Desire Provoked

Part Four

IN dream Pamela mails him a plate. The Dutch are always giving plates. Ceramic plates, wooden plates, clay plates. Generally a hand-painted scene appears in the center of the plate, and around the rim an aphorism: “Happy the Soul Who Trusts in God” or “Coal Remains in the Hills.” A distinct feature of the plates is that they often are addressed to brothers and sisters. Husbands and wives sometimes paint affectionate names on one another’s plates, such as “Gimp” or “Woodchip.” In Adams’ dream the plate arrives wrapped in paper. He cuts the tape. When he removes the last shred of wrapping, he is astonished. In the middle of the plate a hag, like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, leans on a cane. Written in German script on the rim: “Good Morning, Cousin Snitch, You Kissed the Mouth for Nothing, didn’t You?”

At the dance hall he drinks beer and eats sausage. Jill does the polka with a barrel-chested man in long pants and suspenders while Adams taps out a beat on a wooden table to the fiddle. He’s thinking of all the dances in all the halls he ever attended with Pamela, but the people at the table with him raise their mugs and laugh heartily, and he can’t help but feel good. Jill takes his hand and drags him onto the dance floor. It is covered with sawdust, and when she swirls, tiny wooden slivers lift into the air like snow and settle in her hair.

Watching her, Adams feels happy.

“Let’s get our fortunes told,” Jill urges him.

“I’m enjoying myself here.”

“Come on, it’ll be fun.”

Rosa’s in the middle of a seance when they arrive. “Come in, come in,” an old woman whispers through the screen door. They sit on the floor behind a row of women, all of whom are holding hands.

Adams watches Rosa. She might have been attractive once, but years of tension have tightened the skin around her mouth. In the dim light her age shows — she must be in her sixties. The way she rotates her jaw as she slips into a trance is repulsive, and he looks away. Through the front screen he sees boys banging cans behind the cemetery. One of them pulls a frayed head of lettuce from a pile of garbage and they begin to toss it like a football. Outside it’s getting dark and a cool breeze moves through the room.

The spirit that is speaking through Rosa, fluttering candles she has placed in small dishes on the floor, runs out of things to say and begins recommending her spaghetti. She comes out of her trance.

“Let’s take a break,” she says. “There’s strawberries and cream in the kitchen.”

She’s delighted to see Adams and asks about the children. He introduces her to Jill, who’s wholly taken with the scene. “How did you get into this?”

“I started out with a crystal ball, but if you get someone with a clouded past the ball will literally cloud up. You can’t hide it from the client. It’s very embarrassing. I prefer to let people experience their own pasts directly, and that’s what we’re going to do next. Grab some strawberries and join us.”

Adams is uneasy but Jill wants to stay. He sits on the floor next to her. “Nadine.” Rosa gestures to a woman with swollen ankles. “You’ve regressed with me several times. What have you been?”

“I grew cabbages in Italy during the Dark Ages. I sank with Atlantis.”

She lies on the floor in front of Rosa and folds her arms over her abdomen. Her ankles are extraordinärily thick; her heels just touch the ground. Rosa leans over her. “Close your eyes,” she says. “Breathe slowly.”

Nadine’s ankles pulse as if something were trying to hatch from them.

Rosa says softly, “There’s a warmth like water in your stomach, calming every muscle. It fills your chest like foam, washes into your neck and shoulders.”

Nadine appears to be asleep.

“Now then, I want you to take a little journey with me. Imagine yourself in a forest by a creek. Tell me what you see.”

“I see a lizard on a rock. I see the sun.” “Good, good. What else?”

“Arrowheads in the dirt, sunflowers in tall grass, butterflies …”

“You’re high in the air over a forest. When I count to three, you’ll float slowly down until your feet touch the ground. And when they do, you’ll find yourself in the past. One, two, three. Where are you, Nadine?”

The woman writhes on the floor. “It’s hot,” she says.

“Do you know where you are?”

“No … no, I don’t know where I am.”

“What are you wearing?”

“Black and white stripes.”

“Is it a dress?”

“Skin. Animal skin.”

Rosa nods. “Describe what you see.”

