When we set off to buy the produce I realized that it was the first time I had been alone with Joe in a while. He seemed calmer (if Joe could ever be calm). I think the promise of Roth’s million had lifted a great pressure from him and exposed the butterfly business to be expedient rather than essential to his being. The imminence of that financial windfall had reset his ambitions, and allowed him, perhaps for the first time, to think of the things he really wanted to do with his life.
As we followed the flow of the lordly Hudson on Route 9, passing former presidents’ homes and billionaires’ follies, I reminded Joe of the prophetic wish he’d made as we’d gazed from the lookout point over the Hudson River, on the day he’d re-named me.
‘Someday, the Hudson. You think that day’s coming? A house on the Hudson?’
He nodded absently, his mind elsewhere.
‘Is that really your dream, Joe? To be rich. Live in a big house. Hobnob with society.’
‘I do live in a big house. Hobnob? What’s that?’
‘Mix it with high society.’
‘Society is who you meet, Rip. And it’s high enough for me.’
‘But what is your dream, Joe?’
Joe twitched and made a squirming sound. ‘Aw. I don’t go for all that dream talk. I got plenty to do when I’m awake.’
‘Come on.’
‘So many things.’
‘Name one.’
‘I can’t! So many.’
‘You’re afraid to name it in case you don’t get it. That’s it, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t be ridiculing me! Look. A deer!’
I looked and there were deer, in the grounds of one of the great houses he no longer aspired to live in.
‘OK. What do you hope for? Really? If this comes off what will you do?’
‘I got a heap of things planned.’
‘You still want to be the Henry Ford of lepidoptera? Take butterflies to the masses?’
‘Sure.’
It didn’t sound like he did.
‘Isabelle suggested that you’re only doing the butterfly stuff to impress a father you never knew or had. That you’d rather be doing something else.’
‘Are you shrinking me, Rip? I don’t need no shrink here.’
It is a measure of Joe’s brilliant evasions (and my solipsism) that it had taken me until now to make a connection between his restlessness and his fatherlessness. Isabelle’s comment seemed so obvious at the time that I had dismissed it. But there it was. Clear as.
‘Personal is good, Joe. Is it true? About your father?’
Joe made a nervous giggle. ‘Are we done here? This has gotten way too personal.’
‘We both have father issues, no?’
‘I don’t got a father so how can I have father issues? Anyways, I really don’t need a father. I got a heavenly one. If I wanted to find my earthly one, I would.’
‘So why don’t you?’
Joe started to dee-dee-dee.
‘Joe! Come on. Why don’t you?’
‘Because.’
‘Because your mother tells you not to!’
‘Because he ain’t going to satisfy, Rip. He ain’t what I’m chasing.’
‘Then what are you chasing?’
Joe dee-dee-deed again. ‘Dee- d- d- dee, dee, d dee- dee . . .’ to the tune of ‘Dixie’.
‘I think you don’t know what you want.’
‘I know. I just ain’t coming out with it.’
‘To find an entomological wife?’
‘Ha!’
‘Is that it?’
‘For real.’
‘But you have never mentioned having a girlfriend, Joe.’
‘It just ain’t happened. You know this stretch of road is where the first automobile was driven?’
‘No. Is that a fact?’
‘That is a fact. Think what those early century folk would make of Chuick, Rip.’
‘They’d think the world hadn’t progressed much.’
‘Chuick is a wonder of modern science and homemade ingeniousness. And one thing I would like to do when we get the money is to get this car gilded up in gold.’
As we came into Poughkeepsie the car suddenly drifted into the next lane and I had to pull the wheel back to the sound of an angry honking.
‘Woah, Joe! Where were you going there?’
Joe had been looking in his wing mirror too much and lost track of the road.
‘We’re being followed, Rip. There’s a Plymouth sitting on our tail. He’s been following us since we joined the highway.’
I watched the Plymouth in the vanity mirror.
‘Didn’t Mary say we were being followed by a green Plymouth?’
‘She did. Although there’s more than one green Plymouth in this country.’
Joe slowed to a dangerously low speed, to see if the tailing car did the same. It overtook us, as any normal car would, and drove on ahead.
‘Could it be the bailiffs? The IRS?’
‘Probably nothing.’
After we had picked up the lobsters and steaks from the culinary college, Joe suggested we go see Washington Irving’s house in Tarrytown. He said I needed to see the house where the author wrote the story that had brought us together.
‘We have the time?’
‘One thing I have observed is successful people always have time and are never on time, Rip. Rockefeller was famous for his tarditude.’
‘You’re making that up. The fact as well as that word, which I like by the way.’
‘It’s true! I read it in Time Magazine. Ha!’
‘He could afford to be late, Joe. He was a multimillionaire.’
‘So can we.’
‘Not yet. If we get this deal.’
‘When, Rip. Not if. When.’
Irving’s stone mansion was as made up of gables and as full of angles and corners as an old cocked hat. The actual house was closed but we got out and looked around the outside. As we stood there, Joe put an arm around my shoulder.
