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

by Jincy Willett

  “What?” He was sitting back down with more pitchers, placing them with a drunk’s exaggerated care, attending to me only when he was satisfied that they weren’t going to run away. Our glasses were still half full. He had planned ahead. He asked, “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.” Had I actually spoken aloud? For the love of God, Montresor. “I said, I think we should go.”

  “Soon. Drink up.” We did. “So,” he said after a short while, or perhaps a long one. “What do you think?”

  “I think I’m blotto.”

  “Moi aussi, but I’m talking about the novel.”

  “Look, I can’t keep up with you. You said you were junking it.”

  Conrad Lowe slapped the sodden table and swore, thick-tongued. “Pay attention, woman! You didn’t hear a goddamn word. Here I pour my heart out and what do you do?”

  I leaned forward and stuck my face in his, intent, I believe, upon voicing disdain for his hemorrhaging heartlike organ, but just then remembered Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, and that I had had trouble remembering her name, which, though ironic enough, certainly would not have seemed excruciatingly funny to me under sober circumstances, which these were not. We had a jolly hootfest then, initiated by me, our heads bowed together like dear friends, after which I invited him to repeat his important news.

  “Gonna tear the roof off the joint.” He smiled cunningly. “Gonna make Peyton Place look like Sunnybrook Farm.”

  “Good for you,” I said, rummaging around for my car keys, having lost track of how I had gotten there. Time was speeding up by then; I remember this part of the scene in snapshots and sound bites, an antic slide show produced by one of the lesser gods, Bozo, God of Ignominy. During this period I visited the Tap’s disgusting unisex lav at least three times, so that it eventually began to look homey, stopping off at the jukebox once on the way back to study the selections it offered. Somebody yelled from the bar to play “Melancholy Baby,” which unfortunately was unavailable, and I slipped some quarters in and punched up four buttons at random, which turned out to be two Stevie Wonder numbers book-ended by a sappy country tune apparently entitled “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife,” as these seemed to be its only lyrics.

  This struck me funny, although a cracked crown or an air raid would probably have had the same effect, and I giggled through the laborious reiteration of Conrad Lowe’s brand-new book idea, which involved ripping the lid off of something and exposing it, and was going to be set down in our fair city. “Not,” he said at least three times, “a woman’s novel. A novel about women. It’s never been done before, and I’m gonna do it.”

  In this slide you can see me literally under the table, on all fours, still looking for my keys, still chuckling, my nose a foot away from his U.S. Keds. “I think you may be wrong about that,” I called up to him. The next slide sequence clearly shows me bumping my head hard on the way up, my pilsner glass tipping and shattering, and Conrad Lowe distractedly mopping his crotch with some discarded Sunday Journal funnies. “Wrong, my ass. Plus, if I do it right, my agent says I got a long shot at the National Book Award.”

  This was goofy. “On what planet? Besides, do you actually care about critical accolades?”

  In apt response, he belched operatically. “Piss hell out of DeVilbiss,” he explained.

  Discreet Joe Enos reached beneath the bar and came up with a beach towel, which he tossed over to us, refraining from comment (here you see it frozen in mid-zing, stretched out between Joe and us like the Zeus-bull rampant), and we used it to blot the tabletop. It was a Block Island beach towel, with the Lowes’ honeymoon hotel, the Seawitch, prominently featured in the center frame, sandwiched between a laughing gull and a tuna. We studied together its intricate design, all the while arguing about whether his book idea was all wet too. I offered in evidence Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, and he blew them away with a beery whoosh. Tolstoy, he informed me, was “bullshit,” and Flaubert, Guy DeVilbiss’s idol, the Bullshit King. They were too sympathetic, Emma and Anna, and all the rest, they were men in drag is what they were, they were what their creators wanted desperately to believe: that women were human. “Emma Bovary, c’est moi,” sneered Conrad, with a raspberry chaser. “Not me, man. I’m the real McCoy. I,” he said, leaning back in his seat, throwing his arm over the booth wall with a thump, “am the Doctor Livingstone of women.”

