is a pair of scissors, it is made to cut and it cuts, but it is also something quite different.”

  A character muses: Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to say what that “something else” is? And that is exactly what Queneau attempts, here and in all his work: to touch on that “something else” we sense, yet never locate, in our lives.

  Yet because he has a kind of horror of seriousness, it’s often at their most profound moments that his books and poems turn outrageously comic, dissolving into puns, bits of allusive and other business, vaudeville jokes, slapstick. One often thinks they are books that might have been written by an extraordinarily brilliant child.

  Which brings us, quite naturally, to Zazie, a best-seller for Queneau and perhaps his most easily accessible novel.

  As the book opens, murderous dwarf Bébé Overall has abducted little Zazie from the department store where her young mother was choosing fine Irish linen and has taken her into his underground lair far beneath the Paris métro lines, a place frequented by old circus performers, arthritic guitar players and legless Apache dancers, ancient socialists with Marx-like beards and tiny Trotsky spectacles. There Bébé—

  Yes, Miss Mara?

  I see. You may be right; perhaps in my enthusiasm I am not describing Queneau’s novel at all, but rather some alternate version, some possibility, of my own; have begun, as some colleagues might say, deconstructing it. Why don’t you tell us what actually happens in Zazie dans le métro?

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  I WAS, IN A SENSE, SINGING FOR MY SUPPER. A latter-day minstrel show for ol’ massuh, ol’ massuh in this case being Dean Treadwell, who had chosen today—my first day back, after yesterday sheepishly calling my department chairman, apologizing for my absence so profusely that I began to stammer, and finally pleading a family emergency—to audit, as was his custom once each term with every course offered under his aegis, my class.

  Miss Mara acquitted herself well, the students had actually read Zazie, and discussion was lively. One of the young men took a particular, keen delight in Zazie’s Uncle Gabriel, pitching his voice throughout the discussion in a high, thin flutter he obviously imagined similar to the uncle’s own during his performances as a female impersonator.

  As the students filed out, Dean Treadwell came up to me and held out his hand.

  “Fine class. Somehow you have a way of making it all real to them, making them care. I wish half of my other teachers could do that.”

  “You caught me on a good day. Most others, the snoring would have distracted you.”

  “Fascinating. And I never even heard of Queneau before this.”

  “Three weeks ago, none of the students had either. A semester from now, most of them will have forgotten him.”

  “You have a minute, Lew?”

  “Actually, I have about four hours—till my seminar after lunch.”

  “Walk with me, then. I’ll buy you a coffee.”

  “Sure. But if the coffee’s from one of the faculty lounges, I’ll pay you not to have to drink it.”

  We ambl
ed out into the hallway and along it, heads together like two monks strolling the cloisters as they kicked Boethius back and forth.

  “I don’t know how you’ll feel about this …”

  I let it hang there.

  “I understand from some of the faculty members, and from my wife as well, that you worked for many years as a detective.”

  “Worked at it, anyway.”

  Two of my students from Advanced Conversational passed us. One of them said Bonjour, the other Hey, how’s it going?

  We wound up off-campus, at one of the coffeehouses that suddenly seem to be springing up everywhere in New Orleans. This one was a Tennessee Williams set: a hodgepodge of rickety ancient tables and chairs, crumbling plaster walls, windows so hazed you could safely watch eclipses through them, door open onto a dank inner patio where a three-legged cat furiously eyed all trespassers. A massive mahogany counter built directly into the tiled floor and topped with a slab of green marble dominated the room. A cork bulletin board took up most of the back wall, scaled in layers of handbills for alternative music, scribbled ads offering musical equipment for sale, notices of tutors and roommates wanted.

  Like many such places in the city, it was a museum exhibit in other ways as well: here, an unregenerate hippie in jeans, work shirt and vest, scraggly hair stuffed into a bandanna; a fifties young professional in polyester “smart” frock and bouffant hair, or facsimile beatnik with goatee, shades and beret; over there, a black man natted out in suit and impossibly wide tie dating from the forties, slicked hair close to his scalp under a wool slouch hat. People have a way of getting stuck in time here in New Orleans. Once a student fresh from New Hampshire asked “Are all these strange-looking people here for Mardi Gras?” and another student told her, “Those are the ones who live here.”

  “Why did you give it up?” Treadwell asked me when we were seated over tall, untouchably hot glasses of café latte. “Detective work, I mean.”

  “I’d tell you I found honest work instead, but you know better.”

  He laughed silently, a single brief paroxysm, and looked off toward the patio. Sitting in the doorway with its stump raised for cleaning, the cat glared back at him.

  “You’ve been married, haven’t you, Lewis?”

  “Once, a long time ago.”

  “And you had children?”

  “I did. A son. He’s gone now.”

  Treadwell’s eyes came back to me.

  “Gone?”

  I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. But all this has to be leading up to something.”

  “I was married once, when I was younger than seems possible now. It didn’t last long, and afterward, I was by myself for a long time, one of those academic bachelors who comes out of the house on his way to classes slapping dust and crumbs off his coat. I never imagined I’d live any other way. But—What’s the old saying? Life’s all conjunctions, just one thing after another?”

  “More like punctuation, I think. Colons and exclamations for some, dashes for the rest.”

  “One day in Victorian Life I looked up from my notes and, I still don’t know why, noticed a young woman sitting there in the front row. Older than the other students, but still young to me. And while I was looking, while the fact of her existence was slowly sinking in as I prattled on about the monarchy or somesuch, she winked at me. Not coquettishly at all, you understand, but with this amazing sense of maturity somehow, of being very much her own person … solid.

