Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  Nonetheless, when Agnes’s second letter arrived a few weeks later at the start of my August vacation, I was prepared to read it almost as oracular. What new stage of my life would begin with this, pray tell?

  Dear Harry,

  I waited till I was feeling a little better before writing you again. I didn’t want to leave you with the impression I was in despair or anything. I’m not in despair – or if I am, I don’t want to leave you with that impression. The winter is just hard up here, that’s all. Everyone shut up in their houses, no one visiting, no one to talk to. This summer has been better. I can get out and swim in the river in the morning before going to work and in the afternoons I can walk in the woods looking for logs to haul back to my studio. I am back waitressing part-time at Fitzgerald’s at night too, so I get to see the old restaurant gang again, or what’s left of them. And I’m pretty much off the tranquilizers, so the whole situation is a lot healthier. If I can stay clean for six months, Roland will let me have the baby as much as I want. Frankly, I’m not sure how I feel about that after what happened. That is, I’m desperate to see her, but also scared. Fucking terrified is more like it. And then there’s my work, which pretty much obsesses me. I guess I don’t know how I feel exactly. I keep thinking about how simple and great everything seemed in the old days. When I first met Roland, the Fitzgerald’s gang used to come over all the time in the mornings and afternoons. Everyone would bring some vegetables or something and I’d make a huge tureen of soup and some loaves of fresh bread and just leave everything out on the wood stove for them. They used to call me Ma Sole for a joke, as in Oh Ma Sole, Rock Ma Sole and so on. I’d go into my studio and chisel away, but keep the door open so I could hear them in the living room, talking and laughing, eating soup, Roland noodling the guitar, Jack on the saxophone or whatever. Roland played at Fitzgerald’s, that’s how I met him. He sang there every Friday and Saturday night, these sensitive folk-rock songs, very early-Seventies. There’s a lot of that up here – I think this is where the Sixties came to die. Anyway, here was this lanky six-foot-four guy in jeans and cowboy boots with blond hair down to his shoulders and this cute Mr WASP face. I used to hang around the restaurant late pretending to clean up just so we could have a beer together at the bar and talk when everyone else was gone. Finally, one night, he set his empty glass down on the counter, looked across the bar at me, cleared his hair off his forehead, smiled his Pepsodent, goyische smile and said, ‘So – are we gonna do this or what?’ That was it. It was love.

