by Стивен Кинг
It was the Arlens—led by Frank who handled Johanna’s sen doff. As the writer of the family, I was assigned the obituary. My brother came up from Virginia with my mom and my aunt and was allowed to tend the guest-book at the viewings. My mother—almost completely ga-ga at the age of sixty-six, although the doctors refused to call it Alzheimer’s—lived in Memphis with her sister, two years younger and only slightly less wonky. They were in charge of cutting the cake and the pies at the funeral reception. Everything else was arranged by the Arlens, from the viewing hours to the components of the funeral ceremony. Frank and Victor, the second-youngest brother, spoke brief tributes. Jo’s dad offered a prayer for his daughter’s soul. And at the end, Pete Breedlove, the boy who cut our grass in the summer and raked our yard in the fall, brought everyone to tears by singing “Blessed Assurance,” which Frank said had been Jo’s favorite hymn as a girl. How Frank found Pete and persuaded him to sing at the funeral is something I never found out. We got through it—the afternoon and evening viewings on Tuesday, the funeral service on Wednesday morning, then the little pray-over at Fairlawn Cemetery. What I remember most was thinking how hot it was, how lost I felt without having Jo to talk to, and that I wished I had bought a new pair of shoes. Jo would have pestered me to death about the ones I was wearing, if she had been there. Later on I talked to my brother, Sid, told him we had to do something about our mother and Aunt Francine before the two of them disappeared completely into the Twilight Zone. They were too young for a nursing home; what did Sid advise? He advised something, but I’ll be damned if I know what it was. I agreed to it, I remember that, but not what it was. Later that day, Siddy, our mom, and our aunt climbed back into Siddy’s rental car for the drive to Boston, where they would spend the night and then grab the Southern Crescent the following day. My brother is happy enough to chaperone the old folks, but he doesn’t fly, even if the tickets are on me. He claims there are no breakdown lanes in the sky if the engine quits. Most of the Arlens left the next day. Once more it was dog-hot, the sun glaring out of a white-haze sky and lying on everything like melted brass. They stood in front of our house—which had become solely my house’ by then—with three taxis lined up at the curb behind them, big galoots hugging one another amid the litter of tote-bags and saying their goodbyes in those foggy Massachusetts accents. Frank stayed another day. We picked a big bunch of flowers behind the house—not those ghastly-smelling hothouse things whose aroma I always associate with death and organ-music but real flowers, the kind Jo liked best—and stuck them in a couple of coffee cans I found in the back pantry. We went out to Fairlawn and put them on the new grave. Then we just sat there for awhile under the beating sun. “She was always just the sweetest thing in my life,” Frank said at last in a strange, muffled voice. “We took care of Jo when we were kids. Us guys. No one messed with Jo, I’ll tell you. Anyone tried, we’d feed em their lunch.”
“She told me a lot of stories.”
“Good ones?” “Yeah, real good.”
“I’m going to miss her so much.”
“Me, too,” I said. “Frank… listen… I know you were her favorite brother. She never called you, maybe just to say that she missed a period or was feeling whoopsy in the morning? You can tell me. I won’t be pissed.”
“But she didn’t. Honest to God. Was she whoopsy in the morning?”
“Not that I saw.” And that was just it. I hadn’t seen anything. Of course I’d been writing, and when I write I pretty much trance out. But she knew where I went in those trances. She could have found me and shaken me fully awake. Why hadn’t she? Why would she hide good news? Not wanting to tell me until she was sure was plausible… but it somehow wasn’t Jo. “Was it a boy or a girl?” he asked. “A girl.”
We’d had names picked out and waiting for most of our marriage. A boy would have been Andrew. Our daughter would have been Kia. Kia Jane Noonan.
Frank, divorced six years and on his own, had been staying with me. On our way back to the house he said, “I worry about you, Mikey. You haven’t got much family to fall back on at a time like this, and what you do have is far away.”
“I’ll be all right,” I said. He nodded.
“That’s what we say, anyway, isn’t it?”
“We?”
“Guys. I’ll be all right.’
