Still Life with June

by Darren Greer

  So Dagnia/Julie was in a bad mood most of the time, convinced that she was about to be the sole survivor of her updated version of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. She had stopped asking me about Dean, and I had stopped spying on him for her sake. The idea that maybe Dean and Dagnia were not all there still didn’t stop me from wanting to sleep with Dean, maybe even go out with him for a while if he liked me and could stay on one side of the bisexual equation long enough. I guess that doesn’t make me the equivalent of an innocent insurance salesman stumbling unknowingly into the Addams’ family manse. I was more like a distant relative of Uncle Fester’s come to visit on All Hallow’s Eve.

  Dagnia’s nightmare was about to get worse, though.

  Or should I say Julie’s nightmare?

  Whichever.

  CXXII

  The reason why I sometimes stopped going to the BIG BAD BOOKS writer’s group for months at a stretch was that it was always the same people, the same writers reading the same trite, varnished prose. The same old losers who didn’t know they were losers. Every once in awhile someone would read about the group in the BIG BAD BOOKS monthly newsletter and wander in on a Thursday to check us out. If they were any good they quickly realized their mistake and you’d not likely see them again the following week. If they were like the rest of us they’d hang around a while, bore us to tears with French café or Generation-X stories (even fifty-year-old women, it seemed, were trying to cash in on the Generation-X trend machine), and then disappear for a month or two, only to return when the despair of slaving away in solitude became too much for them. Every so often a good writer would come and stay for a while, mostly if they were blocked or had just finished a novel and had nothing else to write about directly. You could always tell the good writers, even when they didn’t read anything. They always said “Pass” when it came their turn to comment on someone else’s writing. Which lets you in on one of my shameful little secrets. I needed the group when I wasn’t writing. I needed the group to stave off the despair of slaving away in solitude, especially when that fever peculiar to writers and artists comes along — the one that says we stink on ice and are never going to get anywhere. But my deal with myself was this. Say “Pass” to everything and keep some dignity intact.

  Giddy-up.

  CXXIII

  Dagnia/Julie was a different case. Dagnia/Julie’s life was a badly written story, one where the hero wanders off in the end looking for a missing fake rabbit-fur glove and the heroine drowns herself in a pool of rhinoceros snot. A bit too graphic, but you get the picture. Anybody who gets their kicks dashing the hopes of bad writers because they’ve got nothing else to do on a Thursday afternoon has got to be going down quicker than you can say Get a life.

  But apparently Julie/Dagnia was not going down fast enough for Dagnia Daley, the Dagnia Daley. I noticed her shortly after the group opened with a reading, as always, from Somerset Maugham’s Writer’s Notebook. That week it was the old chestnut — how to stay inspired. Maugham told himself to dream about the missing parts to his books, then he’d wake up and write notes to his dreams in the middle of the night. In the morning he’d have the answers. This has never worked for me. I don’t remember my dreams, except for one recurring nightmare where I wake up and everyone in the city has just up and left. Let’s just say that Maugham’s advice was a variation of a variation on a theme. One that I had heard from a million Writer’s Notebook readings and a million infomercials from Anthony Somebody-or-Other. Sometimes wat we call inspiration is the blind inability to know when to quit. (I was not in the best of moods either. I always got into this kind of funk when I couldn’t write.)

  The woman came in the middle of the reading and took up an empty chair in the circle. She did not at all look like what I imagined the real Dagnia Daley would look like. First off, she was young. Outside guess? I’d say no more than thirty and maybe only twenty-eight. Which begged the question: How fucking early could menopause be? (Dagnia/Julie’s answer, by the way, was, “It’s never too early for the really important stuff to dry up.”)