‘Just think. If Irving had never written the story of Rip Van Winkle, you might never have met me. You might have been reading something else that didn’t have that same effect on you. You might not have tarried by the Falls that day. I might have missed you by a chapter or a paragraph. And Mary might not have liked the look of the book, never taken it, and I’d never have come back to give it to you. Or offered you a job selling butterflies. That’s a butterfly effect right there, Rip! You know that Butterfly Effects was going to be our company name but Isabelle said it was cheesy and Ma said we’d probably get sued. So we called it Butterfly World. When are you going to write this book, Rip?’
The question jolted me back to my former self; the self who wanted to make a statement on the page. I liked it when Joe talked about me being a writer, even though I knew there was a credibility gap between my ambition and the actualizing of it. In the weeks on the road I had secretly continued with my ‘Americodyssey’, scribbling lines in motel rooms or in the back seat of Chuick, but experience had superseded the writing, and my desire had been sublimated into other things. I had a notion – romantic I see now – that at some point I would stop and take stock and put pen to paper or fingers to the Remington and that all my adventuring would pour out onto the blank page. But I’d hardly thought about writing during that time. I hadn’t had time! My ambitions had been focused on more immediate pleasures and achievable goals: see America (check), screw Mary (check), sell butterflies (check with an A+) and challenge Edith (pending).
‘Someday someone will be driving by the house you wrote your book in, Rip.’
‘That’s a fine thought, Joe.’
‘Will you use your real name or write under a pseudopen?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well. Rip Van Jones is a good name for a writer. I been thinking about titles for this book you’re going to write. I was thinking “The Adventures of Joe Bosco”.’
‘Oh. So it’s all about you?’
‘Well,
mainly, sure. But you can call it “The Adventures of Joe Bosco and Rip Van Jones” if you can fit it on the cover. It’ll be about our adventuring, about America, and butterflies and the search for True Freedom. It’ll be a book that will get people inspired about the beauty of America. And leps, too.’
‘I don’t see when I’m going to get the time to write this book. I’m having too much fun.’
‘We get this deal done, I’ll set you up in a cabin in the mountains.’
‘Would you even read the book, Joe?’
‘I wouldn’t need to. I’d be livin’ it.’
‘You should read more. You’re a smart guy. There are worlds in books. You can’t just read Butterfly Monthly and the Bible.’
‘I read other things! I’m always learnin’.’
It was true. Joe was a scattergun autodidact, making up for the years he’d been selling on the road instead of studying by being fascinated – infatuated – with life.
‘But I have a difficulty with words.’
‘You?’
Joe nodded as if giving himself permission to admit something to me. ‘When I see words on a page they come at me in a strange order. I have to really concentrate. To see them in the order they were intended. Sometimes I read something and I put them in a different order and I get a sense, a different story to the one other people see.’
‘You’re dyslexic.’
‘That’s what they told me. But it’s not quite that. It’s hard to explain but it swells my head when I read. I get this bubble feeling. Sometimes, when I speak, I can’t think of the right word so I say a word – any word – and I know it’s not the right word, but I say it anyhow and then, to cover up for that word, I say another word, and to cover up for that word that I know is not quite right, I say another, building words on words in a kind of panic, and even though I know that each word I add ain’t right I say it anyway; and rather than stop, I have to add a word and then another. Until I have this tower of words. Like Babel. That’s why I need you by my side selling and that’s why I need you to write my story, Rip. Keep it from toppling over.’
‘Have you ever thought about checking on the meaning of a word before you use it, Joe?’
‘If it sounds right, Rip, that’s all that matters. Like lyrics in a song. No one cares about the words really. The melody is what matters. As long as the words fit in with the melody.’
Joe may have been dyslexic but he didn’t have difficulty with words. The numbers of words, that is. He had lots of words in him, and when they came out they usually found a curious eloquence. It hadn’t occurred to me (how much hadn’t!) that he might be talking fast in order to stay one word, one step, ahead of the impediment. Even speaking was an act of plate-spinning for him.
‘So are the most successful people dyslexic as well as late?’
‘Everyone knows that. It’s self-evidenturing.’
As we walked back to Chuick, we both saw the green Plymouth across the street.
‘Our friend’s back.’
I could see a man in the driver’s seat with a telephoto lens. It was trained on the house, and us. As soon as he saw us looking at him, he stopped, started the car and pulled away with a guilty squeal of rubber.
‘Such a purdy colour,’ Joe said.
On the way back I decided to clarify something that had been bugging me.
‘Can I clear up one thing, Joe?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Mary said you took that book. At the Falls that day we met.’
Joe looked at me, checking to see if I might be joking.
‘And you believed that? Man, Rip. You’re right to give her the benefit but you gotta handle what Mary tells you with nuclear gloves.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Mary tells lies all the time. Come on.’
‘Like the one about your mother having her by another man?’
‘Yes and I ain’t going there. You got something going with her? I seen the way you look at her. Rubbing her neck in the car.’
‘It’s just . . . flirting really. It’s nothing serious.’
‘Now you are blushing like Euthalia aeropa. I thought you’d be more Isabelle’s type. But either way, I’d be happy to have you as my actual brother. Then we really can be a family business. Keep up the tradition of the special relationship between our countries. You’d be a big improvement on Mary’s boyfriend.’
