by Carson, Tom
After they’d all gone home—even Gerson, if home meant upstairs; even Jake, if home meant our guest wing—I lingered on in Stella Negroponte’s room, pretending I cared about the scummed glasses, miniature Boot Hills of full ashtrays, and mostly virginal, incipiently spinsterish coffee cups. Luz’s job in the morning, but I thought I’d at least make a start after my nightcap. And spot the mistake there, since some minutes later I was blurrily realizing that now at some point I’d have to get up and collect those scattered clothes too: that quadruple-cupped bra, that zigzag-buttoned blouse, that repeatedly pleated skirt, and those four-legged undies. All four of Stella’s eyes were watching but neither of the bitch’s mouths moved.
Stupid, but I’d never before heard my husband express erotic longing for any other entity but me. He was as incapable of infidelity even with the dead as any man on hell’s green earth. Any marriage made of more than toothpicks can survive an adultery, and in hindsight I knew I’d committed more figurative ones in the last year of mine to Murphy than Bran had the literal-minded kind. Not for lack of trying, but even he couldn’t take on four hundred sixty-six marching women at once.
Glimpses of each other’s unlived lives are the real abyss: the ones that imagine you a stranger or dead as Stella Negroponte or someone who never existed. We’ve all got them and yet spotting our spouse’s is intolerable. I’d just found out about Gerson’s Great Unknown, which unlike mine had a name and location. At least I’d had the goddam decency to keep Pam’s to myself instead of blurting it out in my cups.
“Look, Gerson,” I giggle-gurgled on the rug. “Here’s my cunt. You never call it that. Cunt, cunt, cunt! Stella’s watching and she’s naked too.”
But since he was asleep upstairs in European striped pajamas, he didn’t answer. At one level I’d have given a lot to see the look on his face if he were awake.
“Gerson, did you ever find out your first wife’s anus is just a leedle hairy? Not that I’m complaining. Do you want to know what Dachau smelled like? Do you want to know what Dachau tastes like? Sharon, stick your tits in her! Punish her. Fuck her. Cram your mompricks up her.”
“Oh, God! Oh, Pam. I thought you’d never ask. God, I’m naked too! I’m so shy and old now. Here’s my kitchenized fat deadboy twat. Shove a burning B-17 up it please, why don’t you? It’s all I ever think about anymore.”
“The hell with that! Let me suck dead Stella’s smell off your nipples. What do I care, I’m drunk and I have nightmares and I haven’t written a word in five years.”
Posted by: A Pamographer
Not quite true, by the way. Even if you don’t count letters—to Cath Charters, to Brother Nicholas, to Jake himself—I’d done two or three pieces for Regent’s on the voluptuous allure of Hollywood. Roy had liked them well enough to wonder if I’d be interested in turning movie reviewer, but even if I’d felt qualified (I didn’t), it was obviously impractical with Gerson at Metro. By the time he moved to Rik-Kuk, someone else’s byline was handling the faint praise and beheadings.
Anyhow, if you’re still with me, bikini girl, you may as well know your Gramela’s first venture into cyberporn is a drastic abridgment of what really poured out. So it may surprise you that I came downstairs the next morning able to return Stella Negroponte’s gaze without flinching. Then I glanced around Gerson’s library.
“Oh, all right then!” I said. “À nous deux. I’m going to prove him wrong if it kills me.”
Shades of Peg Kimball in The Gal I Left Behind Me. But you see, if we aren’t Jewish, we don’t have an Israel. We’re stuck here in the crap we’ve got around us. By now even the Israelis know the feeling.
“Sorry, Pam?” It was Jake, preposterously showered. I’d clean forgotten our guest wing was right off the den, but his face didn’t hint he’d witnessed or overheard anything out of the ordinary. I remembered from Sergeant Kowalski days that he was a deep sleeper.
I got us both coffee, a ritual best understood—in the Nine-teen Fif-ties, Panama—as a necessary binge of quick slurps and mild “Ows!” while avoiding contemplation of last night’s harlequinade of glassware. “Hungry?” I asked.
“Starving.” Lips stung by the cup’s rim, he smiled. Then asked in turn, “Hung?”
“Oh, maybe a leedle.” I could’ve strangled myself, but he didn’t react. Pam had the unnervingly alluring thought that being caught would’ve been more permissible if I’d been the guest and not the miscast host.
