Puss in D.C. and Other Stories

by Pamela Sargent

  That rant rang true. Lucas took a breath. “But…but why?” he managed to say.

  “I told you why, on the bus. I told you. You just weren’t listening, because you’re just like him, another guy who doesn’t listen to anybody. So the agent calls me back a week later, and I say I’m still not interested and frankly I have my doubts about all these people being so hot after his stuff. And that was it, I thought, but he keeps bugging me, keeps calling me up and leaving messages on my machine until I finally have to go visit my sister just to get the hell away from him. And now you tell me the same things he did, about all these people wanting to read my dad’s books and that there’s articles about him and how you want to be just like him. Well, don’t bother trying. You’re him already. Been him a long time.”

  Exit 5 was coming up. He wanted to tell her to get into the right lane or she’d miss the ramp, but was afraid to speak. The car suddenly swerved to the right, throwing him to the side; his shoulder strap tightened against his neck.

  “You know what he did after he got that shack in the mountains?” she continued as they sped down the narrow ramp of the exit. “He called me up and said I should come up there to see him, as if I’d want to hang around that place while he ignored me or went on and on about his books, and then he said he had something to give me, to make up for being such a shitty father. And you know what he was going to give me, what my great big present was going to be?”

  “No,” Lucas croaked as the car bounced over a speed bump onto the road that led to his house. His body tensed; he felt melded to his seat. She was still driving too fast, especially in this neighborhood of small houses and narrow serpentine streets. He wanted to tell her to slow down, but the words would not come.

  “His books,” she said. “That’s what he wanted to give me, a set of his books, he was going to autograph them all and then I’d have my own freakin’ first editions of the Loren Reynolds series.”

  She paused. Lucas rushed to fill the silence. “Hope you still have them,” he said anxiously as the row of books flashed in his imagination. “They’d be worth a lot now.” The car screeched to a sudden stop, whipping his body toward the windshield, then throwing him backward. He sat there, gulping air, afraid to move.

  “That’s all you care about, isn’t it,” she whispered, “him and his books. He said he wanted me to have them and that maybe someday I’d read them and then maybe I’d understand him because he’d put so much of himself into them, and before I can even say anything, he hangs up on me. And that was the last time I ever talked to him. He never listened to me, and then he goes and falls into that stupid river and drowns. I never got a chance to tell him what I thought, and when I’m finally ready to tell him, he goes and dies on me.”

  Lucas was silent.

  “All he cared about was himself and being alone and writing his goddamn books.” Her voice was rising. “He didn’t care about me, all he cared about was making himself feel better by giving me his books, as if that was going to make any difference. And you’re just like him.”

  He fumbled at his seat belt. “Look, thanks for the ride.” He struggled for breath, afraid that she would hit the accelerator again. “It’s close enough to my home, I can walk from here.”

  “You’re just like him,” she repeated. “All he cared about was his books. Well, I don’t care how much that agent can get, I won’t sign anything he sends me, not ever. You won’t see me with a bunch of people who only want to talk to me because of my father. You and all those people who think he’s so great will just have to get along without his books.”

  He tried to open the door, heard a click, then pushed his unlocked door open. He swung his legs over the side of the seat. His feet hit the ground hard as he slipped out of the car; he nearly fell to the pavement.

  “Don’t forget your suitcase,” she shouted after him. The rage in her voice stabbed at him. He opened the other door and pulled his bag from the back seat. “You’re just like him, you got what you needed from me and now you’re going to run off to be alone with your writing and your books.” She was screaming now; a light went on in one of the houses that lined the road. “You ought to thank me, you know.”

  “I did—”

  “Not for the ride, for the story. That’s all anything is to you, stuff you put into a story. Isn’t it? That’s all this is to you, something you can write about. Go ahead, write whatever you want, I don’t care. He’s dead, and sooner or later all those people who think he’s so great will forget all about him and his books.”

  “You’re wrong!” he shouted.

  “Hah!” she screamed at him, happy in her revenge.

  But in time they would forget, he thought. Other writers would come along to distract Mack Vernon’s fans. Lucas slammed the car door shut, grabbed his bag, and jumped back just in time as the car lurched forward. He stood alone in the darkened street as she fled from the drowned father who had eluded her.

  Afterword to “The Drowned Father”

  This story had its origins in an actual incident. Some years ago, on a bus trip to New York City, my partner George Zebrowski struck up a conversation with a young woman in the seat next to his. Her father happened to be a writer whose name George recognized, and she soon revealed how little she thought of her father’s profession and his writing. To say that George, a writer himself, was dismayed by the bitterness she expressed would be putting it mildly.

