Erasure

4

Story idea — a man marries a woman whose name is the same as that of his first wife. One night while making love he says her name and the woman accuses him of calling out the name of his first wife. Of course he in fact has called out the name of his first wife, but also he has called out his present wife’s name. He tells her that he was not thinking of his first wife, but she says she knows what she heard.

I drove around the city for a while, noting while doing so how it was possible to be comfortable inside an automobile. My sister had taken my compliment about her automobile as an offense and perhaps, in some way, that was how I had meant it. I had never understood spending so much money on a set of wheels. But I had to admit that it was comfortable, quiet and that it made sense that my sister would want to be able to unlock her car and turn on the lights from across a parking lot. Still, I felt out of place behind the wheel of the thing — what else was new. I drove through Georgetown, then up Wisconsin, then back across Massachusetts to Dupont Circle. I went to my mother’s house, wanting to catch her before her nap. That way I’d be able to leave because of her coming “down time” and because I had to pick up Lisa.

“My Monksie is home,” Mother said again.

We sat in the kitchen and she made tea. “You’re looking great, Mother.”

“Go on,” she said. “I’m an old lady. I don’t know about this tea, sweetheart. This woman who used to be one of your father’s patients brought it to me.”

“That was nice of her,” I said.

“She’s a sweet woman, but, lord, she’s even older than I am. I can’t seem to get it through to her that your father has passed away.” She put the cups and saucers on the table.

“Where’s Lorraine?” I asked.

“She’s out doing the shopping.”

I looked at the calendar on the wall. It was from last year, but on the correct month. “Mother, that calendar’s out of date.”

“Lisa keeps telling me that, but I can’t remember to change it.”

“Tell you what, I’ll pick up a new one for you.” As I said it, I wondered what kind of grief I might cause Lisa by buying Mother a new calendar. Would the old lady go on and on about where it came from? I could imagine the months peeling by and Lisa having to endure, Would you look at that picture of the Grand Canyon. Monksie gave me that calendar. He noticed that the old one was out of date.

“Here you go.” Mother set the teapot down between our cups, then sat. “So, how was your meeting?”

“Fine,” I said. “The paper went well and now I’m done.”

“That’s good,” she said. She got up and turned the dial of the burner to off a second time, then sat back down.

“You should be careful burning things in that fireplace,” I told her. “It’s never been used. The flue is probably stuck shut.”

“It did get sort of smoky in the living room.”

“You shouldn’t use it at all.”

“I’m finished burning the things anyway.” She poured the tea.

“What were you burning?” I asked.

“Just some papers. Your father gave me instructions when he was in the hospital. He said, ‘Agnes, please burn the papers in the gray box in my study. Will you do that for me?’ I told him I would and then he asked me to please not read them.”

“So, did you?”

Mother shook her head. “Your father asked me not to.”

I looked at the counter and saw a blue box sitting there. “You’re not burning the stuff in that box too, are you?”

“That’s what I burned. It did make the living room smoky. I never thought about the flue. That’s why we never had a fire in this house. Because I’m afraid of fire.”

“I knew that about you, Mother.”

“Oh, I didn’t offer you milk. Would you like some?”

“No thanks.” I blew on the tea and drank some. “So, are you meeting with your club much these days?”

“Not so much. They’re all dying off. Young women aren’t interested in bridge anymore.”

“From what I gathered you ladies never play bridge anyway.”

“Is that what you gathered?” She laughed softly. “I suppose that’s right.”

I looked at her eyes and could see the fatigue. “Maybe you should stretch out for a while.”

“I do feel a little tired. Lorraine’s making dinner tonight. We’ll eat at seven, but you can come at six for cocktails.”

“Okay, Mother.”

Anyone who speaks to members of his family knows that sharing a language does not mean you share the rules governing the use of that language. No matter what is said, something else is meant and I knew that for all my mother’s seeming incoherence or out-of-itness, she was trying to tell me something over tea. The way she had mentioned the smoke in the living room twice. Her calling the blue box gray. Her easy and quick capitulation to what it was she and her cronies actually did at their meetings. But since I didn’t know the rules, which were forever changing, I could only know that she was trying to say something, not what that something was.

