Erasure

13

Some water is so clear that trout will swim to your fly, your silhouette all too visible to them as they gaze up and through the water and air, and will inspect your tying job, the amount of head cement you applied, observe whether you used a good stiff hackle or whether you used natural or synthetic dubbing material, nose the thing, then swim away. Occasionally, one will take the fly, not caring that a bit of thread is visible where the tail is tied down, not even caring that your tippet is corkscrewed. A trout hiding behind a rock in fast, muddy water might or might not take a nymph fished deep through the riffle. For all the aggravation a trout can cause, it cannot think and does not consider you. A trout is very much like truth; it does what it wants, what it has to.

I was exhausted, my eyes burning from having been open and staring at either Mother or the book in my lap all night. The backs of my legs had gone numb from sitting in the round-rimmed wooden chair. I was completely distrustful of any measure of stability the old woman exhibited that evening of Lorraine’s wedding. I was terrified that I would wake and find her bed empty, then, after a brief search, her lifeless body floating in the creek or simply laid out at the bottom of the stairs. The business of committing her seemed so much more urgent now. I was desperate to know that she was safe and I was desperate to discontinue my feeling of desperation.

When Mother awoke, she took me in for a few seconds, then said, “Good morning, Monksie.”

“Good morning, Mother. How did you rest?”

“Fine, I suppose. I had dreams I didn’t like.” She sat up, smoothing the sheet and light blanket around her. “I can’t recall any of them.”

“I can never remember my dreams either.”

“You weren’t in that chair all night, were you?”

“No, Mother.” As I lied, I wondered how I was going to bathe and dress for the day. I didn’t have Lorraine to watch her now. “Mother, if you wait right here, I’ll bring you some tea.”

“That would be nice, dear.”

She began to hum as I left the room. I believe it was Chopin, a polonaise, but I could only place the quality of the melody and not the piece itself. I hurried to my room where I washed up at the sink and threw on a clean shirt and socks. I returned to her door and listened. She was still humming. I could hear her turning the pages of a magazine. I ran to the kitchen, put on the water and sat at the table to catch my breath. My eyes must have closed and sleep taken me because I woke with a start, finding Mother removing the whistling kettle from the burner.

“You’re tired,” she said.

I watched as she poured the water into the pot and dropped in the ball that I had already filled with tea. She put the cups and saucers on the table and set the pot between us.

“Isn’t this nice,” she said.

“Yes, Mother.”

“My favorite time is always waiting for the tea to steep.” She looked past me to the screened porch. “Where is Lorraine?”

“Lorraine was married last night.”

“Oh, yes.” She seemed to catch herself. Then she appeared very sad.

“Will you miss her?” I asked.

She looked at me as if she’d missed the question.

“You were just thinking about Lorraine, weren’t you?” I asked.

“Of course. I hope she will be very happy.” Mother poured the tea.

“I’d like you to pack a bag this morning,” I said.

“Why?” She held the cup in her hands, warming them.

“I have to take you someplace. It’s a kind of hospital.”

“I feel fine.”

“I know, Mother. But I want to make sure. I want to be certain that you’re all right.”

“I’m perfectly fine.”

“Your father can give me a pill or something.” She sipped her tea, then stared at it.

“Father’s dead, Mother.”

“Yes, I know. There was a cardinal outside my window this morning. A female. She was very beautiful. The female cardinal’s color is so sweetly understated.”

“I agree.”

Mother looked at my eyes. “I must have spilled something in bed last night.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Shall I pack a small bag?”

I nodded. “A small bag will be fine.”

I could feel the leaves wanting to change color. But still the days were warm. I talked Mother into strolling with me down to the beach. The morning was clear, just a few clouds searching for each other out over the bay. Mother had managed to dress herself; however, her sweater was on inside out. This was a mistake that even I could make, but it gave me a much-needed nudge to keep perspective. That morning, while picking up her room, I had found some stained underwear she’d attempted to hide.

She wore khaki trousers and sneakers and I could tell she was trying to walk briskly. “When you were a little boy the bay wasn’t so dirty,” she said. “You used to dive off the back of the boat and swim around like a fish. You’d go down and disappear under the bottom and my heart would just stop.”

“I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Oh, I know. You were just so small. Actually, I enjoyed watching you, Bill and Lisa having fun like that.” We were at the community dock now and she stopped to stare at a line of weathered boards. “I can’t believe Lisa is gone.”

