Priestdaddy

by Patricia Lockwood

  I do not mean to make light of his shock. He recognized what I did not: that I was running away. I had never been much interested in story, so I had yet to realize I was participating in one: that I would see rising action, twists, and climax; that there would be conflict, revenge, and resolution; but above all, that I was the engine powering it forward. The landscape slid past me because I was moving. I was keeping the I upright.

  Jason went up the great staircase to try to talk to him. He found him sitting in silence, practically nude, and surrounded with gun parts like a deranged warlord. This was at the height of his gun craze, when he used to make the whole family go to the shooting range and compete with each other for accuracy. Whenever he didn’t like people, he cleaned his guns in front of them. Part of me found this habit appalling, but the other part of me respected his flair for high theater. If I wanted to frighten off a chat-room bastard who was trying to be monogamous with my daughter, what better way than to lure him into my rec room and put together the world’s most deadly jigsaw puzzle right in front of his face?

  “Your father has had too much Cream,” Jason whispered to me when he came back down. “He’s had too much Cream and it’s gone to his head. Do you think he’ll try to kill me?”

  “Did you give him any indication that you were a pacifist or an intellectual, or that you liked abstract art?”

  “Hmmmm, I don’t think so,” but his hmmmm had the quality of a yummy sound, like he found the act of thinking itself to be delicious. This was a bad sign. If he had let a hmmmm slip in front of my father, that might have been enough to do it. We decided we had better leave that night, just to be sure.

  • • •

  WE WALKED HAND IN HAND back to the convent, just as the clouds were beginning to ignite. “Oh my god,” he said, flinching at the sight of the river, which must have been the place where mud was invented. “You can practically see the three-eyed fish.” I nodded. If I developed a psychic tumor in my sixth decade, both of us would know why. A beautiful backdrop is an aesthetic luxury, same as shelves of books and music lessons and trips to museums on weekends. It is green, green money to roll in.

  Far in the west, the sun was a malignant pearl. Next to the convent was a little anemic wood, and above its scrabbling branches, the sky was a blood transfusion. My view was stunning too, but in a way that would eventually produce mutants. My sister’s words floated back to me: “We are not the normal ones. A guy named Jason is probably fine.”

  He was whistling, with a sound as full and fibrous as a violin. He contained a wide and wandering spaciousness, in the same way I contained a cloister. His eyes always seemed to be registering great distances. He cast them over the blunt cliffs of the petroleum tanks and turned back to me. “They remind me of the mesas,” he said.

  • • •

  “ARE YOU REALLY LEAVING?” my mother asked. The car was packed, and my father was nowhere to be seen. She reached through the passenger window and pressed money into my hand. A mother, as I understood it, was someone who was always trying to give you sixty dollars. Extremity had brought her over to my side.

  I told her I was. I was wonderful at endings, I thought. I found an artful and unexpected one every time. Endings sprang out of the tip of my pencil like bouquets: they were magic; they were silk and illusion; they were not earned.

  “Please be safe,” she said, her mouth pulled down at both corners like a genius clown’s, a clown known worldwide for her ability to turn human tragedy into facial expressions. My mother understood the fundamental facts about me. She knew that I would always prefer to eat with a tiny spoon rather than a regular one, that I was an excellent Thing Finder because I was always looking down at the sidewalk, that I wanted to recite spells, live in a nutshell, play a gold harp. That I had a house in my head that was far away. But it did not seem plausible, yet, that she and her pain had actually produced me.

  I would be fine, I felt. I would be better. I would be free.

  “Are you sure you have everything?” she asked as Jason started up the engine, and he smiled and gestured to the piles of my books in the backseat. We pulled out past the sign that said GOD ANSWERS KNEE-MAIL and drove away from the church and the rectory, the convent and my stifling upstairs room, the inexplicable thousand-pound statue of a gorilla in the neighbor’s front yard. All of it grew small behind us; I watched it grow small. The stars came out one by one, and the moon: I saw a hinge and a doorknob on the sky.

  2

  LOW COUNTRY

  After we were married—by my father, in the same church where my parents were wed—we moved from city to city, restless and never settling. We dragged a red line behind us across the map and we did not stop. My family had moved so often during my childhood that this did not seem strange to me; in fact, the belief that people should stuff all their possessions into a U-Haul and move kit and caboodle to a different state every few years seemed to be the only similarity my husband shared with my father. We lived in Hebron, Kentucky, near where they had just begun to build a Creation Museum full of apelike mannequins of Methuselah and Moses interacting with the noble triceratops, and we lived in Keene, New Hampshire, where the LIVE FREE OR DIE license plates paraded up and down quaint Main Street, and we lived in Colorado Springs, where I could see the jagged quartz tip of Pikes Peak from my study, and we lived in Stuart, Florida, which made the dubious claim of being the Sailfish Capital of the World. Finally we ended up in Savannah, Georgia, which is the first place that ever felt like home to me.

  It looked like an enlightened underwater city with all the water gone, and seaweed still hanging in the middle of the air. Great mermaids flowed through the streets: southerners. The sun shone down because it was a blonde. The cobblestones were the former ballast of ships and the town was famous for its graveyards and every gate was topped with an iron pineapple. The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist was across the street from us, and I was amused to see that my old senses were still in tune: I could feel it whenever the bishop was there.

