Claimer did remember. Pall had had a picture of the young actor on his wall—a poster from a Rob Reiner film. Claimer couldn’t get over the audacity of naming yourself—or perhaps some agent had done it—after a body of water and a city.
“You always said that River was no name for an older man. He’d regret it someday, you said. People’d call him ‘Old Man Ribber.’”
“Gee, son, I don’t know what to say.”
“It was his real name, you know.”
Before taking in the high stone and wood interior of the room—an A-frame-type chalet—Claimer had to ask, and he did in a whisper: “What are you doing here? I was set to visit you tomorrow.”
“Oh, real sorry, Dad, sorry to disappoint you,” Pall said sarcastically.
A tense pause. Claimer scanned again the vertical space he was in; he noticed a banner, hanging behind the main counter, which said AESTHETIC DEMOCRACY.
“Work release. Kallie—Kallie Ford—arranged it. Can I call you Bill?”
“Sure, son.”
“Call me PM. We’ve done away with the relational around here, okay?”
“Sure. PM.”
He saw the brassy hair; it swung once like a narrow curtain on the other side of the desk and from behind it the orange bone of her shoulder turned. And then the livid face. It was her all right.
Claimer clomped toward the desk. Her green eyes in the brilliantly speckled composition of her face reminded him of something—something homey and familiar. And faintly distasteful. He tried to elude it before it settled on him: peas and carrots.
“William Claimer, welcome to Timbucto. We are pleased to have you. PM has told us much about you and now we get to see you with our own eyes.”
For some reason, her words cadenced into a spectral poetry in Claimer’s ear. “I’m Kallie Ford,” she said, extending a hand with skin as dark as a toad’s. Her fingers were cool. Claimer found nothing to say, and he felt it.
“I could have been Henry,” he blurted out.
Her left eye closed a bit, in a kind of comic discernment. He let her think. A moment passed, and he could hear his son shuffling nervously behind him. Was there something between them?
“You still can be,” she said. “As you know, we renamed ourselves here. We do it all the time.”
PM hustled his father off through a side door. “It’s a bit shabby, Dad. Bill. Hard habit. But the sheets are clean.”
Claimer hurled over his shoulder to Ms. Ford, “We’ll talk about New York. Penn Station? Yesterday morning?” It was too jolly, he feared. Still, she smiled.
PM gave Claimer the rundown, sounding as if he’d rehearsed it. “Six months of this and I’m free. I work with the community here, but it’s really based in Canada, through Kallie. I’m doing drug counseling.” Other details came forth about PM’s plans as he hurried to anticipate and satisfy the usual fatherlies. But Fatherly was aswirl with the gentle ringings of Ms. Ford’s voice and her freckled beauty.
“She’s in charge,” said PM, reading in the opaque revolutions of his father’s attentions something he recognized as hunger or want, like when he would suddenly look up from his newspaper and scan the kitchen ceiling.
“I have to talk to her about this Timbucto thing,” Claimer said weakly.
PM offered his view. “It’s like this, Bill. They mean no disrespect. It’s just that, well, here things are done a little different. People understand the past here. And how it can be used for the future, I guess. You know, did you see that banner out there? Here, it’s on this stationery here: Aesthetic Democracy. We vote on everything, and the main thing is what’s most artful, you know, like pleasing. Like we’re considering a new accent. For everybody. The best spoken English. Wessex or something. And we’ll all learn it.”
Claimer said, “Just tell me this, and I’ll drop it. What is Timbucto? I looked in my files—you remember?—and there was nothing on it but your little ice capade, ‘Where’s my dad?’ thing.”
“Okay, Dad. Fuck it! John Brown, the abolitionist. Harpers Ferry? Wanted to attract runaway slaves and set up a free state up here, for black people. They called it Timbucto. Never went anywhere. But it was a beautiful idea, and that’s why we voted it in.”
Not bad, thought Claimer.
