This was the secret life. For most people, Moose assumed, the secret life was more terrible than anyone could imagine. These couples one saw barely speaking—their lives looked bad enough in public! And yet, would anyone guess at his? Of course, it was unlikely to last; Moose expected this. He had proceeded through the years along a massif of shifting plates, his steps growing more fearful, more tentative each time the ground buckled under him. But for now Priscilla was happy, remained happy, in part (Moose sensed) out of sheer relief at being emancipated from her marriage to Wes Victor, a local root-canal specialist who’d called her a lazy cow and demanded that she sell Amway products, who’d been disgusted by her failure, in three years, to produce even one child. Wes had remarried within months of their divorce, and now took evident relish in herding his copious progeny past Moose and Priscilla’s table at the Cherryvale food court, where they went sometimes on a Saturday. Moose watched his wife’s face very carefully during these encounters, attuned to the smallest flicker of regret or remorse as Priscilla saw her former and much more wealthy husband pass with his new wife, who tugged one kid by the hand, pushed a second in a stroller, carried a third in a drooping sack attached to her back and a fourth inside her womb, which led the way at a salute. But Moose saw only relief. “Look how he doesn’t even help her,” Priscilla said once, in the wondering, reverent tones of someone who, through a minor fluke of rescheduling, has avoided a plane crash.
Priscilla poured batter into four hissing pads. “Go. Work,” she said, patting Moose out the kitchen door. “I’ve got my book.”
In his living room, Moose was greeted by the major nineteenth-century surveyors’ maps of Rockford—1858, ’71, ’76, ’92—along with an array of twentieth-century maps extending to the present day. The Rock River spasmed identically through the middle of each, accentuating the changes around it: the gradual accretion of factories in the last century followed by their gradual dissolution in this one. Moose stared at the maps. It was all right there, the narrative of industrial America told in these glyphs: a tale that began with the rationalization of objects through standardization, abstraction and mass production, and concluded with the rationalization of human beings through marketing, public relations, image consulting and spin. Yet were Moose to invite a student to look at the maps (as he’d done many times), they would not be able to see this. He marveled and puzzled and raged at the awful gap between his vision and other people’s, at his own consistent failure to bridge it. Yet what could he do but try? And keep trying, in hopes that someone, at last, would look back at him with recognition.
At the sound of the shower, Moose rose from the couch. Priscilla was in the bathroom, lifting the lavender nightie over her head, pink toothbrush dangling lazily from her mouth. Steam floated up from behind the shower curtain, mingling with the smell of pancake syrup. Moose stood behind his wife at the sink and slipped his hand down that hard, slightly brown belly, kissing her neck. She laughed, rinsing suds from her teeth, then led him by the hand back into the bedroom, the bed still tussled and fragrant with her sleep, led him there and encircled him with her brown arms and legs. They made love quickly.
Afterward, Moose watched Priscilla’s sleeping face while “Dancing in the Moonlight” played softly on her small transistor radio in the kitchen. At Cherryvale last year, he’d noticed her eyeing a poster for package tours to Hawaii: a couple thrashing through creamy surf, the man vigorous and young, unlike Moose, the woman slender and elastic, like Priscilla. “Would you like to go there?” he had asked, but she’d shrugged this off, knowing they couldn’t afford it, knowing Moose hadn’t boarded a plane since his return from New Haven twelve years ago. But Moose had resolved to take Priscilla there—to Hawaii, yes he would—and in the months since then he’d lain awake many nights, trying to acclimate himself: Fruit drinks. Coconuts. Saltwater. Happy people everywhere, people like Priscilla—Moose longed to be in their midst. But the trip frightened him, too, and he hadn’t mentioned it.
Eventually he left the bed and headed back to his maps. Only then did he hear the shower still running in the bathroom and reach behind the plastic curtain to turn it off.
