Wit's End

by Karen Joy Fowler

  “Thus do I loose all Gordian knots,” he’d said, which had surprised Rima; she wouldn’t have pegged him as a reader. (Though when Rima’s students had surprised her like that, it always turned out to be something they’d seen on an episode of The Simpsons.) She considered the further possibility that Martin might have also helped her into bed and heaped dachshunds on her after. She was quite moved by the picture; in fact, she felt very friendly toward Martin once she remembered enough to feel so. When he wasn’t obsessing about money, he seemed like a nice-enough guy.

  He’d already e-mailed her twice, offering to come down and take her out the next weekend. If the weather stayed good, they could go to the boardwalk, he’d said. They could go to something called the Mystery Spot and see a ball roll uphill. Or there was a haunted winery up in the mountains. Martin offered this last with considerable confidence. Rima could see he thought he had her measure, and her measure was a wine-tasting with ghosts. She’d said no just to prove she could. And because of Tilda. And because, what with her father, Oliver, and Maxwell Lane, she felt she had as many men in her life as she could reasonably manage.

  Chapter Eight

  (1)

  Tuesday was Election Day. Rima, Tilda, and Addison stayed up late to see the Democrats take the House, Addison running back and forth the whole time, between the second-floor computer and the television, dachshunds at her heels. Among Addison’s close friends, several blamed the absence of a new novel on the delayed shock of having seen the Supreme Court, with no pretense of legal standing, hand George Bush the presidency, and everything that had happened since. There was a list on the refrigerator of the five justices who’d done this, pinned into place with a magnet shaped like a fish, next to the five worst Bush recount outrages. And down from that, the name of every congressperson who’d voted for the Military Commissions Act and the end of democracy in this country. Recently, when Addison was asked when the new novel would be done, she answered that she wouldn’t publish again until habeas corpus had been restored. Addison was an intensely political person. She kept lists.

  Wednesday morning, in a post-election euphoria, she added an e-mail she’d received on her website to the hall of shame that was her refrigerator door.

  “I have always been a fan of yours, but I just read what you wrote on the Huffington Post with all your snotty little remarks denigrating President Bush. So now I know you despise the present administration, and prefer people who are so sleazy and morally bankrupt as to submit to blow jobs in the oval office, raping women, committing adultery, lying under oath, and are so stupid as to ignore the threats to American safety such as the first attack on the World Trade Center.

  “I’m sorry you felt it necessary to express your Bush hating aging hippie opinions. I know my comments will mean nothing to you. Liberals never change, but I thank you anyway for revealing yourself. I never have to read you again. I think Maxwell would be just as appalled as I am.” It was signed “a fan no more.”

  “Who says the gracious art of letter-writing is dead?” Addison asked. She was in a magnanimous mood. “You’ll see. Food will taste better, jokes will be funnier, even television, even television will be good. All because the Democrats have the power of the subpoena.” If only Rima’s father had lived to see it!

  (If only Oliver had lived to see YouTube. If only Rima’s mother had lived to see . . . But that death was so long past, Rima was hard-pressed to think of anything her mother hadn’t missed.)

  They were celebrating. Addison was taking Rima downtown for a quick congratulatory stop at the bookstore (which was forty years old this month, and Addison remembered every single year. The Loma Prieta quake had leveled it, and Addison had been among the four hundred volunteers who carried the books out of the rubble, but that was a story for another time, or maybe it wasn’t, nothing more tiresome than people’s quake stories, but anyway, that old rising-from-the-ashes feeling was as powerful today as it had been back then) and then a sushi lunch. Tilda said she couldn’t go, she had a thing. Rima was relieved to hear it. It was hard to share raw fish with someone who thought you were a corrupter of impressionable young men.

  The scene on the street was joyful. A man on a recumbent bicycle pedaled past. He was shouting like the town crier. “The Ring-bearer has fulfilled his quest! Frodo has destroyed the Ring!”