  The story intrigued me. As someone without children, I often wondered if I would have been able to say to any child of mine, as writers surely have to do often, “Go away and don’t disturb me while I’m writing.” Heartless as it sounds, that kind of ironclad rule is necessary to get any writing done, since the writing (unless you’re a writer prosperous enough to rent an office outside your dwelling) usually has to be done at home. Now I began to wonder how some of the children of writers might be affected by this parental choice of profession, one that requires a certain level of selfishness and self-absorption. This may seem a quaint concern in an age when people routinely post photos of their children and tales of their exploits on various social media, but I used to worry how children who saw themselves reflected in a writer/parent’s work might react; embarrassment, resentment, and bitterness might be only too appropriate. As Joan Didion famously put it, “Writers are always selling somebody out.”

  My earlier drafts of this story turned it into a tale of suspense and ultimately murder, but that kind of plot seemed to mute what was at its heart, the pain of a neglected child and the father who had tried to reach out to her in the only way he could, along with the disillusionment of a reader foolish enough to confuse a writer’s work with the writer’s life.

  THE TRUE DARKNESS

  The shrieking wind went mute. Lydia’s ears throbbed in the silence. Matt reached for the remote just as the TV screen went black and the overhead lights winked out.

  Matt did not curse the darkness.

  Lydia lifted a hand to her face. The living room was so dark that she couldn’t see her own fingers. “Isn’t there a flashlight by the bookcase?” she asked. Matt had been looking for his nail clippers over there earlier, shining a flashlight under the bottom shelf and behind the books; she had reminded him that he wouldn’t have lost the damned clippers in the first place if he didn’t insist on clipping his nails while he watched TV. “Think you left it there before.”

  “If I can find it.” She felt the shifting of his weight on the sofa. “Jesus, can’t see a thing.” His voice was above her now. “This must be the third power failure we’ve had. Better call and find out how long it’ll be.”

  “Even if we manage to call through, they won’t tell us much,” she said.

  “At least we’d have an idea.”

  Lydia leaned forward, felt around on the coffee table for her cellphone, flipped it open, and thumbed a button. The tiny screen should have been glowing by now. “My cel
l’s not working.”

  “What do you mean it’s not working?” Matt’s voice was a bit more distant.

  “Just what I said.” She paused. “Where’s your iPhone?”

  “Think I left it upstairs.”

  “I could try the phone in the kitchen.”

  There was the sound of a thump. “Ow!” Matt said. “Just bashed my knee.”

  Action and reaction, Lydia thought, yet another example of Newton’s third law of motion. She said, “Be careful.”

  “Found the flashlight.” A small round circle of light appeared, moved up and down, then went out. There was something wrong with the flashlight, too. Everything around it, except for the patch of light, had remained completely black.

  The floor creaked and then she felt the weight of her husband against her left side. “You don’t have to sit right on top of me,” she said.

  “Sorry.” He moved away from her. The disk of light reappeared, but failed to illuminate anything around it. “This is really weird,” Matt continued. “This flashlight is screwy.” His voice was shaky.

  “Guess I should try calling,” she said, “even if they don’t tell us much.” She had stored the number for National Access Incorporated in both her cellphone and the landline phone in the kitchen after the last power failure. She fiddled with the cellphone again, but nothing happened. “I’ll try the phone in the kitchen.”

  “Take the flashlight.”

  She felt the cool metal cylinder against her palm and closed her fingers around it, then pushed against the slide with her thumb. At first she thought that the flashlight had died, and then she turned the cylinder toward herself and saw the small circle of light.

  Her face felt cold; it was harder to breathe. She aimed the flashlight away from herself and saw the light disappear.

  She heard Matt catch his breath, but he said nothing. During the last power failure, Matt had cursed National Access for a minute or two, cursed some more while trying to locate a flashlight, had tried and failed to get a call in to the power company, then had suggested that they relax and finish their wine and he would tell her about his latest project while they waited for the power to come back on. It wasn’t like him to sit there saying nothing at all.

  Lydia stood up. Even with the flashlight on, she had to feel her way toward the kitchen. She crept through the dining room, expecting at almost any moment to get to the doorway and then around the corner to the countertop where the phone was located, but the kitchen felt far away, almost unreachable. Before she could take one step, she had to take half a step, then half of that half-step, then half—

  Stop it, she told herself. The minutes seemed to crawl by before she finally touched the edge of the kitchen counter.

  Late that afternoon, a middle school kid had called the library to ask what Zeno’s paradox was; Lydia had taken the call.

  “You don’t need a reference librarian to answer that question,” she had told him.

  “But I don’t understand the answer I found,” the boy replied, sounding close to tears. A homework assignment, she thought, probably one he had put off doing until the last minute, and maybe his computer wasn’t working and he couldn’t go online to search for more information.

  “Well, let me put it as simply as I can,” Lydia said. “Zeno’s paradox states that an arrow will never hit its target, because it has to fly half of the distance to it first, and then half of that distance, and so on and so forth, so the arrow will never reach the target at all, because it has to traverse—move through—an endless series of halves.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Having to cover endless half-distances and never able to get where it’s going is a way of saying that motion is impossible. Or an illusion. Think about it.”