  The other surprising thing about the real Dagnia Daley was her face. She was pretty, prettier than Julie would ever be. (I’m not great at describing women, because I don’t look at them a lot. So take my word for it.) She wore black gloves over the smallest hands I’ve ever seen and she never, not once during the entire hour she sat there, took them off. She never took off her black fur coat either. My overall visual impression was of a raven-haired breakable woman who suffered from chronic chills and fever, sitting in the circle of the BIG BAD BOOKS writing group, her legs delicately crossed one over the other, listening intently. None of us suspected she was there for any purpose other than to be a part of our group. She gave every reader her full and focused attention. She nodded and smiled at the parts she liked, and kept her head perfectly still at all other times. The only thing that gave her away — that made me notice her — was her habitual passing. But even when she passed she did it gracefully. Not brusquely. Or rudely. She’d just smile politely, shake her head and say, “I’m just listening, thanks.” It was an ingenious variation on my passes and I admired her for it. Later, even Dagnia/Julie would admit that Dagnia/Dagnia handled the situation well.

  “Not at all like the raving maniac I would have been,” she said to me.

  No shit, Sherlock.

  CXXIV

  The worst of it was, Dagnia/Julie chose to read that day. Worse than that, she chose to read a portion of the articles on premature ovarian failure commonly and incorrectly known, according to Dagnia Daley, as premature menopause. For the first time in a long while Julie read something that the Dagnia Daley had actually written.

  “I had to go and read that,” sighed Dagnia/Julie in the aftermath. “Why couldn’t I have chosen one of the more insipid passages from Fly by Night?”

  It makes sense to me now that a woman who could no longer bleed naturally would write a novel about radical-feminist lesbian vampires.

  “For most women,” Dagnia/Julie read, “the diagnosis of premature ovarian failure is a devastating one. At a time when we should be feeling our healthiest, we must cope with chronic disorder and infertility. Often, before we’ve even had the chance to make a decision about having children, the opportunity is denied.”

  All eyes were on Dagnia/Julie as she read, including Dagnia/ Dagnia’s. I can’t imagine what that woman felt like, sitting there listening to another woman pass off her pain as her own. Most of us hide our pain. We bring it out in the dark to look at it sometimes, to touch it and prod at it the way we can’t stop probing an aching tooth with our tongue. Most of us are unwilling to give up our pain because it is the only way we can tell if we are feeling anything at all. But people like Dagnia/ Dagnia are different. They make ready their pain, harness it, ship it out like a deformed but beautiful thing for the world to see, and make it work for them. Maybe pain doesn’t have to be original in order to be used. Maybe it just has to hurt enough to make you want to ship it out.

  Anyway. We all were carried along in Dagnia Daley’s magic ship. We walked with her before diagnosis, when she stopped having her periods and she and her husband thought she was pregnant and celebrated with carrot juice and étouffée. We took the first enthusiastic trip to the doctor’s office and the second, decidedly less exciting visit to the hospital for uterine CAT scans and ovarian biopsies. The diagnosis. The unpronounceable names, which the writer made sound so horrible: anovulation, amenorrhoea, hysterosalpingogram. “The bewildering language of bloodlessness,” Dagnia Daley called it.

  The husband who quietly backed out of the picture in search of a child-bearing wife. The nightly dreams of children who were born and then devolved in their mother’s arms to tiny bruised ova which the dream mother then fought anxiously and desperately to protect from a prowling dream cat. “Freud would have had a field day with that one,” Dagnia Daley wrote.

  All in all, it was well done. All in all, it was excellent. Despite what the Hollywood success
stories tell you, there are few moments of genuine and spontaneous applause in the annals of human entertainment. Much of our applause is to acknowledge competence, and if you listen, even for the best performers, there will be a slight delay between dénouement and response. That is the audience’s way of saying, “You are a good performer. You are a fine performer. But you did not wow us. Thank you, but you did not wow us.” Dagnia Daley’s article on premature ovarian failure wowed us. I found myself, along with everyone else in the writers’ circle, clapping almost as soon as Dagnia/ Julia read the last word. And I was the only one, or so I thought, who knew that Dagnia/Julie had not written those articles. Maybe I clapped because of the way Dagnia/Julie had read them, in a sweet, bell-toned voice with a lyric precision that perfectly matched the haunting yet informative quality of the piece. Or maybe I was clapping for Dagnia Daley — the Dagnia Daley — wherever she was. (I had no idea that she was close enough to spit on us, had she been so inclined. Had it been me, I would have been so inclined.)

