(Another reason Mark tends to keep his own counsel is that he can be a crashing chattering flap-jaw, once he lets go. His real friends suck it up, though, out of a kind of blind loyalty I’m afraid I can’t help but admire.)
Yes Mark as Christian sees himself as would-be artist seeing himself as archer; baby Cupid; sick, bit Philoctetes, lover beyond time or compare. It is, he says, his one desire, the one beyond conditioning or obscene cuisine.
Except he tells Ms. Ambrose-Gatz it’s beyond him. When he shoots, he feels it so. He feels, in his guts, that it would take three archers really to pull it off, to leave the reader punctured and spent and red. And American children shoot alone: it builds character.
“Three?” she asks, whole stewardess uniform now dark as her stained lap, shoes in a hand that balances her path through mud so fertile it stinks. Gorged insects have drowned in the milky Pest-Aside runoff, and bob.
One, he says, to aim just left and so impale the target’s center. Another, he says, to betray the perfection of his comrade, to split the first arrow in two, with his own shaft.
And the third?
To be the beloved. The willingly betrayed. To wear the bright bull’s-eye, and dance, under one light. To invite the very end we object to, genuflecting. To be aimed at: the at-long-last Reunion of love and what love loves.
Well and this old not-at-all-classy scarecrow is on the job: there are no crows in the rain. The malevolent car is visible through the undulating downpour, above, past a roadside ditch roaring with runoff. Sternberg’s hands are at his window, and his face, looking out. J.D. and D.L. are fogged from sight. The colorful clown is on the crooked porch of the third and most distant shanty, knocking at an open door.
The potent abandoned scarecrow they stand by is just a crude cross of slapdash timber dressed up in faded military fatigues. It has no subtlety at all. The name on the military jacket’s breast is obscured. The scarecrow wears a sodden Chicago Cubs cap on the not-fresh pumpkin that serves as a head, and, since it’s a cross, has its arms straight out to the sides, though the arms’ timber has been jaggedly broken, to simulate elbows, so that the fatigued sleeves droop earthward. The broken arms afford shelter, a bit, for the Magda who stands under an empty sleeve.
Mark can tell that Magda Ambrose-Gatz is smart. Not brilliant or witty or well-read. Not an idea man or a creative genius. She’s just smart, the way simply hanging in there, as you, through all kinds of everyday tribulation and general shit can make you smart. She was in that story of Ambrose’s, she tells Mark, though in there she was disguised and misrepresented, because even then her face was kind of orange. She had, yes, united with Ambrose, for a while, in holy matrimony. She still cared for him. Although they hadn’t been in contact for a really long time. But she wished to speak to Mark Nechtr, here, she said, in the scarecrow’s absence of shadow, because she thought she sensed underneath Mark’s affected cool exterior a boy hotly cocky enough to think he might someday inherit Ambrose’s bald crown and ballpoint scepter, to wish to try and sing to the next generation of the very same sad kids.
This storm’s not a really bad Midwest storm, she remarks, as they stand by the scarecrow in the horizontal rain. Too windy to be really dangerous. The bad storms always hide behind a dead calm and a yellow-green sky. That’s when you head for the cellar.
Mark should keep off the fried roses, in Magda’s opinion. Not because they’re fatal, or evil. Magda claims she’d used something similar, both with her Maryland lover and after, to preserve her orange face and voluptuous history against time’s imperial march through a Depression, three recessions, a War, a Police Action, a Conflict, nine droughts, three plagues of mutagenic pests, twelve corn harvests so bountiful they were worthless, one airline deregulation, three (whoops, make that four) Presidential scandals, and the eventual erosion of agricultural price supports under pressure from the grocery lobby. And not because the dead snacks are advertising embodied, or clunky symbols, or obscene; or that they block Mark, shut him up alone inside the silence he dreads.
But just because they’re not right. And right means more than ought. It also means direction. To try to digest fear into desire is to go backwards. Fear and desire are already married. Freely. One’s impaled the other since B.C. What you’re scared of has always been what moved you. And where you’re heading has always been your real end, your Desire.
