by Ward Just
Six
The Golden Table
NED’S MANOR HOUSE was located on a thick tongue of land that poked into Chesapeake Bay, not far from Casserly’s Island on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a border state with an intemperate climate, gloomy in winter and a furnace in summer, motionless days when even the air seemed exhausted. Nothing moved in the heat, including the heavy branches of the great oaks. In times past, the fifty acres—“Wilson’s Fifty,” as it was known locally—had been farmed in a gentlemanly way, corn mostly, good cover for the pheasant native to the region, a shooter’s paradise, geese and duck along with the pheasant. The bay abounded in shellfish. Outbuildings included a stable, an apiary, and a screened-in gazebo close by the clay tennis court. The gazebo came to be called the Summer House, usually occupied at the end of the day, rain or shine, except for the winter months.
On clear mornings when the sun was low in the eastern sky, Ned liked to patrol his property, see that things were in good order. He began around seven with a thermos of black espresso under his arm, moving slowly down the dewy path in the direction of the bay. Orioles were about. Rabbits were absent, no doubt aware of the intruder in their midst. Ned took little account of them, or the birds either. He was content enough in the near silence, defined somehow by the trill of a bird or the distant purr of a waterman’s two-stroke Evinrude. A gull ghosted by, followed by a flight of snowy egrets. Every few moments Ned paused and stood still, listening to the sounds advance and retreat, heat rising as the sun gathered force, shadows diminishing. The thickness and color of this terrain was still unfamiliar to him, a wild place in the world. Beside it, his manor house looked almost cosmopolitan. There were places in the Fifty he had never visited, a woodland so thick Ned could lose himself in five minutes. There was only this one narrow carriage path. The bay was invisible save for a sliver of blue water if he raised himself on tiptoe, the change of light turning the water clergyman gray. The path itself was meandering, working slowly around the trees and bramble bushes, unwelcoming until he reached the pier where the world opened up. Looking north he could see a portion of the towering Bay Bridge; to the south was the expanse of water that led to the ocean. When he had first arrived a cat was waiting for him at the doorway. Some months ago the cat disappeared. Cats were unpredictable. Obedience was not in their nature. Still, he missed the cat, an elusive companion of sorts. When he came upon the pier Ned thought of Crusoe minus the Man. Instead of the Man, he had the cat. Before the pier was his Adirondack chair, uncomfortable but familiar. Its bright red paint had softened to a dull pink. Ned settled himself in his chair and watched the puny disturbances in the water, evidence of crab life. Elegant swimmers. Delicious. He sipped espresso and thought about his book, then lit a cigarette to help things along. The tobacco smoke rose. A straight line in the breathless air.
So much had gone unwritten. He found his stories difficult to translate, meaning the route from memory to paper. He was an editor, not a writer. Something preposterous about it, editing your own memory. Everyone knew that memory was fishy. False testimony, fingers crossed. In so many of his recollections there would be no corroboration because the principals were dead. His family, all dead. What he had was his working life and the pieces of paper that supplied verification. The flimsies, he called them, mostly garbled and often embellished—as if the raw memory was itself tainted, and below the surface much like the elegant swimmers. The flash of a claw, a bony head, and a black eye. Hopeless.
Even so, on this lovely Maryland morning he was pondering the art of the interview and therefore summoned the gravelly yet grudging voice of the celebrated South American poet of volcanic temperament whose American publisher insisted she grant at least one interview to a national newspaper. Her book of poems was already a near bestseller. Ned was pleased when the poet chose his Washington paper and surprised when the editor of the book review asked him to come along, sit in on what was likely to be a difficult hour. Difficult but entertaining, the editor added. Gunnar Tribes explained that the poet had an ego the size of the sun itself, and indeed was known informally as the Sun Queen. She was a recluse, loath to interpret her own work or even discuss it. She felt herself to be mistreated and undervalued. This, despite all the honors a poet could want. True, she had yet to receive an invitation from Oslo, and that rankled. She preferred to discuss the appalling conditions in her own country, ruled by thugs and bandits. Gunnar said that Antonia—La Antonia, she called herself—would be impressed if the editor of the newspaper was present at the interview. The poet was a student of hierarchy. The idea that Ned would be in attendance was evidence that things would go smoothly. Respect would be paid.