  While the applause raged on, Julie hardly acknowledged it. Stiffly and somewhat awkwardly, she bent down and put the magazine away in the soft leather briefcase at her feet. She sat up and half-smiled at the group, nodded, crossed her arms and leaned back as if to say, “Enough. Move on already.” One thing I’ll say for her: she certainly had the performer’s modesty act down pat. Slowly, the hubbub did die down, and one of the older women in the group, the copper-haired, fifty-five-year-old Generation Xer, raised her hand enthusiastically to speak.

  “Go ahead, Marilyn,” Dagnia/Julie said.

  Marilyn seemed hardly able to contain herself. “As a woman,” she said, “who has very recently been going through menopause, not early menopause but right-on-bloody-time menopause, pardon the pun, I have to say, Dagnia, that your reading was perfect!”

  Dagnia/Julie smiled modestly and said thank you. But there seemed to be an echo in the room. Another thank you came directly across the circle from Julie. Half the eyes in the room stayed focused on Dagnia/Julie. The other half turned to the small, pretty woman in the black fur coat and gloves, sitting on the far side of the circle. I was one of those who looked at the real Dagnia Daley. She too was wearing that tight-lipped, enigmatic smile. But she had also been crying. Her cheeks were still wet from her tears. With at least half the room’s attention, she quietly cleared her throat and got the attention of the other half. I have no idea what Dagnia/Julie was thinking, but I’ve a feeling she knew even then. Hell, even I knew. Or was beginning to.

  “First of all,” Dagnia Daley said, still smiling. “I’d like to thank you, Miss Whatever-Your-Name-Is, for your reading. You handled it wonderfully. Better than I could have myself, I believe. Secondly, I would like, if it’s not too presumptuous, to read you something of my own. Well, not my own actually. It was written for a government department, by some lawyer who shall forever remain nameless.” Dagnia Daley smiled again at the room. She was remarkably composed in front of all those confused writers’ faces.

  “One thing I’ll say for her,” Dagnia/Julie said later. “She’s got the gonads of an elephant.”

  According to the Dagnia/Dagnia’s articles, gonads were to males as ovaries were to females. So in fact, Dagnia Daley, who’d had her ovaries removed, would have had no gonads at all. But Dagnia/Julie was upset, and can be forgiven her imprecision with language this one time. Besides, I got her point. Dagnia/ Dagnia did have the gonads of an elephant, so to speak.

  In front of the entire Thursday afternoon gathering of the BIG BAD BOOKS writers’ group, Dagnia/Dagnia withdrew from her purse photocopied sheets of paper from the Department of Justice Legal Code and read to us the uninspired prose written there. She read us the section dealing with plagiarism of another’s work, and the rights and ownership of intellectual property. She read us the sections on fraud and false identity. She even read us, as a kind of pallid dessert, one section that dealt entirely with assuming ownership under false pretensions for the sake of reputation. Even without monetary gain it’s still against the law. You learn something new every day.

  Apparently Dagnia/Dagnia meant to read us anything in the legal code that dealt with what Dagnia/Julie had been getting away with for the past six months. The light had dawned on the BIG BAD BOOKS writers’ group. Not once did she stand up and cry, “I’m the real Dagnia Daley! This is my work! And this woman is an impostor and a fraud!” She just sat there, without identifying herself, quietly and evenly reading us those mind-numbing passages from the codified law books. But still, everyone figured it out. We may have been bad writers, but we weren’t stupid. Before she was even halfway finished all eyes had turned to Dagnia/Julie. And believe me when I pillage an old cliché here and say: “Hell hath no fury like a writer who thinks she’s been made a fool of.”

  It was like someone was directing a musical. Twenty-six faces looked confused and a little nervous. Twenty-six faces started to realize. Twenty-six mouths started to drop. Twenty-six sets of eyes began to narrow. Twenty-six heads started to turn. The twenty-seventh head droned on in “wheretofors” and “herewiths” and “thou-shalt-nots” and “punishable-by-laws.” And the twentieth-eighth head? Why, ladies and gentlemen, she’s the star of our show! Just plain old Julie now, she got up without looking at anyone, without apologies, picked up her battered leather briefcase and quietly left the room, with the eyes of the chorus line boring resentfully into her back.