  “You presume,” I said. He didn’t get it. Neither, when I tried to understand him, did I. “You’re an explorer of women? You can’t explore people. Maybe you’re an anthropologist.” This sounded familiar. “Wait a minute,” I said. Had I had this conversation before? How was that possible?

  “The undiscovered country,” he agreed, pouring from a new pitcher, which had somehow appeared between us. “Cuntaroon. Twatville.”

  “Let’s keep it clean.” My jollies were in danger of wearing off. This would be too bad, since I certainly wasn’t sobering up. “West Vagina. Estrogenia.”

  He bowed to me. “There you go.”

  “The Cervical Canal.”

  “The point is—”

  “And the far-flung Fallopian Archipelago.”

  “Shut up. The point is, I’m gonna spill the beans.”

  I snorted. I’m afraid that beer actually spurted from my nose. He found a dry section of beach towel and delicately blotted my mouth and chin. “Don’t you think,” I said, “that you might be overreaching just a tad?”

  “Two women.” He lowered his voice and enunciated with a bit more skill, making me wonder if he had been feigning drunkenness all along. But no, he was really drunk. Just not as drunk as I had thought. Not as drunk as I. “One the town pump. One the Oracle of East Clamcake.”

  “Two women.” Oh dear.

  “Uno, Miss Grabass of 1955. Duo, the Josephine March of Little Gasbucket.”

  “I don’t think so.” His intent was beginning to take form in front of me, like pulsating ectoplasm. “Look, I can’t speak for my sister, as we all know, but my life belongs to me, thank you very much.”

  “Your inner life, maybe. The rest is public domain.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You appear nightly on the world stage, sis, along with your ever-loving twin.”

  “Ridiculous.” I remembered the night we met, and how horrible it had been for me to see myself, for the very first time, as a perceptible, public object. I had felt on that occasion like the narrator in War of the Worlds, cowering in a ruined house, sniffed at by wormy Martian tentacles. That this creature even knew I had an inner life (The Martians understood doors!) froze me with dread. And here it came again, the tentacle of doom. But this time it didn’t scare me at all.

  I could have lived my entire life without ever being known, in just this sense, by anyone. Abigail knew me well, but in an entirely different way. My inner life was not her business; to Abigail I was a set of comfortably predictable behaviors and responses. I was the not-Abigail, the other half, the shell to her oyster. And I have never needed to imagine, or cared to, how the world looks from Abigail Mather’s point of view. I’ve had enough to do just tidying up after her. And I found that now, upon Conrad Lowe’s second intrusion, I was receptive. I was going to be known. I was going to be held in the bowl of someone’s mind.

  He wasn’t just playing games with me, as I had thought. He was up to nothing good, and I didn’t trust him any more than before, but he was dead serious in his focus upon me. What an amazing thing. Someone was paying attention to me. To me.

  I needed to get off by myself, to understand this, and to make sense of my own response to it. I had figured out by this time that my car was back at the library. I had to persuade him to take us back. This was not going to be easy, as he was on one of his rolls.

  “…the American reading public,” he was saying, and “…the sexual habits of librarians,” and “…pith her like a goddamn frog.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said. “Listen, I have to go.”

 
“Everyone knows I’m a hack. What they don’t know,” he whispered, “is that I’m an intellectual hack.”

  I patted his forearm. “You’ll show ’em,” I said. “And now we really must go.”

  He took my hand and looked at me intently, without artifice. “If you promise that we’ll do this again. Many, many times.”

  “Why? For your ‘research’? Come on.”

  “Gotta promise.”

  “Look. The mere fact that we didn’t kill each other this afternoon does not make us buddies. Let’s not get carried away here.”

  “Jesus, Dorcas.” Tears shimmered in his eyes, sentimental inebriate tears, but still they moved me. What a red-letter day. “You gotta promise. I get so fuckin’ lonely.”

  “You have a wife. You have no excuse to be lonely.”