(This is all a summary, a what’s the word a synopsis, and admittedly not in Magda’s real voice, which cannot be done justice by me.)
That what unlocks you, even today, is what you want to want. In what you value. And what you value’s married to those certain things you just won’t do. And here’s a cliché that’s earned its status as a cliché: whether you’re free or locked up depends, all and only, on what you want. What you have matters about as much as the color of your sky. Or your bars.
The rain makes the sound of rain. DeHaven’s homemade car whines and roars above the flooded ditch and bare shoulder. The car’s big rear wheels spin, screaming, sinking deeper into the mud. The car’s acclivated shape is now a declivated shape.
Why using beauty for fuel is bad; why it’s clumsy: it’s superfluous: we already ache with desire for what we fear.
This sounds to Mark troublingly familiar: it’s a seamless wave of muscular Anglo-Saxon ideas, it smacks of Dr. C____ Ambrose. Whom Mark no longer quite trusts, obviously.
Magda’ll give Mark examples, then. Sternberg is obviously a big-time claustrophobe—she can always smell claustrophobia on a passenger—so why’s he still inside the steamy enclosed car, eating? J.D. Steelritter desires, more than anything, to be happified, at peace; so why, though he consumes enough roses to color a Tidewater spring, does he spend his whole life worrying, planning, conceding, debating, persuading, interpreting, manipulating a faceless Crowd into backward ideas of what it wants? Why is he trying to bring about a Reunion that will silence the very clamor whose whine in his head is that head’s life and bread?
And Mark’s bride. D.L. wanted to be pregnant, miraculous, so that Mark would love her, do her virtue honor; so why didn’t she seduce him when fertile, instead of constructing a coy and obvious lie whose lifespan can’t possibly exceed three seasons?
The rain on Mark, though violent, feels good, familiar, like the tattered imagined bedroom breezes of pre-sleep. It seems OK that this alive woman who’ll live forever only as an object in Ambrose’s story about passion should know the secret D.L.’s mother knows, Mark’s parents know, Mark knows, that only D.L. still believes he does not know. Why she lied about the little miracle to this boy, who was loved.
“Because she’s infertile; she cannot produce,” Magda says. “She will tell you, when you ask, that it has to do with a past. With a father. She’ll invoke Electra, Vietnam, amputation, Laing, Freud. But the truth is that—inside, where push comes to shove—she wants it so.”
The rain reveals both their bodies, and the skeleton under the scarecrow’s clothes. Magda is really not at all pretty, facially, except for the utter and unconsciously expressed pleasure she takes in the water’s feel, the overhung sleeve’s fungal smell, the milky mud between her toes.
“How do you know this?”
“Because it’s true, Mark. Everybody who really wants to knows what’s true. Most people just don’t want to. It means listening from deep inside. Most people just don’t want to. But the special people listen. You can hear what’s true, inside. Listen. You can always hear it. In the rain. In the static between stations. In the magnetic whisper on tapes, right before the music starts. And in that sound that utter, complete silence has, in your ears—that glittered tinkle, like tiny chimes at great heights. I believe I know you, and that you’re probably special. The chances are good that you’re a born listener.”
Mark listens. It’s true: he’s special. They’re both special. (But I’m not special, and chances are you’re not—shit, we can’t all be special, obviously; not enough room for a crowd that big in here. Suck it up.) So but h
e’s special, it’s true. Magda’s right. He’s a born listener.
But he can’t hear anything out of the ordinary, anything that sounds especially true.
Magda laughs at the sight of DeHaven galumphing back to the screaming car, his wig still clamped tight as a skullcap, leading a big old farmer in a military-surplus slicker. The farmer leads a big horse by a heavy chain.
“I’m afraid I can’t hear anything, Ma’am. I hear rain, and the car, and the car’s horn, and clopping, and a chain clanking. I can’t hear anything that sounds especially true.”
“You will. I promise. Trust me. I know. What’s true never changes its tune. He heard it, once.”
“Ambrose heard it with you?”