She lived in an African village by an antelope herd and a pond, until one day she ran from her tribe. She’d been promised to a warrior whom she didn’t want to marry. The tribal elders found her hiding behind a date palm, bound her to a stake, and tortured her with hot sticks until she agreed to accept the warrior. The wedding night passed pleasantly enough, despite the burns on her back.

Rosa counts Nadine out of her relaxed state. She smiles like a coed who’s just passed an anthropology exam.

Jill is a Mexican peasant with callused feet and a swollen belly. For a few pesos each night she sweeps the streets of the city, smiling up at the candles in the rich folks’ homes. Rosa advances her in years to her marriage, middle age, and death. Her husband dies young, her son becomes a farmer. She lives her late years in a convalescent home, attended by nuns.

Now it’s Adams’ turn. Because he’s so self-conscious, Rosa takes a long time to relax him.

“Where are you,” he hears her ask.

“I don’t know.” His hands feel weightless. “I’m moving.” His mind supplies no image. “It’s like I’m underwater.”

“You’re underwater, then?”

“Yes, I’m in a river.” The image still isn’t clear and Rosa’s questions only bother him. Hard balls of mud slap his crotch. He feels this rather than sees it: his nerves move ahead of his mind. He bounces off a barge and tumbles to the bottom of the river. Muddy dregs sweep into his mouth.

“Where are you?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

The sky turns bright as cellophane. On a pine bridge above him two white deer chase each other. Dirt from their hooves sifts through a space between the boards and peppers his face.

Angry female voices mingle in the air above a wooden house. In a room full of rifles a white-haired man reads a map.

“I can’t read,” he tells Rosa.

“Move yourself forward in time,” she suggests. “Where are you?”

“In town.” He’s carried the mud with him. His clothes are spattered. The streets are little more than damp ruts, and dirty geese straggle across them.

“What do you see?”

Rain barrels, wagon wheels, a tobacconist. “I’m standing in a hotel lobby,” he says. “Are you waiting for someone?” “No. I don’t know anyone.”

A diamond-blue horsefly orbits a kerosene lamp.

“What’s your name?”

“I don’t know. The hotel looks full.”

“Are you the clerk?”

“I can’t read the register.”

He turns on the television, hoping to run across Pavarotti again. Instead, PBS is airing a layman’s guide to the universe hosted by Peter Ustinov, who looks a great deal like Pavarotti but without the mole. Ustinov holds up two billiard balls and rolls them across a curved table with a grid painted on it — a demonstration of what happens to matter when it encounters a black hole. The balls are sucked down a pipe in one corner of the table.

The weekend: Superman III with the kids. Superman, under the influence of not-quite-Kryptonite, has gone on a whiskey binge. The hero in him struggles to regain control of his mind, and in an urban scrapyard the two halves of his personality fight it out. Clark Kent, representing all that is pure within him, falls onto a conveyor belt, knocked silly by the unkempt superhero.

Deidre asks, “Why are they both on the screen at the same time?”

Adams explains split personality.

“That’s stupid,” Deidre says.

At home, she helps him peel shrimp. Toby, with exaggerated kindness, offers to mix him a Scotch-and-soda.

“Where’d you learn to mix drinks?” Adams asks.

“Mom had a party a couple of weeks ago. She taught me.”

“Oh? Who was at the party?”

“Painters, mostly. They talked real loud and dressed funny.” Toby twists his face, trying to be sullen, but obviously he’s in a talkative mood tonight. “I liked being bartender. The women said I was cute and made a big fuss, which was gross, but two of them asked me to fix the zippers on their dresses.”

“Yeah, Toby wanted to take their dresses off,” Deidre says, tossing shrimp into a pot of boiling water.

“I did not.” Toby walks off to make the drink.

Deidre asks, “Why don’t you have a party, Daddy?”

“I might, someday.”

“Can we come?”

“Sure.” He can’t imagine whom he’d invite.

“I want to be the bartender next time,” Deidre says. “I’ll help the men fix their ties.”

Adams adds lemon and celery to the shrimp and covers the pot. He walks into the den, where Toby is standing, staring disconsolately at the drink he has mixed.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know if I added enough soda.”