Gunnar Tribes was a highly respected critic, known to be sympathetic to the dense rhythms of La Antonia. Also, Gunnar was a man of the Left—that was the assurance of her American publisher. Therefore, no Red-baiting. The interview would not stray far from the politics of the hour, the incarcerations, the disappearances—and this put the poet in a good mood. She let it be known that she would tolerate a question or two concerning her verse. Its incendiary effect, its compassion, its woe. Her personal life was strictly off-limits, though it was widely known that, with her companion, she spent most of the year in a rural village, with summer excursions to a seaside villa in Macedonia. La Antonia did have a complicated relationship with the sacred and the profane, poetry and politics. As a woman of the Left she was obliged to enter the realm of the profane. Because it was profane, politics had to be dealt with. Politics had its enlightening aspect, you could say virtue. But politics must not be allowed to contaminate government, a subtle formulation, one not easily grasped. But it seemed, after all, to be a forbidden zone. To say that La Antonia was a difficult interview was to understate the matter. In her poetry the sacred and the profane seemed almost—fungible.
Gunnar Tribes knew what he was up against, but he believed that, properly conducted, the interview would be a newsmaker. He thought it conceivable that Ned Ayres would consent to run it on page one, below the fold of course. What a coup! Ayres had an oddball side and the idea might just appeal to him. But the interview had to stand up, meaning limpid prose with something new in every sentence. Gunnar spent a week boning up, and in due course arrived with Ned Ayres at the poet’s suite in the Washington, the hotel across the street from the despised Treasury Department, midwife to so many financial misdeeds. Had this hotel been selected for that reason? A provocation?
La Antonia offered tequila all around and was put out when Ned and Gunnar declined. The time was eleven a.m. The poet was heard to mutter “Gringos” in a sour voice. The interview proceeded, centered on the poet’s new collection, Walking the Amazon at Twilight. La Antonia stood at the room’s picture window, glaring at the Treasury building, its sullen façade, its many secrets. She wore a gray shirt with gray slacks and a bright red silk scarf. She stood mostly in shadow, but her eyes blazed as she toyed with the curtain string.
Gunnar’s questions were subtle yet to the point. La Antonia’s gruff answers were transcribed on the critic’s yellow legal pad. Gunnar was in his reporter’s crouch, head forward, elbows on knees, his questions asked softly and parried by the poet. She was not helpful. There were long silences when the only sound in the room was the ice chips tittering in La Antonia’s glass. It was evident that she was fundamentally opposed to discussing her own work. To discuss it was to diminish its value. Poetry existed to be read, not discussed. Now and then she brushed aside a Gunnar question with a look of exasperation. She stared out the window and checked her wristwatch. Ned had difficulty keeping up. His eyelids grew heavy, and when he was on the cusp of sleep he saw Gunnar look up from his yellow legal pad and ask this woman of the Left where politics figured in her work. She was voluble at the many symposia she attended. Havana was a frequent venue. Do you mean the Amazon to suggest the Soviet Union? Politics was central to her work, as central as it was to—Yeats! “What rough beast . . . ,” Gunnar said in a whispered voice, as if the reference
were unknown to La Antonia. Where did that ideology fit in, exactly? Perhaps I am mistaken here. Did I skip a beat? Would La Antonia enlighten us?Her head snapped back as if she had been slapped. She opened her mouth but no sound came as she sat glaring at Gunnar, then at Ned, now fully awake. When her voice came it was coarse, a voice from the barrio. Whereas she had been speaking in English, she now spoke in two languages, a kind of shriek, so rapidly Gunnar could not keep up. He translated a fragment for Ned: Fucking Yankee assholes maricones morons . . . La Antonia rose from her chair in a fury, arms flailing. And then she was gone. Disappearing into the bedroom where presently came the sound of breaking crockery. The interview had ended.
But Gunnar Tribes was certain he had his knockout. Page one for sure.
Gunnar began to laugh. He said, She was always a pain in the ass. Beloved by the same connoisseurs who value Damien Hirst. A provocateur, Gunnar said. Nothing more. And as has been seen, a colorful vocabulary!
