Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather

by Jincy Willett

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Grizzly Fair

  Chapter 16

  The Hungry Heart

  Despite her great gallantry [!!!] during the ordeal of our ill-advised, however well-intentioned, intervention, Abigail was wounded to the quick, and soon after disappeared for months, remaining inside the Watch Hill cottage, emerging only occasionally for provender, and precious little of that. She put herself on a killing diet. As she later confided to us, she spent the first week literally fasting, subsisting on strong black tea and celery. At some point she began to experience blackouts.

  You may well wonder what her husband was doing during this time….

  Actually Hilda’s right, she was starving, figuratively and actually, and to my lasting discredit I did nothing about it. After the Great Swamp Fight I avoided seeing Abigail at all. We kept in touch by phone. Not seeing her was easy, since they had taken lodgings at Watch Hill, a solid half hour away (a half-hour drive in Rhode Island being the psychological equivalent to a full-day outing anywhere else).

  About a week after the Swamp, Conrad showed up at my library, on a Friday afternoon just before closing time. I was alone behind the desk, and there were only a few patrons left, all grazing in the mystery aisle. T. R. had left early with cramps, and Anna the Spy was in the basement rummaging among the discards. I was leafing through publishers’ fall catalogues when I heard someone come in. Horror novels were just hitting their stride then, spawning their own publishing houses, and I was holding in my hand, at arm’s length, a black-and-white pamphlet from Torso Press, which promised “grizzly fair, not for the squeamish,” and wondering how they got “squeamish” right, when I caught his scent, juniper and witch hazel, and there he was, inches away, looming over the counter with his horrible amiable smile. He said, “Gimme everything you got on gorgons.”

  “You might try the Grizzly Fair,” I said, zinging the pamphlet at his nose, a bizarre reflex action, my body as machine, my wrist swivel-snapping just as though a spring had been activated. That’s how he made me feel sometimes. Like some old mechanical toy, unearthed in an attic on a rainy day, which works like new, against all odds and for no damn good reason. “You might try the Grizzly Fair,” I said. “The Medusa booth.” Come to think of it, he had just that effect on everybody. Guy, Hilda, Abigail. He knew where everybody’s button was.

  Conrad cocked his head and regarded me quizzically, and with even more interest than usual. “Have I come at a bad time?”

  “You couldn’t possibly do otherwise.”

  I can’t remember the weather that day. It must have been bad—he loved bad weather, and it loved him—yet I see him now in a shaft of dusty sunlight. It was early fall, just before the leaves turn. How bad could the weather have been? And it seems to me now that seeing him suddenly like that cleaned the air around me, made the office colors snap to, cleared my mind like a fat new broom. I was glad, wasn’t I? Sure I was. Here was my nemesis—not everybody has one of those—and we were about to mix it up, and I felt that odd bridal joy again, the same as the night I first met him. There he was, and it was as though we had just finished that nauseating meal at Lobsterama and, for some obscure reason, adjourned to my library. I must have been stunned at my own reaction. Mustn’t I? I must, at least, have asked him what he was doing, coming there, at closing time.

  “I vant to pick your brain,” he said, with a Bela Lugosi stare. “Seriously, sistah. I’ve come to a snag in my latest opus, and I need your, as we say, input. Thought we’d hit the Blue Moon, chew the fat.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re having trouble writing one of your trashy books and instantly thought of me? You imagined that I would accompany you to a notorious dive in order to render you assistance?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Why?”

  Conrad whirled in place, gesturing expansively at the book-lined walls, carrying on as if awed, as if he were in the Library of Congress, and then he hunched his shoulders slightly forward and arranged his face into a wicked cartoon of Guy DeVilbiss. “Every artist,” he intoned, “needs an arena.”

  “As arenas go,” I said, “this one’s pretty puny. Plus it isn’t yours. It’s mine. It belongs to me.”

  “Exactly,” beamed Conrad. “Every artist needs a muse.”

