When they got up to leave, Josh told Judi, You be good, girlfriend. He told me, Adios, Señor Proulx. Judi apologized for not eating more, said it really was delicious, really. Said she needed a nap, said, Laf, if you really do care about me, then why are you still doing this thing with your wife? She didn’t wait for an answer, which was good because I didn’t have one. I knew, however, that I’d better consider the question because it would resurface as a topic of conversation and soon.
I put on a jacket and took Spot for a walk. The lights were on in the Boninas’ living room. I saw this youngish couple whom I knew only by name on their sofa staring at television, her leg over his leg. They looked so beautiful. I could see my breath in the air and the smoke coming from the Foley’s chimney. I felt calm and optimistic. I thought, What a good world this is.
Wednesday: Prince Spaghetti Day. Guests: Stoni and Richie. Menu: antipasto; garlic bread; spaghetti and meatballs; spumoni.
If you visit Jack Kerouac’s grave in Lowell—and you should if you haven’t—you’ll pass under a railway bridge that is painted with the Prince spaghetti logo and this message: “Welcome to Spaghettiville.” That’s why I buy I buy Prince and not, say, Muller’s.
Because of the rain, we ate inside. Judi couldn’t get over the cholera sweeping through the refugee camps in Zaire, the thousands of people dying every day. Stoni described the symptoms of cholera for us. Richie changed the subject. Said how depressing it was that you couldn’t eat any of the freshwater fish you catch in New England anymore because of the acid rain—we all looked out the window—and the mercury I tried to picture Richie with a fly rod, waders, and creel. He told me he and his dad used to fish the Quaboag River every Saturday in and out of season when he was young. Used to clean the fish, wrap them in tin foil, stack them like cord wood in the freezer, eat them all winter. You do that now, eat all that trout, you’d probably glow in the dark.
Richie could eat a meatball in one bite. He ate fourteen. Stoni told Judi that Trixie had heard from their father. She called him Ronnie. He’s in Henniker, New Hampshire, she said. Just phoned her out of nowhere. Fifteen years between calls. Trixie told him how you were. Judi said, How am I? Sick, Stoni said. I’m sure he’s real concerned, Judi said. Richie’s beeper went off. He went into the parlor to make a call. We ate our spumoni in silence. A beeper? I thought about those fish piled in a freezer and about fathers you can hardly remember and can never forget.
Thursday: Dining Out at the El. Diners: Martha and I. Menu: stuffed grape leaves; kibbe sandwich; baklava.
Martha likes to talk in restaurants. I like to talk after a few drinks. If I have a few cocktails and no one brings up doctors or Republicans, I get sweet and effusive. After Martha had heard my confession on her answering machine, she left her own message. Said to meet her at eleventhirty at the El Morocco. We’ll have lunch before our session. What she said as we examined the menu was how it must have taken some courage to make that call. I was disarmed. Was she setting me up for the fall? Would there be a messy scene in the next few minutes? We ordered.
Martha ordered a bottle of retsina to go with our dessert. She poured. What was going on? I felt like a traitor to Judi, but the grape leaves were wonderful. I may not know what love is, but I know pleasure. We drank, we smiled, we ate baklava, licked our fingers, got silly, said, What the hell, and ordered another bottle of retsina. We called in sick to marriage counseling. I thought about how love and marriage are different. One is an emotion, the other a relationship. I thought, hell, maybe I do love Martha. Just can’t be married to her. I took a deep breath, a sip of retsina, and didn’t say anything.
I remembered when I proposed marriage. We were in Martha’s backyard, sitting on a stone bench by her mother’s garden. The lilacs were blooming. I told her what she already knew—that I had little to offer her except my future. I could hear my voice, could feel its tremor through my bones, but it was like I was sleeping or far away. I told her I loved her. She smiled and kissed my hand. Then she cried. I asked her again would she marry me. This was the nicest thing I ever did for Martha. For anyone. The purest.
Martha asked me how Spot was. Say hi for me, she said. She told a joke about O.J. Simpson, how he was going to take another stab at marriage. She said she heard it from the bishop. I thought maybe one joke about a failed marriage was enough, so I changed the subject to other disasters and wondered how jokes about them start and spread so quickly. We talked about Cape Cod. That’s where we were when the Challenger exploded. We were eating in a little restaurant in Truro when we heard. Later we walked around P-town pointing at houses we might want to live in.