Of course the story got around at once, to much merriment. Gunnar told various versions for the rest of his life. He wrote the interview for the newspaper, a deft piece of destruction. He was certain now of page-one play, but Ned Ayres threatened to kill it unless Gunnar softened the tone, particularly the long paragraph that brought to light La Antonia’s “protégé,” a boy of eighteen, a young Adonis, Brazilian born. Gunnar reluctantly agreed, but even much softened the piece caused a scandal.
Ned said, You used a hammer to kill a butterfly.
She is not a butterfly, Ned. In her world, she’s a giant. We’re the butterflies.
With a readership of six hundred thousand, last time I checked.
An ego that big has to be challenged, Gunnar said.
Not necessarily. Or not necessarily by us.
What do you want from the book review? Do we give every loon a pass?
She is not a loon. And her personal life is her own business.
You show up for an interview, you swallow what’s given.
She was inarticulate, Ned said. Muddled when she spoke aloud. Her métier is pen and paper. Many people are muddled when discussing something cherished. Deep down they don’t want to share it, whatever it is. The interview was a mistake. We should have listened for thirty minutes, then given it up. Thanked her. Walked away. She was way out of her depth. Do you know who she reminded me of, a little? Minus the profanity. Minus the tequila at eleven in the morning. Minus the ability to stay silent. She reminded me of Milo Passarel.
Ned raised his eyebrows and said, She made a mistake. She thought we were her collaborators, present to help her along in a medium she despised. She was naïve. An interview was a rare thing in her life. She distrusted confession, the blade that pierced the veil.
Gunnar rolled his eyes. That’s nonsense, Ned.
You didn’t get one thing of value from her. She shut up and stayed shut up.
But that’s the story, don’t you see?
Shooting fish in a barrel, Ned said.
What you say sounds like censorship to me.
I suppose it is. It’s called editing.
I can’t buy it, Ned.
Some people don’t live in the light of day, Ned said. They prefer shadows, a natural habitat. Shadows become them.
What does that mean, Ned?
Ned Ayers waited a moment and then he said, I have some experience with stories like this one.
What do you mean? What experience? Tell me the experience.
You wouldn’t understand it. It’s on a very different level. A different moment altogether. Sometimes you have to look beyond what’s in front of your eyes. Ned looked at Gunnar and gave a wintry smile, evidence of a secret withheld. Ned said, Unforeseen consequences.
That’s no help, Ned.
Not to you, Ned replied. Perhaps to me.
He remembered that Gunnar Tribes leaned in, but when he opened his mouth he made no sound. He allowed Ned to have the last word. Fact was, Ned had lost a step. What was he now? Sixty, sixty-five, somewhere in there. Everyone knew that Ned Ayres had no life beyond the paper. In time he would fade away like an old photograph, soft around the edges. In that spirit they left the hotel and walked away in the direction of the newspaper—the plant, as they often called it.
Ned reclined in his Adirondack chair, his remembered dialogue slipping away. Yes, he thought, the dispute with Gunnar Tribes had the makings of a nice cameo in his memoir. Its value was all between the lines.
Ned entertained himself with these memories, evidence that he had led an exciting urban life before retirement drove him to this remote corner of the Eastern Shore, where the pace was glacial. A man had time to think. There was no hurry about anything in Maryland. He was on strange ground. In his lifetime he had mostly traveled east, and now he had nowhere farther to go. He was boxed in, the bay on one side of him and the ocean on the other. Ned Ayres was settled, living out his days. That was it unless he took a slow boat to France or the Low Countries, where he knew a few American expats, or to Spain, where Susan Griffin had retired to a villa in the hilly countryside near Ávila. Someone had told him she was not well, mourning her husband every hour. But Ned was too old for transatlantic voyages regardless of who would be there to greet him. What would he do in Europe? He had a book to write, and Europe was not the place to write it. He wasn’t certain that the Eastern Shore was the answer either. One year in and he was still learning about the weather, the wind that spelled trouble and the wind that didn’t. In Chicago and Washington he had never thought about the weather. In large cities the weather was an incident. In the country it was ever present. In Herman they thought about the weather from time to time, and in the summer and fall there was always the threat of tornadoes. He looked at the sky, darkening in the northeast. That was one of the bad winds, originating somewhere in the Gulf of Maine. Assisted by a low-pressure zone in the south. Or was that the other way? Well, the bad weather would come or wouldn’t come. Nothing to do about it but go inside. He remembered that Elaine was very good with the weather in Chicago, where bad news always came from the north. Lake Michigan was the unlucky lake. Summer in Chicago was miserable. He remembered being goddamned happy when he left for Washington. No one cared about the weather in Washington unless it was a snowstorm that immobilized everything, including traffic. The District of Columbia had no snow-removal equipment. So you sat and stewed until the thaw came. The snap of a tree branch caused him to wheel about, but there was nothing unusual in sight. Ned stared into the woods and then resumed his stroll to the pier and its September breezes. He needed to collect his thoughts.