I put my arm around her. “Neither can I. Lisa was special. She loved you very much, Mother.”

“I know. I loved her too.”

“Lisa knew that.”

She rubbed my arm. “Why aren’t you married, Monksie?”

“Haven’t found the right person, I guess.”

“I suppose that’s the important thing, finding the right person. Still, life is short.” She paused. “I wish I were closer to Bill’s children. The distance has been so difficult.”

“I know.”

“Do you talk to Bill?”

“Occasionally.”

“I think I haven’t talked to him in months. Poor Bill. Bill and your father never got along. Sad thing.”

“Yes, it was.”

“I don’t think Ben was fair to Bill.”

“I think you’re right.”

“But you. Your father was crazy about you. He’d talk about you when you weren’t around. Did you know that? Well, he did. You were his special child.”

“I suppose I knew that. Lisa certainly believed it. Bill, too. Actually, I appreciated your evenhandedness more than his attention.”

“You would.” She smiled at me. “He was right to consider you special.”

“Thank you, Mother.”

The conversation was unraveling my resolve. She was so lucid, so reasonable, so much herself.

Pollock: You first.Moore: No, you.Pollock: No, I insist.Moore: You.Pollock: You.Moore: Very well.

As I stood there with Mother, the breeze off the bay filling my shirt and chilling me, I tried to consider her coming loneliness, waking in a strange bed, with strange faces, strange food, but instead I thought of my own loneliness. I had allowed the letters of friends to go too long unanswered and I imagined they had written me off. I felt small for regarding myself, for being so self-centered in the face of Mother’s coming day and life.

“Should we be going?” she asked.

“Mother, I have to tell you what’s going on.”

“Yes, dear?”

I held her close and looked at the water while I talked. “Lately, your condition has been getting worse. The doctor said it would happen this way.” I took a breath. “Do you remember standing in the boat out in the middle of the pond.”

Mother laughed. “What?”

I could see she did not know what I was talking about. “You rowed yourself out into the pond and I had to swim out and get you.” I let her silence settle. “You locked Lorraine out of the house and came to me in the study with Father’s pistol. You locked yourself in the bathroom at Lorraine’s wedding. Mother, I’m afraid you’re going to get lost and hurt. I’m taking you to a new place to live today.”

She pulled the edges of her sweater. “Is it time to go?”

“I guess so.”

“I trust you to do what’s best, Monk.”

My first table saw had a plastic guard on it. I would faithfully lower it and let it protect me every time I slid a piece of wood through the machine, happy when it cut easily, cursing when the awkward shield caused me to have to switch off the power or bring back the half-sawn wood. But the high whine of the blade, frankly, scared me. I could measure with my eyes and hear the destructive capabilities of the disc and even smell it when a piece of wood would linger against the blade and get burned. Then I learned to remove the guard for larger boards, then screw it back on. I screwed it back on less often, then less often still until I could not say where the thing had been put. I would push the boards through without a thought that I might lose a finger or that the blade might fly off and carve through my cranium. I began to enjoy the burning smell, the whine of the machine, the sight of the first notch the blade made in the bottom corner of the board.

And so we made the trip to Mother’s new home in Columbia. She was so clear-headed throughout the admissions process that I was ready to take her back to the beach. But the administrator showed no pause, only asked the questions and filled out the forms. We walked to Mother’s suite, an apartment more than a room, though it lacked a kitchen. Mother touched the institutional furniture and frowned slightly.

“Would you like me to bring some things from the house?” I asked.

“That would be nice. You decide what.”

We walked outside to the grounds and the real sadness of the place took me. An old woman reached to me with her eyes as I passed her wheelchair, asking if I could tell her something, tell her that I knew her, anything. They were all old, all waiting. Some seemed in good enough spirits. Most were women. Outside, the sun was warmer, the expanse of green lawn leading to a wrought iron fence negating the earlier hint of fall in the air. I turned to Mother to find her wandering away toward the fence.

“Mother?” I chased after her. “Mother?” I turned her around.

Her face showed no recognition. I was a blank space in her universe. She let me lead her back to her rooms. The young nurse who had been guiding us and trailing back a proper distance seemed to all too well understand what was happening. She helped me put my mother to bed, backed me out of the room and said that she would sit with her a while. As I left I realized that all the furniture had rounded edges and was soft wherever possible. I would bring no furniture from home.