And if we’re not, we try to make sure no one knows it.” He looked at me, eyes still leaking, handkerchief in one big sunburned hand. “If you’re not all right, Mikey, and you don’t want to call your brother—I saw the way you looked at him—let me be your brother. For Jo’s sake if not your own.”
“Okay,” I said, respecting and appreciating the offer, also knowing I would do no such thing. I don’t call people for help. It’s not because of the way I was raised, at least I don’t think so; it’s the way I was made. Johanna once said that if I was drowning at Dark Score Lake, where we have a summer home, I would die silently fifty feet out from the public beach rather than yell for help. It’s not a question of love or affection. I can give those and I can take them. I feel pain like anyone else. I need to touch and be touched. But if someone asks me, “Are you all right?” I can’t answer no. I can’t say help me. A couple of hours later Frank left for the southern end of the state. When he opened the car door, I was touched to see that the taped book he was listening to was one of mine. He hugged me, then surprised me with a kiss on the mouth, a good hard smack. “If you need to talk, call,” he said. “And if you need to be with someone, just come.” I nodded. “And be careful.”
That startled me. The combination of heat and grief had made me feel as if I had been living in a dream for the last few days, but that got through. “Careful of what?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know, Mikey.” Then he got into his car—he was so big and it was so little that he looked as if he were wearing it—and drove away. The sun was going down by then. Do you know how the sun looks at the end of a hot day in August, all orange and somehow squashed, as if an invisible hand were pushing down on the top of it and at any moment it might just pop like an overfilled mosquito and splatter all over the horizon? It was like that. In the east, where it was already dark, thunder was rumbling. But there was no rain that night, only a dark that came down as thick and stifling as a blanket.
All the same, I slipped in front of the word processor and wrote for an hour or so. It went pretty well, as I remember. And you know, even when it doesn’t, it passes the time.
My second crying fit came three or four days after the funeral. That sense of being in a dream persisted—I walked, I talked, I answered the phone, I worked on my book, which had been about eighty percent complete when Jo died—but all the time there was this clear sense of disconnection, a feeling that everything was going on at a distance from the real me, that I was more or less phoning it in.
Denise Breedlove, Pete’s mother, called and asked if I wouldn’t like her to bring a couple of her friends over one day the following week and give the big old Edwardian pile I now lived in alone—rolling around in it like the last pea in a restaurant-sized can—a good stem-to-stern cleaning. They would do it, she said, for a hundred dollars split even among the three of them, and mostly because it wasn’t good for me to go on without it. There had to be a scrubbing after a death, she said, even if the death didn’t happen in the house itself.
I told her it was a fine idea, but I would pay her and the women she brought a hundred dollars each for six hours’ work. At the end of the six hours, I wanted the job done. And if it wasn’t, I told her, it would be done, anyway.
“Mr. Noonan, that’s far too much,” she said.
“Maybe and maybe not, but it’s what I’m paying,” I said. “Will you do it?”
She said she would, of course she would.
Perhaps predictably, I found myself going through the house on the evening before they came, doing a pre-cleaning inspection. I guess I didn’t want the women (two of whom would be complete strangers to me) finding an
ything that would embarrass them or me: a pair of Johanna’s silk panties stuffed down behind the sofa cushions, perhaps (“We are often overcome on the sofa, Michael,” she said to me once, “have you noticed?”), or beer cans under the loveseat on the sunporch, maybe even an unfiushed toilet. In truth, I can’t tell you any one thing I was looking for; that sense of operating in a dream still held firm control over my mind. The clearest thoughts I had during those days were either about the end of the novel I was writing (the psychotic killer had lured my heroine to a high-rise building and meant to push her off the roof) or about the Norco Home Pregnancy Test Jo had bought on the day she died. Sinus prescription, she had said. Piece of fish for supper, she had said. And her eyes had shown me nothing else I needed to look at twice.