For my father, the road had to wind uphill both ways and be as difficult as possible. Sadly, this was the sensibility he instilled in me when I set myself to the task of writing fiction. It wasn’t until I brought him a story that was purposely confusing and obfuscating that he seemed at all impressed and pleased. He said, smiling, “You made me work, son.” He once said to me in a museum, when I complained about an illegible signature on a painting, “You don’t sign it because you want people to know you painted it, but because you love it.” He was all wrong of course, but the sentiment was so beautiful that I wish to believe it now. What he might have been trying to say, I suppose, though he never would have even thought about it in these terms, was that art finds its form and that it is never a mere manifestation of life.

Lorraine had been the housekeeper since before I was born. She liked me as a child. She liked me as a young adult. But when she opened a book of mine and discovered the word fuck, she stopped liking me. From that point on she was polite, but curt, never overtly displeased by my presence, but clearly not anticipating any grief upon my departure. Lorraine, as far as I knew, never had a life away from my family. She had days off, but I didn’t know where she went, if she went anywhere. She even went with us to the beach in the summers. But she was not our nanny. If we had a problem, we went to Mother. If we needed rides someplace, we went to Mother. If we needed food or clean clothes, we went to Lorraine.

“Good evening, Mr. Monk,” she said as I entered the house with my sister.

“How are you, Lorraine?” I asked.

“Getting older every day.”

“You don’t look it,” I said.

“Thank you.”

Lisa took my jacket to hang in the closet as if I were a real visitor. I looked at the house again. I had loved the house as a kid. It was a large two-story with many rooms and nooks and a finished basement apartment in which Lorraine resided. But it now seemed cold, despite how high the heat was turned. The drapes covering the windows were heavy, the wood of the stairway bannister and door jambs dark and somber.

“Mrs. E is already at the table,” Lorraine told us and led us into the dining room as if we didn’t know the way.

Mother remained seated when we entered. Her eyes were red and weak. We leaned to kiss her and she patted our cheeks.

“Are you feeling okay, Mother?” Lisa asked.

“She missed her nap today, Dr. Lisa,” Lorraine said.

We sat on either side of our mother. I poured the wine and Mother waved it off.

“Did you take your medication?” Lisa asked.

“I did. All three thousand pills.” Mother fanned her off the subject. “How was your meeting?” she asked me, having forgotten our earlier conversation.

“It’s over, that’s the important part.”

“You presented a paper?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“On?”

“Just some stuff about novels and literary criticism. Dry, boring, meaningless stuff. I actually just came to see you.”

“That’s my sweetheart, Monksie. But why aren’t you staying here with me?”

“Since I am at the conference, I need to be near the proceedings.” I looked at my sister. “I did go down to Lisa’s clinic earlier. She’s really doing good work.”

“She’s just like her father.” By the way she said it, it was not clear it was a good thing. Then she aked me, “Are you still driving that station wagon?”

“Yes, Mother.”

Lorraine came in with the dinner. The roast beef was lean. The broccoli and cauliflower were overcooked and the grains of rice were so separate and distinct that it was near impossible to pick them up with a fork. Lorraine came in a couple of times to check on us.

Lisa put down her fork and picked up her wine glass, held it over her plate without drinking. “Mother, I’ve been going over the books and I believe you’re going to have to sell Father’s office. The upkeep is costing so much that the rent is meaningless.”

“That was your father’s office.”

“Yes, Mother. You’ve got the other properties,” Lisa said.

“Your father started out in that office in nineteen fifty. You weren’t born yet. Bill was just a year old.”

“Well, I’m putting the office up for sale. It’s something we have to do.” Lisa was tugging at the corners of her napkin, a tic she’d had since childhood.

“It was your father’s office, dear.”

“I know that, Mother.” Lisa looked at me.

“Mother,” I got her attention. “When’s the last time you visited Father’s office?” She didn’t have an answer. “The fact is, you hardly ever went there when Father was practicing. Now, it’s completely different. It even looks different from the outside.” I reached over and took her hand. “Lisa knows what’s best.”

“Oh, Monksie.” Mother sniffed in her tears. “You’re such a sweet child, always have been. And so smart. You get that from your father, did you know that?”

