by Darren Greer
“Come on,” I told her. “It’ll be good for us.”
“No way,” said Julie. “Not in a billion years would I willingly put myself through that humiliation again.”
“Don’t think of it as humiliation,” I said. “Think of it as revenge.”
“I don’t need revenge,” Julie said. “I’ve got resentments and plenty of time to nurse them. That’s good enough.”
“It’s not,” I told her. “You can spend the rest of your life nursing resentments. That’s what life is for. Now is the time for action. Now is the time for courage.”
“What makes you the expert?”
“I have a sister who illustrates the point for me.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” Julie said.
“I don’t.”
“Cameron,” Julie said. “You’re crazy.”
She should wait until I feed her the second idea. “So, you’ll do it?”
“Why in the world would anybody in their right mind do this, Cameron? It doesn’t make sense!”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said. “But what does? I mean, does Dean make sense to you? Does brain cancer make sense to you?”
“That’s not fair,” said Julie. “That’s really unfair actually.”
“It’s also manipulative,” I said. “But we’re going to do it.”
“But Cameron! I’m not even a goddamned writer!”
“So be a writer!”
“Not everyone can be, you know,” she said. “Not everyone wants to be.”
“You want to be,” I said. “You know you do.”
For the first time, Julie grew silent. I knew I had her. As crazy as my idea was, I knew I had her.
“Think of it as Phase One of Redemption,” I told her.
“And what’s Phase Two?”
“You’ll see,” I said.
CLX
Like Iroquois Pete. Unlike Tattoo Sam. Unlike Darrel Greene and Dean Lowell. Like General Dawes and June Greene, Julie and I were losers who knew we were losers. There’s nobility in that, somewhere. It’s one of my themes, in case you hadn’t noticed.
CLXI
For weeks Julie and I practised every day. She would try to write in the morning then call me before she left for work to tell me how it was going. Each time she said, “I can’t do this.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s too fucking hard. That’s why!”
She would read to me what she had written. I would encourage her to go further. That was difficult for me. I have never been the encouraging type. Jealousy, silence, and burning resentment are more my style. I even gave Julie a working title for her story that wasn’t really a story: the name of the song that Dean had played at his piano recital at the university. That much, at least, of Dagnia’s initial story about Dean was true. Truth and lies.
“‘Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,’” I told her.
“That’s dumb,” said Julie.
“Then come up with something better. Another song by Nina Simone.”
Julie’s story was about Nina Simone. And, of course, a brother who played Nina Simone songs at a piano recital.
“How about ‘Strange Fruit?’”
“Cliché,” I told her.
“Why does it have to be about Nina Simone at all?”
“It doesn’t,” I said. “The title can be anything. The title hardly matters at all.”
“Then why even bother?” Julie asked me. “Why the hell am I even doing this?”
“How about ‘Still Life with Dean?’”
I knew I had her by her silence. You can tell a lot about a person by their silences.
“Perfect,” she said to me, and hung up in my ear.
CLXII
The Thursday afternoon BIG BAD BOOKS writers’ group had changed thus:
1. Dagnia Daley no longer facilitated the group. She had crawled back into the elitist woodwork, and the writers’ group officially had no successful writers in it again.
“Par for the course,” said Julie when she heard.
2. Marilyn, the middle-aged redhead who had told Julie/Dagnia and Cameron/Bubby not to return to the group, had taken over the role of chief critic and head guru for the lot. She had finally published a single poem in a local journal and had become, as a result, an expert by default.
3. Marilyn’s poem was called “Pirate Jenny,” inspired by a song in The Threepenny Opera. “It’s about revolution,” Marilyn the middle-aged redhead told the group when she announced the poem’s publication — for which she was paid, by the way, in cat-box liners.
“Oh brother,” said Julie when she heard.
4. BIG BAD BOOKS kept several updated copies of the lyrics and score to “Pirate Jenny” in the music section of their store, with liner notes explaining the communist symbolism in The Threepenny Opera.
“Bertolt Brecht for Dummies,” I told Julie when I heard.
5. BIG BAD BOOKS kept no copies of Marilyn’s poem in the store, as the journal was given away free at communist poetry slams and by the Young Socialist Party at the university.
6. The group had been infiltrated by a coven of serious young male adolescents who wrote “hard” science fiction and had published extensively on the Internet. These stories all began with sentences like, “The great ship stopped at every uninfected system in the galaxy,” and, “The planet’s three moons shone down on the desolate landscape with an eerie glow.”
7. The coffee was no longer free. Perhaps in response to the writings of Marilyn the copper-headed communist, the capitalist management at the store had started charging fifty cents per Styrofoam cup.
8. Despite these serious developments, no one in the Thursday BIG BAD BOOKS writers’ group was glad to see us. Even the acne-plagued science fiction writers had been forewarned, it seemed, and stared at us coldly at first.
“Strange fruit,” whispered Julie when we walked in.
CLXIII
Julie had taken my advice. In fact, I had supplied her with the title for her story, and even wrote some of it for her. It most definitely was influenced by my style.
