by Hugh Fox
Him: So how are you today?
Me: OK, a little chilly.
Him: It was reminding me of Paris in the Fall today. Of course it never gets as cold as here. Although it gets cold. La Boheme’s pretty close to real life. Remember, what is it, Act II, the Port D’Orleans? It’s been so many years since I’ve seen either Paris or La Boheme. It’s not all that easy to live on a violinist’s pension, but I somehow manage..but it’s very alone...
Kind of charming, a lot of fluffy white hair. Looks at my legs a lot. I can’t imagine why. Wants me to come to his place so he can play the violin for me.
November 20 -- I still go to the park, but Saul has disappeared.
December 24 -- Days are years and years eternities. Mrs. Goerke doesn’t really want me any more. I not only can’t get things right or even just (neutrally) care, it’s as if there were some sort of demon in me that wants the pea soup to end up charred in the pot, or the pork chops to catch on fire or the (unwatered) ferns to die, or the vacuum cleaner to suck up a bent hanger and screw up its guts.
And then I center myself in the cold, white antarctic of my Self and I couldn’t care less, breathe in, breathe out, my breaths becoming the comings and goings of the...
December 26 -- Rose came by today and said I’m going to have to go to the Illinois State Mental hospital in Elgin. When? Another month of “grace,” she said. Grace, inferno. I told her “When our father died, you got the ranch in Colorado, all of his ‘slum’ property with the stipulation (yes, I used the word stipulation) that you would take care of me, which you’ve never done up to now anyhow, and which you’re going to totally renege on now...”
She was icy. I thought she was going to come up with an asthma-attack, but didn’t even bother, just left, and Mrs. Goerke came in with some boxes. All so subtle. All my books, Lewis’ Main Street and Arrowsmith, James’ The Golden Bowl, Rimbaud and Baudelaire, both of whom I deeply identify with, falling asleep...whenever I do write in this void called DIARY I’m always falling asleep. I could just as well be a mummy at the Field Museum...this terrible vision I have, I see a twenty year old face on the street and imagine it dead a hundred years, this horrible vision of FLUXUS, everything on a speeded-up time-belt, like our 70 or 80 years on the planet pass like an hour, nothing stable in front of my eyes, me dissolving...and everything else.
June 10, 1949 -- Josh just graduated from high school. Sean came by with pictures.
Time accelerates even more. My teeth decayed. Sean hasn’t been here for years. And Rose turned the key and then turned her back. It’s so easy to forget someone you never see. And here it really does accelerate! Everything unreal.
I think I had a little stroke yesterday, an “episode,” but I’m OK again. A horrible moment of BLANK. I’m wiped out of everyone’s life anyhow, now a hand reaches up from inside and wipes me out for myself too...
(Fern died on December 24, 1949. She was 59)
Michigan, 30 years later.
Seans’s mother comes from California for the marriage of Sean’s daughter, Marcy, 29. He has another daughter, Sarah, who is a paranoid schizophrenic.
The day before the marriage, Sean is with his mother over at the Kellogg Center where he has put her up so she’ll have all the comforts. She loves it.
He takes her to lunch in the dining room. She has Blackened Catfish. he has a Veal Cutlet Sandwich.
“I guess you can explain Sarah’s problem if you reference back to Aunt Fern. Schizophrenia, after all, is genetic. It’s too bad she spent her whole life in Elgin and I never got a chance to meet her...”
She was only in Elgin for a few years before she died,” his mother answers, forgetting that all his life Sean has been told that Aunt Fern spent all her life in the Illinois State Mental Institution in Elgin. “She used to live over in Southshore, not a mile from where we lived, the whole time you were growing up. I used to visit her every once in a while, bring her old clothes. She was my size...”
“How come you never took me? I would have loved to have met her.”
“She was totally out of it. She wouldn’t have known you anyhow. She never really knew what was going on. Almost dangerous, really. She never even knew you’d been born.”
ÇA SUFIT/ THAT’S ENOUGH
1.
The house was out in the country on a hill overlooking this swamp. Well, let’s not say “swamp,” “marsh” is better, nicht wahr?