We paid the check. Martha said she’d make me coffee. We drove to her place. The apartment smelled different. I sniffed—like vanilla and cinnamon. There were messages on the fridge with names I didn’t recognize. Names and phone numbers. Martha had a new stereo. She told me to put on whatever I wanted. I turned on the radio to a jazz show on ’ICN and heard Duke Ellington. We had coffee in the parlor. I noticed these little items that I had bought at flea markets and she used to hate. They were all over the house: the alligator nutcracker, the old box of Hartz Mountain canary food, the photo of Fess Parker in the old frame, the bronzed baby shoes, the ashtray from the Loveless Motel in Nashville, the Lundgren & Jonaitis milk bottle, the 1918 menu from Coney Island Hot Dogs, the Jerry Mahoney ventriloquist’s dummy Martha adjusted the Venetian blinds to keep the sun out of our eyes. We went from coffee to wine seamlessly. An insouciant burgundy. Martha took out a photo album, and we paged through it. We laughed at our hairdos and clothes, watched ourselves grow older in minutes. We ended up making love on the floor. When we finished, I didn’t want to be the first one to move. Ellington was into “Caravan” by then. The news came on. I didn’t move. Martha smelled like buttermilk biscuits. I felt her shoulder twitch. I was free.
Friday: Blue Light Special. Guests: Layla, Pozzo, and Arthur. Menu: grilled cheese on white; pickle chips; cole slaw; French fries; lemonade; apple pie à la mode.
What I was trying to re-create here was the picture on the menu at Kresge’s lunch counter in about 1965, back when we used to shine our penny loafers with Vaseline, back before the city fathers built a shopping galleria downtown and all the good stores and all the good lunch counters closed: Woolworth’s, Kresge’s, Newberry’s, Grants, Liggett’s, Denholm’s, the Waldorf. Menus with pictures of the food. Think about it. Says something about the place, doesn’t it? Pride? I don’t think so. Anyway, Pozzo didn’t eat meat since he came back from space. He’d become a veterinarian, he said.
Judi said I looked distracted. I’m fine, I told her, just at a crucial spot in my story, and I’m preoccupied, sort of. Spot woofed when he heard his name. I told him to hush. Judi ate her grilled cheese, but not the crust. She drank her lemonade. Her appetite wasn’t much, but it was encouraging. Pozzo was pretty close-mouthed about Venus, actually. Demure, you might say. Arthur got him to open up a little bit. He wanted to know what they ate on Venus. Pozzo said, Not each other, not anymore. They eat something called fartlek, which is organic but not animal and not quite plant and looks like gefilte fish, like a brick of gefilte fish. Layla said, Pozzo brought some back; tastes great, kind of.
Pozzo, I said, you still the sun? Judi kicked me under the table. He nodded. I asked him if he intended for us to understand this solar image as a metaphor, like Jesus or Osiris or Adonis or one of those. He said not. So who was your father? I said. He said, Marlon Beckett from Grafton Street. Not Chaos or the Void? I said. Why was I hassling him? Pozzo said, My dad split when I was like seven or eight. Took off with the baby-sitter, Giselle Turgeon. Even though Giselle was in high school, I was in love with her, too. I saw the mythic dimensions Pozzo’s story was taking on, but I didn’t push him. If he hadn’t already thought of tracking down his old man and exacting revenge, then I wasn’t going to bring it up.
We heard the roar and backfire of a motorcycle and froze. Arthur dropped his fork and his jaw. He paled. We
listened as the pitch of the engine increased—Arthur pushed back his chair and measured the height of the Devlins’ fence—and then faded. I looked at Arthur. I wanted to say, Why do you do this? Why go out with a woman who wants another man, a dangerous man? Why put your life in peril? But I kept quiet. No matter, Arthur heard me. Because I love that girl, he said. I’d do anything. Love is patient, Pozzo said. Layla took Pozzo’s hand, kissed it, said, Let me file these nails for you, honey.
After lunch, Stoni stopped back to take Judi in for tests at Memorial. She brought along a silk kerchief for Judi. Green and gold. She tied it onto Judi’s head. This would be Judi’s first venture back into the world since the chemo. She seemed apprehensive. I walked her to the car. She walked slowly, as if she were a full glass of water that didn’t want to spill. When they left, I changed the sheets on the bed. Every day now I could brush together a handful of hair from Judi’s pillow. I went to the kitchen and sat down to work. I didn’t write about Dale and Theresa. I wrote about a boy and his father in Maine. Somehow that’s what the week had meant to me. I don’t try to figure it out. I just write it. When I finished the story a week later, I sent it off to Probable Cause. Here it is:
39.
