House of Prayer No. 2

by Mark Richard

  The New York Times asks you to go down to Atlanta to profile Jimmy Carter. One thing they don’t tell you that you probably should have known is Jimmy Carter has a contentious relationship with the New York Times; and that’s probably one reason you were offered the job.

  Mr. Carter is cool to you at first, then loosens up as you meet his wife, and you spend a couple of weeks with them coming and going to the Democratic National Convention, which is in Atlanta that year. At the end of the two weeks, you have an idea of how to put the story together, and Mr. Carter invites you to go to Africa with him, where he’s leading a campaign to eradicate river blindness. You call the editor at the New York Times and tell her you’re going to Africa, and after she hears your pitch that maybe Mr. Carter needed to be president to become the statesman that he is evolving into, she tells you to come back to New York, you’re not going to Africa, you’re too sympathetic to Mr. Carter. The paper pays you a kill fee, and you’re back on the streets again.

  It’s the first year of the time when the doctors said you would be in a wheelchair, and maybe because you’re aware of this, the pain in your hips is getting to you, maybe it’s just walking the hard concrete of New York looking for work, often not having subway fare, maybe it’s the bitter cold.

  You help a guy who has fallen out of his wheelchair on East Seventy-ninth where people keep walking past, and the guy is angry with you for helping as he accepts your help, and all you can say is I know, I know.

  YOU MAKE YOUR WAY TO VIRGINIA BEACH and don’t tell anyone at first that you’ve failed at becoming a writer. You have a canvas cot you found in some trash on a side street in New York, a two-volume edition of The Oxford English Dictionary, a suitcase, and your typewriter and box of papers. You hide in a house on the North End of the beach that your old friend Kenny the drummer said was empty, but you are discovered in two days. You see a man on the beach who tells you his daughter has just bought a house a few blocks away.

  The daughter lets you stay in the attic apartment of the house she has just bought. Her family is the family that built your hometown. She’s beautiful and between her third and fourth husbands and a little lost at sea herself. You insist on paying rent, and she says, Fine, a hundred dollars, and you don’t even have a hundred dollars, and she doesn’t care.

  You’ve only been gone two years, but there’s nobody from the old guard anymore at the T-bird when you wheel a bicycle up there one night and look through the plate glass. You’re about to wheel away when you see Melvin. Melvin was with Witcher the day Witcher played chicken on the single-lane bridge, driving his tractor-trailer at the oncoming log truck. When you first moved to New York and were eating beans for the fifth day in a row from a Crock-Pot in Queens, and homesick, you’d called the T-bird one night to tell them that you were coming home. They were having the annual Tacky Tourist party. Melvin had answered and said how proud everyone was of you for going to New York to be a writer, even though New York’s a sewer and no place anybody else would want to live, and you’d hung up, realizing you could not go back to Virginia Beach. And yet here you are, and Melvin is surprised to see you. He buys you a drink, and you sit at a table in the corner, and Melvin hears your confession—you don’t think you have what it takes to become a writer.

  THE NEXT DAY MELVIN TAKES you out in the country in his Jeep and you drive down to North Carolina, where his father was the superintendent of schools, and his mother says it’s okay for you to take one of the old mattresses out of the barn for your attic apartment. On the way back to the beach, Melvin stops in a place where he has to collect some rent from some people. You pull in to the yard of an old house up on concrete and brick pillars; there are some dirty children playing in the yard who look up when Melvin drives in as if they’ve never seen a Jeep with a mattress on the roof before and it frightens them. Melvin says there’s a pistol in the glove box, if he’s not out in fifteen minutes, to get the pistol out of the glove box and come in the house looking for him.

  Melvin goes to the door, and a white woman who’s not happy to see him makes a smile on her old face and lets him in.

  You watch the children for a while. There are some dogs in the yard, stray-looking mostly. They keep going around to one side of the house and keep sticking their heads up under the foundation, and their throats move as if they are drinking, and you figure there must be a leaking pipe to a tap there, though there is a working well in the yard. You sit and watch for a while, flip down the glove box door, and see the .38 pistol you know there is no way you’re going to touch, and you flip the glove box door closed and wait some more.