  Addison pointed out a man downtown who would, for a dollar, debate you on any subject you chose, taking whatever position you opposed. His look was eclectic—stained navy pea jacket, deer-stalker cap, ski gloves, mirror shades. His nose was purple, his cheeks veined. But he was refusing to argue. “We’re all on the same page today,” he kept saying. “One day only. Out of business! Tomorrow we’ll talk about how the Democrats’ taking the House is not the same as the end of the Iraq War.” Addison said she’d never before seen him refuse an argument. It was unprecedented.

  An a cappella group by the flower stand was leading a sing-along of “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” “Aren’t there any Republicans in Santa Cruz?” Rima asked.

  “Apparently. They write letters to the editor,” Addison said. “And the local results weren’t as invigorating as the national.

  “But that’ll be a cold comfort today. Today you’ll recognize the Republicans by the expressions on their faces.”

  She was wrong about this. The pink clown was just walking by. His umbrella was printed with little ducks, and he was wrapped in a sparkly shawl. His smile was both beatific and scary, but this had nothing to do with the election. Rima had seen exactly the same smile the weekend before. He could easily be a Republican; no one would ever know.

  And once again, Rima seemed to be the only one to see him. Perhaps he was a hallucination. A visitation. Her own private clown.

  A woman came toward Rima. She had wild wiry red hair and was carrying a string bag with groceries in it—loose carrots, soup cans, dinner rolls. For a moment Rima thought she was the woman from the beach. The nose seemed right, and the red-rimmed eyes, but Rima’s suspicions were roused mostly by the way she stared at Addison. Rima almost said something, but then she saw another woman who could have been the woman from the beach. This one had black hair, sticking up from her forehead in spikes. Obviously Rima had no idea what the woman from the beach had looked like, beyond the fact that she was white.

  And there were many people staring at Addison. Rima had forgotten how famous Addison was. Now she remembered. A famous writer going into a bookstore in her own hometown was likely to be stared at.

  People came out from the stacks and behind their counters to say hello. The quick stop-in stretched to half an hour, then forty minutes, as there were remainders to be found and signed, and these were immediately bought, so they had to be re-signed, but personalized. There was the election to be exulted over, the California results discussed (schizophrenic, they all agreed), and a great many new books to be pointed out and recommended. Plus Rima had to be introduced to everyone. “My goddaughter from Cleveland,” Addison said.

  Well, Ohio hadn’t delivered the complete Democratic rout that had been predicted. Still—a clear winner in the “most improved” category. People in the bookstore were letting bygones be bygones.

  By the time Addison finally made it to checkout, she was buying three novels and the selected letters of Martha Gellhorn. There was a small book, more like a pamphlet, faceup on her pile. The clerk, a young woman with two short ponytails on top of her head like teddy-bear ears, picked it up to scan it. Addison stopped her. “I have that one at home,” she told Rima, and the clerk set it aside on the counter by Rima’s arm.

  Rima looked at the cover. Holy City: Riker’s Roadside Attraction in the Santa Cruz Mountains: A Nostalgic History, by Betty Lewis. How weird! Rima hadn’t even known there was a Holy City until a few days before. And now she’d sent a letter there. She’d had no idea it was a roadside attraction. And now she had no idea what kind of roadside attraction. She pictured a small storefront. A pin-ball machine. A curtained doorway with a
sign to the side. “Fifty cents admission. See the Horrible Thing!” She picked the book up, flipped through it while Addison paid. The Horrible Thing turned out to be a white supremacist cult.

  (2)

  They walked a couple of blocks to the sushi restaurant and sat at the bar. Here again, Addison seemed to know everyone. A martini appeared without having been ordered. To the list of things her friends had failed to warn her about Santa Cruz, Rima added the fact that the sushi contained crushed nuts. Even more surprising was what a good idea that was. “How about that election,” the sushi chef said. He looked more like a surfer than a sushi chef.

  There was a ceramic cat on the bar, mostly white, with calico patches and a raised paw. Maneki neko. A good-luck charm to bring in customers. This one was Americanized, beckoning with the back of its paw outward instead of the front, which was traditional. Or so Rima had read somewhere or other.