“Yes, me too. Hope I can get some sleep on the plane.” Not bothering to put hand to mouth, he showed me his fillings. “Tenure interview tomorrow.”
He wanted me to catch that, so I did. “You’re turning Rik-Kuk down, aren’t you?”
“Uh-huh. I didn’t much like myself last night, Pammie. Or anyone on hand, to be honest. I know they say Hollywood does strange things to people, but I didn’t think Jake Cohnstein would succumb in under, what’s it been? A week. For one thing, I’m not used to hearing Jake Cohnstein assertively call Jake Cohnstein Jake Cohnstein in conversation. Are you?”
“No, but—” I decided not to explain that I’d thought I knew the reason. “But you have to remember we aren’t like that when we’re working.”
An irrational “we,” I agree, for Pam to include herself in. Yet the Hollywood “we” isn’t functional: it’s tribal.
“It’s not just that. Ah!” His coffee had cooled enough for a nonstinging mouthful, the reward for all those burnt sips. You’re frightened it’ll stay that hot unless you demonstrate you’re willing to suffer for its sake. “I think Noah’s a dreamer. Pam, you’ve met Gene Rickey.”
“Sure. But Fran’s the horror.”
“Lord help you if she’s worse. I’m not used to people who call Shakespeare Willy. Or to hearing myself called, variously, Jack, Jerry, and Joe.”
Out before I thought, it broke one of our rules. “What, Gerson didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“Odds are you’d have to give up being Jake Cohnstein, at least in the credits. Gene was trying things out. Jack Clamstone, Jerry Cumberland.”
“Why couldn’t I have been? Gerson’s Gerson. I couldn’t watch much of That’s My Fran, but I did get that far.”
“Oh, well. Noah Gerson is only going to sound Jewish if you live here. In Minnesota it goes right by. But Jake Cohnstein just sounds”—I felt helpless, but it was awfully early—“Jewisher.”
“Hear that, Noah?” Jake said. “Nah, nah. The game is done—I’ve won, I’ve won. I’m Jewisher.”
My bathrobed husband reached for his mug. “Are we still talking about Jerusalem? Good. I wanted to hear more.”
“No, Hollywood. But I don’t think we’ve met.” Jake put out his hand. “I’m Jack Cornhole.”
“No, that would never—” Gerson’s face sagged. “That’s a no, I take it.”
“Afraid so. I was planning to tell you on the way to the airport.”
“We couldn’t—”
“Really, no. But I do thank you for the offer, Noah, and the trip. God knows I saw a lot.”
Posted by: Pam
Assuming you’ve read it, something Amazon says isn’t likely, you may be baffled by my insistence that rapturous Glory Be—forgotten now, scorned in the groves of academe, but in the Nine-teen Fif-ties, Panama, by Pamela Buchanan’s second and last bestseller—came out of solo squalor under Stella’s gaze, self-sick and she-sick and seasick from those towering waves of suddenly inadequate Winken, Blinken, and Nod. Don’t be. Up until Cath Charters placed it at Random House, the full title was Glory Be: A Beginning.
My original plan was to end with a verbal closeup of a British drummer boy—sorry, Eve, fully clothed—beating “The World Turned Upside Down” at Yorktown. It didn’t work out that way because I realized I wanted to end with a beginning, leaving the outcome in now notional but once
real suspense. I brought the curtain down instead with the Shot Heard ’Round the World. The book didn’t call it that because they didn’t yet.
Since I soon learned that nobody then or now knew whether a redcoat or a militiaman fired the war’s literal first shot at Lexington, I left my nameless final protagonist’s allegiance ambiguous while tempting the reader to guess he was an American rebel: shades of the unidentified “hands” I’d described a decade earlier packing dynamite in “To the Ends of the Earth.” Also a classic example of why academia’s tenured ninepins revile my kind of history. My final image was a verbal closeup of a finger tightening on a trigger: by a coincidence I was conscious of long before sharing it with you, just how my life and daisysdaughter.com will end 231 years later if Pink wins her battle with Kirsten. Closing line? “They say he pulled it soon after eight in the morning on April 19, 1775.”
Not the best sentence I’ve ever written, no. Just the best last sentence I have, as of now anyway.