Julie hadn’t wanted to do it. “What’s the point?” she said. “It’s just more plagiarism. You wrote most of the goddamned thing.”
“It’s your story,” I told her. “It’s about you. I just helped shape it a little.”
As so Julie finally agreed to go and read it aloud.
“Phase One of Redemption” Julie read out to the group. “Still Life with Dean.”
“Where did you get this one?” Marilyn asked Julie pointedly in front of everyone.
“From my head,” Julie pointedly returned.
“That would be a first,” replied Marilyn.
“Well,” said Julie. “It’s not The Threepenny Opera.”
CLXIV
Why are we doing this again? she had asked me on the way to the bookstore.
Because, I told her, I’ve learned that certain mistakes need to be rectified. Certain amends have to be made before we can move on with things.
Where did you learn that? Julie asked. The Salvation Army?
You bet your ass, I told her smartly.
CLXV
Excerpted from:
Phase One of Redemption: Still Life with Dean
by Julie Lowell
My brother used to call me the ice queen. He meant it as a compliment, I believe — a way of saying I was cool under any circumstance, the epitome of reserve and self-control. It’s funny how people see you. Even people who think they know you well.
Dean was the original curly-haired angel; I remember him hanging like an angel against the sordid backdrop of my childhood. We would chase each other through our upscale apartment, manoeuvering around our mother and the antique furniture, that was not cared for and had begun to wear. (The furniture and our mother.) Somehow my brother, though smaller, was always faster. He would disappear into one of the many guest rooms and hide under the bed or in the closet and it would take me hours
to find him. When I did he would be asleep, curled up with his little head in the crook of his little arm. I would wake him gently and he would smile and rub his eyes and pronounce himself the winner. We would trudge off together for dinner, prepared by a lone, harried, live-in maid. Our mother, already drunk on Tom Collinses and clad in a lime-green, practically see-through chiffon nightgown, would regale us with stories of her days on the stage and our father, whom we had never met, yet who paid for the apartment and our schooling and the maid and my mother’s Tom Collinses. He had even bought my mother the nightgown, from an expensive lingerie shop downtown, and she rarely changed out of it unless she was planning to leave the apartment. My brother and I grew up with a limited kind of privilege, though Dean always said the same thing about it when we got older.
“If that’s privilege,” he’d say, “I’d rather be fucking poor.”
When Dean was nine years old he discovered our mother’s piano sitting in the dining room. Discovered is perhaps the wrong word. The piano, a 1952 upright Steinway, had been there since before Dean was born. Our mother had once played it, in those days when she could still fool herself that she was a singer and an actress; before, in other words, she met my father and became his whore. Now she played it only when she was very drunk. She would sit on the bench late at night, still in the chiffon nightgown, and draw out of it pretty one-fingered melodies she remembered from those few, and mostly unsuccessful, musical revues she had once been in. By the time Dean came upon the piano, it had not been tuned in years — sharps sounded like flats, majors fell away towards minors, it was nearly impossible to play.
He tried anyway, and before long my mother had it tuned, so that Dean would not drive us all crazy with his warbling, out-of-tune amateur symphonies. We expected little improvement other than the tuning; what a surprise it was to find that all this time Dean could play! His hands were still small, so he had trouble spanning the keys, but the basics were there. The day after the piano-tuner came, he sat down and played a popular tune from the radio — I forget what it was — so well that my mother thought it was the radio. She shouted for the maid to turn it down so she could watch the remainder of her soap opera undisturbed.
“It ain’t me,” the maid complained. “It’s your son.”
For an hour or so that afternoon, the maid, my mother, and I stood around Dean as he played for us — half-remembered tunes from the radio and nursery songs from his days at kindergarten. My mother was excited, I remember, that Dean had such an ear, and swore to enrol him in lessons immediately.
“He’s a genius,” she kept saying. “Perfect pitch and not a single instruction.”
She hugged Dean more than usual that night, though she often hugged us too much when she was drinking heavily, Dean especially. Right after supper she sent him back over to the piano to play, even though he had nothing to practise other than those things he had already learned by ear. She could have killed it then, I suppose. She could have forced Dean to be at the piano every waking moment, to achieve her own dreams of musical stardom. So many parents ruin their children’s ambitions by getting them confused with their own. But she didn’t. There was no need. Dean went to the piano as soon as he got home from school and every night when he finished dinner. He began his lessons, practised scales and notes, and learned how to read music. We no longer chased each other through the house or played Monopoly or Snakes and Ladders together. I did what all sisters are expected to do when it seems they have no talents and are least appreciated by their parents. I studied. I became an authority. Every day after school I went into my room with my books and opened them to the day’s biology or chemistry or English lesson. Our childhoods were over before I even remember them beginning, and Dean and I fell into our own separate disasters, our not-so-friendly, life-long competition.
As you shall see.
CLXVI
And see we did. Especially Marilyn. She had started to chew her lower lip nervously almost as soon as Julie started reading. Near the middle I could see she was in a kind of private hell. I knew that hell. It’s the hell of hearing something read out in the group that is better than you have done, better than you could ever do, by someone you hate. To use the colourful analogy of The Threepenny Opera, Julie had set sail upon a sea of bad prose in the writers’ group and spilled blood. She had captured the heart and attention of every person in the room, even the adolescent gaggle of science fiction writers.