  At one point a second cathedral grew up around it, made of scaffolding, and construction workers sat there and ate their bagged lunches and swung their legs. No one knew what they were doing, and it seemed to go on forever. The Flannery O’Connor house stared suspiciously at them all day. She had been a child in that house, with boiled-clear eyes and a watery chin. She had been briefly obsessed with the Dionne Quintuplets. She had a chicken that she taught to walk backwards. The little-leafed vines that climbed up the side of her school had fine penmanship; so did she. She would grow up, and leave, and keep peacocks. Her lipstick would always be the wrong color, but her ink would be fine: black. The sea that had been removed from the city was a force, was full of pronouncement, was equally capable of religious calm. You could feel it, you could still feel it. And over it all, anchored equally in time and eternity, the beautiful laboring sound of the bells.

  • • •

  IN FLORIDA, I HAD WAITRESSED at a Key West–themed diner that had coarse fishing nets and tangled buoys hung on the walls, and where I was required to wear loud tropical shirts that made me look like Jimmy Buffett’s illegitimate son. The owner was a handsome, compact Greek man who combed his black hair back and had a fetish for smashing pies in women’s faces—though perhaps he didn’t know it was a fetish, since he refused to ever use the internet. “The porn is there,” he said witheringly, every time it came up in conversation. “Disgusting.” Whenever customers slowed to a trickle, he would stand by the dessert refrigerator and flirtatiously lift pies in my direction, a hopeful arch in his eyebrows. When my first poem was published in The New Yorker—plucked out of the slush pile somehow, a miracle—I brought a copy to work and watched him puzzling over it throughout my shift, with the expression of someone trying to decode a magic trick. On my last day, he asked if he could throw a whole pie at me, but then someone ordered a piece of it and his dreams were dashed.

  Those afternoons of legi
timate employment often drifted back to me as I worked in our large, lazy apartment in downtown Savannah, in a building erected sometime around the end of the Civil War. It echoed because we couldn’t afford to fill it with furniture, and the echoes were slower-moving than our voices, somehow drawling. The windows sorted and poured light like prisms, and patches of clarity fell everywhere onto the floor. I had decided not to take a job right away, but to keep concentrating on the strange bundle of poems I was writing, ones that revealed my most hidden preoccupations: sex, gender, animal puberty, bizarre fetishes and the Midwest, the Loch Ness Monster despairing of ever being able to leave her remote silver-skinned lake and get an education. I was never sure whether these long stretches of refusing to draw a paycheck were a mark of my entitlement or the only act of rebellion available to me. My flaming certainty that I was born to write books dovetailed so neatly with Jason’s belief that he was destined to be a sort of Leonard Woolf figure, helping to usher female thinking into the world, that mostly we accepted our pinched circumstances as foreordained.

  It was the first place, too, where I didn’t feel alone in my ambitions. Diapered, moody horses clopped by at all hours pulling carriages of kindhearted tourists, which is as good a metaphor for writing as any I can think of. One of my friends had a job at the local art college where she was required to do things like come up with synonyms for “spritz” all day, and another friend had been writing a novel about loons for five years, or something like that, which struck me as the upper limit for how long a person could write about loons, but maybe it was a masterpiece. Two poets up the street ran a reading series, which meant every month we all got drunk on cheap whiskey while listening to traveling poets read, then walked home shoulder to shoulder swaying like long grasses. Sometimes on the mornings after the readings, after we had eaten hungover eggs and salami at a nearby diner, we went to Bonaventure Cemetery out near the islands, which was supposed to be full of ghosts. I’m not sure whether it was named after St. Bonaventure or not, but that would have been apt—St. Bonaventure was said to have continued his memoirs even after his own death. The only surviving relics of him are the arm and hand he wrote with. That seems exactly like God, doesn’t it, to kill a man and then make his hand keep writing his books.

  There was a poet buried in that cemetery, too: Conrad Aiken, who once said that poets “really stink. Especially in large numbers, when herding.” This was a slander, in my opinion. Before I met any other poets, I worried that they were the sort of people who said “lo” in conversation and were constantly forcing you to play games of exquisite corpse, but that hadn’t turned out to be the case at all. These poets were normal; they even knew their own phone numbers. I was getting to herd for the first time, and I was happy among the other ruminants.

  During the day, though, I kept to myself. I liked being able to walk to the river, where ideas swam in the water, firm as the backs of terrapins. If I had a few dollars, I would get a baguette and a cup of coffee and ride the ferry back and forth just like Edna St. Vincent Millay, and then walk home after a while in a cloud of no-see-ums and contemplation—not sweating, exactly, but working up a higher shine.

  • • •

  JASON WORKED AT THE NEWSPAPER: editing and designing pages and following the exploits of the local politicians, who all had names like “Saxby Chambliss.” He entertained himself by slipping increasingly outrageous puns into the copy, which culminated in a headline about a dachshund race that read, “All Wieners in the Long Run.” He was so pleased with himself over that one he brought home a bottle of champagne that night. “To the wieners,” he toasted, “and to their long lives.”