Some planned opening chapters were discarded as well. The Vikings got lopped and so did Columbus. As I’ve mentioned, I began with “A Landing,” and Panama? Sorry: I’m a writer. If I couldn’t bring myself to revisit Provincetown for a book’s sake, there’s no chance a ring of jolly Cadwallers on the elephone, barked at and barged at by a lively little dog, will persuade me.
Gerson-led, Gerson-loving, I set myself rules. Pure narrative: no anticipation, flashbacks, or reflections outside each bit’s time frame. Each chapter hung on an incident, a moment—even just “a sort of anecdote,” as Mencken had described the Scandal. I honed the writing, ditching not only Nothing’s careless prattle but my old Regent’s molasses. Like my other two books, Glory Be had jokes in it; I did want to make Gerson smile. But no mugging.
From “A Landing” on, chapter titles were abrupt. My rule was never to use “The,” which was falsely defining. It was always “A Cargo” (first slave ship docking at Jamestown), “A Misfit” (Roger Williams: last words, “Rhode Island”), “A Sermon” (Cotton Mather), “A Storm” (Franklin’s kite), “A Fort” (the untried George Washington in the French and Indian War). And so on, from the well-meant, off-rhyming with “cargo,” but now archaic “A Negro”—Crispus Attucks, of course—all the way to “A Morning.” Off-rhyming with “landing,” you see.
Ah, Cadwaller’s gun! How it depresses your owner’s widow that April 19, 1775—and all that goes with it, from Minutemen to “If this be treason, make the most of it” and so on—has been appropriated in our day by the crackpots who wrathfully style themselves militias. Generations of high-school history teachers got driven to despair by my compatriots’ fabled hostility in every poll to their topic, and now this.
And curse liberals too, for ceding the whole beautiful thing’s imagery to their opponents just because its unsophisticated musketry embarrassed them. Unless April 19, 1775, belongs to all of us, it can’t belong to any of us: the lesson a pigheadedly Mayfloral Pam learned from her Gerson’s stubborn library-shelved conviction that he had a claim on events predating his family’s arrival at Ellis Island by a century or more. I wrote Glory Be to hold him when he began to despair of believing that it was a claim on much.
No, I had no formal training. One proof’s that it took me two years. Each moment laboriously researched, sites (all but one) visited, each chapter written and rewritten until I could’ve staged my own ticker-tape parade with typewriter ribbons. And no, the reviews weren’t all glowing. My old friend Dwight Macdonald had company. But I spluttered whenever “cinematic” popped up as a term of abuse, often with a slighting reference to my then current roots—an Americanism if I’ve ever coined one, by the way. Though my Los Angeles address wasn’t fudged, Cath and Random House agreed I’d better leave Pam’s marriage to a Hollywood producer unannounced on the dust jacket. But Vogue and everyone else profiling me printed it.
So what and of course! Perhaps you’ll see what they couldn’t. I meant to give Gerson one movie Metro’s pashas would get no chance to dicker and euchre into eunuchhood; two dozen fabled historical prefilm occasions Rik-Kuk Productions couldn’t turn thumbs down on. Take it from me, daisysdaughter.com readers: if you want to make the movie or TV show of your dreams, write a book.
Near Pulitzer miss or not, Glory Be isn’t in much repute nowadays. Tenured ninepins sniffed from the start, since Lux et Veritas is Latin for “No amateurs need apply.” By the mid-Seventies or so, none did—and my God, narrative was a term of abuse! So was “entertaining,” so was “brisk.” When one ninepin calls another’s book “highly readable,” both parties understand the next step is cudgels at dawn.
Glory Be’s author is a minor member of a forgotten breed. The most recent online citation of my once much loved book is a mention in some ninepin’s withering dismissal of yesteryear’s “popular historians.” Scorned for being more interested in the reader’s pleasure and my own prose than substance, I’m a minnow alongside bigger fish in the barrel. They include not only Gene Smith and Cornelius Ryan, whose letter apologizing for Pam’s deletion from The Longest Day (“I left out Marty Gellhorn too”) is in the Paris footlocker, but—here’s where this old bag’s jaw dropped—Barbara Tuchman.
Barbara Tuchman? No, really? I’ll take that with bells on, you unwitting flatterer. Good Christ, how that woman could structure and write!