  “Thanks, lady,” the boy said, sounding unconvinced.

  At least she had made it to the kitchen, unlike the arrow forever kept from its target by halves. The power had only gone out for an hour last time, and for about half an hour a month ago, but there had been a high wind warning up earlier in the evening. There had been more such warnings lately, perhaps a sign of increasing climate change since this region had rarely been swept by such strong winds in the past, and the wind had been howling for at least a couple of hours, to the point where she had started to worry about the roof and the tree limbs that might come crashing down on the house. That was one thing they hadn’t had to worry about while living in the city, where the nearest trees of any great size were in the park a block and a half away.

  She slapped the countertop. Her hand found the telephone; her thumb pressed the “Talk” button. Instead of a dial tone, all she heard was a distant whistling sound.

  Lydia leaned against the counter. The silence outside was unnerving. No police sirens, overheard conversations, car alarms going off, or people calling out to one another or gabbing on the sidewalk. She bit her lip, tried the phone again, set it down, then turned off the flashlight. The darkness and silence pressed in around her; she turned on the flashlight again. The patch of light shone up uselessly at her, illuminating nothing, as though the light was being blocked by an invisible barrier, or else struggling to penetrate the ether scientists had once believed filled all of space.

  She made the journey back to the living room and sat down on the sofa. “Any luck?” Matt asked.

  “I couldn’t even get a dial tone.” She waited for him to curse or say something, but he was silent. “Wasn’t there supposed to be a full moon tonight?” She had noticed that earlier, on her office calendar at the library. Matt kept up on things like that.

  “Yeah.”

  “So you’d think we’d see some light through the blinds, wouldn’t you?”

  “I was thinking the same thing. Maybe it’s gotten really cloudy. Maybe the clouds are really thick. That’s what I’ve been telling myself.” His hand slipped around her wrist. “But that doesn’t explain the flashlight. Light doesn’t work that way.”

  “I know.”

  She turned off the flashlight. They sat there in silence. This was what it must be like to be blind, Lydia thought. At last she said, “Maybe we should see how the people across the street are doing.” They had been living in this house for almost four months now, and she had still not met any of their neighbors, but Matt must know something about them by now, since he ran his business from home. “I mean, this is the third power failure since we moved here. Maybe they can tell us how often this happens.”

  “They’ve got three kids,” Matt said. “At least I think all of them are their kids, the ones I saw playing on their lawn the other day. Hard to believe anybody can afford three kids these days.” He sounded a little more like himself. “Guy’s name is Olaf. He looks like an Olaf, too. He’s a big blond-haired guy who’s built like a linebacker and his wife is this little tiny thing with black hair.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Don’t know. I only talked to the guy for a few seconds. He asked me what I did, and I told him Web site design and computer workshops for individuals and groups, and he asked if maybe I could design a Web site for him if he ever quits his job and starts a landscaping business. And that was it.” He sighed. “I could head over there, see if he’s found out anything.”

  “I’ll come with you.” She fumbled for his hand, afraid of sitting alone in the dark; his fingers closed around hers.

  They moved slowly toward the front door, clinging to each other. After long moments, Matt let go of her and then she heard the door creak open. The still air seemed even colder than it had been earlier, when the wind had started to pick up. It was as dark outside as inside the house; the other houses on their street were completely invisible.

  “Matt,” she whispered. Even the thickest cloud cover wouldn’t have turned the sky this black; there would have been some sign of the full moon, a soft silvery glow behind the clouds, a
break through which she could have seen stars.

  A speck of light suddenly appeared in the blackness. “Olaf?” Matt called out. “That you? It’s me, Matt Polgrave from across the street.”

  “Matt?” That was a man’s voice, sounding very faint.

  “Olaf?” Matt replied.

  “Yeah, it’s me. This flashlight isn’t working.” The speck of light disappeared. “Maybe it’s the batteries. I knew I should have picked some up on my way home.”

  “My flashlight’s got the same kind of trouble,” Matt said.

  “Vicky tried calling National Access, but she couldn’t get through. National Asshole, I call them. We’ll probably be the last ones in town to get our power back on.”

  Olaf was very likely right about that, Lydia thought. They were on a cul-de-sac in the middle of nowhere, or so it had always seemed to her, since it took her a good five to ten minutes just to get to the highway and another half an hour after that to drive to work. “We’ll be able to have two cars,” Matt had told her before they moved, “and we won’t have to worry about parking.” She would have preferred just the one car and the parking hassles and her former ten-minute walk to her job at the library. She had felt freer in the city, with the sounds and movement of so many other people around her. Here, she often felt cut off, embedded, trapped. Inertia had become the ruling principle of her life.