  “I dismissed class shortly thereafter. That was on a Thursday. And by Monday we were married. Twelve years ago. Twelve years. From the first I felt as though I’d packed up everything and moved to a new country. A different language, different customs, different weather—who knows, maybe even different physical laws. Everything changed.”

  I waited. Good interviewers never have to say much; they turn themselves into voids, into receptacles.

  “Laura is my life now, everything else revolves around her, her and the university. But I have a son by that first, youthful marriage. He’s an adult himself now, of course. We never had much to do with one another, never communicated much; he grew up on the West Coast, mostly. But a couple of months ago he moved back here, to New Orleans, and we began seeing one another. He’d call every week or so. We’d meet for lunch, a glass of wine. It’s an ambiguous relationship, at best. Would you like more coffee?”

  I declined, and after a moment he said, “I’m afraid he’s in trouble. I wondered if you might be able to help him.” Then he added: “Laura’s dead against my getting involved.”

  This is none of your business, Griffin echoed far back in my head. I said: “I’d have to know two things. What kind of trouble—”

  “Drugs. I don’t know how deeply.”

  “Then your wife may be right. The other thing I’d have to know is what you’d expect me to do. There’s probably not much you, or I, or anyone else can do. You have to know that.”

  He nodded, head remaining momentarily bowed. “I suppose in a sense I’ve dedicated my life to the belief that knowledge, that learning, intellect, reason, matter.” He looked back up. “Yes, I know. I’ve dealt with this in my usual manner: I settled into the library and read everything available. But now I seem to be flying in the face of all that, don’t I?”

  “If not flying, at least taking one hell of a leap of faith.”

  “Too close to the son,” he said. I wouldn’t have thought he had it in him.

  And because of that, as much as anything else, I told him I would do it.

  I got the son’s address, a snapshot (his only one, he told me as he pulled it from his wallet) and as many details of his son’s life as he knew. There weren’t many: a workplace that might or might not be current, a bar he’d mentioned a couple of times, a few friends’ first names. His son drove an old mustard-color Volvo, loved spicy food and war movies, was not a reader and had no particular taste for music.

  “I want to know how bad it is,” Dean Treadwell said, “how deeply he’s into this. That’s all I expect of you. Maybe then I can find a way to help him.”

  “I’ll do what I can. I still have a few contacts out there. I’ll ask around, turn over some stones.”

  Treadwell had pulled a checkbook out of his coat pocket and was uncapping a pen.

  I shook my head. “This is a favor. Besides, it may well come to nothing.”

  “I insist.”

  “So do I.”

  “Very well, then.” He clipped pen to checkbook and slipped them back into his pocket. “At least promise that you’ll come over for a meal with Laura and me, soon.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  Outside, he turned back.

  “Lew. I almost forgot: my wife made me promise to ask when there’s going to be a new book. She’s read them all, and said to tell you she loves them, especially the ones set in New Orleans.”

  “Tell her thanks, but I’m not sure. Lately I seem to be getting distracted by life a lot.”

  Neither of us knew, of course, that the next book when it came, written in a two-week binge of twenty-hour days and published just before Mole, would be the story of his own son’s last days.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  IT WAS MUCH WORSE THAN HE SAID, OF COURSE. Probably even worse than he thought.

  The first thing I did that afternoon, from my airless, shared office in the basement of Monroe Hall, was call Walsh. They couldn’t find him for a while, and I sat listening to a rumble of shouts and clatter, indecipherable conversations, other phones buzzing. Finally he came on with “Yeah?”

  “Lew.”

  “Listen, I don’t care how much you beg, I’m not buying you any more dinners.”

  “Two desirable bachelors like us, both our calendars are probably filled anyway, bubba.”

  “Well, I might just be able to squeeze you in—but you’d have to buy.”

  “I’m not that desperate yet.”

  “You will be.”

  “So I’ll call you back
when I am.”

  “Sure you will.” Someone spoke to him, and he turned away briefly, came back. “How’s the girl?”

  “Doing okay, this far.”

  “Good sign. Any word from Clare?” When I said nothing, he went on. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry about that, Lew, I really am.”

  “Life goes on.”

  “Yeah. Such as it is. So what kind of favor you need this time? Not a big one, I hope. The city just dumped a new load of shit on us and now the mayor and his boys are down here smearing it all around.”

  I told him.

  “You at home?”

  “School.” I gave him the number.

  Twenty minutes later, he called back.

  “What about the mayor and his boys?” I asked.

  “Hey, urgent police business came up. It happens like that. They’re cooling their buns on the bench out in the squad room, staring at me in here. Told them I’d be right out, soon as I took care of this emergency. First time I’ve sat down today.”

  “Maybe I should thank them.”

  “Maybe you should shoot the whole lot of them.”

  “So what’s the story?”

  “Well, it looks like your boy’s cut himself a little swath down the coast from Seattle to Portland.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Initially. Possession, PI, sales. Then your man went to school somewhere: suddenly B&E, suspicion of auto theft and attempted fraud start rolling up. No convictions on any of it, so a lot of this isn’t on the record, but he became a familiar face. A couple of short falls, one for assault and battery, the other for, get this, unpaid traffic tickets. He’s been lucky. But the captain I talked to up there said he’s a body ready to drop. That help?”