Posted by: Pam
It wasn’t all Gerson, too much Beverly Hills, or disgust at having shown Stella Negroponte Pam’s Coos Bay. The blacklist was on my mind too, despite my regretfully scrapped Salem chapter “A Trial.” Arthur Miller had dibs. The play whose London production he’d been denied a passport to see was The Crucible.
By the time Glory Be reached stores, the witch hunt was waning. Brave as ninety-five mice confronting a rat, the Senate had finally censured McCarthy. That didn’t spare me from being attacked in left-wing circles, some of whose circlers had known me in my old Republic days. I was guilty of knuckling under to the Age of Conformity with a craven American Heritage hymnal—a charge repeated as late as 1965 in his lugubrious How the Red Faded Out of Old Glory by a creaky weathervane you’ve met before. You old fraud, Alisteir Malcolm.
Not a bit of it. Pam was as fed up as any of them with the flatulent complacencies of the Nine-teen Fif-ties, from its scrims for Ike’s grin to his true grandson Howdy Doody capering on General Motors’ strings. Now a dyed-in-the-Loy liberal Democrat, I hadn’t forgotten our Thirties hopes. Gerson and I did our best to stay chipper; blowing our brains out was at best Plan D, only rarely discussed and only while driving, ever Los Angeles’s Ferris wheel for conversational caprice. Yet even before Jake’s visit, in moping moods my husband would worry as we drove that spending one day in Fran Kukla’s U.S.A. would convince Lafayette it had all been for nothing.
Privately readier to agree with him than he yet was with himself, more likely in later years to think the Marquis’s IQ was all in his wig anyhow, I wrote my book to not only hold Gerson but buck both of us up. I meant my look back to prompt him and any other readers it might attract to look forward. To restore, if saying so’s not self-aggrandizing—oh, what the hell if it is? I’m just babbling unheard out in cyberspace anyway—a sense of possibility, accident, circumstance, hope.
In two words, of beginning. It wasn’t called Glory Was. My people weren’t preserved in aspic. With a few grim exceptions (spend a month with Cotton Mather and a taxidermist won’t have you), they were urging us to go forth and do likewise in our own metamorphoses.
The catch any author will recognize is that what I was doing to hold Gerson took me away from him. Not only on my research trips, since there wasn’t a lot I could do about the fact that California’s part in stirring up the American Revolution, however prominent in my own case in 1954–56, had been fairly limited in 1620–1775. Even at home in Beverly Hills, pacing and typing in my heretofore barely used study above Stella Negroponte’s room, I was a Mercury astronau
t before they existed, my only hairdresser a pencil for weeks at a time. I believe Antoine scraped by.
Luckily, my husband had never had to count on his Mrs. for cooking or cleaning. Nor did the servants need Pam’s compass to navigate our house, since both Luz (the housework) and Ava (the kitchen) dated from Gerson’s first marriage. That was how redecorating, which I’d never given a tinker’s dam about, had become my early declaration of Pamhood, though I swear I never once waited, let alone hoped, to hear Luz crash into a sofa where a clear path had been.
Yet now there was many a Saturday and Sunday when my husband, home from Rik-Kuk and increasingly weary of Winken, Blinken, and Nod, could go well past sunset more likely to hear a peep out of Stella than me. Being Gerson, he wouldn’t have put it that way on a dare, but he did mutter sometimes.
“Why, Gerson!” I tried to reason with him. “I used to spend all day here waiting for you to get done working. Never once complained.”
“Not on weekends. And I wasn’t right on the other side of the ceiling the whole time,” he said, nodding upward. “I can still hear you sometimes, but I can’t see or touch you. It’s an adjustment, Pammie, that’s all.”
If you’d like proof Gerson loved me, he didn’t bring up the most obvious difference. His job at Rik-Kuk was supporting me, trips to Jamestown and Boston and the site of Fort Necessity now making that dog-tongued receipt drawer bulge more. Though Dame’s royalties had kept me in Antoine and toreadors (the pants, Eve, not the bullfighters) for the first year or two of our marriage, even then all the big bills were his.
If every marriage has one boast kept untarnished, ours was a good one: we never once fought about money. He did that with Gene Rickey, not me. We weren’t to be reprieved from all marital cliches, however. I was two-thirds of the way through my manuscript when he wretchedly asked—at a ten p.m. dinner, gone cold: Ava did chicken salad for lunch a lot in those days—if I was having an affair with someone back East.