  I think those were actually the best days of my life: after he moved in and when his friends would come by and I would work and they would play and compose. I even had work showing in a gallery then – not a gallery, just a crafts shop off Route 12, but Lily, the woman who ran it, put a few of my pieces in with the handmade potholders and coat pegs and mailbox windmills etc. And she did sell a piece of mine from time to time. And people were always coming up from New York to ski or fish and what-not so at least I had the illusion of gaining a wider audience. Of course, when my really big chance came, I fucked it up completely in typical self-destructive fashion. This was about two years ago – almost exactly two years ago now. This woman, this New York gallery owner, had been spending the summers here and she’d seen some of my pieces and mentioned to Lily that she wanted to see more. So I got very excited. I started working away like a madwoman trying to make enough good new stuff to show. And, at the same time, around May, I got pregnant. Well, I was sick as a dog. And crazy: there were so many hormones coursing through me I looked like Cruella De Vil in that red-eyed close-up just before she drives off the cliff. My schedule was: work, puke my guts out, scream at Roland, cry, then puke my guts out again, then go back to work. I don’t usually use maquettes but I was making them then just so I could twist their fucking heads off, that’s how I felt. And after this long period when I’d really been feeling good about my work, everything I did started to look like shit to me again. And summer was coming and the Gallery Woman was coming and … yaaagh! So just about the middle of June, I got this idea, this inspiration. I had this gorgeous piece of spalted pine I’d found in the forest. It had these wonderful black lines running through it, and it was just at the edge of decay, so soft you could almost gouge it with your hands. I saw this gesture in it, this striving gesture, like a monkey reaching itself into existence out of the core of a tree, and I saw a face, a woman’s face, where the monkey’s face would be. The wood had only had a couple of years to dry, I knew it wasn’t ready, but (with just a brief pause to puke my guts out), I locked myself in my studio and set to work on it. No chainsaw, no compressor – the wood was too fragile. It was just me and the gouge and the mallet whacking away. And a week went by and the thing came free of the wood – perfectly. And another week went by and it was beautiful. Roland and his friends were wandering in from the living room to watch me go. I was almost finished, I was down to the three milimeter chisel, doing detail work. And, all of a sudden … I hit worms. I shaved a strip away and found this inch-wide medallion of rot right at the base of the monkey’s left breast, and these thick, white hideous grubs came squiggling out of it spilling onto the floor. Instantly, I puked my guts out. I mean, I’d known the wood was spalted, I’d known it was too wet – the whole thing was totally my own fault – but fuck that shit: what was I going to do now? So I thought: All right, I’ve still got some room to maneuver. I’ll dig out the rot, plug it, shape the thing down a little, maybe the bad stuff doesn’t go so deep. So I did that – a few hours’ work. And I was very lucky – it wasn’t deep at all. I didn’t even need a plug. I worked the contours down past it. Even I could hardly tell the difference. When I was finally finished, I relaxed on the sofa weeping and retching, and Roland sprayed the piece for me to kill any grubs that were left inside. Then, for the next two days I rubbed varnish on it, layer after layer. Then I painted it. Then I varnished it again. I figured: Any of the little shits that are left are sealed in there for good. Die, you bastards! And that was it. A month went by. As promised, Gallery Woman came to Lily’s crafts place. Thin as a spindle, wearing three hundred dollars worth of khaki from Banana Republic. Dropping her g’s and pretending to be a human bein’ because she was out in the country with us folks. But, for all that, as Lily pointed out, she was at least original enough to be sniffing around outside the city – and looking at wood too, which was still very outre – so we had some hope. Her husband saw the monkey first – I’m told; I wasn’t there. Hey, look at this, hon, he says. She looks up and stops in her tracks. Lily said she could see the thoughts running through her mind: Whoa! Shit! Talent! Art! Yes, but is it … in? Can I put words to it that give it a cachet? Fresh … no, no … radical innocence – maybe … a radical retro look at feminist evolution … yes, that might fly … and the fact that it’s heartbreakingly gorgeous that could be a … a … an ironic post-modern parody of the concept of Beauty … Yes! And all the while, she had started moving closer and closer to the work. Circling it, dodging her head this way and that, eyeing it from this angle, that angle, until finally, she was right up close to it, her nose almost touching it – because the wood does that, that soft wood is so beautiful it’s like flesh, you want to taste it and stroke it and practically fuck it, it looks so good. So she was right there, right in front of it. And just under the left breast, she slowly became aware of a movement. What’s that? Her eyes shifted. A fleck of dust seemed to stir on the surface of the wood. And then there was another fleck. Sawdust – there was a little circle of sawdust gathering there as if by magic. It got thicker. A pinch of it sprinkled to the floor. Gallery Woman followed it down, open-mouthed – then she looked up again … just in time to see the fattest, ugliest, whitest, slimiest grub of a worm writhing and struggling out from inside the sculpture. Her high-pitched scream – her screams, because she screamed again and again, her body rigid, her hands spasming in front of her – could be heard, I’m told, at the campground about five miles up the river. Even I had to laugh when Lily to
ld me. Of course, then I wept. Then I screamed at Roland and puked my guts out …

  This letter came on the Saturday before we left for the Berkshires. The cream envelope again, no return address. That annoyed me a little. That and all the references to people I didn’t know, events I hadn’t heard of. The point was: she didn’t need me to understand. She didn’t want me to write back to her. She wasn’t even writing to me really. She was writing to the Idea of Me. She was writing to herself. I was sure of this because I’d been planning to have an affair with the Idea of Her before her first letter came; I knew how she felt. But it annoyed me anyway.