“The Wood Inside” by Lafayette Proulx
WHEN THE EARTH FINALLY THAWED LAST SPRING, IT WAS OPENING WEEK OF rainbow season on the Big Wilson, and we buried the Easter animals that Dad had wrapped in tin foil and stacked in his freezer alongside Hector Papineau’s dressed-out venison: the pair of Muscovy ducklings from the Ben Franklin’s in Guilford who caught pneumonia, Mom said, from sleeping out on the back porch; Simone’s cozy leghorn chick, Lulu, whose eyes leaked green syrup, and whose beak softened to oatmeal; and my Belgian hare, Jake, who’d gnawed nearly through the claw-foot leg on Mom’s wardrobe before choking on a splinter, digging at his neck, tearing through his fur, skin, and sinew, trying to reach the wood inside.
Mom’s husband, George, dropped us by Dad’s on his way fishing. Simone and I ate Sugar Pops and watched TV at the kitchen table while Dad showered and dressed. We watched cartoons. Simone kept her mittens on. In his bedroom, Dad answered a phone call and spoke quietly to whoever it was. I carried our milky bowls to the sink and set them in an inch of sudsy, gray water beside the two glasses. I took a Marlboro from the box on the counter, slipped it in my shirt pocket. Took the book of matches, too. From the Dog Sled Tavern. We watched that coyote blow himself to smithereens again with a tube of Acme dynamite.
We buried our animals off the path in the woods that leads down to the Bowditch farm. Buried them wrapped like candies three feet deep by the speckled alders. Dad tamped the dirt with the rusted blade of his spading fork. I said a prayer to St. Francis. Simone hugged Dad’s leg and sniffled. He smoothed her hair. She closed her eyes. We drove to the Dixfield Diner. Dad does all his talking in public.
We sat in a booth. Silver and blue vinyl seats. The diner smelled like Dutch Cleanser. Simone and I sat across from Dad. He wore the plaid flannel shirt we’d bought for him last Christmas. Dad joked about mud season with Mary Moody, our waitress. I could see Dad’s reflection in the window, see the back of his head like the dark side of the moon. And beyond his reflection, I could see George’s pickup parked across the street outside Ledoux’s Olde Tyme Inn. Dad told Mary he’d have two eggs sunny-side, bacon, and wheat toast. And give the kids whatever they want. Two chocolate milks and two grilled cheese sandwiches.
Simone kicked her feet against our booth, blew chocolate bubbles through her straw. Dad hung his spoon from his nose to make Simone laugh. He saw me staring at his hand and at the space where a finger used to be. He smiled, touched the back of my hand with his fingertips, drew a circle. Dad sponged the yoke with his toast, ate the toast, clapped the crumbs from his hands. He sipped his coffee and watched Mary Moody slide a dish of apple pie from the glass dispenser at the counter. He sat up straight. And then he started talking.
After my father left, quit Sawyer’s Home Heating Oil, and moved to Delaware, that’s when Donny Morin told me we could have saved the Easter animals, could have stuffed them with sawdust like his old man did with the twenty-three-inch rainbow he’s got mounted over the sofa in their trailer. Donny watched him do it. You scrape what’s inside, all that damp and shiny stuff, and then whatever it is will last forever. That’s the way it works. Donny said his old man said you only get to keep what’s gone.
40.
A Literary Evening at Circe’s Bar & Grille
I STILL WASN’T SURE THIS WAS SUCH A HOT IDEA. OUR LOCAL LITERARY MAGAzine, the Blackstone Review (which had rejected without comment two of my stories, “Tula Baker’s Face-Lift” and “Tenderness,” and three sestinas, one with these ambitious end words: cleave, schizocarp, highboy, nebbish, patulous, and yammer, all in the last year), was sponsoring a literary reading, featuring writers from the forthcoming issue. I had to ask myself, Was I going to the reading for revenge?
I’m of the school that believes literature, like children, should be seen and not heard. But Nicky told me this was Victorian thinking, and I should be ashamed of myself. He told me these lumpen poets were my comrades. You think I should go and mingle, then? I said. We used to mingle, he said, now we network. He patted me on the back, winked.