THE YOUTH OF TIMBUCTO, led by PM, it turned out, had pressed for a midnight vigil for the late Mr. Phoenix. PM worked as industriously as a UAW organizer all afternoon—first on the phone in the kitchen and then speeding to other units to make face-to-face appeals. A quorum was rounded up for the 8:00 P.M. vote. Claimer begged off, claiming that he had to listen to Marketplace on the local public radio station, but he slipped in the side of the Communal Center at about 8:15. His son had the floor, dark hair brushed back, his face daggered in shadow. He looked amazingly famous, better than an actor. He looked like the young Artaud. Claimer, with a dad’s pride, felt there were women and girls swooning as Pall shyly swayed back and forth, his index finger pressed thoughtfully to his lower lip, as he searched for the right words. He broke into a little speech that was obviously memorized from one of the dead actor’s parts. A few of the girls and some teenage boys cheered at the end. PM seemed exhausted by the effort; his dark clothes hung loose upon him, as if he had just suddenly lost weight. With nothing left to say, he looked like he would collapse with indecision—should he sit down?—when Ms. Kallie Ford came forth and put an arm around his waist and called for a vote. “Let us hear your voice,” she said, while looking through PM’s hanging forelock for his eyes.
It was unanimous; the adults took evident joy in giving their sons and daughters—their coequals in this high-minded community—the right to a ritual they wanted. Ms. Ford and Claimer’s son hugged.
Claimer went up to Kallie Ford when the meeting was over. He quickly explained that he had come to Timbucto to investigate the name change—did she know that he had done the original incorporated ID?; she did. But that it really didn’t bother him? It didn’t. He was now here to see his son. During his little confession, Ms. Ford had been tending to a string of people who needed to have some small thing or another acknowledged, a task she handled with effortless charm. But when he mentioned seeing his son as his current priority, she squared her body and appraised him in a schoolmarmish way, a silent admonition. She knew it was a lie.
“Will you come over for a drink,” he said. And she did.
“WE ARE VERY FRANK HERE, Mr. Claimer. I have many lovers.”
Claimer, oddly, was not taken aback. She was in his house, his unit 3, after all; and it was late. Well, ten o’clock. And they were alone.
“I didn’t intend to pry,” said Claimer, “about your many lovers.”
“It could not be prying, could it?” she said, swirling the scotch in her glass. “I told you.”
She sat on the hassock in Claimer’s open living room. Her loose peasant blouse disguised the secrets of her breasts.
“Where are you from?” he asked. Claimer could have been dressed a little more sportily. He had on gray woolen slacks with a sharp crease and a cotton turtleneck. His loafers struck him as terribly square. “Do you want to smoke some grass?”
She laughed an assassinating laugh, and said no thank you, noncommittal as to whether she ever indulged, though she was working her drink with a veteran’s verve.
“I’m an artist,” she said. “I work with stone and steel. I’m from Canada.”
Claimer mentioned the one sculpture exhibit he had seen—the work of Anthony Caro—and the trip he’d made to Storm King.
“My, my,” said Kallie Ford, draining her drink while laughing in it.
She moved forward on the hassock, a signal that she was leaving. Claimer scrambled. “Is that your work, on the drive coming in?”
“Yes,” she said, settling back for a minute and taking an ice cube into her mouth. “Do you like it?”
Claimer actually had an opinion. “It’s marble, is it?” he guessed.
She nodded, as if this was a common mistake.
“No. Limestone.” She brightly chewed her ice.
She’s playing, thought Claimer. She thinks I’m a fool. Well, so then: “What the hell is it?”
“It’s a word. A word in the stone. Ocean. There’s a word in every stone.”
Then she was standing, holding out her glass for him to take. “You should come to the vigil tonight. There will be a movie.” She canted her head to the side. This was a bribe. “C’mon. It won’t be that heavy. The kids just want to feel good about this friend they feel they’ve lost. He was a very gifted actor, you know. And a beautiful boy.”
“I just may do that,” said Claimer, wanting to be a beautiful boy. “Ocean. I’ll have to take another look.”
CLAIMER DID GO DOWN FOR THE VIGIL. It was held right where the vote had been held, in the Communal Center. The mood was both festive and funereal; people milled about, the kids dressed in black, munching from cups of popcorn. There was a crudely painted banner hanging beneath the Aesthetic Democracy one, reading RIVER: 1970–1993.