Adams takes the drink. “Toby, what is it?”

Toby jounces on the couch. “You’re not going to like it.”

“Try me.”

“All right.” He assumes an innocent expression. “I want to know why you and Mom stopped fucking.” “Toby …”

“I want to know why. Did you get tired of her?”

“Toby, we were getting along so well. Don’t spoil it, please.”

“I was watching these guys at Mom’s party. They bragged about their work and acted stupid in front of these stupid women, and I know what was going on, they all wanted to fuck each other, the men and the women too, moving around each other like Muhammad Ali or something, waiting for the best shot. Mom was doing it too. Acting stupid every time she talked to a stupid guy.”

Adams shrugs. “Men and women are attracted to one another for very good reasons,” he says.

“Like what?”

“Like what, well, haven’t you ever noticed a pretty girl at school and she smells good and she’s very nice, but for some reason you don’t get along with her? You don’t know why, but you’re just not interested in getting to know her? On the other hand, you meet a girl who’s not so pretty but you kind of like her — ”

“I don’t like anybody in my class,” Deidre says. “None of them know how to draw except me, and Mrs. Collins says we’re the most obnoxious kids she’s ever had.”

“Or like your friends,” Adams continues. “There are certain guys you like to hang around with — ”

“I’m talking about fucking,” Toby says.

“It’s no different.”

“What’s fucking?” Deidre asks.

“Honey, please.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s when a man and a woman get naked with each other,” Toby shouts. Deidre’s eyes grow big and she glances, frightened, at Adams, wondering if Toby’s in trouble, or if she’s in trouble, or if maybe Adams himself is in trouble.

“Women’ll fuck anybody,” Toby says.

“That’s not true. It’s especially not true of your mother.”

“She was acting so stupid.”

“That’s called flirting. People do it because it’s fun. It doesn’t always lead to making love. It’s like a game. Most of the time it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Sometimes it does.”

“Sometimes. But people make choices. And people like your mother and me … well, we make responsible choices.” He sips his drink. “Most of the time. Anyway, it’s natural for you to be confused about all this, but believe me, it’s not as crazy as you think. There were reasons your mother married me and not someone else.” He pauses. “Just as there were reasons the marriage ended when it did.” He hopes Toby won’t ask him for the reasons. “What do you know about making love?” he says.

“I know how it’s done.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Let me know when you do, all right?” Toby nods.

Deidre is still at sea. Adams scratches her head. “Put the sauce on the shrimp, all right?”

“Sam, I’d like you to meet the Honorable Frederick Palmer, congressman from the tenth district.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Adams says.

Palmer is wearing a red string tie.

Carter takes them to an Italian restaurant, where he and Palmer discuss a water control project. Adams does not follow the conversation closely; it’s clear he’s not meant to.

“I’m being purposely vague,” the congressman tells him, “because I don’t want to confuse the issue.”

Back in the office, Carter pulls Adams aside. “Palmer’s going to help us with our next project. What I’d like from you is a detailed map of the following region.” He hands Adams a set of coordinates. “Thursday, hmm? Oh, and Sam, Vox has the W-2 forms in his office. When you pick yours up, sign for it, all right? There’s been some hanky-panky with the records and we’re trying to be more accurate.”

“What kind of hanky-panky?” Adams asks.

Carter looks around. “Some cash is missing from the political action fund.”

“Mallow?”

Carter shakes his head. “There’s some other stuff, too. Just sign your name so we know you got your forms.”

The women’s shelter has moved to a permanent location, a gray two-story house wedged cozily among three giant cedars in one of the oldest neighborhoods in town. The grass is neatly mowed. Kids play tag between bashed-in-looking cars parked in the drive. A woman in a long skirt is sitting on the wooden porch in a rocker reading “The Cow Jumped Over the Moon” to a little girl nearly asleep on her lap.

“Hi. I’m Valerie.”

“Valerie. Pam nearly through?”

“I don’t know. I think they’re reading poems.”

Cicadas throb in the cedars. Lamplight falls through the lace curtains onto Valerie, who, Adams sees, is wearing a splint on her right arm.