  The door to the house finally opens, and a rough-looking guy lets Melvin out, and Melvin shakes his hand and comes out to the Jeep. You’ve got one of your little notepads on your lap and you need to borrow a pen, and as you drive off he asks you what you are writing, and you don’t answer but what you are writing is: At night, stray dogs come up underneath our house and lick our leaking pipes.

  A friend calls you and says he is one of the judges of a short story contest, and if you send him one, he’ll put the fix in for you, it’s a thousand-dollar prize. So far you’ve been eating when the girl in whose house you are staying takes you out to dinner at nice restaurants. Sometimes Melvin comes around and throws pine bark through your open attic window to come out and play, but you are on your mattress in the hot attic going over At night … because you’ve learned from Gordon that everything you need is in that first line, all you have to do is unpack the story, its metronome is already ticking back and forth.

  You finish the story about the stray dogs and send it to Esquire, and that’s when a new editor calls you up. He’s found the story in the slush pile, and they’re going to take it and run it, and you hug Melvin and his wife and kiss your landlord friend goodbye and get on a train back to New York.

  NEW YORK IS BETTER NOW that you will have a story published in a national magazine. You live in a haunted house on East Twenty-second Street that belongs to the girlfriend of a Coast Guard pilot you met at the T-bird one night. Her name is Anstice. Anstice is a caterer, and you eat when you work for her and help her clean out the four-story brownstone, which is pretty much as her parents left it thirty years before. A woman from Barbados who was her mother’s nurse still lives there, and the woman from Barbados still talks to the mother, who has been dead for a long time. The woman from Barbados doesn’t like the ghost of the man who walks the top floor and terrifies the bejesus out of you when you hear him up there.

  One night someone leans over you and blows cold breath on you, and when you tell Anstice, she asks you which bed on which floor you are sleeping in, and when you tell her, she says, Oh, that’s just my father coming to see who’s sleeping in his old bed.

  When it’s time to sell all the old furniture in the place, the piano movers come to move the piano, and it’s the piano Anstice’s parents used to play when they came home late in the evenings with friends after finishing the shows they’d been performing in on Broadway. The dead mother doesn’t want the piano moved. At first, the movers can’t get in the house; the double front doors are jammed, even with you inside pulling and the movers outside pushing. You have to call a locksmith and he can’t get the doors to open; he’s taken the locks out and handles off and removed all the hardware. Then, while you’re standing there with the locksmith and the movers outside, the doors swing open as if they’d been pushed by a gentle breeze. The movers are spooked, especially by the running commentary of the woman from Barbados. Then, when the piano movers are starting to move the piano, the plaster in the ceiling starts cracking and falling in big pieces, and the movers run outside. Just then Anstice comes out of the hospital across the street, where she’s been visiting a dying friend, and you call out to her from the window of the room where the plaster is falling, and Anstice comes in and stands in the center of the room. She has been crying across the street. Her hands are balled into fists, her eyes are closed, and she yells, Mother, stop it! And it st
ops.

  When Anstice sells the brownstone, you move into a nightclub kind of performance space in Alphabet City, an old loft where the Communist Party used to print the Daily Worker. Where the printing press used to be the old splattered ink is so thick on the walls of the pit they’re using as a bar that you can’t get paint to stick to it. There’s a lot of performance art going on in New York City, and a lot of it gets performed in your new home. There are two levels, six thousand square feet, a first floor with a stage and an upper level with a balcony and a handful of bedrooms around a large common area. You have one of the bedrooms by the grace of one of the guys who had heard you read there and is a voracious reader himself; his family holds the patent on submarine periscopes.