Near the end of my “pre-cleaning,” I looked under our bed and saw an open paperback on Jo’s side. She hadn’t been dead long, but few household lands are so dusty as the Kingdom of Underbed, and the light-gray coating I saw on the book when I brought it out made me think of Johanna’s face and hands in her coffin—Jo in the Kingdom of Underground. Did it get dusty inside a coffin? Surely not, but- I pushed the thought away. It pretended to go, but all day long it kept creeping back, like Tolstoy’s white bear.
Johanna and I had both been English majors at the University of Maine, and like many others, I reckon, we fell in love to the sound of Shakespeare and the Tilbury Town cynicism of Edwin Arlington Robinson.
Yet the writer who had bound us closest together was no college-friendly poet or essayist but W. Somerset Maugham, that elderly globetrotting novelist-playwright with the reptile’s face (always obscured by cigarette smoke in his photographs, it seems) and the romantic’s heart.
So it did not surprise me much to find that the book under the bed was The &loon and Sixpence. I had read it myself as a late teenager, not once but twice, identifying passionately with the character of Charles Strickland. (It was writing I wanted to do in the South Seas, of course, not painting.)
She had been using a playing card from some defunct deck as her place-marker, and as I opened the book, I thought of something she had said when I was first getting to know her. In Twentieth-Century British Lit, this had been, probably in 1980. Johanna Arlen had been a fiery little sophomore. I was a senior, picking up the Twentieth-Century Brits simply because I had time on my hands that last semester. “Sk hundred years from now,” she had said, “the shame of the mid-twentieth-century literary critics will be that they embraced Lawrence and ignored Maugham.” This was greeted with contemptuously good-natured laughter (they all knew Women in Love was one of the greatest damn books ever written), but I didn’t laugh. I fell in love.
The playing card marked pages 102 and 103—Dirk Stroeve has just discovered that his wife has left him for Strickland, Maugham’s version of Paul Gauguin. The narrator tries to buck Stroeve up. My dearj3llow, don’t be unhappy. She’ll come back…
“Easy for you to say,” I murmured to the room which now belonged just to me.
I turned the page and read this: Strickland’s injurious calm robbed Stroeve of his self-control Blind rage seized him, and without knowing what he was doing he flung himself on Strickland. Strickland was taken by surprise and he staggered, but he was very strong, even after his illness, and in a moment, he did not exactly know how, Stroeve Jund himself on the floor.
“tau funny little man,” said Strickland.
It occurred to me that Jo was never going to turn the page and hear Strickland call the pathetic Stroeve a funny little man. In a moment of brilliant epiphany I have never forgotten—how could I? it was one of the worst moments of my life—I understood it wasn’t a mistake that would be rectified, or a dream from which I would awaken. Johanna was dead.
My strength was robbed by grief. If the bed hadn’t been there, I would have fallen to the floor. We weep from our eyes, it’s all we can do, but on that evening I felt as if every pore of my body were weeping, every crack and cranny. I sat there on her side of the bed, with her dusty paperback copy of The Moon and Sixpence in my hand, and I wailed. I think it was surprise as much as pain; in spite of the corpse I had seen and identified on a high-resolution video monitor, in spite of the funeral and Pete Breedlove singing “Blessed Assurance” in his high, sweet tenor voice, in spite of the graveside service with its ashes to ashes and dust to dust, I hadn’t really believed it. The Penguin paperback did for me what the big gray coffin had not: it insisted she was dead.
You funny little man, said Strickland.
I lay back on our bed, crossed my forearms over my face, and cried myself to sleep that way as children do when they’re unhappy. I had an awful dream. In it I woke up, saw the paperback of The Moon and Sixpence still lying on the coverlet beside me, and decided to put it back under the bed where I had found it. You know how confused dreams are—logic like Dall clocks gone so soft they lie over the branches of trees like throw-rugs.
I put the playing-card bookmark back between pages 102 and 103—a turn of the index finger away from IOUJNNY little man, said Strickland now and forever—and rolled onto my side, hanging my head over the edge of the bed, meaning to put the book back exactly where I had found it.
Jo was lying there amid the dust-kitties. A strand of cobweb hung down from the bottom of the box spring and caressed her cheek like a feather.