  I ignored this, and suggested the Providence Athenaeum, and he announced that without my presence it would be as inspiring as a public toilet, and then I suggested with some asperity that his wife could function perfectly well as his muse, and he stuck a long index finger partway down his throat and made a gagging noise, and I jumped to my feet, my face inches from him, and he snapped his fingers in front of my nose and said, “Quick, Watson, the names!”

  Watson? At that moment I couldn’t remember my own name. “Whose names?”

  “The names of the nine muses. They were nine, and their names were…?”

  “Terpsichore,” I said, “Calliope, Thalia, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Urania, Clio. Euterpe…”

  “That’s eight.”

  “Terpsichore.”

  “Bzzzzzzzzzt.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You said that one already.”

  Why was he asking me this? Why was I answering him? Who the hell was the ninth muse? I got it. “Mnemosyne,” I said triumphantly. “Now would you mind—”

  “Nah. Mnemosyne was the mom.” His eyes momentarily lost their obscene glint. “The Mother of Memory,” he said, and then, “She said you’d know.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Your sister, sistah. She said you’d know all the muses.”

  When Abigail and I were ten we went on a field trip to the museum at the School of Design. All I remember to this day was the big Buddha on the second floor, and the gift shop on the first, where I bought my first book with my own money. We bought it together, actually, for we had to pool our allowance. We decided on Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, I because I was ready to graduate from children’s fairy tales to more complicated material, and Abigail because on the cover was a picture of naked Perseus, holding the head of Medusa. It wasn’t the head that interested her.

  “She told me about the paper dolls. She said you had a full set of Olympians.”

  This was a shock, the pleasant shock of sweet detail suddenly recollected. “Not just Olympians,” I said. Heroes of the Iliad, heroines from Euripedes, and the whole benighted Atreus clan. I made them all myself, of course, tracing their figures from library books, transferring them with LePage’s mucilage to Father’s shirt cardboards. I didn’t bother much with outfits—they wore mostly togas and drapes anyway—but I kept each grouping in a separate shoe box. Abigail, quickly bored with her Rhonda Flemings and Diana Lynns, sometimes rifled through the boxes, so I’d occasionally come upon Hades in pedal pushers, Medea the all-turquoise bridesmaid.

  “Which doll was your favorite?”

  “Cassandra.”

  “Natch. And your least favorite was Aphrodite.”

  This was puzzling, on two fronts. One, that he cared enough about this stuff to get it out of Abigail; and two, that she had cared enough about it as a child to notice.

  He read my mind again. “I guessed.”

  Natch.

  “Aphrodite,” he said, “was an amoral fatso, like someone we both know. And by a spooky coincidence she fucked everything that moved, human or otherwise.”

  “The Olympians were flawed, like us. That’s why I liked them.”

  “Get your purse.”

  I stared at him. “It’s half an hour to closing time.”

  “Close early.” He reached out and flicked the light switch, on-off-on-off, and the mystery grazers obediently flocked to my desk with their finds. Mildred Colasanto with her Florida PIs, Ob Minurka’s sister Valerie with a stack of Shell Scott.

  I opened my mouth to say, “It’s okay, you’ve got thirty more minutes,” but nothing came out, and I checked them through and watched them leave, and got my purse and stood up. “
Not the Blue Moon,” I said.

  “Then the Rational Tap it is,” he said.

  Inside Conrad Lowe’s car it was soporifically hot. We didn’t speak during our short journey. I spent the time unprofitably, wondering why I was there. The last time I had been alone with him had been at Abigail’s insistence. This time there was no such excuse; I couldn’t even get a handle on proximate cause. The car was an ancient two-tone Plymouth, black and white, an automatic with the shift somehow miniaturized and embedded in the dashboard. An ante-seatbelt car, cavernous and ramshackle, upholstered in slippery vinyl the color of Rhode Island Red eggshell. The interior was filthy from cigarette smoke, with ancient magazines, Looks and Times and Harper’s Bazaars, sloshing underfoot, and a pyramid of fast food detritus on the back seat. It looked like a college kid’s first car, and it probably was. For the first time it occurred to me that Conrad Lowe, who had money to burn, was nuts.

  Inside the Rational Tap, he insisted upon “our booth,” which was, of course, the site of his dreadful nuptial party. He brought over a pitcher of Narragansett and poured my first glass. “So,” he said.