The lights went down and everyone sat. No ceremony at all. On a large-screen TV, the FBI warning sat and stayed. “Hit fast forward,” said someone, and the image went into the fibrillation that meant it was speeding by. Whoever had the remote also raced through some coming attractions for movies no doubt already come and gone and now on video; Claimer recognized Emma Thompson, who was telling some joke and flipping her hair and closing a door. And then a road scene and time seemed to stop: the film.
Several of the kids, and then more, chanted along with the voice-over narration. “I always know where I am by the way the road looks. Like I just know that I’ve been here before . . .”
What’s this? thought Claimer. Ah, well. The sensation of profundity. So the kids are alright.
Claimer looked for his son and spotted him. In the front row, arm in arm in arm with about five other kids in a chain. No call for a father there. Kallie Ford was not in evidence. In fact, Claimer realized he might be the only bona fide adult left in the place, now that he looked around. Where had the others his own age gone to? His own age? My God, he thought, it’s after midnight. And then sleep took him.
“I just want to kiss you, man.” A man’s voice. Claimer was rubbing his eyes, awake. On the screen, two guys were sitting around a campfire. Later, his wife entered his twilight imagery as he drifted again. They had an argument. They were throwing plastic champagne glasses. Things escalated into passion. Clare was saying glass and ass as if there were some mystical linkage between them that suggested human linkages. They wrestled on the bed and then went still. Clare slowly worked the stem of the champagne glass up his ass. And she said, “There.” Claimer could see Kallie Ford in the corner of what had been his old office, her freckled face peeking out from behind a curtain.
Claimer woke up in the empty Communal Center. It was dark. He let himself out the side door and made his way to his unit. All the lights there were still on, but this son wasn’t in his room, or anywhere. Claimer turned the lights out and headed for bed. It was 3:00 A.M. He noticed a brightness out behind his place. He saw the roiling silver of a Jacuzzi, scarves of white steam lifting into the dark. He’d not seen it before—a big redwood deck and a sloshing tub. They must have added it since he was last here, he realized. He saw a thin bare back at the far edge turn toward him. It was Kallie Ford. She held handfuls of smoking snow. She stood there in the churning water, rubbing up the length of her arms and across and down the declivities of her chest. The red ran off of her like blood.
Wolfsnow, thought Claimer, fondly for an old idea.
He watched for a long time. It was a transformation he could not credit or understand. Nor did he want to, somehow. It was enough just as it was.
He tried with his eyes to search the caul of darkness. He looked for his son to materialize, or for some “Henry” to appear. He could almost envision his own figure lurking at the lip of the Jacuzzi, admiring at closer range the luminous pearling of Kallie Ford’s body. But he would not move.
In the end, he went to the kitchenette and made a cup of tea. He called his wife but hung up after two rings: he’d drawn a blank on her name.
SUNLIGHT
IT WAS A TERRIBLE SATURDAY, the kind of Saturday you have after a Friday night spent explaining to your third wife why you had a hooker in your house and how the condom wrapper she spotted under the couch was not, after all, even necessary. I promised said wife I would get some help. To mark my sincerity, I suggested we all go to a bookstore—wife, son, me. I’d start there. This earned her gruff consent.
I considered changing everything about the way I read, but my remorse ran deeper. I considered changing everything about the way I lived, loved, breathed, and ate as well. I was in that not smoking, not drinking, resume going to Mass place, maybe learn a foreign language and spend a decade reading Dickens place. I would live forever in family. I was in the poorhouse of want and shame, which dogs often call home. It’s where I belonged.
In the poetry section, I picked up an anthology edited by Robert Bly—he couldn’t have been more disdainful of the kind of work I had loved; I’d always returned the favor. He wanted “story,” “emotion,” “power,” and “love.” He wanted language treated as sacred, not something to be torn, shorn, and stripped naked. That’s it! That’s what I wanted to hear now. Next to Bly was an old favorite—Charles Bernstein, founding Language poet, colleague, friend. On the back of his book, this: “Bernstein’s allegiance has not been to any one kind of poetry, but to an ‘artificed’ writing that refused simple absorption into the society around it.” Why would I be interested in that? Refusing society? What had that done for me? What was I doing? I took the Bly and dropped Charles back in his slot.