All these forests below her hill,and then the water and the cattails and you name it, any bird you could imagine. She had a bird-feeder on her front lawn, for redbirds. No one knew how she kept other birds from eating there,but that’s all you ever saw...redbirds.
And the house one of those sprawling Frank Lloyd Wrightish ranch-types with the heavy concrete-block wals, all kinds of bedrooms and bathrooms and the downstairs looking out on a fun-time patio above all the wild nature.
Miriam divorced. OK. But was in the real-estate business, mid-Michigan, you know, the auto-industry, thriving for years, about forty minutes from GM/ex-GM, Lansing.
Her daughter out in California working in the movies. Screen-writing. Had gone to Loyola-Marymount, a lot of the right contacts. Lived in West Hollywood,no kids, a boyfriend from London of all places, but it never moved toward “completion,” let’s put it that way, spiritual, psychological completion, just bodies in the dark.
Miriam’s best friend one of her old college professors. In Marketing. A nice guy Irisher, small, blue-eyed, Mr. Gentilesse (he spoke a little French too, was married to a French Canadian).They started sharing major holidays together, Halloween, Easter, the Fourth of July, only never Christmas, that was only the most intimate family, not “pals” which was how they always saw each other.
He became great pals with daughter-Sal too, as she went through high school into college and got interested in marketing too...electronic marketing. And kept talking about moving to Los Angeles.
“It’s so electronic! In the world today everything’s lap-tops and multiple-function cell-phones and the internet and....”
“Whatever happened to the sound of corn blowing in the wind, crickets, tadpoles in the spring, a walk in the rain,” Karl would laugh over wine at, say, a New Year’s Day Fest, Miriam’s sister, Beatrice there, a widow for a year, but still working at Sears, somehow still a jubilant fifty-eight, and the next-door neighbor,the Rainers, Samuel Raymond, her real estate partner, Egan Winthrope, Mr. Watermelon Belly, a seventy-two year old widower,always making fun of Sal: “You can’t use laptops in the rain....”
Miriam always serving lots of salad and canteloupe and ham and parsnips, wine, chocolate cake with all sorts of little flowers and wavy lines all over it. Karl always had to admit, when he left after a long bout with good humor and ere-and-nowness, that he had had a great-great time. And his little Canuk midget wife always said the same, with a pork-cop slicing accent “ EET WAS WONDERFOOL!” It was I-love-you all over the place, year after year, the most exotic place in the world with the most open, sharing, generous people in the whole world.Merry, happy glorious everything. More champagne, more cake, a walk through the garden, down the road to look at the river.
2.
Fall, glorious, the ride out from town.
“You never see this sort of...I wanted to say ‘masquerade.’ What’s the word?”
“Masquerade sounds good,”Karl smiling, all these different trees, “all these different trees and colors, it’s a real show...”
“You never see this sort of show in Montreal.”
All swamps and rivers, all sorts of fishermen on the bridge over the river closest to the house, a couple of motorcyclists coming toward them down the road, an explosion of noise and then quiet forest, a few houses here and there, all resplendent ranch-houses, from time to time made out of logs, one totally neoclassical with huge Corinthian columns in front, surrounded by flame-colored maple trees.
“I’m amazed at how people seek out country places here in Michigan, as if they want to totally get aw
ay from everything.”
“Je comprend tres bien porquoi toute le monde veut echapper / I understand very well why they want to escape. I’d like to escape too,go back to Montreal.”
But we’re all doing so well...”
“Mais....but.”
Her spirit gliding down into the bottom of its gloom-well. No more talk for a while until the bluebirds and redbirds and butterflies and racoons and deer brought her back into the love-it-as-it-is-no-matter-what-NOW....
Miriam waiting for them at the end of her long driveway. Her usual chipper chipmunk self but the incarnation of super-solemnity, a totally unexpected FOR SALE sign in front of the house.
“We can’t really stay here today,”suddenly all hyper-kinetic, paranoid, rolling eyes and terrified face.