  Sometimes you write a story to read onstage. Some of the other acts include a guy who comes out in a tuxedo and sits at a table on which a solitary candle is burning; there’s a bucket of water placed on the edge of the stage. Silently, the guy in the chair completely undresses while staring at the flame of the candle. When he is naked, he squats on the chair, still staring at the candle. Then he suddenly leaps over the candle and the table, does a forward-roll somersault, and plunges his head into the bucket of water. People applaud.

  There are some nasty comics, two guys and a girl who perform War and Peace in fifteen minutes, some guys in blue paint beating drums, and a beautiful girl who performs topless wearing the bottom of a mermaid costume sitting on a stool. She sings “Under the Boardwalk,” and when she’s finished, she tosses her seaweed hair around and blows kisses. You and the guy whose family holds the submarine periscope patent stand in the balcony and clap until your hands are sore and say, Now, that’s art!

  GORDON OFFERS YOU A BOOK CONTRACT for ten thousand dollars, which is a lot of money for you at the time, and twice as much as he is able to get some of his other writers. You had gone to his office one day to wait for him and there was a letter he was typing to the publisher that was still in the typewriter, and you see your name so you read it. Gordon makes a plea to the publisher for you, saying you are soul-less and you blush when you see that, until you read the letter again and realize he has written sou-less, without money. When it comes time for you to decide to whom to dedicate your first book, Gordon says To your mother, Claire, of course. Gordon does not know that your mother wakes up every morning before dawn so that she can pray for all the people on her prayer list, names of people she has gathered over the years on a stack of worn three-by-five notecards from which she reads and holds during the two hours each morning she prays. He does not know that after you had your breakthrough in his class, his name has been added to Claire’s prayer list where it remains to this day.

  Your book comes out and nothing happens. A friend of yours who works at the Washington Post calls the publicity department of your publisher to get a copy to review, and they tell him you are not one of their authors. When he calls again, they tell him you are dead. You pay off your personal debts and continue to live off the stories you sell to Esquire; they end up buying five of them.

  The editors there, Will and Rust, often take you to the Broadway Deli for pastrami sandwiches and manhattans. One time at the end of the lunch you carefully pack the uneaten half of your pastrami sandwich, and Rust asks you why you are doing that, and you confess that you’re broke again, which is no surprise to Will, who lets you borrow and repay two hundred dollars at least twice a month. Over lunch you have been telling them about the summer previous when you were in Virginia Beach and spent an afternoon sitting on your bicycle watching the police retrieve a body that had been sucked into a sand dredge in Rudee Inlet. You were thinking of writing a story called “Where Blue Is Blue,” but you didn’t have it all worked out yet.

  At the end of the lunch Rust tells you to come by the office the next day, and when you walk eighty blocks on your hips, you find that he’s not there, he’s just left an envelope with a note. You open the envelope, and there’s a note that says the magazine’s writers do not walk around hungry, and there’s a voucher for an advance against a story he’s commissioning called “Where Blue Is Blue.” You go home and write the story.

  When it comes time for your book to go into paperback, the publisher says it may not be going into paperback. The publisher’s office says nobody has been buying your book.

  A week later, it’s announced that your book has won the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award and you’ll be flying to Boston to receive the award from Norman Mailer.

  In Boston, you meet Mr. Mailer and the head judge for the award, Josephine Humphreys, and you’re allowed to bring some family and friends, and you fly up your sister and your mother. In your speech you recount your mother bringing you books by the grocery bagful from the library when you were recovering from hip surgery. The ceremony is at the Kennedy Library, and you don’t know it at the time, but Mrs. Onassis is in the audience, and when the speech is over and it’s time for the dinner, she asks that you sit beside her.

  Mrs. Onassis asks you a lot of questions about yourself, and you talk about the ocean and sailing, and she says how much she loves those things, and she says her happiest times were always on a boat, and she says especially that one out there, and you see through the window she’s meaning the little sailboat that’s on display at the museum. Your mother can’t believe she’s met Jackie Kennedy, and when it’s over, you think it’s over, but it’s not. In a couple of days one of your roommates at the nightclub performance space tells you he’s been hanging up on someone who keeps claiming to be Mrs. Onassis when she calls. He says once when she identified herself, he said, Right, and I’m the king of Spain! and hung up.