  The letter arrived while I was at home, and I was glad of that: Marianne never had to see it. She’d been her usual airy-fairy self, all sensitive and accepting, when I’d declined to show her the last one. ‘You don’t have to explain yourself,’ she said firmly. ‘There are some relationships that are just private, that’s all.’ Yeah, but I’m no idiot, I knew I couldn’t push it too far. Still, and to my own surprise, I found I did want to keep Agnes private. I’d never told anyone about her really. My first lover, Kate, I told her, but no one after that. I just felt somehow it wasn’t anybody’s business but mine.

  So, also, I had to control my curiosity. I didn’t want to read the letter this time until I could get off somewhere by myself, and this was tough to do on the weekends. There was Charlie, first of all. I had to play around with him all morning. He was crawling now and smiling with his round, rosy cherub’s face and just that little token of humanity had changed everything for me with him. I’d discovered suddenly that I adored him. I thought about him all the time, took time off to buy him presents, blocks, busy boxes, fuzzy blue outfits with bears and bunnies on them. I couldn’t hug the guy tight enough, I loved him so much. Of course, he was a bore to actually be with for any extended period of time, but I could overlook even that for love and I spent most Saturday mornings with him when I could. Then, when he went down for his nap, I seized the opportunity to ravish the mystic Missus, toward whom I’d also been feeling very affectionate of late – especially this last anxious week when terror of Manero’s corruption investigation had made me sentimental and she and Charlie seemed like the only really good, clean things about my life.

  So it was around three in the afternoon of that hot, thick, gray, sooty day before I finally went out on the pretext of buying a novel for the trip. Instead, I stopped into the Greek diner on Amsterdam and plonked myself down at the far end of the counter and started to read the letter there.

  Before I was this far, about halfway through, I had noticed several points, at least three points. One: the postmark on the letter was Gaysville, Vermont. I hadn’t noticed that the first time. I hadn’t cared the first time where she was. But now I saw it and I knew I could find her if I wanted to. How big could Gaysville be? Two: I was beginning to remember her. That is, when I read the first letter, it was so at odds with my fantasy that I was repulsed by it. But now it came to me: she’d never been the sort of girl I’d been attracted to particularly. She’d always been weird. Troubled, deep, crazy. If I kept that in mind, I found I recognized something – I really did recognize something I remembered, something I’d been connected to – in this letter, in her voice. Three: She was falling apart. Mentally, I mean. I could see it coming a mile away. People who are really in trouble are always telling you that a new day has dawned. Spring has sprung, they’ve had a revelation, they’re much better now. It’s a bad sign, hope. Healthy, normal people complain constantly.

  So she was writing to me because she was slowly falling into desperate trouble. And the strange thing is, this made me feel afraid – for myself, for what I sensed, what I already knew, was happening to me. I’m not sure how much of that was the superstitious nonsense again, the stupid oracle business and so on. But I could not somehow entirely separate myself from the poor unhappy woman who wrote these letters. And that made me wonder also, seeing that I could probably find her, seeing that I felt connected to her, and seeing that she was coming apart at the seams, what, if anything, I was supposed to do about it.

  What, if anything, did she want from me?