I moved to the self-help section. I stood there in the brightly lit area (it seemed more brightly lit than the poetry section—is that possible?). I found the adoption books, most of them on how to adopt. Or how to search. Being adopted was the source of my problems, I’d grimly announced. My wife approved this line of inquiry. I was on it.
I spotted Betty Jean Lifton’s spread of titles on the adoption experience. I opened one of them and found a brief section headed “Literature” toward the back. It dealt solely with the writer Harold Brodkey—“an adoptee who is not involved in the adoption movement.” Adoption movement? I decided to leave that part for another time.
Lifton offered up Brodkey as a victim of what she called “the adoption syndrome,” and his prose as symptomatic of an adoptee’s unwhole self. Brodkey had told her that he “used adoption as a form of freedom—it separates you from the norm.”
“Brodkey is all adoptees writ large,” she concluded. Adoption, freedom, writing. I leafed inside for more:
“Orphans child heroes—Oedipus, Moses, Sargon, Romulus, Remus and Superman . . . pretended to be real persons in everyday relationships and then disappeared on secret exploits that they shared with no one.
Unless caught.
“Adoptees, then, live with a dual sense of reality, wanted and unwanted, superchild and monsterchild, immortal and mortal. . . . One part is chosen, the other abandoned.”
And left on the carpet.
“Adoptee fantasies . . . are an attempt to repair one’s broken narrative, to dream it along. They enable the child to stay magically connected with the lost birth mother.”
Her name was Cinnamon, she said.
I underlined the words broken narrative so hard, I tore through the page: everything I did not know captured in two words—and now it’s the only thing I know.
I took the Lifton book, returned the Bly to his slot, picked up the Bernstein again, put it back again, and read in a chair till the rest of the family had made their choices. I had made mine: Lifton, with a promise to find Brodkey.
“AN ACCIDENTAL GLORY.” These three words end the first thing I ever read by Harold Brodkey, a story of his called “His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft,” long ago. The story appeared in an issue of the New American Review, edited by T
ed Solotaroff. Long ago was around 1979 or ’80, after NAR had become defunct, and its slim teal-colored volumes, each bound like a mass-market paperback, could be found in used-book bins all over the city. They made for bargain reading. I was young and new to New York City and its literary culture. I was making $117 a week as a copyeditor for the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers on East Forty-seventh Street.
By the time I arrived at these three words—sitting alone in my fourth-floor walk-up on East Eighty-first Street—I was in tears, breathing hard. That’s what I remembered of Harold Brodkey.
“His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft” is about one thing—a son being carried by a father, into and out of sunlight. That’s it. In about seven thousand words, you go from “I am being lifted into the air” to the ending, where the sunlight is so bright in the child’s eyes that he turns his head inward, toward the heat of his father’s neck, and then notices his father’s face, “unprotected from the luminousness all around us . . . caught in that light. In an accidental glory.”
That passed for love, in Brodkey. It passed for love with me—a tableau, of some relation, in a wider, alien, luminousness, where nothing is fated, nothing is assured; where everything’s an accident, but nonetheless glorious.
I was particularly vulnerable to that kind of thing at that time: My little boy, from my first marriage, not yet two years old, and his mother, after trying to live with me, had decamped for Indiana, where she was from and where we had met three years earlier. Together, she and I had endured a romantic collision at the end of my senior year of college, gotten married at an outdoor hippie/Chicano civil ceremony that August, complete with roasted pig, Mexican rock band (Los Impactos), and plenty of psilocybin; we’d braved a year in Leeds, England, as I worked toward a master’s degree; survived my parents’ disapproval of our marriage and then enjoyed their blessing when my son was born; but we couldn’t handle eighteen months of being poor and unaccomplished and kid-burdened, and we came apart. Though one part of me was giddy with the freedom of being single again and not strapped by nightly, suffocating family affairs and grinding domestic chaos, I missed my little boy.
The Business of Naming Things Page 3