Bill and I were over at Eastern Market, wandering through the aisles of produce and fish. Bill was a teenager and I was pretending to be one. Father had charged us with finding a nice late-season bluefish. School was about to begin for us and we were enjoying the last days of summer break. Bill was talking with a friend of his who worked at a crab stand while I looked over the fish. Two letter-jacketed boys from Bill’s school swaggered down the aisle toward us, making their kind of animal noises to announce their presence.

“Hey, it’s Ellison,” the shorter one said.

“Hello, Roger,” Bill said.

“Ready for school?” Roger asked.

The taller of the guys looked at his watch, then out the far door. “Come on, Rog.”

Roger smiled. “In a minute.” He looked at the skinny kid behind the counter. “What about you, Lucy?”

“Don’t call me that,” the kid said.

“So, what were you two talking about? Is there a party somewhere I shouldn’t know about?” Roger laughed, nudged his friend. His friend laughed weakly, disinterestedly. “Is this your brother?” he asked Bill.

“Yeah.”

“You one, too?” Roger asked me.

I looked at his face, then at the letter G sewn onto his blue and white jacket. I understood it was an award for wrestling, because it had pinned to it a medal, two figures posed one behind the other in close contact.

“What are those guys doing?” I asked.

Roger was thrown. “What?”

“On your jacket. Is that what you got a letter for? What sport is that?”

Bill and the kid behind the counter started to laugh.

“What?” Roger said. “It’s for wrestling.”

“You mean rolling around on the floor with another boy.”

Roger’s brown skin turned purple and he took a step toward me. His friend caught him and said, “Let’s just get out of here, Roger.”

Bill and I watched them leave. Bill then flashed me an awkward smile, then seemed to fold up. But I was pumped up, wanting to talk, jump around. “Did you see his face?” I asked.

“Yeah, I saw it.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“No, I’m not mad at you, Monk.”

“Then what is it?”

“Nothing. You wouldn’t understand.”

“I understand a lot of things.”

“Like what?”

“Like—” I stopped and looked at the fish. “This is a good one. Father will like this one.”

I drove back to D.C., back to what had been my mother’s home, what had been my parents’ home. The inside of the house was stale and hot. I switched on the large air-conditioning unit in the dining room and sat at the table. I sat where I had always sat during meals and regarded the other chairs. Mother and Father had sat at the prominent ends and I was placed on a side alone, facing my brother and sister, an empty chair beside me. The occasional guest would occupy that seat, but otherwise it was always there, empty, never removed to be against the wall like the other auxiliary chairs. I listened to the house, recalling my parents’ voices and footfalls, but I couldn’t hear them. I heard the hum and periodic rattle of the air conditioner, the switching on of the refrigerator in the adjacent kitchen, the ringing of the phone.

It was Bill. “I’ll be there in a bit.”

“Where are you?”

“National. I’m about to walk over to the Metro.”

“Would you like me to pick you up?”

“No, that’s all right.”

“I’ll pick you up at Metro Center.”

“I’ll take the Blue to the Red and I’ll meet you at Dupont Circle at,” I could hear him looking at his watch, “four o’clock.”

“See you there.”

My brother’s hair was blond. I recognized his face as he sat on a bench near some conga players, but I thought only That guy looks just like my brother. My brother had blond hair. It was my brother and his hair was yellow. His skin was still light brown. He called to me.

“Bill?”

“It’s me.” He hugged me, an event in itself, and I appreciated the gesture, but it was as stiff as if he hadn’t touched me at all.

“Hey, your hair is blond,” I informed him.

“Like it?”

“I guess. It’s different.” I felt like an old fuddy-duddy, as my mother would say of herself. “I found a parking space up on Connecticut.” I reached down and picked up his soft leather bag. “It’s good to see you,” I said as we started to walk.

“You’re looking well,” he said.

“A little out of shape. But not you.”

“I’m in the gym every night.”

I made a kind of congratulatory sound that I hoped didn’t come off as patronizing. “I should try a little of that.”

“How’s Mother?”

“In and out.” As I said it I wondered which was the bad way: in or out? Was she lost when she was in her mind or out of it? And I wondered if the symptoms I had been observing were in fact not those of her disease, but of her coping with deterioration, a retreat to a safer place.

“Does she know who you are?”

“She did today,” I told him. “How are the kids?”

“Fine, I think.” He watched me for my reaction and when I gave it to him, he said, “We’ll make it through. It’s hard to hear your daddy’s a fag.”

“Would you like to go the house first or to see Mother?”

“The house. I need a shower. I was up early to catch the plane.”