  “I’d be happy to tell you about Holy City,” Addison said, “if there’s anything particular you want to know.” She was stirring her drink with the olive in a careless, fiddle-dee-dee way, as if she knew nothing about the letter Rima had sent. But why else would she keep bringing up Holy City? Kenny Sullivan, postman to the rich and famous, must have sung like a canary.

  Rima opened her mouth to explain why she’d sent a letter to a woman she doubted was alive, and signed it with a fictional character’s name. No one was more curious than she to hear what she would say. But Addison was still talking. “What did your dad tell you?”

  Although Rima had been wanting Addison to talk about her father, she would have liked to choose the place and time. She needed to be braced for it; the question struck her like a slap. “I never heard of Holy City until that box of letters you gave me,” she said. Her voice began shaky but leveled out. She was changing the subject, and doing it as quickly as she could. “With Constance Wellington’s letters?”

  “I don’t remember,” Addison started, and then she started over. “Cat lady? God, I haven’t thought of her in years.”

  The great advantage of sitting at the sushi bar was in not being face-to-face. Rima could avoid looking at Addison without appearing to avoid it. She stared instead into the glass case of ice, salmon, eel, avocado. She looked up into the round white Buddha-beaming face of the calico cat. There was music in the background; the soundtrack for this conversation was the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Rima took another piece of seaweed, raw fish, and crushed nuts, but she was too tense to eat it. What was it exactly that went on between you and my father? she practiced. This was not the way she’d planned it; the way she’d planned it was drunk. But Addison was the one with the martini. Rima had only her green tea. This was not a level playing field.

  “She was a real mystery buff. Not just mine. That woman read every mystery ever written, and she wrote everyone about them too. I remember once at a convention, there was a whole panel about her and her letters. Always so sure we were all getting it wrong.

  “She was postmistress out there. We used to joke about how she must give herself a bulk discount on stamps.

  “She might have been the last survivor of Holy City,” Addison said. “I think she was. I picture it like something out of Flannery O’Connor. The post office long closed, cobwebs over the scales. Just her and her cats, living in a labyrinth made from piles of paperbacks.”

  “Still in her wedding dress,” Rima offered. What was it exactly, what was it exactly . . .

  “Something like that.”

  A sushi roll called Clouds and Rain arrived. Rima seemed to remember that Clouds and Rain was a traditional Japanese euphemism for sex. Or else Thunder and Rain. Or else it was Chinese. This Clouds and Rain was diced scallops in a spicy mayonnaise and not at all traditional.

  “I actually met Ms. Wellington once,” Addison said. “How ironic is that? I spend a whole evening with her, and she writes her letters to Maxwell as if I don’t exist. Not that she should remember me. I wasn’t a writer yet when we met. Though we talked for quite some time.”

  The sushi chef returned. He and Addison spoke briefly about the prospects for the Senate. A month ago it had seemed impossible. Now it all came down to Montana, where the vote was still being counted, and Virginia, where things looked awfully good. He asked about the dogs and heard about their Halloween costumes. He suggested that Rima must be really happy to be in California instead of Cleveland, but since he lived in California he said “real happy” instead of “really happy.” He asked how she liked living by the ocean. “Not that you don’t have water in Cleveland,” he said. “I know you have lakes. Great lakes is what I hear.”

  Californians always thought they were all that. They had no idea how great a lake could be. Instead of saying so, Rima did him the courtesy of pretending not to get the joke. “I like the pelicans,” she said. This severely understated the case. Rima loved the pelicans, loved watching their hard, slow wing beats, their unfathomable, indifferent, prehistoric silhouettes. She loved the way they surfed the air in front of the curl. Just this morning she had seen a flock of ten. Sometimes, on the rocks or the water, they were so large she mistook them for sea lions.

  Rima ate another piece of sushi. She was just calming down, feeling that the conversation was under control again, that she could talk about pelicans. But she was also beginning to feel that it would maybe be okay to talk about her father, as long as she could initiate it, be the one asking the questions, not be ambushed again. What was it exactly that went on . . .