“And you’re wrong about why he’s wrong. You and Steelritter are both wrong. I’m no postmodernist, or artist. I can’t lie. But I still know the center you want isn’t in classes, or categories, or even in what kind of religion you choose to genuflect to. It’s here.” She doesn’t gesture. “Wherever you are. It’s all around you. Every minute. That sound you hear when it’s quiet, without sleep. Or awake, listening. A great silence.” Her eyes roll up toward her receding hairline, toward memory. “He used to love that silence. He’d just surrender, listening.” She looks at Nechtr. “That was before you were even born. Before he wrote anything anyone but he and I would ever buy.”
“Before Mr. Steelritter turned him on to meat and oil and metabetrayal?”
She smiles orangely, smooths her limply askew hair with a fatigue-sleeve.
“And what’s true never changes, is what he said. From B.C. to this Very End you kids seem to worship. I believed in him, as an artist. I loved him very, very much. Enough to trust him even now.
“If you want,” she says, “your whole life in the adult world can be like this country. In the center. Flat as nothing. One big sweep. So you can see right to the edge of where everything curves. So everything’s right in front of your nose. That’s why I sometimes throw cards. To show me my nose.”
“You throw cards?” Mark says, making a face with his rosy face. “Jesus, D.L. throws them.” Mark distrusts thrown cards: all those arcane categories, vague meanings, wish-fulfillment as prophecy. “I don’t trust them,” he admits. “They just tell her what she wants to hear. They’re just vague enough so you can make them say what you want to happen or are neurotic about happening.” He almost sneers, if there’s such a thing as a numb sneer. “And then you and her psychic call it prophecy. It’s obscene, is what it is.”
Magda looks at him baldly from her side of the broken-armed cross in military surplus. The rain around them is letting up. The real heart of the sudden storm has moved off East, seeming coolly to strut, a bit tiptoed.
“Your lover doesn’t throw cards,” Magda laughs. “She carries them around probably wrapped in silk, probably even with a souvenir crystal; and she shuffles them and closes her eyes and spreads them out, afraid to look, the way people who make wishes are scared to tell you the wish, for fear the magic is fragile, sensitive to light.”
(Again, I feel an obligation to say that this is synopsis, and not true to a voice I’m afraid I just can’t do.)
“She tries to use them,” Magda (more or less) continues. “She invests them with a power to change what they can only reveal. She wants shelter, a structure. A house of cards, with tiny furniture. Not the kind of great blind sweep you get when you throw.” She makes a throwing gesture that’s surprisingly deft and slight. “Not a mirror, that just shows you your nose.” She looks at Mark. “When’s the last time you saw your nose?”
FOREGROUND THAT INTRUDES BUT’S REALLY TOO TINY TO EVEN SEE: PROPOSITIONS ABOUT A LOVER
Maybe because she’s never, never once, been made to be anything other than what others see, Magda Ambrose-Gatz has vast untapped resources of virtue and smarts and all-around balls. D.L. reads painted Elkesaite cards, knows her own rising sign, and consults media. Magda, who’s been seen so often her face is pumpkin-colored, is never called on to see others, or to speak from the heart. So she listens. And sees, inside. Never called on to speak, she can actually love her own tongue, as those born to subjection may love their skin, ears, eyes. She can count the hairs in your head, hear the cries of my cells expiring. She can see. She can spread the whole outside flat, inside, throw the kind of colorless cards that reveal what cannot change. She does so for Mark, and does not condescend when the boy protests that she has no Tarot cards, only a regulation flight-attendant’s skirt and a faded fatigue jacket taken from the superfluous figure suspended above them and wrapped around her against the bland chill that always follows a storm’s third act.
I am sorry. I have such respect for this woman that I just cannot show her to you in the light her shadow deserves. I am lovesick, and ungrown, and know no trope or toponymic topoi, no image worthy. I have to play the supplicant here; ask you simply to eat some raw bare propositions I can’t prepare or flavor enough to engage your real imagination. We’re all quite tired, and deprived, and it’s getting pretty clear that we’ll probably be asleep by the time the actual revel gets started; so I’m going to cease all fucking around and just tell you what Magda tells Mark—what she knows, from just her senses, which are never in demand.