I drove us home. Bill fiddled with the radio.

“How’s work?”

“Good.”

“How’s—” I searched for his friend’s name.

“Gone.”

I have often stared into the mirror and considered the difference between the following statements:

(1) He looks guilty.

(2) He seems guilty.

(3) He appears guilty.

(4) He is guilty.

“Are you all right?” Bill asked. He was out of the shower and had returned downstairs to join me in the den. I was lighting a cigar. “You shouldn’t do that,” he said.

“Yes, I know.” I watched the tip glow orange and shook out the match. “Are you about ready to go?”

“It’s sort of late now, don’t you think?”

It was in fact nearly six. “It’s a little late,” I said, “but it is her first day there. I’d like to check up on the old lady.”

Bill nodded.

Mother had not eaten, we were told. She did not recognize Bill, pulled away from him when he took her hand and tried to look at her eyes. She did not recognize me. She might have if we had stayed another sixty minutes, another fifteen, another five. But we didn’t.

“About the money,” Bill said.

“I’ve got it covered,” I told him.

It had become my practice (at least I wanted it to be) to let such conversations wither and die of their own accord, to not offer any appropriate or inappropriate comment, but to simply shut up and let the words become vapor.

Only appearances signify in visual art. At least this is what I am told, that the painter’s work is an invention in the boundless space that begins at the edges of his picture. The surface, the paper or the canvas, is not the work of art, but where the work lives, a place to keep the picture, the paint, the idea. But a chair, a chair is its space, is its own canvas, occupies space properly. The canvas occupies spaces and the picture occupies the canvas, while the chair, as a work, fills the space itself. This was what occurred to me regarding My Pafology. The novel, so-called, was more a chair than a painting, my having designed it not as a work of art, but as a functional device, its appearance a thing to behold, but more a thing to mark, a warning perhaps, a gravestone certainly. It was by this reasoning that I was able to look at my face in the mirror and to accept the deal my agent presented to me on the phone that evening.

“His name is Wiley Morgenstein and he wants to pay you three million dollars for the movie rights,” Yul said. “Monk? Monk?”

“I’m here.”

“How’s that sound?”

“It sounds great. Are you crazy? It sounds terrific. It makes me sick.”

“He insists on meeting you.”

“Tell him I’ll call him.”

“He wants to meet you. He wants to pay you three mil, the least you can do is have lunch with the guy. I haven’t told him that there’s no Stagg Leigh yet.”

“Don’t. Stagg Leigh will have lunch with him.”

Yul laughed. “You’ve lost your mind. What are you going to do? Dress up like a pimp or something?”

“No, I’ll just put on some dark glasses and be real quiet. How’s that?”

“Three million for you means three hundred thousand for me. Don’t screw this up.”

“Yeah, right. Gotta go.”

“Wait a second. Random House says there’s so much excitement about the book that they’re going to try to bring it out before Christmas.”

Bill asked if everything was all right when I walked into the kitchen after having been on the phone. I told him that all was well and he told me that he was going out with an old friend. He told me that his friend was coming to collect him shortly. He told me not to wait up.

I hadn’t noticed before the box containing the letters from Fiona to my father smelt of lavender and rose-leaves. This time, without actually reading the letters, I attended to the script, the hand at work, and found a purity there that perhaps reflected the depth of feeling. I imagined that nurse had had small but strong hands with trimmed nails, a weaver’s hands perhaps. I opened each letter, then thumbed through the pages of the curiously chosen novel. With Silas Marner I found a slip of paper and on it was written the lower East Side Manhattan address of Fiona’s sister. Her name was Tilly McFadden.

Editor: What a surprise.Stagg: I just called to ask if I need to make any changes in the manuscript since you plan to bring the book out earlier.Editor: No, it’s just perfect as it is.Stagg: Will I see galleys soon?Editor: No need to bother with that.Stagg: There is one change I’d like to make.Editor: Certainly.Stagg: I’m changing the title. The new title is Fuck.Editor: Excuse me?Stagg: Fuck. Just the one word.Editor: I so love My Pafology as the title.Stagg: We’ll call the next book that. This one is called Fuck.Editor: I don’t think we can do that.Stagg: Why not?Editor: The word is considered obscene by many.Stagg: The novel has the word fuck all through it. I don’t care if many find the word obscene.Editor: It might hurt sales.Stagg: I don’t think so. If you like I can give you back the money and take the book elsewhere.

FUCK A Novel Stagg R. Leigh