  He stared at me for the longest time. “Don’t you know anything?”

  I could believe, without effort, that he was wretched. He was a dreadful man, furious, in the modern and the mythological senses, unable to fend off his horrid mother, to protect his weak father, or at least to avenge him properly, as no matter how assiduous he was he could not, literally, destroy every woman on the planet Earth. Had he been a man’s man, the sort of creature most comfortable with others of his kind, he would have at least had the comfort of company. But he wasn’t, there was too much of the feminine in him, and he was too acute not to know it. He was a ladies’ man who hated ladies. Except for me. Lucky lucky me.

  “Tell me more,” I said, “about your book.”

  The book was of course going to be about the three of us, pretty much just as we were, not all tarted up with supernatural powers and trunkloads of deliquescing body parts. The narrative engine would be fueled by spectacular sexual tension between the husband and the unmarried sister. He would not tell me how it ended. Which was okeydoke with me, although I affected, I think, a certain frustrated curiosity.

  I remember the rest of this evening, the inaugural of our civil relationship, solely in underdeveloped color slides. This is how the profoundly drunken memory works (mine anyway): just visual snatches, glimpsed from the corner of the wary eye. No sound-memory at all. Clock faces, for some reason, register with perfect accuracy, so I can trust that he began to tell me about the book at 7:05 and pretty much wrapped it up at 10:40. Meanwhile, at 8:00, on the black-and-white TV above the bar, Mickey Rivers got chased down trying to steal home, and at 8:15 the Sox lost anyway, six to five. Apparently I didn’t check the clock when Abigail’s husband put his hand over mine. I didn’t do anything about it, except, apparently, stare at the intriguing picture this made. Click.

  In this shot you can see that we have been joined by T. R. Corrow’s uncle-in-law, Ernest Crosby, who blew us to a pitcher of Carling and then slunk off, having been frozen out of our intimate discussion. I remember him smiling at me, just before leaving, in an unpleasant way.

  Here’s the bathroom again, and again, and again, out of paper and the hot water faucet rusted shut. Here—click!—is my long face in the bathroom mirror, slyly captioned:

  LAVESE LAS MANOS

  And here we finally are, having closed down the joint, scooting out of the booth, our booth, and here he is, facedown on the floor, toppled and bleeding from the nose and lower lip, and here I am, solicitously stanching his wounds with a paper napkin while Joe Enos disunites his Keds. Some prankster has apparently tied Conrad’s shoelaces together. Here I am in the front seat of the swerving Plymouth, laughing myself into hiccups, having just recalled that it was me. Here is his profile at the steering wheel, limned by streetlight, hawk-nosed, squinting, intent. On what? On getting us home in one piece, on evading the law, on finishing his book, on destroying my sister, on me, on me, on me.

  He got me to my car. He did not touch me. He did not need to. I don’t remember driving home. I do remember throwing up in my own john. I do remember waking up the next morning with no hangover, feeling like a million bucks. I do remember wondering why, and then remembering, and shrugging and shaking my head with stagy rue, for the benefit of God’s camera. Here we see the good sister, only human, repentant. Here we see an honorable woman. A contradiction in terms.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Watch Hill

  Now Hilda gives us a Watch Hill interlude, ostensibly to describe my sister’s downward spiral (she uses the phrase “downward spiral”) into anorexia and madness, but really to show off Agincourt Cottage, their “unpretentious little Norman farmhouse.” Unpretentious little Norman must have had his head up his ass, architecturally speaking, because the Francophile DeVilbisses had overelaborated upon their modest French farmhouse knockoff (a style popular on Watch Hill between the World Wars), tic-tac-toeing its white stucco walls with black-painted timber which served no structural or aesthetic function. The house was too small for all this fuss. It looked like a tea cosy crocheted by Piet Mondrian.