Charlotte rode to Winnebago College directly after school, her body alive with spidery anticipation. The twisty college road, the lunar quiet of the campus lulled her into a state not unlike what she experienced at night, sleepwalking from her bedroom to her bike. They were connected, Moose and Michael West, linked in a relationship of cause and effect that Charlotte could not have explained but felt deeply, instinctively. It had all begun with her uncle: first the sense of waiting, then seeing Michael West that second time. And Moose’s advice—-follow your desire—which had worked almost supernaturally.
She left her bike in the rack and made her way toward Meeker Hall, walking slowly because she was early. Wandering the curled paths, going in circles to make the extra minutes pass, she remembered last night, lying with him right after they had done it—not on the kitchen counter but again, upstairs (it was in her notes). “Where were you before you came to Rockford?” she asked, as he gazed at the ceiling.
“New York.”
“And where before that?”
He glanced at her, moonlight spinning on his eye. “Overseas.”
“Which sea?”
Rather than answer, he snapped a kumquat from his tree and broke the skin with his teeth. Its essence wafted over Charlotte: tart, bitter, sweet. Was it the smell of love? She waited for him to answer, but he sucked out the kumquat’s insides and nudged the empty rind toward the open window.
As she was leaving, Charlotte paused in the back doorway, facing him, and forced herself to speak. “Maybe you could give me something.”
“Give you something.” He didn’t understand.
“Anything.”
She shouldn’t have to ask. She had to ask for everything.
“Ah,” he said at last. “A gift.”
“It doesn’t have to be new,” Charlotte added quickly. “I mean, you don’t have to buy it.”
His eyes moved, he was thinking.
“It could be that,” she said lightly, pointing at his chest. The bead of amber on its leather string was hidden beneath his T-shirt, but he knew what she meant. If he gives me that, then he loves me, Charlotte thought, and knew that it was true, that the other, smaller proofs had proved nothing. She looked into the mystery of his face—angles, corners, depths—the face of a stranger to whom she had given her heart.
“Or something else,” she said casually.
“Something else,” he agreed.
Charlotte arrived at her uncle’s office to the odd sensation that he’d been awaiting her. “Come in, come in,” he murmured, bustling uncharacteristically to usher her into her chair. She was surprised, encouraged.
When Moose was seated behind his desk, Charlotte took out her essay and read:
How Two Machines Changed Everything About Grain
After the prairie got broken up, there were a lot of nutrients left in the soil, which they called “sod,” and Rockford farmers in the 1830s and ′40s started planting grains: wheat, corn, oats, barley, rye. They grew like crazy. After the harvest, each farmer poured his grain into cloth sacks with the name of the farm on them, which was how they were sold.
Normally her uncle sat hunched in his chair while she read, knuckles to forehead, eyes closed. But today, Charlotte felt his gaze trained on her face, as if something there had caught his attention.
But growing the grain was the easy part. The nightmare was getting those fat heavy sacks to a place where they could be sold. To get to Chicago, you had to load the sacks onto a cart pulled by a horse, praying to God the wheels didn’t break or get stuck in the mud, because the roads were 100% dirt. That’s what a road was: dirt!
She glanced at her uncle again, found him watching her still, and felt herself begin to blush.
To get to St. Louis, you loaded the sacks on a flatboat or a steamboat and floated them down the Rock River to the Missis
sippi River, but if the grain happened to get wet, then it was ruined. And the trip took so long by boat AND cart that when you got to market the price of grain was sometimes too low. How did these farmers survive, with so many hardships? You almost wonder.
As she read, Charlotte began to hear her essay in a slightly different way; imbued with whatever it was that had snared Moose’s interest. She could feel the words in her mouth: “grain,” “sacks,” “dirt,” “wet,” each with its own soft weight.
Then in the 1850s came the railroad …
Moose was watching his niece as he’d promised Ellen he would. He noted her flushed cheeks, the skin pink all the way to her hairline, her bright dark eyes glancing at him shyly as she read. And again, half against his will, he heard Ellen’s words, in the grip of something, and felt the stirring of a possibility.
A second invention, which became widely used in the 1850s, was the steam-powered grain elevator. Now, what is a “grain elevator?” Well, it’s a building that can take in grain, weigh it, store it and release it.