  He always answered the phones during his shift, and every night an old woman called, recited three random news sound bites in a row, and then hung up the phone. “GEORGE BUSH. NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST. HORSEMEAT IN HAMBURGERS.” She repeated the phrases three times, waited a beat, and then commanded him gracefully, “Put it in print.” She gave the impression of having been doing it for decades. “MOON LANDING. STOCK MARKET CRASH. THE REDCOATS ARE COMING.” Perhaps she was the news itself. And at the end, always, “Put it in print.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he would say with relish, and she would hang up the phone with a satisfied click: a citizen who was simply performing her duty. If it hadn’t been for her, the flow of reliable information would have ceased. I imagined my mother would take up a similar hobby in her twilight years, and I looked forward to her contributions.

  He liked that job better than any he had ever had. He took me to see the press once, where people still lost their fingers even though this was the twenty-first century. There was a sign announcing how many days had passed since the last workplace accident, which made me think of the unlucky employee who had to climb up on a ladder the next morning and flip the number back to zero with a maimed hand. It was navy blue outside, past midnight, and we stood looking at the galloping press from above. The front pages shot out the mouth of the machine: fresh, up to the minute, blazing with something terrible. Put it in print.

  • • •

  BACK WHEN I WAS WAITRESSING at the diner, Jason had often told me my tropical shirts looked nice, which had been my first clue his vision was going. I sent him off to the local mall, which was offering free checkups, and he came back with a pair of glasses from an optometrist in tight disco trousers whose septum had been almost entirely worn away by cocaine use. After a few months at the Savannah Morning News, he realized the glasses weren’t helping anymore and went to visit a more respectable doctor, one whose pants would presumably not melt and fuse to his body in the event of a fire. Halfway through his examination, the man murmured, “Wait a minute,” which is never a good sign, and zoomed in for a closer look.

  He had, it turned out, a rare type of cataracts, and he needed double lens replacements. The doctor had no idea why he had developed them, since they were most frequently seen in the elderly or children who lived in the developing world; he had never encountered them in someone under the age of thirty. He told Jason that without surgery, the cataracts would mist over his natural lenses until he was blind.

  Empedocles wrote that the eye was fire set in a lantern, which poured out to illuminate mountains and forests and the face of the beloved. Other Greek philosophers believed sight was water. Either way, it was an element, capable of flaming or flooding if it was let loose from its delicate pen, of sending mountains and forests and the face of the beloved up in smoke, or else surging them away till they were gone.

  I couldn’t make myself understand it—it had come out of the clear sky. It was even more shocking because the color of his eyes was so extraordinary: the purest sea-glass green, with crystals of blue and black in a ring around the pupil. They should have lasted longer than other eyes, I thought irrationally. They should have been indestructible. They should have had deep and anchoring reserves of vision under the surface like glaciers, the same cool colors and going nowhere.

  • • •

  THE COST OF THE SURGERIES would be astronomical. Our meager health insurance covered only a small portion, and the rest needed to be paid in advance. The doctor gave us a stack of literature, and later we pored over brochures of silver foxes peering sightfully at old hotties across candlelit tables. You might even be able to read the menu in a romantic restaurant, the brochures claimed. Indeed, the people in the pictures were laughing out loud in pitch-black steakhouses while toasting each other with glasses of white wine that represented the perfect acuity of their vision. We lived on very little, though, and had for a long time. We couldn’t afford to go to romantic restaurants, let alone pay for the cyborg technology that would allow us to see each other in them. Money was as far away as the moon.

  “Ten thousand dollars?” my mother gasped, when I called to break the bad news. “What are you going to do?”

  I would return to waitressing or get work at a bookstore, I told her, but nothing I did would really matter in the short
term. “We have to come up with the money in the next few weeks,” I said. “The longer we wait, the riskier the surgeries will be.”

  Even over the phone, I could hear her mind begin to whir. She was trying to figure out how to scoop out her own kidneys, sell them on the black market, and have the money to me by tomorrow.

  “People on Twitter have been asking if they can help,” I continued. “They want to hold a fund-raiser.”

  I had unthinkingly started a Twitter account in the spring of 2011, when Jason had surprised me with my first-ever cellphone. Free in the knowledge that no one was listening, I mostly used it to tweet absurdities like “‘Touch it,’ Mr. Quiddity moaned. ‘Touch Mr. Quiddity’s thing,’” and “2 Predators f’ing in the trees. The girl is on her period and their intercourse is glowin like a rave. Arnold pops an X and begins to climb.” These penetrating insights had swiftly found me a number of friends there, and soon after that, an influx of followers completely unknown to me, who seemed to be general connoisseurs of filth and nonsense. Yet connections forged in filth and nonsense are strong.

  “What, those internet addicts?” she asked in disbelief. She had progressed from believing the internet was a country where murderers lived to believing the internet was something you could inject into your veins, and she had fondled a special hatred of Twitter in her heart ever since she had stumbled upon a user who called himself satanic_cumlord.

  “Tweeting is an art form,” I told her. “Like sculpture, or honking the national anthem under your armpit.”