Ned Ayres was troubled inside his own head, unable to concentrate on the book he was writing. Progress was slow in the beginning and was no better now. The thing seemed to him a jumble and he did not understand why. The objective was simple enough, an account of his life as a newspaper editor, quite straightforward. But the thread of it kept slipping away, and not for any reason of old age and its discontents, moments of gray confusion, call it chronic forgetfulness. He was taking the project seriously, unlike one close friend who said he should title it Rat Tales, ha-ha, amusement he did not join. There had never been a serious book on the craft of editing that went beyond grammar and sourcing and the rest of it found in an introductory course at a school of journalism. Ned Ayres had the idea of devoting a full chapter to the look of page one, the geometry of it, its variety and usefulness and subtle beauty, like a fine landscape, something by Constable or Cézanne. Ned thought there should be mystery also, a problem not quite solved. Page one should be welcoming and surprising at the same time, the lead story something of consequence accompanied by a photograph. An urban story should have the wit and suggestion of something by Kirchner or, rougher still, George Grosz. Provocative, yes, but never a reach beyond the known facts. Always the provocations should lie below the fold, a reminder that the piece was not essential, any more than a fedora was essential to a gentleman crossing Dupont Circle. A beret would do. A Stetson added color. Bareheaded was
fine. This was the story of the man who won the lottery and was broke six months later, or the woman racecar driver obliged to quit the track when her eyesight failed. In other words, a slice of life as it was lived. This was partly a matter of space allocation—a one-column head or a two-column head, or if it was placed at the very bottom of the page, a one-line four-column head. A properly edited page one was a thing of beauty that any serious reader would recognize at once and look at it for a minute or so before reading. No tabloid stuff, though. Tabloid material threw the page out of balance because it was contrary to its surroundings, almost surreal—a dirigible tethered to the summit of Mont Sainte-Victoire. And he realized he had taken more than one idea from Milo Passarel. Milo was a defeatist but he was not always wrong. Naturally Ned was unable to entirely reconstruct the paper’s page one. Readers did not appreciate innovation, especially those resolute readers who remained on the subscription list. Ned’s insight was that beautiful design trumped anything slapped on the Internet. Newspapers now required lean, not fat. Fat was an anachronism, yesterday’s virtue, today’s sin. After Ned’s departure, the new man allowed things to slip back. At the newspaper they called it the Restoration.
Ned had all the research papers that anyone could want, three dozen cartons filled with letters, diaries, notes, fifty-year-old newspaper clippings so brittle they fell apart in your hand. He had stories that no outsider had ever heard, the news behind the news, stories given in the strictest confidence, the teller eager to set the record straight and at the same time imply a particular role at the center of events. This is for you personally, Ned, and if you print one damned word I’ll deny it and sue for libel. Later on, when I’m gone, you can do anything you like. Good to have the facts released at last so that people can understand what was at stake and how the secret held after all these years. Won’t my kids be surprised! They never had a clue. So many of Ned’s confidants were gone now, and the two or three still alive were non compos mentis. Care had to be taken so as not to step over the line. The serious editor sought not prurience but enlightenment, always mindful that sometimes only a tissue paper’s edge separated the two. But Ned’s own material did not gel. It would not write. Ned had come to think of himself as an archaeologist assembling fragments of a dead civilization.