Magda knows that the water D.L. finally boils will not be for any labor. Magda knows that D.L. will emerge, in time, unMarked, as the single best copywriter J.D. Steelritter Advertising has ever used. She will rise through the adman ranks, assume a management position, eventually marry J.D.’s atonally ambitious harlequinned son (who’ll be a sensitive and surprisingly gentle father), and be the lone female pallbearer when the most creative mind in the history of American advertising finally succumbs to carcinoma of the lower lip and is buried in a plot that requires no floral embellishment. Drew-Lynn will, in time, become J.D. Steelritter Advertising, and discover that the key to all ingenious and effective and original advertising is not the compelled creation of all-new jingles and images, but the simple arrangement of old words and older pictures into relationships the consumer already believes are true. She will take root, blossom, and mature in an environment of responsibility, and will do her late mentor true honor in continuing the masterful orchestration of the two long-term, brand-building campaigns J.D. will die proudest of. She will live to see Ray Kroc’s one little Collision concession stand truly become the world’s community restaurant. She will see to it personally that Dr. C——Ambrose’s one flat gutted Maryland Funhouse comes truly to offer a whole new dimension in alone fun, become the discotheque where America can be themselves. She’ll impose her will on awed, sleep-deprived, travel-weary clients with a dispassion born of an oracular instinct for What the People Want. A grown D.L., cardless, will divine a nation’s post-postmodern economic future. Funhouses will eventually allow patrons to toast the idea of toasting with actual drinks: the consequent rise in patronage, consumption, Demand, and thus price of admission, will meet the Supply curve at profit. McDonald’s will eventually suspend its free-food-forever-for-commercial-alumni policy, unmoved by scattered reports of hungry former actors wandering, pressing gaunt noses to windows warm as flesh—and will, in consequence, suspend its emblazoned pronouncements about how many trillions of burgers have been served since the beginning of franchised time. The public will interpret McDonald’s new silence about the number of meat patties served as the kind of modest reticence only the world’s true community restaurant could afford to display. P.R. And it shall be good.
Magda’s Tower- and arcana-dominated reading of Thomas Sternberg I’ll skip, out of respect for limitations of time and a general repulsion for all those like us. Know, though, that he’ll eat what cannot be food, be prurient, have ideas, believe he wants to heal and act, neither heal nor act, will putter all his adult life around the house his dead parents leave standing, and generally become the sort of Back Bay neighborhood presence with whom you Do Not Fuck.
Mark’s field of time is harder to survey; because, since he is, at root, still an
infant, his future is not yet something that cannot change. He believes there’s some simple, radical difference about him. He hopes it’s genius, fears it’s madness. Magda knows it’s neither. She knows that in truth Mark is just a radically simple person, wildly noncomplex, one of the very few men she’s read for who’s exhaustively describable in fewer than three adjectives. She predicts he will, in the Eleemosynary period following a scarred divorce he wants to be depressed about, give away a detergent fortune to the United Redemption Charities Corporation. That he’ll travel without cease—not in the way of his father or J.D. or Ambrose, who steer exclusively by their rearview mirrors, but with the forward simplicity of a generation for whom whatever lies behind lies there fouled, soiled, used up, East.
But since J.D. Steelritter is the type of Parousia whose advent leaves exactly zero to chance, the bloody, chocked field of the Reunion’s next five days cannot change. And Magda sees that, in that time, Mark, his complicated bow exchanged for a bulky rented key, will shut the Funhouse franchise doors against the reveled babble, sit his ass down, and actually write a story—though it’ll be one he’ll believe is not his own. He’ll see the piece as basically a rearranged rip-off of the radio’s “People’s Precinct” episode they’ve heard just now, and of the whole long, slow, stalled trip in general. It’ll be a kind of plagiarism, a small usurpation; and Mark will be visibly embarrassed about the fact that the Nechtr-story Professor Ambrose will approve best, and will maybe base letters of recommendation on, will not be any type of recognized classified fiction, but simply a weird blind rearrangement of what’s been in plain sight, the whole time, through the moving windows. That its claim to be a lie will itself be a lie.
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