“What’s going on, an invasion of radioactive termites?” Karls laughs cautiously-sarcastically.
“Ne parle-pas comme ça / Don’t talk that way,” whisper-cautions Monique.
“I understand that.’Don’t talk that way,’ answers Miranda, cutting edge but still a little ‘distant,’ caught up in herself.
The front door opening, a small Italianate-Sicilianish woman coming out all in long brown wool...sleeves...skirt...almost Lebanese-looking.
“You can stay here,” she tells Karl, “we haven’t yet really....”
“So what’s going on? Everything was OK last week, we had our tea and cookies and talked about the good old days, the even better new days....”
Karl wants to go on. He loves dissertations, like being back in class in the old days before he retired.
But she shusshes him, her hand over his mouth, her face like a death agony, “Shhhhh, let’s get out of here. We can’t stay here, talk here, anything here...”
“But you...,” the newcomer in the doorway starting to talk as Miriam scoots over to her and puts her hand on her mouth, the newcomer pissed,starting out again, “Listen, I don’t know if I want to....”
“Can’t you get the idea?” screamed Miriam, “Shut the ass up!”
“That’s a new approach, ‘shut the ass up,’ “ Miriam pulling him by the hand down the driveway to his car, getting in the front seat as he got in,Monique angrily getting in the back seat.
“Je voudrais savoir le verite!!/ I’d like to know the truth!”
“You’ll know! Patience!” Miranda’s voice as lacerating as broken beer bottles, “So listen, drive downtown to the Riverside Cafe, we’ve gotta talk1”
“How come so bossy?”
Monique in the back echoing his words.
“C’est la premier fois en ma vie que j’ai vu ume femme comme ça/ This is the first time in my life that I’ve seen a woman like this....”
“I understand everything you say!” Miranda sneering at Monique in the back seat. Miranda never sneering before. It wasn’t her. Over the years she had always been the incarnation of affability. “Besides, I’m not a dictator, just desperate,” whispering now, almost pleasant for a moment.
“But what happened?” asked Karl.
“When we get to the restaurant....but until then SILENCE...and I mean it.”
Karl feeling like stopping, telling her to get and walk home, but at seventy-six he was turning into Sir Tolerance, the Incarnation of Civility, always almost counting the minutes, hours, days he and everyone else had left above ground, the voices inside him always whispering “Soon you’ll be bone, no more eyes, skin, ear...enjoy while you can...”
Reached up and turned on the radio. WKAR the angelic station from Michigan State University, Rachmaninoff’’s third piano concerto, one of his favorites, although there wasn’t anything of Rachmaninoff’s that he didn’t like.
“Nice” says Miriam.
“Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto.”
“How do you know that?”
“Oh, he can identify any piece of music ever written, that’s all he ever does,” laughs Monique from the back seat, ridiculing Karl, the only time in her life she ever laughs.
The country gorgeous, corn, corn, corn, the tassles already on the cobs and the soy beans ready, most of the wheat already harvested, going into town, founded in the mid nineteenth century, a classic old brick farmhouse now and then, and as they get into town some classic Gothic colonials, Thomas Jefferson style,the ancient rulers of the town, new townhouses, mostly ranch, some Frank Lloyd Wrightish, too many new ones the incarnation of two-story plasticized ordinariness, some log cabins, once in a while real mansions with huge back-decks and pointed roofs, then downtown itself, all the usual, a hardware store, drugstore-pharmacy, an oculist, lawyers, investment-people in a bank building...finally the restaurant right next to the river, decks outside right over the river, Miranda not sure, “Isn’t it dangerous over the river. Lots of rain this last week.”
“No, it’s all iron and stone. Perfect.”
The waitress all blonde, her hair pulled tightly around her head, an obvious student. Karl couldn’t resist, as she seated them and handed them these huge fancy menus...”So you’re a student of...”
“Nursing.”
“Wonderful,” and she leaves with a twirl and a smile as they sit down and start studying the menus. At least Larry and Monique do. Miranda already knows what she’s getting.
“Have tuna melt sandwiches. Great with cheese.”