  The sushi chef moved down the bar. Addison rolled her chop-sticks in her fingers. “I met Constance Wellington on August 5, 1959,” she said. “The same night I met your father.”

  (3)

  In 1959, Addison had been seventeen years old, working part-time for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Her beat, as you’d expect, was the obituaries. Bim Lanisell was twenty-three, working at the San Jose Mercury News.

  They met at the annual meeting of a journalists’ professional group called the Fill Your Hole Club. In 1959 this meeting took place in Holy City’s Showhouse and Lecture Hall, which had been rented for the occasion as a lark. The journalists were a larkish bunch, and why not? Back in those days, there was no Internet, with bloggers checking every fact in every story. Journalists then didn’t know how great they had it, making it up as they went along, not a care in the world.

  Plus Father William Riker, the patriarch of Holy City, was always good for a few inches. He was on hand for this occasion in the role of gracious host. The keynote speaker, Bill Gould, inspired by the cult’s aspiration to perfect governance, waxed lyrical about what a perfect world might look like to journalists. No deadlines. No assignments. At least a murder a day, all done in broad daylight on the other side of a saloon window, so the reporters could cover them without leaving their barstools.

  An arsonist had been plaguing Holy City that summer. If he would only set a fire in the Showhouse and Lecture Hall that night, Bill Gould said, he could personally guarantee him the front page of several papers. That last joke had been an uncomfortable one. During the course of the evening, the remaining cultists all managed to wander into the banquet and check things out. It wasn’t far-fetched to think that the arsonist was in the audience during Gould’s speech, laughing with the rest.

  Don’t tease the arsonist. Rules to live by.

  The auditorium had been decorated with twists of yellow and green streamers. There were two sparkling cut-glass bowls of Hawaiian punch, much improved, Addison said, by the clandestine addition of a local corn whiskey, known for its kick as white mule. Liquor (as well as sex) was forbidden to the residents of Holy City, but even at seventeen Addison had known they were screwing, and probably drinking too. Father Riker made a show of commenting that the punch tasted funny, while he helped himself to another glass. He grew loquacious. The property was no longer a convenient watering hole for tourists on their way to the beach; some in Riker’s position would see that as sour lemons, he said.

  But he was more the sort who to
ok those sour lemons and made lemonade. He floated the idea of turning Holy City into a retreat of some kind. Perhaps, just off the top of his head, a nudist colony.

  The property was no longer Riker’s, so the proposal was purely speculative. It had passed into the hands of someone from Hollywood, the music editor of Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, a guy named Maurice Kline. Jewish. Suddenly Riker was convinced that Jews were practically white—he’d never had anything against the Jews, he said—and he gave Kline half the property as a gift, and designated him the Jewish Messiah of Holy City too.

  Within the year, Riker sold Kline the other half, though there was a condition on the sale that Kline build a new Jerusalem on the site.

  Within the week, Riker wished it all back.

  Soon they were in court, Riker suing Kline, the other cultists suing Riker and Kline both, in separate suits for what they saw as their share of the property. The court’s decision was that Kline owned it all.

  This was when the fires began. Holy City was falling to pieces.

  The night of the Fill Your Hole meeting, Riker wore a gray suit, a blue tie, and a red beanie. He had an enormous belly and he burped frequently. Addison had always heard what a charismatic, compelling young man he’d been. As an old man he was ridiculous. Another cup of punch had to be procured and drunk quickly, just to avoid picturing him naked.

  But other reporters found much to like in the nudist colony plan. They turned on a dime from adult professionals into adolescent frat boys. Several volunteered to cover the story of the nudist colony’s opening day. Or uncover it, if that was called for. Or go undercover to it. The key, they agreed, to a successful nudist colony was naked women. They raised their glasses to Addison. A couple of them winked. There were very few women in the room, and Addison was the only young one. Father Riker’s wife had died nine years before.