  The DeVilbisses were always fussing with it, collecting notions and gewgaws during biannual trips to Camembert, where Guy did most of his heavy writing, in their endless quest to create a little Old World island for Guy’s muse. They were always prattling about daub and wattle and the inordinate expense of unseasoned oak and the outrageous provincialism of local zoning laws, which forbade finishing their steeply pitched roof with genuine thick reed thatch, whatever the hell that was. Hilda furnished the place in what she hoped was the Bloomsbury style, artlessly artful, ostentatiously playful, but any success she might have achieved was deliberately spoiled by Conrad Lowe’s mischievous additions. Her tasteful “pearwood bread trough” kitchen counter contrasted painfully with the de Sade-inspired coffee table in the next room, a glass-topped horror supported by a naked mannequin wearing a dog collar. Conrad loved to taunt Guy with stuff like this, backing his old roomie into an aesthetic corner, forcing him to defend de Sade as a revolutionary feminist instead of the crazy old pervert he clearly was.

  A week after the Rational Tap truce, Abigail phoned me at the library and invited Anna and me down for the weekend. Conrad had gone to L.A. for a series of meetings, and Abigail claimed she would “die of boredom” without him. Her voice was small and strained, so hard was she working to sound airy. “Do what you like,” she said at least three times, and “only if you have nothing better to do,” and so on. I tried to talk her into visiting us, but she claimed that would be impossible, as Conrad had left their only car at Logan Airport. I didn’t quiz her about this. Obviously Conrad had stranded her deliberately, and she had let him do it, but I didn’t give her a hard time, as I would have done before. I told her Anna had a paper due and would stay in Frome, and that I was on my way.

  We are all sinners. So say most clerics, except Stanley, I guess, and the other pious humanists, and I guess they’re right. But there are sins and there are sins. Before colluding with Conrad Lowe, my sins were, in my not so humble opinion, pretty mediocre, and had not tormented me much. I could face them all, known and unknown, squarely. If God chose to burn me for hurting Mike Callahan, or needling T. R., or taking some small pride in my own rectitude, well then poop on Him. But now things were different. When I tried to confront my own mendacity I found the prospect blurry, and myself easily distracted from the task.

  When we were kids Abigail and I would watch scary movies together, both fearful but perfectly matched, because, while visual cues upset her and aural ones did not, I was her exact opposite, so that we could attend, say, The Tingler or House on Haunted Hill together, she with her eyes squeezed shut, I with my fingers jammed into my ears, and afterward reconstruct a seamless narrative. I saw two gloved hands reach out of a closet and strangle a woman while she was getting dressed; Abigail heard the choked scream, the piercing violins; we were both unscathed.

  Now, as I drove south toward Agincourt, and tried to view my own calumny in full sobriety, I found myself, metaphorically speaking, deliberately unfocusing my eyes, clapping up my ears, and singing la la la in my loudest voice. It was no good. When I pulled up to Agincourt, she was squatt
ing in a bed of withered chrysanthemums, tending to them ineptly, and in any event too late. She looked as wilted as they. She had lost enough weight by this time that her skin had begun to look like a husk. It aged her. She was now merely, ordinarily, middle-aged plump, and you could see the substance leak out of her by the minute. Her eyes, when she looked up at me, were frantic. “You’re early,” she said, and the smile on her face was way too hopeful. How could I possibly help her?

  “I brought a picnic lunch,” I said. “I thought we could take it down to the Point.” She led the way inside, where it was dark and smelled like the sea. I have always hated that salt smell. “I’ve got Genoa salami and some halfway decent mozzarella and two loaves from Tony C’s.”

  “I can’t eat any of that,” Abigail said, her back to me.

  “Well, then, I’ve also got a pretty good take-out antipasto. Surely you can eat a salad.”

  “Not with all that olive oil.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Not with oil. No pepperoni either. Use your head.”

  “Well, what can you eat?”

  “Lettuce,” she said, in an obscenely cheery singsong. “Carrots, tomatoes. Pepperoncini, I guess. Lots of cukes. One egg.”

  “Now you’re talking. I’ve got deviled—”

  “No mayo. Anyway, I had my egg this morning.”