He pokes his head in the door. A television, black-and-white, sound off, sits on a crumpled shower curtain in a corner of the living room. A circle of wooden chairs spotted with green paint. A chipped and dusty glass chandelier. On the walls (the same pale green as the spots on the chairs) Pamela’s Matisse-figures playfully chase one another all the way up to the ceiling. In the stairwell one of the cardboard figures has come partially untaped and appears to have placed its feet on the carpeted stairs.

A woman clears dirty dishes and coffee cups from a poorly varnished table. Pamela motions for him to come in and shut the door. Most of the women are young — some in their early teens — and with children. A few are cut and bruised, made up heavily to hide the marks, but the rest seem healthy, in good spirits. A little tired perhaps. Cynical jokes.

A thickset lady next to Pamela picks up a paperback book and reads Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar.”

Only three or four women are listening, and all agree they don’t understand that one.

“You’re right, let’s try another,” the lady says, and chooses Emily Dickinson:

“That’s pretty,” one woman says faintly, gazing out the window. Another turns up the sound on the television.

Pamela touches Adams’ arm. “They don’t need me anymore tonight. I’ll just be a minute.” She hugs several of the women (one flinches; “I’m sorry,” Pamela says, gingerly rubbing the woman’s ribs), straightens their hair, and accompanies Adams out the door. The little girl who was resting on Valerie’s lap now stands in the front yard while Valerie pulls off her shorts and lays them in the grass.

“Diarrhea,” Valerie says.

The little girl stares imperturbably at the cars passing on the street, as if this were just one more thing that has happened in her life.

“If you throw any more wild parties for your artist friends, I’m going to fight for custody,” he announces with some degree of pleasure.

Pamela, stunned, lifts her glass of Riesling. “I don’t think we should use the children to spy on each other.”

“Who’s spying. Toby felt bad and he let it out, that’s all.”

“So what are you telling me, Sam? I can’t have people over?”

“I’m not in a position to tell you — ”

“You’re certainly not.”

“But I won’t have the children exposed to anything before they’re ready.”

“Unfit mother, is that it?”

“It’s the crowd you’re in with. Painters with their flies open — ”

“Don’t say another word, Sam. If you’ve got some horrible stereotyped image of artists, that’s your problem, not mine. You don’t know my friends. It’s pretty damned impertinent of you to pass judgment.”

“I know what Toby told me.”

“He’s a child. He doesn’t understand — ”

“That’s my point.” He gets up, leaving money for the bill.

“Don’t walk out on me, Sam. This is not some goddamn movie where you can pull a stunt like that.”

“Don’t raise your voice to me.”

“Here, take your money,” she says, “I can pay for my own.”

Elgin Creek is at its deepest in the area that Carter wants mapped. No one knows who owns the land. The county’s contesting the claims of three families.

Adams puts his work aside for the afternoon, drives out to Deerbridge Road. He parks the car on a flat grassy spot next to a dirt path, gets out, slides down a brambly slope to the creek. Mimosa fuzz circles slowly in the air. He can hear the water but cannot see it through the bushy weeds. Finally he clears a path to the bank. The creek is green. Low. Swirling wild-flowers and pebbles. Adams slaps mosquitoes from his neck, dabs his face with a handkerchief.

Absurd to worry about water control here.

A broken bottle of ink on the floor beneath his drafting table.

Deidre stands in the kitchen doorway.

“What happened?” he asks.

“It broke.”

“I can see that. How?”

“I don’t know.”

For the first time in years he feels like spanking his child. “Did you break it?” he says.

“No.”

Her first direct answer.

“Did Toby break it?”

She withdraws into the kitchen. Toby is sitting at the table, reading the morning paper. “There’s an article on Mom’s show.”

“Did you break my bottle of ink?”

Toby looks at Deidre.

“I want you to stop using Deidre as a shield.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I don’t care who broke the ink. But if you’ve got your sister covering for you, I’m going to be very upset. Now, what’s it going to be?”

Toby stares at the paper.

“Grown-ups admit their mistakes.”