  And the twenty-ninth head? What did he do? The twenty-ninth head knew one thing: loyalties can form in strange places. Even people he thought he didn’t like can become familiar and comfortable and easier than going out and looking for people he did like, knowing as he did that everyone in the right situation can be unlikable enough. The twenty-ninth head knew that no matter how justified the twenty-seventh head may be, or how good a writer she was, he’d better stick with the twenty-eighth head, because the fraud you know is safer than the writer you didn’t.

  Jean Paul Sartre for Dummies again. Paraphrased of course.

  I got up and followed Julie out of the room, the same twenty-six pairs of eyes drilling into my back and the low lovely voice of Dagnia Daley washing over them with the legal code and its punitive warning to all those who want to be someone or something they’re not.

  Hallelujah!

  CXXV

  I found her at our usual table in BIG BAD COFFEE. She was remarkably calm for someone who had just been exposed as a complete fraud in front of twenty-six people who used to admire the pants off her. I sat down across from her without saying a word, and when the waitress came I ordered the usual: an Italian soda.

  “Fuck the soda,” said Julie listlessly. “Order a coffee like a real man.”

  “I don’t drink BIG BAD COFFEE,” I told her. “Too trendy. I only drink Maxwell House.”

  Julie turned to the impatient waitress. “Bring him a large coffee, the strongest you’ve got. Black.”

  “Whatever,” said the waitress, who was too young to be of our generation but had stolen our nihilist terminology. She disappeared and Julie said to me, “You’ll drink real coffee or you won’t drink anything at all.”

  “Whatever,” I said. I noticed that she did not have her usual drink either.

  “What happened to the decaffeinates?”

  Julie shrugged. “I need all the stimulant I can get. If they sold cocaine here, I’d buy some.”

  I told her that if they could figure out a way around the legalities and there was a profit in it, all she need do is wait. No smile. Not even a twinkling in the eye. I sure knew how to cheer a Black Widow up. I asked her what she was going to do next.

  “What do you mean, next? It’s not like I lost my job or Dean died. It’s a stupid writers’ group. A group of bad writers at that. What’s it to me if they all think I’m the next best thing to unevolved liverwort?”

  At least liverwort is not unoriginal, I was tempted to say. Mother was right. Sometimes it’s best to say nothing at all.

  “Why don’t you
try writing?” I asked. “Maybe you’d be good at it. You never know.”

  “Yes, I do,” she answered. “What am I going to write about? Premature ovarian failure?”

  I was getting a little annoyed with her. She was supposed to be contrite, grateful that I had stood up for her and walked out of the room. She was supposed to be nice to me for once, for Christ’s sake.

  “Well, hell, woman!” I said. “Why don’t you write about your life? Not someone else’s. Write about Dean, or your alcoholic mother or your asshole father the third. That’s what makes the story believable: it happened to you.”

  Julie was uninspired. “This,” she said, “coming from someone who is writing a whole bunch of stories about a guy he doesn’t even know.”

  She had me there. She had also crapped all over my idea, as I knew she would. Black Widows can be like that.

  “Fine,” I said. “Stay here. Pine away over your brother. Practise Dagnia Daley’s signature all day if you want. See if I give a shit.”

  For just a minute I thought she was going to cry. She lost control of the muscles in her face. Her lower lip quivered just the tiniest bit. She opened her mouth as if to speak, or meow, like Juxtaposition. Then she caught herself, tucked her emotion into her back pocket like it was a Kleenex she had removed by mistake. She did, however, reach out and put her hand over mine on the table.

  “You’re not entirely a bad guy, you know. And you’re a good writer.”

  I am not one for scenes like this. They make me extremely uncomfortable and nervous. Whenever anybody lets their essential kindness shine through (and despite all my bitching I do believe that we all have some kindness in us somewhere), I can’t help but think it’s only a matter of time before we end up hurting each other for keeps. When people who you know are assholes do something stupid and hurtful, it’s easy to write them off. When people who let you see them as they really are, who reveal their humanity to you, even for just a moment, when they do something awful, you can still write them off, but they take a little piece of you with them.