  Mrs. Onassis sends you to her brother-in-law’s orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery. You thank her, but you’ll never go. Just recently you had appendicitis, and when, by the grace of a book-loving physician named Bruce Yaffe, you were admitted, the hospital released you early because you didn’t have insurance. But soon, the orthopedic surgeon’s office is calling to schedule an appointment, and the woman calls every day until you set the appointment and promise to show up.

  You see several doctors at the hospital, and they all ask you the same thing: How do you get around? You think they are asking which subway do you take, the No. 6 train? Which crosstown bus? You tell them it depends on where you’re going, you suppose. They become a little impatient. No, where’s your walker, your wheelchair, your crutches, your cane? They show you your X-rays—it’s all bone grinding into cracked bone. They say it’s a wonder you can walk at all. Yeah, I can walk, you say.

  Even in the coldest winter a walk across midtown Manhattan has you in a sweat. The doctors are telling you that there is much surgery in your future, but you’re embarrassed to tell them that you have no insurance. Thanks, but you’ll push on. You call the doctors’ office and worry about the bill, but the bills never come. Mrs. Onassis has taken care of them.

  In a Sunday afternoon talk with Mrs. Onassis you tell her about the migratory fowl flyways through the Great Dismal Swamp, and she is very interested. You make some calls about when the best time is to take a guided tour, winter probably, or early spring before the bugs and snakes are out. Before you can show her the Great Dismal Swamp, you find out that she has taken ill and has died, though you feel as if you just saw her. One morning you went up to your new publisher’s offices, and her office was near that of your new editor, Nan Talese, and on your way out you were lurching up the hall with Mrs. Onassis on one arm and Nan Talese on the other, and people were sticking their heads out of their offices to see what was laughing and lurching so loud going by, and it was just a very happy you.

  IT TAKES YOU FOREVER to write your next book, a novel. You had once asked Gordon what the hardest thing is to write about. Without looking up, he had said the hardest thing to write about is the love one man has for another without it being homoerotic. The only thing you could think of that would approximate that in your life would be the feelings you once felt for two sea captains on wh
ose boats you had once shipped.

  You are lost at sea in New York City, headphones on, Bible tract in your back pocket, the seafaring novel roaring in your head, the heaving concrete, headlong black foaming ocean, a pitched deck where men hold on for life in the shadows, a Master somewhere on the upper deck, unseen but seeing, seeing you, no urgency, no destination, no end to the night, you sail under reefed sail, a stranger pulls you by your collar from stepping in front of an express bus on Fifty-seventh Street.

  So you rent a beach cottage down on the deserted end of Virginia Beach in winter to finish the novel, and immediately a nor’easter rips off the front of the house and floods the first floor. You send the girl you’ve brought with you back to New York while you stay in the ruins of the place. Melvin comes by and finds you with a shovel and a broom trying to clear your driveway, which the persistent winter wind will cover again overnight. Every day you wake up and shovel and sweep until dark and spend every night at the only bar at that end of the beach where you drink until the bartender drives you home at closing, even though your car is in the parking lot and it’s only two blocks.

  The only other people living in your neighborhood of summer rentals are a pretty woman across the street and her three small children. Her husband is a Navy carrier pilot on deployment in the Med. He’s secreted his family here while he’s away because someone has been stalking his wife. You eat when she brings you over plates of food or when Melvin and his wife feed you. At Christmas you buy the lady and her kids across the street a Christmas tree, but you won’t take it in her house. It wouldn’t look right. Once she has a prowler, and she calls you, and you take a pistol over there in the middle of the night and find footprints under a back bedroom window; it could have been teenagers or a hobo. You tell her it’s okay, but you sit up on your porch wrapped in a blanket with a bottle in the dark and keep watch until you fall asleep.