Her uncle was staring at her in a peculiar way, and it came to Charlotte that he must notice the difference in her—he alone, of everyone she knew. And now Michael West seemed to float up between them, a sudden, spectral presence. Charlotte imagined she was reading the story aloud to her uncle: He carried me upstairs. The room was dark, but street light came in through the window. I saw the bones in his chest…
A machine pulled the grain in buckets out of the railroad cars, a machine weighed the grain and a machine poured it into bins to be stored, which meant that no one had to haul those heavy sacks of grain around a dock anymore, because no one even put their grain in sacks anymore …
Moose felt a sharpening in the room, a quivering intensity that excited and confused him.
There were no more sacks of grain because now grain was sold by weight and poured like a liquid and mixed together with other grains from other farmers. Now it was not this farmer’s grain and that farmer’s grain, it was just Grain, capital G, everyone’s grain mixed together, and this was a very big change.
“Oh-ho!” Moose cried, bolting from his chair. “Yes, it was! A very big change. Abstraction; standardization; the collapse of time and space … it was the beginning of modernity!”
He stood in a pose of astonishment. Not merely in response to Charlotte’s words—perhaps not her words at all, but some feeling behind them, as if she were recounting a tale that mattered to her deeply, personally, in all the ways a thing can matter. The feeling half frightened him; what did it mean?
Her uncle had leapt to his feet and was regarding Charlotte in a way he never had before. And the prolonged surge of his attention roused a hungry, empty part of her that reached toward him helplessly, eagerly, craving more of his attention.
For the farmers (she read on, voice trembling) the combination of trains and grain elevators changed everything, really. Bigger amounts of grain could be bought and sold because you didn’t need actual human beings to carry it around in sacks. Grain wasn’t separate things anymore; it was just one big thing called Grain, like water is one big thing called Water …
Moose lowered himself back onto his chair, allowing himself to imagine that Charlotte was on the verge, not of seeing—that would be reaching, that would be wishing—but of readying herself for the first faint intimations of sight. And he had a sudden impression of light, light everywhere, in the room and all around his niece, as if his office window opened not into the earth but to sky.
He was frightened to have Charlotte go on, afraid that whatever she said would destroy his hope.
Because of all these changes, the futures market got started, which meant that people began buying and selling the idea of grain without ever actually giving each other any grain or even touching grain, or even seeing it. It was basically gambling on the price of grain, whether it would go up or down. Which I guess made sense because the grain was already an idea, like paper money is just Money, unlike gold coins that actually have value in themselves.
In Moose’s imagination there was a break, a snap, and then a great many things ensued with a drastic simultaneity that was the hallmark of mental events unfettered by the constraints of physical possibility: he bellowed (mentally), “Yyyyyeeeeeeeessssss!,” his uvula swinging like a pendulum at the back of his throat, the prolonged, gut-heaving force of his yell loosening the support beams over his head and sending tiny fissures through the walls of Meeker Hall, which widened into cracks and gaps and then gullies, so that shortly the building was collapsing over their heads: desks, computers, books, a hecatomb of didacticism and scholarship and cruelty (toward him) reduced to nonsense by a single yell from the man they’d relegated to the basement, but that wasn’t all—his yell sent shock waves through the soil in whose depths they’d forced him to work, waves that burrowed under those delicately landscaped hills and dales and dells and playing fields, so that the buildings whose halcyon views they enhanced were shaken to their foundations, and by the time he reached the sssss of Yyyyyeeeeeeeesssss, a thunderous general collapse was in progress that threatened to spread indefinitely, his departmental colleagues airborne and whirling like locusts, desks, files, documents intended to effect his dismissal (he knew it! He knew it!), all of these separated and broke and divided until they were blowing in the breeze like the furry seeds of dandelions, and in the silence that seeped over the world following this juggernaut, a silence like the falling of night, Moose stepped from his basement hole and surveyed the wreckage his affirmation had wrought and was pleased, yes, he was satisfied. They’d had it coming, trying to bury him alive down here, and he looked at Charlotte seated across his desk, Charlotte who was on the verge of seeing, Charlotte who knew not what she saw, and said, very softly, “Yes.”