  I drained my glass in two swallows. I don’t much like beer, so ’Gansett tastes as good to me as Lowenbrau, and it’s a good deal cheaper. Day-trippers never touch Narragansett.

  He replenished my glass. “You come here often?”

  “What exactly do you need to know about Gorgons?”

  “Nada. I want to know about you.”

  “Only one was mortal, Medusa. The other two sisters could not be killed. I don’t remember their names, and I don’t remember who fathered them. At one time I knew. It was probably Poseidon and some nymph.”

  “Actually it was another sea god, Phorcys.”

  “You’ve already done your research.”

  “I’m doing it right now.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “A drinking buddy? The little woman’s off the sauce. Too caloric.”

  “You don’t need me for that. Frome’s full of boozers.”

  “Well, I guess you’d know.” He squinted and glinted. “Have some Madeira, me dear.”

  I said nothing. Maybe this was what I’d do: say nothing until he gave up.

  “Horror novels are harder than they look. The Mantis was a bitch.”

  “They’re all about bitches, aren’t they?”

  “They’re all about women. And they’re all for women, too. My readers are women. They eat this stuff up. They love to read about their power. You can call them any filthy name, as long as you’re paying attention to them. That’s all they want.”

  “It’s not what I want.”

  “No, it isn’t, is it?”

  “Tell me again why you married my sister.”

  “To get close to you.”

  “You do realize that that makes no sense.”

  “You thought I was horsing around with you, that speech I made on our big date, about how you are an honorable woman. You figured I was shit-faced and shooting off my mouth.”

  “‘An honorable woman: a contradiction in terms.’”

  “Hey, you remembered! Yes, the breathing definition of an oxymoron. But it’s true. You fascinate me. From the first time I saw you, sitting on the couch next to old Sadie Thompson, all upright and stern, looking right through me. I thought, There she is! The impossible woman.”

  “The world is full of women like me. There may once have been more of us, in the days, say, of E. M. Forster. Civilization once gagged on impossible women, ladies of a certain age, every one of them upright and stern as all get out.”

  “Yes, but those ladies didn’t have a choice. You did. You made a choice.”

  No kidding. Was that true?

  Maybe it was the atmosphere of the place, the luxuriant murk. Whatever the reason, I decided to let myself get sloshed, something I rarely do. I was so sick of worrying about Abigail. I was even tired of hating her husband. Sitting there, watching him pour and pour, watching him order pitchers by twos, I felt, not forgiving, certainly not to any degree sympathetic, but terrifically winded. He looked winded too. It was as if he had been chasing me for hours over difficult terrain, and we had both tacitly agreed to lean against the same boulder for a few minutes and pant.

  “You’re an intelligent man,” I found myself saying to him, “an educated man. Why do you waste your time writing crap? If I had any talent, I certainly wouldn’t throw it away like that.”

  “You know, I always wanted to write for the movies. You’d think I’d be a natural, with my show-biz bona fides, plus I know some people. But the funny thing is my screenplays don’t work. At least that’s what they tell me. I get all this horseshit about keeping it simple.”

  I wondered what could be simpler than your basic misogynistic horror story, but, in the spirit of our time-out, refrained from saying so.

  “And,” he continued, “they always insisted on changing the ending. They always wanted the monster to die. Gotta kill the bitch, they told me. Not completely, of course, in case there’s a Son of; but she’s gotta die, big time.”

  “Who?”

  “She. Corinna Gabriel. Mantis Woman. The Gorgon. Whatever. They always want to kill her off. The public isn’t ready, they tell me, for the monster heroine. What do they know? Seriously, I could have sold the mantis thing, big money, real stars. Except at the climax she’d have to explode. Humongous mess, they said, entrails all over the place, a publicity tie-in with vomit bags issued at the door, which was way off, because that noise went out with Bill Castle.”