I called Judi after I’d strained the fat in the deep fryer to see if she’d like to join us. She said, Thanks, but no thanks. Said she just wasn’t up to it—all the barroom smoke would only make her ill. She told me to just go on with Nicky and have a good time. Stoni was bringing over a movie for them to watch. Charlie Chan at the Opera. I told her if she needed me for anything to call Circe’s.
So Nicky and I closed up Our Lady’s and walked downtown. We grabbed stools at the bar, back by the door. That way we could whisper if we wanted to be snide, could roll our eyes if we had to. And if we needed to leave, we could slip out without disturbing the patrons, distracting the readers, or ruffling any metaphors. We should have recognized how we were only reinforcing our bad attitudes right off. Nicky ordered two ouzos, in honor of Homer, he said.
I recognized a couple of people. One was this bearded guy I’ve seen for years grilling hot dogs at Coney Island. And for some reason I think he’s a defrocked priest, but I don’t know why I think that. Another guy I knew was sitting with a young woman who looked familiar, probably an old student of mine.
If you’re sitting home every day writing, you could get the idea that you’re the only practicing writer in the city. But here they were, the Worcester literati, and they all seemed to know each other and seemed so delighted to be together. And none of them knew me from Adam’s off ox. I caught the novelist at the end of the bar looking at me. I smiled. He nodded. I knew who he was from his photo in the Telegram & Gazette. He’d left town a decade ago and was back to sign some books at Tatnuck Booksellers. Wrote a Southern gothic novel, of all things. He sat alone, I noticed, and drank steadily. Trying to be Faulkner, I guessed.
The first reader was an English professor from Holy Cross who had several books of poetry published by small but prestigious presses. His name was Scott something, and he was quite charming in an earnest and self-effacing way I bet his students loved him. He told us that he got most of his inspiration from the wilderness, from his love for his wife, Liz—Liz is here tonight, he said; he asked her to stand; she refused.
Scott recited a poem about fishing in the Quabbin Reservoir and hooking something profound and deep that jolted him out of his worldly cares. And there were golden scales gleaming in the sun and thunderous slaps of water and ten-pound test line tangled up in Heaven’s Gate and later a meal of transcendentally poached rainbow trout. I looked at Nicky, ordered two more ouzos. Nicky said he had to pee and did so while the performance poets were setting up.
A guy who called himself Bonewheel (Hi, Mom, it’s Bonewheel. How’s Dad?) played saxophone while his partner, Jane Eyre, performed a long, Whitmanesque poem about a bus trip across America. The poem, “Inside/Outside USA,” was nightmarishly gruesome, but
the music was sweet bebop. Bats burst from storm drains, tarmac liquefied, corpses floated into living rooms on tides of radioactive sewage. Fellatio was frequently, gratuitously, and prodigiously performed in malls, at Burger Kings, and in supermarkets. Pus oozed from air-conditioning vents. The audience chuckled, nodded their heads, applauded, as if to say, Yes, yes, this is the way we live these days in America. Nicky whispered that Jane Eyre must be a Nazi.
The featured reader was a large African-American woman whose photo graced the cover of the newest issue of the Review. Her name was June McClary, and she was from Boston. She had just published her first novel, a ’tale about coming of age in Roxbury called ‘Buryed Alive. June told us immediately that she was thirty-something and a lesbian. A few in the audience barked at that, hooted their approval. Then she read a chapter from the novel dealing with the central character’s first sexual encounter with a white girl after a gym class at South Boston High. It was very funny and heartwarming. It really was.
During the question-and-answer period that followed, June told us that she had been compared to Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, and J. D. Salinger, and she was quite serious. But, she added, I don’t write like no one. Whoopi Goldberg, she said, was interested in the novel for the movies. Applause.
I suppose it was inevitable, the ensuing discussion of the pitiful state of contemporary American poetry The audience for poetry had disappeared, Scott said, and it’s the fault of the poets. This was another popular notion at Circe’s. Poets write for other poets. It’s become an elitist pursuit, he said. Not in this room, I thought. In other countries poets are honored and respected. Everyone writes poetry, Scott said, but no one reads it. One young woman suggested that rap music was the real poetry of America, and though she got no support from the peanut gallery, it was agreed that poetry needed to be more accessible, needed to abandon its literary pretensions if it ever again wanted to be taken seriously. If people don’t understand poetry, it’s the poets’ fault, not the people’s.
Love Warps the Mind a Little Page 17