“Oh, yeah? Toby stands behind his chair. “Do you admit you made a mistake when you let Mom leave?”

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” Adams says. He turns to Deidre. “Did he tell you to lie for him?”

She glances at Toby.

“It’s all right, honey. You can tell me.”

She lifts her fingers to her lips. “He told me never get him in trouble.”

“Do you know how to make toast and eggs,” he asks. She nods. “All right, start the toast and eggs while I have a talk with your brother. I’ll be in to help you in a minute.” He leads Toby to the back porch. A cool spring morning. A wisp of fog in the air.

“I’m disappointed in you, Toby.”

“I don’t want to hear this shit.”

“Well, you’re going to. What bothers me is the way you treat your sister. If you want to hate your mother and me, that’s fine. We’re big people, we can take it. But you’re bigger and stronger than Deidre, you know? I love you both, but so help me, Toby, if you frighten her or intimidate her in any way, you’re going to wish you had a different father. Do you understand?”

Toby nods, his face bright red.

“Now let’s eat some breakfast.”

Adams tells Pamela he’s going to stop paying for Toby’s visits to the doctor. “But he’s getting better.”

“He’s getting subtler. He’ll outgrow this phase or he won’t, but the doctor’s not going to make a bit of difference.”

“Sam, I don’t know how to handle him.”

“Neither do I. It’s time we learned.”

Rosa’s sitting in the cemetery beneath a cotton-wood tree. As Adams walks by on his way home from the library, she offers him an egg salad sandwich.

“Do you often picnic in the graveyard,” he asks.

“Why not? It’s pleasant, quiet. I’ve also got some Ruffles and a can of Tab.”

He takes some potato chips.

“What’d you think about the other night?”

“It was interesting. I don’t believe in past lives, though.”

“The experience is what’s important. Do you know Greek plays? Remember the Oracle at Delphi? The Greeks really believed she had divine power. Then some scholar comes along and says, ‘Nah, it was a crazy old woman inhaling sulfur fumes from a crack in the earth.’ The fumes changed her voice, see, so it sounded like some other being had taken hold of her. And she was eating hallucinogens from the plants, which made her sound mystical. I say, what the hell’s the difference? The experience is the same.”

“There’s a big difference,” Adams says. “It’s important to know where you stand.”

“Ahhh.” Rosa waves her hand. “How’re your kids?”

“Fine. They really enjoyed having their fortunes told.”

“Your little boy’s got a lot of hostility, you know?” “Yes.”

“Was he born in a leap year?”

Adams is astonished.

“Saw it right away. He’s not at home with himself. He tries to keep up but he’s like a slow watch. His sense of timing’s been off from the start. He wants to be older than he is, and it crushes him that he’s so far behind.”

“I wish it were as simple as that.”

“Believe me.”

“Maybe I do.”

“More chips?”

“No thanks.”

“Well, drop by sometime. The dead don’t say all that much.”

Jordan is back at work, conciliatory, cheerful, refreshed. He insists on treating Adams to lunch. Jill comes along. She was questioned this morning about the missing money, as was Adams a week earlier. Routine, the accountant says, we’re checking everybody. Jordan forgets his wallet and Adams ends up spending forty-three dollars.

Carter tells him, “Things’ll calm down once this latest deal goes through. Ever been to Greenland?”

“No.”

“I don’t know if we can swing it, but Comtex has some interests up there. Word has it they’re dissatisfied with the base maps Tobin and Muldrow have given them. Want their own, firsthand. Would you like me to check into it for you?”

“Wonderful, yes.”

Adams waiting for the kids. Pamela reading into a tape recorder (“I have to prepare a lecture on art and politics for this little gallery downtown”) a passage from Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour: “‘White water is inconceivable.’ That means we cannot describe (e.g. paint) how something white and clear would look, and that means: we don’t know what description, portrayal these words demand of us.”