‘She had a boyfriend?’
‘Ricky Fountain. He was in the Marine Corps. He went overseas some place. El Salvador. He was a total crazy. He asked her to marry him and everything.’
‘And she accepted?’
‘Yeh. But then he disappeared.’
‘Jesus.’
‘There you go again, Rip. Praising.’
‘She never mentioned him.’
‘Like I said. He dumped her in a bad way.’
‘She told me she’d . . . never had a serious relationship.’
‘Maybe that’s because she likes you. She’s trying to impress you. She lies to make herself seem more interesting. Or make things happen. It’s like a disease with her.’
I felt nauseous. The revelation threw me into a sulky silence all the way back to the house.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
In which a thanksgiving feast becomes a last supper.
The table was laid with assorted cutlery and crockery and American produce. It made for a still-life that a deranged Dutch master might have dreamed up: lobsters piled high in a steaming pink-red tower, steaks like plates, tomato ketchup, butternut squash, hammers (to smash the lobsters), Mickey Mouse mugs and a set of fine crystal goblets – one of the few relics left by the previous occupants. The uneven heights of the chairs made it look like a council of giants and pygmies. Celeste a foot higher than Isabelle, Edith’s head at Elijah’s shoulder. No two people were at the same level, the lesser were greater than the taller. The only person not present was Mary.
Joe’s grace had the tone of a departure and was – I know now – charged with the prophetic.
‘Friends, pilgrims, sisters, brothers, mother. I’m calling this the Feast of the Assuming because I am assuming that pretty soon our lives will change. That we are about to receive a blessing which I would like to thank the Lord for now. We have food from the oceans of Maine and the fields of Kansas, as well as vegetables from our own allotment. It’s a spread of goodness.’
Mary entered the room. I had my eyes half closed for Joe’s still unfinished grace, and I pretended that I hadn’t seen her.
‘I ain’t done yet. Ceelee? Hands off. I want to thank Rip here for his contribution on the road. He proved a fine salesman. And when it came to the big deal, he delivered big. So here’s to Rip.’
‘Rip.’
Joe raised his Mickey Mouse mug.
‘Roth said this case of wine is from France. It was made in 1964. Same year as me. It’s called La Tour. Which I’m pretty sure means “damn fine” in French. I know those Pilgrim Fathers would have frowned on it but those zealous nuts should have read their Bible better ’cos even pagans know the Lord’s first miracle was turning water into wine. So let’s raise it and praise it!’
Apart from Mary, we all raised our assorted receptacles. ‘Raise it and praise it!’
‘And . . .’
‘Come on, Joe,’ Edith said. ‘We’re all starving here.’
‘Just one more thing. Ma says never count your chickens. We got two chickens on the table. They are definitely hatched so it’s safe to count them. And whatever happens with this deal, it don’t change the good things about us. We stay humble and kind. Amens?’
‘Amens already!’
I was sat between Celeste, who towered over me on a bar stool, and Mary, who slumped back in an armchair with her plate on her lap, withdrawn. Up until that day I had ignored her immature posturing, fibs and attention-seeking in the pursuit of pleasure, choosing to see it as sexy rebellion. With the veil lifted, her smouldering glower – so sexy before – looked petulant
and self-indulgent now.
Clay poured the Chateau La Tour into whatever receptacles he could find.
‘Join us, Clay,’ Joe said.
‘I’m all fine, Joe. The spirit is enough for me.’
How I disliked his pious phraseology. When Joe flung God into things it was somehow more natural. With Clay it was hard not to hear some kind of judgement. I misread a lot of people and was wrong about a lot of things during my butterflying days, but about Clay I was right.
Joe, as he had done at Roth’s, knocked back the wine like it was milk. Isabelle took small, appreciative sips. The only person – other than me – who looked like they understood what they were drinking was Edith. I noticed her savouring it, swirling it expertly in the glass, a gesture I’d never have associated with her. As she looked into the dark liquid she decanted a memory:
‘I can tell this is nice.’ She held out her glass and I charged it for her. ‘Your father liked wine,’ she said, addressing no one in particular. ‘He always used to do this. And it drove me insane. Pretentious fucker.’
‘What’s a pretentious?’ Celeste asked.
‘Someone who tries to be someone they’re not,’ Isabelle said.
‘That could be pretty much anyone here,’ Mary said, a little scattergun. She finished her toothpaste beaker of wine and poured herself some more.
I was being a bit slow. My mind was on other things: the wine, the food, the excitement of the deal – Mary’s secrets and lies. But I began to see what was about to happen: Mary was steeling herself for an assault on Edith. That glower – usually directed at ‘everything and everyone’ (the world, me, men, her brother) – was for her mother.
I tinkled my glass with a fork, cleared my throat and tried to head her off at the pass.
‘I know you think it bad luck to count chickens, Edith, but let’s just imagine. Let’s assume our chickens hatch. The deal comes to pass. Let’s go around the table and each of us say one thing they’d like to buy with the money. If you could have one thing. Edith, you go first. What would it be? Don’t be superstitious now. It’s not bad luck to speculate.’
The Killing of Butterfly Joe Page 24