Her red hair looked dull, but her eyes were dark and alert and baleful in her white face. And when she spoke, I knew that death had driven her insane.
“Give me that,” she hissed. “It’s my dust-catcher.” She snatched it out of my hand before I could offer it to her. For a moment our fingers touched, and hers were as cold as twigs after a frost. She opened the book to her place, the playing card fluttering out, and placed Somerset Maugham over her face—a shroud of words. As she crossed her hands on her bosom and lay still, I realized she was wearing the blue dress I had buried her in. She had come out of her grave to hide under our bed.
I awoke with a muffled cry and a painful jerk that almost tumbled me off the side of the bed. I hadn’t been asleep long—the tears were still damp on my cheeks, and my eyelids had that funny stretched feel they get after a bout of weeping. The dream had been so vivid that I had to roll on my side, hang my head down, and peer under the bed, sure she would be there with the book over her face, that she would reach out with her cold fingers to touch me.
There was nothing there, of course—dreams are just dreams.
Nevertheless, I spent the rest of the night on the couch in my study. It was the right choice, I guess, because there were no more dreams that night. Only the nothingness of good sleep.
I never suffered from writer’s block during the ten years of my marriage, and did not suffer it immediately after Johanna’s death. I was in fact so unfamiliar with the condition that it had pretty well set in before I knew anything out of the ordinary was going on. I think this was because in my heart I believed that such conditions only affected “literary’’ types of the sort who are discussed, deconstructed, and sometimes dismissed in the New York Review of Books. My writing career and my marriage covered almost exactly the same span. I finished the first draft of my first novel, Being Two, not long after Jo and I became officially engaged (I popped an opal ring on the third finger of her left hand, a hundred and ten bucks at Day’s Jewellers, and quite a bit more than I could afford at the time… but Johanna seemed utterly thrilled with it), and I finished my last novel, All the Pay from the 3p, about a month after she was declared dead. This was the one about the psychotic killer with the love of high places. It was published in the fall of 1995. I have published other novels since then—a paradox I can explain—but I don’t think there’ll be a Michael Noonan novel on any list in the foreseeable future. I know what writer’s block is now, all right. I know more about it than I ever wanted to.
When I hesitantly showed Jo the first draft of Being Two, she read it in one evening, curled up in her favorite chair, wearing nothing but panties and a tee-shirt with the Ma
ine black bear on the front, drinking glass after glass of iced tea. I went out to the garage (we were renting a house in Bangor with another couple on as shaky financial ground as we were… and no, Jo and I weren’t quite married at that point, although as far as I know, that opal ring never left her finger) and puttered aimlessly, feeling like a guy in a New Yorker cartoon one of those about funny fellows in the delivery waiting room. As I remember, I fucked up a so-simple-a-child-can-do-it birdhouse kit and almost cut off the index finger of my left hand. Every twenty minutes or so I’d go back inside and peek at Jo. If she noticed, she gave no sign. I took that as hopeful. I was sitting on the back stoop, looking up at the stars and smoking, when she came out, sat down beside me, and put her hand on the back of my neck. “Well?” I said. “It’s good,” she said. “Now why don’t you come inside and do me?” And before I could answer, the panties she had been wearing dropped in my lap in a little whisper of nylon.
Afterward, lying in bed and eating oranges (a vice we later outgrew), I asked her: “Good as in publishable?”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t know anything about the glamorous world of publishing, but I’ve been reading for pleasure all my life—Curious George was my first love, if you want to know—”
“I don’t.” She leaned over and popped an orange segment into my mouth, her breast warm and provocative against my arm. “—and I read this with great pleasure. My prediction is that your career as a reporter for the Devry News is never going to survive its rookie stage.
I think I’m going to be a novelist’s wife.”
Her words thrilled me—actually brought goosebumps out on my arms. No, she didn’t know anything about the glamorous world of publishing, but if she believed, I believed… and belief turned out to be the right course. I got an agent through my old creative-writing teacher (who read my novel and damned it with faint praise, seeing its commercial qualities as a kind of heresy, I think), and the agent sold Being Two to Random House, the first publisher to see it.