“Hence,” Pamela says into the recorder, “Dangerous words. No, scratch that. Let’s see. Color. What can we say about color? Well, all right, for one thing, color is temporal — not like words on a page where it takes two minutes or whatever to read a paragraph. But Time, as in the tenor of the times or the latter days of the twentieth century, fixes color and dictates color choices. A silly example — get a better one later — say I’m working on a portrait. I pause for lunch and read about the deployment of medium-range missiles in Western Europe and I think about the end of the world and my mind trips back to the passage from Revelation that my father forced-fed me every night, about the moon turning blood-red. So when I return to the portrait, I mix a little extra red into the skin color. Temporality has chosen the color for me because I live in a tragic, temporal world.”

Sometimes Adams sees colors when the band’s in the middle of a set. It’s as if there were a thin film of tinted water on the drums; when he taps them with a stick, sheets of blue-green, ruby, and yellow shimmer in the air.

“So much of modern art,” Pamela continues, “has no philosophical basis. It’s aimless and irresponsible, like the country. As such, it’s an accurate barometer of the country. But every choice of color and form is a moral choice. We discriminate, one instead of another. That’s why my art and my political consciousness are developing hand in hand, why the nuclear threat affects the way I draw a line.”

According to a front-page story in the Elgin Observer, the Honorable Frederick Palmer, congressional leader of the tenth district, has secured funds from the Bureau of Reclamation to build a dam on the north bend of Elgin Creek for the purposes of flood control.

Adams checks the records: Elgin Creek has never flooded. Carter and Palmer have figured out a way to make a profit on the dam, and have government funds to pay for it.

He’ll press harder for Greenland.

“Only one man I ever met had good reason for owning the land he did,” Otto tells Adams on the phone. The connection is weak, since Otto lives in the mountains of Pennsylvania where telephone linemen seldom service equipment. One of the richest men in the state, he chooses to live in a one-room wooden cabin full of squirrel shit and mice. “When I worked as a landman, we scouted ranchers to see if they were willing to sell mineral rights to their property, then we looked for oil and gas. One time I visited this old man in western Kentucky. He owned a bunch of woods down there, never had developed them. They’d turned to brambles but he wouldn’t sell. I asked him what he planned to do with that property and he said, ‘Nothing.’ When I asked him why, he said, ‘Cause there’s a wild child in there.’ I didn’t know what he meant. He told me a son of his had crawled into those woods soon after he was born and never was found. They could hear him late at night, though, howling with the wolves. And the old man wouldn’t sell — wanted to protect his son.”

Tracing grids, preparing to add the numbers. He remembers Deidre, at the age of two, trying to unfold a slip of paper. Until she had actually opened it, she didn’t know what the flat piece of paper would look like, though she had watched Adams fold it seconds earlier. Now that his divorce is final, Adams sees himself in this same blank relation to Pamela and the kids.

I’ve made a decision, Pamela tells him (by way of asking for a loan). After long years of fast food and automobile air conditioning, of learning to ignore, for the sake of my children’s uninterrupted happiness, the rapid decline of our dear urban centers, the dyeing of our air, dark, darker, as though it were an egg on Easter Sunday, the division of men into segments, the left hand literally not knowing what the right etc. (the inevitable result of a division of labor), the thinning of our bones in disgust as we bat the badminton birdie over poisonous lawns and gardens, entire communities smelling like burnt toast, the murderous revolt of our own tissue cramped as it is by carcinogens and Coke, perfume and smoke, and finally, Sam, after the failure of love, I have decided to wrap myself (along with hundreds of other women who have been running to keep the planet from crumbling under their slippered feet) around a nine-mile stretch of chain fence at Greenham Common, England, to pester and molest the young American men there dressed as soldiers, to goad them to distraction so that the deployment of medium-range American missiles cannot be accomplished with any degree of businesslike efficiency and pleasure. Joyously we will cling to one another in the mud and rain, tampons held proudly between our legs, hearts beating proudly beneath our breasts, our powerful female bodies blocking the birth of twilight. Don’t try to follow me, old friend, men have been banned from the Common, a source of consternation to those of us who feel that disarmament is not specifically a fern-inist issue; on the other hand, those are men’s missiles, vast and raw as Easter Island penises, leaning heavily on the children of the Soviet Union, the children of East Germany, the children of China, while their missiles lean in turn on the children of Europe, the children of the United States. Their children, our children.