Pirate Julie.
CLXVII
Julie had always been a good reader. Even Dagnia/Dagnia had admitted that Dagnia/Julie had read the piece on premature ovarian failure better than she herself could have done. Even Marilyn the middle-aged, copper-headed communist had complimented Dagnia/Julie on her reading ability once or twice before she found out the truth. But this was something different. Even though I had pushed her to do this and helped her with it, I was a little jealous when I heard her read that piece aloud. There was something utterly hypnotic both in the words and the way she read them. Never once did we doubt the story itself. We were carried along with Julie and Dean through the death of their mother, the failures, the eventual disaster of their relationship, and their ultimate betrayal of each other. Julie had found the perfect tone for such a story, halfway between authority and vulnerability. My only wish was that Dagnia/Dagnia had stuck around long enough to hear it. If Dagnia/Dagnia was a real writer, if she put words on the page simply for the love of it and the fear of not doing it, then she would have forgiven Julie that very afternoon for stealing her work.
It was clear that the story belonged to no one but Julie. She started crying before the story was even finished. And when she did finish, when she had read the final line to the group in that gorgeous, bell-toned voice of hers, she was greeted with stunned silence. Even Marilyn had nothing to say. As she had done before in the middle of that kind of silence, Julie slowly got up from her chair and left the room. I followed her, but I was not quite out of the room when the applause started. I could still hear it when Julie and I found our table in BIG BAD COFFEE.
Julie, invigorated but in control, ordered us both large cappuccinos. I was so impressed I didn’t even protest that it wasn’t Maxwell House. We drank in silence, and only once did I refer to the sheaf of thumbed, typewritten papers lying on the table between us.
“You should publish that,” I said. “You should send it off somewhere without changing a fucking word.”
“You should publish it,” she said. “You wrote most of it.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
We were only halfway into our cappuccinos when Marilyn the copper-headed communist came marching boldly up to our table. “That was damn wonderful,” she said breathlessly to Julie. “That was the best thing I’ve ever heard in the group.”
“Thank you,” Julie said.
“I’m serious,” said Marilyn. “That was better than anything Dagnia Daley ever read us.”
“It was,” I agreed. “Better than premature ovarian failure.”
Julie only smiled a little, took another sip of her coffee. Marilyn left eventually, but not before telling Julie and me that we were welcome back into the group at any time.
“See?” I said. “Redemption.”
Julie nodded, though I think both of us knew we would not be going back to the group. Julie said she wanted to get on with her life.
“I like teaching night classes,” she told me. “I like my students. I think I’d like to concentrate on that for a while.”
“What about Dean?”
A shadow passed across her face for a moment, then she shrugged it away. “I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll see. I guess Dean can make his own way for now.”
“What’s my name?” I asked.
She looked at me strangely. “What are you talking about?”
“What’s my name?”
“Cameron, you idiot,” she said. “Are you feeling okay?”
“It’s not Cameron,” I said.
“The
n what the hell is it?”
“Cameron/Darrel.”
I told her my own story and Darrel’s. She was the first person I had let in on things since Darrel Greene took it upon himself to end his life in the utility closet of the Sally Ann Treatment Centre. I told her about that, and June, and Dawes, and my attempts to dig into the essence of these lives in my stories. Julie listened to it all without interruption, and only after I’d let my own last line hang in the air did she ask me why.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s complicated.”
“I’ll say,” said Julie, and sighed heavily. “It seems none of us can manage to be who or what we say we are for very long.”
“What are you doing this weekend?” I asked.
“No plans. Why?”
“I want you to go somewhere with me.”
“Where?”
“To a little town a few hours north of here called Three Rivers.”
Julie looked surprised at my suggestion. “What the hell for?”
“Phase Two,” I told her.
Where the
Three Rivers
Meet
That thou this very day hast drunk of Lethe;
And if from smoke a fire may be inferred,
Such an oblivion clearly demonstrates
Some error in thy will elsewhere intent.
Truly from this time forward shall my words
Be naked ...
— DANTE ALIGHIERI, THE DIVINE COMEDY, PURGATORIO, CANTO XXXIII
CLXVIII
Getting June away from the city on a day pass was not just a matter of packing a suitcase with a toothbrush, a change of clothes, and her Minnie Mouse paraphernalia. I had to provide itineraries, bank statements, meal plans, mandates and objectives; I had to outline emergency procedures in case there was trouble. Even then it wasn’t automatic. I had to meet with General Dawes in his office for an hour on Friday to review the reasons why I wanted to take June away for a whole day. Dawes had put on his glasses and was going over for my application for the twentieth time. It was all in order. We both knew that. I had enough money for the trip, had planned it carefully, had checked out the local hospitals near Three Rivers. Under the mandate section I had written: To give my sister a little time away from the hospital and the city. To take her Christmas shopping, to take a walk in a country field, to eat at a nice restaurant. To spend some quality time with her.