  That was the beginning of what I sometimes ever-so-wittily call the Pregnant Pause. A really bad period I had most of the time I was pregnant. I hardly did any work at all, none at all really. I’d decided the worm incident was a metaphor, some kind of sign: there was rot at the heart of my work, you know, the whole concept was misguided. This drove Roland absolutely up the wall. He used to come home sometimes – he was getting more gigs now, and he was doing some studio work for a friend down in Boston – and he used to come home and find me sitting in a chair by the window, smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer. And he’d just go ker-azy. He even got down on his knees once: grabbed my arms, gave me his sincere WASP gaze. Please, Agnes, stop smoking, stop drinking, you’re going to hurt the baby. Lucky I didn’t tell him I was taking pills again or he’d probably have left me right then and there. Taken the fetus away and brought it to term himself. Why don’t you just try to work, Agnes? he’d say. The things you make are so beautiful. We had our first real screaming fight that winter. I told him: that’s exactly what’s rotten, the beauty of my work. I said, the whole idea of beauty has been the central perceptual ideal of a civilization that has tortured and oppressed and slaughtered my people from its inception. You can’t separate those things. The project of creating beauty was inseparable from the project of destroying what they saw as ugliness. Which, more often than not, was represented by the Jews. The Renaissance was the Holocaust, I said; they were ultimately the same thing, one inherent in the other. Praxiteles is the same fucking guy who marched my sister to the river side. My father’s daughter, Lena. Six years old, clutching her dolly. Shivering in her nightgown. Rodin put the pistol to her head and pulled the trigger and shattered her face and splattered her childish brains. And six million others like her. Six million! A third of all my tribe. If I’m silent it’s my father’s silence – thus I railed at poor Roland. Because my father knew, he was there. He knew what the beauty and the ideals and the fantasies of western civilization had been trying all those centuries to suppress. So Roland sort of shrugged and said: So don’t make beautiful things. No one cares about that anymore. Isn’t that what all the artists are saying now? (I had told him about Joseph Beuys making ‘ugly’ art as a reaction to Auschwitz.) And that set me really going at him: They’re wrong! They’ve got it all wrong! Beauty is beautiful, beauty is truth, it’s the only thing that matters – that’s the whole problem – there wouldn’t be a problem if that weren’t true! Anyway, what’s the fucking difference? Whatever you make, whatever you say – ugly, beautiful, philosophical, political – you suppress the other thing, the silent, invisible thing that you didn’t say, that you didn’t make. That’s the first principle of the Jewish religion: Thou shalt make no graven images. Thou shalt make no graven images, Roland, because the minute you do, you destroy the part of the truth that’s unmade, that’s suppressed! (You have to picture this pregnant woman in an I Lo Vermont sweatshirt pacing up and down with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, reciting these things to a wondering six-foot-four son-of-a-horse-breeder who’s sitting in a beanbag chair with a guitar in his lap, staring at her, open-mouthed, shaking his head.) No graven images, he said finally. Doesn’t that make it kind of tough to be a sculptor? Which was when I started screaming. Screaming, crying. I stood in the middle of the floor jerking my hands up and down so hard the beer foamed up out of the bottle and flew all over the place. That’s the problem with you people! I screamed. Whenever you’re confronted with the great Jewish truths, you have to negate them to preserve your wretched world view. Our insights drive you mad, you go mad in huge masses. How else can you explain Jung and the atom bomb! And Christianity! And western fucking civilization! I think every brilliant Jewish guy must be followed around by this humpbacked gentile Igor. And the Jewish guy says, ‘Love Thy Neighbor.’ And the goy says, ‘Yeah, and let’s b
uild huge churches and not let anyone have sex!’ And the Jewish guy says, ‘E=MC2!’ And Igor says: ‘KABOOOM!’ I want to carve my father’s silence into the tree of life, Roland. And you just sit there? With that face? With those boots? Look at those boots! (A piece of advice, Harry: Never get pregnant. It makes you absolutely insane.) Even Roland, the sweetest, calmest human being on earth, started to yell at me. You want to carve your father’s silence into the tree of life, go on ahead and do it, he said; I mean, just do something, all right? cause you’re driving me up the wall. And I drew myself up to my full five foot six and said, ‘I can’t do it. I haven’t suffered enough.’ Well, you’re working on it, he said, and stomped out, boots, face and all.

  Shit. Here I meant to write you such an upbeat letter and show you how much happier I am, and all I’m doing is picking over the bones of my poor, dead marriage again. Again and again and again. Over and over and over. And it’s not even so bad now really. I really am happier now than I was before, last winter. I really do think I’m pulling out of the gloom anyway. I’m certainly working hard. Anyway, I’m glad that summer’s here. Take care of yourself, Harry.