I glanced over at Lisa to see that she was eating again.

“Of course, we’ll sell the office.”

“Just like that,” Lisa said. “Monk chimes in and you’re hooked on the idea. Christ.”

Lorraine stepped into the room just in time to hear her lord’s name used in vain. She collected our plates and issued an admonishing “Hmmph, hmmph, hmmmph” as she exited.

Mother complained of a headache and we had dessert without saying much. Then Lorraine came in and mercifully informed us of Mother’s approaching bedtime. We kissed the old lady goodnight and watched Lorraine walk her upstairs.

Sitting in my sister’s car outside my hotel, I apologized for butting in about the sale of the office at the dinner table.

“No, you helped,” she said. “Thanks.”

“I’m sorry she always reacts to me like that.”

“Monk, you’re special. I don’t mean just the way Mother, and Father when he was alive, treated you. I’ve always thought that. I just wanted you to know.”

I looked out the window at the street. “I think the same about you, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.” She smiled. Her smile had always been so confident that I was jealous of it. Her smile always made me relax.

I kissed my sister goodbye, told her I’d talk to her soon and went into my hotel where I found Linda Mallory waiting in the lobby.

“Hi, Linda.”

“I’ve been thinking about your paper.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Would you like to go upstairs and fuck me?”

“No, Linda.”

“I’m having a real crisis,” she said. “I really need to have some sex. I need it for self-validation.”

“I’m sorry, Linda.”

She stormed past me, out the door and into the street. Then I heard my name being shouted from outside. It was a bit embarrassing as I turned to find the hotel staff and a couple of guests staring at me. I stepped out and on the narrow path leading through the yard was Davis Gimbel.

“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now,” he said.

The words had little effect on me, save to announce Gimbel’s disturbed, certifiable, and agitated postmodern state. Behind the short, bomber-jacketed academic were Linda Mallory, seething with pent-up sexual frustration, and three other intellectually homeless academics aching to see a fight.

“What’s this all about, Gimbel?” I asked.

“There’s nothing to compare it to now,” he said.

“Okay.” I stepped down the steps to take the noise away from the stoop. “Listen, I’m sorry you didn’t like the paper, but I believe you misunderstood something. I don’t even think about you guys, much less write about you.”

That really got him mad. He circled me as best he could in the small space and even pounded his chest with a closed fist once or twice. “You don’t think much of postmodern fiction, do you?” he said. “Like all avant-garde movements, we never have time to finish what we set out to accomplish.”

I looked at his face in the street and moon lights and found it no more or less ugly for its contorted state. “What did you set out to accomplish?”

“You know good and well. You and your kind, you interrupted us.”

“My kind?” I let that go. “Interrupted you? By not paying attention?”

“The whole culture. You’re just one of the sheep.”

“What the hell are you talking about, man? Are you drunk?”

He continued his circling. A couple of unassociated people stopped at the gate to watch. “Of course, if an avant-garde movement ever achieves its purpose, then it ceases to be avant-garde. By the mere fact that it opposes or rejects established systems of creation, it has to remain unfinished. Do you even understand what I’m saying? We are defunct practitioners of defunct art.”

“You know what your problem is, Gimbel?” I said, leaning away from him. “You actually think you’re saying something that makes sense. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

That’s when the little Hemingway doll took a poke at me. I sidestepped the swing and watched him roll into an azalea bush. Linda and the other defunct artists rushed to his aid. I offered a shrug to the confused bystanders and stepped away toward the door.

Gimbel was on his knees now and he yelled, “Postmodern fiction came and went like the wind and you missed it. And that’s why you’re bitter, Ellison.”

I stopped, not believing that the man had actually come to fight me because of a paper that I only barely took seriously. Standing over them all on the steps, I said, “I don’t mean to disparage or belittle what you do, Gimbel. I don’t know what you do.”

Gimbel found his legs and stood straight, puffed up his chest. “I have unsettled readers. I have made them uncomfortable. I have unsettled their historical, cultural and psychological assumptions by disrupting their comfortable relationship between words and things. I have brought to a head the battle between language and reality. But even as my art dies, I create it without trying.”