  He obviously expected me to have some idea what he was talking about. Vomit bags? It did sink in that, contrary to my previously unexamined expectations, he wanted his monstrous females to survive. I pondered on this. “So,” I said, “maybe your Medusa will be the charm. Maybe the public is finally ready for a gorgon protagonist.” The thought was intriguing. “Anna tells me they can do anything with special effects nowadays. Apparently there’s this new movie, Battle Stars—”

  “Star Wars.” He shrugged and gazed into his beer.

  “My point is, they could probably manage the writhing snake hairdo, and the wings.” Despite myself I was warming up. It wasn’t the beer, I’m certain; it was the subject at hand. “There’s so much you could do with her. You do know, don’t you, that she was once beautiful? And that she was punished by Athena for sleeping with Poseidon, in Athena’s own temple?”

  “Athena,” said Conrad Lowe, looking sharply at me, “being your pet Olympian.” He caught my surprise, and it irritated him. “Look, I did go to Harvard, even if I was just pre-med. I know who the Olympians are. And I know you, Dorcas. You’re Athena all over.”

  I couldn’t avoid feeling complimented, even though he had surely intended an insult. “Athena was implacable, it’s true, but her expectations for the human race were the highest among her entire family, including her father. She punished Medusa, not for sleeping around, but for dishonoring the temple.”

  “Natch.”

  “And did you know that Athena gave a phial of Medusa’s blood to Asclepius, so that he could raise the dead? So Medusa was really the world’s first blood donor.”

  “I’m not going to finish Gorgon. Not right now, anyway. I’m working on a new idea.”

  This brought me up short. “Then why,” I asked, “did you come to me for gorgon references?”

  “To get you alone.” He flashed his tooth at me and filled our glasses. “I told you, Dorcas, I want to know all about you. You’re all the references I need.”

  This was so tiresome. I had actually been, if not enjoying the afternoon, at least not minding it, which was a small miracle. I could not easily clear my mind of Medusa and her great cinematic potential. Which was ridiculous, because I had never been much of a moviegoer. When I tried to picture Medusa on the screen I could manage only Elsa Lanchester in a remote-control fright wig. The ideal Medusa movie would need to be animated, and what better artist than Steele Savage, the pen and ink genius who
illustrated Edith Hamilton’s book, whose gods and mortals looked etched in marble, and I grew captivated, instantly, by the very idea of these figures in motion. It’s crazy, but sitting there in the yeasty gloom, buzzing with too much beer and the promise of much too much more, three feet away from a man whose very existence threatened everything I held of value, I could focus only upon “The Rape of Europa,” my favorite of the Savage drawings, and I pictured the great bull flying, static yet magically in motion, arcing over scrolls of sea foam, with his lovely passenger, astonished yet unafraid, trailing clouds of wildflowers, and all of it black and white, and perfectly beautiful. God, I was pathetic.

  He was saying something else about the remarkable Me and getting the amazing creature I am off alone to do with as he would, and so on. It made my head hurt, deep in the back of my eyes. I tuned him out for a while, which forced me to tune in on something else, a plangent jukebox offering currently favored by the Rational Tap regulars. Ooh I wanna do you, ooh the way you do me, ooh do you up against the wall. I had never, in my heart of hearts, required a lover. Never tormented myself with yearning, nope, slammed the door on that, and over time, and of course in my native humid climate, the door swelled tight against the frame and stood as fast as if dead-bolted in blue steel. I did not suffer that gaping want, I left that to my sister, I would rather have endured unanesthetized amputation than admit that breach. And this when I was young, when my skin was firm and I could run and run, when desire, however ignoble, would not have been ugly. Imagine actually becoming that staple of cruel farce, the lustful spinster, all bones and shimmering shame, a naked elon-gated skeleton. I did imagine this, trying it on for size, and then I imagined I could see the door itself, weathered metaphor complete with panels and brass fittings, snug against the virtual jamb, and then I imagined it bulging out ever so slightly, pulsing with the inane juke beat, ooh. I imagined all this. This is important. It was in my head, the thumping door. Which was awful enough, but it was in my head, no farther south, and it was so goddamn trite and drear that I would have cried, if I had been the crying sort. Our old wooden booth hummed along, Ooh, do you up against the wall, and I thought, I had walled the monster up within the tomb.