And in that moment, Charlotte, too, experienced a falling away; her life fell away, her friends—they fell away. She’d been clinging to them these past weeks, wanting to be like Melanie Trier, like other people. But now she saw, or felt, that this wasn’t possible. She made her choice: Moose, and Michael West. Her secret life. She gave up the rest. The relief was physical, like releasing a long tight breath that had crowded her lungs for too long, letting it go because it was stale, the oxygen was gone. Her uncle looked younger, lean and eager under his slight growth of beard: the boy in the picture again, the water-skier grinning, half submerged. And Charlotte had done it, made him that way again. She was his special student—she felt this. Knew it.
“I think we should pause,” Moose said carefully, “and not read any more today.”
“Actually, I was done,” she said, laughing. “The end.”
“But not the end.” Moose leaned back in his chair, watching Charlotte as if she were a marvel, as if the mere sight of her had the power to restore him. They sat that way for some moments.
“Uncle Moose,” Charlotte said at last. “Could I see that picture in your wallet again? Of the river?”
Surprised, Moose dug his wallet from his back pocket, opened it, removed the picture from its plastic sleeve and slid it toward Charlotte across the desk. She hardly needed to look. She knew already that it would be the same place, the exact spot where she’d first seen Michael West, last August. The same place, a hundred years ago.
It was all connected.
“Keep it,” Moose said, nudging the picture toward Charlotte across his desk. “I want you to have it.”
She frowned, not believing him. For as long as she’d known her uncle, he had carried that picture.
“It’s yours,” Moose said, and looked away.
Part Two
The Mirrored Room
Chapter Ten
“What you have to understand, Charlotte—please don’t take this the wrong way—,” said Victoria Knight, friend of Lily Cabron, the hair stylist from my failed job for Italian Vogue, “but there’s nothing inherently sympathetic about your story. I mean, most people would consider you lucky just to have lived the glamorous life you’ve had. The chal
lenge for us is to open a door into your inner world, so they’ll sympathize with you and root for you and want to spend money finding out more about you.”
“I see,” I said, which was not quite true.
This lunchtime primer in public relations was the fruit of my own arduous campaign, launched ten days earlier, after my calamitous date and failed suicide attempt. Ignoring the sage advice of Mark, the downstairs neighbor whose coitus I had interrupted, I had not slept late the next morning, but had risen early and pawed through the prior day’s pockets and handbag like someone feeling for traces of life under a layer of smoldering ash. I’d been looking for Irene Maitlock’s business card, out of some amorphous wish to make contact with the reporter, to speak with her. I couldn’t find it. What I found instead was Lily Cabron’s business card with the phone number of her friend, the alleged PR wizard, scribbled on the back.
I called Victoria Knight three times each day for nearly a week, only to be flicked away by several assistants who had a way of delivering the phrase, “She’s in a meeting,” as if it were an obscenity. But I kept calling (being not exactly busy). She was the only lead I had, despite a call to the New York Post in search of Irene Maitlock, about whom I lacked sufficient information—Department, floor, desk, staff or freelance? barked the switchboard operator—to locate.
And what did I want to say to her, anyway?
One night around ten o’clock, I caught Victoria Knight at her desk, sounding weary, and managed to blurt out the rudiments of my story. At which point, with a straightforwardness that seemed no less arbitrary than her prior avoidance of me had been, we made a lunch date.
“Unless—,” she went on, “and I think this is something you should consider—unless we can portray your accident as being the outcome of some kind of destructive behavior pattern, like drinking or an abusive relationship, drug use maybe, something in your childhood that’s haunted you—I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but if we can work the story around the idea of punishment and redemption, that could be very appealing. Never underestimate Americans’ religious fanaticism—that’s something I learned early on. If you take that route, you’re saying: I had it all in the palm of my hand but I squandered it and now I’ve got nothing. And yet, out of this wreckage, I’ve learned the meaning of life and can be reborn.”
Look at Me Page 22