His little group applauded.

“Man, do you need to get laid,” I said, shook my head and stepped through the door.

It’s 1933 and Ernst Barlach is cracking his knuckles while the cup of tea on the table in front of him cools. “My hands hurt so much these days,” he says.Paul Klee nods, sips his tea. He is saddened himself. He has just been expelled from the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. “They are calling me a Siberian Jew.”“Who is? Das Schwarze Korps?”“Who else? And they are burning any books which contain pictures of our work. They call me a Slavic lunatic.”“They’re correct about both of us.”Ernst laughs.

Eckhart: You know I have a novel, Adolf.Hitler: Do tell, Dietrich.Eckhart: I call it The Morning. The main character is essentially myself. The character is an unrecognized literary genius wbo is addicted, but manages quite well the sweet gift of morphine.Hitler: I hope it is as powerful as your volume of poems. Such anguish and sheer beauty those verses offer the reader.Eckhart: It irks me no end that the whole of my recognition rests on the translation of that damn Norwegian. I actually hate Peer Gynt.Hitler: Oh, but how you transformed it. Now, it speaks to the German soul. That is why it is so popular with the people. And what the work led you to, your patriotic writings and how you’ve unveiled the Jews for what they are. I will fight the trolls with you.Eckhart: They will destroy German culture if we let them.Hitler: Then we will not let them.

Eckhart: I am ein Judenfresser.Hitler: Me, too.Eckhart: I can’t believe we lost the war. These pamphlets of mine however will show our people why we lost and that the enemy we sbould fear most was not in the trenches.Hitler: What is this one called?Eckhart: I call this one Judaism in and out of Us.Hitler: I liked Austria under Judah’s Star.Eckhart: Everyone seemed to like that one. I sent This is the Jew to a professor and he sent it back to me with a note telling me it is full of hate. So, I wrote back. I wrote, “It is said that the German schoolmaster won the war of 1866. The professor of 1914 lost the World War.”Hitler: You told him.Eckhart: I have an idea for a newspaper, a weekly that I plan to call, Auf gut Deutsch. And I have been thinking. You should join the Thule Society.Hitler: I am already a member.Eckhart: Shall we recite the motto together?Hitler and Eckhart: Remember that you are German. Keep your blood pure.

Somehow these notes for a novel came to me on my flight back to Los Angeles. The faces of those nuts in front of my sister’s clinic served as inspiration. But I must admit to a profound fascination with Hitler’s relationship to art and how he so reminded me of so many of the artistic purists I had come to know. But those faces, washed with hate and fear, wanting so badly to control others, their potato eyes so vacant, their mouths near frothing. I could still hear them calling my sister a murderer. Their voices had the scratch of overuse, like the twisting of metal.

On the plane I read a review in the Atlantic Monthly or Harpers of Juanita Mae Jenkins’ runaway bestseller We’s Lives In Da Ghetto: Juanita Mae Jenkins has written a masterpiece of African American literature. One can actually hear the voices of her people as they make their way through the experience which is and can only be Black America.The story begins with Sharonda F’rinda Johnson who lives the typical Black life in an unnamed ghetto in America. Sharonda is fifteen and pregnant with her third child, by a third father. She lives with her drug addict mother and her mentally deficient, basketball playing brother Juneboy. When Juneboy is killed in a driveby by a rival gang, the bullet passing through his cherished Michael Jordon autographed basketball, Sharonda watches her mother’s wailing grief and decides she must have some voice in the culture.Sharonda becomes a hooker to make enough money to take dance classes at the community center. In tap class, her athletic prowess is noticed by the producer of a Broadway show and she is discovered. She rises to the top, buys her mother a house, but her limitations catch up with her and she comes plummeting back to earth.The twists and turns of the novel are fascinating, but the real strength of the work is its haunting verisimilitude. The ghetto is painted in all its exotic wonder. Predators prowl, innocents are eaten. But the novel is finally not dark, as we leave the story, with Sharonda trying to raise enough money to get her babies back from the state. Sharonda, finally, is the epitome of the black matriarchal symbol of strength.

“Is something wrong?” the woman seated beside me asked.