“OK,” agrees Karl.
“J’ai besoin de salad. / I need salad,” Monique insists, “too much...gut...,” banging on her tummy.
The waitress reappears, orders are taken Miranda and Monique lattés, Karl his usual Mug root beer, which he is so happy the restaurant even has, it’s so rare to find.”
“So exactly what is going on?” Karl allowing himself to get testy, hefty, hasty. Enough of all this sadomasochism.
Miranda’s face getting suddenly pure apple-white and tragic, lips and eyes tensing up, voice getting working a little girlishly.
“Tragic. I’m thinking of killing myself. I don’t know why there aren’t suicides with unemployment the way it is. You work for a company for a hundred years and....”
“Exactly!,”Karl the incarnation of sarcasm, “Let’s turn it into Batman!”
“I closed my business. Nobody’s buying anything. No one is selling anything. No money coming in, just going out. I’m finished. No future! Which erases the past. TO WAS OR NOT TO WAS. Everything in its place, all the right towels and microwave, all the right peaches and kumquats, the right summer shoes, winter boots, the right varicose vein surgery, even a husband way back when, before he ran away with his Hungarian and who knows where the hell he is now, hopefully hell, my only daughter thousands of miles away, which is exactly where she wants to be... you, my closest friend, seventy-six, on the edge of the grave, no future, a mottled, ripped-up past,” she jumps up, goes to the door, stops, starts in again, loud enough for the waitress to hear, no one else in the place at all, “You needn’t ever come again. Hallow-nothing, Christmas-Zero, Birthday-Deathday, Easter-Smeester... or call or write, no more anything cards... you can come and visit my grave, if you can find it. I’ll want it somewhere where the guava grows, the last pennies I’ll have...”
No tears in her eyes, just a kind of mummified finality, and out the door she goes.
Karl, of course, gets up to follow her, but Monique, who never gets solemnly defensive or controlling, gets up and pulls on the back of his belt, stops him. He stops.
“Forget her!” Monique starts in as they start driving back into bucolic-sylvan splendor, one of the most forest-wild roads on planet earth, “Everything has to come to an end, peach pie, guava jelly, your bottle of Irish Creme liquor sleep-medicine, the universe itself...”
“But I’ve known her for...”
“Maybe she’ll get a job some day and everything will return to the way it was. Think of your dead friends, Noel Peattie, Charles Bukowski, Anita Loos, Curt Johnson, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Morris....”
He reached over gently and put the palm of his right hand on her mouth, and she sto
pped.
“Ça sufit! / That’s enough!”
Opens the window and lets the beginning chilliness come in, turns off the FM, WKAR, playing, he’s not sure, French, fin de siecle XIX, Ibert, Poulenc.
Miranda very aware that he’s trying to identify the work. His chief obsession.
“Forget it! What’s the difference if you can or can’t identify it, what are you, some kind of musical encyclopedia?”
Smiling.
Exactly what is he, never a football, baseball, soccer, golf, tennis game in his life,but...?
“Debussy’s Images...”
The music joys on, almost a touch of Chabrier’s España, wild beyond wild, all kinds of brass and woodwinds and string conflicts that play off each other balletically.
Then it’s over and the announcer announces, “Debussy’s Images...”
3.
Christmastide. But Karl still sits on his screen-porch in the afternoons to watch the sun go down. Two coats plus two blankets, always tells Miranda "It's good for circulation... the skin..."
Snow everywhere outside in the wooded backyard. Sun just about down. And they have to play with Daylight Savings Time too, don't they.
Almost snow-sliding into sleep, when his cellphone starts ringing/playing Rhapsody in Blue, Karl unzips his coats a bit, reaches into his shirt pocket and gets the phone.
"Hello!"
"You know who this is. The bitch-witch turned back into angelic again. I have a job, worker-finding for strange jobs. In Woodland... you know, about fifteen minutes from home, one of those small towns that's beginning to zoom back. They're even making shirts and shoes there again. USA cotton and leather/synthetics... I wanted to invite you and Miranda for Christmas dinner..."